Television Review: I Do (Lost, S3X06, 2006)

I Do (S03E06)

Airdate: 8 November 2006

Written by: Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof
Directed by: Tucker Gates

Running Time: 43 minutes

By its third season, Lost had evolved into a show of such labyrinthine mythology and epic scope that even its most inspired creators risked narrative vertigo. The sheer weight of its expanding mysteries, coupled with the logistical and personnel challenges of production in Hawaii, necessitated a strategic pause—a recalibration of the story’s trajectory and the audience’s expectations. This need for breath explains the structural decision, unprecedented in network television at the time, to halt the season after only six episodes. I Do served as what the producers termed a "mid-season finale," a punctuation mark designed to deliver maximal dramatic impact before a thirteen-week hiatus, leaving viewers to stew in a broth of cliffhangers and moral quandaries.

The episode’s central, taut drama unfolds on the Hydra Island, where Jack Shephard finds himself trapped in a surgical version of the prisoner's dilemma. Ben Linus demands an operation to remove his spinal tumour; Juliet Burke, via her ingenious cue-card deception, covertly demands Jack ensure Ben dies on the table. Jack’s initial response is defiance: he refuses both paths, telling Ben he will simply let him die. To break this stalemate, the Others escalate, introducing Kate as emotional leverage. Brought before Jack, she pleads with him to comply, revealing the ultimatum: operate, or Sawyer will be executed by the vengeful Danny Pickett, who seeks retribution for Sun’s killing of his wife, Colleen.

This threat sets in motion a parallel narrative of desperate passion. Kate, seizing a moment of inattention, slips through the top of her cage and breaks the lock on Sawyer’s enclosure. Their reunion, however, is tempered by grim reality; Sawyer informs her they are on another island, making escape impossible. In the face of certain recapture or death, they choose a different form of defiance, succumbing to their long-simmering attraction in a moment of raw, urgent intimacy. This is an act of existential rebellion, a fleeting assertion of humanity against their captors' cold manipulation.

Their post-coital embrace is, predictably, recorded by the Others' omnipresent surveillance. Jack is given way out of his cell to a control room where he witnesses the lovers on a bank of monitors—a psychological coup de grâce engineered by Ben. Confronted with this image, a visibly shattered Jack capitulates. He agrees to perform the surgery, but his surrender is merely the prelude to a more audacious counter-scheme. During the operation, Jack deliberately makes a kidney incision, sentencing Ben to bleed to death within an hour unless his demands are met. At the last possible moment, with Ben’s life hanging in the balance, Jack uses his leverage to secure Kate’s freedom, telling her to run.

These events are juxtaposed with a Kate-centric flashback to 2004 Miami-Dade, where she lives under the alias "Monica," engaged to the decent, unsuspecting police officer Kevin Callis (Nathan Fillion). The idyllic domesticity is suffocating to a fugitive forever glancing over her shoulder. Upon learning she is not pregnant, a development that might have anchored her to this false life, Kate confesses her truth to Kevin. In a act of twisted mercy, she drugs him to ensure he cannot be implicated as an accessory, and disappears into the night. This flashback reframes her Island actions as the behaviour of a woman conditioned to believe her presence is a contaminant, that love and safety are mutually exclusive with truth.

On the main Island, Locke and Sayid undertake a sombre side-quest. Rejecting a beach burial for Eko as "too demoralising" for the camp, Locke chooses a jungle interment. Retrieving Eko’s famous stick, he and Sayid briefly discuss the Smoke Monster that killed their comrade. During a simple funeral service, Locke discovers intricate carvings on the stick—a cryptic map or set of instructions he interprets as a divine mandate.

Upon its original airing, I Do was a contentious episode. Fans left stewing for thirteen weeks resented the brutal cliffhanger, a narrative torture device they had not anticipated from a show already notorious for its mysteries. Furthermore, a vocal segment of the audience was aggrieved by what they perceived as Kate’s definitive romantic choice of Sawyer over Jack, a tribal shipping war that the episode seemed to decisively settle. The complexity of Jack’s surgical blackmail also struck some as convoluted, a knot almost too intricate to be satisfyingly untangled later.

From the privileged vantage of today’s streaming era, where the hiatus vanishes with a click, I Do transforms into a superlative piece of television craftsmanship. The script by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse uses the limited, claustrophobic setting of the Hydra Island—its cages, control room, and sterile operating theatre—to stage a par excellence melodrama of coercion, defiance, and tragic romance. Jack’s arc is particularly well-realised; his revolt against the machinations of both Ben and Juliet, culminating in his own ruthless gambit, represents the character at his most strategically brilliant and emotionally devastated. It is the moment the idealistic doctor fully embraces the pragmatism of war.

While the love scene between Sawyer and Kate is undeniably steamy, it is executed within the strict confines of US broadcast standards and is far from gratuitous fan service. It is a logical, character-driven culmination of years of fraught tension, rendered poignant by its context of imprisonment and looming death.

True fan service is found elsewhere, in the charming cameo by Nathan Fillion. His appearance as the doomed Officer Callis is a delicious piece of meta-casting. For contemporary audiences, his arrival in a police uniform feels prophetic, foreshadowing his iconic role as Officer John Nolan in The Rookie. At the time, however, he was recruited as an homage to his beloved performance as Captain Mal Reynolds in Firefly, a figure of cult television reverence. Fillion, a self-professed Lost devotee, later spoke glowingly of his brief time on set—a fitting footnote for an episode that so expertly balanced the intimate with the epic.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

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