Just as this episode started, I commented to my wife “Do you think Summer Glau expected to find herself typecast as an action heroine when she became an actress? Especially since she got her first role based on her ballet experience?” I cannot express how pleased I was to then be given an episode in which she actually performs ballet.

Also, despite my complaints about this show, I will say that any show that brings in Bruce Davison is okay in my book. I was actually pretty pleased with his storyline; it’s the first time the show has really referenced T2 so explicitly, and the imparting of religious significance to what is the most memorable (maybe even iconic) sequences in the film was very nicely done.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I’m always saddened when a show has a decent premise but can’t really think of what do to with it but to append “…and he fights crime.” This show starts with a pretty bizarre premise – Dutch settler of New Amsterdam (with the help of Native American magic) lives forever until he finds his true love – then mucks it up by appending that to a horrible cop procedural drama. There are moments that are decent on this show. I like the idea that the protagonist makes a little extra cash by making desks that he passes off as antiques (since they’re the same style as they were when he made them in a previous career as a carpenter) and the awkward scene with an ex-lover (now elderly and senile) had some promise, but the show never really exploits its premise. As it is, we get a painfully stupid murder case for him to solve, which really could have been solved by a non-immortal person. There’s some potential here, but I have very little faith these people are going to tease it out.

This show’s already growing on me a bit from the previous episode. While the pilot’s detective storyline felt a little tacked-on and forced, this episode felt more like a proper story, and I must say that the protagonist’s continued assertions (out loud) that assorted people are all her hallucinations is pretty amusing.

The reunion episodes are enjoyable enough, if not particularly gripping or dramatic. They didn’t really give much time to the ex-contestants who were clearly bitter about their treatment on the show, which certainly added to the liveliness of the get-together. Really, the whole episode was worthwhile just for the footage of Michael Kors cracking up. It’s unfortunate they didn’t use that in the actual episode.

There was a lot that was lousy about this episode (or, rather, there was a whole lot of one lousy thing – the Kate-Jack-Sawyer triangle), but I’m really hoping that Faraday’s tests to show his short-term memory loss will be the writers’ explanation of why people on the island can’t remember to tell other people anything, ask critical follow-up questions, or basically move the story forward at a reasonable pace. If the island is making everyone slightly brain-damaged, it would certainly explain a lot about why everyone acts like they do. Anytime writers come up with a reason for the half-assed writing of previous writers is okay in my book.

I skipped writing up the last couple episodes of this show due to surgery, but I’m starting to find this show a little directionless. While there’s a stated goal to end Sky Net, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of urgency on the part of the main characters. We started to get a storyline in which Sarah would hunt down (or at least date) the various people that the safe house crew were investigating, but that seems to be going nowhere. I’m sure they’re just trying to spread out what little plot they have over a lot of episodes, but there just doesn’t seem to be much in the way of forward momentum here.

Part of the problem is certainly the assortment of robots hunting them. There was a stretch there when they were building up the robot now played by Garrett Dillahunt as the main enemy for the series, but he’s disappeared for a while now and has been replaced by some ringers.

All that said, the addition of David Austin Green seems to be moving things forward a bit, though I suspect we’re in for a whole lot of flashback over the next few episodes, since they have retroactively cast reasonably experienced actors (like Bubbles! And that kind of weaselly looking guy I can’t quite place) in the parts of the already-dead safe house members, which isn’t going to do much for forward momentum.

The serialized structure has gotten pretty impressively out of hand at this point. The third season at least contained an occasional one-off story (with maybe a few minutes devoted to moving the big story forward), but this season is pretty much one, sixteen-hour story. I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s certainly an impressive shift (especially from the first season). Obviously, the big problem this season is Connor, who is fantastically annoying. He gets sidelined towards the end, which helps, as does the moral ambiguity the show settles on at the end. For a show that talks at great length about good and evil, it’s a pretty interesting to decision to present a situation that is good for a great many people, but very bad for a few, as an outright morally wrong choice. The audience (and the protagonists) don’t question this presentation until everything’s all over, at which point they realize that perhaps they should have thought things through a little bit more than they did. It’s not often a show reminds people that an uncompromising striving toward perfect good may end up making the world a much worse place.

Huh? This is some pretty goofy rule rewriting going on here. A sudden death showdown to be resolved in two weeks to determine who is showing in the finale? I find it hard to believe they haven’t been deadlocked in the past, so this just seems like some arbitrary rule changing. What is this, Love Cruise?

I should point out that I was pretty loopy on painkillers and still recovering from surgery when I watched this episode, so my memory of what happened is a little fuzzy. I remember being a little unimpressed with the future Sayid storyline. The revelation that he and Ben are working on some sort of homicidal plot in the future is good, but the romantic dilly-dallying with his target just seemed like they were killing time a bit. I kind of hope that, once they realize they’ve got to finish their season in three or four fewer episodes than planned, the writers will have to trim some of their bad habits.

Like the previous season, the first half is pretty rough. Pretty much any episode with Darla is almost unwatchably bad, but, when she’s not onscreen, the show hums along pretty nicely (though, as with the previous season, the “one character becomes alienated from his friends” arc sort of undercuts the appeal of the show). The choppy, stand-alone nature of the first season seems to have been largely tossed in favour of a highly structured serialized structure. I’m not sure how well it worked when watching an album a week, but it certainly worked well when watching the whole season in one shot.