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History Repeated by Luhks

2010-02-22T02:49:00.000+00:00

In a few short months, the network television show Lost will complete its initial run. As time passes, people will begin to look back on the series from its proper historical context. Lost might be regarded as the biggest cult television phenomenon of its era. However, even the show’s biggest fans must admit that ABC’s Lost most likely will not be remembered as the best dramatic series of its decade. (The cable-television triumvirate of The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men, will take the gold, silver, and bronze medals, in some order.) Within its own genre, though, J.J. Abrams’ Lost probably has ensured its spot on Mount Rushmore alongside Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, and Chris Carter’s The X-Files. Tracing the history of those four shows reveals a great deal about the evolution of the medium. When The X-Files was peaking in the 1990s, writers were beginning to shift away from the same creative mindset that had prevailed since the 1960s, that each episode operates as a self-contained, one-time broadcast. The ambitious X-Files team struggled mightily in their early attempts to convert their Monster-of-the-Week drama into a Grand-Mythological-Saga. Over time, technological shifts have changed fundamentally the way in which the artists are approaching the medium. After syndication, DVR playback, streaming media, and most importantly the DVD market, television programming carries a more permanent life than ever before. Today’s Lost writers operate with the understanding that their episodes will continue to exist long after their transitory time slots. Any fan would be naïve to believe that everything was planned from the beginning, but Abrams and Lindelof certainly understood that their Pilot was a Beginning that would lead to a Middle and an End. Each episode no longer needs to operate as an individual short story within a compilation, but as interconnected chapters in one great novel.

Perhaps more so than any other Lost episode, Follow the Leader represents the farthest frontier of this sci-fi television trek away from the original Leader, the Twilight Zone storytelling prototype. Episode 15 continues the trend set by its Season Five predecessors Because You Left and Namaste; it focuses on no character in particular. (Although many people will disagree with me, I would rank these three aforementioned Season Five episodes among the low points of the series.) The game pieces merely shift from one position to another in preparation for this year’s check-mate finale. As always, O’Quinn’s voice describes it best: “You and I have an errand to run, and we don’t have a lot of time.” The script from Paul Zbyszewski and Elizabeth Sarnoff can barely even be treated as a story in its own right. Each element only makes sense in relation to the episodes that it follows, and the episodes that will follow it. Its beginning, middle, and end exist only in the temporal sense, not in the functional sense. If Lost’s final season follows this lead (as well as whatever future successors who step in front of the line), then the paradigm will have shifted too far, and will require some course-correction back to a more stable equilibrium. Many months after that season’s end, almost every reader probably remembers the events of Faraday’s life story in The Variable, but I would expect that many people would need a refresher course for Follow the Leader. The human memory operates less like our home digital recorders, and more like Kirk’s Captain’s Log or Mulder’s filing cabinet. Without some unifying idea, theme, event, or character, the story will tend to fade away into nothing. The attempt to transform Lost episodes into pieces of an enduring novel has resulted in a paradoxical effect. An episode like Follow the Leader exists only to please the tastes of the plot-hungry immediate public, but it does not succeed (unlike many of its great predecessors from Serling down to Lindelof) in telling a complete story that will last forever.

BEN: So, which one are you? […] Are you the genius, or are you the guy who always feels like he's living in the shadow of a genius?
LOCKE: I was -- I was never very much into literary analysis.

While some people might regard Follow the Leader as the first Richard-centric episode, by no means does it tell a story about Richard Alpert. The ageless one, the only person present in both time periods, naturally appears in more scenes than any other character. This additional screen time barely reveals any special insight into his psyche or even his personality. Although his position on the Island hierarchy (and his status as a fan favorite) commands respect, his agency (and his appeal) remains severely limited. Alpert’s two exclusive story functions are referenced in this episode’s opening segment: to serve as a dutiful ‘advisor’ for whatever Leader the Island happens to choose for a particular decade; and then to sit back and ‘watch them all die’. Two key artifacts double as symbols for Alpert’s existence. First, Richard appears alone on the beach, arranging the sails of a replica ship inside a glass bottle, known as an Impossible Ship. The image conveys some characteristics shared by Alpert himself: an incongruous relic preserved from another time, a lonely vessel designed to travel forward but trapped inside a glass prison. Later, Richard interacts with the Compass, an object seen many times before, but whose exact nature had never been revealed. As suggested in the previous Luhks article Beyond Belief: “at no point during this chain did any person sit down and build a compass. If the compass Richard gave to Locke is the same one Locke gave to Richard, then it was never created, but it merely existed outside of time.” Like the Ship’s figurative moniker, the Compass is literally Impossible. During its fifty-year life cycle, the Compass remains completely intact, never wearing down, or 'aging' the way all physical bodies must. It is somewhat revealing that Richard shares stronger connections with these two inanimate objects rather than with other characters. The familiar face of Cane Consiglieri Carbonell has become as much a part of the scenery as the beaches and trees of Hawaii.

By practical necessity, history records only the names of its Leaders. As the Island’s foremost student of history, Ben Linus understands that only “a great man, a brilliant man” will be remembered beyond his years. No matter how much power he might attain during his regime, Ben’s legacy ultimately would be judged against that of his successor. For Linus, it was not enough for his cause to succeed, but he alone needed to receive the most credit. Despite his head start, no degree of effort and manipulation could account for the difference in their natural gifts. The Island gave dictation directly through John as its instrument, while it forced Benjamin to listen to second-hand accounts with an empty longing. To borrow from Amadeus, perhaps the greatest screen depiction of jealousy: “God was singing through this little man to all the world, unstoppable, making my defeat more bitter with each passing bar.” Although he retained the upper hand throughout their relationship, the existence of a genuine replacement cast a shadow over his entire life’s work. The brief career of Locke, the Island’s Mozart, would live forever, while Ben’s entire body of work would vanish along with the music of Salieri. Even after murdering his rival, Ben continues to be haunted by Locke’s image in its new form, a constant reminder of his ultimate failure. In Follow the Leader, the New Locke exposes the embarrassing secret that Ben was a false prophet: the Island never spoke to him, Jacob never appeared to him, and even a martyred John could take people farther in a single day than during decades of Linus' leadership. History may be written by the victors, but no degree of Linus’ revisions, with his weapons or his words, could erase the name and face of John Locke from Island annals.

HURLEY: Are we gonna get there soon?
LOCKE: How long?
BEN: I don't know. I've been following him.
LOCKE: What? What do you mean, you've been following him?
HURLEY: I'm not even in front!

Follow the Leader borrows its name from an activity played by children in those dark ages before television and Internet. The game requires the players to file behind the chosen person at the head of the line, and to mimic the Leader’s actions as they walk in his path, until everyone is eliminated except for the new Leader. This episode offers numerous suggestions that the true nature of the once-mysterious organization known as the Others might be a more elaborate version of that time-killer for schoolchildren. By all indications, the Followers, both during the 1970s and the 2000s, live a mindless and fruitless existence: they do whatever the Leader tells them to do, until a new Leader is chosen; then they continue playing the game until they end up with a gunshot, like the disposable Erik. (Not coincidentally, few readers are likely to remember Erik; he briefly distinguished himself with his spectacular roundhouse kick, before Sayid eliminated him for poor sportsmanship.) Our story now spans four rounds of the game, with the reveal that Widmore once served under Hawking, long before Linus seized control. Tragically and comically, Locke’s entire tenure as Leader involved about two seconds of introduction, a one-second flash in which he disappeared, followed by three years of sitting around a campsite and waiting for his corpse to return. As pointless as the role of Follower might be, the position of Leader seems to be share an equally thankless job description: sacrifice your autonomy, sacrifice your children, and accomplish nothing, until you end up banished. For how many decades did this pointless game continue before someone grew enough backbone to question its purpose? (In a cynical touch, the final moments of The Incident reveal that this particular someone was not even human.) The New Locke shifts the herd mentality as effortlessly as a shepherd prods his flock in a new direction.

Famously, the “Follow the Leader” game served as a key plot element in J.M. Barrie’s classic story Peter Pan, which takes place on its own fantasy island of Neverland, home of the orphaned Lost Boys who never grow older. The so-called Peter Pan syndrome refers to emotionally immature adults who ‘never grow up’ in the figurative sense, a common affliction among our Lost Men and Lost Women. Childhood became perhaps the prevailing motif throughout Season Five, with nearly every main character either visualized as, or at least analogized to, a child. (This script even adds one more name to the list of minors, with a throwaway line that confirms that Eloise, just like Charles, was only 17 years old during her appearance in Jughead.) Whether applied to the unnamed Others or the main characters, this episode’s prominent Peter Pan allusion makes for quite an unflattering comparison. The Island serves as a inverse Neverland for the ancient Alpert, trapped in his perpetual adulthood, watching each generation of children repeat the same mistakes. He offers this resigned summary of his years of experience as referee: “Let’s just say that love can be complicated.” From the convoluted efforts of Hawking and Widmore to sacrifice their love child for his salvation, to the unloved children Locke and Linus whose rivalry for the affections for a mound of dirt continues from beyond the grave, the advisor speaks the truth.

JACK: Every little bump we hit or turbulence, I mean I, I actually close my eyes and I pray that I can get back.
KATE: This is not gonna change.

Although Richard is the only Lost boy that never grows older, this episode’s core debate revolves around a one-time opportunity to become three years younger. Jack the Apostle seeks to convert followers into true believers of the martyred Daniel’s promise of resurrection. A safe 2004 landing at LAX is not exactly equivalent to the eternal life mentioned in John 3:16, but Shephard now views that urban airport as a paradise, relative to his Island adventures. Jack’s notion of "putting things back the way they’re supposed to be" begins with completing his own deeply personal mission, to rescue his father from the hellish Down Under, and return him safely to the City of Angels. The chance to reset time holds particular appeal to him as a doctor, as he can fix hundreds of his lost patients from Flight 815, with the push of a button. “All the misery we’ve been through, we’d just wipe it clean. Never happened.” Ever the practical thinker, Sayid puts his own spin on the notion of misery: “If this works, you might just save us all. And if it doesn’t, at least you’ll put us out of our misery”. As always, they walk Lost’s fine line between being a hero, and simply wanting to die. Their shared desire to detonate the bomb indicates a deeper impulse toward self-destruction. They even might desire the atomic explosion as an end in itself. Consciously or not, Jack probably wanted to nuke this infernal Island since he first landed. Each miserable man projects his internal frustrations onto some outside entity: Jarrah sent a bullet through little Benjamin’s chest. (Linus later plunges his knife into the heart of his father figure Jacob.) Dr. Shephard selects a plutonium thermonuclear core as his Occam’s scalpel, to euthanize his Island patient. He would regain control over his universe, by vanquishing the same incomprehensible landmass that had vanished without his permission last season.

This episode’s triumphant reunion of Jack and Sayid revives an annual Lost tradition. Even though the surgeon and the soldier might have a few disagreements during the early episodes of each season, the two men always manage to collaborate on some common master plan in the finale. Sayid tends to decide most of the war room details, while Jack tends to handle the public relations (and then to receive most of the credit or blame). The usual power dynamics of Leader and Follower do not apply to the Jarrah-Shephard partnership. Sayid’s rational assessments of the available options, and Jack’s intuitive judgments about what should happen, lead them to arrive eventually to the same conclusions. With an unspoken synergy, these two men alone agreed that it was okay to shoot kids and blow up hydrogen bombs. Kate serves as the emotional counterpoint against these mad efforts to rewrite the history books. The shared past of Shephard and Austen, of course, is much more complicated than Jack’s friendship with Sayid. The preferred Tabula Rasa moment of her life already occurred, with the crash of Oceanic 815. Kate desperately attempts to rescue her most cherished memories from incineration in the atomic fire. Either decision effectively results in genocide, either from the active annihilation of the Island’s 1977 population or from the passive indifference to the lives of hundreds of Oceanic passengers in 2004. Ultimately, this universal decision rests in the hands of flawed, self-loathing individuals each coming to terms with his or her own past. (Despite its shortcomings in other areas, I think Follow the Leader manages to suggest stronger, multi-dimensional motivations for the show’s male and female leads than the season-ending Incident.)

BEN: Not so long ago, Jack, I made a decision that took the lives of over forty people in a single day. I'm telling you this, because history is about to repeat itself, right here, right now.
JACK: Let me guess, you've got us surrounded, and if I don't do what you say you're going to kill all my people.
BEN: No, Jack, you are.

Although Follow the Leader emphasizes its defined hierarchies, the title also suggests the transitory and cyclical nature of power struggles. The Dharma Initiative, the more scientific counterpart to the faith-based organization of Alpert and his Lost Boys, follows its own set of laws. Despite vague references to the bosses in Ann Arbor, four power players dominate the Island decision-making. LaFleur, Head of Security, ceded all his legitimate authority the moment he crossed over the perimeter fence into the jungle. The friend who appointed him, Horace Goodspeed, loses his standing in the fallout. The voice of the eminent Dr. Chang might have carried more resonance under the old regime, but now he limits his role to damage control. Radzinsky emerges from the crisis as dictator, tacitly appointing the sycophantic Phil as his right-hand man. Dharma’s Head of Research views himself as another Great Man, the rare Black Swan of this Island pond, whose achievements will be recorded alongside those of Edison. His infant duckling, the Swan research site, must be protected at all costs. It might be easy for the viewer to condemn the methods of Radzinsky and Phil, because we watch these scenes through the eyes of Jim and Juliet. This violent reaction is hardly unique. The past decade of Lost’s history (as well as American history) more frequently places us in the position of captor. As the cycle of history has proven many times over, fear of the other will cause otherwise civilized people to corrupt their principles behind closed doors.

If there is one theme underlying Follow the Leader, it might be history’s natural tendency to repeat itself. Richard’s torch lights his path through the tunnels, just as he marches through the jungle thirty years later, still completely in the dark. The Hostiles capture Jack and Kate as Dharma insurgents; while the Dharma Initiative holds James and Juliet as suspected Hostiles. Miles relives a formative experience from the perspective of innocent child and omniscient adult observer simultaneously. Jack embraces his destiny as the reborn version of John, his old nemesis. James follows the footsteps of his old rival Jack, prepared to enter the submarine with Juliet and never look back. The New Locke establishes himself as the man who “always has a plan,” while the Ben now searches blindly for answers. (Hurley even echoes those exact words here, spoken by Ben one season earlier.) The episode even includes one entirely literal repetition of an earlier scene, by closing the season-opening loop of Alpert's Compass. Human nature guarantees that people will respond in the same destructive ways to similar situations. Lovers will quarrel, victims will victimize, new leaders will overthrow old predecessors, and groups will escalate misunderstandings into full-scale war. Any number of iconic Lost images convey the same core theme: Pierre’s skipping Willie Nelson record, the impossibly circular compass, the eight-fold wheel of the Dharma logo, the Swan timer that resets every 108 minutes, the spirals of the Oceanic corporate logo, even the iterations on Rousseau’s distress call from the Pilot episode. Eastern religions spoke of samsara, the cycle of rebirth, thousands of years before Western science-fiction writers delivered these time-travel causality loops.

Personally, my favorite commentary on this concept comes from the Greek author Thucydides, arguably the West’s first genuine historian. One of the most forward-thinking individuals ever to live, Thucydides broke free from his culture’s subjective re-tellings of past events. In his seminal text, a record the fifth-century Peloponnesian War, between the Athenians and their polar opposites from Sparta, he prefaced the work with this legendary disclaimer:

"And it may well be that my history will seem less appealing to read because of the absence of a romantic element. It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.”

His work indeed will last forever, because people continue to make the same mistakes twenty-five centuries later. Every subsequent historian has followed his lead, studying the past in the hopes of understanding the future. His argument, of course, depends upon his basic premise that human nature will remain constant, rather than progress over time. The poet Santayana famously claimed: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” A cynical historian might argue that even those who do remember the past must suffer that same cycle. Thucydides might help us understand the causes of suffering, just as a cinematic serial novel like Lost might dramatize our enslavement to time and space. Even if we learn to predict tragedy, we would be powerless to prevent it. Our historians and artists can only offer some level of catharsis by describing the big picture. Regardless, one thing is certain. After failing his pop quiz from Dr. Chang, Hugo is one person who will need to repeat a few history courses.

The Dark and the Light by Luhks

2010-02-03T01:33:00.036+00:00

There are only two types of Lost fans: those who watch the show for the Characters, and those who watch the show for the Mythology. The statement I just made is, of course, a false one. It reflects a gross generalization, which oversimplifies the complex motivations of a wide spectrum of individuals into two categories. Look no further than the Season Five finale, The Incident, for evidence that the definitions of ‘character’ and ‘mythology’ overlap each other as to make the classification nearly meaningless. Jacob, the central force lurking behind all Lost mythology, is in fact a character. Nevertheless, that exact thought has probably crossed the mind of every person reading this article, in one form or another, at some point in time. Our world is so complex and chaotic, that if we never made such generalizations, if we never drew such dividing lines, then we could never understand anything. All science, art, and even language depends upon a binary choice between ‘X’ and ‘not-X’. Even when we stare into a random and meaningless abyss, a Rorschach inkblot, we instinctively need to find some greater meaning within it, to find some pattern in the black ink on white background.

When presented with a choice between two options, neutrality is nearly impossible. Personally, I know where I stand on most of Lost’s dueling opposites. The characters are more important than mythology. Season One is much stronger than Season Five. Terry O’Quinn is a far better actor than Michael Emerson. Jack is many times more interesting than James. Exposé kicks ass. Jack belongs with Juliet, and Kate should be with Sawyer. I hope that Widmore defeats Linus, and that Jacob loses to his nemesis. Science should always triumph over faith. I prefer one immutable timeline over alternate universes, and I prefer John Locke over everyone and everything. (While I’m at it, Elvis made better music than the Beatles, Manning is a better quarterback than Brady, Batman is better hero than Superman, Latin is more beautiful than Greek, but the Greeks themselves were more interesting than the Romans.) On an intellectual level, I understand the validity of the opposite perspectives, but, on an emotional level, I’m also 100% convinced that my opinions are correct. At its best, Lost presents us with a world of black-and-white dichotomies in perfect symmetry, but then exposes the truth in all of its shades of gray. Along the way, we can revel in the conflicts and enjoy choosing sides. Those who refuse to take sides, in the words of Rose and Bernard in this episode, simply don't care. True objectivity functions no differently from apathy. Ultimately, our reactions, opinions, and preferences reveal more about ourselves than about the artwork itself.

The two-part episode The Incident presents two stories in parallel: a science-fiction adventure involving time-travel, electro-magnetism, and a mad scientist hoping to change things with a hydrogen bomb; and a fantasy myth involving mortals enslaved by ancient demigods, trying to change things with a knife and sacrificial fire. (In keeping with the disclaimer introduced earlier, it must be noted that ‘science’ and ‘fantasy’ are terms loosely applied, and that perhaps even the Jacob story might craft a more plausible scientific explanation than the Incident itself.) This work of fiction exists somewhere at the intersection of drama, sci-fi, and fantasy, but wholly within the category of Mythology. The episode’s first images evoke the dawn of human culture, the harnessed power of fire, shelters made of rock, hand-spun clothing and sandals, and primitive tools to gather fish from the ocean. After mankind adapted the necessary technology to survive, his mind began to expand to other pursuits, darkening his bare walls to produce painted images, carving majestic statues into rock, weaving decorative tapestries dyed different colors, telling stories through language, and even building ships to explore the seas (and planes to conquer the skies). Although Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey still holds the record for the longest flash-forward in cinema history, the centuries-long transition after the opening scene achieves a similar narrative effect. Even though man has evolved from taming the Promethean fire to building Edison’s light bulb to unleashing the power of the atom, our civilization is still in its infancy. Human beings themselves have not matured at the same rate as our technological progress. “They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.” The same petty jealousies that motivated the biblical rivalry of Jacob and Esau, also inform our nuclear-age warfare. A doctor can now perform once-unthinkable paralysis-saving surgery on your spine, but can that same doctor ever fix his own backbone when dealing with his father? Even our artwork, after generations of progress from cave paintings to wireless transmission of digital media, have also taken us from Homer to New Kids on the Block.

LOCKE: Years later a visiting prince came into Michelangelo's studio and found the master staring at a single 18 foot block of marble. Then he knew that the rumors were true -- that Michelangelo had come in everyday for the last four months, stared at the marble, and gone home for his supper. So the prince asked the obvious -- what are you doing? And Michelangelo turned around and looked at him, and whispered, sto lavorando, I'm working. Three years later that block of marble was the statue of David.

Two special artifacts from this classic opening scene, which are revisited at the ending of the episode, deserve special attention. The first is Jacob’s tapestry. The meticulously hand-crafted decoration initially appears in incomplete form. He has emblazoned the top section of the tapestry with ancient Greek lettering, a phrase from Homer’s Odyssey: “May the Gods grant thee all that thy heart desires”. Under those letters, the Egyptian symbol of the Eye of Horus, a symbol of divine power, occupies the center, between two massive wings. When Ben arrives at the statue centuries later, Jacob’s masterpiece is complete. Arms stretch down from the eye, towards nine human figures, while two kings observe from both sides. The image offers a visual representation of Jacob’s long-term plan, to give each piece ‘a little push’ into place for his endgame. Presumably, those nine individuals correspond to Kate, Sawyer, Sayid, Ilana, Locke, Sun, Jin, Jack, and Hurley (although Ben might be the final person, as Ben received Jacob’s touch rather than Ilana). Much like the sequence of literal and figurative long cons that preceded this one, the tapestry doubles as a metaphor for the show’s writing process. The gods of this particular story, writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, strung the audience along for several years, slowly revealing pieces, painting each character with care, until it was time to unveil this man behind the curtain. Of course, they understood that the journey was more important than the final destination. As Jacob later confesses: “It takes a very long time when you're making the thread, but, uh... I suppose that's the point, isn't it?”.

Allusions to outside mythology, of course, occur quite frequently on Lost. For every direct reference that the show makes, there are a dozen other meaningful comparisons to be made, some intentional (such as Apollo the son of Zeus, or Everything That Rises Must Converge) but many others are merely fortuitous. Minds working independently across the globe tend to converge on the same core ideas or mythemes. Mythology scholars have produced a number of different theories to explain why authors from different cultures, without any direct contact, produce legends with such striking similarities. Each theory of mythology necessary rests on a simplification and generalization, more valid for some works than for others. In my assessment, the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss offers the deepest insight into the objectives of Lost-style myth-making. Lévi-Strauss posited that human beings organize information primarily through binary oppositions (pairs like faith-empiricism, freedom-determinism). The underlying storytelling purpose of any myth is to unify those irreconcilable opposites, or at least create the illusion that the conflict has been resolved. Through the clash of thesis and antithesis, we can arrive at a synthesis. The commonly-cited analysis of the tragedy of Oedipus Rex offers a useful example: Sophocles revealed the consequences for a son showing not nearly enough affection for one parent, by killing his father; and far too much affection for the other parent, by marrying his mother. The great Lost myth revolves around the mirroring psyches of its pair of heroes, Jack Shephard and John Locke, one child who received far too much parenting (with Christian pushing his adult son around the clock) and another child who received far too little parenting (with Cooper pushing his adult son out of the eight-story window). The endless dichotomies of Lost are indeed false ones, and no one who chooses one extreme side, can ever be fully correct.

LOCKE: Backgammon is the oldest game in the world. Archeologists found sets when they excavated the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia. Five thousand years old. That's older than Jesus Christ.
WALT: Did they have dice and stuff?
LOCKE: [nods] But theirs weren't made of plastic. Their dice were made of bones.
WALT: Cool.
LOCKE: Two players. Two sides. One is light … one is dark.

The second key artifact is Jacob’s home, the Statue itself. As confirmed through outside sources (although hardly apparent from the actual episode), the Statue represents the hippopotamus-headed Egyptian fertility goddess Tawaret. (The interior chamber also includes a painting of the Egyptian deity Isis, another goddess similarly associated with protection, birth, and motherhood.) Before this revelation, many people, including myself, predicted incorrectly that the Statue would depict Anubis, the jackal-faced god of death, judgment, and the underworld. Images of Anubis last appeared during Season Five's Dead is Dead, on the tunnel walls where Linus confronted the black Smoke, also known by its Greek mythological moniker, Cerberus. The overall implication here is that the dividing lines have been drawn, with Jacob’s light side linked to Life, with the Man in Black associated with Death. In flashback, Jacob’s touch breathes life in Locke’s fallen body, while his nemesis apparently has been manipulating corpses for years to help him commit a murder.

Among the ancient secrets revealed in this episode, Ricardus answers Ilana’s ongoing riddle “What lies in the shadow of the Statue?” with the Latin phrase: ille qui nos omnes servabit. The standard translation apparently characterizes Jacob as a messiah figure: the one who will save us all. Despite all preliminary indications, it would be a premature mistake to equate the light-dark imagery with a good-evil metaphor. As Frank Lapidus wisely remarks: “In my experience, the people who go out of their way to tell you that the good guys are the bad guys.” The basic conclusions are undisputed: Jacob wants to keep bringing people to the Island to bring about an Ending, while the Man in Black wants to kill Jacob and keep the Island isolated. (The physical acting of the two rivals even conveys their dueling outlooks, with Mark Pellegrino relaxing as he scans the horizon, but with Titus Welliver squinting uncomfortably in the reflected sunlight.) Conceivably, Jacob’s Ending, his desire for change, could include the death of all mankind, to make way for the birth of a new progressive era. A phrase on the bottom of his tapestry offers a foreboding hint of Jacob’s final solution to end human corruption: “Only the dead have seen the end of war”. Keep in mind, the first on-screen action of Jacob, the great fisher of men, was to gather life from the ocean, rip its guts out, and then devour it.

(Here is another fun etymological fact for all of the Latin lovers out there. Early in the episode, Bram and Ilana share a cryptic exchange about whether Frank might be a Candidate for their side, a term that undoubtedly will reappear in Season Six scripts. The Latin adjective candidatus literally means “dressed in white,” and Mr. Lapidus clearly fits that bill. The word developed its English meaning from the white gowns worn by Romans seeking senatorial election. The word also shares a common origin with the adjective candidus which could be used for its literal meaning of “white,” or in a more figurative sense as “clear”, “candid”, or in other words “Frank.”)

MIKHAIL: Ha! Don’t waste your time. For ten years I have tried to defeat that game. But it was programmed by three grand masters. And it cheats.
LOCKE: Hmm. Well, I’ve played a lot of computers and I’m pretty sure they don’t know how to cheat. That’s what makes being human so distinctly wonderful.

For the first time, The Incident allows the viewer to rise up from a ground-level view of the game pieces on earth, to see the chess board from the player’s perspective in the sky. The story begins with the Man in White and the Man in Black trapped in an eternal stalemate. The fisherman Jacob gathers people from the seas, and then his enemy the hunter watches them destroy each other. Like the layman’s definition of insanity, Jacob repeats the same action over and over, while expecting a different result, faithful that one day the humans will change their nature, and the outcome. As Jacob points out, though, time is on his side: only one counterexample is necessary to disprove a negative. The rules of the game favor an endless cycle of perfectly symmetrical violence, until one of the players can find a way to change, break, or at least bend the rules. The Man in Black found the loophole in the rules that would allow him to kill Jacob. Evidently, he needed to impersonate Locke (and a number of other departed souls along the way) in order to persuade Ben, the leader of the Others, to choose to murder Jacob. At the same time, Jacob knew that his opponent would exploit the technicality eventually. In response, Jacob found his own way to cheat the rules: he brought a handful of special individuals to the Island, so that they could erase the events that lead to his death. To borrow a key phrase from Lost creator J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek opus: “Going back in time, changing history ... that's cheating.” Both master plans required a tremendous degree of faith in mankind: Jacob placed his confidence in the better angels of our nature, the ability of separate individuals to collaborate on one final goal; the Man in Black went all-in gambling on the inherent weakness of Locke, the corruption of Ben, and the mindlessness of his followers.

Their debate about whether mankind can change its nature arrives alongside the time-travel corollary question of whether human beings can alter their future. The “we’re the variables” framework presented in Season Five - note the emphasis on the plural - suggests that one person acting alone cannot alter history. Due to our natural tendency to oppose each other, the reactions of some other person will negate that action. Season Five's test case demonstrated the principle, as Kate's efforts to save little Benjamin negated Sayid's attempts to destroy him. The light will drive away the darkness, and vice-versa. However, if enough individuals combine in an effort to alter history, then the magnetism of their aggregate positive charge can overcome the negative pull. When the dark energy approaches the Swan (Jack, Sayid, Jin, and Hurley - all shown as adults in flashback), the forces of light gather to stop them (James, Juliet, and Kate – each one appearing as a child). The ensuing argument between echoes the central time-travel issue of Season Five: James asserts “What’s done is done,” and Jack responds “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.” The resulting boxing match between the Black-Jack and Light-LaFleur depicts the larger war between the dueling demigods in microcosm: the two men are evenly matched when trading punches, so James exploits a few holes in Jack’s rulebook. In the end, though, one side prevails with nothing more than a little push to tip the scales. Juliet’s paradoxical, circular logic, a freely-willed decision grounded on her concept of predestination, resolves the conflict into its synthesis.

BERNARD: You realize we're the only two married guys on the island?
[He shows his ring]
BERNARD: Married?
JIN: Married.
BERNARD: Yeah, well, no, not to each other. No. (laughing) You got it. It's not easy, is it? Oh, I mean, it's--it's wonderful, but... let's face it, every decision that you make takes twice as long. 'Cause you always gotta talk them into it.

The episode’s black-and-white motif takes on a completely different meaning in the context of the Island’s two married couples. Part One includes the long-awaited return of Rose and Bernard, a couple whose bond transcends not only the color barrier between black and white, but also the perhaps deeper divide between a woman of faith and a man of science. The retired couple sets the example that the children refuse to follow, to lay down their differences and evolve into peaceful harmony. Subsequent flashbacks also reunite our other married couple, the wedding between Sun in her white dress and Jin in his black tuxedo. Western observers often mistakenly refer to the prominent Eastern symbols of yin and yang, as images of the struggle between good and evil. On the contrary, the black-and-white emblem common from Chinese philosophy (also incorporated into the flag of South Korea) represents duality rather than polarity. The dark and the light, the male and the female, instead of opposing each other become unified halves of a stronger whole. Jin provides another useful image: “We will never be apart, because being apart would be like the sky being apart from the earth.” Their wedding rings reinforce the idea of interconnectedness between the two halves of the same story, an unbreakable bond despite decades of separation. Sun’s later discovery of Charlie’s Driveshaft ring suggests a similar connection between the living and the dead, the past and the future. On a more depressing note, this episode also includes a third married couple, with the tragedy of Sayid and Nadia. While Sayid bleeds to death from his gunshot wound on the island, he suffers a deeper wound in flashback, his own sky being ripped away from his earth.

In what is either a sheer accident, or the product of intelligent design, the dark and light phenomenon even extends into the ongoing turmoil between the episode’s four romantic leads. On the physical level, James and Juliet share the same light-haired, lighter-eyed look of Jacob, while Jack and Kate share the same dark-haired, darker-eyed look of his nemesis. As Radzinsky might attest, basic electromagnetism holds that like charges repel and opposite charges attract. Even heading into the final season, the love quadrangle has never settled into a stable equilibrium, due to a peculiar mix of shared-physical-traits-with-opposite-personality-traits and vice versa. If you wanted a second opinion from Dr. Freud, then he could tell you a thing or too about Ms. Austen and Mrs. Shephard, Ms. Burke and Mrs. Ford. (Speaking of Freud, what can a psychoanalyst say about writers who changed temporarily the name of one of its leads from the revenge-driven Sawyer to flower-sniffing LaFleur. The Flower, as it translates from French to English, is traditionally associated with femininity, fertility, and even serves a common symbol for a certain part of the female anatomy. Fortunately, The Incident confirms that, “there ain’t no more LaFleur,” and with it the nominal castration of James Ford comes to an end.) The Incident focuses much of its creative energy on manufacturing motivations for each of the four lovers, to join forces to detonate Jughead, mostly at the expense of the supporting players. For each of these four characters, Lindelof and Cuse go too far in spelling out the answers to the audience in childish black-and-white terms, when shades of adult gray would have sufficed.

KATE: So, do you believe it?
JACK: Believe what?
KATE: That everything's going to be okay?
JACK: Yeah, I do.
KATE: Kind of unlike you -- the whole glass half-full thing.
JACK: There's a glass?

The childish immaturity of adults often comes across in a negative light, but child-like innocence can also be seen as a positive trait. Hurley, more than any other character, has been blessed (or, depending on your perspective, cursed) with the heart of a child. The adult Hugo not only enjoys a nice cherry Fruit Rollup on his ride home from jail, but he is thoughtful enough to offer to share it with a stranger. Just as any girl Juliet’s age will blame her own actions for her parents’ failed marriage, Hurley similarly internalizes the misfortunes of others as his own personal shortcoming. Hurley’s conversation with Jacob carries the same tune as any kid in need of parental guidance. Jacob’s words add another classic binary opposition to this tapestry of black and white: optimism and pessimism. There are always two ways to look at any situation. Even the darkest curse might be viewed as a brilliant blessing in disguise. As a point of caution, though, the converse of that principle also holds some merit. Throughout this story, Jack plays the unlikely role of a zealous optimist. Absolutely confident in the plan’s improbable success, he illuminates all of the wonderful merits of the revised timeline (Sayid’s life will be saved, Jin will get reunite with Sun, Claire will have the chance to keep Aaron, etc.). Foolish optimism can be a more dangerous force than cautious pessimism. His alternate future easily could result in an abyss of darkness, rather than a beacon of sunshine.

After so many rays of hope, the story of John Locke now ends in the gloomiest depths of tragedy. Frank quotes the same eternal question that links together Through the Looking Glass with There’s No Place Like Home: “What’s in the box?”. Three years later, the answer remains the same: Locke’s rotting corpse. John's life ended with him alone, miserable, and a failure. He was a puppet on strings, pulled by Cooper, by Ben, and by the Man in Black, and then discarded as a piece of trash, like on the day he was born. In a way, the entity now occupying Locke’s body has been fulfilling John Locke’s lifelong dreams. Locke always wanted to become a decisive leader, a man strong enough stand up to the Coopers and Linuses and Jacobs of the world. This master pulling the strings is unburdened by John’s emotional scars, his neediness, his self-doubt, even his morality. John’s ambitions of divinity could not be reconciled with his identity as a mortal, so one of those two needed to die. Even so, Locke’s tragic curse can be viewed as a blessing of martyrdom. Seemingly, Locke’s last chance for redemption hinges upon the success of Shephard’s mission to erase history. His phony resurrection in The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham could be explained only by a cheap deus ex machina. The alternative option, resuming his life in a wheelchair at LAX, would be the product of his own leadership, the effect of mentoring Jack into a true believer. Jack drops the warhead onto the Swan site, like a kid tossing a coin into a wishing well, with the hope that when the magic box opens again, whatever he imagines will come true.

