Steve, on Recon

I WANT SAWYER AND MILES TO HAVE THEIR OWN CRIME-FIGHTING SPINOFF. OHMYGOD HOW AMAZING WOULD THAT BE?!

Um that said, there was absolutely nothing wrong with this episode and everything right with it, except for that scene when James tried to bring the sunflower to Charlotte, because HELLO, they might be in a different reality but we all know that someday sometime in the future he's gonna be all having coffee with Juliet and need to apologize for something and try that and now it won't be as adorable. That's a lie. It will still be as adorable.

...I would write more coherent things about Widmore/NotLocke, but, a) who am I kidding, and b) I'm *so* distracted by the incredibleness that was Miles and Sawyer as detective partners that I can't focus on the actual island plot for more than a few minutes. Seriously, Best. Idea. Ever.

Oh, one thing: Sawyer's timeline doesn't seem to have changed that much except that he made a different choice at the "turn out to be a criminal or a cop" juncture. Was that influenced by Jacob not having talked him out of burning the letter at his parents funeral? Like, was his anger made slightly less because of his not having a physical object to carry around to focus his anger on? Because he still has the folder full of evidence. Also probably not being a con man would make him way less angry and self-loathing and "I became the man I was hunting-how terribly poetic"-y....but my point is twofold: (and like all things in Lost, when I say "point," I mean "question"): 1) Why was his timeline so much less altered than the other characters? and 2) Are the characters actually the same *people* in both realities? Like, Sawyer's "I reached a point in my life where I could be a criminal or I cop. I chose cop" speech was probably applicable to both realities, only in the other one he chose criminal. The island having blown up in 1977 can't have impacted his life so much that he had enough different experiences to chose the other option, could it? Is he actually a slightly different, dare I say better, version of himself? This is similar to something I was thinking about in the last episode...in either reality, Ben is Ben, right? But in one reality he sacrificed his daughter for the Island, and in the other, he wouldn't sacrifice her well being for his own self-advancement. Of course the difference is that with the Ben situation, the Island is obviously involved, and the stakes were different in the different realities (survival on the island vs. promotion to principal), but it still seems like the alternate reality characters aren't quite carbon copies of the first reality characters. They're slightly better people who make better decisions. And I'm not convinced that would have happened naturally had the island blown up in 1977.