Lost Recap: Not in Portland

The third season of Lost (finally) picks up again with this episode, and we get to see what happens with Ben - or at least, we get an update on what's happening with Ben, because it isn't exactly resolved during this episode. At least we get a morsel, which may be better than nothing.

The action picks up right where it left off in I Do about three months ago, with Jack trying to buy time for Sawyer and Kate to get free from the evil clutches of The Others by snipping a hole in Ben, and presumably giving a small head start to his compatriots. Unfortunately, he doesn't know that they are currently on a different island than the other island, where the other survivors are on the beach. So it's all for naught.

But you have to give Jack credit - he is nothing if not dedicated, and he has decided on a course of action, so he decides to stick to it, even if he does seem to be giving in a bit when he's told that they are on a different island than where they started. What comes as a bit of a surprise is that Ben is awake during much of the exchange, and he hears what is happening, so he has a little talk with Juliet, instructing her to help Sawyer and Kate escape. We don't know why, so it's certainly an interesting development. Presumably Ben is just feeling his own mortality.

While Juliet is gone, Jack and Tom - that's Mr. Friendly - get to talking, and he seems like a genuinely nice guy. In the end, Tom helps Jack to stitch Ben back together, but we don't yet know if it's a success or not. It looks like we're going to have to wait on that.

The back-story in this episode is what is really interesting, because rather than being something from one of the survivors of the crash, we instead get to see how Juliet got to the island, but we don't find that out until the very end.

We start off in Miami, where Juliet is with her sister, who seems to be a cancer patient, yet that fact is minimized. Instead the focus is on the fact that Juliet is working on some sort of fertility drug, which she is administering to her sister - and apparently stealing from the university, which is run by her ex-husband. While odd, the really odd thing is that she's approached by another company about a job in Portland, where she will have the freedom to do even more work.

What gets interesting is that one of the people who is offering her the job is Ethan, who we know was on the island, as he went to meet the survivors of the plane crash. Eventually Juliet turns down the job because she says that the only way she can get out from under the thumb of her husband is if he is "hit by a bus".

The next day - or some indeterminate amount of time later - she finds that her sister is indeed pregnant, and as she tells her husband of her success, he steps into the street and is hit by a bus. Not long after, she is confronted in the morgue by the job she was offered, and as if that's not strange enough, it gets even more strange when they tell her that the job is "Not in Portland", so it seems that this is how she gets to the island, even if we don't know exactly how that happens.

Back on the island, Juliet has returned from the beach, where she helped Sawyer and Kate escape to the other island by using a boat provided to them by Alex (who we find is Ben's daughter), and they take her boyfriend Karl with them, but she isn't allowed to go). There, Jack asks Juliet what Ben said, and Juliet confides in Jack that Ben told her if he helped them escape, he would let her leave the island, where she has been for more than three years. Very interesting.

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