LOCKE: You have to do it.
JACK: You do it yourself, John.
LOCKE: No, you saw the film, Jack. This is a two person job, at least. […] I can't do this alone, Jack. I don't want to. It's a leap of faith, Jack.

Jack’s mad quest to detonate the bomb and prevent the Incident should remind the audience of Locke’s equally mad quest to end the 108-minute cycle of button-pushing once and for all. The content of Season Two’s Live Together, Die Alone resembles The Incident in other ways as well, a two-hour flashback episode to introduce a new character, with a timer ticking down to a scheduled event, which ends with one last heroic gesture to "make it all go away" in a flash of light. (Also, it never hurts to add liberal doses of the Great Radzinsky into your script.) These two episodes pull their characters violently towards the same magnetic focal point, with metal projectiles flying through the air. In each case, the man of faith puts his blind beliefs to an empirical test, to find a yes-or-no, black-and-white scientific question. Locke told us: “I’m more sure about this than anything in my entire life,” and he was wrong. For Jack, the words are: “Nothing... nothing in my life has ever felt so right.” (These statements also reveal a great deal about the degree of confidence the two men felt in themselves over the years.) The destinies of these two great men have been intertwined quite beautifully. Indeed, the outcome of one question hinges upon the answer to the other. If Jack had succeeded in destroying the energy, then Locke would have been correct as the timer ticked down to zero. On the other hand, if the Button truly served no purpose, then Oceanic 815 would have crashed regardless of any Incident, and Jack’s plan would have no effect on the timeline. I cannot help but admire their pure strength of will required to risk everything, seemingly beyond good and evil, beyond fate and free will.

Lost’s famous Live Together, Die Alone dichotomy reappears in another form, in the story of Juliet. When Jack first spoke those words in Season One’s White Rabbit, he phrased it as an either-or choice: “if we can’t live together, then we’re going to die alone.” When Juliet references the mantra in The Incident, she makes a crucial misstatement, “Live together and die alone” (at least, according to the closed-captions on my DVD.) A few minutes later, Juliet indeed does die alone, in the hope that everyone else might live again, together at LAX. The method of her death, proved to be an inspired creative choice. James, who tried desperately to lift John from the well in This Place is Death, once again found himself on the losing end of a tug-of-war with the grim reaper. Despite moving on from the death of his parents to build a new life, he finds himself in the same place as his childhood self in Tennessee, losing the woman he loves most in the world. The magnetically-charged chains, pulling her down into the gaping hole, offers a more scientific counterpart to the fantasy-inspired image of the Smoke Monster’s black hand of Death. Chains commonly serve as a symbol of restraint, imprisonment, inevitability, the antithesis of human liberty. In the famous words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Pulled underground against her will, Juliet makes one last free choice, to erase countless freely-willed decisions of others. She achieves her destiny by destroying the chain of events that caused her to fulfill that destiny.

When the final white screen with black letters appears for the first time, after five years of white-on-black writing, the implication is clear: the Lost universe as we know it has inverted itself. The central binary dilemma of Season Five hangs in the balance with the flash of light. Two players, two sides. Did the events of the Season-Five-ending Incident prevent the Season One-opening Pilot’s crash of Oceanic 815? Or did the characters cause the very future they were trying to prevent? Both options offer a mix of positives and negatives. A brand new timeline would offer fresh storytelling opportunities, and a chance to revisit old friends long gone. On the other hand, the explosion would also incinerate the entire five-season hand-crafted tapestry of the Island story. The entire post-1977 universe, including the 2007 storyline of the Incident, would amount to nothing more than a dream. Preserving the old timeline would re-affirm the show’s fundamental rules for meaningful storytelling stakes: dead is dead; whatever happened, happened. With that solution, the entire time-travel story arc that lead to this finale event, and all those post-cliffhanger months of anticipation, would become meaningless. (Logistically, I don’t think either solution even makes much logical sense.) Perhaps the fatal flaw of this debate is that we view it as a debate. As Juliet did, maybe we should simple replace the word ‘OR’ with the word ‘AND’. There can be two universes, one in which Jacob succeeds, and one in which the Man in Black succeeds. Instead of conflict, we can find harmony. As the men who first painted on cave walls understood, one color is not enough. A world of pure white and a world of pure black would be indistinguishable from chaos. But, when you combine the dark and the light in some kind of balance, then any work of art becomes possible.

The Hole in the Heart by Luhks

2009-06-14T09:47:00.001+01:00

All five seasons of Lost follow a parabola of sorts, with highest points of action at the beginning and end of each year’s collection of episodes. Season Five literally opened with a lot of flash, a razzle-dazzle series of time jumps backward, forward, and sideways. Eventually, the drama settled down into a smoothly-curved valley inside the happy yellow houses of the 1970s Dharma Initiative. Episode 5.13 Some Like it Hoth, which closed with Miles peering into the window of the Chang home, represented the last fleeting moment of domestic tranquility before the Island accelerated back into crisis mode. The Variable revamps the show’s conflict quotient, without using any Because-You-Left-style or Constant-style time travel. Instead, it relies on the old Lost tools of the trade: a tragic series of flashbacks, a handful of twists and reveals, and a desperation plan to get everyone back to where they are supposed to be. Along the way, Jeremy Davies provides the year’s best performance (by any cast member not named Terry O’Quinn), during both his first lead effort and his swan song. The Variable is one of those rare achievements that succeeds both as a character study and as a thrilling piece of plot development.

The early minutes of The Variable briefly send the audience back to the season opener, with a literal repetition of the meeting between Chang and Faraday. The limitless energy source beneath the Orchid station served as the catalyst for this season’s grand storyline. The oversized magnet under the Swan dragged Oceanic Flight 815 to its destiny, while the Orchid sent its characters back in time to create that destiny. These pockets of energy represent the epitome of the Island’s natural and supernatural powers. After Daniel arrives in the middle of the night, mankind wages a one-day battle to strike the Island directly in its heart. Faraday’s plan confronts these mighty natural forces using world’s strongest man-made power, the hydrogen bomb (or, perhaps something even stronger, the human will). Faraday, along with his lone disciple Dr. Shephard, briefly becomes Lost’s own version of Dr. Frankenstein, the man of science, driven by emotion to rebel against the natural order. The ultimate outcome remains unresolved, but this episode certainly foreshadows which side will win the battle. By the end of The Variable, Mother Nature reasserts her superiority quite emphatically, in the form of Mother Eloise.

LOCKE: And then a light went on. I thought it was a sign. But it wasn't a sign. Probably just you going to the bathroom.

Over the past few seasons, Lost writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz have produced (in my judgment) the most consistently excellent scripts on the show. The Variable adds another instant classic to their growing resume. Their writing almost always offers more depth beneath the surface than the average episode. Seemingly insignificant details often elevate the meaning to otherwise straightforward scenes. This particular episode uses the recurring image of characters being interrupted by a knock on their door. Daniel’s first stop on the Island is to awaken Jack from his sleep. Shephard had been lying dormant since he arrived in 1977, awaiting further instructions. After one look at the Doc in his Dharma jumpsuit, the audience already knew what Daniel soon told him: “You don’t belong here at all.” Jack is already out the door and ready for action, before he even gets dressed, and well before he hears Daniel’s plan. By contrast, James and Juliet remain inside their home for the entire episode. Three separate times, a character knocks on their door and disrupts the LaFleur household (first Jack, then Daniel, then Radzinsky). The final knocking comes from within the house, when Phil, the skeleton in their closet, finally makes his presence known. Like the Oceanic Six before them, living the Lie is only a temporary solution. Sooner or later, destiny will come knocking, whether from outside or from within.

At the end of He’s Our You (the most recent Kitsis/Horowitz episode), LaFleur was able to contain the initial fire sparked by Sayid. It was only a matter of time before Jack and Kate literally would blow up any chance of happiness in this Dharma community. Juliet had been hearing the alarm bells in her head since their arrival, but James needed to hear Radzinsky actually sound the alarm itself before he could understand the inevitable. I wish I also could argue that the 1970s shootout at the motor pool (in which Captain America Jack Shephard detonates a barrel of gasoline in front of his decidedly-Eastern-sounding-comrade Radzinsky) doubles as some sort of clever historical commentary on the Cold War, global warming, and the oil resources in the Middle East. Even I have to draw the line somewhere. Sometimes, an explosion is just an explosion. However, it still warms the heart to see Jack following in the footsteps of his mentor Locke, by improvising some pyrotechnics without any dynamite or C4 on hand.

CHARLIE: My greatest hits. You know, memories. They're all I've got.

Although Lost has used its traditional flashback format only sparingly since the end of Season Three, The Variable provides probably the strongest sequence of flashbacks since Greatest Hits. Each of the four moments in this walk down memory lane contains plenty of emotional power, in its own way. The back story begins with the image of Daniel as a gifted young boy playing the piano, while a metronome swings back and forth (similar to his mother’s Foucault pendulum from 316). Each tick on the device reminds Eloise of her son’s impending death, the finite number of seconds that remain in his life. A person can respond to mortality in two ways: either dedicate your time in the tireless pursuit of some extrinsic purpose; or live in the moment, and pursue things like love or music, for their own sake. This idea carries over into the second flashback, in which Eloise continues to push Daniel to forego happiness in the pursuit of greatness. The scene concludes by revealing Eloise’s loving inscription inside Faraday’s journal, the ironic counterpart Desmond’s copy of Our Mutual Friend. The blank journal becomes an interesting image for Daniel’s life itself: a gift from his mother, an apparent tabula rasa waiting to be filled. Although Daniel is free to guide his life story by his own hand, the book has already been written. The contents of his journal, all of the thoughts and memories he recorded, already exist at another point in time. Ultimately, the journal outlives Daniel himself, and its collection of words and numbers becomes his only form of immortality.

The other two scenes focus on a story idea left unexplored since early in Season Four: Daniel’s memory loss. Daniel shares the same affliction as Leonard Shelby, the main character of the 2000 film Memento, which gets my vote for best movie of the decade. (The shot of Phil bound and gagged in LaFleur’s closet also provides a visual homage to a similar moment from that film.) Faraday’s condition not only renders all of his natural gifts useless, but it also forces him to live in a state of constant grief. Daniel can remember what he did to Theresa, but without any new memories, he remains trapped in that time period (the broken record playing the same song over again). Although the Island does heal his mind, just as Widmore promised, the intact memory merely allows his heart to be broken a second time. After being unable to remember anything, Daniel becomes incapable of forgetting the death of Charlotte. The scene offers no direct explanation for why Daniel breaks into tears at the sight of the sunken Oceanic airliner, but the dead bodies of Charlotte and Daniel exist somewhere on the Island, independent of his memories. When Eloise visits her son for the final time, once again at the piano bench, the condition reduces Daniel to a childlike state. He transforms into that same boy, seeking to earn his mother’s conditional love. It almost seems as if Eloise pushed her son to grow up too quickly, and fate found a way to compensate. The most basic human constants (things like memory, age, and love) simply do not work the way they are supposed to work in the life of Daniel Faraday.

DESMOND: Well, Moriah is the mountain where Abraham was asked to kill Isaac. It’s not exactly the most, festive locale is it.
CAMPBELL: And yet God spared Isaac.
DESMOND: Well one might argue then, God may not have asked Abraham to sacrifice his son in the first place.
CAMPBELL: Well then it wouldn't have been much of a test, would it brother? Perhaps you underestimate the value of sacrifice.

Eloise Hawking urged her son to give up many aspects of his own life, in service of a larger destiny. The concept of sacrifice is a familiar one in the Lost mythos. The superb second half of Season Three drew comparisons to one of the world’s most famous sacrifice stories, the Binding of Isaac from the book of Genesis. The looking-glass Lost universe inverted the details of this story in a number of different ways. Desmond disobeyed the universe’s command to sacrifice Charlie, and he was eventually rewarded with a son Charlie; Locke struggled to slaughter his father in biblical fashion in the Others’ initiation ritual, so he outsourced the job; and Ben’s burdensome sacrifice was not the killing itself, but the decades of waiting before he could gas Roger. Season Five’s Dead is Dead revealed another permutation, as Widmore ordered Linus to sacrifice his adopted daughter in the name of the Island. Eventually, the angel of death named Keamy offered Ben a chance to sacrifice himself in Alex’s place. Unlike the Hebrew God, Widmore was not bluffing. The Variable provides its own variation on the human sacrifice story, with another unhappy ending. Ultimately, Eloise and Charles agreed to bind their son to the Island’s altar, knowing full well that his life would not be spared. Despite its fatalistic motivation, the slaughter required three separate acts of free will, once from Widmore and twice from Hawking. The two British Hostiles somehow managed to distinguish themselves within Lost’s rich tradition of parenting.

What possible justification could Hawking and Widmore have for sending their own son to be killed? Did they receive the Island’s divine command as a test of loyalty, or did they seek to avoid some scientific doomsday prophecy, or both? Hawking’s words from Flashes Before Your Eyes reveal some insight into the meaning of her job of keeping people on the right path: “If you don't do those things, […] every single one of us is dead.” Rightly or wrongly, Eloise seems to believe that the fate of the world rests in the balance. (Unless it is possible to erase one timeline and create a new one, perhaps changing history would result in the destruction of the universe.) Season Five's central biblical reference comes not the Book of Genesis, but from Christian scriptures. In the words of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” The Variable offers a twisted, subversive, science-fiction re-telling of the gospels, with Daniel Faraday as its Jesus, Eloise Hawking as its Virgin Mary, and Charles Widmore as its God. If the fate of the universe depended upon sacrificing your child, which choice would be the right one?

Before The Variable, Eloise Hawking would have ranked near the absolute bottom of my list of favorite Lost characters. Not only is Fionnula Flanagan one of the weakest recurring actors on the show, but the writers have not done her any favors with her material. In the past, she was barely a character at all, but more of a transparent storytelling device. She served as nothing more than a Lindelof/Cuse spokeswoman to dispense information, and a lamp-post to point others on their way. The Variable accomplished something nearly impossible: it transformed Ms. Hawking into a genuine Lost character. Even her previous conversations with Jack and Desmond now become revelations of character rather than plot. Her monologue about course correction in Flashes Before Your Eyes now doubles as an attempt to convince herself that she did the right thing with Daniel. A woman who has believes so strongly in her cause that she would sacrifice her son’s life, certainly should have no qualms about sending another young man to lose his freedom. (One can imagine the thoughts that might be running through her head: “You want your damn three years back, Desmond? I want my son back!”) The younger actress, Alice Evans, also made a key contribution, by showing some recognizable human emotions during her early flashback scene: glimpses of fear, doubt, and even self-loathing. Season Five Eloise occupies one end of the Lost parenting spectrum opposite from Season Two Michael, who was willing to sacrifice everything and everyone else to save his own special son. Each parent believed (falsely, of course) that no other options existed, that his hand was forced when he pulled the trigger. Eloise’s motivations might never make perfect sense, but the character finally has developed some substance. After a season filled with the theme of motherhood, Mama Eloise might be the ultimate metaphor for the Island’s true nature: it gives life, nurtures a person’s gifts, pushes and pushes person to fulfill some role, and then it takes that life away.

LOCKE: That's not work. That's a joke - rats in a maze with no cheese. [...] I was never meant to do anything. Every single second of my pathetic little life is as useless as that button! You think it's important? You think it's necessary? It's nothing. It's nothing. It's meaningless. And who are you to tell me that it's not?

The self-referential title of Episode 5.14 makes for a rather bold fashion choice worth noting. Supporting scribes Kitsis and Horowitz present The Variable as the spiritual inverse of Season Four’s revered classic The Constant from Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Both episodes portray the four-dimensional Lost universe as a fixed equation, in which the past is just as much a function of the future as vice versa. For Desmond Hume, this perspective on the universe offered great comfort. If your destiny is to spend the rest of your life with someone you love, then even oceans of space and time can be overcome. As Benjamin Linus reminded the audience back in Cabin Fever, fickle destiny can have a major downside as well. Faraday’s fate was sealed with a gunshot before he was even born: a lifetime of solitude and misery, in which any woman he loved would be hurt terribly. In The Constant, complete strangers (Jarrah, Minkowski, Faraday, even Widmore) all joined forces to help Desmond find his love again. In The Variable, Daniel is so alone in his quest that even his own family conspires against him. On Desmond’s path, love can somehow make a person bulletproof. For someone like Daniel, love guides that bullet directly into his heart. Desmond and Penny are the outliers in this system, the unique and miraculous exceptions that prove the rule. The Hume family’s brief appearance here emphasizes the contrast between their story and the rest of the Lost narrative. The sheer bliss of another Desmond-Penny reunion becomes a cruel cosmic joke, to amplify the magnitude of Daniel’s tragedy even further.

Among other ideas, The Constant also focused on the relationship between emotions and reason (so much so that my review of the episode last year was entitled “The Heart and the Head”). Desmond overcame a crisis of the brain, through his unbreakable attachment to Penelope. In its own way, The Variable re-affirms this same principle of the supremacy of the heart over the head. The same force that healed Desmond’s mind also conquered Daniel’s brain. More than any other character, Faraday is defined by his intellectual gifts. Even the strongest mind can fall powerless to a grieving heart. Ultimately, his plan to destroy the energy underneath the Swan does not make any rational sense. Three different characters in the episode (Miles, James, and Kate) refer to Daniel as insane, and for good reason. For one thing, basic thermodynamics holds that energy cannot be destroyed. Logistically, his plan should also be impossible: if Daniel does not arrive on the Island in 2004, then he can never exist in 1977 to detonate the bomb (or, for that matter, when he first told Eloise to bury it in 1954). His eventual ‘we’re the variables’ explanation to Jack and Kate does not support the conclusion that the past can be changed. Human decisions may be unknown, but each action only occurs once. To extend the equation analogy, the value of one variable may depend on the value of another variable. One person’s decision to change the past causes another person to cancel its effects (e.g. Sayid’s choice to kill Ben caused Kate’s decision to save him). The outcome of one side of the equation remains constant, even as the values on the other side vary. His speech did not express the thoughts of a scientist, but only the hopes of a desperate soul.

The artistry of Lost thrives on its own unique blend of smoke and mirrors. The smoke conceals its secrets until the most opportune moment. The mirrors reveal deeper truths by reflecting back opposites. The previous episode Some Like it Hoth drew a nearly explicit comparison between Season Five of Lost and The Empire Strikes Back, Episode V of the Star Wars saga. Hurley’s favorite Star Wars sequel climaxed with the daddy of all pop culture plot twists, those four words ‘I am your father,’ which turned a fictional universe upside down. The Variable includes a smaller moment of parent-child revelation, in which Charles Widmore, the ruthless leader of his own empire, reveals himself to be the father of the gentle Daniel Faraday. The more consequential surprise occurs in the episode's final moments, when Eloise shoots him in the back, just before hearing the words, "I'm your son." Lost’s Daniel Faraday already knew that he was the son of a bitch, but he never understood the full extent, until his dying breath. Perhaps the more meaningful line, however, came from Eloise, with the three words: "Who are you?" We all need mirrors to remind ourselves of who we are, and Daniel is no different. Any number of reflections might answer that question, either by comparison (Leonard Shelby, Dr. Frankenstein, Orpheus, Jesus) or by contrast (Isaac, Luke Skywalker, Walt, Desmond). Daniel's own answer to the question might be the most complete. Like all of us, Daniel Faraday amounts to exactly what his parents made him.

Nobody's Perfect by Luhks

2009-04-27T09:44:00.004+01:00

With only three episodes remaining, the grand canvas of Lost’s fifth chapter is coming into view. Even after several months, the season premiere still seems like a fresh part of the collective consciousness. As with its season-opening predecessors, the first scene of Season Five established the overarching tone for the story that followed. Man of Science, Man of Faith began with button-pusher Desmond peering up from the Swan station at Locke and Jack above him. A Tale of Two Cities introduced trouble in paradise for Ben and Juliet in the Others’ village. The Beginning of the End highlighted the tenuous return to civilization for the Oceanic Six. Because You Left shifted the spotlight away from the core group of characters into the Chang family home. Nearly every element of that scene hinted at the story elements to be explored over the next few months: the inner workings of the Dharma Initiative, the ongoing war with the Hostiles, time travel, the famous Hitler hypothetical, dead characters reborn, uncovering ancient ruins, false identities, domestic tranquility disrupted by crises, mothers, fathers, and children.

Episode 5.13 Some Like it Hoth revisits that same family unit of Miles, Lara, and Pierre (and even finishes with the return of Daniel Faraday, the other principal character from the opening scene). Over the first half of this season, the Wheel at the Orchid station caused Lost’s temporal structure to fall out of joint like Chang’s beloved Willie Nelson record. After a period of uncertainty, the past four episodes have returned to the traditional single character-centric format, along with its steady rhythm of flashbacks. Compared to Sayid’s He’s Our You, Kate’s Whatever Happened, Happened, and Ben’s Dead is Dead, the melody of Miles' Some Like it Hoth sounds the most similar to classical Lost tunes. Like many seminal episodes from the first three seasons, this first-ever Miles episode provides a fresh look at the inner life of a character with a tough outer shell. Early in the episode, Miles speaks some words central to almost every character on the show: “I need you to tell me why I'm this way... how... how I do the things I do. And I need to know […] about my father.” (Later, Bram tries to recruit him to his team, by offering that same reward.) Miles does not obtain any easy answers to his questions, but his journey on and off the Island does give the viewer an understanding of how Miles evolved from the infant from Because You Left into the misanthropic hustler of Confirmed Dead.

After a streak of considerably self-referential episode titles, the name Some Like it Hoth derives its meaning from two films outside the Lost universe: the classic 1959 comedy Some Like it Hot, from Billy Wilder; and The Empire Strikes Back, the 1980 sequel to Star Wars. Lost is no stranger to Star Wars references, but it has acknowledged liberally the influence of the famous movie saga along the way. For people like Hurley and for the writers of Lost, Star Wars represents more than just a movie series, but a common point of cultural reference as useful as The Bible or The Odyssey. Three decades after George Lucas set out to bring his vision to the big screen, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof approached an ambitious television project with many of the same objectives. The two works exist at the intersection of past and future. Both Star Wars and Lost seek to create an enduring cultural myth, within a science-fiction universe. The heroes still fit many of the same basic archetypes (the prodigy chasing his father's shadow, the martyred mentor, the reformed every-man-for-himself scoundrel, the bumbling sidekicks), and the basic religious and psychological roots remain the same. Whereas Lucas' films pushed the limits of technology in the film industry, Lost has experimented with narrative techniques. Working as a serial ensemble drama, Lost has been able to dig much deeper into the minds of its characters and the substance of its literary sources.

The Star Wars trilogy has served as such a predominant influence on Lost, and the references in many episodes are so overt, that it is difficult to know exactly how far to extend the analogy. Hurley’s discussion of the famous ending to The Empire Strikes Back deserves special attention. Although Empire is the second film in the saga, it is officially known as Episode V. This reference might hold greater significance when the final segments of Season Five are complete. Perhaps the Empire (Widmore? Dharma?) will re-establish itself on the Island stronger than ever. Perhaps another character (Daniel?) is being set up for an “I am your father”-type revelation. Perhaps some other novel twist is in store to turn our perception of the Lost universe upside down. Despite Hurley’s attempts to change the past and to re-write the script, the climactic sixth chapter in this saga is also inevitable. WIth Hurley's editorial comments about Return of the Jedi, the writers of Lost make one difference abundantly clear: they feel confident that they can produce a more satisfying ending than Lucas did. A year from now, we can judge how well they lived up to that boast. For now, the new group of players led by Ilana and Bram operates more like Boba Fett and Jabba the Hutt, and less like the Ewoks. Hugo is not the only one trying to make some 'minor improvements' to his beloved saga.

Hurley also makes a direct analogy between the central father-son conflict of The Empire Strikes Back and the relationship of Miles and Pierre Chang. This comparison does not make much intuitive sense, but Hurley's heart is in the right place as he tries to encourage his friend to re-connect with family. In fact, the core elements of the relationship seem to be backwards. Luke led his life idolizing his dead father, with the false belief that Anakin died as a genuine hero. Lara Chang convinced her son to despise his father, by claiming that he abandoned his family for selfish reasons. Dr. Chang's heartwarming interactions with his infant son suggests the opposite. The ultimate revelation of this story is not the identity of Miles' dad, but the reversal of perspective on his true nature. Most likely, Pierre sent his wife and son away from the Island, because (much like Jin earlier in this season) he wanted to save his loved ones from certain death. The enigmatic Dr. Pierre Chang has concealed his true nature behind many different masks: Dr. Marvin Candle of the Swan, Dr. Mark Wickmund of the Pearl, and Dr. Edgar Halliwax of the Orchid. The most important role of his life is still to come: to do whatever is necessary to convince his wife to leave the Island forever, even if it means that she will hate him. Based on the Swan orientation video, the older Chang in the family (as opposed to the younger Skywalker) will lose a limb along the way.

This episode offers fewer connections to its other main cinematic allusion, Some Like it Hot. The film is widely regarded as one of the top comedies of all time. Hot's Lost counterpart mixes in plenty of similar story elements: music, booze, buddies on the road, and people living under false identities. The title phrase ‘some like it hot’ comes from a discussion of musical tastes midway through the film. Jazz musician Joe (played by Tony Curtis) disguises himself as a millionaire named Junior, in an effort to impress lounge singer Sugar (played by Marilyn Monroe). When she expresses her enthusiasm for hot jazz music, Junior takes the opportunity to look down his nose: “That fast music, jazz? […] Well, I guess some like it hot. I personally prefer classical music.” Lost’s Some Like it Hoth includes its own variation on this highbrow/lowbrow distinction. Here, Lara Chang’s appreciation for jazz (specifically Miles Davis) makes her appear more refined in comparison to her husband, a country music fan. This script has no aspirations of snobbery, but it is particularly concerned with embracing its populist roots: not only with Hurley’s opinions on Star Wars, but also some beer guzzling, jokes about foul odors, polar bear poop, diaper-changing, the circle of trust, necrophilia, fish tacos, use of the word douche, and a cumbersome pun on the little Dutch boy with his finger in the Doc. The emphatically unpretentious dialogue from Gregg Nations and Melinda Hsu more closely matches the tone of Kevin Smith than the films of Wilder or Lucas. Some Like it Hoth positions Lost about as far away from high-culture affectations as possible.

(On a personal note, writer/director Billy Wilder is my favorite filmmaker, and I could not resist giving his movies my highest recommendation. However, Some Like it Hot is actually my least favorite among his works. If you want to experience two Wilder masterpieces, then I suggest The Apartment and Sunset Boulevard. Those two films stand right alongside the first two Star Wars films among my personal favorites.)

Our familiar Lost characters might not be using humorous disguises and voices like the protagonists of Some Like it Hot, but nevertheless their cover with the Dharma Initiative is about to be blown. Despite an extensive résumé of cons and deceptions, and after fooling the entire world with the Oceanic Six Lie, the Lost team cannot match wits with an incompetent security guard and a drunk janitor. Dharma's other unfriendly father figure, Roger Linus, plays a prominent role in the episode. Mr. Linus might not be the world’s greatest dad, but even he tends to notice something amiss when his dying son disappears from the infirmary. Both Kate and Jack have some experience in dealing with a parent who has a drinking problem. Roger allows them to use those old dysfunctional habits once more. Kate decides to take pity on the poor guy and drink a Dharma brew alongside him. Jack first tries to cover for his inebriated co-worker, and then becomes confrontational when things begin to unravel. Interestingly, Miles is not the only person who has passed up a second chance to contact his dead father. The mainland is only a submarine ride away. James could be getting even with dad, or Kate could be making amends with Wayne, or Jack could be working with Christian rather than cleaning up after his fellow workman. For many people (including Back to the Future's Marty McFly), checking in on your parents would be the first thing to do if you were transported thirty years in the past. In Hurley's words: "It all could've been avoided if they'd just, you know, communicated." These Lost souls have decided to take their chances with Dharma and the Hostiles rather than confront their own personal Darth Vaders.

Moreover, this side plot exposes one of the central ideas of the overall 1977 Dharma storyline. Apparently, whenever someone sets out to try to do some good, they end up causing harm instead. When Kate makes an effort to ease Roger’s pain, his mind jumps from despair to angry suspicion. When Jack tries to defuse his fears, he amplifies Roger’s paranoia even further. Similarly, James escalates the growing crisis when he punches out Phil. Thus far, the group’s primary accomplishments have been to bring Ethan into the world and to corrupt the innocence of young Benjamin Linus. Their hearts may be in the right place, and even their heads as well, but the end results are pretty far off the mark. Hugo still clings to the naïve hope that the past can be rewritten, for something as minor as the Star Wars trilogy or as significant as global warming. If Faraday has returned to try to prevent future tragedies, expect the results to be nothing short of catastrophic. (The episode includes two other smaller images of failed efforts to alter history: Miles’ aborted attempt to delete the surveillance footage, and Jack’s interrupted effort to erase a lesson on ancient Egypt.) When Luke Skywalker tried to lift his X-Wing from the swamps of Dagobah, it sunk all the way to the bottom. Yoda's famous advice echoes Lost's fatalistic approach: "Try not. Do or do not. There is no try." On this Island, effort and good intentions lead to failure.

The Star Wars universe used the term 'the Force' (an energy field that connects all living things) to explain its fantasy aspects. The Island of Lost of course emanates its own powerful forces as well. Electromagnetism serves as a key element of Lost's science-fiction mythology, and a metaphor for the Island's overall power. In this episode, Alvarez, Dharma’s unfortunate ditch-digger, suffered the consequences of whatever unrestrained forces rest under the Swan construction site. Hurley offers a reminder that the Swan station pulled the Oceanic airliner out of the sky decades after it ripped out Alvarez’s filling. On a more symbolic level, the Island’s powers to attract and to repel include more than just metal objects. Oceanic 815, the Kahana freighter, and Ajira 316 all seem to be drawn in by the Island’s attractive forces. The Island follows its own rules of magnetism of human beings: it pushes away the majority of the world is pushed away, and it draws only a few special individuals toward it. The more such people gathered in the same place, the greater their aggregate charge becomes. Season Five has slowly revealed that Charlotte, Daniel, and now Miles were all children of the Island to different degrees. Looking back on Confirmed Dead, the energy surrounding the helicopter must have been off the charts.

This story goes to great lengths to explain the precise nature of Miles’ supernatural gift. His initial off-island flashback scene from Season Four implied that Miles could speak with the souls of the dead. This episode scales back his communication skills, into one-way eavesdropping on the deceased. The central contradiction of his character remains intact. As I wrote after episode 4.02: “Many other characters would rejoice at the chance to speak with the departed, but, in a true Lost reversal, the only dead people Miles cares about are the dead presidents printed on bills.” To put things delicately, Mr. Straume is not exactly a people person. The revised take on his powers offers some insight into how Miles’ colorful personality took shape. At the age of eight, he was already exposed to things far beyond his years. Unlike Hurley’s experience, in which friendly ghosts keep him company, Miles’ link to the spirit world amplified his loneliness. Spirits could not listen to anything he said to them, and his mother did not lend a sympathetic ear, either. His solution was to shut out the rest of the world as best he could. Hearing the unfiltered thoughts of the dead must have altered his perspective of humanity in other ways as well. In Confirmed Dead, Miles argued that there was no point in taking care of Naomi’s body: “What’s the point? […] It’s just meat.” This episode carries its somewhat nihilistic meat comparison even further, with Alvarez’s corpse delivered alongside a case of sandwiches, and Felix’s body examined inside the kitchen of a restaurant. Miles’ sixth sense causes him to view the body itself in material terms. He does not hear the voice of the soul, but only those thoughts physically stored in the brain at the time of death. A corpse is just a package, which might contain some valuable information. (Interestingly, Chang's examination of Alvarez's body is equally swift and precise. Pierre shares several elements of his son's personality as well, and perhaps the family curse.)

The flashback storyline highlights Miles' search for the truth about his own past. Miles could have waited until after his mother's death, and then learned all of the information from her that he needed. Instead, he made a point to ask those questions while he was still alive. Like the grieving father Mr. Gray, Miles might not have been searching for the truth, but for peace of mind. Later, when Bram's mysterious group gives him a second chance to learn the truth, Miles turns down the offer once more. In 1977, the Island offers him daily opportunities to interact with his dead father. Which belief would cause Miles more pain: thinking that his father never mattered in the first place, or feeling that he lost such a special person? The final sequence of the episode includes what is, in my opinion, the most poignant moment of the time travel story, and one of the best scenes of Season Five. The image speaks volumes on its own. The sight not only transforms his view of Pierre, but Miles will never be able to look at himself in the same way. Miles tried to believe that he never missed out on anything worthwhile. Now that Miles understands exactly what he lost, soon he will lose it all over again. All of us have a few holes in our hearts, but that empty space exists to remind us of the substance that once stood in its place.

Luminous Beings by Luhks

2009-04-24T16:01:00.001+01:00

Three years after the original Star Wars closed on a triumphant high note, the sequel redefined the tone of the series, beginning with this simple sentence: “It is a dark time for the Rebellion.” For financial reasons, the majority of movie sequels are formulaic. Studios want to replicate the box-office success of the original film, so they emulate whatever worked the first time. The opening crawl of this second film, as well as its title, signaled that the next chapter here would follow a much different path. The film that follows lives up to that promise, and offers a fresh and unique experience from start to finish. The Empire Strikes Back does not follow the formula, but instead subverts it in a way so that the two films add meaning to one another. The film’s hero, Luke Skywalker, uses the Force five times during The Empire Strikes Back. In each of those five scenes, Luke is upside-down immediately beforehand. In order to fully understand his world this time around, Luke must literally invert his existing perspective on the world.

