#enter 77

[lostecho815]

[theafictionados]

Every Afictionados Best Line Award (Brittany)

LOST Episode 311: Enter 77

by the Afictionados Podcast Network

[girlinthefireplace16]

Lost Rewatch - 3x11 Enter 77

“I've played a lot of computers and I'm pretty sure they don't know how to cheat. That's what makes being human so distinctly wonderful.”

[luuuna-rambles]

Lost Rewatch: 3x11 Enter 77

Yesterday, a happy-go-lucky feel good episode. Today... not that

According to the Lostpedia timeline, the A-Plot and B-Plot take place on two different days, which is an odd decision

If the ping-pong table was in the Hatch the whole time, how come we never saw anyone playing then?

They seem to be trying to set up Paulo as some kind of foil for Sawyer, which... yeah... no

Sayid says they’re following a compass bearing North of 305, but would the bearing for north just be 0?

Sayid seems (rationally) pissed that they’re been following a magic stick for two day, but it really took him two days to raise concerns?

Har har, Sawyer doesn’t know who Nikki is. But, if you’ve spent over two months with the same people, surely you’d recognise them all by sight at least. You know, if they’d actually been there the whole time

16 year on the same fairly small island, moving around pretty much constantly. How has Danielle not run into Mikhail’s house before?

The complete tonal whiplash of Kate and the Boys fighting Mikhail, to Sayid being tortured in a restaurant basement, to... a friendly game of ping pong

I can never take ‘Not every nook and cranny, John’ ever again seriously after seeing the bloopers

nOt EvErY nOoK aNd CrAnEe JoN... Good God Homes

And Sayid very much is Holmes here. Working out someone else is here from the horse stirrups... figuring out exactly what is going on without being told a damn thing. Sayid is the man!

Come on, Locke. I get that you haven’t played games in months, but getting distracted by Chess???

Why does Dr Chang ask if there has been an incursion by the Hostiles only after you try to communicate with the mainland? Shouldn’t that be your first question every time?

Ms Klugh was barely even a character, but you have to respect the way she goes out. Outright ordering Mikhail to kill her, no fear whatsoever

Why tf does Sayid tell Mikhail exactly how he plans to get to the Barracks?

Fun Fact: The first time I ever saw Lost, I walked in on the rest of my family watching this episode. Specifically the Cat Speech scene. I thought it was incredible then, and it still holds up now. Amazing Sayid episode

Overall Review:

Sayid is such a great character, and this is a great episode for displaying that. Sayid does everything this episode, to the point where Kate feels like a sidekick and Locke feels like a moron. And the flashbacks are such a great way of reminding the audience that this guy is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. This guy you’ve been rooting for all episode? He tortured an innocent woman in his past

Overall Rating: 9.2/10

[theafictionados]

Every Afictionados Best Line Award (Scott)

LOST Episode 311: Enter 77

by the Afictionados Podcast Network

[theafictionados]

Every Afictionados Best Line Award (Robyn)

LOST Episode 311: Enter 77

by the Afictionados Podcast Network

[woozapooza]

So when I was looking at reviews of Enter 77 and getting mad because some critics weren’t giving it the praise it deserved, it got me thinking about how my standards for what makes good tv are just really different from those of a lot of real critics. The real critics are way better than I am at analyzing an episode, seeing if it makes sense, seeing how it fits into the show, seeing whether characters are acting out of character, etc., but in addition to all that, I feel like I’m much more willing to love an episode based on its own merits (as opposed to how it fits into the context of the show) and based on how it allows the characters to shine (as opposed to how it moves the plot forward). Not that I don’t think an ideal episode would play an important role in the show as a whole, but I think my standards for what constitutes a significant episode are just...so different that a lot of real critics’ perspectives just don’t make sense to me.

Like, to take Enter 77 as an example, it was the flashbacks in particular that were mainly being criticized, but the flashbacks are precisely what made the episode so good to me. A lot of people seem to think that the flashbacks didn’t add anything either to Sayid’s character or to the present-day part of the plot, but I don’t agree on either point. To start with Sayid’s character: yeah, we already know that he was a torturer and that he has a lot of angst about it. It’s true that we’ve already seen him be confronted by one of his victims (Sawyer) and repent to them. But while the Amira/Sawyer parallel is interesting, there are so many differences (Amira forgives Sayid, Sawyer doesn’t; there’s no indication that Sayid thought he was doing the right thing by hurting Amira whereas with Sawyer he was trying to save Shannon; the Amira encounter simply features a younger Sayid who presumably has never been at the mercy of one of his victims before, etc.) it’s impossible for me to see Enter 77 as a retread of the relevant scenes in Confidence Man and All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues. As for how the episode fits into the main plot, it’s enough for me that Sayid has to choose whether to continue the cycle of mercy with regards to Mikhail. A huge, absolutely fundamental part of the show is that being on the island forces the characters to revisit key moments in their lives and confront the lessons they learned, and that’s exactly what we see Sayid do. Another major element of the show is its themes of sin, forgiveness, and what morality really is. We see these themes in the whole thing from season one about whether they’re being punished (I feel like it was Claire and Sun who had this conversation but I’m not sure), in the Others’ insistence that they’re the “good guys,” in the presence of the concept of dharma, in Eko’s final speech, perhaps in Mikhail’s claim in the following episode that Kate, Sayid, and Locke are “flawed” (I can’t say for certain because I don’t yet know what he meant), and so on. Amira is important because she simply provides a philosophy we haven’t seen before. But more fundamentally, I just really, really liked seeing such a fantastic character as Sayid in such an emotional and captivating story! It’s as simple as that! I guess what we’re really disagreeing on is whether it’s inherently worth it to see Sayid in a new situation, to give Naveen Andrews a new challenge as an actor, and to put Sayid’s character arc and its themes (and the themes of the show) in new words. I think it’s obvious which side I come down on.

