The Jin Lives Rant

Hey you, have a look at this a second.

What an amazing death scene, eh? Action. Drama. Tragedy. It’s got it all. It’s probably one of Lost’s finest moments and a heck of a way to kill off one of the main characters.

What’s that, you say? Jin didn’t die?

Get outta here! Don’t be a dick! Course he did! Weren’t you watching?

Huh? What’s that? Take a look at. . .?

Oh.

I see.

He made it. Jin managed to. . . get off the exploding freighter and. . . drift back to the Island. So, I guess, Jin’s not dead after all? Cause for celebration then?

Like fuck it is. What a crock of shit. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I do like Jin and all, but there’s no way he got back to that Island. I don’t care that he once managed to get off an exploding raft. That was OK. We briefly saw him dive off that piece of crap just before it went up. That’s not the case here. Here he was flapping his fucking arms around right on the deck when the thing went ka-boom.

Oh sure, the sequence cut away for a moment to show Michael talking with Christian Shephard, so some might argue that Jin jumped overboard whilst we weren’t looking. You’ll say, Hey AC, don’t be such a fucking know-it-all asshole. You didn’t see what Jin did! You didn’t see him dive off the freighter! You didn’t get to watch Jin right up until the last second so shut your Comet mouth!

‘Tis true. I didn’t get to see the whole thing. But I know someone who did.

That’s not the look of a woman that thinks Jin might have a done quick sprint to the side and high dived into the water before the enormous explosion destroyed everything and dragged The Freighter wreckage to salty depths. That’s not the look of a woman that thinks her husband might have made it. She never took her eyes off what was happening and she saw Jin die, for God’s sake!

Hence:

And there then followed a grudge that lasted for years where Sun turned against her own father and plotted the murder of Benjamin Linus. She was serious and she was sure. (That she suddenly became convinced she was wrong is down to the writer’s betraying the moment we already witnessed. We can file it under the same bullshit as Faraday’s ludicrous ‘explanation’ that the blast must have thrown Jin clear. Sure it did. That’s what explosions do. They just throw people clear. They don’t turn people into charred fragments in a searing 700 degree fireball – they’re like a stiff wind lifting people away into the air like leaves on a breeze!)

No? Not buying it? Still think Jin could have made it? Fine. Great. He survived the explosion. Terrific. How did he get to the Island?

Now we know that, when the Island disappeared, there was a ‘radius’ that you needed to be inside. For argument’s sake we could therefore give this incident leeway and suggest that the radius was large enough to ‘capture’ Jin – only we’ve got various pieces of evidence that suggest otherwise.

Firstly, The Freighter was not within this radius. We know this because Sawyer and Juliet were on the beach and were looking at the black plume of smoke (that was fucking miles away) of The Freighter. Then the Island moved and, hey presto, the black plume of smoke was gone. Therefore we know for a fact that The Freighter wreckage did not move with the Island and was therefore not in the vicinity of the ‘radius’.

Faraday and his zodiac raft were, mind.

Faraday explained that he was headed towards The Freighter when he saw it blow up. So he turned around and headed back to the Island. Let’s be clear on that. Faraday wasn’t even at The Freighter, and then he turned around and headed back to the Island in a motor boat to get within the disappearance radius of the Island.

Jin might be a fast swimmer. He could have been the fastest swimmer in the world. He’s still not making that kind of distance. I mean, to be fair, even a helicopter didn’t make it!

See, Frank departed The Freighter in the helicopter. And sure, he may have circled around a little bit surveying the wreckage but the whole issue was that they didn’t have much fuel. Frank wasn’t for fucking about – he was heading back to the Island as fast as he could to get to some solid land because the helicopter was airborne on nothing but fumes.

And he didn’t make it!

The Island disappeared and the helicopter didn’t make it to the bright white disappearance radius. Get that: The helicopter didn’t even make it!

Can Jin swim faster than a helicopter? No.

Should Jin have made it to the disappearance radius of the Island? No.

Is this bullshit?

Yes.

That the Lost creators tried to make us swallow this bullshit by sweetening it all up to make us think it was chocolate cake is perhaps the most reprehensible part of the whole fiasco. Because the revelation that Jin was alive arrived at the same time as we were meeting Young Rousseau and the long-awaited French team! One of the most exciting and eagerly-awaited moments in Lost mythology smacked us about the face to make us forget about the rotten bitter taste of CHEATING and FRAUDULENCE we had been subjected to.

Probably they’ll say that Jin didn’t die because he still has “work to do”, like Michael did. Yeah, well, whatever. That still doesn’t explain how Jin managed to swim like a fucking torpedo to make it to the Island disappearance radius, does it? Just because he’s a fisherman it doesn’t mean he can swim like a shark shout out of a cannon, does it!?

No, it doesn’t.

They break our hearts. . . and then they take it all back.

Next thing you’ll tell me that Charlie’s not really dead.

Oh for fuck’s sake. . .