Although the character archetypes remain the same, the storytelling structure in The Empire Strikes Back becomes almost a complete inversion of the first film. In Star Wars, the Imperials discovered the location of the Rebel base during the final act, which set the stage for a spectacular large-scale battle won by the Rebels. In the sequel, the Empire locates the Rebellion, then wins the movie’s biggest battle, and destroys their hidden base, all within the opening act. In Star Wars, Luke learned about his identity through an early conversation with Obi-Wan, which marked the beginning of his adventure. In The Empire Strikes Back, the entire adventure leads up to a climax of emotion rather than spectacle, in which Luke learns that his self-image was based on a lie. The film’s secondary climax, Leia’s goodbye to Han before he is frozen in carbonite, is also a moment about the lives of two characters, not a key event in the war between the Rebellion against the Empire. Throughout the first movie, different characters sacrificed their own interests to serve the common good; the second movie pushes the collective to the background and then shifts its attention back on the individuals.

Size relationships played a major role in the original Star Wars, and The Empire Strikes Back builds on the first film’s philosophy. The film once again opens with a shot of an Imperial destroyer in space. The first character on-screen is a small droid, this time an Imperial probe droid rather than C-3P0 and R2-D2 of the Rebellion. Much like the other two droids did in the first film, the probe droid’s pod drifts down to a barren wasteland on the surface of a remote planet, on a mission vital to the larger conflict. In the ensuing Battle of Hoth, the Rebels defend themselves against massive Imperial walkers by tripping them from underneath in maneuverable snowspeeders. The Millennium Falcon survives the assault of the giant Star destroyers, by hiding rather than by force. After the Imperial starfleet fails in its pursuit of the lone ship, only the bounty hunter Boba Fett manages to track them in an even smaller ship. Little R2-D2 once again foils the Empire’s plans, this time by fixing the Falcon’s hyperdrive at the last moment to escape from Vader’s Super Star Destroyer.

The film’s best exploration of its size philosophy, though, comes through the introduction of Jedi Master Yoda. Luke initially overlooks the strange little creature on Dagobah, because he’s looking for ‘a great warrior.’ (Little Yoda's response: "Wars not make one great.") In due course, the tiny green alien turns out to be the powerful master himself. In perhaps my favorite scene of the entire trilogy, Yoda teaches Luke that ‘size matters not,’ and then uses the Force to lift Luke’s X-Wing from the bottom of a swamp. The feat is remarkable for two reasons. First, there is the obvious size disparity between Yoda himself and the multi-ton ship. Moreover, though, the scene plays with the deeper irony in that a machine designed to fly across the galaxy with ease depends upon this creature in order to fly a few more feet.

Although the size motif plays an important role in the story, this new recurring theme of the relationship between nature and technology becomes perhaps a more prominent feature of the second film. During the opening scene, two different objects crash on the Rebel base, first the Imperial droid and then a meteorite. The two objects (one natural, one artificial) look indistinguishable. When Luke witnesses the falling meteorite, the audience should suspect that he will encounter the probe droid. Instead, Luke comes under attack from a wampa, a polar bear-like creature that drags him back to its cave. This same pilot who destroyed the Death Star nearly dies, first from a random creature attack, and then from the elements of the icy planet. After learning that “it’s to cold for speeders,” Han ventures out to find Luke on the back of a tauntaun creature. Han saves Luke from exposure through a decidedly low-tech solution, by stuffing his friend inside the guts of the creature for warmth. The first film essentially presented a battle between Rebel and Imperial technology. From the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back, though, nature begins to assert its agency as a major player in the story.

After those early scenes in the dangerous environment of Hoth, the natural world continues to launch an assault on both Rebel and Imperial technology. When the hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon fails, the ship stumbles into an asteroid field. The Falcon defends itself from the approaching fighters, not with its guns as it did in a similar scene from the first film, but by using the natural environment. The Empire’s fighters prove to be no match for a chaotic assortment of rocks. Later, the asteroids take out entire Imperial star destroyers as well. Both living and non-living elements of nature make quite an impact on this man-made conflict.

After escaping from the Imperials, the Falcon seeks refuge in what he believes to be an empty cave. The environment then begins attacking the ship, first from an infestation of parasitic Mynock creatures. Then, the cave itself turns out to be part of a living creature, the belly of a giant Space Slug that tries to consume the ship. What Han and Leia believed to be an inanimate rock turned out to be a living creature. This ultimate reveal not only makes for an exciting scene, but it highlights the saga’s recurring metaphor that compares the world itself to a living organism. In a convoluted way, this scene also foreshadows Han’s ultimate fate in the film, as he himself will be transformed from a breathing being into a slab of rock. Halfway through the film, Yoda’s explanation of the Force expands upon Obi-Wan’s definition (an energy field created by all living things) to include non-living things as well (the land itself and man-made technology). Fittingly, the story itself blurs many of those distinctions.

Meanwhile, on the jungle planet of Dagobah, Luke and his ship faces a similar set of natural challenges. When approaching the system, Luke notes that there are “massive life readings” on the planet, but “no cities or technology”. The same starship that triumphed in the Battle of Yavin barely survives a simple landing, due to the thick canopy on Dagobah. A giant snake swallows R2-D2 whole and then spits him out as they make their way out of the swamp. Luke sets up camp with a wide array of his high-tech gadgets, none of which serve much of a purpose on this particular planet. Dagobah marks a major departure from every other system in the Star Wars galaxy in that nothing on the planet requires science-fiction. The setting itself serves as an integral part of Luke’s training, as he evolves from treating it as a “slimy mud hole,” to appreciating all of it life forms.

Midway through Luke’s training, he encounters a cave in the middle of Dagobah. (There are actually three different caves in the story, including the wampa cave on Hoth and the space slug belly in the asteroid field.) Although the cave on Dagobah is filled with creatures just like the other two caves, it presents a much different source of danger. This ominous setting serves as the backdrop for one of the most unique and memorable scenes in the saga. The Star Wars films follow some strict temporal guidelines: there are no flashbacks or hallucinations or dream sequences allowed, and action scenes never use slow-motion. This scene on Dagobah is the lone exception, and consequently this choice of technique presents many questions of interpretation.

When Luke asks what’s inside the cave, Yoda tells him “only what you take with you.” Here on Dagobah, Luke encounters Darth Vader (an impossible event with Vader across the galaxy), and a brief, slow-motion battle ensues. Luke wins the fight and beheads Vader, only to see his own face revealed underneath Vader’s mask. Neither Yoda nor Luke offers any explanation of the event afterward, which leaves the audience to decipher the imagery. This visual of course hints at the ultimate revelation of the true relationship between Luke and Vader, but I think the scene would work on its own even without that later connection. The scene marks the saga’s deepest exploration of its Dark Side, and it requires virtually no dialogue. Which detail of the event is the more damaging revelation to Luke: seeing his own head lying on the floor, or seeing his own face inside Vader’s helmet? The film’s eventual climax forces Luke to choose between those two fates, to follow Obi-Wan’s path of martyrdom or to follow his father’s path to power.

Of course, Luke would not be in the position to make that ultimate decision if he had not made another, more challenging, decision earlier in the film. During a meditation exercise on Dagobah, Luke catches a glimpse of the future, and sees his friends Han and Leia suffering at the hands of Vader. The wise Jedi master Yoda advises Luke that he must complete his training before he confronts Vader. To justify this decision, Yoda essentially echoes the morality of the first Star Wars film: Luke must sacrifice his own individual concerns (personal attachments) in order to achieve a greater collective purpose (defeating the Empire). Instead, Luke does the opposite. He ignores his duty to the Rebellion, and instead rushes into battle to rescue his friends. Luke’s decision here is the focal point for the final act of the film, and his decision is, on its face, the wrong one.

Luke’s actions set off a chain of events that achieves his intended result. By fighting Vader when he did, Luke gives Lando the opportunity to release Leia and Chewbacca. Luke also brings R2-D2 with him, and the droid makes their escape possible. Luke does not defeat his opponent, but he survives the battle and learns the secret that will ultimately conquer Vader. One could conclude that Luke just got lucky here, but I think that more meaning rests under the surface. Earlier in his training, Yoda taught Luke that the reason he could not lift the starship was that he believed it was impossible. This idea is not merely a fictional conceit but a legitimate psychological phenomenon: if a person believes that he will fail, then he probably will fail. In the situation that surrounds Luke’s decision, Yoda is the disbeliever. Yoda thinks that Luke is doomed to fail, but Luke truly believes that he will succeed. Through the Force, he makes the impossible possible. This idea might seem naïve, but Luke’s confidence in himself does show a degree of wisdom about the power of positive thinking that Yoda himself might have lost. The student disobeys his master, but follows the spirit of his master’s teachings, at the same time.

In a series famous for its amazing special effects, the on-screen realization of the character Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back might rank as the most impressive visual effect in the entire series. In the masterful hands of Frank Oz, the puppet itself shows such a life-like range of movement with its body, face, eyes, and ears that Yoda can emote as well as any actor. Mark Hammil deserves plenty of credit for execution of Yoda’s scenes as well, because none of them would work without a full commitment from his co-stars. Legend has it that director Irvin Kershner often found himself delivering instructions to Yoda himself rather than the puppeteer.

Although Yoda has received plenty of justified praise over the years, I think that the portrayal of the Darth Vader character might be a more difficult and more impressive feat. The Empire Strikes Back gives Vader motivations as dynamic and complex as those of any other character. The film needed to convey a range of human emotions without the benefit of any facial expressions. James Earl Jones deserves plenty of credit for his spot-on line readings, and David Prowse does phenomenally effective work with head movements and body language. The real burden for the development of the character, though, rests on the director. Irvin Kershner used a wide array of techniques (the camerawork, the lighting, movement in the frame, along with the assistance of music) to elevate Vader beyond a one-dimensional villain into a tragic figure. In the first film, Vader was merely a servant, second in command to Tarkin, to serve a military objective. The Empire Strikes Back unleashes Vader’s full fury, and his new motives become purely personal. On the first viewing, audiences would be unlikely to appreciate Vader’s actions as anything more than a necessary element of the plot. However, Vader’s climactic revelation to Luke humanizes the character, and then a number of throwaway details take on a more poignant meaning.

Vader’s first and last scenes in the movie appear almost identical to each other. In both cases, Vader stands on the bridge of the Executor, the largest and most powerful starship in the galaxy, peering out into space. The first scene shows the Imperial starfleet massed at full strength, and he initially appears to be basking in the glory of his power. In both the first and second acts of the film, Vader uses the Force to strangle two of his incompetent Imperial officers. Initially, these acts highlight Vader’s nearly limitless strength, but on later viewings, they become pathetic acts of frustration. When a third Imperial officer fails him in the final act, Vader walks away in resignation, as he learns the pointlessness of his powers. During the final scene, the audience knows the true reason why Vader has been staring off into the depths of space: his longing to find his son. On a second viewing, the opening scene highlights Vader’s powerlessness rather than his omnipotence. Even with unlimited resources at his disposal, he cannot acquire the one thing that truly matters to him. By the end of the film, Vader's signature sound effect, his raspy breathing, no longer inspires fear.

The film also highlights Vader’s vulnerabilities in another series of three scenes aboard his flagship. In the first one, an officer walks in to find Vader inside a tiny meditation chamber. When the general arrives a second time, he catches a glimpse of what Vader was doing inside the chamber, regenerating his weak and damaged body. Vader’s next scene shows him in an even more vulnerable position, kneeling before a massive hologram of the Emperor. The abundant presence of technology in these scenes plays an important role in characterizing Vader. The dark lord depends entirely on machines to survive. Throughout the the two films, Vader never sets foot in a natural setting. His world is completely artificial, a prison of cold metal. Vader has chosen a world of seemingly limitless physical power and material success, but the means to that end place severe limits on himself. Vader’s one-hundred percent artificial living space on the Executor serves as the polar opposite of Yoda’s one-hundred percent natural home environment on Dagobah. Luke navigates back and forth between the two realms. At the end of the film, Luke’s own body becomes a blend of nature and technology, when he replaces his severed hand with a machine.

As visually impressive as the first film was, Star Wars did not offer much variety with its lighting and coloring. With The Empire Strikes Back, Irvin Kershner experimented more with the use of light and color to convey different emotions. These techniques were particularly effective in scenes that explored the love story between Han and Leia. Their relationship progresses through three phases in the film, each of which matches the prevailing color scheme. The ice planet of Hoth is dominated by white, blue, and gray tones. The environment is bright, sterile, and very public. Each of the conversations between Han and Leia on Hoth takes place with other people present, and the two characters maintain a façade that corresponds to their expected roles. Throughout the second act of the film, Han and Leia bond together aboard the Millennium Falcon in space. The interior of the Falcon is predominantly dark, but there are plenty of small and warm lights throughout the background, much like a candlelight home. The Falcon itself becomes an intimate family setting, complete with the dog-like Chewbacca and the child-like C-3P0. Sheltered from the external pressures, Han and Leia begin to open up and expose their true feelings for each other. When they move on to Cloud City, they return to public spaces and brighter interiors, and now they feel comfortable enough to show the same affection to the rest of the world.

The overall use of color at Bespin is more striking and memorable than any other phase of the film. The city uses two basic color schemes. The first scheme is highly reminiscent of the Rebel Base on Hoth: plenty of white interiors and white clouds against a beautiful blue sky. Kershner uses this palette whenever he seeks to portray the City as a haven: when Lando makes them feel at home, and when Luke arrives to rescue his friends. The second scheme is almost the exact opposite: an ominous red sky filled with black highlights. When the Falcon crew first arrives at Bespin, unsure whether they will find safety, the City is surrounded by red clouds. The red sky again dominates during their dangerous escape from the city. Throughout the film, Kershner uses the color red to connote danger. One of the most memorable shots in the film occurs when Luke takes flight away from Dagobah. The green jungle becomes pitch-black with Yoda’s face bathed in the ship’s red lights.

The Empire Strikes Back refrains from showing any blood, but some blood-red images still impact the viewer on a subliminal level. My personal favorite use of this technique occurs soon after Lando’s betrayal. Up until that point, the film had used only white interiors on Cloud City, but after Vader captures the Rebels, he confines them in black rooms with some red highlights. Vader proceeds to torture Han with a sadistic piece of technology. As Han approaches the device, the red light from the machine glows onto his face. Before Han makes contact with the device, the camera cuts away quickly to outside the room. Lando appears in the same part of the frame as Han, and he reacts as he hears his friend’s screams. The new background behind him is completely red, as he experiences his friend’s suffering. The combined effect of the two shots creates an implied mental image of Han’s pain, and reveals Lando’s feelings without saying a word.

This visual motif moves to operatic heights as the action eventually moves to the carbon-freezing chamber. The room’s atmosphere (an array of red lights against a dark blue background, along with plenty of smoke) provides a perfect complement for the two emotional events that take place there. The predominant mood here is despair. First, Leia must say goodbye to Han before he is frozen in carbonite. Soon after, an outmatched Luke begins his showdown with Vader. The prior lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan and Vader during Star Wars was essentially a tame fencing match between two old experts, which ended in forfeit. The duel at Bespin is absolutely brutal by comparison. The two Skywalkers shift back and forth as aggressors, and they rip apart several rooms with their anger. The choreography, pacing, set direction, and dialogue during the duel could scarcely be improved. Vader relies as much on his physical skill as he does on psychological manipulation. After Vader severs Luke’s hand, he delivers the biggest blow of all, the revelation that Darth Vader is Luke’s father.

Regardless of how many times the ending to The Empire Strikes Back has been quoted or parodied, it retains its power. It is difficult to describe exactly why the confrontation between Luke and Vader is such a beautiful sequence. Good vs. evil myths and father-son conflicts can be found throughout literature and film. The Empire Strikes Back found a way to combine those two cliches into a more meaningful work of art. From the beginning of the first Star Wars all the way into the final act of The Empire Strikes Back, Luke and Vader has been portrayed as moral absolutes. The films portrayed a static universe in which Luke was purely good and Vader was purely evil. With a single sentence from Vader ("I am your father"), all of that purity vanished. Vader had once been as purely good as Luke, and Luke might one day become as purely evil as Vader. The moment requires the viewer (particularly the younger viewer) to address the reality: there is a very real possibility that you yourself might become the bad guy some day. Before that point, the audience could treat Vader as something completely foreign from ourselves. Afterwards, Vader becomes part of your family, and in a sense, part of you. The person under that mask looks just like you. (Tot put it another way, Vader transformed from a heartless machine into a red-blooded human being.) Maybe America really is the Evil Empire, but we're just not wearing a black cape and carrying a red saber.

At the end of The Empire Strikes Back, the Star Wars universe has been turned upside down. The Empire has destroyed the Rebel Base on Hoth. Han has been frozen and transported a galaxy away from Leia. Obi-Wan has been exposed as a liar. Luke lost his duel, lost his weapon, and lost his innocence. Somehow, in the midst of all of this heartbreak, a new glimmer of hope shines through in the final frames. The hope in the final scene is not a childish hope, not the belief that everything will turn out okay because good conquers evil. As Luke and Leia watch the Falcon fly off into the distance, an adult understanding of the situation sets in. In the words of Yoda: "Always in motion is the future." If the Empire can turn the tables on the Rebellion so quickly, and if a person like Luke can become Darth Vader, then the opposite transformations are also possible. The Rebels have no certainty that they will succeed, but only a resolve to help each other through the darkest times.

Size Matters Not by Luhks

2009-04-24T16:00:00.001+01:00

I have lost count of how many times I have seen George Lucas’ Star Wars, whether in part or in full. Even after all these years and so many repeat viewings, the 1977 original still retains the power to entertain, amaze, and inspire like few others. The film has been so influential, and so ingrained in our cultural consciousness, that it can be easy to take the film’s virtues for granted and fix your eyes only on its faults. When I watched it again recently, I tried as best as I could to examine it with a fresh set of eyes. It was bound to be an impossible exercise on some levels, but I did discover some new elements in the storytelling, and in the filmmaking craft, that I had never fully appreciated.

Perhaps more than any other American movie, Star Wars is an exercise on mythopoeia, the conscious generation of myth. It is no secret that George Lucas consulted mythology scholar Joseph Campbell while crafting his screenplay. Campbell is most famous for his seminal text The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which analyzes the common elements of myths across cultures and lays out a blueprint for the archetypal hero’s journey. Lucas borrowed quite liberally from an even wider variety of sources: Flash Gordon serials, King Arthur legend, Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo, John Ford’s The Searchers, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Lucas’ own 1950s nostalgia piece American Graffiti, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Wizard of Oz, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Freudian psychoanalysis, World War II newsreels and propaganda films, the music of composers Richard Strauss and Gustav Holst, the American Revolutionary War, and religions from both West and East. Star Wars is not merely a work of fantasy fiction, but a key intersection within a massive web of cultural storytelling, both narrative and sensory, that stretches across every direction in time and space.

It would be a mistake, however, to regard Star Wars as anything other than an original work. Few films are more imaginative than George Lucas’ seminal work, and one man’s individual personality shines brightly through the entire run-time. Even a mere glance at that list of inspirations above shows a few key insights into how the mind of George Lucas operates. Some of those works affected the film on the large scale, by informing the broad structure of his story; many of those works influenced some very specific details of his film’s production. Lucas’ main strengths as a filmmaker exist on the micro level (the invention and careful planning of thousands of different elements of his universe) and the macro level (arranging those elements into a stylistically and thematically consistent whole). He keeps a keen eye for both the big picture and the small picture simultaneously. Star Wars is a film rich with many layers of possible interpretation, but when I watched it most recently, I was amazed by the central role that size played in the film, both in the screenplay and in the celluloid.

Beginning with the very first shot, the film’s imagery conveys the artist’s unique attitude towards size relationships. After the famous opening crawl, the background of an entire universe of stars and planets fills the screen. Slowly, the camera tilts downward, to reveal one small planet on the right side of the screen and another larger one on left of the screen. Then, a third, much larger planet appears in the foreground, dwarfing the other two objects. This simple visual progression dramatically alters the viewer’s perspective on the objects, by suggesting that the first two objects are moons orbiting around the larger planet. In reality, though, the opposite could just as easily be true. Our assumptions about relative size depend entirely on the placement of the camera. As Obi-Wan would eventually say in the final film of the saga: “Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”

Next, the Rebel blockade runner enters the screen from the top right. The planetary objects provide a sense of scale, which becomes essential in creating the illusion of tremendous speed. Finally, this setup pays off in a huge way, with the introduction of the massive Imperial star destroyer following closely behind it. The object just keeps getting larger and larger in the frame for a breathtaking effect. With just a single elegant camera movement and a careful choreography of models, Lucas has introduced the audience into the Star Wars universe. The initial shot highlights the vastness of space, a backdrop of planets filled with limitless possibilities. The in-between shot focuses on the planet and moons, and plays with the relationship between perspective and size. The third set of images introduces the two sides of the conflict, with the small collection of Rebels being hunted down relentlessly by the colossal and technologically superior Empire. These visuals also hint at what will become a major motif throughout the story, and perhaps the central element of the Star Wars mythology, the relationships between very large things and very small things.

The next sequence introduces the audience to the story’s first characters, R2-D2 and C-3P0 (and then Princess Leia soon after). The little astromech Artoo enters as the smallest and most insignificant element of this movie universe, but he becomes the focal point around which the whole story revolves. In a small compartment, inside the smallest droid, in the halls of a tiny Rebel starship, trapped within a huge Imperial ship, near a massive planet, somewhere in a wide galaxy; there resides the information upon which the fate of all of those planets depends. The Empire captures every Rebel onboard, and only the two droids can escape, because they are small enough to avoid detection. Darth Vader, the biggest and strongest character in this battle, with the might of the Empire at his disposal, is undone by the efforts of the two little droids and the young princess. As their escape pod drifts away, C-3P0 comments on the battle: “That’s funny. The damage doesn’t look as bad from out here.” The audience will not hear Obi-Wan’s initial explanation of the Force for another thirty minutes. Well before that explicit explanation, the film has already offered the first of many illustrations of the film’s philosophy.

“The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”

Both the visual power and the narrative power of Lucas’ film reside in its ability to shift the viewer’s perspective on size. If you examine the smallest characters in the galaxy (little R2-D2 and young Luke and Leia) from up close, then they appear larger than life. If you look at the biggest elements of the universe (Vader and the Imperial war machine) from far enough away, then they appear small enough to be beaten. If you compare both the Rebellion and the Empire against the vastness of space, then the difference between them seems pretty insignificant. The film’s entire narrative arc can be seen as an epic struggle between two machines: R2-D2 and the Death Star. Common sense would dictate that the Death Star is a much more significant element in the universe than R2-D2, but in this story, the opposite proves to be true. We can conceive of the Star Wars galaxy as one giant organism, in which the Death Star functions as a cancerous growth that threatens it, and R2-D2 and the rest of the Rebellion serves as an immune system to protect it. The story does not necessarily serve as an allegory for good and evil (and this idea becomes even more apparent in Lucas’ prequel trilogy), but instead a story of small things overcoming large things.

As the script unfolds, its preoccupation with size becomes even more apparent. R2-D2 soon finds himself captured by a band of Jawas, creatures even smaller than himself. The message inside him contains a hologram of Princess Leia, which delivers life-altering orders from her miniature form. Artoo goes off to find Kenobi after Luke supposes, “I guess you’re too small to run away from me”. Obi-Wan quite ironically warns the alien thugs in Mos Eisley that “this little one [Luke] is not worth the effort”. The Millennium Falcon successfully escapes capture from two Imperial cruisers, only to be lured into a trap by one tiny TIE fighter, which is “headed for that small moon”. The heroes eventually escape the Death Star, but the Imperials rely on a hidden tracking device. The Rebels attack the Death Star with one-man fighters, small enough to avoid the barrage of large-scale defenses, and target a 2-meter exhaust port. The mighty Imperials can only defend themselves by resorting to even smaller fighters, the smallest and deadliest of which is piloted by Vader. Again and again in the story, the smaller elements of the universe prove to be the most significant.

Lucas conveyed this recurring motif of size relationships not only through the screenplay, but also with his filming technique. This effect is more obvious in space, but it also applies on the ground. Specifically, he used different camera placements to affect the size of characters in the frame, and then he used the size of the character in the frame to convey its relative importance in the story. The best way to maximize the physical size of a character on screen is to shoot a tight close-up, from a lower angle, with the actor centered. Throughout the film, four characters receive the greatest number of such shots: R2-D2, Leia, Luke, and Obi-Wan (although Vader receives quite a few himself). This choice creates a twofold effect. First, it establishes a strong sense of empathy and intimacy between the audience and those characters. More importantly, though, this visual cue serves as a symbol for the metaphorical size of these figures, a measure of their courage and their high ideals.

A few scenes in particular illustrate the almost-subliminal effectiveness of this technique. When Luke and Obi-Wan first meet Han Solo in the Mos Eisley Cantina, the two sides of the bargaining table are filmed differently. Luke and Obi-Wan repeatedly appear in the center of the frame, from a low angle, and up close. Han is frequently shown from a more mid-range distance, from a higher angle, and offset to the left side of the screen. Chewbacca towers over him on the right side of the screen, and makes Han appear even smaller in context. At the same time, the dialogue of the scene highlights the differences in their motivations. Han’s materialism and self-interested behavior contrasts against the idealism and altruistic behavior of the two Rebels. The physical size of the characters in the frame depicts the difference between their worldviews.

Lucas maintains this pattern in subsequent philosophical conversations between Obi-Wan and Han. When the two characters debate each other inside the Falcon and on the Death Star, Obi-Wan features prominently in the foreground while Han is marginalized in the background. (During the first scene, Obi-Wan comments that Luke has “taken [his] first-step into a larger world,” despite Han’s pessimistic influence.) Over the course of the film, the mercenary Solo is usually filmed from a more distant perspective than the Rebels, and thus made to seem smaller. He appears in more mid-range shots, frequently off-center, or turned to the side, hunched over or leaning back, and very often with a larger background characters looming behind him. Of course, this trend eventually breaks down as Solo evolves into a Rebel. When Han returns to rescue Luke in the Death Star trench, the camera shows him larger than ever before, as the visual and ideological equal of Luke and Leia.

Another primary character in the story, Governor Tarkin receives a similar visual treatment. Tarkin serves as the secondary villain in the story, but he is first in command on the Death Star. Tarkin can be seen as the film’s chief emblem of military power, in control of what appears to be ‘the ultimate power in the universe.’ Despite this status, he remains a relatively small visual object in the camera lens. It is almost impossible to find a frame in which Tarkin’s face occupies the center of the screen. In most of his scenes, the mystic Darth Vader towers above him with a dominating presence (in the same way that the noble Chewbacca overshadows Han). One of my favorite shots in the entire film occurs just before the destruction of Alderaan: Tarkin stands before a massive viewing screen, looking out at a vulnerable blue planet much like our own. Tarkin at once appears quite large in relation to the planet but quite small relative to our screen. The image conveys the tremendous destructive power of man, with the smallness of mind that accompanies it.

Perhaps even more powerful images, though, can be found in the mirroring scene in the climactic battle. The Death Star appears far into the background on the left of the frame while the Falcon and three other Rebel fighters race towards the camera. As the ships move closer, they also dominate more space in the frame, one-by-one growing larger than the Death Star itself. The camera cuts to a brief shot of Tarkin’s profile, peering off-screen, pensively awaiting his “moment of triumph”. In contrast with the massive, centered close-ups of Han and Luke, Tarkin’s last breath suggests powerlessness and the failure of his vision. The film cuts back to the Death Star, now zoomed even further away. The station assumes the same space occupied by Tarkin’s face in the previous shot, conflating the two figures, just before the two detonate.

Lucas’ Star Wars is often accused of being a childish film, and many people treat it as a scapegoat for the transition from the dark and serious American films of the 1970s into the commercial blockbusters of the 1980s. On the surface level, it is true that the film’s form makes it accessible to viewers of all ages. Mythology scholar Roland Barthes argued that truly successful myths operate through second-order signals, coded messages that become our assumptions of truth about the world. The Star Wars myth conveys its own particular worldview in precisely this manner. To a large degree, the film reflects many of the most serious issues that America faced in the late twentieth century.

Advances in science and technology make our world smaller and larger at the same time. As Americans and Soviets raced to the moon, photographs from space transformed people’s perspectives about exactly how small, fragile, and interconnected out planet really was. Star Wars extended this idea into an entire galaxy of life forms intimately tied together in the same fashion. During the Cold War, our planet was struggling to adapt to the reality of nuclear annihilation, the world’s supreme destructive force derived from elementary particles. Star Wars again shifted this realization outward, with the Death Star serving as the ultimate symbol of escalating military force. Over the previous decade, though, America itself had received a harsh lesson about the limits of technological superiority. The same U.S. military that had defeated Germany and Japan with conventional and atomic weapons in World War II proved to be no match for the power of human will in the jungles of Vietnam. Americans understood exactly what Vader meant when he warned his fellow Imperials: “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.” We may be accustomed to seeing ourselves as the Rebellion, but in reality, the Empire might serve as the more accurate mirror. (The sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, explores this concept more fully.)

George Lucas was a visionary filmmaker on many levels. He imagined an entire galaxy from the largest planets down to the smallest creatures. As a craftsman, he intuitively understood how to use the camera to shape human perception. He knew how to make the smallest objects appear to be colossal, and to make the largest objects appear to be insignificant. This understanding not only informed the technical aspects of his work, but it also became a central aspect of his art. At one point in the film, Obi-Wan Kenobi instructs young Luke: “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.” The visuals of Star Wars depend upon our acceptance of countless optical illusions. The mythology of Star Wars, however, asks the audience to distrust our own limited senses in favor of a larger perspective on the forces at play in our universe.

Kill Ben, Vol. 2 by Luhks

2009-04-14T13:34:00.001+01:00

Although it might seem odd to reveal a story's ground rules just before the final chapter, Lost has always thrived by revealing things out of order. The titles of episodes 5.11 and 5.12 make for an intriguing pair. Whatever Happened, Happened recycles the words spoken by Lost physicist Daniel Faraday twice already this season. In due course, the equally redundant phrase Dead is Dead was also spoken by Ben midway through this episode. These two titles express rather explicitly two main rules of storytelling that have been established and tested over the course of the series. In order to maintain the dramatic weight of any chapter, two principles are necessary. First, the past cannot be changed. Second, death is permanent. Only in science fiction do these basic tautologies of life need to be proven. The life-threatening injury to young Ben Whatever Happened, Happened provided a not-so-subtle lecture followed by a not-so-subtle demonstration of that first rule. The main plotline then went to great lengths to prove that Ben’s gunshot did not kill him, but helped transform him into the man he became, even with some unnecessary amnesia ex machina thrown in to eliminate possible inconsistencies. Again, for the second straight week, the powers that be were asked to judge whether Ben Linus had a right to live. As an child in the hands of adults, and as an adult in the hands of Island gods, the end result turned out to be the same.

The follow-up episode Dead is Dead used a less direct approach to illustrate a related question. Although Lost characters will not be traveling back in time to prevent historical deaths, could the Island offer some other method to escape from the grim reaper? Dead man walking, John Locke, now represents the main exception to the rule of Island death. Three statements appear to be true simultaneously, which creates an impossible contradiction.

(1) Locke is dead.
(2) Dead is dead.
(3) Locke is not dead.

This contradiction might not pose the same threat to the space-time continuum as last week's, but one of those three assumptions must be revised in order for the Lost universe to make sense. When Sun was confronted with the resurrection of Locke, she immediately challenged the first statement. She concluded that Locke’s death must have been staged from the beginning. In the early stages of Season Five, many fans reacted the same way (with some even suggesting that he might have been paralyzed by Dr. Arzt’s Medusa spiders). As Ben knew at the time, and as the audience soon learned, John Locke's body definitely died inside that lonely hotel room.

CHRISTIAN: Claire, your mother is alive, but she’s not really living.
CLAIRE: What the hell’s that supposed to mean?
CHRISTIAN: It means that now may be the time to look at other alternatives.

The next possible explanation is to challenge the second premise: maybe dead does not mean dead. Certainly, the Island can heal people from cancer, paralysis, and nearly fatal wounds. The souls of the dead can already communicate to special people like Miles and Hurley, through words and visions. The resurrection of a month-old corpse would stretch the limits of the Island’s healing powers, but the overall believability would not suffer. (At this point, adding another supernatural feature to the Island would be as difficult to accept as adding another name to Ben’s list of murder victims.) Although Locke cannot explain the details of his transformation, he assures Sun that “I’m the same man I’ve always been.” Another way to read the title phrase is to say that “dead” is dead. In other words, if Locke’s body can be restored to life, then the concept of death no longer carries much meaning on this Island.

Of course, the third explanation is to refute the final premise: Locke actually is dead, despite the appearance to the contrary. More accurately, Locke is not Locke. The man we now see standing on the Island is not the same man who died in Los Angeles. The episode includes a number of suggestions that Locke has become one with the Smoke Monster, in a manner similar to the re-animations of Christian, Yemi, and Alex. Ben’s trial at the mercy of the Monster seems to begin much earlier than his arrival at the Temple; Locke questions a number of Ben’s past decisions in conflict with the Island’s will, ranging from his treatment of John to the use of Dharma’s facilities, and of course, his role in Alex’s death. When Ben summons the creature, and he warns that “what’s about to come out of that jungle is something I can’t control,” Locke arrives in its place. When he reaches the vents beneath the Temple, John conveniently leaves the room while the Smoke delivers its verdict, and then returns as soon as it finishes. Throughout the episode, Locke certainly behaves differently from his previous self. Remnants of his old personality remain (just as Christian’s ghost appeared to retain his old memories), but the new Locke is empowered with unparalleled knowledge, confidence, and mastery over his old weaknesses. At the very least, the Monster has aligned itself completely with John, by using its manifestations to command Ben and Sun to follow his lead.

In my assessment, the most likely solution must fall somewhere between the second and third possibilities. The new John Locke appears to be a more evolved, more substantial version of the other incarnations of the Monster. His existence is permanent, and open for everyone to see. If taken at face value, his assertion that he’s ‘the same man as always’ suggests that Locke’s communion with the Monster began well before he exited the coffin. John has survived one fatal injury after another, but his unbreakable body continues to regenerate. The new Locke appears to be both puppet to larger forces, and puppet-master controlling his own destiny. His will, the Island’s will, and the Monster’s will are one and the same. Locke is a man, and simultaneously Locke is not a man. The Catholic conception of the holy Trinity embraces this same paradox of entities that are distinct but the same. The Island is the father, Locke is the son, and the Smoke Monster is the Holy Spirit.

CHANG: Don't be absurd! There are rules, rules that can't be broken.

