Lost: "Ji Yeon"

Jin and Sun have always been the most foreign of foreigners on "Lost" - Jin couldn't speak or understand English, Sun had to make pretend she couldn't either, and unlike the Iraqi-accented English featured in Sayid's flashbacks (or the African accents in Eko's), their Korean dialogue is always subtitled (yet another "Lost" breakthrough that now seems utterly normal, since that Hiro Nakamura - the most popular character in a zeitgeist show - hardly ever speaks English.) It was easy to brush them off as vague Asian caricatures: the proud businessman husband who knows karate, the quiet respectful wife who likes gardening. Husband and wife - that was the weirdest thing about them, really. On an island full of young, hotly disheveled single people, here were a pair of young, hotly disheveled married people.

Seriously, what's weirder than marriage in a TV drama? Sitcoms, from "I Love Lucy" and "The Honeymooners" through to "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "The King of Queens," have focused so much endless attention on married life that it's easy to forget how few hour-long dramas have featured marriage - not in the supporting cast, not as a show-killing ratings-grabber, but as an integral part of the show right from the start. I mean, just look at a list like this and ponder just how rarely the dramatic possibilities of marriage have been explored on American television. "The Sopranos" might have changed that - marriages are at the center, in one way or another, of "Dirty Sexy Money," "Big Love," "Rome," and of course "Desperate Housewives," but that last show is really just proof of the skewed vision of marriage that reigns in TV land - rife with death twists and yardboy mancandy, it's a vision of America as the country of divorce, where getting married is just the first step to having an affair.

Sun had an affair - one of the many buried mysteries on the island that, in this splendid fourth season, seem constantly in danger of forced excavation. As horrifying as writing for "Lost" must be some of the time - trying to navigate between flashbacks and flashforwards, all while creating a new cliffhanger every commercial break - it must also be a nice feeling to have so many storylines lying around, like land mines in a field of roses just waiting to be tripped. On Thursday, in the midst of a quietly antic episode, there were at least three such explosions - Jin found out that Sun slept with another man; out of the shadows of a dank ghost ship stepped island-Judas Michael; and we found out who got off the island - and then found out we were wrong.

I tend to rag on the Jin/Sun episodes, mostly because their two entries in season 3 were such painful retreads of old themes - Jin selling his soul to Sun's father for the sake of their marriage, Sun trying to escape Jin but then realizing that she loved him, etc. This kind of stuff could fly way back when Jin seemed genuinely a bit dangerous and their on-island marriage was truly hanging by a thread (and when Michael and Sun developed a quiet, unresolved, rarely-remarked-upon flirtation) - but ever since he got back from the failed boat adventure with Michael and Sawyer (remember the boat?), he's been a badass teddy bear, fishing and learning English to please his preggers wifey. Nothing could be more of a buzzkill, after a Desmond or a Locke episode, than the expectation of yet more Korean domestic intrigue.

But Yunjin Kim and Daniel Dae Kim are two of the best actors on the show - she usually gets the acclaim and her overarching storyline is more interesting, but it's remarkable what a complete character he has carved in a performance that's only subtitled half of the time (his campfire story session in "Catch-22" is a moment for the ages.) And their marriage has held strong. "Lost," for all its po-mo narrative zip-zap, can be so lovably retro when it comes to romance. Penny waits 8 years for a phone call; Sayid arranges a torchlit picnic for Shannon and asks her brother for permission to date her. (It may be notable that all these classically romantic couplings mostly involve foreigners, whereas the Americans on the show have invariably twisted relationships, strewn with cuckoldry and divorce and bastard children and step-cest.)

"Ji Yeon" might have been about the beginning of the end for Sun and Jin - perversely, and in classic cross-cutting gusto, just after portraying their greatest marital triumph. Jin, sobered by his fishing trip with Bernard, forgives Sun for her affair - recognizing that his own actions pushed her away. I know some people thought that the Jin flashback was a cheat, messing with the audience's perceptions just to keep Jin's fate a secret. But I would argue the whole tone of that flashback spoke volumes about his decision on the island - that, even before he started beating fools up for his mobster-in-law, Jin was a driven workaholic who would stop at nothing to get some functionary's newborn a giant plush fucking panda. For about a moment towards the end, just after it clicked that Jin wasn't bringing the panda to Sun, I thought that maybe he HAD gotten off the island, but that he just cared more about his work than his newborn baby.

That wasn't the case, of course, but I think that we were supposed to take that confusion one step further - to note that, without the island, Jin would have been that kind of man. Of course, thanks to the island, they have experienced reconciliation - really, they seem to have been happier than they ever were before - and they have conceived, but at the cost (it seems) of Jin's life. Is a short happy marriage worth more than a long unhappy one? Yet again, the writers deployed the flashback to mercilessly undercut our warm fuzzies, to cast doubt on the whole arc of the episode's island storyline, and to force us to fits of panic as we consider two and a half seasons of waiting to see a beloved character die, or worse.

There were other great moments in this episode. If "The Constant" and "Walkabout" are gigantic slabs of seasoned Porterhouse, then episodes like "Ji Yeon" and "Tricia Tanaka is Dead" are a plateful of sushi sampler, or a course of randomly selected Tapas - full of tiny diverse morsels, setting you up for a main course to come. That boat just gets freakier and freakier, for one thing - the crazy Kiwi stuntgirl from "Death Proof" finally appeared in person after weeks on the radio, just long enough to read a book upside down and then, in a haunting and hilariously non sequitur image, jump into the water weighted down by chains. (Another great image - walking in to their new bedroom, Desmond and Sayid spot a Cobain blood mark on the wall.)

Jack and Juliet didn't share any scenes, but was it me, or did they both seem to have an extra little swing in their step - as if they were constantly tiptoeing back from a makeout sesh down the beach (or from a freaky mysterious-jungle screw - Where would you rather do it, honey? The cockpit of a crashed plane? That Question Mark station with all the video feeds? Henry Gale's balloon? The Caves? Hurley's golf course?)

Wonderfully, Michael is back - and, even more wonderfully for everyone who ever got ill playing the "WAAAAALLLT!!" drinking game, he seems to have more on his mind than saving his son from everything. Next episode is the last one before a monthlong break - can it be that we'll get the Michael flashback that we've all been waiting for? And if it is a Michael flashback, then good god! Not since "The Man Behind the Curtain" has there been an episode with so much potential for constant whathafuck.