Lost Episode 3.18: "D.O.C." Original Airdate: April 25th, 2007

Episode 3.18, "D.O.C."

I mean, I don’t know, y’know?

I’m just a dude on a couch. I push a button and the TV comes on. People talk upon it. I listen, and I watch.

Sometimes, I am compelled to fall asleep, as I nearly was several times during this week’s episode of Lost, "D.O.C." To be fair, I had just put in a twelve-hour day at the hate distillery where I ply my trade, but still. A good hour of Lost--nay, a good hour of ANYTHING--should be able to quicken my pulse into at least a bare minimum of human alertness.

Instead, this week, I just felt...blah about the proceedings. Not much to thrill about, not much to gossip about, not much to laugh about. A placeholder episode, running without getting anywhere, keeping the treadmill of weekly TV going and the beast of the viewership well-fed.

There was potential here, however, and it makes me wish the writers had picked up on it. This week, Sun learns about the dark fate of all pregnant women who have concieved their children on the island--they all die by the middle of the second trimester. This drives her to take charge of her fate and confront Juliet, something I wish a castaway had done weeks ago.

What is it about these people, that they are so consistently complacent about their fate? Juliet wanders into their lives, a woman who at the very least has been anecdotally linked to the strange Others who have killed their friends and stolen their children, and they just sorta shrug and continue doing laundry in the ocean.

Again and again, they fail to ask questions, and lack any sense of agressiveness or drive about their fates, and it gets more and more frustrating. Until you realize the only reason they are in fact so apathetic is because the writers NEED THEM TO BE TO TELL THEIR STORY IN THEIR OWN STUBBORN WAY.

Oh man. My Internet Bitching Elbow is acting up this week. Ouch.

So Sun grows herself a pair and takes care of confronting Juliet, which leads Juliet to volunteer to take Sun to that creepy bunker (amongst all the other creepy bunkers on the island) where Claire hung out while she was pregnant. Juliet wants to give Sun an ultrasound to find out when her baby was conceived, and Sun of course is half-sure it’s not Jin’s baby, but instead the love child she concievably concieved with that sweet-talkin’ son of a hotelier.

(Wasn’t that a Dusty Springfield song? No? Of course it wasn’t. Sorry.)

Which brings us to the flashbacks, where we again tread previously-trodden ground: It’s the whole "Jin’s embarassed about his family" tune again. Second verse, same as the first; a little bit louder, a little bit worse. Seriously. This is like a rewrite of an episode we’ve already seen. It’s that boring.

Meanwhile, back with the loopy psychic and his three amigos, they’re trying to save the strange girl who fell out of the tree, only she’s got a branch in her lungs, and Jack’s eight hours away, so what will they do? Panic, until the dude with the eyepatch and the accent who supposedly fried on the invisible fence several weeks ago appears, miraculously alive and still surly.

(That is a sentence I would never have had the pleasure to type, were it not for Lost. So, thank you, Damon Lindeloff.)

Naturally, Patchy is a former Soviet army doctor, so naturally, he can save the dying girl. Which takes him the entire episode, even though it COULD have taken him a few minutes.

It’s a shame that the writers chose to make this vapid hour about Sun, instead of another rehash of how Jack’s got daddy issues and Kate’s a winsome crook and Sawyer’s really not that bad under the vicious, uncaring face he shows to these people he barely knows.

We could have USED a good Sun episode. They could have TRIED to push the character forward in the flashbacks, instead of taking her noplace special. (What was the point, anyway? That she’s tough? That she can stand up for herself? I think we may have already known that. So if the flashbacks were meant to illuminate, mission accomplished, in the Bushian sense of the term.)

My enthusiasm for Lost has waxed and waned muchly through this third season, but I maintain optimism for the season-ending run that approaches. I choose not to view this week’s hour as a harbringer of doom, but rather a misstep along the path to illumination and greatness.

Like boring flashbacks, hope springs eternal.

iTunes Links:

Lost Series Lost Season 3 "D.O.C."

Vern Seward is a writer who currently lives in Orlando, FL. He’s been a Mac fan since Atari Computers folded, but has worked with computers of nearly every type for 20 years.