Below are the first reviews for “LaFleur” from around the web. It looks like most of the critics have enjoyed this episode as much as we have!

Over the next few days, we’ll be collecting and quoting additional reviews, as well as the recaps and analyses by Chris Kirkman, Jeremiah, Gitsie Girl and the SL-LOST Team. Oh, and there’s a “In Preparation for Season 5.5″ video coming soon, so stay tuned!

Click on the authors’ names to read the full articles.

1. Jeff Jensen (EW.com):

The timing of the episode couldn’t have better. As much as I dig trippy time travel puzzles and heady riffs on religion, reason, and existentialism, Lost’s fifth season has very much lived inside its big old brain. ”LaFleur” — flower in French — felt as if the show decided to open up some windows and let some fresh spring air chase away the stuffiness. I laughed, I teared up (Juliet delivered a baby! She’s not the Passover angel, after all!), I got goosebumps. ”LaFleur” reminded me that Lost is at its best when the show is an emotionally-charged adventure story that keeps its geeky mysteries in the background — not invisible at all, but rather turned away from the drama lest they overwhelm us and the story. You know: Exactly like last night’s long-awaited return appearance by Four Toed Statue (Complete Edition), which loomed in the horizon, back turned to us and the castaways, standing like some Statue of Liberty scanning the horizon and beckoning lost, huddled masses to come to it shores…so Smokey can eat them. Decoding the visible details demands a Doc Jensen column of its own. But briefly: Looks Egyptian. Skirt, but no shirt — so despite the long hair, I’m thinking male. Those appear to be ankhs in the hands — symbolic of life in general and eternal life, specifically. And on the head, two pointy ears (Cat? Greyhound? Pig? Spock?) and a rectangular headpiece, like a crown or Jughead’s beanie. These clues could link to any number of Egyptian deities (Bast, Set, Anubis, and Horus will be popular guesses), though given how the Island’s wormhole exits into a different North Africa nation — Tunisia — I’m mulling Ba’al and Moloch, too. In that spirit, I would like to cover my ass and note that…we never actually saw that famous foot, did we? Was this really Four Toed Statue — or some monolithic companion? For now, let’s stick with the general vibe the Statue gives us: The Island appears to have once been home to an ancient civilization; and that Egyptian connotation reminds us that Egyptians were fixated on the afterlife and the possibility of resurrection. Both themes were detectable in ”LaFleur.”

[More reviews after the jump].

2. Alan Sepinwall:

“LaFleur” wasn’t a mind-blowing episode of “Lost,” nor one where we can spend a lot of time picking over it for clues about the larger mythology. But boy, was it fun.

Having shown us Dan in the ’70s in the season premiere, and having shown Jin driving the magic bus and wearing a Dharma jumpsuit at the end of “316,” the writers didn’t have much of a surprise left in showing that the rest of Sawyer’s motley band also wound up hanging with Horace Goodpseed and company. But that’s fine, because the the storytelling model of the last few seasons means that every now and then we need a filling-in-the-blanks episode, and this was one of the more entertaining ones they’ve ever done. Sometimes it’s nice to have an hour of “Lost” that’s relatively straightforward (even with the frequent Three Years Later/Earlier jumps), that doesn’t require an advanced degree from the Dr. Sam Beckett Fan Correspondence School for Quantum Theory to make sense of, that’s simply about the pleasure of watching a great character like James Ford doing his thing — and, for that matter, the pleasure of watching Juliet Burke do her thing right beside him.

3. Paul Levinson:

A fabulous, very satisfying all-island episode 5.8 of Lost tonight - one of the best Sawyer episodes, and, for that matter, one of the best Lost episodes of all time, also.

Speaking of which - time - Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, Faraday, and Jin are back in the 1970s, and the island has stopped skipping, due to Locke’s turning of the wheel. We get a great immersion in prime Dharma time - before Ben and his father have arrived. Horace (who met Ben’s father and mother on the road in Oregon) is head of the Dharma island crew. He’s married to Amy (played by Reiko Aylesworth - Michelle Dressler on 24, and a pleasure to see again), who is having his baby boy.

But the real love story, and it’s a wonderful one, is between Sawyer and Juliet. She’s got Sawyer’s back, as he says, and he enables her to recover her confidence, culminating in her successful delivery of Horace and Amy’s baby.

4. Patrick Kevin Day (Los Angeles Times):

Just when “Lost’s” producers had sent us rushing out to pick up copies of the King James Bible with their allusions to Doubting Thomas and Christ-like iconography, now it appears we’re going to have to learn all about the ancient Egyptians’ beliefs in the afterlife as well.

It turns out Hurley’s watercolor of the Great Sphinx last week was apparently just a preview of what’s to come. In “LaFleur,” we finally got a glimpse of the rest of “Lost’s” famous four-toed statue, and although we only saw the back of it, it looks like it would be right at home in the Valley of the Kings.

But which Egyptian god is it? It could be Anubis, sure. But the ears look wrong. Maybe it’s Thoth? He passed judgment on the dead, among his other duties. The possibilities are endless, and we won’t know for sure until we see that face. Will it have an animal’s face — or the face of someone we know?

5. James Poniewozik (Time):

I’m guessing “LaFleur” will be a polarizing episode for Lost fans. It was chock-ful of the multiplying side characters, chronology that requires a slide rule, and dense history that make some people think Lost is a tease, an endless network of bottomless rabbit holes. Me, I can watch Dharma Initiative stuff until the second coming (of Locke, anyway), so I was in geek heaven with this one. The nerdiness, the cultiness, the microbuses—I love it all. Then again, I also liked the first part of season 3, and pretty much anything involving any hatch, ever, so take that with a grain of salt.