Somehow, Locke has bypassed one of the most important rules of the Lost universe. The flashbacks of Dead is Dead focus on a different type of rule-breaking, the violation of man-made Island laws. Throughout this decades-long story, the most prominent rule seems to be the segregation of Hostiles and outsiders, preserving the difference between Us and Them. By bringing Benjamin into the Temple, Richard Alpert broke that time-honored code. Later in the episode, Ben reveals that the wall around the Temple was designed to protect it from the wrong kind of people. More correctly, the Temple was built to prevent people like Ben from entering as well. After one seemingly minor exception made for a harmless little boy, the structure of Widmore’s society began to crumble all around him. A decade later, more bastard children are seeping through the cracks. Ben has already taken Ethan, another of Dharma’s lost boys under his wing. Against Widmore’s direct orders, Ben spares the life of Danielle, another foreigner, and then brings her child back to Hostile society. Baby Alex provides Ben with a golden opportunity to undermine Charles’ authority in public. By that point, the rules had already been changed, and the new impure order established.

Although Widmore’s policies might not have been noble, his people certainly embraced a stronger connection to the natural world. The episode offers contrasting glimpses of the Widmore and Linus regimes. King Charles commanded his people from horseback, as they lived in tents surrounding a campfire. Mr. Linus led his people from behind a desk, into their acquired real estate, complete with electricity and running water. Three years after Linus' exit, those yellow houses remain unoccupied, as the Others have re-established their roots. Certainly, the technophobic John Locke shares Widmore’s vision of Island living, and disdains the Linus lifestyle. In the end, it seems doubtful whether Ben ever understood the will of the Island, or whether the con-man simply played the political process better than anyone else. Ben may not have cared about any rules, but he did exploit his people’s reverence for those rules to his own advantage. Eventually, he arranged to exile Widmore from the Island for violating those same boundaries between Us and Them that Alpert and Linus had crossed years before. According to the Hostile rule book, stealing a stranger’s child is acceptable, but fathering your own child off the Island is unforgivable. Widmore was banished by an outsider, because he associated with outsiders.

LOCKE: Because it's not fair! You make people think that you're their family. And then you leave their life in ruins. And I'm not going to let you do it again!

Ironic references to friendship are scattered throughout the script of this episode: from Widmore’s reassurance to Ben that he is ‘among friends now,’ to Caesar’s favorite catch-phrase, to the triple entendre on Our Mutual Friend. When Locke jokes that Ben ‘makes friends everywhere he goes,’ his retort is layered with meaning: “I've found sometimes that friends can be significantly more dangerous than enemies.” Time and again, Ben uses friendship as a weapon. He postures himself as an ally, in order to strike at the most vulnerable point. Widmore and Locke both fell victim to this brand of trickery, and newcomer Caesar suffers a similar fate. Ben manipulates the well-intentioned Ajira leader into distrusting Locke, just so he can put himself back in John’s good graces with a shotgun blast. For an episode ostensibly about atonement for past sins, Ben’s shows absolutely no remorse on his path back to the main Island. His way of apologizing for the murder of one of his closest companions is to lie through his teeth, and then set up another innocent man to be killed.

Unfortunately, our friend Caesar managed to become collateral damage in the dealings of the Island’s triumvirate of Linus, Widmore, and Locke. Apparently, Caesar’s regime on the Island came to an end almost before it began. Although ‘dead is dead’ on Lost, one need only look back one episode for proof that ‘shot in the chest’ does not necessarily mean 'dead' on this show. With such a promising introduction to this character (played by the excellent Saïd Taghmaoui), I hope that Caesar’s longevity matches the model of Octavian rather than Julius. While Linus acted quickly to eliminate the threat presented by Caesar, he seems to have overlooked the greater danger posed by Ilana and her cronies. Two episodes earlier, Ilana claimed to be a bounty working for the Avellino family, one of Widmore’s alleged associates. The presence of a massive steel crate indicates that ... going to Guam ... might not exactly have been her primary objective. Ilana’s coup was swift and merciless, complete with its own secret riddle for separating friends from foes. The game of Island Risk has been suspended for a few years, but the players are ready to resume. Widmore warned Locke of the war coming to the Island, and Ilana’s special delivery seems to put a few pieces into place. (What lies in the shadow of the statue? My answer: Paulo Lies.)

EKO: Every Sunday after Mass, I would see a young boy waiting in the back of the church. And then one day, the boy confessed to me that he had beaten his dog to death with a shovel. […] And he wanted to know whether he would go to hell for this. I told him that God would understand -- that he would be forgiven, as long as he was sorry. But the boy did not care about forgiveness. He was only afraid that if he did go to hell -- that dog would be there waiting for him.

This episode finally sets the stage for Ben to fulfill the friendly promise he made a season ago, only to close the curtain at the last moment. The purpose of the marina scene seems to be to absolve Ben in the eyes of the audience, before the Monster does the same. Ben’s personal set of rules is a strange one: lying with every breath in your body is expected, stealing children from their parents is mandatory, gassing an entire village is just another day at the office, and shooting an unarmed man is good sport. However, killing a woman in front of her kid is off-limits. After all, the little tyke reminds him of the thing he loves most: himself. Can one good deed redeem an entire lifetime of evil? (Or, to be more precise here, can one momentary-hesitation-before-performing-an-absurdly-heinous-deed redeem an entire lifetime of evil?) In this particular story, the answer seems to be: maybe. Throughout this episode, Ben shows no remorse for any of his actions, except for two. He begs Desmond to forgive him for trying to kill Penny, and he pleads with the Island to spare him after sending Alex to her death. In both cases, the line between genuine repentance and pure fear becomes hard to distinguish. The Monster persuaded him to change his ways, not by appealing to his sense of duty, but to his self-preservation. The manifestation of Alex threatens to hunt him down and destroy him if he disobeys its orders. Ben’s directs an apology to Desmond perhaps for the same reason, because he fears that the raging Scotsman will finish the job he started.

Although Ben survives his encounter with the Monster, his final judgment leaves some room for ambiguity. The prosecution makes no opening statement, but simply recites the evidence. The series of flashes depicts the full span of his relationship with Alex, from the moment he refused to kill her, to the moment he granted Keamy his permission to kill her. The main issue of interpretation seems to be the same question posed by Widmore: did the Island want him to sacrifice Alex? Either way, the verdict would need to be guilty. If the Island wanted Alex to die all along, then Ben disobeyed its will when he adopted her. If the Island wanted Alex to live, then Ben failed the test when he refused to surrender. When Ben confesses that “it was all my fault,” the re-animated Alex agrees with him. Although the verdict is not entirely clear, the sentence is unmistakable. Instead of death, the Monster condemns him to a lifetime of imprisonment, as Locke's servant. (The Island’s policy for capital punishment seems to suffer from some of the same racial biases as the American justice system. The Monster executed Mr. Eko for lesser crimes, and Christian appeared just before Michael’s death. Always the master manipulator, Ben understood how to play the system to his own advantage.) For a man like Linus, submitting to someone else’s leadership might be a fate worse than death. I suspect that Ben will make at least one more attempt to seize power before the series is complete. Perhaps even more certain than the rule of 'dead is dead', we all know that Ben is Ben.

As the instruments of power continue to be passed from one set of hands to the next, every generation believes that it can be special, that it can avoid the mistakes of the past. Ben promised himself that he would not become selfish like Widmore, that he would always serve the Island's best interests. The corruption of that promise began almost immediately after it was made. Ben could not fight the inevitable. Widmore's fall from grace offered a cautionary tale that Ben ignored. Eventually, the younger generation finds itself standing in the same position that it swore to avoid. Now, the torch has been passed from Linus into the hands of Locke. As strong as he may be, he would be naive to overlook the lessons of his predecessors. He must overcome the dangers from his enemies, the dangers from his friends, and the dangers from within. By many indications, though, (particularly the fact that he was recently deceased) Locke is indeed special. He has proven that he would sacrifice anything for the Island, including his own life. He truly is different from the men who preceded him, and that difference alone might be enough to change the rules of the game permanently.

Kill Ben, Vol. 1 by Luhks

2009-04-14T10:42:00.001+01:00

Thus far, Season Five of Lost has been a veritable bloodbath. During the first ten episodes, characters have been slapped, shot, stabbed, scorched, smashed, shredded, strangled, skewered, spinally-snapped, sonically-showered, and stricken with sci-fi sicknesses. Episode 5.10 He’s Our You was one of the most violent episodes in recent memory, not just in terms of its physical brutality, but also the wounds inflicted on the psyche of Sayid Jarrah. The final scene ended with the cold-blooded attempted murder of a 12-year old boy, struck down with a bullet through the chest. The follow-up, Whatever Happened, Happened, reveals the domino effect set off by that event. Episode 5.11 shows no further acts of violence, but instead focuses on the combined efforts to save young Benjamin’s life. On Lost, no good deed ever goes unpunished, and the rest of Ben’s adult life is Lost history. Repairing his body is itself a destructive act. Mr. Linus can look forward to thirty years of lying, kidnapping, and murder on a massive scale. The adult Linus would undoubtedly be back next week to add further crimes to his lifetime total. Of course, if you adopt Hurley’s theory about being erased from existence, then Ben’s personal path of destruction would be incomparable to the harmful effects of changing history, by letting him die. Regardless, though, episode 5.11 provided sixty minutes of relative peace within a season of escalating bloodshed.

The story of Whatever Happened, Happened operates on two parallel levels. On the macro level, the episode explains the same overarching principle expressed by the title. As lead writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have done since the beginning of Season Five, they continue to explain the Island rules through the mouths of characters. As if the past explanations provided by Eloise Hawking, Pierre Chang, and Daniel Faraday were not adequate, Miles Straume reiterates those same ideas to Hurley in two central scenes. If anyone had any lingering doubts whether Lost would adopt the multiple timeline approach to time travel, their conversation explained Lost in direct contradistinction to Back to the Future. These elements essentially amounted to a televised producer podcast halfway through the episode. Ken Leung and Jorge Garcia did an admirable job of trying to stay in character, even though they were really playing the roles of Lindelof and Cuse. Lost’s lead writing tandem often employs this same feigned-ignorance, question-answer format during their own promotions. Hurley managed to stump Miles with a possible contradiction involving Ben’s memory. That problem gets resolved at the end of the episode (albeit in the most unoriginal way possible) with some Temple-induced amnesia. Although the reactions of Hurley and Miles are both realistic on some level, their entire exchange took on an undoubtedly patronizing tone. I hope that the remaining episodes of the series can minimize this type of direct exposition to the audience, but the trend is certainly growing (particularly in the Lindelof/Cuse scripts).

DIANE: You can't help who you love, Katherine. And for good or bad, I loved him.

On the micro level, the episode sets out to answer smaller questions surrounding Lost’s female lead, Kate Austen. Neither the mysteries addressed nor the outcomes revealed here offered much surprise. What did Sawyer whisper to Kate on the helicopter? He told her to take care of Clementine. Where did Kate leave Aaron? She left him with Carole Littleton. Why did Kate go back to the Island? She came back to find Claire. Along the way, the drama generates heated discussion in all four legs of the series’ predominant love quadrangle. Many people have concluded that the long-term commitment between James and Juliet brought an end to the days of on-again, off-again Island romances. In reality, this episode offered no more finality than Season Three’s similarly-toned Kate drama I Do (also written by Lindelof and Cuse, and also referenced here). By the end of this chapter, Juliet approaches a showering Jack by shouting “I needed you”, while Kate and James reunite on another sweaty trek through the jungle. The text of the episode indicates that Jim and Julie are permanent, but the subtext of the scenes reveals the opposite. Kate’s favorite Patsy Cline theme song provides a succinct explanation of the constantly shifting entanglements: “The only thing different, the only thing new: she’s got your picture, I’ve got you.” During their three years apart, Kate has clung to the ‘picture’ of James in the form of baby Aaron. Similarly, Juliet only took an interest in James after he became the shepherd of the left behind flock, following the image of Jack. Expect to see more innuendo and suggestive glances until the end of Season Six.

Increasingly, the time-bending narrative of Season Five has highlighted the never-ending debate between free will and determinism. That overarching theme adds another texture to the romantic rivalries of Jack-vs.-James and Kate-vs.-Juliet. Each of these individuals has been torn between two different sides of their own being. The James-Kate and Jack-Juliet pairings fall more closely to the deterministic side of the universe: the attraction between people who share similar personalities, careers, and experiences. The Jack-Kate and James-Juliet pairings exist more on the free will side of the spectrum: people with contrasting characteristics, who decide to change themselves for the benefit of their partner, almost as a form of wish-fulfillment. Their relationships are not as simple as that classification, but the underlying conflict is present in all four characters. Do you love the person who reminds you of your past, or the person who offers a tabula rasa for the future? As the grand Season Five narrative blends fate with free will and past with future, the original distinctions between these options have also become less distinct. Coincidentally, the agent of change throughout these rivalries has always been Benjamin Linus. During Season Three, the adult Ben consciously grouped James with Kate and Jack with Juliet as part of his master plan to save himself. When Ben turned the Wheel, he inadvertently produced the opposite effect. Three years later, it was again Ben who sent them all on a collision course once more, in his plot to restore his Island rule. In this episode, little Ben’s surgery serves as the catalyst to force those old tensions back to the surface.

MICHAEL: Look, I'm going after my son. I'm going after my son, and nobody is going to stop me, okay? Okay, that is my right. That is a father's right.

Another useful analogy for these relationship dilemmas is the conflict between nature and nurture. Kate Austen’s back-story dramatized this struggle through her two paternal figures: Sam Austen, who raised her as his own; and Wayne Janssen, her biological father turned step-father. During this episode, the ghost of Wayne revisits the adult Kate in the form of Roger Linus. Her conversations with Roger re-frame the abusive, alcoholic father in a more sympathetic light. The younger Kate viewed Wayne only in black-and-white terms, as the personification of evil in her life. (The name Janssen refers to Jansenism, a branch of Catholic thought that emphasized original sin and human depravity.) Through Roger, the Island allows Kate to interact with a proxy for Wayne, to see her father through adult eyes, in all the shades of gray. Roger’s dialogue emphasizes that he had the potential to be a decent guy. He began fatherhood with the best intentions, but circumstances and extreme weakness overcame him, until his own child eventually hated him. Across the globe in 1977, Wayne is alive somewhere, and most likely undergoing the same process. Little Benjamin’s loss of innocence in this episode parallels Kate’s path to adulthood. Both characters murdered their fathers in an attempt to purge the part of themselves that they hated. In the process, Ben and Kate succumbed to the dark side of their natures: the path of murder, lies, and manipulation. Neither of them raised children from their own bloodline, but they adopted Alex and Aaron in hopes of a pure, fresh start.

Blood itself serves as a prevailing motif throughout the episode, both in physical and symbolic terms. Little Benjamin survived the initial gunshot, but he is slowly bleeding to death on the inside. Kate donates blood from her own veins to sustain him (incidentally, after she had denied surrendering a sample to him as an adult). Ultimately, only Richard Alpert’s blood-oath initiation ritual inside the Temple can heal his wounds. On Lost, blood connections entitle parents and children to certain rights and responsibilities, despite conscious efforts to deny them. The old cliché says that blood is thicker than water (or, in the parallel maternal imagery used in this episode, milk is thicker than juice). The episode’s flashbacks explore two mirroring parental relationships. Kate and Aaron share no biological connection, but she desperately tried to keep him as her own. Little Clementine is descended from James, even though he disowned her from birth. Both characters try to make amends for their violation of natural duties: Kate surrenders custody of Aaron, and James becomes a distant part of Clementine's life. In the events of Whatever Happened, Happened, Kate comes to terms with her own blood. Meanwhile, though, Benjamin begins the process of denying one’s heritage and facing the inevitable consequences all over again.

MIKHAIL: I will try to make this as simple as I can. You are not on the list because you are flawed. Because you are angry, and weak, and frightened.

As a whole, this episode idealizes the concept of childhood. Kate, James, and Juliet, who have all killed adults under various circumstances, find it unthinkable to let Benjamin die without doing everything in their power. Ben is no ordinary child, but one who would grow into quite possibly the most destructive force on the Island. Despite all of the crimes that lie ahead of him, they all believe that Benjamin has a right to live. All three characters share a special vulnerability when it comes to children: Kate devoted herself to Aaron, James refused to steal from couples with young kids, Juliet watched countless infants die in that same village. When Kate delivers Aaron to Ms. Littleton, she speaks of him in nearly angelic terms: “You're gonna see that he's so sweet and kind and good.” In her mind, Aaron is the anti-Wayne; something untainted that she wishes could be a part of herself. For three years, Kate was able to insulate herself from the sordid world of adult motivations. She replaced the often petty Island politics with the purity and simplicity of childhood. Aaron’s honesty is absolute. When Aaron asks for something to drink, it means that he’s thirsty. Whenever one of the Island adults asks for something, they could be acting out some Freudian angst and/or dragging you into a Machiavellian long con. At the end of the episode, Ben’s loss of innocence is visualized a dramatic entry from sunlight into darkness. Kate’s “bye-bye baby” moment serves as her own departure from Aaron’s idyllic world, back into the Island gloom. Eventually, though, Aaron will eat from the same Tree of Knowledge as all of us, and his innocence will be corrupted by the outside world. As with any boy, there is no guarantee that baby Aaron will not grow into a man like Ben.

One of the recurring trends in the script of Whatever Happened, Happened is the basic impurity of adult motivations. Even some of the most seemingly altruistic actions contain varying degrees of selfishness. A person might even deceive herself into believing that her motivations were absolute, but the mind is too complex to operate that way. Cassidy helps Kate understand that her decision to protect Aaron was influenced by her own emotional needs. (Mama Cass herself seems to carry some ulterior motives as well.) The episode refers back to two dramatic instances of self-sacrificing behavior from James and Jack, but frames them in a more negative light. From Cassidy’s perspective, Sawyer’s leap from the helicopter was an attempt to escape from his responsibilities in the outside world. Later, James’ reaction to the accusation reveals that fear of inadequacy played a factor in his decision to return to the Island. Similarly, Jack’s heroic sacrifice at the Hydra station was at least partially motivated by a desire to get away from everyone else. Juliet also confronts him with the accusation that the he did not come back to save anyone except himself. There are two explanations for every action, and both contain elements of truth.

LOCKE: Desmond, what if I told you that for all that—all those years that you and all the men before you were down there pushing that button—what if I told you that it was all for nothing? [...] Tomorrow we're going to find out what happens if that button doesn't get pushed.

Despite its many overt references to ‘doing the right thing,’ the most intriguing element of the episode came from the man who defied intuition and refused to do any thing. Jack’s justification for denying help to Benjamin could have followed the same utilitarian route as Sayid, a refusal to become complicit by aiding Ben in his crimes. Instead, it went a step further. According to the rule of Whatever Happened, Happened, the ultimate outcome was never in doubt. Whether Jack chose to put another bullet in Benjamin, or to perform life-saving surgery, or to make sandwiches for Miles and Hurley, the Island would have found a way to restore Ben back to his original course. For a man who literally poured his own blood, sweat, and tears into trying to save Boone, another young man injured on the Island, this realization reshapes his entire worldview. Apparently, he would have accomplished the same result by banging his fists on the hatch. The ‘do no harm’ oath becomes meaningless, as Jack can accomplish neither harm nor good in this situation, no matter what he does. Since actions no longer have any tangible consequences, individuals need to find some other principle on which to ground decision-making. Jack defines his new purpose as the same journey of self-discovery as Mr. Walkabout himself. If you apply the Lost notion of course correction, then Ben also would have made it to the Temple no matter what Kate, Juliet, and James decided to do. In the end, their efforts to save him did not benefit Ben (a fact that is highlighted by the realization that he does not remember them). Instead, the experience was designed to ease their own pain, to help them get to where they needed to be. By saving Ben, they too were saving their own souls.

The work of the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, offers a useful system to categorize these different journeys. Many Lost characters gradually evolve from the aesthetic stage of life, defined by the pursuit of beauty and pleasure; to the ethical stage, defined by adherence to social responsibility. This process is typically characterized as 'the redemption arc’ followed by characters such as Charlie, Sawyer, etc. Other characters, like Locke and Jack, began their stories in the ethical stage of life and then progressed toward the religious stage. Kierkegard’s concept of religiousness did not match the ordinary sense of the word, the observance of organized rituals. Instead, the religious stage involved a heightened awareness of universe that often runs contrary to intuition and reason. Here, Jack Shephard embraces two essential paradoxes of Lost. He decides to follow a more meaningful path, by realizing that his choices are meaningless. He seeks to free himself from the prison of cause and effect, while also becoming a slave to the will of the Island. Refusing to help Benjamin required a Lockean leap of faith that bordered on insanity. However, it would have been equally insane for him to keep doing the same thing over and over, while expecting a different outcome. By adopting this new faith, Jack has also become more empirical. He changed one of the key variables in this Island experiment, and now he is waiting to observe the results.

As Season Five moves into its final act, childhood has assumed an increasingly prominent role in the story. Ranging from the younger versions of adult characters (Miles, Charlotte, Ethan, Sayid, Ben) to their ultimate successors (Charlie, Aaron, Ji Yeon, Clementine), children have taken more tile space on the grand mosaic. Even an adult character as twisted as Ben or Ethan started out with innocence. Even children as innocent as Aaron and Clementine might be corrupted by experiences like their predecessors. Within every grown-up lives a child. This comparison serves as a double-edged sword. Youth is associated with purity, but it also indicates childishness, ignorance, and immaturity. In the overall relationship between the characters and the Island, it is difficult to determine who are the parents and who are the children. Aaron helped raise Kate just as much as Kate helped raise Aaron. Have these adults been assigned as caregivers for the Island in its infancy? Or, has the Island adopted all of these children who were in need of nurturing?

Natural Born Killers by Luhks

2009-03-31T02:36:00.012+01:00

The tenth episode of Season Five arrives with the perplexing, pronoun-filled title He’s Our You. Taken out of context, the name seemed to suggest what many Lost viewers have theorized for years: the existence of multiple timelines. The potentially misleading title of the episode’s main literary reference, A Separate Reality, suggests something similar. This week’s cliffhanger ending, in which Sayid shoots a 12-year old Benjamin Linus in the chest, tested the limits of Lost’s timeline consistency. In the early seasons, moving through time served only as a metaphor for the mental journey of Lost characters, but literal time travel has become the primary plot device of the current season. The concept of symbolic character doubling has also permeated the story since the beginning. If the Lost characters obtain the power to change their past, then the days of Parallel Sayid lording his cowboy hat over Regular Sayid might not be far behind. To borrow two words from Meet Kevin Johnson, Season Four’s similarly themed exploration of human freedom: NOT YET. The beloved Lost universe took one to the chest, but space-time remains intact as long as little Benjamin keeps breathing. The audience must continue to accept the most unpleasant elements of the timeline, because even minor change would erase the good elements along with it. As James reassured Juliet early in the episode: “Nothing’s changed.”

For the time being, doubling will remain a metaphor in the story rather than a science-fiction plot point. In due course, James spoke those three titular words to Sayid at the episode’s halfway point, as a succinct introduction to Oldham, the Dharma Initiative’s reclusive psychopath. The narrative of He’s Our You offers a number of looking-glass versions of Sayid Jarrah: Oldham, the intimidating interrogator; Eko, the self-sacrificing sibling; James, the conflicted captor; Roger, the weak-willed widower; Ilana, the proficient professional; even Keamy, the adolescent assassin. Any individual character can be conceived as the center of a panoramic hall of mirrors, in which dozens of other characters each reflect back different aspects of someone’s personality. He’s and She’s frequently come into conflict with other You’s, and create a duel of opposites. These battles extend beyond character showdowns, and into the realm of ideas. Every debate blurs the distinctions between perceived enemies (Us-vs.-Them, empiricism-vs.-faith, Widmore-vs.-Linus, good-vs.-evil, Jack-vs,-Sawyer, past-vs.-future, Dharma-vs.-Hostiles), by highlighting similarities instead of differences. Inevitably, the storytelling of Lost reveals each polar dichotomy to be a false one. The deepest level of introspection in He’s Our You occurs as it reveals the yin-and-yang inseparability between two laws of action, free will and determinism; and two characters, Sayid and Ben.

EKO: I did not ask for the life that I was given. But it was given, nonetheless. And with it... I did my best.

The first frame of He’s Our You shows a close-up image of a caged chicken, mindlessly bobbing its head and waiting to be eaten. The most recent Sayid story, Season Four’s The Economist, used a comparable image in its final scene: a dog trapped inside it own cage. That episode ended with the revelation that Sayid had become Ben’s personal attack dog, dependent on his master’s will. Due to Lost’s circular timeline, the story of these two allies/enemies makes as much sense when viewed backwards as forwards. In the latest ending, a younger version of Ben unleashes his trained bloodhound onto himself. The fateful shooting becomes another of Lost’s self-fulfilling prophecies, an event which creates itself out of nothing. As a child, Benjamin witnessed Sayid’s violent nature first hand. As an adult, Ben exploited that knowledge of Sayid to serve his own ends. When Sayid traveled back into the past, his experiences as Ben’s assassin enabled him to perform that bloody deed in the first place. (In retrospect, Sayid survived a bullet wound at the end of The Economist for the same reason that little Benjamin must survive here. Anyone who still has work to do in the timeline is effectively invincible. Did Ben come to understand that this destiny made his assassin unstoppable?) The opening image of the chicken also recalls the classic riddle of initial causality: which came first, the chicken or the egg? The story of He’s Our You offers its own answer to that question: neither. The cause produced the effect, because the effect produced the cause. In a sense, twin killers Sayid and Ben form one indivisible being, a double-headed monster in which one half spawned the other half.

Despite the heavy reliance on a new time-travel causality loop, He’s Our You includes a return to Lost’s traditional flashback format for the first time since Cabin Fever. The main focus of each scene is not to reveal what happened, but to understand why it happened. As Sayid approaches his ultimate choice, his journey explores the various ways in which individuals can be enslaved by time and space. The human will is essentially the product of two forces outside our control: biology and past experience. The adult versions of Sayid and Ben describe one other in terms of innate qualities. At their meeting in Santo Domingo, Ben suggests that Sayid enjoys killing, due to his inner nature. When Sayid describes his employer to Ilana, he makes an equivalent accusation, by depicting Ben as some sort of instinctive lying and killing machine. It would be difficult to accept that Linus and Jarrah could lead such lives without some inherent tendency towards violence. However, formative experiences also shaped the two boys into the men they became. While little Benjamin was growing up, his father provided more verbal and physical abuse than hugs. Young Sayid grew up in restrained environment, under the influence of his demanding father (during the reign of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein). Sayid sought to emulate his father as a military hero, while Benjamin radically defined himself in terms of the Hostile counterculture. (Even the adult Ben did end up repeating some of his father’s behavior. Roger’s line “I’ll tell you what to think” becomes the Ben Linus mantra, even to the point of brainwashing.) The birth of a monster requires two ingredients: both inherited capacities and acquired experiences.

The opening scene introduces a novel thematic wrinkle that builds throughout the episode. Young Sayid kills the helpless chicken out of compassion for his older brother. Presumably, that chicken will be cooked and eaten, and the food would be shared with the family. Sayid is the only character shown killing anything in this episode, but several other characters are shown eating or preparing meat. Ben delivers a chicken-salad sandwich, Juliet fries up some bacon, Chef Hurley serves breakfast ham with dipping sauces, and Ilana orders a blood-red steak. The prevalence of meat-eating offers an intriguing reminder of the role of killing in society. The average person consumes countless animals over the course of his life. The vast majority of those people have never killed a live animal on their own. Division of labor shields most of us from facing the more unpleasant aspects of our lifestyle. Before someone like Hurley can share a ham with his friends, someone else needed to kill that pig for him. (Sayid’s brother seems to serve as a double for his friend Hurley: overweight, with curly hair, and a gentle nature.) Similarly, nearly every secure society requires occasional bloodshed. Homo sapiens are natural born killers, by necessity. We destroy life in order to preserve life. Every civilization comes with a steep body count, but that burden is not shared equally. Jarrah embraces violence as his necessary obligation to others. In doing so, he seeks to protect his people from killing, by engaging the dark side of human nature. Men like Sayid do the things that many people cannot do, fighting wars to keep everyone else safe. Everyone benefits, but only a few people get blood on their hands.

CHRISTIAN: One simple phone call and I could fix everything.
SAWYER: Why don't you?
CHRISTIAN: Because I am weak.

Beyond the power of genetics, the brain also constrains human liberty in other meaningful ways. Every individual suffers from character flaws alongside their virtues. Sayid’s own personal frailties precipitate his journey back to the Island. Linus tempts him out of retirement, with vague notions of revenge and the need to protect his friends. Jarrah always had a particular soft spot for attractive women, and newcomer Ilana exploits this vulnerability in order to capture him. Emotions, sexual desire, and even alcohol all limit his higher decision-making faculties on the road to Island jail. When Sayid meets Dharma’s village drunk Roger Linus, the prisoner and the servant trade insults with each other about whose mind must have been weaker, if they put themselves in their current situations. Sayid and Roger share a deeper, unspoken connection as well; the two men both fell into despair when they lost their wives in tragic circumstances. Sayid responded to Nadia’s death by murdering strangers as a slave to Ben. Roger turned to alcohol when his wife died, and then he unleashed his violent self-loathing onto his own son. Which bereaved husband revealed a deeper weakness in his response to loss?

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously defined liberty in physical terms, as the absence of external impediments to motion. Sayid’s autonomy over his own body encounters just about every possible obstacle during his Island vacation. Every other passenger made a conscious choice to join Flight 316, except for him. Ilana subdued him with physical force at gunpoint, and then she dragged him onto the airplane in handcuffs. The Dharma Initiative captured him with its own guns and imprisoned him in a jail cell. James subdued his friend by electrocution, to allow Dharma security to tie him to a tree and force-feed him chemicals. A veteran interrogator like Sayid (or Oldham) even understands how the power of the human will itself can be broken down systematically. Sayid’s method of questioning a subject involved attacking the body’s pain threshold until the mind surrendered. The Dharma Initiative employs its own combination of scientific and spiritual techniques to achieve the same result. Oldham’s drug concoction bypasses human free will by attacking the brain directly. Both methods represent intense bodily invasions, on a different scale. Execution serves as Dharma’s final solution to control their prisoner permanently. Throughout this cruel bondage, Sayid makes only a simple request from his captor: “let me go.” Ultimately, young Ben is the one to liberate Sayid from his cell. Without this series of physical coercion, he would have never made his ultimate choice. Even after his release, Sayid still remains trapped by the boundaries of the Island itself, as well as three decades of time.

The episode includes a number of hints to suggest that Sayid’s eventual decision to shoot Ben may have been directed by a higher power. Oldham encourages Sayid to shut his mind off, to free himself from the illusions of sensory existence and access a separate reality. The prisoner offers Dharma a clairvoyant glimpse of its destiny, while he achieves clarity on his own future. The interrogation scene echoes similar Island moments from past seasons: Michael’s prolonged inquisition by the Others, Sawyer’s torture from Sayid, and Boone’s hallucination forced by Locke. Such mind-and-body-altering experiences force the truth to emerge, whether from within or from without. The sequence of events implies that Sayid establishes some communion with the Island’s past and future will before he makes his fatal choice. Sayid’s conspicuous purple shirt perhaps suggests a similar idea. Violet light has a higher frequency than any other color in the visible spectrum. Some Hindu traditions associate the color with the seventh chakra, the highest energy center of spiritual consciousness. Sayid seems to obtain some degree of enlightenment while in chains, an understanding of his new purpose.

LOCKE: You may think this is a democracy, Kate, [...] but this is not a democracy.
KATE: Well, I guess that makes it a dictatorship.
LOCKE: If I was a dictator, I would just shoot you, and go about my day.

Other notions of freedom also come into play throughout the episode, on the community level. In today’s global landscape, freedom is often equated with democratic rule. (Sayid’s first meeting with Ben inserts some subtle political subtext into the story. The American-born Ben ends his military alliance with his Iraqi partner by announcing: “Mission accomplished. […] I suppose you should go live your life. You’re free.” Not surprisingly, the struggle continues.) The Dharma society lives under a rule of law, and makes decisions as by popular vote. True democracy in action can present just as great a threat to liberty as a dictatorship can. In the seminal text On Liberty, philosopher John Stuart Mill popularized this concept of the tyranny of the majority. The Dharma Initiative’s democratic council ordered the execution of an innocent man, because they believed he posed a threat to their security. At the time, Sayid had committed no crime against any of them, aside from a harmless trespass into their jungle. Dharma may regard itself as civilized, but their decision resulted in a savage outcome. The con man James is unable to persuade them in this forum, and Radzinsky’s faction gains the weight of law. James even caves in to save his own reputation under the weight of group pressure. The voting scene offered a chilling demonstration of the easy path from fear to gross injustice in a supposedly free society.

The Dharma community makes its unanimous decision only after Amy reminds them of the risks to their children. The biggest threat to their culture is a child, a Hostile spy and traitor in their midst. Indeed, Sayid’s desire to kill Ben would make him a savior to their families rather than a danger. Throughout the episode, though, James LaFleur receives constant reminders that Sayid does pose an immediate threat to his personal lifestyle. James struggles to negotiate some compromise between his competing loyalties. Liberating Sayid would endanger the rest of the group. For every decision he makes, he feels that his choice is the only one available to him. Technically, he should be free to make any decision he wants, but his new life comes with its own chains. In his own way, James becomes a prisoner of this situation, despite his comfortable position on the other side of Sayid’s cell. In flashbacks from Season One’s Solitary, Sayid once found himself in a similar position. The Iraqi military captured his childhood friend Nadia, and ordered him to interrogate and later execute her. Sayid eventually betrayed his people, and murdered a fellow soldier to save her. James now walks a similar path between his group responsibilities and his personal attachment. In the end, the outcome is not much better. This escape ends with another body on the ground, and possibly irreconcilable relationship between James and his people.

SAYID: I have no life. They took it from me.
BEN: Go home, Sayid. Once you let your grief become anger, it will never go away. I speak from experience.

The first scene of Season Five introduced a classic conundrum of both morality and science-fiction. If it were possible to travel back in time when Hitler was a child, could you murder him to save the world from his evil? This episode offers its own response to that question. (If so, then you already tried it, and you helped create the monster you wanted to destroy.) According to a strict utilitarian morality, such a deed might be justified if the good outweighs the harm. When judged by non-consequentialist moral theories, murdering a person is equally wrong regardless of what that person will do later in life. Science-fiction authors have treated the famous question a bit differently, and looked at the more basic issue of whether it would be possible to kill someone who already existed in the future. According to the universe’s self-consistency principle, such an action would be impossible. Changing the past would require creating a separate four-dimensional universe. He’s Our You uses the scientific notion to answer the ethical dilemma. Young Ben will survive the bullet wound. After all, Sayid’s continued existence after the gunshot proves that the timeline remains intact. The moral question then becomes a moot point: the harm of the act definitely outweighs the good. The shooting of young Ben will no doubt play a role in leading him to his destiny as the Island’s brutal dictator. The savage trauma (and the war to come) destroyed the innocence of the child, and left behind the shell of the human being, dead on inside.

