LOST AGAIN (S1E17) Series Re-Watch - Season 1, Episode 17, "...In Translation"

Day 32-33

This weeks eye-opener is Jin, although he isn't waking up, he's just staring out at the ocean.

Sun and Jin are probably the characters that change the most from the beginning to the end of the series. There almost unrecognizable in the first season.

Big cross-character flashback: we see Hurley on TV in Korea. It goes quickly so you have to be sure to see it. We know now that it's reporting his winning the lottery – apparently it's big news even overseas.

We also see where Jin got the dog that he gives later to Sun. It was a gift from the Korean secretary to Mr. Paik.

Sawyer and Jin would become pretty close in their time working for Dharma together. Of course in the beginning of the series it's not uncommon to see a number of relationships go up and down. They would settle down into familiar patterns as the series went on.

There's an interesting parallel that I didn't see in this episode before. Maybe I'm just dense. Sun intervened by slapping Michael when Jin would have done much worse to him. Similarly, Jin intervenes by merely beating up the Secretary when the hitman would have killed him.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait... Did Michael just fist bump Walt? Was that a thing in 2004? Hey, maybe you're getting old when you're not even close to sure when fads actually started.

Walt's question to Locke about whether his father was cool, is so full of ironic subtext that we'll find out later, it's not even funny. It's like asking a survivor of the Titanic, "So, was the ship nice?"

Poor Hurley. Everybody's got a girl but him. But at least he has his tunes. Until the CD player dies. At least eventually Libby will show up. But then she dies. Poor Hurley.

One of the main, most obvious running themes of LOST is the concept of characters having daddy issues. Jin is the only character we've seen so far who has a positive relationship with his father. Does no one else in the LOST universe grow up to be like their father? And while were on the subject, I feel the show lost an opportunity when it was revealed Jacob and the Man in Black actually had mommy issues. Maybe the rewatch will shed a different light on this, but it feels like the show needed to be brought full-circle by showing them having issues with a father.