Episode Report Card Cindy McLennan: A | 1374 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT Live Alone; Die Together
By Cindy McLennan | Season 5 | Episode 16 | Aired on 2009.05.13
A Hospital: It, too, has seen better days. One of Ilana's eyes takes it all in, because the rest of her head is bandaged. Okay, her mouth and nose are free, too. A nurse speaks to her in what I'm going to guess is Russian and tells her that she has a visitor who insists upon seeing her. It's JACOB! Or is it? Well, it looks just like him, so he's getting called Jacob for now. He's wearing a black overcoat and black gloves. He pulls a white chair up and takes a seat at her bedside. He folds his hands in his lap and apologizes for not making it there soon. In Russian. He switches to English and leans in very close to her. If he touches her, I didn't see it on my TV screen. "I'm here because I need your help. Can you do that? Will you help me, Ilana?" Ilana looks at him with her one free eye, and says, "Yes." He gives her nothing but words. We jump back to...
The Cabin: It's a disaster inside. Ilana takes note of the portrait of a dog, Lulu. Ilana's gaze travels from the dirty old sink, to the table covered in debris, the upturned chair and all about this hellhole, until it lands on a knife in the wall. It's holding some sort of note -- or rather, a tapestry scrap. She pulls out the knife, examines the scrapestry and goes back outside, where she tells Bram that "He isn't there and hasn't been in a long time. Someone else has been using it." She orders her crew to, "Burn it," which they do despite Frank's observation that starting a fire in the middle of a jungle might not be the smartest move. When Bram wants to know, "What now," Ilana hands him the scrapestry, which features Tawaret. Bram's eyes grow wide. "I guess we know where we're going." Oh, me too, me too! They take in their fire for a moment, before carrying their what's-in-the-box-box away, into the Commercial.
California; 2000: JACOB sits on a bench outside a building, reading Flannery O'Connor's, Everything That Rises Must Converge. Although familiar with O'Connor, I haven't read her work, so I'm not going to be a pretender and draw a bunch of parallels to it and Lost. Plenty of people who actually know what they're talking about have already done so, so if you want to know more, that's why Jacob made Al Gore invent the Internet. Speaking of Jacob, he sits and reads for a long time, a really long time, a really really long time, because watching someone read silently on TV is not what you'd call exciting. You wouldn't call it exciting, that is, unless and of course that reading-someone is sitting in front of the very building from which Anthony Cooper is just now defenestrating John Locke. When the glass shatters and you hear the sickening thump of his body hitting the ground, things start to pick up speed. Jacob marks his page, closes his book, uncrosses legs and saunters over to the scene of Locke's demise and I mean to use that word, because it sure looks to me like Locke is dead. It looks like he's dead, and dead is dead, until Jacob kneels down and firmly grasps Locke's shoulder. Locke gasps at Jacob's touch, which sounds more homoerotic than I mean it to, and he regains consciousness (returns to life). As Locke struggles to focus his eyes, Jacob says, "Don't worry. Everything's going to be all right. I'm sorry this happened to you." He rises and leaves a still-dazed Locke looking after him in wide, if still slightly-googly-eyed wonder. I'm not in much better shape as we jump to...