Cheating Time by Doc Jensen

They never made it to Albuquerque in the flash-forward future (at least, not yet), but Jin and Sun landed somewhere deeper in last night's moving, deviously tricky installment of Lost. Back on point after last week's subpar Juliet-centric episode, ''Ji-Yeon'' had me dabbing my eyes repeatedly. You're always going to get me watery with a story about the sometimes perilous road of bringing new life into the world; it's a personal thing, and Lost tapped it well enough, so there you go: I'm sold. Even better, I loved how this story, unexpectedly, dealt with resolving Sun's sin against her husband — her infidelity with Jae — yet also completed Jin's redemptive reconstruction into a husband worthy of his wife's faithfulness. I'm not sure if Jin really is destined for death, as the final moments of the show seemed to suggest, but in many ways the episode felt like a valedictory for the character. Recognizing his own moral failure during his fishing-boat heart-to-heart with Bernard (a kinda corny but altogether effective scene), the former underworld strongman was able to forgive his Sun and recognize his role in pushing her away. But the beautiful moment came when he said he would follow her to Locke's camp — this, from the man who just a couple months ago in Lost time demanded his wife obediently trot after him. The role reversal closed the circuit on Jin's redemptive arc and had me searching for tissues anew. When he asked, with great vulnerability, if the baby was his, and Sun assured him that it was, I grabbed more. Well played by Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim, this was Jin and Sun's finest hour since season 1.

But we're going to rumble over that flashback fake-out, aren't we?


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