Certainly, Sayid was destined to shoot young Ben from the beginning, but the act is the product of his own choice. The shooting itself can be explained equally well by either of those two forces. When Sayid pulls the trigger, he basically surrenders the internal battle against his violent nature. Faced with overwhelming reminders that he is a born killer, he performs the deed that no one else could, shooting a defenseless child. By the same token, the shooting also serves as nearly the epitome of free will. Early in the episode, James comments that he “doesn’t have a choice” of whether to live with young Ben, but Sayid believes that there is another option. If Sayid succeeded in killing Benjamin, then he would not only save dozens of lives, but he would save himself from becoming Ben’s assassin. He fires a bullet directly into the past, in an attempt to destroy his own history. The gunshot is simultaneously an act of violence and protection, self-destruction as well as self-preservation. The murder would not only create a time paradox, and his motives themselves are paradoxical: to murder a child in cold-blood to prevent himself from becoming a cold-blooded murderer.

The Möbius-shaped story of He’s Our You explores the connections between two sets of mortal enemies, and concludes that neither could exist without the other. The unholy partnership between twin killers Sayid Jarrah and Benjamin Linus reveals another unbreakable bond between free will and determinism. Sayid's liberty is restrained in a number of significant ways: by nature and nurture, by himself and others, by mind and body, by the will of Island people and the will of Island gods. In the end, though, it is Sayid and no one else who pulls the trigger. Sayid chose to shoot Ben, just as he chose to shoot Andropov. Without Ben's future actions, Sayid would not even exist in his present form. If Sayid succeeded in killing Ben, then he would also erase countless later events, along with all of the human decisions in them. Sayid's inability to end Ben's life in the past preserves his own existence, and thus protects his own will. Indeed, changing the timeline would be the ultimate enemy to free will, because every human decision in history could be erased by the side effects of any time traveler. If history could be re-written even once, then it could also be changed a second time, and then an infinite number of times, until everything and everyone in the original timeline never existed. Complete freedom to alter outcomes would be indistinguishable from chaos. The fire would grow exponentially until it consumed everything. Ultimately, you can only control your actions, if there is only one You. In the words of Oldham, the restraints are for your protection.

Balance of Power by Luhks

2009-03-26T00:52:00.005+00:00

Even by Lost standards, Season Five opened with unprecedented degree of Christian symbolism over its first seven episodes. In the first segment of that arc, John Locke watched the Virgin Mary fall from the sky; the final segment revealed his death and resurrection. The past two episodes have borrowed religious imagery from different sources, even further into human history. LaFleur of course embraced a number of ancient Egyptian influences. (In last week’s article, I overlooked another hidden reference. The new Dharma characters, Jerry, Phil, and Rosie, were named after The Grateful Dead, a band named for a passage from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which describes burial rites and the role of Anubis.) Episode 5.09 Namaste shifts its spiritual focus about 3,000 miles east, from the Nile River to the Indus River. The first frames of the episode show the now-familiar Flight 316, with its prominent India-based Ajira Airlines logo. The word ‘ajira’ has several translations in different languages, but it translates from Hindi as ‘Island’. The episode’s title comes from Dharma Initiative’s favorite Hindi phrase. The saying Namaste can express either a welcome or a farewell. Literally, it means: “I humble myself to you,” but, as with so many other Lost titles, this one proves to be more ironic than literal. The episode was filled with different greetings, with characters expressing varying degrees of humility towards each other. Throughout the numerous power struggles in the episode, the prevailing question seemed to be: who is humbling themselves to whom?

Hinduism is the world’s oldest surviving religious tradition, and it encompasses a variety of different beliefs. One common idea in Hindu (as well as Buddhist) thinking is that the human sensory experience is ultimately an illusion. Under this view, the temporary division between the individual human self and the rest of the universe is a false impression. All persons are part of the same undivided self. Fittingly, the structure of Namaste embraces this lack of egoism. Although it is not the first episode to forgo the character-centric format, Namaste truly centers on no particular individual. Each scene takes place on the Island, and showcases just about every one fairly equally across its two time periods. Lost has already alluded to the most prominent concepts in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, sometimes directly (karma and dharma) and sometimes indirectly (samsara, the wheel of rebirth). The Dharma Initiative itself appears to practice some combination of borrowed Eastern philosophy and twentieth-century Western science. Dharma is aptly named for this framework, as both an English acronym (Department of Heuristics and Research on Materials Application) and a central idea from Hinduism. The word dharma denotes the law, the code of ethics that describes each person’s set of obligations to the rest of society. The Initiative’s logo borrows the design of a Buddhist symbol for such teachings.

(The episode even includes a return to the Flame station, along with its signature cow. Hinduism famously regards the cow as a sacred creature in the cycle of reincarnation. However, Namaste also reminds the audience not to treat Lost’s religious subtext too seriously: the Dharma initiation party includes a feast of flame-broiled hamburgers.)

ALPERT: You answer to someone, don't you? You follow a chain of command, right?
FARADAY: Yeah.
ALPERT: Yeah, well, so do I.

Namaste offered a more revealing look at the inner workings of Dharma than ever before. Almost every member of the Dharma Initiative wears a uniform that displays the person’s first name, along with that person’s job assignment. From the glimpses shown here, these positions are prescribed immediately and permanently on arrival. Each person carries his or her individual dharmic duty in public: Security, Motor Pool, Mathematician, Nurse, Teacher, or Workman. For thousands of years, Indian culture used the idea of dharma to justify its own caste system. Each individual in the lower castes was required to fulfill the social obligations of its group, in order to ensure reincarnation into a higher level. It is difficult to judge whether the Dharma Initiative follows some similarly strict social hierarchy, or whether all participants are viewed as equals. Their top decision-maker, Horace, goes by his first name and he apparently never talks down to anyone. Even an important figure like Dr. Chang stops by to say Namaste to the lowly Jack Workman. Although everyone else in the Initiative walks around with their first name and title in view, two members of Dharma’s social order expressly put themselves above their subordinates. Only LaFleur, Head of Security, and Radzinsky, Head of Research, have their last names and ranks embroidered on their jumpsuits. Even without these status symbols, their behavior demonstrates their higher status. LaFleur has trained Jin and Miles to obey his commands, while Phil and Jerry appear to be bungling sycophants. In his brief introduction here, Radzinsky proves to be a power player, who refuses to humble himself, even in the presence of LaFleur.

Three decades later and a few miles offshore, the survivors of Ajira Flight 316 struggle to make their own group decisions, in the absence of any established social order. The first scene of the episode shows the plane’s final moments in the air, which also serve as the final moments of any defined hierarchy. The landing destroys the Ajira Airlines chain-of-command, as it kills Frank’s two direct subordinates, his co-pilot and his lead flight attendant. As with the crash of Oceanic 815, this new collection of strangers crashes from civilization and back to a state of nature. From these circumstances, newcomer Caesar establishes himself as the voice of Island law. The tools of leadership belong to those whoever uses them. He only needs a few minutes to undermine Frank’s authority and establish himself as the Ajira leader. In the preliminary stages of this society, Caesar follows in the footsteps of the famous Roman emperors from which his name derives. This Caesar apparently hails to no one. His loaded name serves as an ambiguous signal at present; some caesars acted as benevolent administrators for the Roman Empire, while others became brutal tyrants. Captain Lapidus never seemed like the type for mainstream politics, and he steps away during the power play. Having lost everyone else he knew from the plane, Frank feels determined to look after Sun, his only remaining friend.

SAWYER: Well, well, well. I don't know if you Islam's got a concept of karma, but I get the sense this island just served you up a heaping platter of cosmic payback.

Meanwhile, Lady Kwon stages her own coup d’état against the leadership of Mr. Linus. Ben wastes no time before heading back to his old group of cohorts on the main island. Even so, he cannot resist the prospect of adding Sun as another follower in the mean time. No matter where he goes, it seems Ben needs the powerful feeling that comes from stringing people along with the carrot of his superior Island knowledge. In a refreshing reversal, Sun in fact was manipulating Ben for her own benefit, in a rather Ben-like fashion. She uses a combination of deception and brute force to eliminate him, as soon as he reveals his destination. (Let this be a lesson to everyone: never underestimate a Kwon.) In doing so, Sun and Frank manage to trade away one enigmatic leader for an even more mysterious one. After a cameo from the Monster, the Dharma Processing Center becomes an inverted counterpart to Jacob’s Cabin. Christian uses artificial lighting for the first time, and then he answers Sun’s question with a dated photograph, empirical evidence of her friends’ whereabouts that requires no act of faith. Even after his death, Christian Shephard continues to live up to the role that his name implies. The shepherd is a protective figure, and also a modest leader, who guides the flock in the proper direction whenever one strays.

In his second tour of duty on the Island, Jack Shephard has given up any of his old responsibilities and become a member of the pack. Reincarnation is one of the central themes of Hinduism and Buddhism, often visualized as the soul replacing one set of clothes for another. According to some Eastern traditions, karma, the sum of a person’s actions in life, and the extent to which they fulfill their dharmic duties, determines a soul’s status upon reincarnation. Just after Dr. Chang greets him with a half-hearted Namaste, he humbles Jack with the news of his work assignment. In his rebirth into the Dharma Initiative, he has entered into the lower castes of their society. The Island does not appear too pleased with his previous work. Quite possibly, this same concept applies to Ben as well, who suddenly finds himself at the mercy of Sun and Locke. Both Linus and Shephard became ill toward the end of their respective reigns, and now karma has even more humbling experiences in store for them in the next life. Interestingly, the Dharma Initiative assigned both of the 2004 leaders to the position of Workman. This sign leaves two interpretations: either Dharma management is incompetent enough to let them slip through its administrative cracks; or the Island always wanted these two men to live as subservient pawns rather than powerful chess players.

BOONE: Red shirt. […] Ever watch Star Trek? […] The crew guys that would go down to the planet with the main guys, the captain and the guy with the pointy ears, they always wore red shirts. And they always got killed.
LOCKE: Sounds like a piss-poor captain.

Jack’s humility lessons continue when James delivers his own, less supernatural, brand of payback. Jack enters the LaFleur household with the vague ambition of fixing the Sayid situation, and he leaves relieved of any responsibility. Not surprisingly, the showdown between Shephard and LaFleur became the most heavily discussed scene of the episode. After three years, the two men have reversed their roles, with James established as the upstanding civil servant and with Jack demoted to the fringes of society. The conversation creates multiple feelings of déjà vu, not only from past Jack-Sawyer arguments, but also with shades of Benjamin Linus and John Locke. LaFleur’s entire demeanor seemed equivalent to the Linus style of putting others in their place: sitting down patiently, reading a book, preying on insecurities, and asserting his own superiority. James also described himself in Jack-like terms, as a savior of sorts. The lines, “I saved your ass today. […] I'm gonna save Sayid's tomorrow,” echoed some of Jack’s repeated promises to fix people. Moreover, because James assumes autonomous control over security, Jack now becomes free to find his own destiny, in the same way that Locke once forged his own path when Jack was in charge. Regardless of different leadership styles, the task of saving lives on the Island seems to be an impossible one. Despite all of Jack’s efforts, only a handful of people survived. LaFleur’s people will soon be wiped out completely during the Purge, no matter how hard he tries. The Island seems primed to teach the new James the same harsh realities that so many other characters learned: if you aspire to save people from Death, the Universe will find a way to show you who is really in charge.

Similarly, Dr. Juliet Burke was once regarded as the savior in that little yellow village, for all of its mothers and children. Despite her years of research, the cycle of birth and death had different plans for all pregnant women on the Island. In the previous episode, Juliet finally had the opportunity to deliver a child safely on the Island, the chance to feel that she had accomplished something good in her journey. Such happiness always proves to be a fleeting sensation for Lost characters. When Juliet holds the baby in her arms, Amy destroys that brief feeling of contentment, with an innocent mention of its name. The word Ethan does not carry the same connotations for Juliet as it does for the Oceanic group. Baby Ethan serves as a cruel reminder of her failure to solve the pregnancy problem, as he himself died to his obsession with Claire and her baby. Not one of Juliet’s infant patients has outlived her, and Ethan is no exception. Along with Richard, Ethan was one of the people who originally recruited her to the Island prison. Juliet and Ethan remain trapped in an infinite loop of birth and death, each one bringing the other to the Island. Currently, the life of Ethan represents the one tangible impact that the group of time-travelers has made in 1977, and it sets the precedent for all further actions. Any efforts to make the world of 2004 into a better place will accomplish nothing. Their influence on the universe will be neither positive nor negative, but only bring about the inevitable.

SAYID: What good it would be to kill you if we're both already dead?

For Sayid Jarrah, his symbolic rebirths always amount to nothing more than lateral moves. Sayid's own personal wheel of samsara is a series of wars, solitude, imprisonment, and torture. There is no peace for him. Sometimes he gets to inflict pain upon others, but sometimes others inflict pain upon him. While Jack, Kate, and Hurley all arrived together and assimilated into the Dharma Initiative, Sayid was all alone and in chains. Instead of a Namaste welcome, his old friend points a gun in his face and demands that he kneel. Later, LaFleur’s interrogation forces Sayid to admit falsely that he is ‘one of them’. Ultimately, the answer to that question is meaningless to him. As he has moved from one side of a war to another, or from one side of a cage to the other, his level of freedom never increases. The final scene of the episode reintroduces Sayid to the personification of his suffering, the emotionless and unblinking face of Benjamin Linus. The young Hostile-obsessed man in front of him will grow into the monster who caused the deaths of countless Oceanic survivors, quite possibly murdered Penny and Nadia, and slaughtered this idyllic Dharma community. Apparently, the downside of Dharma’s caste system is that it only takes one disgruntled and power-hungry Workman to destroy a utopia. Sayid’s lack of liberty extends beyond those bars and handcuffs. Any attempts to stop this dictator from succeeding will fail. The life of little Ben is as secure as the lives of all characters during their own flashback scenes (or, by the same token, the lives of any character already shown to be alive in flash-forward scenes). Worse yet, anyone who interacts with Ben will become complicit in shaping his personality into its adult form.

Aside from discussions of leadership, Namaste has also generated a heated debate that centers on the same question introduced in the opening scene of Season Five: can the past be changed? The popular interpretation seems to be shifting in favor of multiple timelines. Understandably, many people feel that the time travel plot would be meaningless unless something changed. Personally, I disagree with this argument (continuity issues aside). On the contrary, human actions are only meaningful, because each event occurs just once. If the Lost characters somehow changed the show’s history, then large portions of the story would disappear. Whether past, present, or future, every event in the universe is final, along with all of its consequences. Although the characters must have a limited impact on their environment, the characters themselves will continue to evolve throughout this entire experience. To borrow a concept from Hinduism, the cycle of reincarnation allows the human soul itself to move closer to enlightenment. A person cannot fix the universe, but we can heal ourselves. If their ultimate goal is inner peace, then these souls all have a long journey ahead of them.

Nothing Stays Buried by Luhks

2009-03-18T22:55:00.000+00:00

As the Lost storyline inches ever closer to its narrative ending, it continues to reveal more of its chronological beginning. Due to the nonlinear storytelling format, The Beginning of the show’s timeline has transferred from one scene to another over the five seasons: Jack’s childhood in White Rabbit (which may have been preceded by scenes of young James and Eko); Ben’s birth in The Man Behind the Curtain; Locke’s birth in Cabin Fever; then Widmore’s flaming arrow attack of 1954 in The Lie. The opening scene of LaFleur, which coincides with the ending of This Place is Death, briefly takes the audience deeper into the Island’s past than ever before. Now, if you placed all Lost on-screen events in chronological order, there would be a new beginning. The first moments in our show’s history, millennia in the past, were the following: Locke fell down deep below the Island’s surface, while Sawyer tried to hold on; and Charlotte’s body gave a few last breaths, while Daniel tried to hold on. Although some even older event might take its place over the remaining episodes, the Lost universe now begins with Death.

Episode 5.08 LaFleur marks the halfway point of Lost’s penultimate season. Several elements of this initial eight-episode arc stand out above the rest. All of these episodes, of course, focused heavily on time travel, and examined the subject from every different angle. This momentary detour into an ancient time period offers one of the most notable uses of this storytelling device. Moreover, though, I cannot recall any other sequence of episodes so preoccupied with themes of birth, and death, and re-birth. LaFleur is no exception to this growing trend. The main Island conflict revolves around the deaths of Paul and two Hostiles, an event that leads to the miraculous birth of the child of Amy and Horace. Daniel struggles to cope with the death of Charlotte, as her younger self re-appears before his eyes. James serves as the central character of the episode, as he brings about the death of his Sawyer persona, and the birth of Jim LaFleur. Each of the Season Five episodes presents a slightly different angle on the cycle of birth and death. From the beginning of the episode, burial serves as a common link between each of the storylines of LaFleur. Locke finds himself buried alive in the Island’s underworld, under a mound of dirt deeper than any man-made grave. When he turns the Wheel for his journey to begin the journey to his afterlife, the stone well soon appears on top of those mounds. This collection of rocks becomes an Island-made tombstone to memorialize Locke’s departure from the people above him.

MICHAEL: Silent movies, huh? You're not that old, man.
LOCKE: I'm old enough.

In the time before the construction of the well, the rope in the dirt also marked this fateful spot. When Sawyer held onto the rope, the object simply appeared in the ancient past. (I love the disorienting way in which the rope was filmed: first it is framed horizontally, and then the camera rotates to correct our perspective.) The rope serves as another near-paradox in the story, as a mystical object that links people from our time with people from the origins of civilization. When the earliest inhabitants of the Island stumbled upon this mysterious marker, they must have viewed it as magic, a sign from the gods. Just as Locke once uncovered a piece of buried metal and believed that it was his destiny to find what was inside, some historic man of faith must have stumbled upon this rope and reached the same conclusion. Then, he kept digging until he found this cave, along with its Wheel linked to a limitless energy source. These apparently Egyptian visitors left enough clues for the Dharma Initiative to excavate the same cave in the twentieth century. The Egyptians carved their hieroglyphics into the cave walls, symbols for "resurrection" and "time travel". The Dharma Initiative built their Orchid station on the same site, and left behind their own collection of words and pictures, videotapes with terms like “exotic matter” and “Casimir effect”. After so many centuries, the language and technology of humankind have become seemingly more sophisticated. However, the origins and the power of the Wheel remain just as much a mystery to Dr. Chang as it was to the Egyptians.

People tend to think of ancient Egypt as a death-obsessed culture, because a great deal of modern knowledge about it comes from studying their burial customs. The Egyptian pharaohs developed some of the most intricate death rituals in human history to prepare themselves for the afterlife: embalming, mummification, preservation of organs in jars, and internment inside massive stone pyramids. While many other traces of their culture faded away, these monuments to death withstood the test of time. This episode offers a glimpse of the famous Four-Toed Statue, which appears to be another great work of the ancient Egyptians. The rear-view of the Statue has been scrutinized more closely than any Lost screen capture since Radzinsky’s blast-door map. The Statue appears to have an animal head, on top of a human body in Egyptian dress, and it holds an ankh in each hand. There are many Statue theories floating around the Lost fan-base, but the Egyptian god Anubis seems to be the best fit. Any pyramid would be filled with images of Anubis to ward off grave robbers. This god is depicted with the head of a jackal, painted black, to signify his associations with death. He is a watch-dog of sorts, charged with the task of protecting the dead and escorting them safely to the afterlife. Essentially, Anubis is Egypt’s counterpart to Cerberus of Greek mythology, a figure that needs no introduction. Whoever encounters the Island’s protector describes it according to his own language. The Oceanic survivors called it the Monster; Rousseau's team called it système de sécurité; to Radzinsky, it was Cerberus. If the ancient Egyptians encountered this dog-like creature made of black smoke, they would probably name it Anubis. The Statue faces outward to the ocean, and it sends conflicting signals to anyone who might approach. Was the Statue intended as a warning, much like Charlotte’s famous phrase, “this place is Death”? Or, did the Statue serve as an invitation to paradise, a guardian figure carrying the symbols for eternal life?

Nearly every culture across the globe buries its dead in some form or another. The ceremony is driven by practical concerns, as well as the fundamental human desire to respond to the loss of life. Death rituals are one of the key elements that distinguish human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom. Charlotte’s death in the ancient jungle offers a cruel reminder of the reasons why human beings first decided to bury their dead. She rests completely alone in the past, without anyone to show respect to her remains. Her corpse is left to decompose out in the open. Her body might be ripped to shreds by birds or other scavenging animals. (The Egyptians associated the jackal with death for this same reason.) Charlotte’s body might only be spared such a gruesome fate, if some ancient stranger took pity on her. If the original inhabitants of the Island found the rope, then they also might have encountered Charlotte’s remains. The anthropologist died thousands of years before she was born, and became an artifact from the future for ancient people to study. Her skin, hair, and clothing would be unlike anything they had ever seen. Moreover, she left behind no trace of how arrived on the Island. She would barely even appear to human to their eyes, but as some magical entity. Perhaps the Island’s past civilization even came to worship her as another supernatural being.

SAYID: You would remember! You would remember how deep. You would remember every shovelful, every moment. You would remember what it felt like to place her body inside. You would remember if you buried the woman you loved.

The primary purpose of any burial ceremony, however, is to help the living rather than the dead. Because Charlotte remains trapped in the past, the Island deprives Daniel of the opportunity to bury the woman he loves. Lost has shown more than its share of funeral scenes in past seasons, to help characters bring closure after losing their friends. In general, though, the bereaved suffer tremendous consequences whenever they cannot bury their loved ones. Jack continues to be tortured by the image of his unburied father, Hurley’s visions of Charlie’s floating corpse drove him to the insane asylum, and Ben embarked on a quest for revenge after he was forced to leave Alex’s body lying on the ground. It can be painful to bury a person you love, but Daniel’s fate appears to be even harsher, without any opportunity to find some peace. In his lasting mental image of Charlotte, she is not resting safely in the earth where she belongs. Instead, she is lying alone and unprotected, with her lifeless eyes reflecting the trees above her.

The final time jump into 1974 compounds Daniel’s lack of closure. Faraday spent his entire life intellectualizing the realities of space-time. As Season Five began, he was the voice of reason, calmly explaining to the grieving Sawyer that the past is unchangeable. After losing Charlotte, Daniel’s emotions are now at war with his intellect. Charlotte has revealed his future to him, by telling him that he will warn her to leave the Island. By the universe’s self-consistency principle, this event must occur, regardless of what Daniel wants. The two lovers are trapped in a loop of self-fulfilling prophecies. In the Minkowski view of space-time, every event in a sense is causally connected to every other event. Daniel promises himself that he will never tell Charlotte, because doing so will cause it to happen. Daniel understands that when he warns young Charlotte of her death, he will become complicit in the four-dimensional universe that will ultimately kill her. He must keep his emotions in check every time he sees her, because any day might be the day in which he started the chain of events that led to her death. Faraday’s new mindset involves a torturous combination of grief and guilt, along with hatred of his life’s work, and the growing realization that his will is no longer free. Even suicide is no longer an option for him, at least until after he speaks to her.

The episode’s burial motif continues as the crew encounters a new character, Amy of the Dharma Initiative. When our time travelers walk by, the two unnamed Hostiles have already murdered her husband Paul for unknown reasons. After Juliet and Sawyer kill the two attackers, conflict continues to revolve around the fate of those three bodies. Amy demands that they bury the two men to hide their crime from the Hostiles, and that they carry Paul’s body with them to give it a proper funeral. When Richard arrives at the camp later that night, he insists upon being told the location of his two men, and then takes Paul’s body away with him. On the surface, Alpert is out for justice, but his motivations seem to run deeper. The Hostiles seem to practice their own special religion, complete with its own ceremonies after death. When Colleen Pickett died at the Hydra station, the Others specifically did not bury her body on the Island. Instead, they placed her on a burning funeral pyre and floated it out to sea. Richard’s followers seem to understand, or at least believe, something about what happens to someone on the Island after death. Perhaps the souls of any person interred on the Island do not achieve rest. Whatever Richard planned to do with those three bodies, his brand of justice definitely required treating Paul’s body differently from those of his own people. (The Hostiles do not exactly treat Dharma remains with reverence.) At the very least, he guaranteed that Amy would never find peace, without a proper ceremony for her husband.

FARADAY: Just bury it. Bury it, and everything will be fine. [...] You wanna take care of this bomb? You bury it!

While the Dharma and Hostiles resolve their dispute over these bodies, James bids farewell to his former self. The most intriguing aspect of his transformation from Sawyer into LaFleur is that the change was unnecessary. Horace would be just as likely to believe his cover story if he used the name Sawyer rather than the name LaFleur. This second major identity change in his life, just like the first one, was a voluntary act of dissociation. The young James Ford loved his parents and then lived a life full of pain after they died. At the age of 19, he became Sawyer, a new man who could do the things that little James could not. Sawyer would be strong and free, not bound by any code of morality or personal attachments. He could distance himself from James’ pain and lead a life of pleasure. After almost a full 19 years later, the Sawyer persona also began to outlive its usefulness. He completed his revenge against Cooper. Sawyer himself grew to love other people, and then he lost them as well. In response to these changes, Sawyer used that same defense mechanism that James once did: he created another identity. By becoming LaFleur, he detached himself from Sawyer's life, and allowed himself to create a new future. This new man, Jim LaFleur, is a leader, first as boat captain and then as head of Dharma security. LaFleur even embraces the same rules of society that Sawyer had once ridiculed, and imposes Dharma's order over the Hostile wilderness. As always, though, his past continues to re-emerge, no matter how deep under the surface he tries to bury it.

LaFleur became an upstanding member of society, with strong ties to the Dharma community. He developed substantial, long-term relationships in work (with Miles and his other employees), with friends (Horace and Amy), and in romance (with Juliet). James now has spent three years with this new group of Dharma people, and he probably has shared more experiences with them than he ever did with any of the Oceanic castaways. Jin, of course, is the lone exception, the main link to old friends. In an interesting contrast, Jin wanted to make sure that his wife never returned to die on the Island, while Sawyer wanted to bring Kate back regardless of the risk. Three years later, James and Jin maintain their secret efforts to find their missing friends, by searching the Island one inch at a time. In one scene, he reassures Jin that they will never forget what happened, and continue waiting “as long as it takes.” In another scene, he confides in Horace that his memory of those few months is almost completely gone. “Is three years long enough to get over some one? Absolutely.” James leads a double life, torn between his Sawyer’s past and LaFleur’s future.

LOCKE: It looks like you're digging a hole. Every man's entitled to his secrets, Paulo, but can I give ya a piece of advice? [...] You should put the shovel away and save yourself some trouble. [...] Things don't stay buried on this Island.

While James made a conscious choice to move up in the Island’s social hierarchy, Juliet instead decides to move down a few levels. When she first arrived on the Island, Juliet was treated as a celebrity in the Others’ village, perhaps even a savior. They assigned her the nearly impossible task of correcting the Island’s severe pregnancy dilemma. She watched helplessly as the Island killed one pregnant woman after another. Currently, Juliet rejects any of the responsibility attached to the position of protector. At the beginning of the episode, Juliet seemed to be the most natural choice to lead the new group left behind. Instead, she deferred from that position, and followed as second in command behind James. She eventually decided to stay on the Island, not out of any sense of duty, but only due to her attachment to James. Juliet chose to blend in to the lower levels of the Dharma community rather than take on any leadership position. She even made an agreement with James to keep her training a secret. Juliet spent her first three years on the Island, because Richard and Ben treated her as special. When she lived there for another three years, she escaped the burden of being special. Eventually, James convinced her to come out of retirement. Most likely, she was the only person who could have saved the lives of Amy and her son.

James refers to himself in this episode as “a professional liar,” and he displays his skill by convincing Horace with an elaborate cover story. When the time comes for him to persuade Richard Alpert, telling the truth serves the same purpose. With James, it can be difficult to tell where the lies end and the truth begins. After three years, which half of his double life is genuine? Was he lying to Jin about his intentions, just to spare his friend’s feelings? Or, was he lying to Horace, just to spare his other friend’s feelings? When James walks into Juliet’s house with a flower and says that he loves her, everything appears authentic. When James stares longingly at Kate in the episode’s final scene, his emotions appear equally authentic. His ultimate response to this situation will reveal whether the tiger ever did change his stripes. If James stays true to Juliet, then he has evolved into a new man. If he leaves her for Kate, then he reverts back to his old state as Sawyer. The old con-man Sawyer could convince any woman that he loved her, just before leaving her life in ruins. Leaving Juliet would be the equivalent to leaving Cassidy, or any of the other women he abandoned over the years. Not only does Sawyer have a lot of experience in dumping women, but Juliet herself has some experience in being dumped for someone else. Her ex-husband Edmund Burke traded her in for the younger model, and now James is in the position to do the same. If history repeats itself, as it does so often on this show, then Juliet’s future with him looks fairly pessimistic.

The ending of LaFleur puts a number of pieces in place for the second half of Season Five. Since the beginning, Lost has focused on characters whose minds were trapped in the past. Now that Jack, Kate, and Hurley have joined James, Juliet, Miles, Daniel, and Jin in 1977, the idea of living in the past has become completely literal. James and Juliet have already left a mark, by saving the lives of Amy and her son when no one else could. The rest of this crew must also be destined to complete some special work on the Island. Whether their deeds are good or bad, they have been sent back to make sure that whatever happened does happen. Somewhere in this time period, there is an unloved boy named Benjamin Linus. His hatred of the Dharma Initiative is growing (probably along with an almost-oedipal desire to kill James and take Juliet as his own). The date of the Purge has already been set. Linus and Alpert will kill Horace and all of his people, and then leave their unburied corpses to rot in the jungle. If these characters do not find some way to escape from the past, then they too will suffer that same fate.

Another Life, Part Two by Luhks

2009-03-07T03:24:00.007+00:00

Who is John Locke? There are many different ways to answer that question. The easy answer is that John Locke is the greatest character ever to grace our television screens. While that statement may be true, the answer is not quite complete and certainly not satisfying. So, who is John Locke? When Locke first entered the spotlight in Season One’s Walkabout, he set out on a journey of self-discovery. One would expect that an ordinary man would come to understand himself pretty well after fifty years, but Locke is still trying to find his identity. He features in every scene of Episode 5.07 The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham, as he interacts with characters both young and old, around the globe. Each of those characters offers him a different look into the mirror, to help him answer that same question he set out to answer before boarding Oceanic Flight 815. Who is John Locke? As the episode begins, newcomers Caesar and Ilana set out to understand this mystery man before them. He has a name. He has memories. Even after all of his experiences, I doubt that John himself could offer an answer to that question.

For a story that focuses so heavily on deconstructing all aspects of John Locke, the title of this episode seems out of place. The audience has known for some time that the name Jeremy Bentham is nothing more than an alias to conceal his identity. Thus, the episode’s title refers to a man who never existed at all, except as an idea. Similarly, the Life of Jeremy Bentham and the Death of Jeremy Bentham are both false events. Bentham’s Life consists of a series of apparent failures, which bring about the ultimate success of his mission. Bentham’s Death of course proves to be only temporary, and Locke’s real Life resumes soon afterward. His first words spoken in the episode affirm the true nature of his identity: “My name is John Locke.” The man resurrected on the Island is not Jeremy Bentham, the weak, pathetic failure shown in flashbacks. Bentham is merely the Looking Glass version of Locke, an inverted image of his ultimate identity. The ultimate Life of the man named John Locke exists in his future, not in his past.

The episode opens with two different birth scenes of sorts, both of which correspond to two seminal moments from his life. The adult John Locke was re-born in 2004 on the Island, as shown in Season One's Walkabout. His natural liberty was restored instantly after years of paralysis. By the same token, the newly Resurrected John Locke returns to vitality in the opening scene of this episode. Instead of relying on others to drag him around from one place to another, Locke once again stands on his own two feet, ready to forge his own path. By contrast, Bentham’s Birth scene matches the events off the Island in Cabin Fever. When the infant John Locke was born in 1956 in California, he was helpless and in peril. After surviving a car crash, his life rested entirely in the hands of medical science. He was entirely alone, as his own mother abandoned him without hesitation. Jeremy Bentham arrives in Tunisia under equivalent circumstances. His severe leg injury grants him even less mobility than he had when he was paralyzed. Even with a broken back, he could still use his hands to move around on his own; the pain of his leg makes any movement unbearable. Once again, he must rely on doctors to save his life. Like all newborns, Bentham’s only degree of autonomy rests in his ability to cry out to others for help, but only in a language they do not understand. A powerful figure presides over the event from afar (Richard Alpert in California and Matthew Abbadon in Tunisia), hinting at a greater destiny to come.

As an orphan, John Locke lived the majority of his life pining after a relationship with a father figure. Even his last name came from his mother’s maiden name, not from his father as is customary. His new off-Island self interacts immediately with a paternal figure. Charles Widmore supplies him with a new name, as Anthony Cooper never cared enough to do. Widmore tells John the things he always wanted to hear, that he believes in him, that he wants to protect him from harm, and that he made plans for John to rule in his place. In fact, Widmore had served as Locke’s benefactor for years without his knowledge, and he had sent Abbadon to tell him not to give up, in his time of need. In an episode filled with memorable conversations, I think Locke’s interactions with Widmore might have been the strongest moment. After hearing dozens of Linus’ self-serving, second-hand accounts of Widmore as the boogey-man, Charles finally had the opportunity to make his own case. (On a related note, I think Widmore's appearance added support for a theory that I have maintained for a year, despite all ridicule to the contrary: Widmore never intended to kill all the Oceanic survivors, as Ben claimed repeatedly and then other characters parroted back and forth to one another. He sent Keamy to extract Linus, and his crew only attacked the people who appeared to be protecting Ben.)

Maybe I am a bit naïve, but I found Widmore’s account very credible. The show has proven time and again that Benjamin Linus is both a liar and a killer, single-mindedly selfish. Thus far, Widmore has only been characterized as a killer, but a man of his word. Benjamin is a Machiavellian politician, who uses deception as his primary weapon; Charles instead follows the model of military gentlemen like his idol General MacCutcheon. When young Charles’ first appeared on the island in The Lie, he was dressed in a U.S. military uniform. In the days before modern warfare, soldiers wore uniforms as a matter of principle, so that you could at least see your enemy in plain view. When Charles was interrogated, he did not tell lies, but he merely refused to answer questions. By contrast, in Ben’s first appearance on the island, he dressed in civilian clothes, and he told lies at every opportunity. Linus has always been the wolf in sheep’s clothing, but Widmore makes no efforts to disguise his true intentions.

