SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't yet seen this episode of Lost, you should avoid reading this article and the user comments, as they will discuss events that happened during the episode.

Episode 7 Metascore

92
Ep. 6 82	Ep. 3: 64
Ep. 5 71	Ep. 1/2: 89
Ep. 4 88

Season 6, Episode 7: "Dr. Linus"

Before we get to details about the Ben-centric "Dr. Linus" -- the best-reviewed episode of Lost's final season so far -- let's take a quick moment to address the nature of these episode review compilations that we have been posting for Lost this year.

In a follow-up to his recap of last week's episode, Zap2It Lost columnist Ryan McGee wrote: "Am I leaping for joy over 'Sundown' 24 hours later? Definitely not. My problems with the episode still remain. Still, for Metacritic to interpret my recap as giving the episode a 40 out of a possible 100? That's more than a little much."

That brings up several interesting points:

1. The scores we assign to episode reviews represent our interpretation of how the reviewer/recapper not only feels about the episode in question, but how he/she compares it to other episodes of Lost. Thus, the episode metascores for Lost can be compared to each other, but not to those for other programs. (We haven't mentioned that before because we don't actually cover any other programs on an episode-by-episode basis right now, but we may in the future.) For example, if an episode of Lost were to get a Metascore of 40, it might be one of the worst episodes of Lost, but it is probably still much better than, say, an 80 episode of Melrose Place. Thus, McGee's problems with "Sundown" (for example, he wrote "I rarely felt compelled by what I saw onscreen") indicated to us that he rated that episode much less favorably than he did previous episodes -- hence the 40 score we assigned. (40, by the way, is not even a "bad" review on our scale -- it indicates a "mixed or average" review.)
2. All of the people who review and/or recap Lost on a weekly basis probably love the series to begin with -- or else they wouldn't be writing about it so frequently. So, in many of their reviews and recaps, you'll see plenty of good things about the show, even if it wasn't the series' best episode. Thus, we try to be a little stricter about how we assign scores to episode reviews than we normally might be with a TV series as a whole.
3. With the luxury of being able to write about the show daily, McGee in particular does something that many reviewers are unable to do with this or any other show: he is able to re-watch the show, give it more thought and time, and post his revised opinions in a later column. While that's great for readers, it's problematic for us when calculating Metascores. So that there is a level playing field -- and the reviews are directly comparable to each other -- we have a sitewide policy to use only the first review posted in a publication for any release. (This problem also comes up with online videogames, among other things.) Any re-reviews are ignored.

OK, now it's time to get on to the show. By the way, we try to select quotes from the reviews/recaps that represent the episode as a whole. So what you may not see below is something that was present in every review of last night's episode: heaping amounts of praise for Michael Emerson's performance. Oh, and that there aren't many fans of Arzt.

Individual critic scores are assigned by Metacritic (on a scale of 0-bad to 100-great) based on the overall impression given by a review. The overall Metascore listed at the top of this page is a simple average of the individual scores.

What did you think?

Did you enjoy this episode of Lost? Let us know in the comments section below. As a courtesy to other users, please do not include spoilers of any kind in your posts, although you are welcome to discuss all events shown in this particular episode of the show.