Everytime "LOST" begins to right itself -- such as with the, IMO, exemplary "The Long Con", a nasty bit of business such as "One of them" comes along to add a little gravity to the downward spiral.

Unfortunately, "One of them", shows a strengthening of a disturbing trend in recent "LOST" episodes: the recycled plot device. Once again, we get to see Sawyer taunted by a jungle beast, except this time it isn't a boar, it's a measly tree frog. Once again, we get to see Locke and Jack struggle over issues of faith and logic. Once again, we get to see a flashback that explores an aspect of a character that, well, isn't that interesting to begin with.

After "LOST -- One of them", I find myself wondering if I am crossing over to be "One of them" myself; one of those who's mounting dissatisfaction with the show is rapidly gelling into desponency.

"LOST" fans who bristle at episodes that fail to advance the central plot of the show will be rusteling their quills in fury tonight. "LOST -- One of them" proved to be another drawn out stall tactic, filled with hyperbole and "going-nowhere-fast" anticipation scenes, and a measure of the flawed logic seen in "What Kate Did". For those who have forgotten, the reason that Kate killed her father was because he was a jerk and, well, he was her father. It was just plain too much for her to bare that she carried his genes. She felt a prisoner of his chromosomes and could only break free by torching the poor drunk bastard.

In "LOST -- One of them", we have an extremely simple plot. Danielle captures a man who claims to have crashed on the island in a balloon. Sayid takes said man to the hatch to interrogate him. That flawed logic I mentioned? Well, Sayid is positive that the man is one of the "others" because... he didn't feel guilty for kicking the crap out of him. I guess Sayid has psychic knuckles or something.

Indeed the counter did reach zero, with little fanfare. There indeed was a difference between the counter in last weeks promo and the one used on the show, however the one in the promo did not appear in this episode which makes it the worst kind of red herring. Maybe the new trend is to show us stuff in the promos that will never even happen in the episodes? Sheesh.

So what happened? Well, it looked like Locke was playing cosmic slots for a few seconds, then he was successful in reseting the counter even though it hit zero several seconds earlier. I guess zero on the hatch timer is a little like the gas light in your car, it only comes on to tell you that your almost out of gas.

Sadly, even Clancey Brown as a "more-sadistic-than-he-seems" CIA operative couldn't bring any enjoyment to the flash-back sequences. Aside from some great CGI work from the Kevin Blank team, the flashback to Sayid's induction to the craft of torture fails to move or connect with the present-day-island events. In fact it is woefully inconsistent with what we learned about Sayid in "solitary". The creative team seems to be trying to make some weird psuedo-political statement: The Americans MADE Sayid a torturer. It's just weird. We already got a fairly good take on this in solitary, why did we need to know where he got the knack from? And what does it really advance?

If you are one of those frustrated by the lack of movement in this episode, here is the kicker: This episode is the beginning of a five episode arc concerning the captive Henry Gale. If your sitting where I am right now, that likely means it will be four episodes before we hear much of anything out of him. --------