My favorite image of the episode is probably the shot of Charles Widmore, handing John a glass of water, which he accepts. Season Three included three similar moments. In Flashes Before Your Eyes, Charles Widmore declined to offer a glass to Desmond, after Desmond asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Widmore refused to accept Hume as his successor, and poured only a single glass for himself. In this episode, Charles does not even pour his own glass, but instead gives up his glass to John. Two other characters had also offered a glass to Locke in the past, and he had refused both of them. The Man From Tallahassee himself, Anthony Cooper, tried to give Locke a glass of whiskey, right before he pushed him out an 8-story window. The Man Behind The Curtain himself, Benjamin Linus, also tried to share a drink with Locke, shortly before he shot him and left him in the Dharma grave. Those two con-men used alcohol to weaken Locke’s defenses. Here, Widmore fills Locke's glass with water, an honest liquid if there ever was one. He does not want to dull Locke’s senses, but to sharpen them, to help him “wake up.” As trusting as Locke tends to be at times, he saw through both of those tricks. However, Locke accepts Widmore’s glass without hesitation. Perhaps this image suggests that Locke will become Widmore’s true successor, and he will complete his work on the Island.

(As always, though, this scene leaves signs of ambiguity. If you extend the metaphor between Locke and Jesus, then the entire sequence might take on a different meaning. According to Christian mythology, Jesus ventured out into the desert some time before his Crucifixion, where he was tempted by the Devil. Widmore emphasizes his desire to spare John from his inevitable death. Similarly, the Devil appealed to Jesus’ fear of dying, as he tried to persuade him to escape his Crucifixion.)

With the help of Widmore and Abbadon, Bentham begins his quest to bring everyone back to the Island. In his mind, he probably imagined a relatively simple process. He thought: deep down, everyone must know that they were never supposed to leave. He only needs to remind them of that truth in their souls. He feels so assured that his way of thinking is correct that he barely even attempts to see things from their perspectives. One by one, each of the disciples turns the tables on their would-be leader. He shows no insight into any of his friends, but each of them imparts some wisdom onto him.

Bentham’s first stop takes him to Santo Domingo to speak with Sayid. Past conversations between Sayid and Locke have been antagonistic, most notably in their clash in Season One’s The Greater Good. These two men shared a desire to serve the best interests of the Oceanic survivors, but they disagreed on the means to serve it best. Locke’s motivations for serving the Island have never been adequately defined. He has always assumed that the Island is somehow serving some greater good, but the actual nature of his work is unknown. For two years, Sayid made the equivalent mistake of relying on someone else’s assurances that he was serving a good cause, rather than using his own sense of right and wrong. Above all else, Sayid is a practical man who focuses on things that he can control. He traveled to another tropical island in order to accomplish some tangible good. Locke cannot articulate exactly why the return to the Island would serve any purpose at all, let alone a good purpose. Although Bentham is named for a utilitarian philosopher, Sayid manages to challenge him with a stronger utilitarian argument.

Bentham’s visit with Walt raises further doubts about the morality of his mission. Their brief conversation reaches a stumbling block when Walt mentions his father. Michael’s death offers a reminder that the Island is not a utopia, but a dangerous place to try to live. During Season One, Michael repeatedly warned Locke to stay away from Walt, in an effort to protect his son from harm. Then, Locke led Boone, his only remaining protégé, to his death. The Island that claimed the lives of Boone and Michael might impose the same fate on Walt. Locke’s only justification for leaving Walt alone is “he’s been through enough already.” Locke defies his explicit instructions to bring every one of his friends back. Locke has an intuitive sense that it would be immoral to bring a young man back to the unquestionably dangerous island. If so, then why exactly would bringing anyone else back be different? Previously, he also promised Jin that he would keep Sun off the Island. How could he justify endangering the lives of four adults, but consider it wrong to do the same for one woman and one teenage boy. Perhaps Locke is just trying to keep his promises to Michael and Jin, but if he truly believed that it was in everyone’s best interests to return, then these compromises would be unnecessary.

For destination number three, Locke joins Hugo at the Santa Rosa Mental Health Institute. In half-amusing, half-depression fashion, Hurley reminds Locke of his impending death. More importantly, though, Hurley questions Locke’s rationality throughout the scene. Hallucinations and delusions are two broad symptoms of mental illness. Hurley, of course, suffers from frequent hallucinations; he sees things outside the bounds of reality. Nevertheless, his worldview and his decision-making process remain rational. Hurley thinks clearly enough to point out that Locke’s plan defies logic: you cannot convince adults to abandon their lives without something more tangible than destiny. Locke’s beliefs are not grounded in rational thinking, but they border on delusions. In a sense, Hurley is much saner than Locke. Hurley’s mind falls victim to false sensory experiences, but Locke’s mind had developed a fantastic system of belief about the world, despite any evidence to the contrary.

After Sayid addresses the philosophical angle and Hurley challenges the mental angle, Kate focuses on Locke’s emotions. She makes a sharp observation about Locke’s underlying motivations: one of the main reasons why Locke has always been so desperate to stay on the Island is that no one outside of it ever cared for him. In Kate’s view, only a person with no emotional attachments would want to put an ocean between themselves and the rest of the world. Staying on an island prison is easy to accept if the outside world appears to offer nothing better. She could have easily made the same statement about Sawyer, when he wanted to stay on the Island throughout Season Four. Later on, this idea also applies to Jack: only after Jack found himself alone in the world did he become obsessed with returning to the Island. Locke is also a man without loved ones. His desire to keep everyone on the Island doubles as a personal need to keep his remaining family all in one place.

Locke’s next trip takes him to the graveyard for an even more depressing look into the mirror. Helen's tombstone reveals that the only woman he had loved died in April of 2006. From Locke’s mental calendar, the time for him should be only around early 2005. He jumped to the future without ever setting foot in the year of Helen’s death. Sayid, at least, was able to spend nine months with Nadia before she died, which he referred to as the happiest time of his life. Time and Death have combined forces to play a particularly cruel trick on John. Those years of opportunity simply vanished into nothing. If he somehow had landed in an earlier time, he might have enjoyed a few months of love. Instead, their future had already been predetermined, carved in stone long before he even arrived to make any choices about it. Helen was fated to die of a brain aneurysm, Abbadon was fated to die of gunshot wounds in the middle of a graveyard, and Locke was fated to end up hanging from his hotel room ceiling.

The final two stops on the Jeremy Bentham grand tour are unscheduled. Locke does not approach Jack of his own free will, but the collision course is inevitable. Shephard ignores any notion of bedside manner and attacks Locke right where it hurts most. Every one of Locke’s own attempts for trying to lead everyone back to the Island failed. Christian supplied to him the only idea that worked, proof of a miracle. Bentham had no liberty and no power of his own. He was nothing more than a puppet to deliver this message from the Island. The most important image of the scene appears at the same point in the conversation. When Jack stands up to leave, he casts a prominent dark shadow on the wall behind him. This same lighting effect has been used twice before on the show, during Jack’s visit to Hurley in Something Nice Back Home and his exchange with Hawking in 316. These three scenes share one more common element: someone reminds Jack that Christian is not through with him yet.

Psychologist Carl Jung used the idea of the shadow to describe something quite similar to Jack’s perception of Christian and Locke. In Jung’s framework, the shadow is a part of the self that the conscious mind refuses to accept. Each person’s shadow contains his own repressed weaknesses. The unconscious mind tends to project these perceived deficiencies outwardly onto someone else who reminds them of these shortcomings. Jack reserves this special brand of emotional intensity for Christian, and Locke by proxy. “Have you ever stopped to think that these delusions that you're special aren't real? That maybe there's nothing important about you at all? Maybe you are just a lonely old man that crashed on an Island. That’s it.” Jack’s remarks do not reflect his opinion of Locke, but his opinion of himself. Years of disappointment, failure, and loneliness destroyed the belief that his father instilled in him, that he was destined for greatness. His conclusion that “we were never special” forces Locke's own self-doubt to the surface. Like Michael before him and Jack after him, Locke seeks the only permanent end his suffering.

The Locke/Jesus metaphor layered throughout the story would be incomplete without a Judas Iscariot. Lost's Benjamin Linus is ideally suited for the task. Despite warnings from Christian, Widmore, and Sayid, Locke lets his guard down in Ben’s persence one more time. Ancient texts actually present two different versions of the story of Judas. The canonical gospels portray Judas as a villain, the apostle who pretended to be loyal to Jesus, but then betrayed him in the same act for thirty pieces of silver. Ben deceives Locke with a quite convincing display of loyalty. After he talks Locke down from the noose, he extracts the necessary information. He strikes immediately after Locke mentions the name of Eloise Hawking, as the one person who can help him return to the Island. Ben profits even further from the transaction, pocketing not silver, but a piece of gold, Jin's wedding ring.

Although unacknowledged by Christian theology, the Gospel of Judas presents a different account of Judas’ motivations. According to this text, Judas did not send Jesus to death for selfish reasons. Instead, it portrays Judas as the only apostle who understood Jesus' destiny: a second agent was needed to set in motion the planned course of events that included the Resurrection. In this view, Judas’ act freed Jesus from the spiritual prison of his body, so that all his followers might one day enjoy eternal life. The second interpretation of Linus’ actions follows the same general logic. Perhaps Ben did not kill Locke in his self-centered quest to restore his own reign on the Island, but as a necessary act of obedience to the larger plan.

The brief life of Jeremy Bentham serves as its own inverted form of walkabout, without any actual walking. As Matthew Abbadon described the experience: "I went on my walkabout convinced I was one thing, but I came back another. I found out what I was made of, who I was." When Locke's off-island journey began, he was convinced that he was a special individual with an all-important purpose in life. A series of cruel reversals deconstructs that self-image. Maybe he has been helping the wrong side. Maybe he is not serving the greater good. Maybe he is leading more people to their deaths. Maybe he is suffering from delusions. Maybe he is just reacting out of loneliness. Maybe he has no free will. Maybe he was never special. Maybe he is better off dead. The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham forced Locke to confront every one of his weaknesses. He suffered and he died, and he somehow emerged again stronger on the other side. John Locke still has not found his answer to the question: who am I? His latest journey of self-discovery proved one thing above all else: he can survive anything. If struggle is nature's way of strengthening, then Locke is better prepared than any one to take on whatever challenges lie ahead.

Another Life, Part One by Luhks

2009-03-07T03:23:00.001+00:00

Legend has it, during Season Three, ABC reached a compromise when they decided on the show’s end date. My memory might be incorrect, or the information might not even have been accurate in the first place. The show’s writers wanted to finish the series with two more seasons, but the network of course wanted to keep its valuable product for at least three more. Their solution was to reduce the length of the final seasons, and divide up the remaining 48 episodes over three years. Then, the infamous writers’ strike complicated matters even further, and the fourth season became even shorter. The fourth season finale, There’s No Place Like Home, ultimately delivered plenty of excellent drama, but it did not provide quite the same sense of narrative finality as its three predecessors. Basically, the Season Four conclusion did not move into any new territory, but it merely filled the gaps created by the superlative ending of Season Three.

Many elements have changed over the course of production, and it is impossible to know how much of the story was planned in advance. Nevertheless, I suspect that the original ending of Lost’s fourth chapter probably matched the events of this recent three-part saga: This Place is Death, 316, and The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham. To make this situation even more confusing, The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham was originally written as the lead-in to 316, rather than vice-versa. After both episodes, you could make a strong argument for either order. The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham essentially represents an ending, for the Coffin story, as well as the Oceanic Six storyline. 316 represents more of a beginning, with the start of a new Island adventure for our familiar 815 survivors, and with the introduction of Ajira 316, another plane full of castaways. The opening images of 316, showing the return of Jack and company to the Island, might have even served as the penultimate season-ending cliffhanger.

The opening scene of 316 transports the viewer back in time to the first moments of the series. A number of episodes have repeated some of the famous introductory images from the Pilot episode (the close-up of the eye opening, the overhead shot of a man lying on his back), but none more closely than this one. 316 recreates the same sequence of shots, depicts the same character in duplicate circumstances, and uses identical music. Jack once again follows the screams for help, and rushes to the aid of Hurley and Kate (who like Claire from the Pilot may be pregnant with another Shephard baby). Some things never change: Jack’s instincts still propel him to run directly towards the cries of help, as reliably as Vincent being hailed by a whistle. These two scenes not only portray Jack’s natural bravery, but they first highlight a sense of isolation. Perhaps the Shephard’s ultimate destiny is to die alone in the jungle, apart from the rest of the group. Many people have guessed that the series would end with the image of Jack’s eye opening, but now the image of Jack’s eye closing seems more likely.

The similarities in these two introductions may be obvious, but some key differences deserve mention. The shot of Jack lying in the jungle is not merely a repetition, but an inversion of the original shot. The object in Jack’s pocket has transformed as well, from a bottle of alcohol (his form of self-medication), into the letter with the mystical, open-ended sentence “I wish ...”. When Jack sits up in 316, the camera shows the left side of his face, rather than the right side as shown in the Pilot. This new angle of 316 instead matches another Season One shot, the image of Locke rising from paralysis at the end of Walkabout. Furthermore, the Matthew Fox’s expression does not express those same emotions from Jack’s original awakening in the jungle: fear, confusion, and pain. Instead, he gazes upward with the same gasping smile first displayed by Terry O’Quinn. The new Jack sees the Island through Locke’s eyes, as a place where miracles happen. Locke’s miracle was a physical one, as the Island restored his broken body; Jack’s miracle is a spiritual one, in which the Island revives his shattered soul. The story of 316 chronicles the final stages of that miracle, Doubting Jack’s transformation into a true believer, Locke’s primary apostle.

316, as well as its follow-up The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham, restores many other core elements from the show’s original Season One form. With the Wheel firmly in place, the random time jumps from the early episodes of Season Five have ended. The primary storytelling device, flashbacks centering on an individual character, resumes as well. In fact, Jack is present in every scene of 316 (while Locke similarly features in every scene of the following episode). These two characters have been my personal favorites since the first season: the paraplegic and the spinal surgeon have always been linked together inseparably as the backbone of the story. A significant portion of this episode also involves recreating specific details from Oceanic Flight 815. Almost every original character (even forgotten ones like the Marshal and Rose) receives a nod or two along the way. Most significantly, though, 316 also manages to shift back into Season One mystery mode. On some level, each passenger on the plane becomes a mysterious stranger. What convinced Kate to give up Aaron? How did Hugo come to join the flight? Why did Sun abandon her daughter? Why is a law enforcement officer, Ilana, escorting Sayid to Guam? Who is the mystery man with the ominous name of Caesar? Did Ben really complete his unfinished business with the Widmores? The episode could have answered everything outright; instead, it shows Flight 316 entirely from Jack’s perspective, in order to impart that same sense of wonder onto the viewer.

As one notable exception, however, the episode's first off-island scenes place Lost squarely in Answer Mode rather than Question Mode. Jack, Ben, Sun, and Desmond convene inside Dharma’s Lamp Post, buried underneath a church, for a didactic lecture from Ms. Eloise Hawking. The setting bears such a strong resemblance to a science classroom (with bookshelves and machines and equation-filled chalkboards and an old woman demanding everyone’s attention) that Ben even refers to it as ‘school’ later on. Judging from this scene, as well as Lost’s earlier jokes about Dr. Arzt, I suspect Lindelof and Cuse do not have a high opinion of science teachers. Anyone who has worked as a teacher will tell you what a poor job Ms. Hawking did in her instruction. To be fair, she did a decent job at classroom management, and kept some difficult students in line. As an educator, though, she failed miserably. She essentially delivered a series of orders, without asking the students not to develop any understanding of why she gave those orders. Her entire pitch relies on an appeal to authority: “Some people smarter than you, who worked those complicated equations behind me, somehow determined scientifically that you need to re-create the circumstances of the original flight. There’s no time to explain, so you’ll just have to take our word for it.”

Season Five has included countless allusions to Jesus of Nazareth, and these scenes in Hawking’s church pile on a few more overt references. The title of this episode, among other things, refers to John 3:16 from Christian scripture. Next to Jesus, the second-most influential martyr of Western civilization, the Greek philosopher Socrates, also was sentenced to death under comparable circumstances, four centuries earlier. Socrates was tried for nothing more than asking questions, and challenging people to reconsider their assumptions about the world. In doing so, he developed the Socratic method, the most effective method for teaching anything (and certainly not the method used by Ms. Hawking). Only one of Hawking’s students, Desmond, embodies the spirit of Socratic thinking. Desmond has enough skepticism of this authority figure to question what he had been told. He does what any true student must always do: he thinks for himself and he questions everything. Specifically, he challenges the assumption that returning to the Island could be a good thing. His own experiences offer plenty of evidence to the contrary. The only response he receives (the Island is not done with you yet) is unsatisfactory. Desmond, the only Catholic in the room, refuses to make the leap of faith.

If I were in that classroom, I also would have questioned much of Ms. Hawking’s instructions. At one point, she claims that Island is 'always moving'. This idea still does not make any sense to me. If the Island were jumping around the globe, then the people on the Island would see the sun shifting from one part of the sky to another. I suspect that the moving Island is really a misnomer, a metaphor for how to reach the Island. The windows to reach the Island might change all the time, but the land mass itself must occupy some fixed location on the earth’s surface. I also would have questioned Hawking’s instructions to recreate the details of the original flight. Her conclusion does not follow from the stated premises. If the Lamp Post can predict the next open window to the Island, then the contents of the plane would be irrelevant. Calculations might explain why Flight 316 to Guam had the best chances of success, but no numbers could ever explain why bringing Christian’s shoes would increase that probability. The Oceanic passengers would need to be together for it to work, only if they were the factors that caused it to work. Possibly, Hawking’s entire display was nothing more than like the pyrotechnics that surround the Wizard of Oz, mere scenery to convince the subjects.

Later, Ben’s monologue adds another layer to the show’s Christian symbolism when he compares Jack to Thomas the Apostle. First, Ben refers to the Thomas’ bravery, his refusal to let people 'die alone'. More importantly, his story portrays the force of doubt in direct opposition to faith. Doubting Thomas’ great flaw was his refusal to accept second-hand accounts of miracles. Jack shares this mindset, as he refused to believe so many of the things that Locke and Ben had told him. The morality of Lost’s Doubting Thomas story seems highly questionable. Why should skepticism be regarded with such disdain, and blind belief be regarded with such admiration? Personally, I admire the skepticism of men like Thomas, Jack, Socrates, and Desmond. Paradoxically, a scientific mind requires its own brand of faith: you must trust your own senses and your own powers of reason. Why should a person need to be redeemed simply for being unconvinced without proof? It is not even apparent why Jack the Believer is really an improvement over Jack the Skeptic. At the very least, Jack’s new willingness to trust Hawking and Linus presents a troubling sign for his future.

As part of his transformation, the new Jack has developed the uncanny ability to let things go. The transcript for 316 contains 124 question marks after lines of dialogue. (By contrast, there are only 24 exclamation points.) Jack, of course, asks more questions than any other character in this episode, but he rarely hears a straight response. The lack of direct answers almost becomes a running gag through this particular script. There are many different ways to avoid answering questions, and the writers of Lost employ every one of them in this episode. One way to avoid a spoken question is to ensure that none of the characters know the answer, either. When Kate awakes on the Island, she immediately asks the obvious question: What happened? (When the scene is repeated at the end of the episode, she also asks to know the whereabouts of the plane, Sun, Sayid, and Ben.) Jack and Hurley, though, have no more information than she does at that point. This episode provides no answer to this major question, either to the audience or to the characters.

Perhaps the simplest method of avoiding an answer is to avoid asking the question altogether. Sun, for instance, never needed to explain why she chose to leave Ji Yeon, because no one mentioned it. Similarly, when Sayid arrives aboard the plane, Ilana sits between him and his friends, and prevents him from saying a word. Other questions need not be answered, because the response is implied in the language itself. This episode contains a few examples of rhetorical questions, but the best of the bunch is Frank’s memorable line: “We’re not going to Guam, are we?”. Another sure-fire method is to change the subject. When Jack begins to ask Hurley about how he arrived for the flight, Hurley brushed the inquiry aside by saying “All that matters is that I’m here, right?”. Kate’s method of changing the topic of conversation is equally effective, even though it is remarkably less subtle. When Jack asks her “Where’s Aaron?”, her reply is: “No, don’t ask questions. If you want me to go with you, you’ll never ask that question again.” Immediately after, Kate employs history’s most proven method to silence an inquisitive male: she sleeps with him. I am not a neuroscientist, but I am fairly certain that whenever Evangeline Lilly jumps a guy and starts making out with him, the portion of his brain required for forming questions shuts down entirely.

As secretive as those Oceanic survivors can be, master manipulator Benjamin Linus knows how to conceal information better than anyone. For Ben, dodging questions is not only a way of life, but almost a form of art. He uses outright lying (Jack: “Did you know about this place?” Ben: “No. No, I didn’t.”). He tells cryptic half-truths (Jack: “Where are you going?” Ben: “Oh, I made a promise to an old friend of mine, just a loose end that needs tying up.”). He stonewalls (Jack [on the phone]: “What’s happened to you?” Ben: “Just do it. Please.”). He answers questions with questions (Jack: “What’s going to happen to the other people on this plane?” Ben: “Who cares?”). He deflects with humor (Jack: “How can you read?” Ben: “My mother taught me.”). Linus’ bag of tricks can only be surpassed perhaps by Presidents Nixon and Clinton. Ben is far from my favorite character on Lost, but I must admit that 316 contained one of his strongest performances yet on the show. The phone call from the marina might be the ultimate Ben moment: he calmly states that he has been ‘sidetracked’, with blood pouring down his face, moments after likely murdering an innocent woman.

As a whole, the episode 316 sends conflicting signals about the viewer’s role in interpreting Lost. In the first half of the episode, Hawking and Linus suggest that our role should be passive one: the audience should just listen to the experts, believe whatever they hear, and try not to over-think anything. Nobody appreciates a Doubting Thomas. It would be impossible to enjoy this work of fiction without constant suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, other elements of the episode not only suggest, but require, that the viewer take an active role in the experience. No one could appreciate the mystery elements of this episode if they were not actively asking themselves questions and thinking about the possible answers. This episode’s magic show at the senior citizens’ home provides an apt analogy. Jack’s grandfather, Ray Shephard, is the only person in the audience who refuses to enjoy the magic show before him. Ray knows that there is no such thing as magic, only trickery. No one can deny that the storytelling is contrived, and the audience is constantly being manipulated by curtains, smoke, and mirrors. By the same token, the pleasure of watching would disappear without these contrivances. Perhaps truly enjoying Lost requires some degree of double-think: treating the show seriously enough to engage its mysteries, while simultaneously remembering not to take the show seriously at all.

In my opinion, Lost episodes work most effectively when the writing is at its most Socratic, when the show presents one thought-provoking question after another. Instead of telling the viewers what to think (a la Hawking), the best Lost moments ask the viewers what they think. By obscuring the facts, the show encourages the viewers to search for the underlying truth on their own. The show’s best and most famous example of this type of storytelling, the Through the Looking Glass Coffin, plays a central role in this episode. 316’s number one mystery box exists on a much smaller scale, Jack's unopened letter from Locke beyond the grave. As with the coffin, Jack needed time to wrap his mind around things, before he could open it. He needed to consider the possibilities, to prepare himself for what would find inside. The delay also allows the audience to ponder the unknown, and to think more deeply about the characters than we would otherwise. As Socrates understood, the questioning process is more important than the final answer.

The actual letter does not contain the meaning of life, or reveal a personal secret, or even uncover any great Island mysteries. The ultimate revelation is a simple message, which stays true to character: “I wish you had believed me.” When Jack reads the sentence, two miracles occur. Jack achieves his dream of returning to the Island, his chance to start over and do everything differently. Reading the heartfelt letter achieves the same effect for Jack as touching Jesus' wounds did for Thomas. Locke’s written wish is also granted. Jack not only believes him in the present, but the Island transports him back in time, so that Jack ‘had believed’ him in the past tense. There must be some happy medium between believing everything you are told (as Locke often does) and believing nothing that you are told (as Jack once did). The new Jack the Apostle has jumped from one extreme end of the spectrum to the other. In the process, he seems to have replaced one tragic flaw with another. Desmond’s words offer a sound warning that faith can be misplaced easily. Looking forward, I have two wishes of my own to make. I wish that Jack and Locke will continue to search for answers, using their own reason. More importantly, though, I wish that Lost itself will continue to pose questions worthy of being answered, even after the series ends. All answers have a definite, final end point. The right type of questions, however, ensure that a work of art will live on forever.

Die Together, Live Alone by Luhks

2009-02-17T10:37:00.003+00:00

I have had the privilege of writing about each Lost episode over the past two seasons. The show has produced some excellent episodes in that span, most notably Episode 4.05, The Constant. Desmond’s Season Four time trip (penned by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse) was by all means an outstanding achievement, an emotional and cerebral journey that reshaped the viewer’s outlook on the series. A full season later, audiences now have been treated with Episode 5.05, This Place is Death, written by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. This veteran Lost writing tandem brings it own unique blend of dark humor, introspection, and thematic connections to the show. In my opinion, This Place is Death is the finest Lost episode since the ending of Season Three, which concluded with the Kitsis/Horowitz classic Greatest Hits and the Lindelof/Cuse epic Through the Looking Glass. In its own way, this episode similarly alters perspectives on Lost’s past, present, and future. The Island means many things to many people, but quite possibly its most important meaning is expressed in those four words: “this place is death.”

The experience of watching This Place is Death nearly defies description. Many people have commented that the episode felt much longer than usual. The storytelling on display is remarkably succinct. The episode managed to compress four meaningful stories (Danielle and the Monster, Sun and Jin, Daniel and Charlotte, Locke and the Island) into a single hour. Rather than feeling disjointed, though, each of these stories links together beautifully, and offers its own take on that overarching theme expressed in its title. Another important sign of a masterful episode is the way in which the actors respond to the script. By my count, the episode included four truly great acting performances (Jeremy Davies, Daniel Dae Kim, Rebecca Mader, and Terry O’Quinn), along with a full complement of strong supporting turns. However, I think the best way for me to illustrate my feelings for the episode is not to praise the writing or the acting, but to make the following confession. For the first time, I find myself utterly intimidated by a Lost episode. As amazing as The Constant was, I still felt fairly confident that I could express my reaction to it in a single article. Not so for This Place is Death. I do not think that my words will be able to do it justice. I will begin, anyway.

EKO: If you don't mind, I will begin at the beginning. Long before Christ the king of Judah was a man named Josiah.
LOCKE: Boy, when you say beginning, you mean beginning.

The first segment of the episode connects two core pieces of Lost mythology that were introduced in the Pilot episode: the Monster and Danielle Rousseau. Part One of the Pilot offered the first glimpse at the power of the Island's supernatural enforcer, the Smoke Monster. In the first attempt to find rescue from the island, Jack, Kate, and Charlie ventured out into the jungle to find the plane’s transceiver. When it seemed as if their mission was accomplished, the Monster attacked for the first time, murdering the pilot and nearly preventing the team from recovering the radio. This Place is Death begins with a compressed version of comparable events, sixteen years earlier. Another strangely familiar group of people crashes onto the same island, and then ventures into the jungle in search of a radio transmitter. The Monster attacks the group on their way, to prevent them from reaching the equipment. Later in this episode, Robert echoes Danielle's memorable phrase that the Monster functions as a 'Security System' for guarding the Temple. Neither the Oceanic search party nor the French research team seemed to pose any direct threat to the Temple; the two groups of castaways were only looking for an escape route. Although Robert's description might be true, it does not offer a complete explanation of the Monster's behavior.

The Great Radzinsky used a different name for the creature, Cerberus, which offers another clue as to its purpose. In Greek mythology, Cerberus was the name given to the three-headed canine beast, which guards the gates of Hades, to prevent souls from escaping. No one who crosses into the underworld is ever supposed to return to the world of the living. Lost’s version of Cerberus seems to serve that same function for the Island. It possesses other abilities as well: the ability to re-animate corpses (Yemi and perhaps Christian), and to infect living bodies (Montand and Robert). In the seminal episode Walkabout, John Locke stared down the Monster face-to-face. Since that point, Locke has taken it upon himself to perform the task designated to Cerberus: to ensure that no one ever leaves the Island. It was Locke who eventually smashed that same transceiver, who detonated the Flame station, destroyed the submarine, killed Naomi, and turned a gun on his friends as they trekked to the radio tower. Locke may not be 'infected' in the same manner as Robert, but he has been acting as the willing agent of Cerberus for some time.

SHANNON: I'm alone now. On the island alone. Please, someone come. The others, they're … they're dead. It killed them. It killed them all.

Part Two of the Pilot concluded when the gang used the transceiver intercept the transmission from the radio tower. While the Monster in Part One served as a warning not to leave, Rousseau’s words in Part Two served to foreshadow the ultimate fate of the Oceanic passengers. The necessary corollary of the Island's command “You are not supposed to leave,” is the unspoken conclusion: “You are supposed to die here.” Jin’s rapid time-jumping in this episode accelerates our perception of the ultimate effect of the Island. One minute, you might be chatting about baby names, and the next minute, you might be forced to shoot your family members in the face. Rousseau had enough wits to outlive her team, but eventually Keamy (derived from Kimi, the Mayan symbol for Death) arrived to slaughter Danielle and her daughter. The one common link between Adam and Eve, the Black Rock, the Dharma Initiative, the French team, Henry Gale, the Nigerian plane, the Others, the Oceanic castaways, and the Kahana Freighter is that everyone dies on the Island. People on the Island do not merely grow peacefully into old age, leave behind a healthy family, and expire from natural causes. Instead, every character inevitably meets some horrible and violent end, when his work is complete. Death is the Island’s only Constant.

JACK: We're all here now. And god knows how long we're going to be here. But if we can't live together, we're going to die alone.

If the people on the Island have no power over Death, then what things can they control? The motif of ‘live together or die alone’ permeated the first four seasons, as the Oceanic crash survivors struggled to unite in their efforts to avoid death. Over that span, the tumultuous marriage of Sun and Jin has paralleled the ups and downs of the larger Island family. In Season Five, the divide among the group is wider than ever before. This particular story calls attention to the distance between Sun and Jin, not only on different hemispheres, but across decades of time. This episode employs night-and-day imagery to amplify this effect, but interestingly it casts Jin and the rest of the Island team in sunlight, while it surrounds Sun and everyone else with darkness.

This Place is Death forces Lost's preeminent couple into a novel predicament, which tests the bonds of their marriage. Jin witnesses a firsthand demonstration of the Island's power, and then he receives Charlotte's direct warning about the its nature. He resolves to live up to the same promise that Robert failed to keep: “I don't want anything to happen to us. To you, or to our baby.” On one hand, Sun and Ji Yeon can remain safe off the island, but she can never see Jin again. On the other hand, Sun can return to the Island, a place where Death can and probably will strike them soon. Essentially, Mr. and Mrs. Kwon were given the choice: would you prefer to die together or live alone? Jin chooses never to see his wife and daughter again, rather than put their lives in danger. Sun would prefer to risk her own death again on the island, rather than live the rest of her life apart from Jin. The husband and wife make opposite choices, each motivated by love of the other. Their wedding ring travels across an ocean of space and time to bind them together once again. Ultimately, Sun punches a one-way ticket back to the underworld, to join her husband, till death do them part.

DESMOND: Please, let me go back. Let me go back one more time. I'll do it right. I'll do it right this time. [...] I'll change it. I'll change it. -- Flashes Before Your Eyes

The journey to the underworld operates as a common theme throughout literature. For an epic hero like Odysseus of Homer’s Odyssey, the underworld serves merely an intermediary stage as part of a larger journey. Typically, the hero interacts with ghosts from the past, and receives visions of the future, before he moves on to the next phase. For other mythological figures, though, the underworld can serve as the focal point of the entire journey. The most famous example of such a character is Orpheus. In the Greek myth of Orpheus, his beloved young bride Eurydice suffers an untimely death, and then he ventures into Hades to bring her back to life. Desmond has long served as Lost’s version of Odysseus, and now Daniel Faraday has become the show’s sci-fi version of Orpheus. How far will Faraday go in his efforts to bring Charlotte back? Of course, he will try to warn her, and try to harness the temporal power of the Island to change the past. (I would not be surprised to see Daniel search for Jughead, to destroy the island some time between Charlotte’s departure as a child and her return as an adult. In doing so, Daniel may try to destroy Death itself.) Eventually, Orpheus was granted an opportunity to take Eurydice back from the underworld, on the sole condition that he must never look back at her on his way out. Tragically, Orpheus could not overcome the temptation, and he lost Eurydice once again. As Faraday himself explained: "You cannot change anything. You can't. Even if you tried to, it wouldn't work. [...] If we try to do anything different, we will fail every time." The same rules apply to ancient mythology as well as to Lost: death is more powerful than love.

The story of Charlotte Lewis by no means follows the path of the typical Lost character. (Depending on the chronology of the time jumps, she may have died even before she was born, or at least at a young age.) As a child, she received a message from Daniel, warning her that she would die if she ever returned to the island. Benjamin Linus, who is Death incarnate for the Dharma Initiative, murdered her entire people. Despite Daniel’s warning and her mother’s efforts to dissuade her (or, more accurately, probably because of those events), she spent her entire life trying to find This Place again, to find her Death. She immersed herself in study of ancient history, embracing the world of the dead rather than the living. She studied the Carthaginians, another race of people wiped away from existence by a group of Latin-speaking killers, the Romans. When she first appeared on-screen, in Season Four’s Confirmed Dead, she was shrugging off the sight of 324 bodies, and digging up skeletons with a morbid grin. She survived another brush with Linus, the Dharma killer, but he eventually killed her anyway (by turning the wheel that caused her fatal sickness). There is no morality here in her story, no redemption, no personal fulfillment. The only force at play in her life was Death itself. Charlotte’s entire life can be summarized by the memorable image from the beginning of the episode: an unstoppable black hand, dragging her down underground to her doom.

