Lost 5.3: Jughead

By Teresa Jusino

Usually, Desmond episodes are the best of the lot.  He’s a fascinating character that has an important part to play in the grand scheme of the Lost universe.  So why was most of this episode, entitled Jughead, so boring?

Desmond is safe, has a son named Charlie (aww! Unless he’s named after his grandfather, in which case, boo!), and is living with the woman he loves.  It’s bliss.  Until he remembers in a dream that Daniel Farraday came to him in the past even though he didn’t know him yet and told him to find his mother and save the world.  He spends much of the episode running around England looking for Mrs. Farraday who, as it turns out, is in a coma, being cared for by her sister and supported by none other than Desmond’s shady almost father-in-law, Charles Widmore!

QUESTION**: So…Daniel was a professor at Oxford.  His mother lives in England, and his aunt has an English accent.  Is Daniel supposed to be British??  If so, where the heck did his accent go?

Meanwhile, on the Island, time travel is still making everything wonky, and it is there that the episode was really interesting.  Locke, Sawyer, Juliet, and the folks from the freighter have time-shifted to the Island circa 1954.  The Others, including Richard Alpert who never seems to die, have taken over an army camp after the military refused to leave them and their island alone.  There’s an atom bomb that needs defusing, a redhead that needs medical attention (or a constant), and no end in sight for the time jumping.  And, as it turns out, one of the Others under Alpert’s command is none other than Desmond’s shady almost father-in-law, Charles Widmore!

Widmore gets around, doesn’t he?

After the intensity of last week’s episodes, I was surprised by how boring Jughead was.  Despite the inclusion of an atom bomb and The Others being able to speak Latin (they speak LATIN!  How cool is that?!), the first half of the episode was molasses.  There’s nothing enthralling about dead ends, and that’s all Desmond got this episode.  Normally, Desmond is the most interesting character in any episode he’s in.  This week, he felt like filler.

And speaking of boring, the award for the most Uninteresting Love Story on Television goes to….Daniel and Charlotte.  Seriously, they’ve been on Lost for over a season and we still know next to nothing about them.  We know that she has red hair, and that she was born on the Island.  We know that he stutters a lot, and knows tons about physics.  So, how can viewers be expected to care that Daniel loves her, or be expected to be patient and wait while they waste several scenes making goo-goo eyes at each other?  I feel Miles’ pain.  The thing is, Daniel is an interesting character as far as the driving plot of the show…they need to stop bogging him down with a weak love story, OR they need to make the love story relevant, like, yesterday.

It wasn’t until Locke got to The Others’ camp that Jughead got interesting.  Now we know that Locke sent Alpert to find him by telling him when he was going to be born.  We also know that Charles Widmore was an Other!  He was also hot:

Ahem.

Also, Desmond confronted Widmore in a great scene, discovered that Faraday’s mother is actually in Los Angeles, and Penny agreed to support him in his quest.  There was a good 10-15 minutes of interesting in the episode before a really, really lame ending.

Rule #1 of Television: Don’t end an episode on a nosebleed.

If that’s not a rule, it should be.  More lame than the nosebleed, however, was the fact that it and the subsequent collapse happened to someone I couldn’t care less about.

This episode served to give us important plot information, not to entertain.

**ANSWER??: Yes, he apparently is supposed to be British, but that woman in a coma isn’t Daniel’s biological mother.  Check it out:

	Ellie: English accent.  Daniel stares at her, and when she asks why, he says she looks like…someone.
	Eloise Hawking: English accent.  In Los Angeles working with Ben.  And yes, though she’s only known as Ms. Hawking in the televised series, the enhanced version of the episode “The Lie” gives her name as Eloise.
	Eloise the Rat: The white rat that Daniel used in his time-travel experiments was named Eloise.

Ellie….Eloise….hmm…. Perhaps that blond twelve year old with the gun is Ms. Hawking?  Could she have been an Other then?  Why is Daniel’s rat also named Eloise?  And why did Ellie look so familiar to him?  Could it be that Ms. Hawking is Daniel’s mother?  It’s possible.  Though that still doesn’t explain why Daniel sounds as American as I do.

They just better not pull any Luke and Leia crap with Daniel and Charlotte.  If Charlotte somehow turns out to be Daniel’s sister, I quit.

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TERESA JUSINO was born on the same day that Skylab fell. Coincidence? She doesn’t think so.  As a writer, her work has appeared in Elmont Life newspaper, and on the sadly defunct website, CentralBooking.com. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories. As a geek, Teresa loves Star Trek, Lost, comics, and anything Joss Whedon ever touched. She has a fangirl *squee-ing* crush on Brian K. Vaughan, which beat up her Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man crush in a fight proving once again that writing skill trumps gadget skill even when that gadget skill is attached to bulging biceps.  Teresa is also an aspiring fangbanger.  Visit her in The Red Room.

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