Jeff Jensen of EW Recaps Lost Episode 10, "Something Nice Back Home"

My new favorite Lost reviewer, EW's Jeff Jensen, wrote a great 4-page article which included the significance and analysis of:

• the passage of Alice In Wonderland that was read in the episode
• Jack's appendicitis
• Hurley compared to Alice In Wonderland
• the beginning of Jack's downward spiral to Season 3 finale status
• the Millennium Falcon
• Charlotte's Korean influences

Read more of my blog posting for the juicy bits of the article, cut out just for you (I really want to read Alice in Wonderland now).
You can read Jeff Jensen's entire article here.



"'Something Nice Back Home' was partly a transitional passage in the Lost saga, a busywork episode designed to put all the characters in position for the year's big finale, a three-part affair that starts in two weeks. Jin cut a secret deal with Charlotte, Claire went MIA, Christian Shepherd bonded with his grandson, flash-forward Hurley went nutty, and flash-forward Kate did secret favors for left-behind Sawyer. But mostly, it was about Jack."

"Jack's toxic appendix was a symbol of his seemingly dormant psychological baggage, which catastrophically ruptured in his flash-forward story."

"Talk about Alice in Wonderland links: We learned Hurley had become as mad as the Hatter — a character, intriguingly enough, who believed he had literally murdered time. More to the point of the episode's cited passage, Hurley had become like Alice: despairing over how he fit into the post-Island world, puzzling over the man he was — or wasn't."

"Jack's transformation into a pill-popping, booze-guzzling, airplane-crash-yearning, bridge-jumping-wannabe grizzly bear [has] begun....[Jack] is one really complicated guy whose savior complex not only is an expression of his damage but gets in the way of his own redemption. Jack might be a good man, but he's a control freak (see: insisting on observing and guiding his own surgery) who hates himself and will sabotage any chance athappiness that he gets (see: driving Kate away). For Jack, there will never be ''something nice back home'' — both literally and spiritually — until he gets over himself."

"On the Millennium Falcon: Sure the toy was chosen for a reason. My theory? The ship's notoriously erratic hyperdrive = the Island's unpredictable time-space-bending properties."

"On Hurley: I found that the name of Hurley's doctor — the one who he thinks isn't really real — was ''Stillman.'' The name links provocatively to Paul Auster's trippy existential mystery novella City of Glass and a character named Peter Stillman, who has a mother lode of father issues, was the subject of a bizarre pseudoscience experiment straight out of the Dharma playbook, and who may or may not be real."

"As for Charlotte's Korean, the crazy thought occurred to me that perhaps this Dharma-hunting anthropologist uses it to converse with one of her secret masters, someone I suspect has more to do with the larger Lost mythology than we've been led to believe — Sun's father, Mr. Paik."