Counting Down To Lost's Return: 4 To Go

With a big advertising blitz for its return in full swing on ABC right now, Lost is now less than 100 hours away (or less than C hours, as Hinckley would say).

I occasionally get the sense that South Korean couple Sun and Jin aren't necessarily all that popular with the general audience of the show. I don't know if that's because they have to read sub-titles during the flashbacks - apparently some folks won't even watch a great foreign film unless it's -shudder- dubbed! - or because they're already together and thus mostly missing that will-they-or-won't-they manufactured 'heat' that popularizes shows like Grey's Anatomy, Men in Trees, and maybe even the Jack-Kate-Sawyer triangle in Lost itself. Whatever the rationale, I personally find their stories fascinating for at least a couple of reasons.

First, there's the cultural and social background, in which Jin started out as a lower class commoner whose fisherman father was heart-breakingly an embarrassment to him as he tried to better his situation, while Sun goes through Life naively oblivious (we think) to her own father's dirty business practices. We see glimpses of Korean life in the flashbacks, and one of our earliest impressions of the couple, on the island, was Jin's domineering attitude toward his wife, which would be considered unacceptable in our culture. But of course the writers were reminding us that beliefs and morales aren't the same everywhere, which may end up being important to eventually understanding what's happening on the island, and why.

The other thing that really caught my interest vis-a-vis our young lovers was the time it took for us to begin to understand their relationship. We were lead to think one thing initially - controlling husband, docile wife - and then every subsequent flashback so far has peeled back another layer of camouflage to challenge what we thought we knew about them. For most of the backstories on the show, we're just seeing new dimensions to the individual characters, but with these two, we're also treated to a relationship slowly appearing before our eyes, like a Polaroid.

I can hardly wait to see what new revelations await us, and Sun and Jin themselves, as the show rolls on!