LOCKE: [It] kept saying they're dead, it killed them all, over and over? Is that a place you really want to lead people to? – The Greater Good

In addition to bringing death to Dharma, Benjamin Linus has been a destructive force for the Oceanic survivors. Linus shot Locke at the mass grave, he ordered the death of Charlie, and he destroyed everyone on the Freighter without a second thought. The ending of This Place is Death reveals the true source of the massive Island casualties of Season Five. (Daniel’s empirical breakdown of the situation early in the episode hints to this same conclusion.) The 'very bad things' that happened over the first five episodes did not occur because of the helicopter’s departure. The You in Because You Left refers to one man. Ben’s actions at the Orchid station not only cast out the Oceanic Six, but also tossed the Island’s inhabitants into temporal disaster. In his most important moment of the episode, though, Ben describes himself as a protector, not a killer: “If you had any idea what I’ve had to do to keep you safe, to keep your friends safe, then you’d never stop thanking me.” Ben’s outburst in response to Jack’s threat seems uncharacteristically sincere. As always, his words most likely are designed to conceal the truth. I suspect that the more honest phrasing of his sentence would be: “If you had any idea of the things that I’ve actually done to your friends, then you’d really want me dead.” Sayid, for one, distrusts Ben entirely, and he either knows or at least suspects that Locke did not die from suicide. In his fateful meeting with Bentham, perhaps Linus finally finished the job he started in The Man Behind The Curtain, to add John's body to his personal pile of corpses.

John Locke lived his life with hopes of becoming a great leader. At the end of Season Four, his dream appeared to come true. The Island had cast out his two rivals, Jack and Ben, and chosen him to lead the people left behind. The ending of This Place is Death reveals the true nature of the destiny he had been seeking for so long. He was chosen not as a leader, but as a martyr, the sacrifice that the Island demanded. His whole life had been pointing him towards his one great accomplishment, his death. In possibly the most heartbreaking moment of the entire series, Locke accepts his fate, without a single complaint. He loses everything in one scene, more than any character in this epic story called Lost. Locke loses his friends as the Island buries him under its surface; he once again loses the power to walk, in a remarkably painful fashion; he loses his beloved Island, never to return to it in living form; and ultimately he will lose his life. In exchange, he gains nothing, except the assurance that someone believed in him.

This Place is Death provides an onslaught of macabre imagery that one hardly would expect to find in an ABC prime-time drama: the innocent faces of Danielle Rousseau and her friends, ghosts trapped in the tragic prison of the past; the determined face of Jin, as he declares himself dead in an attempt to spare his wife and daughter; the pale face of Charlotte Lewis, spewing forth blood and random memories, as her brain slips through time; and the anguished face of John Locke, as he crawls willingly to the altar of his self-sacrifice. After This Place is Death, Locke will never see the Island again in this life. I do not think that I ever will see this place in the same way, either. According to Christian belief, the sacrifice of Jesus made it possible for his followers to enjoy eternal life. I doubt whether John's sacrifice will accomplish as much in this story, but his death ensures that when these characters die, they will at least die together. If death seems to be a given on Lost, then dying together might be the nearest thing possible to a happy ending.

Beyond Belief by Luhks

2009-02-08T23:15:00.001+00:00

From its inception, Lost has been preoccupied with the idea of revisiting the past. The prevailing episode structure, designed around flashbacks for a single character, explored the connections between a character’s history and the present. As the story expanded, the show began to revisit its own past in different ways, by crafting a web of literal and metaphorical connections between each of its characters. Lost adopts the position that no character can be understood in a fixed point in space and time, but only in relation to other characters and to the collective past. Season Five’s The Lie and Jughead adopt a new format, which contains only a single flashback during the opening scene. The on-island events of the episode still take the viewer into history, but through the storytelling device of time travel rather than flashback. The resulting structure has a contradictory effect on the narrative: the relationship between the island characters and the past becomes quite literal; the relationship between the island story and the off-island story becomes more figurative.

Even though the time travel story in Jughead physically inserts present day characters into the island’s history, it also includes many of the story's more traditional space-time connections. The episode begins with the birth of Charles Hume, who joins a quite exclusive club of characters (Aaron Littleton, Benjamin Linus, Ji Yeon Kwon, and John Locke) to be born on the show. Like all children, the mind of little Charlie is a blank slate, an opportunity for a brighter future. His name, however, indicates that he is intimately connected to his parents’ history: both to the man who kept them apart for so long, Charles Widmore; and to Charles Hieronymus Pace, the man who sacrificed himself so that they could be together once again. All people owe their existence to their predecessors, not only our mothers, fathers, and grandparents, but ultimately to every minor event in the chain of causation all the way back to the Big Bang. As Charles Widmore phrases it in this episode, we are all “involved in something that goes back many, many years.” (Anyone who has ever studied Latin, like Widmore, also will tell you that even a ‘dead language’ remains very much a living part of our English vocabulary.) No one can escape the inevitable ties to the past, either the happiest parts or the most unpleasant parts.

Desmond and Penelope remain fixed in the present day for the entire episode, but their star-crossed history pervades every conversation. Desmond has received a hidden message from his own past, a memory of his conversation with Daniel Faraday. The incident sends him away on a new odyssey, back to the place where his first journey began. The first present-day scene between Desmond and Penny highlights two opposite reactions to the trip down memory lane. Desmond looks out at the horizon with excitement and a sense of adventure; Penny focuses her eyes solely within their present family. For Penny, this return to their past renews every old wound: the heartbreak, abandonment, years of loneliness, and fear of the wrath of Charles Widmore. Desmond admittedly tries to “leave a wee bit out” of his recollections of his past. (His repressed memory of his encounter with Faraday depends upon this ability to forget certain things.) In their final scene of this episode, Penny convinces him that forgetting is not a solution, so they need to confront it head-on. The ghosts of the past always will re-emerge no matter how deep under the surface you try to bury them.

This newest chapter in the epic romance of Desmond and Penelope once again explores the limits of free will and predestination. From the audience’s perspective on the big picture, the predetermined course back to the island appears plainly, as if it were laid out for Desmond and Penny all along. (The viewer literally knows that everything is planned and written in advance.) Somehow, fate never forces their hands. The two characters themselves must still arrive at the destination through their own free decisions. Desmond’s namesake, the philosopher David Hume, posited the theory of compatabilism, which contends that there is indeed a successful marriage between free will and determinism. Hume argued that the laws of physical causation must govern the entire universe, and the human brain and body must be no exception. For any ‘why’ question on Lost, two separate and equally correct answers exist. Jughead answers the question: “why did Desmond and Penny travel to Los Angeles?”. As Locke would phrase it, they went there, because they were supposed to go there. As Jack would phrase it, they went there, because they chose to go there. Both the man of science and the man of faith are correct, here. Lost embraces the paradoxical notion that every event in space-time is rigidly predetermined, and yet the human will is perfectly free.

Another essential Lost literary reference, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (namesake of Lost character Eloise Hawking), is similarly preoccupied with the idea of determinism. His famous text chronicles mankind’s efforts to discover a Grand Unified Theory of the universe. Supposedly, if we perfected our understanding of all scientific laws (gravity, relativity, etc.), and if we knew the complete state of the universe at any given time, then we could predict everything that would ever happen. If scientific determinism holds true, then it applies to everything, including human behavior. At one point in the text, Hawking jokes about the potential implications of time travel in a deterministic universe: “While this would be fine for writers of science fiction, it would mean that no one’s life would ever be safe: someone might go into the past and kill your father or mother before you were conceived!”

The on-island story of Jughead adds a few more wrinkles in the show’s unified view of space-time laid out in the previous Desmond time-travel adventures, Flashes Before Your Eyes and The Constant. When Faraday and the rest of the team find themselves trapped in the past, they are not impossibly altering history, but inevitably fulfilling events that already occurred. The competing groups on the island alternate back-and-forth as prisoners to one another, but every character makes those individual decisions freely. Time travel stories disrupt the normal flow of cause-and-effect in a way that challenges human intuition. Almost every time travel story will encounter a few paradoxes along the way. (The word paradox does not derive from ancient Latin, but from the Greek for 'beyond belief.') With few exceptions, Lost has managed to avoid falling into the conventional time travel paradoxes. The most famous such example is known as the Grandfather Paradox, essentially the same issue that Hawking mentioned. Season Five of Lost has introduced the premise that it is possible to travel into the past, but it is not possible to kill anyone (or to destroy anything), if it did not occur during the original timeline.

(Jughead indicates that the writers of Lost also discovered the Great Britain Paradox, the new scientific principle that states that, even in a country with 58 million people, every character with a British accent must at some point interact with every other character with a British accent. This notion does not qualify as a paradox in the ordinary sense of the word, but it certainly seems beyond belief.)

Sawyer makes one such attempt to change history (although he is unaware at the time), by pointing a gun and firing it in the direction of Charles Widmore, who escapes through the jungle. Seemingly, if someone killed Widmore back in 1954, then the entire freighter disaster would be averted. Doing so, however, would create an impossible contradiction. Sawyer is incapable of murdering Charles Widmore in 1954, because if he succeeds, then he could not have traveled back to 1954 in the first place. Even if James had tied Widmore to a tree, aimed his gun from point-blank range, and pulled the trigger, no bullet would harm Young Charles. (Michael and Locke illustrated similar examples of this phenomena during Season Four.) For the sake of consistency, Widmore effectively must be invincible at least until 2008 when he interacts with Desmond. The Island offers the ultimate life insurance plan for anyone who has work to do with the future, whether good or evil.

The thought of changing the past holds great personal importance for Sawyer. Two full years have passed since a Lost episode revolved around him. (Season Three’s The Brig was technically a Locke flashback episode.) Conventional wisdom says that the death of Anthony Cooper inside the bowels of the Black Rock put an end to Sawyer’s revenge plotline. After all, death is the most permanent resolution one could ask for. Personally, I hope that Season Five will revive the grand-daddy of all Lost villains, the nemesis of James and John. The premiere episode highlighted James’ resignation at his inability to change the past (“I know what I can’t change!”). Ostensibly, James only referred to the destruction of the freighter. If he did somehow gain the ability to change the past, then he would most certainly try to do what he was powerless to do as a young child, to prevent the death of his mother.

Now, imagine the story implications if James and John encountered a young Anthony Cooper on the island during another flash. Sawyer’s emotional reaction would be uncontrollable. He would try everything in his power to murder Cooper, to stop Cooper from one day causing the death of his parents. James would fail every time. You cannot kill the man who created you, before he created you. Your very existence refutes that possibility. Amazingly, James would need to come to terms with the reality that even the act of killing Cooper will never change his family’s tragedy. Whatever happened, happened. Perhaps Cooper even assumed the name Sawyer because of his historic interactions with James. In that case, even the name Sawyer might become its own paradox: a metaphor for a cycle of revenge as one continuous loop with no beginning, no middle, and no end.

Although it is clear that Lost will avoid violating any variation of the Grandfather Paradox at all costs, the show’s time travel mythology still includes a few circular enigmas that defy our intuitive sense of cause and effect. The Constant included two such apparent paradoxes, and Jughead references both of them. The lab rat Eloise remembered how to navigate a maze hours before she learned it. Did Daniel ever teach Eloise to run the maze (which would only be possible if she forgot it soon after)? Daniel also sends a message to himself across time: “Set the device at 2.342, and it must be oscillating at 11 Hz.” How exactly did Daniel discover that information? He told himself to write it in his journal, because he found it written in his journal. Apparently, that spontaneous piece of information also spelled doom for Daniel’s next lab rat, Theresa Spencer, imprisoned inside her own memories. In all likelihood, these paradoxes are not the products of mere oversight, but intentional mysteries. Time travel on the show seems to have spontaneously created itself.

Many people have concluded that Daniel Faraday’s mother is Eloise Hawking, the elderly British woman last seen in the Los Angeles church with Benjamin Linus. Fans have theorized that Eloise is also Ellie, the younger British woman shown on the island during the 1950s. Daniel recognizes Ellie, because she ‘looks very much like someone he used to know’. The two characters share an awkward flirtatious moment that may be an homage to the classic time travel movie Back to the Future. In that film, protagonist Marty McFly travels back to year 1955, and unfortunately finds that his own mother has the hots for him. (Not to be outdone, Lost made sure to send its characters back exactly one year further into the past.) The fact that Daniel named his lab rat Eloise is either a sign of affection or disdain for his mother (or both, as is often the case). Throw in the family-style bickering between Daniel and Ellie, and the case becomes pretty strong. The most damning piece of evidence, though, is the fact that ABC somehow managed to find a young actress (Alexandra Krosney), who looks and sounds similar to her older counterpart (Fionnula Flanagan), but seems to give exactly the same quality of performance. Interpret that last statement however you wish.

Daniel’s historical interactions with his mother raise another bit of intrigue resembling the near-paradoxes from The Constant. During the episode, Ellie learns that Daniel and his people were visitors from the future, and then she apparently watches them vanish. If her scenes in Flashes Before Your Eyes and The Lie are any indication, then Eloise Hawking studied space-time for a significant portion of her life after that event. Then, she probably passed on much of her knowledge and interest in the subject to her son Daniel, who spent much of his life researching the possibilities of time travel. At what point in his life would Eloise come to conclusion that the funny little man from the future was her own son? Daniel’s obsession pointed him on a path back to the island, so that one day he will travel back into the past to fulfill the incident that sparked his mother’s interest all along. The lives of both mother and son were determined by the son’s actions in the distant future.

Jughead also continues the ongoing saga of Richard Alpert’s compass, which presents its own potentially unsolvable paradox. The apparent timeline works as follows. In 1954, Locke hands the compass to Alpert. At Locke’s suggestion, Richard then visits Locke on his date of birth in 1956. Five years later, Richard returns with the compass that Locke gave him, and asks him to identify it. Some time after 2005, Richard hands the compass over to Locke. John carries it with him back in time to 1954 to start the whole process over again. The obvious problem here becomes: at no point during this chain did any person sit down and build a compass. If the compass Richard gave to Locke is the same one Locke gave to Richard, then it was never created, but it merely existed outside of time. (The easy solution to this paradox is to assume that Richard must have lost or destroyed the original compass, acquired a new device some time over the years, and then he gave Locke that different one many years later.)

Personally, I hope that the mysterious origins of the compass remain unexplained. The compass itself already serves as a multifaceted image for predestination. The object is circular, but it is designed to point its characters only in one inevitable direction. The compass leads Richard to find Locke, and then it leads Locke back to Richard, to help the people of the island find their way. Another key problem with the compass paradox is that it the object itself must never change over the years. All objects ‘age’ over time, even if our senses cannot perceive the microscopic differences. Over fifty years, the compass would lose little bits and pieces of itself, and pick up dirt and other things along the way. Perhaps the compass serves as the key image for Richard Alpert himself, who apparently exists outside of time in his own way, as the island’s unchanging constant.

Throughout the entire Lost narrative, John Locke had always been a paradox of his own. Locke exhibits many inexplicably contradictory aspects: potent yet crippled, zealous yet skeptical, an individualist desperately seeking acceptance, and a man of great potential with a track record of failure. The events of Jughead now confirm what was hinted at in the season premiere. The entire course of Locke’s life is the result of his own circular, self-fulfilling prophecy. His destiny is the product of his own design. As I wrote about the season premiere: “In a unique way, Locke may become his own creator, his own metaphorical father. When the elder Locke interacted with the island’s past, he set off a chain of events that somehow resulted in the nurturing of the younger Locke, which Cooper never provided. That unbreakable steel blade we know as Locke was forged in the fire of his own will.” Much like his circular compass, Locke seems to have created himself from nothingness. His free will and his destiny are one and the same.

Not to be overlooked, one of the most important developments of the episode, was the introduction of Jughead itself, the American-made hydrogen bomb resting somewhere on the island. To quote Daniel: “You want to take care of this bomb? You bury it!” Timeline consistency requires that the island will be safe from nuclear annihilation until 2005. After that point, though, anything is possible. The buried bomb might serve any number of purposes in the story for the remaining two seasons. The power of the hydrogen bomb overshadows the destructive power of the Tempest station introduced last season. Our Lost characters will need a lot more than just gas masks to survive the wrath of Jughead. As Locke once reminded us, “nothing stays buried on this island for long.” If island paradoxes continue to pile up, then Jughead might become the ultimate Occam’s Razor to resolve them once and for all. Regardless, the Humes and the Hawkings and the Lockes and Lost writers would all agree that the island's fate has been determined already, whatever it might be.

The Motherland by Luhks

2009-02-08T22:48:00.003+00:00

In seasons past, the fathers of Lost have assumed center stage and pushed the mothers into the background. From the opening scene of Season Five, motherhood has started to play a more prominent role of the story. The first character shown on-screen was a woman who may or may not have been the mother of Miles. (The reveal of Miles’ long-term exposure to the island in this episode lends much credence to that theory.) Kate began the season with a pair of lawyers pounding on her door to remind her that she was not Aaron’s real mother. Locke began the season alone, until a statue of the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, fell from the sky. The Lie included a small reminder of Sun’s recent delivery, with the throwaway line that Ji Yeon is safely at home with grandma. That epsiode also culminated with an emotional exchange between Hurley and his mother. Thus far, Carmen Reyes is the only non-islander to expose the Oceanic Six Lie, and she accomplished that feat solely by virtue of maternal instinct. The opening scene of Jughead inducted Penelope Hume into the Mothers of Lost Club, and then chronicled Desmond’s attempts to track down the mother of Daniel Faraday. (If you accept the theory that the retro British Other Ellie is the current Space-Time Sheriff Eloise Hawking, then Faraday’s time-jumping may have linked him to his mother in a borderline paradoxical/incestuous way.)

The Kate-centric Episode 5.04, The Little Prince, once again highlights issues of maternity. As one would expect from the title, much of the drama surrounds the ongoing battle for custody of Aaron. Three additional mothers make appearances as well, one somewhat expected (Carole Littleton, longing for her lost daughter Claire), and two wholly unexpected (Claire herself, and Danielle Rousseau, pregnant with Alex). The title of the episode, a reference to the French children’s book Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, offered a variety of other connections to the episode’s content. Exupéry himself was a French aviator who survived a plane crash in the Sahara desert, and the narrator in his story does the same. The narrator soon meets the titular Little Prince, a special, young, blond-haired boy who traveled to earth from an (island-like) asteroid. Among other issues, the novel explores the gap between children and adults. The world of narrow-minded grown-ups contrasts against the simple wisdom of a child’s perspective. Similarly, Aaron finds himself wrapped up in the rather silly world of Lost’s adult relationships.

Lost's version of The Little Prince provides a classic nature-vs.-nurture debate on the meaning of motherhood, through the question of who rightfully should serve as Aaron’s guardian, in the absence of his parents. The episode offers two reminders that Claire intended to give up custody of Aaron, first from Kate’s words in the opening scene and later from Claire’s words in the revisited birth sequence. Eventually, Claire did abandon her son in the middle of the jungle, for as-yet-unexplained reasons. Claire still would have the strongest claim over Aaron, if she could be located somewhere on the plane of existence. Kate not only delivered the baby, but she has served as Aaron’s parent for almost the entire three years of his life. Can Kate ever become his real mother, and, if so, how many years would it require? Sun undisputedly is a real mother herself, but as far as the audience can tell, she has been spending more time as a cloak-and-dagger corporate vigilante than in child-rearing. Throughout the episode, Sun is the only character with physical possession of Aaron, and sometimes possession is nine-tenths. Jack shares both a genetic connection with Aaron and a few actual instances of parenting, but neither of those links are particularly strong. The grandmother, Carole Littleton, shares twice as many genes with Aaron as Jack does, but she does not even know that her grandson exists. Ben apparently has made a legal claim for custody of Aaron, and the courts often have the final say over custody. (In what is most likely a pure coincidence, Aaron’s biological father, Thomas, also bears a striking resemblance to Ben, so perhaps Linus also has some blood relation. In years past, I would never even consider such a theory, but the way Season Five has progressed, anything seems possible.)

The ultimate direction of the episode sends Kate on a collision course with Ben Linus, the secret client who sought custody of the child. Let this be a lesson for anyone who ever bets against Ben on a mystery question. (I was nearly convinced that Sun was pulling the strings, even after the convoluted Carole Littleton misdirection. My thinking actually was that Ben had already been used far too many times in the past to be used again here. I was wrong.) We can now add Daniel Norton esquire onto that long list of characters on Ben’s payroll. The Linus Corporation apparently is the only company still hiring in today’s economy. The final off-island scene concluded with a typical Ben Linus retort: “He's not your son, Kate.” Interestingly, the episode juxtaposes Ben’s statement about Aaron’s real parentage with the final scene, which reintroduces a young Danielle Rousseau into the story. The arrival of a pregnant Danielle on the island eliminates any lingering theories that Benjamin may have been Alex’s biological father. Ben should be the one person who understands Kate’s parental situation better than anyone, but he has never been one to sympathize. Ben does not see Aaron as a little prince the way other characters do. He only cares about Machiavelli’s conception of The Prince (i.e. himself). For him, the entire Oceanic Six are nothing more than pawns for him to move into place on his global chess board.

If anyone is to resolve this dispute over Aaron, we might need King Solomon to order the child cut into pieces. Of course, things might be simpler on that crazy old island. It seems that time travel would make it possible for multiple Aarons to exist at the same time. In perhaps the boldest addition yet in the show’s time travel mythology, the island offers Locke and Sawyer a chance to revisit past island moments. Neither Locke nor Sawyer interferes with these prior events, but the show certainly has revised its own history. From now on, anyone who goes back to watch Deus Ex Machina and Do No Harm must do so with the creepy realization that there are two Lockes and two Sawyers (and two Juliets) running around on one island. How many other times has a future version of a character been lurking nearby, just out of sight beyond the dense foliage? How many other classic moments will be altered in this way before the series is complete?

When Locke and Sawyer witness the famous hatch light shining into the night sky, they present an intriguing contrast of perspectives. In Season One, Locke often served as the mentor to younger characters, always concerned with helping them find their own way. The most dramatic example occurred in the seminal episode The Moth, in which Locke encouraged Charlie to struggle through heroin withdrawals. As he explained, "Struggle is nature's way of strengthening." After Boone's tragic accident, the old John Locke could have used some guidance of his own. Essentially, Season Five Locke finds himself in the position to assist Season One Locke in his moment of need. Lost's time travel determinism of course dictates that he could not interfere even if he tried, but he still freely, consciously decides to take a laissez-faire approach. His explanation here is similar to his perspective from The Moth: "I needed that pain to get to where I am now." In Locke's view, even the most intense human suffering can play an essential role in a higher purpose.

Sawyer plays the part of the skeptic to Locke's philosophy, the same role that he has served since the beginning of Season Four. From Sawyer's worldview, suffering is never a good thing. If you have any opportunity to "save yourself from a world of pain," then you should take it. (Sawyer's suggestion of a pleasure/pain dichotomy serves as the basis for utilitarianism, a perspective shared by theorist Jeremy Bentham. Perhaps Locke might come around towards Sawyer's utilitarian thinking rather than vice-versa.) Locke once referred to himself ironically as “an ordinary man, meat and potatoes,” who “lives in the real world.” However, Sawyer truly fits the part of the everyman, devoted entirely to earthy concerns. The current season casts him as the odd man out in a team of specialists: Locke, the veteran hunter and mystic; Charlotte, the anthropologist and dead language expert; Daniel, the physicist; Miles, the spiritual medium; and Juliet, the fertility doctor. The other five members all operate in the realm of adult ideas. Sawyer, by contrast, focuses only on physical concerns (food, beer, supplies, safety), as well as emotional ones. James operates on the base levels of developmental psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. He was deprived of the full opportunity to grow up, like the rest of his companions. His perspective on things is similar to the way a child would see the situation. Exupéry, author of Le Petit Prince, might argue that the minds of children often possess more common sense than their adult counterparts.

James himself, though, soon fell into his own world of pain. More than anything, the Island loves to twist the knife when it gets the chance, to pile on misery to a character already crushed by circumstances. Sawyer’s fleeting vision of Kate and Aaron magnifies his loneliness. For consistency’s sake, the scene adds no additional dialogue as he witnesses the birth of Aaron. It leaves the audience to interpret whatever must have been going on in James’ mind, with the editing of the scene and Holloway’s reaction shots as the only clues. Although poor Claire is the one going through labor, Kate is also a true mother at that moment, at least from Sawyer's perspective. When he sees Kate, overcome with joy, holding that baby boy in her hands, the sight must remind him of his own mother. He sees his original lost love, the one that he has been lamenting for thirty years, not just thirty hours. The image must also remind him Cassidy and Clementine; it demonstrates the type of parental happiness he missed when he consciously chose to avoid his own daughter.

Moreover, the scene also highlights his second missed opportunity to embrace fatherhood. A few weeks ago on the island, he had referred to the prospect of Kate with a baby as “the worst thing in the world.” In Sawyer’s mind, he can only associate childhood with pain. The Island has shown him that starting a new family might have been the best thing in the world for him, perhaps the only means through which to heal his deepest wounds. He twice gave up the chance at that life, and now he understands what he missed. The scene still manages to mix some hope along with the despair. Kate’s words, directly from the original scene, take on new layers of meaning in the context of the Season Five story: “You're not alone in this. We are all here for you.” These words to Claire double as a fateful message to Sawyer himself in his present situation. The event itself serves as a reassurance that she is still out there thinking of him somewhere, no matter how far apart in space and time they might seem.

Kate delivers the most pregnant line of all (pun intended) immediately afterward: “This baby is all of ours.” In the original birth scene, both Jin and Charlie were present. The shots used in this episode feature only on Claire, Kate, and Sawyer (perhaps implying that 'all of ours' refers to those three people). Many images from Season Four suggested an intimate symbolic connection between Kate, Aaron, and Sawyer. During the initial episodes of that season, Kate believed she was pregnant with Sawyer’s child, and the idea grew inside of her. As the season closed, Sawyer came running out of the jungle to hand-deliver a different baby to her. Aaron entered Kate's life precisely at the time when she lost Sawyer. I also would argue that it is no coincidence that the actor chosen to play young Aaron is almost a duplicate of the young James Ford in Season One’s Outlaws. Kate always had viewed Sawyer himself as a child, by looking past his outside persona to see the vulnerable James Ford underneath, the little boy in need of nurturing. She has come to see Aaron as the new living embodiment of James, which partially explains why she grew so attached to him.

Of course, the more relevant interpretation of 'all of ours' is its originally intended meaning: Aaron is a member of the larger Island family. These words also take on added weight in the context of Season Five. Events off the island highlight the dozens of people have staked some claim in Aaron’s life, and made a lasting impact on his future. Aaron offers an interesting case study in the aggregate contributions that comprise one single human being. The blood of Carole Littleton, the abandonment of Thomas, the prognostications of Malkin, babysitting by Locke and Hurley, kidnappings by Ethan and Rousseau, Charlie’s many sacrifices, Christian taking Claire with him in the middle of the night, Sawyer carrying him from the jungle to Kate, the handoff to Sun and the narrow escape at the freighter, the Oceanic Six Lie that protected Kate’s custody, bedtime stories with Uncle Jack, and now Ben’s attempt to seize him … all of these things add up to that little prince sitting in the car-seat. The old cliché about child-rearing says that “it takes a village,” but in Aaron’s case, it takes an entire Island. Although the show regards Aaron as special, you could make an equally long (although not nearly as dramatic) list for just about any person. Like Aaron's life (and evidently much like Miles), many of the most important events that shape a person's life occur well before any of us can remember them.

Season Five’s current preoccupation with motherhood seems to foreshadow upcoming revelations for the larger island mythology. The pregnancy problem still looms as one of the show's biggest mysteries. The first four episodes emphasize quite possibly the last three people ever born on the island: Charlotte, Alex, and Aaron (plus a possible fourth, if you include Miles). If our time-jumping fertility expert, Juliet, can survive her bloody jet-lag, she might find the clues needed to understand island birth. In the mean time, though, the final scene of this episode gives us two examples of dead characters, reborn on the island. (The name on the side of Ben’s van, Canton/Rainier, serves as a not-so-subtle anagram for Reincarnation.) Danielle Rousseau is dead in the present, but born again in the past for the purposes of the story. Jin, however, seems to have experienced a more literal rebirth, floating around in the primordial ocean of space-time that surrounds the island. To date, Jin has survived a plane crash and two separate boat explosions miles offshore. He now surpasses Mikhail as Lost’s resident Rasputin.

Perhaps the motif of motherhood serves as an image for the Island itself. All of the characters are in some sense born of the island, whether literally born like Aaron, or figuratively re-born many times over, like Jin and certainly like Locke. The Island, however, has not been a very positive force in the lives of many of its children (poor Boone comes to mind here, along with Danielle, Alex, and the entire French team). The Island not only has the power to give life, but also the power to take away life whenever it pleases. Ultimately, which frequently repeated maternal metaphor will provide more insight into the Island's true nature? Will it be the Virgin Mary statues that keep re-appearing in Locke's journey? Or will it be Sawyer's useful description for everything and everyone on the island: "Son of a bitch!"?

Two-Faced Liars by Luhks

2009-01-29T02:39:00.004+00:00

Since the first season, honesty has always been a scarce commodity for Lost characters. For every instance of a character’s confession, it seemed that a few more buried secrets took its place. For every example of sincere cooperation, you could guarantee that a handful of cons, deceptions, and betrayals would soon follow. Things started on a small scale in the first two seasons, with petty crimes and infidelities scattered throughout the flashbacks and island interactions. Benjamin Linus, Juliet Burke, and the rest of the Others escalated the level of deceit as things moved into Season Three, and made the crash survivors look like amateurs by comparison. Season Four then introduced two massive global conspiracies into story: first, the staged flight 815 wreckage at the bottom of the ocean; and then the Oceanic Six cover story (a lie to conceal the other lie). Misdirection has become a way of life both for the characters and the Lost writers, who manipulate perceptions of truth with more skill than Anthony Cooper himself.

The second episode of Season Five, with its decidedly straightforward title The Lie, offers perhaps the series’ most thorough examination of this recurring motif. The episode begins by sending the story back to the formative stages of the Oceanic Six Lie. Kate, Sun, Sayid, Hurley, and Jack all respond in subtly different ways to the situation, and each one participates in the scheme for deeply personal reasons. The conversation arrives at a unanimous conclusion: they need to lie, because it’s the only way to protect those left behind from Charles Widmore. In those immortal words once spoken by Dr. Shephard (perhaps the only good thing ever to arise from Stranger in a Strange Land): “That’s what they say. That’s not what they mean.” As Hurley points out straight away, the logic behind their Lie never even made much sense; Widmore would seem to be just as likely to find the island no matter what story they told. The reasons stated on the surface serve as a mere pretext to disguise their true motivations underneath. These five co-conspirators are even incapable of being honest with each other about their collective dishonesty.

The sheer quantity of lies on the show places a heavy burden on the cast members. Although acting itself is a more complex form of lying, playing the part of a liar presents an even greater challenge. The actor must present two faces at the same time, each with an opposite meaning. The performance must successfully communicate to the viewer when a lie is being told, but it still must appear genuine enough so that the audience can also believe that other characters would be convinced by it. The proper balance can be nearly impossible to find. By and large, though, the gifted collection of regular cast members excel when placed in these situations. The opening scene offered each of these five stars an opportunity for ambivalence, and the rest of the episode enabled them to explore those conflicting motives more fully.

Kate is the first character to agree with the Locke/Shephard cover story, and she definitely required the least persuasion. The physical setup of the scene frames her off to the side, already aligned with Jack, while the other three characters huddle together on a bench. With little hesitation, she simply answers “Yeah” when asked to go along with the Lie. The helpless infant resting in her arms also goes a long way towards explaining why this decision was so easy for her. Of all the characters, Kate stood to benefit the most by participating in the Lie. Kate’s dilemma became a fairly simple choice between accepting her past and embracing her future. The Lie presented her with the opportunity for an almost entirely clean slate, the chance to reinvent herself in a unique way. Kate could not steal someone else’s name, as she tried to do during Season One, but she could create a new identity. Instead of Kate Austen the Murderer (destroyer of life), she could become Kate Austen the Mother (protector of life). This fugitive so accustomed to running away from her past, finally found a future life worth running towards. By denying the events of the island, she also spares herself from revisiting the emotional pain from the island, and the memories of two people who might haunt her, Claire and Sawyer.

Later scenes in Los Angeles put this contrast between Kate’s two identities on display. The face of Maternal Kate appears first, a portrait of utter bliss. Aaron allows her vicariously to find the beauty in activities as mundane as pushing an elevator button. She continues to show her contented motherly face as she trades pleasantries with Sun, mother of another young child. Steadily, though, Sun shifts the topic of conversation from the future generation, to the older generation. First, Sun suggests that Kate should ‘take care of’ the threat to Aaron. Initially, Kate reacts with denial: “What kind of a person do you think I am?”. Sun responds with a not-so-subtle reminder of Jin’s death. The face of Murderer Kate re-emerges, and, probably for the first time in years, Ms. Austen must examine her past. She could fool the entire world, even the criminal justice system, without much difficulty, but she cannot deceive Sun, an accomplice in the Lie. Kate did not murder Jin, but she is indeed a murderer. It was not the first time that Kate had seen someone else explode and then walked away unscathed. Although Kate never said she was sorry for intentionally blowing up Wayne, she does offer an apology (seemingly a sincere one) for her role in Jin’s death.

Sun is the only character who refrains from speaking at all during the initial debate over the Lie. She assents to the lie by nodding silently. The quietest person in the room will often prove to be the most dangerous. In the Season Four finale, which depicts the immediate chronological aftermath of this scene, Sun also keeps her thoughts to herself. Her companions do not suspect a thing from harmless Mrs. Kwon, but the cold blood of Paik still flows in her veins. Sun, it would seem, agreed to participate in the Lie, as part of her own desire to deceive and betray her partners. Sun’s knowledge of their Lie gives her leverage, which she can use at any time to influence the other members of the Oceanic Six. She has no quarrel with Sayid or Hurley, of course, and her attention focuses squarely on Jack and Kate. (Judging from her later conversation with Kate, I suspect that Sun exploited this position already, and she was the mysterious client who demanded a maternity test. Sun is out for blood, and she demands more than just a small sample.)

