LOST Recap

From EW:

Welcome back, friends and obsessives. It's been so long. Yet so not-long in island time. Let us begin.

So this was a Sun and Jin episode, cleverly (and, I think, effectively) paired with plot movement: Creepy, gnomic Henry Gale comes out of his cage, sends Ana Lucia and her party (Sayid and Charlie) on what may turn out to be a suicide mission, and succeeds in further balkanizing the Losties (Jack from Locke, Ana Lu from Jack-Locke, and so on). And Dharma Krispies (now with more mysticism!) are shamelessly product-placed.

Let's begin with the happily unhappy couple. Jin gets cranky about Sun's garden and uproots a few plants to make his point. Then it turns out the whole English-speaking thing isn't the only secret Sun's been keeping from Jin. Back in Korea, the couple wanted a child — Jin more than Sun. The fertility doc blamed their lack of success on Sun's endometriosis. Later, he revealed to Sun that Jin was shooting blanks; the good doctor was just afraid to say it to the reluctant gangster's face. This all comes into sharp focus on the island, when Sun learns she's preggers. Is it Jin's? Or is the daddy-o her former arranged-marriage prospect and English teacher, three-time winner of the Annual Seoul Yul Brynner Lookalike Contest? Only time and sweeps will tell. You are now free to post liberally on the combined hotness of Sun and Jin, the separate but equal hotnesses of Sun and Jin, and the improbability of anyone cheating on DDK.

But duty and fatigue compel me to move on. Let's descend hatchward, and pick up the story with Ana Lu and Henry Gale. ''I don't make the same mistake twice,'' A.L. tells Gale, after recounting the story of how she mistakenly persecuted the wrong man on shaky grounds of Suspected Otherness. And no, Ana Lu doesn't make the same mistake twice. She makes completely different catastrophic mistakes every time. And this time, she may have broken totally new ground in the field of catastrophic mistakes: By giving Gale the benefit of the doubt and following his balloon map (um, never trust a map written on the back of a page from Dostoyevsky — you're just asking for a morally charged plot twist), she may well have walked herself, Sayid, and the increasingly punk-assed Charlie into a trap.

Meanwhile, back at the Hatch, there's another pair in need of couple's counseling: Jack and Locke. Their little scene in the steamy bathroom had a sparky marital charm to it. Jack pops out of the shower to find Locke shaving. (''Opens up m'pores.'') Locke immediately starts in with the undercutting, knowing there's no better time to razz a man than when he's naked. Ol' John probably turned down the thermostat, too, just to shrink his opponent into submission (a tactic that's straight from Sun Tzu's The Art of War, chapter 5: ''Kitchens and Bathrooms'').

Everybody thinks they've got the answers in this ep, but questions abound: Who does fly with a pregnancy test, anyway? And where exactly did Sawyer find it? What's Widmore Laboratories, the company that makes the test? According to a Lost podcast from producer Damon Lindelof, there was a sign for Widmore Construction in the background of a scene in ''Fire + Water'' a few weeks ago — what gives? Is it an extension of the Alvar Hanso-Dharma empire? What exactly is Sayid building, with Charlie as his labor force? (Looks like a big bamboo lattice, suitable for straining the giant tea leaves you need to read the future in this crazy show.) And why doesn't Sawyer think there's enough sex in Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. As I remember it, it's full of sex. And dragons. Am I thinking of another book?