Lost 3.01: A Tale of Two Cities review

The One Where: Sawyer, Kate and Jack are locked up.

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AIR-DATE: 4/10/06

Written by: JJ Abrams, Damon Lindelof
Directed by: Jack Bender

Starring: MC Gainey, Julie Bowen, John Terry

In Flashback
Jack is going
through a divorce with his wife
Sarah. She refuses to tell him the
name of her new man, making
him paranoid. Jack begins to
suspect that she’s going out with
his dad, so he follows him one
night. But his dad is only
attending an AA session and has
been sober for weeks. Jack is still
convinced that his dad is dating
Sarah, though, and attacks him at
the meeting. He’s arrested and
thrown in jail until Sarah pays his
bail to get him out. As he leaves
the police station he sees Sarah’s
new bloke. It’s not his dad.

On the Island
The episode
kicks off with a mini-flashback to
the day the aircraft crashed. We
see it from the point of view of
the Others, who, it’s revealed, live
in a small town (with all mod
cons) on the island.

Having been caught by the
Others, Jack, Sawyer and Kate all
wake in separate places. Jack is
in a metal cell, where an Other
called Juliette tries to win his
trust. Instead he attempts to
escape, and opens a door that
lets in hundreds of gallons of
water and he almost drowns.
It seems his cell is underwater.

Meanwhile, Sawyer’s in a cage
full of logic puzzles designed to
train animals to access food.

Kate wakes up in a changing
room, where Mr Friendly forces
her to shower and change into a
dress. Handcuffed, she’s taken to
see “Henry Gale” for breakfast on
the beach. He tells her to be
ready for two very unpleasant
weeks ahead, then she’s put in a
cage opposite Sawyer’s.

Juliette breaks Jack’s will.
‘Henry’ congratulates her, and
she replies, “Thank you, Ben.”

Trivia
Mike Emerson (Ben),
Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliette),
Rodrigo Santoro (Paulo) and
Kiele Sanchez (Nikki) are now
listed as a regular cast members,
though Santoro and Sanchez
don’t appear in this episode.

Review
And so the big
revelation of the episode is…
Henry’s really called Ben. Wow.
That’ll get ’em tuning in next
week. Though, to be honest, it’s
more exciting than Jack’s dull
divorce flashback (which may
have been more interesting if
Sarah had been revealed to be
dating an Other, or something).

Okay, so we all expect Lost to
do the unexpected, and some
may argue it’s brave to open the
season with an episode that
doesn’t feature three quarters of
the main cast. But, to be honest,
it’s simply not a very exciting
opener. Luckily, Jack, Kate and
Henry all have some great
scenes, and the opening
sequence is a corker – totally
unexpected and brilliantly
realised. And some people
I know really liked the image of
Sawyer in a cage…

Dialogue

Tom: “How’d you
do that?”
Sawyer: “I figured out your
complicated gizmos, that’s how.”
Tom: “It only took the bears
two hours.”

Dave Golder

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