The Moth Chase

Dear MothChase Readers,

In preparation for the season 6 premiere of Lost on February 2nd, we will be blogging our way through season 5.  Please join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to refresh your memory or, better yet, rewatch the season with us!

Here’s the fun part – Kathryn has seen season 5, but Natalie hasn’t, so please don’t post any spoilers in the comments!

oxox,
Natalie and Kathryn

Hey Kathryn,

Oh my, this is going to be fun!  I was very aware while watching this episode that as we blog this season together you are going to know what happens, having already seen season 5, and I’m going to be utterly in the dark, confused and lost (ha ha) as I watch it for the first time!  This is going to be either totally fun, or totally infuriating…at least for you!!

What a great episode.  Unlike a lot of Lost fans, I wasn’t crazy about season 4, although it did have two things I loved: the introduction of Daniel (forget Jack, forget Sawyer – it’s all about Daniel for me!) and his crazy time travel drawing Desmond into a larger role, and Locke’s name change to Jeremy Bentham.  It seems that these are two themes to be developed in season 5.

I’m sure there’s lots already out there on the whole Locke, Bentham, Hume game.  I honestly can’t fit them together neatly, which is why I love this name change so much; it’s not straight allegory.  John Locke, an enlightenment philosopher known for hisempiricism, had immense influence on David Hume (for whom Desmond David Hume is named).  I could never line Lost’s JL up neatly with the philosopher, but I doubt we’ll be able to line him up too neatly with the historical Jeremy Bentham either…which is what makes it fun (like Daniel being named for real life physicist, Michael Faraday).

I know Bentham primarily as the architect of the panopticon concept – in essence, a space in which one figure has the ability to see everything around him to such an extent that everything in that field of vision feels the presence of constant surveillance even when they aren’t being physically watched.  I’m sure this relates to our island, but I haven’t worked it out yet.  But the historical Bentham was also the father ofutilitarianism.  So we have our Lost character embodying two philosophical schools, moving from empiricism to utilitarianism as he changes his name…and in so doing, gaining some sort of panoptic presence in time.  Ok, I’m sure we’ll get to develop this idea more as our correspondence progresses – I just wanted to introduce some of the necessary concepts to get us going.

So we open on the time-traveling island (or time-traveling islanders – not yet clear).  Our island friends are moving around through time, managing to stay together, but shifting in and out of relationship with other island inhabitants we’ve come to know like Ethan, Richard and Desmond.  Back in the real world, Ben and the Oceanic 6 face the reality of a dead Locke/Bentham, who has apparently been visiting them, trying to convince them to return to the island. We find out at the end of the episode that Locke returned to the real world knowing he would have to die to accomplish this task…mystery ensues.

Ok, so Sun is now a total badass who wants to kill Ben.  Kate faces losing Aaron and goes on the run again.  Sayid is a total badass assassin who takes Hurley on the run (lots of badass, lots of running).  Hurley is still Hurley (best line of the episode: Hurley to Sayid, “maybe if you ate more comfort food, you wouldn’t have to go about shooting people”).

I know when it comes to fictional time travel you aren’t supposed to think too hard about it, otherwise your head just explodes, but there are two things that intrigue me about Lost’s version of this trope.  First, Daniel insists that you can’t change what ‘happens’…which leads me to wonder, what is meant by a ‘happening’?  It seems that happenings are social events – meetings, exchanges between people, interactions in time – but they aren’t necessarily what happens to an individual body.  Wounds that happen to bodies move through time with the body (like John needing to tend to his wound as he shifts time, rather than it simply appearing or disappearing depending on temporal context).

Along those lines, you can carry objects through time with you – clothing, backpacks with notebooks in them, and compasses – but you can’t necessarily carry people with you (which is why Richard, Ethan and others disappear at the shifts).  There’s lots more to be said on this (like, so how do our people manage to stay bonded to each other through time, especially when they’re grouping is made up of flight 815 survivors, scientists from the freighter and Juliet?), but I’ll leave it at this question for now: what is the relationship between bodies and time that Lost is trying to play with here?

And second, I usually tire of love stories – the romance between a man and a woman usually bores me to death in tv shows.  And while I couldn’t give a crap about the Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle, I’m totally captivated by Desmond and Penny, as well as Daniel and Charlotte, and I think this has everything to do with time travel dimensions to their relationships.  After stopping Sawyer from knocking on the hatch door, Daniel is inspired to do so by his concern over Charlotte’s scary nosebleed.  Perhaps what intrigues me most of all, then, is this relationship between Desmond and Daniel that endures through time – my two favourite characters, of course.  I love the idea that a ‘memory’ can travel into a mind through a ‘dream’ – I don’t even know what to with that yet, but it was a great moment that stimulated my imagination no end!

Ok, I’ll leave it there – what was it like for you returning to this episode…and please answer that question without giving any spoilers!

oxo,
Natalie

—

Hello Natalie,

I am right there with you – it is so fun to be back in the world of Lost and actually really fantastic to revisit this season in prep for the grand finale. I watched this season in a blur of stolen moments while working on my dissertation last summer (thank you, DVR) and returning now is giving me a whole new perspective on the season. Your injunction not to spoil anything for you will be hard, because it all starts to blend together, but using my trusty episode recap and trying to stick to the episode at hand, I think I can do it.