During her pre-island life, Sun successfully concealed a double life. Within her marriage, she maintained the veneer of a faithful wife for Jin’s benefit, while she was unfaithful outside of it. Sun now utilizes those same skills in the present time for a different purpose. The outward image of calmness conceals that same screaming, anguished expression from the helicopter, just below the surface. Please bear with me while I make a rather improbable (but, I think, meaningful) comparison here to an obscure little movie you might have seen last year. Two months after Yunjin Kim’s piercing scream aboard the helicopter, audiences were treated to another memorable ‘No!’ moment, from Aaron Eckhart of The Dark Knight. (Warning: The remainder of this paragraph contains spoilers for that film.) During the 2008 Batman epic, Harvey Dent suffers a tragedy that unleashes his alter-ego, known as Two-Face. Dent was an essentially decent person, forced to witness his significant other destroyed in an explosion, while rendered powerless to save her. After surviving the incident, he became consumed with a quest for revenge on the people he held responsible, those who made the decisions that caused her death. Sun’s transformative event shares almost all of the same elements. Now, the question becomes, what manner of revenge does Sun seek against Jack? Dent was not content with killing Gordon, but he wanted Gordon to lose the person he loved most, to force him to suffer in the same way he did. Could this example become the most fitting model for Sun’s revenge? She could have spent the past years plotting an end game that recreates the freighter disaster, and forces Jack to lose Kate in the same way she lost Jin.

Out of the five principal characters, Sayid’s motivations for participating in the lie most closely match the official reasons. Uniquely among Lost characters, Sayid consistently shows the ability to sort through all of the complexities of the big picture, and to focus only on the most relevant issues. At his core, he is a man of action and facts, not of words and fictions. His decision-making process manages to bypass the usual politics and focus only on consequences. During the opening scene, the key question in Sayid’s mind was: what course of action will lead to the best results? Or, more accurately in light of their quandary, what course of action will be likely to lead to the fewest catastrophic results. In the beginning of the debate, Sayid feels conflicted about the merits of the lie. As the scene progresses, he mentally evaluates the potential risks of their two options. Ultimately, he decides, “I don’t believe we have a better choice.” Whatever reason tipped his scales in that direction remains unstated in the scene, but the episode offers a few clues as to his real deciding factor.

Precisely when Sayid makes his final decision to uphold the Lie, he is looking right at his good friend Hurley. His gaze suggests an almost paternal affection for the big kid before him. I would argue that Sayid did not choose to partake in the cover-up as he said to protect the people that they left behind, but to protect the people right in front of him. The reasoning works as follows: lying about the plane crash might help the people on the island, and it might not. The island itself vanished into thin air, so Sayid does not have any control over what happens on the island. The Lie probably would not harm the people’s chances of survival on the island, but it most definitely would improve the odds for the people who escaped. If he returned to civilization and spoke the truth about Widmore, then he would essentially place a target on his own back, as well as on Hurley, Nadia, and anyone else any of them cared about. The alternative to the Lie would be the Truth, and the Truth would escalate the danger. Thanks to a tranquilizer dart, Sayid spends the majority of the episode unconscious. Sayid’s reaction when he finally awakens in the hospital reveals this same underlying motivation: preservation of others. His number one priority reveals itself in the question, “Where’s Hurley?”. Sayid failed to protect Shannon and Nadia and Elsa in the past, and he cannot take much more loss. Protecting the people on the island seemed to be an impossibility after they left, so protecting his other friends became his the only tangible goal.

Hurley gradually has transformed into a more prominent character as the series has progressed. For the second straight season, an episode focuses on Hurley before any other character. Hugo serves as both the moral and emotional center for the opening scene that formulates the Lie. The other members of the Oceanic Six fail to convince him that the Lie will help protect the people left behind on the island, but he eventually agrees for a different reason. Jack asks: "You think anyone's gonna believe that... believe any of it? They're gonna think you're crazy." When Sayid refuses to join him, Hurley submits under the burden of popular vote. Hugo has no hidden agendas here, other than his two most powerful driving forces, his conscience and his loyalty to his friends. Even though none of those friends reciprocate the same loyalty, he still agrees to go along with them. He judges that the emotional weight of lying would eat him from within, but the feeling of being all alone in the world would be even more damaging.

The theme of Hurley's insanity has evolved through each season. The episodes Dave and The Beginning of the End both suggested that immense survivor guilt caused his mind to break away from reality. The Lie adds a slightly different perspective on the source of his madness, which emphasizes his loneliness. Two scenes with David and Carmen Reyes highlight how The Lie itself created a gaping chasm between Hurley and his parents. By nature, Hurley is incapable of deceiving to his loved ones successfully, as both of them see right through him. The way his friends forced him to lie created a rift between them as well. Hurley found himself without a single person in the world, with whom he could act like himself and be perfectly honest. As a solution, he imagined himself new friends, the ghosts of people who died on the island. It is no mistake that Ana-Lucia visits him at a moment when he feels alone, unable to talk to Sayid. In a remarkably sad way, Charlie, Mr. Eko, and Ana-Lucia became his only true friends left. Given the choice between insanity and loneliness, Hurley chooses insanity.

In his efforts to persuade Hurley to join the Lie, Dr. Shephard mentions what is possibly the most sensible justification for the Lie: even if they told everyone the truth about the island, no one would believe them, and people would think they were crazy. This appeal specifically targets Hurley, but it also reflects his own state of mind on the matter. From the Pilot through There’s No Place Like Home, Jack had been confronted with situations that contradicted his view of the universe. The most dramatic example occurred in his last moments near the island, before it vanished completely. He responded to this miraculous event with a direct, immediate denial. Jack's worldview, which he cultivated during his study of medicine, rests upon some basic principles. Whenever Jack observes what appears to be a miracle, he must make one of two choices. One one hand, he can deny the event, distrust his own senses, and dismiss it as insanity. On the other hand, he can believe his own eyes. If he chooses to believe, then he must also reject everything that he already knows about the world. In Hurley’s case, the stress of lying pushed him towards madness. For Dr. Shephard, the opposite holds true: lying for years served as his own self-prescribed Clonazepam medication. Jack choose sanity over honesty, but we know he eventually would lose both.

Flash-forwards from previous seasons revealed how the transition into a man of faith nearly destroyed his life. The consequences of becoming a believer destroy the foundation on which Jack built his entire identity. The old Jack knew for a fact that he did the right thing by trying to rescue the people from the island. The new Jack has accepted that he made a mistake, and he was not serving the best interests of his friends after all. The old Jack knew for a fact that there was no such thing as destiny, and no higher power than humanity. The new Jack has accepted that there are forces in the universe outside human control, and that he must have faith in a larger plan. Most importantly, though, the old Jack knew for a fact that when people die, they stay dead. The new Jack is still trying to wrap his head around the last one. The possibility of raising the dead still scares the hell out of him ("He's dead, isn't he?"). If the man inside the coffins can return, then it means that Jack must confront Locke (and Christian) in the future. When Jack finally meets them face to face, he must take a long look into the mirror himself, and realize that he was never much different from those crazy old men all along.

No Lost actor uses more faces than Matthew Fox, and no Lost actor uses the same face as often as Michael Emerson. In both cases, the style of the actor suits the demands of playing the character. Instead of displaying a wide variety of emotions, Ben tries to conceal his emotions as often as possible. Rarely does any other character, or even the audience, catch a glimpse at his true self. His poker face is always a means to an end: to prevent anyone else from gaining information that they could exploit, and to intimidate others by showing no possible weaknesses. In The Lie, Ben once again maintains that traditional facade, during his conversations with Jack (and Jill, believe it or not). The manipulations continue as usual for him, at least until his confrontation with Hurley. For once, Ben speaks to a person with utter sincerity, and he lays his cards out on the table for Hurley to see. Ben's sales pitch to the island ("You'll never have to lie again.") reflects not only an insight about Hurley, but the comment might reflect his own fatigue with dishonesty. In an ironic reversal, Ben suffers the same fate as the Boy Who Cried Wolf. After so many years, Ben's attempt at truth-telling (with that little forced smile) became even less convincing that his lies, and Hugo calls his bluff incorrectly. The final scene of the episode, a meeting with Ms. Hawking, casts Ben into one of his scarce moments of vulnerability. The man who always seems to have all of the answers must resort to lighting a few prayer candles and begging for guidance from a higher authority.

No Lost episode would be complete, however, without the ultimate face of Lost, the island itself. As Ben and the Oceanic Six race against time to return to their home, the events on the island reinforce the urgency of their return. Ben's exceedingly positive recruitment angle distorts the reality of the situation. The island might be the place where these people finally can be honest with each other, but it is also a place where very bad things tend to happen. Lies serve no purpose for Rose, Bernard, Juliet, and Sawyer in this episode (Sawyer even tells his interrogators, "I'll tell you whatever you want to know!"). However, you never know just when you might be transported through time, and then suffer through an ambush of flaming arrows that kills half of your friends, followed by an encounter with a British badass named Jones who considers it an act of mercy to cut off only one of your hands. These things happen. When the situation appears to be at its worst, the island sends its own version of the Deus Ex Machina, its weapon, its face, Mr. John Locke himself. As the time travel plot continues, how many other great past deeds will this hero perform through the island's history?

Although Episode 5.02 The Lie aired immediately after Because You Left, the story stands out on its own with many examples of classic Lost storytelling. Personally, I had some difficulty evaluating the two episodes in my mind until I viewed them both separately. Many elements that seemed odd or meaningless at first glance carried deeper resonance when put into context. I would like to mention one final such observation before closing. A significant portion of the episode's plot focused on the efforts to revive Sayid from near death. In dealing with this story, the episode included both-low brow imagery (the Expose reference and the Weekend-at-Bernie's-style sunglasses), and some images that carry great gravitas (the crucifixion crosses and Virgin Mary paintings in Casa de Reyes) to the same effect. This plot line concluded when Jack revived Sayid inside the hospital, and I suspect that the instance foreshadows a future scene. Will the season conclude with Jack bringing Locke back from the dead, and, if so, what means will he use to effect this miracle? The answer to this question, as with everything else in Season Five of Lost, is only a matter of time.

Very Bad Things by Luhks

2009-01-27T01:43:00.003+00:00

As a general rule when analyzing an episode, I try to refrain from mentioning Lost’s two executive producers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. There are many reasons that I try to follow this rule. First of all, the two producers are students of the Benjamin Linus School of Truth-Telling. Second, I disapprove of the manner in which they promote the show, essentially by declaring themselves as the definitive authority on its interpretation. No artist has exclusive control over the meaning of his work, especially not in an intensely collaborative process like television. Dozens of artists play a role in crafting each episode: creators, producers, directors, writers, cast, and even crew. Each artist himself rarely becomes aware of the full implications of his work. For better or worse, though, no one now can deny that Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have appointed themselves as the ultimate auteurs of this massive work. Season Five of Lost kicked off at 8 pm on Wednesday with what may prove to be an worrying sight for the future of the show: these two producers on the television screen, telling their viewers what the show is about. I realize that Lost: Destiny Calls was merely another clip show, intended to draw in casual viewers, but the show itself still struck me as odd. I am fairly sure they have done similar things before in the past, but even still, I cannot ever recall a time when Lindelof and Cuse made themselves such a prominent part of the viewing experience.

If the story of Because You Left proved anything, though, it confirmed the age-old wisdom that all rules are meant to be broken. (The show managed to follow Faraday’s immutable laws of time travel only for a few minutes before it introduced Desmond as the exception to the rule. It might not be long before the exception becomes the rule.) Thus, I will break one of my own rules, and begin with a direct quote from Lindelof and Cuse about Season Five: “The show is finally at the point where it can answer more questions than it poses.” Judging by the first two episodes, his statement seems to be true. Over the past few seasons, the storytelling model has transformed steadily from question mode into answer mode. Different fans will disagree about the quality of these different incarnations of Lost. Personally, my heart sank when I heard that statement. The viewers must sacrifice wonder for clarity, and I do not think the trade is even. I have always found Lost questions to be infinitely more interesting than Lost answers.

Of course, I would never mention this clip show, unless I also thought it made some relevant impact on the episodes that followed. One of the most notable aspects of Because You Left (as well as its follow up, The Lie) was the way in which the clip show seemed to continue well past 9 pm. The episode’s opening segment was a mammoth 12-minute effort, which included four scenes in three time periods. One of these scenes literally began with a clip of the movement of the island, images ripped straight from the Season Four finale. The makers of the show prefaced this clip, just one of its many narrative time jumps with a ‘Three Years Ago’ title card. (The second episode begins with another ‘Three Years Ago’ tag, which seems particularly unnecessary because the first scene had not even started yet.) This needless flashback, with its needless time stamp, contributed to quite an awkward opening.

Because You Left’s titular scene between Jack and Ben included not one, but two, flashbacks recycled from the Season Four finale. The first flashback showed Sawyer and Juliet, in a moment that neither Jack nor Ben witnessed; the second flashback reinforced what will likely prove to be another of Ben’s lies about ‘the last time he saw Locke’. Why do I think that he is lying? His lips were moving. (Later, The Lie inserted another superfluous flashback, to the destruction of the freighter, into a conversation between Kate and Sun.) The premiere episode also recapped many past events in its dialogue, most notably in Juliet’s pithy summary of the hatch. (The second episode concluded with Hurley’s succinct summary of the show’s entire plot.) While each of these inclusions can be defended on some level, it seemed as if this exposition was primarily intended for new viewers, or for people who have forgotten key elements. There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to appeal to casual and dedicated viewers at the same time, but no one can deny that such a compromise can lead to some problems. Within a story that moved too quickly for character introspection, the show also crammed in an unprecedented amount of backtracking.

Episode 5.01 borrowed even more elements from the recap show that aired before it. Just as the clip show presented the main characters in a countdown format, the premiere episode also offered a series of superficial re-introductions to each of its characters. To save precious time, characters were grouped in convenient pairs: Jack and Ben, Sawyer and Juliet, Rose and Bernard, Kate and Aaron, Sun and Widmore, Hurley and Sayid, Locke and Richard, Daniel and Charlotte, Desmond and Penny, Miles and Sarcasm. The majority of their conversations consisted of thinly-disguised reiterations of past events. In particular, the Jack-Ben, Hurley-Sayid, Sun-Widmore conversations are little more than carbon copies of scenes from the Season Four finale. Ben tells Jack once more why they need to bring everyone back, Sayid again explains to Hurley his ‘paranoia’ after Bentham’s death, and Widmore even offers the explicit details of his entire exchange with Sun from last season. If there were any viewers that did not know about Sawyer’s sacrifice on the helicopter and the destruction of the freighter, then they heard him discuss it not once, but twice. For those people unclear about Daniel’s role, we got to watch Sawyer’s interrogate him to learn: he’s our physicist, the guy who spent his entire life studying space-time. Why were Rose and Bernard separated initially? So that when they were reunited, viewers would understand that they are a couple. Who’s Charles Widmore, you ask? He’s the-guy-who’s-been-searching-for-the-island-for-like-20-years, of course.

I would even go as far as to argue that the blood test plotline from Kate’s opening scene was merely a pretext to explain to new viewers that Aaron is not her biological son. If so, expect that little story to resolve itself quickly. The writers of this episode (none other than Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse themselves) left no chances for confusion. Because You Left was Lost, Cliff’s Notes style. An even more egregious example came later with the blatant re-introduction of Miles’ abilities during the second episode, rendering his old scenes pretty useless. The final seconds of Because You Left close with one of the weakest cliffhangers in the entire series. After this list of redundancies, the last lines of the first episode finished with yet another one, which offers a microcosm for how the entire episode was written. Desmond: “We’re leaving.”; Penny: “Leaving to go where?”; Desmond: “Oxford.” Anyone watching the episode could have answered that question for him, because his destination had already been revealed about two minutes beforehand. The skipping record metaphor is beginning to make sense for me.

(Why was the episode so repetitive? The show wanted to integrate or re-integrate as many people as possible, because so many people had stopped watching the series. As the esteemed Doc Jensen pointed out, the title of the episode Because You Left doubled as a reference to viewers who abandoned the show. In an ironic twist, though, the Season Five premiere earned some of the lowest ratings ever for the series. Despite all of these compromises to make the show accessible to new viewers, the ratings actually indicate that only the core audience was watching anyway. All those potential newbies were busy watching American Idol.)

This unprecedented degree of re-exposition might be tolerable, if not for another, even more glaring feature of the episode. After the season’s introductory clip show presented a series direct explanations from Lindelof and Cuse about the show’s meaning, these didactic question and answer sessions leaked onto the script pages as well. As the past few seasons have progressed, Lost has introduced more characters that serve as direct mouthpieces for the show’s writers, to deliver information to the audience. Ben Linus has served this role the most frequently, as he has gradually shared his authoritative answers to questions about the island. The use of Ms. Hawking in Season Three’s Flashes Before Your Eyes was the most blatant example of this technique. By all indications, she solely exists to tell the audience information. (Surprise! She’s back for more.) To a lesser extent, Richard Alpert, Daniel Faraday, Matthew Abbadon, and Christian Shephard also filled comparable functions in different episodes. Whenever a character or the audience needs to know how something works, the easiest solution is to introduce some partially omniscient character, who can state the truth.

By my count, Because You Left incorporates a grand total of four of these mouthpiece characters for its two writers. First, Pierre Chang explains the source of the time travel phenomenon to a construction worker. Then, Ben must explain to Jack more rules for returning to the island. Next, Faraday explains the principles of time-jumping to Sawyer, and the explains the exception to Desmond. Finally, Richard Alpert must explain hastily to Locke why he needs to die. (The Lie concludes with a fifth, Ms. Hawking herself, who actually serves a mouthpiece behind another mouthpiece, Ben. Perhaps she is in turn a mouthpiece for Jacob, who is a mouthpiece for the island. In the end, it makes no difference, because Lindelof and Cuse are the real ventriloquists here, dictating down to us from the top of this hierarchy.) Perhaps I suffer from nostalgia, but I do not remember this style of writing in Lost’s formative years. Are the days gone, when Lost episodes showed mysterious things and allowed the audience to craft their own explanations for them? Has Lost become a monotheistic experience instead, where all answers must stem from the same divine authority? Lost fans have been placed into the same frustrating experience that of John Locke’s entire life: just waiting around for someone to tell us what he’s supposed to do (or think) next.

The wall between writers and viewers nearly collapsed during the season’s opening scene. The initial monologue from Pierre Chang has a great deal of audacity (as Charles Widmore loves to say). Chang’s response to the discovery of the frozen wheel is notable not only for the reasons mentioned above, but also as a declaration of Lost’s new direction.

CHANG: This station is being built here because of its proximity to what we believe to be an almost limitless energy. And that energy, once we can harness it correctly, it's going to allow us to manipulate time.
FOREMAN: (Chuckles) Right. Okay, so, what? We're gonna go back and kill Hitler?
CHANG: Don't be absurd. There are rules, rules that can't be broken.

Within the very first scene of the season, the show leaped farther into the realm of conventional science fiction than it ever has before. Later in the scene, the foreman turns to Faraday, a confirmed time-traveler himself, with the comment: “Time travel. How stupid does that guy think we are?”

In general, I think it is a good idea for the Lost writers to mix some humor into its time travel mythology. The Season Four scenes inside the Orchid station offered a nice example of how to accomplish this goal. However, I was not comfortable with the tone of this entire exchange in the Season Five opener. The intended humor did not strike me as light-hearted, but as an almost malicious attempt to defuse potential criticism. The role associations in the scene make everything clear. If you want to be a cool person, an intelligent person, an important person (like Faraday and Chang), then you must embrace physical time travel as part of the story. If you want to complain about the ridiculousness of things, and be the type of person who asks annoying questions like “Why do their clothes and backpacks move with them when they time-jump?”, then you must be an uncool, unintelligent, and unimportant person (like the lowly foreman), who is barely worthy of being in the same room. Lindelof and Cuse were not even trying to sell the idea of time travel here, but they were presenting an ultimatum, in a manipulative package. Just listen to the guys with the lab coats and the buzz-words and the watered-down metaphors, and keep your mouths shut. I think a significant portion of the audience still needs to be convinced that time travel stories will improve the show. The scene replaced persuasion with coercion.

Depending on the direction of the story, the method of time travel on display in Because You Left might explain any number of past mysteries. Are the ill-fated Adam and Eve skeletons from characters we know? Are the whispers voices from other times? Is Jacob a man from the past (or future)? Richard Alpert’s apparent lack of aging seems to be the result of time travel. Perhaps the indigenous hostile population just appeared mysteriously out of nowhere, in a jolt from the future. Maybe Ben and the Others knew so much about the crash survivors, because time jumpers sent intelligence from the future. Perhaps they always behaved so strangely, because they could only interfere in certain ways consistent with those future events. Has Ben already interacted with an older version of Charles Widmore, and thus he knows that any effort to kill him will fail? Will Walt soon jump back in time to deliver a message to kill Naomi? Will Locke jump across time to bring Anthony Cooper to the island? Locke’s power of foresight (drawing the smoke monster as a child, vision of the Nigerian plane, etc.) seems to be a residual effect of his new journeys into the past. The possibilities here are as limitless as the energy source buried under the Orchid. Time travel could even be used to explain time travel (i.e. advanced four-toed people from the future traveled back and manufactured the frozen wheel). This new story element might be the little push that knocks down all the dominoes one-by-one (unless another Lie or two blocks its path). The more valid question now might be: what mysteries left can not be explained by time travel? The ghosts, the smoke monster, the button, and the pregnancy problem do not easily lend themselves to time-based explanations, but some creativity might do the trick.

Despite all of the disappointments I have outlined earlier, Because You Left still included one main bright spot, our always-reliable John Locke. Although technically, the premiere episode did not follow the traditional character-centric format, John Locke seemed to stand out, as the only character to move into any novel territory. Due to last year’s ending, the Christian symbolism was virtually a given, both here, and in upcoming episodes. Locke’s unexpected encounter with Ethan in this story, however, accomplished something quite remarkable. Currently, one can interpret this scene in two ways: either Ethan forgot the event, or he remembered it. I think the second possibility is more likely. Daniel was adamant that the ordinary rules do not apply to Desmond. The Scotsman’s mind does not operate in a linear fashion: he can often remember things that have not yet happened, and now it seems that he can forget certain memories until a future period. If Desmond is the exception, then Ethan must follow the rule, which is that he remembers things according to the Arrow of time. I suspect that Ethan watched Locke disappear from before his eyes, that he never forgot the event, and then he related the experience to Ben and the rest of his people. In essence, Ethan witnessed a miracle, and received a prophecy from the future.

If this possibility pans out, then it adds layers of meaning to Locke’s journey. Locke’s message to him then becomes a twisted example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Locke might have interacted with the Others in their past (and his future) several times. The Others had been waiting for Locke to lead them, simply because he himself told them to. The effect preceded the cause, much like in Alpert’s backwards proverb states, “What comes around, goes around.” In his past, Locke has always been a self-made man, and one who reinvented himself many times through his life. The power of Locke’s belief in himself, in his greater destiny, propelled him forward. The island, with its metaphorical magic box, offered him the ability to manifest his dreams into reality. In Locke’s case, he literally made his chosen destiny for himself become reality. He became destined for greatness, because he believed that he was destined for greatness. In Deus Ex Machina, Emily Locke referred to her son as an immaculate conception, and at the end of The Brig, Locke claimed that his past with Anthony Cooper was not true anymore. In a unique way, Locke may become his own creator, his own metaphorical father. When the elder Locke interacted with the island’s past, he set off a chain of events that somehow resulted in the nurturing of the younger Locke, which Cooper never provided. That unbreakable steel blade we know as Locke was forged in the fire of his own will. I would not be surprised to learn that when Matthew Abbadon approached Locke during Cabin Fever, he acted as a messenger from Locke himself.

Each new season of Lost begins with an overarching question that defines its purpose in the overall narrative. Charlie’s “Guys, where are we?” (Pilot) launched the first season. Hurley’s “What do you think is inside the hatch?” (Exodus) set the tone for Season Two. Michael’s “Who are you people?” (Live Together, Die Alone) introduced the third season. The latest, Season Four, closed the gap between island events and flash forward events, in order to answer Jack’s woeful question “How did this happen?” (spoken in both premieres The Beginning of the End and Because You Left). Our newest season opens with Locke’s existential cry as he slips through existence: “When am I?”. Time will tell whether this question, and the time travel storyline, can sustain momentum for fifteen more episodes. After this chapter is complete, fans will be free to debate which of this series of Where, What, Who, How, and When questions they found most compelling. Of course, all that remains afterward will be the Why of the story, possibly the most complex and rewarding one of them all.

The clock is ticking (32 episodes remain), and each passing episode moves Lost closer to its conclusion. Inevitably, some episodes will excel, and some will disappoint. Despite some major content differences between the four seasons, each year contains a few undeniable classics. The common element between all the show’s greatest achievements cannot be found among its content (some sci-fi and some straight drama), but in its storytelling form. The beauty of Past Lost, Present Lost, and Future Lost will reside in how the stories are told rather than what stories are told. I can only hope that a handful of great episodes will emerge before the end, which can live up to the high standard set in past seasons.

DarkUFO and SpoilerTV Forums are now Live!

2008-05-20T09:10:00.002+01:00

We're pleased to announce that the new DarkUFO and SpoilerTV forums are now live. We have over 800 members already registered who have been helping us test the new forums. I'd like to thank all the Beta Testers and especially our Site Admin Pete and his team of Moderators and Staff for helping us get this up and running so quickly.

One of the Site Admins, Pete, will be making a longer announcement later on but for now you can visit the forum from the link below.

http://www.spoilertv.co.uk/forum/index.php

Once there you can register your username, upload your avatar and create a signature.

Please make sure you spend a few minutes reading the announcements in the Welcome Section.

http://www.spoilertv.co.uk/forum/viewforum.php?f=27

And lastly enjoy yourself and have fun!

Note: This Forum section on the menu will still continue to be displayed for a few more days and then this will be changed to link directly to the new forums.

Dead people

2008-05-17T21:45:00.006+01:00

With all the theories about dead people going around, something hit me. We all know that Richard Alpert doesn't seem to age. We also know that a few dead people are walking around on and off the island (Christian Shepherd, Charlie). It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the others could all be dead people, especially Richard. I think that there could be a large group of people on the island who are dead, whether they know it or not.

This group could include: Claire, Richard, Christian, Boone, the kidnapped part of the tailies, and most of the others. Other possibilities are Locke, Jack, and Michael-because for some reason they can't seem to die. What if they were already dead?

Now I know I am out on a limb with this outrageous theory, but what if all the pregnant women on the island dying were already dead? One more idea, maybe all of these people I listed could only be mostly dead, stuck in time like Jacob? Be nice if you don't agree, I am just trying to think outside of the box.

Why We'll Never See Jacob, and the Brothers Lost

2008-05-12T09:20:00.000+01:00

We'll never see the real Jacob. I'm basing this in part on Darlton's interview comments stating that the deep mysteries of the show would be ruined if they were to give them away completely (i.e. numbers, what's the monster, who's Jacob).

I'm basing it in part as well on the belief that Jacob is not a physical being, but a spiritual one. He inhabits the island, whatever the island IS, but does not inhabit a physical body. Rather, Jacob speaks through others (Others?): Christian, Claire, Walt, Abbadon, and other messengers.

The Brothers Lost
Vozzek brought up the idea of Ben and Locke as brothers. Doc Jensen brought up the idea of Ben and Locke as alternate possible versions of one another, with Ben stepping into Locke's shoes when Locke was deemed not ready; both would be driven to murder in name of the island. They're interesting theories. Then there's the already oft-mentioned issue of them both being born to women named Emily.

Here's another theory, revisiting Jewish scripture, Buddhism, and the names. As potential Dalai Lama, which is what the item selection test was clearly directing us to consider, Ben and Locke (and Walt in the tests he was doing with Bea Klugh) were being evaluated as potential reincarnations of the Dalai Lama. We've been told that Jacob's name is important. Jacob/Israel is the father of the 12 tribes of Israel, one of whom is led by Benjamin. Sounds simple, but maybe not.

Locke was born before Ben, but they're competing for the same inheritance and are functioning, especially in this episode, as sibling rivals. Sounds more like Jacob/Esau to me, where Esau is the firstborn and seemingly rightful heir -- heir, successor, Dalai Lama. Esau is the hunter, and is a simple man, which in Hebrew has a more complementary meaning than it does in English. Ben is born next. Both want to be loved. But Ben more clearly wants power. In the Jacob/Esau rivalry, Jacob is the younger, more manipulative brother. Sound like Ben?

Flash to 2005 and onward. We don't know what Locke is up to, but Ben certainly seems back in control. Looks like, as with the original Jacob, he won his inheritance from his older brother. Widmore could be Esau, rather than Locke. Or perhaps both could be evoking an Esau idea, for the purpose of making us think about how Ben is trying to be Jacob.

Back in 2004, a hairy (Esau was hairy) Locke-type man in a rocking chair called to Locke, pleading "help me." Ben was freaked and tried to kill Locke.

Let's try this theory on for size: Jacob is a spirit and we will never see him in actual human form. But what we saw in that first appearance was supposed to be some version of Locke or Locke's spiritual father, stuck in time, and feeling frustrated at having been manipulated out of the proper destiny.

Perhaps course correction will make Ben eat his words about destiny.

Posted by lostaficionado

Rules for the Chosen One: Kill Your Own Father

2008-05-12T09:19:00.000+01:00

In line with everything people are saying about the similarities between Ben and Locke and whether one is the true "chosen one" or not, I think this sheds light on why Locke had to kill his father and all the others had to see it in "The Brig". I never really understood why Ben made such a big deal out of it, and never really bought his reasoning.

Now it all seems to come together. Remember that Ben also killed his father. Maybe the Book of Laws has a set of criteria for the chosen one which include

1. Mother's name being Emily
2. Premature birth (or birth in difficult circumstances?)
3. Killing one's own father (to show dedication to the island??)
... and ??? (there must be more, I'm sure you guys can fill some in).

So Alpert goes around evaluating possible chosen ones under these criteria. Locke matched some of these things but he failed the test from "Cabin Fever" so they continued to look, later finding Ben. Although they never gave up on Locke (as is we know from his recruitment to Mittlelos), which makes me thing Locke still fulfilled some key criteria that Ben did not.

Although it's true that Sawyer actually killed Cooper (even though by getting Sawyer to do so, Locke did lead to his death), what I'm getting at is that all the Others, including Richard, seemed to really want Locke to go through with killing his father, from which I'd conclude that doing so is some sort of sign that he was indeed the chosen one. The Others were excited about meeting him, but disappointed when he first failed to kill his father.

Ben set the scenario up as something necessary to show his commitment to the island, saying that his people have to exhibit some sort of 'free will'. But take another island newbie case -- Juliet. She did sacrifice leaving her sister, but not as a commitment to the island. And as far as we know she was never forced to take a similar action that Ben tells Locke is necessary for people who want to join them. That argument doesn't fly for me here.

I think Ben hid the real reason Locke had to kill his father. In the same conversation, he saids Locke is not 'ready' to find out more about the island -- and he will be when he kills his father. This suggests that Locke will only be privy to the island's secrets (i.e. access to Jacob) once he kills his father, showing he is indeed a 'chosen one'.

As I've been writing this I'm re-watching parts of the Brig, and it all comes together. When Locke fails to kill Cooper while tied to a tree -- and all the Others come out to watch -- Ben turns around and announces "I'm sorry. He's not who we thought he was". Meaning, he's not the 'chosen one', because he didn't fulfill this rule. Of course Ben is thrilled about this inside, as Locke is posed to usurp him as the leader (given his recent tumor, which suggest to all that it's not his turn anymore).

When Alpert gives Locke Sawyer's file, he explains everyone has been excited about Locke, who is obviously 'special' because his spine was healed. And he says 'I want you to find your purpose. But to do so, your father has to go.'

This is just a little mini-theory, but i think it could form part of the island mythology, which is possibly written in the Book of Laws we saw this week.

Posted by R1832

The episode format for next season

2008-05-12T09:17:00.000+01:00

This is what I believe the episode format will be for the next season, S5. I believe that there will be two distinct narrative timelines, one in the island with the remainder people, and one off island with the Oceanic 6, Ben and possibly Desmond/Penny. There will be very few flashbacks/flashforwards, possibly no more than 2-3 for the whole season.

The off-island story will stop being random and out of order, but it will pick up from the S4 finale's flash forward (which will take place after the S3 finale with Jack trying to suicide). From that point on, the story off island will be as narrative and in-order, as the story so far in the island has been.

The on-island story instead will run much faster, and while it will still be presented in order, it will cover a few years of time, just to catch up with the off island story in terms of timeframe (island's time displacement taken into account too).

At the end of S5, we will see the two stories/groups merge again, as the off islanders will have made it back to the island for the final act in S6. I don't expect many flashbacks during S6 either, except maybe a few Dharma-based ones.

Posted by Eugenia Loli-Queru

Tesseract

2008-05-11T13:24:00.000+01:00

This is just an idea. They could be in a Tesseract. It's used in alot of sci-fi movies and novels to explain alternate realties, time travel, etc. It could explain how time is different on the island. For example, how the doctor washed up on the shore dead before he was killed or how Walt aged so fast adn Richard dosent age at all. The Tesseract is used in the Novel A Wrinkle in Time and the "The Cube" a Canadian series of horror movies. In the movie Cube 2: Hypercube the Tesseract theory is used to explain the alternate reality contained in one of the rooms in which on of the prisoner sees his own death. I just watched on of the cube movies from on demand and thought it kinda parallels with lost. Also the whole E=mc2, the Chaos Theory, and Quantum Physics could also be involved with what is happening on the island. comments are appreciated!!!

Posted by Alex G

Daddy Not Dead

2008-05-11T13:22:00.003+01:00

In recent episodes of Lost, it has come to out attention that Christian Shepard (jack and Claire's father) has been appearing purioticly throughout the show.
Now, My theory is that he isn't actually dead. Let me explain:
When it was revealed that he was dead and that Jack went to see him in Australia to take him home, we saw his dead body. I think, they had the worng body. Christain shepard re-constructed someone's face maybe from Claire's Family to fake his own death.

He went to the Island on the plane ans survived the crash along with the other fusa lodge passengers. When Jack kept thinking he saw Christan, he really did beacuse he was actually alive! Thats why his coffin was empty, Christan saw the coffin and emptied the body out of it. He might've thrown it into the pile of dead bodies of the former Dharma Initiative workers.

When Claire saw him in a recent episode, so Did Miles. Which means he really was there so he must be alive. He lead Claire to Jacob's cabin to wait for Locke in when Locke saw him to.

In the future we see Christian in the hospital with Jack again. So when Jack got off the Island (howevere they do), Christian also snuck on and went back to the land in where he confronts Jack.

That is my theory on How Christian Shepard, Father of Jack Shepard and Claire Littleton, is still alive.

Posted by Daria