I just don't buy Jin (who was both very committed to doing his job well, and planning to permanently escape to the US)

It didn't sound, to me, like this was some long-planned venture - Daddy says drop some shit off or pick some shit up in Sydney and LA and Jin goes - not a lot of time, necessarily, for Berlitz. And the escape, if it was ever really going to happen, was likewise just an opportunity to grab, not a long-term plan.

Did anyone get a better sense than I did of the timeframes between flashbacks than I did, though? Was this all happening as fast as it seemed or were we just seeing the various turning points? I suspect the former, though I'd've been more satisfied with the latter.

I was not very impressed with Sayid's "your recently estranged brother said not to go out with you so we're done" response to his conversation with Boone.

Loving Locke more, intrigued by Walt, my love for Michael is definitely fading, and Jack has completely fallen off my interest radar.

I was under the impression that Jin's decision was very sudden and close to the time of the trip. It was easier for Sun to get English lessons, she could easily pass it off as something else and she had the time. BossDaddy kept Jin on a tight leash and it looked like there was barely time to spend with Sun much less sneak off for lessons.

but ... how do we know he doesn't know those basic phrases?

Fair point. Still doesn't gel for me.

Ooh - something that I was thinking about while Michael went after Jin on the beach.

I wonder if part of Jin's motivation during that scene wasn't to provoke some of what happened to him? He saw how Sun reacted to him coming home covered in blood. And he clearly has a hate-on for the violence he's done himself. So if nothing else, Michael's actions here had to put the kibosh on any warm fuzzies Sun was feeling towards him, regardless of what happened between Sun and Jin.

DDK rocked the house on this one. That whole scene - from translations (thanks Vonnie) he was clearly trying to explain himself. But the way he kept getting back up after each hit, the combination of pride, defiance, and the whirlwind of emotions flying between himself and Sun - amazing.

When Sun was flashing back, it seemed like years passed between the wedding and Flight 815, but this time it seemed more like months.

how do we know he doesn't know those basic phrases?

Well, the joke is, even if he didn't before he got on the plane, he's spent 4 weeks on an island where English is the default and pretty damned necessary for survival. Of course he's learned some English, as anyone would, hearing nothing but all day long and needing to know what it means.

I mean, he might have learned only "cave" and "doctor" and "asshole", but those are three very useful words!

I think Jin's using the lack of a common language as a way to keep himself and Sun separate from the others, and actively avoided learning English in order to keep up that protective barrier.

Oh, I agree in general, and that would explain why he's still at the single-word stage, instead of picking up whole phrases. But, like, when somebody borrows his fishing net, after a certain while, mime plus words gives those words meaning. You can't really help that kind of learning.

The human mind is a powerful and scary thing, though. If you didn't want to learn a language, you could probably convince yourself you hadn't, and forget whatever you *had* picked up.

I don't know, LJ -- that sounds like something that requires a serious complex about it, which I'm not seeing in Jin. If you're interacting with a language every day, and we've seen that he is, most of the time you can't help but learn bits of it. Refuse to use those bits, yes. (That can be a form of power, speaking or not speaking; as Sun demonstrated yesterday.) Enact psychological gymnastics akin to repressed memory in order not to learn them in the first place? Hard for me to believe.