6. Ryan McGee (Zap2It.com):

Bloody brilliant, that’s the summary. By focusing exclusively on Those Left Behind, the show achieved a narrative focus that has been lacking this season. Even “Bentham,” with its Locke-centric storyline, didn’t feel as focused as this week’s outing. The Dharma Initiative is such an intrinsic part of the story of Lost, and yet so little is known. Putting our characters into the thick of things is a master stroke and justifies the somewhat wobbly road the show took to get there.

Now, that might sound like a harsh statement, but what this show’s attempting, narratively speaking, is damn near impossible and damn sure unprecedented. No one expected smooth sailing for the entire trip; the road through the first half of the season was always going to have the bumps that those flying Ajira 316 experienced. But man, it looks like the show might stick the landing after all, insane degree of difficulty be damned.

7. Maureen Ryan for the Chicago Tribune:

I was ambivalent about last week’s Locke-centric episode of “Lost.”

But I loved this week’s episode so much I think I want to marry it.

There were a couple flaws in “LeFleur”: It wasn’t seven hours long, and there was no Pierre Chang/Edgar Halliwax/Marvin Candle. In every other way, though — I loved it.

Last week was Christmas for Locke fans. This week was Christmas, Easter and Hanukkah all in one for us Dharma nerds. I’m super-tired right now, so forgive the lack of in-depth analysis or anything else that resembles coherent thought (I stayed up too late to watch the episode a second time).

8. Jonathan Toomey (TV Squad):

I think the best way to describe this episode was safe. Nothing crazy or out of place happened and you knew how it was going to end the second it began. Think of it this way - when we first started watching Lost, it was like dumping a giant puzzle onto the floor. At this point, the entire puzzle is assembled, and for the most part, we can almost see the big picture, save for a bunch of pieces that are still missing. “LaFleur” was one of those pieces.

9. Jace (Televisionaryblog.com):

I’ve long since given up trying to figure out who Kate will pick between Jack and Sawyer when given the chance and yet I couldn’t help but have my heart melted by this week’s episode of Lost (”LaFleur”), which featured a pairing between two characters that has been subtly building throughout Season Five.

Those of you who believed that this week’s episode would feature some sort of tearful reunion between Sawyer and Kate, returned to the island after three years apart, clearly don’t watch the series carefully enough: there was no way that Team Darlton was going to fulfill that tension without making the audience work for it. (We’ll have to wait two weeks for that.)

10. Drew McWeeny (HitFix.com):

I think it’s now safe to assume that anyone who thought Sawyer was going to be the subject of the four-toed giant statue was wrong.  The statue is waaaaaaaay back in time in the Island’s history.  And after just a glimpse of it, they’re launched forward in time again, and they land sometime in the early days of the Dharma Initiative’s struggle with the Others.  And this time, when they land, they land in a way that makes them feel like maybe John Locke pulled off what he was trying to pull off.  Maybe he put the needle back in the groove, because everyone’s headache goes away, and there are no more flashes.

Now that the writers aren’t bound to one structure that’s the same each time, they are free to play with time in all new ways, and this time, the episode revolves around jumps either “Three Years Later” or “Three Years Earlier,” each time as punctuation to whatever we’ve just seen.  And it really works.  It pays off that jump in chronology each time, and it sets up a sense of where the story’s going, but not how it’s going to get there.  The introduction of LaFleur is pretty wonderful.  Sawyer just took back ownership of a significant piece of the show’s mythology.  He’s not just a survivor.  He’s a guy who knows how to live along the way.  He’s just as driven by his feelings about the Island as Locke ever was.  He’s just not as vocal about his crazy.

11. Cultural Learnings:

It has been said that the last two episodes of Lost, “316″ and “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham,” were sort of a launching point for the rest of the show’s fifth season, the one bit of major story material (focusing entirely on off-island activities beyond the bookends of each episode) that felt like it needed to be blatantly exposed to switch gears. “Lafleur,” then, has a lot to live up to: it takes us back to the storyline we’ve abandoned for two episodes, and has created new expectations and new mysteries upon which it is going to rely in the future.

But to answer Jin’s question immediately (and get to Juliet’s later), “Lafleur” establishes that the moment the island stopped “skipping,” the show has gone back to a familiar tune, one less driven by the series’ structure and far more by the series’ characters. What we have in this episode is the closest Lost has come to its initial purpose all season, offering up a few really intriguing character arcs that have created two parallel but ultimately very different series of flashforwards in regards to how these characters got to this place. Faraday seems to indicate that the record is playing the wrong song when they end up stuck in 1974, but the establishment of the “when” doesn’t lead the show to a detailed investigation as to why.

12. Chris Carabott (IGN.com):

Last week’s “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” was the closing of a chapter for Lost. In that chapter we discovered how some of the survivors of flight 815 got off the island and how they eventually returned. We also learned about the island’s unusual time traveling properties and that there are those out there (Charles Widmore) willing to kill to return to this seemingly magical paradise. “LaFleur” is the start of what could very well end up being the show’s final chapter. Its setup feels a lot like a series premiere; jumping ahead in time a few years (relatively speaking) from the point we had last left Sawyer, Jin, Juliet, Miles and Dan. The narrative successfully establishes a new direction for the story from here on out and gives us an exciting, yet familiar, setting for the next few episodes.

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