P.S. I’m not touching on the few comments I saw that were like “this show sucks so obviously this episode sucks” because obviously I disagree with those people on such a fundamental level there’s really no point in arguing.

P.P.S. Yeah, this episode was clearly based on Death and the Maiden. What of it?

P.P.P.S. It just occurred to me that these flashbacks add resonance to the Sayid vs. Sawyer plotline of season 1. Not that this resonance is necessary to make the s1 plot work, but it does make it even better and more meaningful in my opinion. Sayid’s guilt over having hurt Sawyer and his line “what I did today, what I almost did, I swore to do never again” make perfect sense on their own, but I find that there’s an additional “ohhhh!” factor now that we’ve learned that Sayid had already been confronted by one of his victims once and made to acknowledge his remorse.

P.P.P.P.S. I encountered one person who thinks that Sayid’s confession was false and that Amira was wrong. Hmm. No.

P.P.P.P.P.S. This post is really just a long-winded way of saying that I really love Sayid Jarrah.

[donheisenberg]

Classics Reviewed: Lost S3 Ep10/11 Tricia Tanaka Is Dead/Enter 77:

After 6 below par episodes, followed by a couple of classics (including an episode that would feature in just about everyone’s top 10 in the form of Flashes Before Your Eyes) followed by Stranger in a Strange Land, consistency has been hard to come by so far in season 3 of Lost.

Both Tricia Tanaka Is Dead and Entry 77 help to stabilize the season. The first of these episode focused on Hurley was voted Lost’s second worst episode by IGN, but I think that they are quite wrong on this occasion (as IGN often are) and instead Tricia Tanaka is one of Hurley’s very best episodes and probably Lost’s most underrated episode.

If the flashbacks this season have been characterized by the show not having anything particular new to say about the characters Tricia Tanaka certainly doesn’t buck the trend. They add a new daddy issues angle to Hurley’s backstory but really this is still the story of the cursed lottery winner.

But if you take a step back and look at Lost purely as a piece of entertainment for a second, the flashbacks here are as funny and engaging as any for a while. Not only this but whether or not you see much point in them, they are still full of character and the sort of great character moments that Lost should be remembered more for.

The word underrated ripples through a lot of my thoughts when it comes to this episode. Not only is Tricia Tanaka itself an underrated hour of TV but lots of what makes it great are themselves under-appreciated. 

When we talk about Lost and its characters, we quite often think of them in pairs. Each character has a story that exists inter-dependent of other characters, but the relationships were always as important as the individual characters they were comprised of and the Sawyer/Hurley friendship was always one of the best even if it didn’t quite have the fanfare.

This and the next few episodes are probably the best showcase of it and for that Tricia Tanaka should get a bit more credit than it does.

A-/A (proper borderline)

Enter 77 is another really solid hour of Lost. The flashbacks are again less problematic than the ones without being hugely significant in the wider schemes of things.

They are exactly the sort of flashbacks that you quite want to populate the show in-between the more significant off-island-vignettes. They find a new way of exploring something we are pretty familiar with when it comes to Sayid’s tortured past (apologies) in having him been the interrogated rather than the interrogator.

The on-island action is similarly strong. Outside of Locke’s slightly suspect decision to play a game of online chess when Mikhail is tied up, the episode flows nicely and doesn’t take you out of the action the way some episodes have.

Although ostensibly a bridging episode it gives something in the way of an answer with regards to Mikhail and also in what has become quite a trend Enter 77 is another really strong Jack-less episode. With the exception of the excellent Not in Portland, the episodes that have not had Jack in them have fared a whole lot better than his this season.

Another strong episode in a run that as earlier alluded to functions mostly to stabilize the show before it goes onto bigger and better things.

A-

Spoiler Section:

Is the 77 in Enter 77 a reference to the year 1977, in which I believe most of season 5 is set?

First reference to the Purge here. I can’t remember if I thought that the others and the Dharma initiative were the same when originally watching it? What ever the case you can’t help but be sent forward to the excellent The Man Behind The Curtain where we see it in happen.

In terms of how these two episodes work as last flashbacks, I think they are both really strong. Hurley’s seemingly ties up his story while Sayid’s finds that one final angle from which to explore his past as a torturer.