So let’s start with Jeremy Bentham/John Locke. I agree – I love that these names are suggestive and allusive, but not allegorical. And I love that somewhere along the way the Locke we know felt the need to take a new name when he returned to the “real world” in order to eventually return (dead?) to the island. You have got to be right that there is a panopticon reference going on in the choice of Bentham – we do know, after all, that he returned to keep tabs on folks and he clearly acts on many of them (Jack especially) as an all-knowing, all-seeing presence. In addition to whatever is going on there, there is something in the transition from one moral code to the other. Empiricist though he was, the historical John Locke was still a big believer in the natural law, especially a natural moral code. In Utilitarianism there is no natural moral code, just the guideline to consider all actions from the standpoint of the greatest good for the maximum number of people. So when our John Locke realizes that he has to die in order to accomplish the greater good of bringing everyone back to the island, he has moved from the Locke who is searching the island for its natural law to the Bentham who is willing to make the sacrifice for the greater good. Or something like that – and also something more!

Speaking of other fun name tidbits: did you notice at the end of Season 4 that Ben’s fake name in Tunisa was Dean Moriarty. This is a character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. But as suggested in The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, that Moriarty might be related to the infamous Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ arch nemesis. If Ben is a kind of anti-Holmsian character, what does that make Locke? But I digress…

I look forward to paying attention to the time-travel more carefully this time round, since it is the big theme of the whole season. The question of what we can and cannot change in relationship to fate and destiny has been a preoccupation of the show all along. Adding the extra time dimension only makes this theme clearer to me, because in a sense how we relate to our own actions, consequences, and becoming in time has everything to do with what we think of fate or destiny. Though, of course, the time flashes also act as a kind of “hand of God” device, preventing the characters from controlling their own actions, sometimes in ways they want (Locke flashing out of the scene just before Ethan shoots him again) and sometimes in ways they don’t want (Daniel flashing out before he can finish telling Desmond what to do).

There is much more I want to say about big themes of the show and hopes for season 6, but we have 16 more episodes to go and not much time, so I will save these reflections for other posts.

Glad I am when I am now.
K

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Episode 2: The Lie

Hey Kathryn,

So this episode calmed down a little after all the new stuff they threw at us in the last one.  It reaffirmed for us that Hurley sees dead people with a lovely return of Anna-Lucia.  It reminded us of Kate’s role in Jin’s death (as well as how much I am loving this new scary Sun!).  And it did a fun Weekend at Bernie’s type escapade around LA with an unconscious Sayid.  It developed our concerns for Charlotte – yes, something terrible is happening here, even if we don’t know precisely what yet (did the forgetting of her mother’s maiden name remind you of the erasing of the kids in the photo in Back to the Future or am I just on some sort of 80’s movie kick tonight?).

The only new tricky things we really had to integrate were the appearance of yet another vicious island tribe we know nothing about and the re-appearance of the jeweler lady who apparently is some sort of witchy, scientisty, religiousy type all-knowing, all-controlling God(ish) figure (was that chalk thing a play on Foucault’s pendulum, itself an experiment with space and time? And was she calculating the time between the flashes on the island? Is that what that “event window determined” was all about?).  Even with that, though, this was a much easier episode than the last one!

All of which lets me focus in for a moment on Hurley.  We all love Hurley – he’s sweet, funny and simply fun to be around.  When he panicked and threw his pizza pocket at the wall, I laughed louder than I’ve laughed at any other moment in Lost ever.  But his humour isn’t just slapstick or playful.  He’s also our jester in the sense of being our truth-teller – a role played out quite literally in this episode.

I’m always startled by how easily folks lie in this show – not just the Oceanic 6 covering up their story, but Ben, Kate in general, spouses to each other in a supposed effort to protect each other (Jin to Sun, Sun to Jin), Michael to everyone, even Daniel to Charlotte, and so on.  It’s good to finally see the emotional toll of dishonesty borne out on at least one of the characters (while all the Oceanic 6 suffer psychologically or emotionally, only Hurley’s suffering seems explicitly related to living a life based on a lie).

And all this is what made the scene with his mother so funny and so sweet.  Hearing Hurley recap the last 4 seasons of Lost was perfect; we were in on the joke with him because he offered an incredibly helpful, succinct version of everything we’ve been tracking and ourselves trying to understand. His confusion is mirrored in our own.  And we as the audience realize that we know precisely what he knows – no more, no less.  Of course he sounded crazy, but it was a crazy that we’re continuing to participate in with each episode we watch.  But we resonated with his mother too – she believed him, but didn’t understand him.  And that’s sort of my experience of this show.  I’m tracking it.  I’m following along.  I can add it all up.  But my god, I don’t understand it to save my life!  It was a sweet moment that I’m choosing to interpret in a genuine way, rather than as a mother humouring her clearly crazy (although not) son.

So, do you think Hurley was right in following Sayid’s advice to do the opposite of whatever Ben tells him?  Or do you think he should have followed Anna-Lucia’s advice to avoid getting arrested?  For all of Ben’s duplicitous ways, my hunch is that ghost/sub-conscious projection Anna-Lucia and, surprisingly, Ben, were the real truth-tellers of the moment.

Ok, let me know what you thought!
Natalie

—–

Dear Natalie,

This will be a fast response, since family is on their way over and I have to get cracking on the next two episodes!

I agree – this episode was less about new shocking information and more about character development and small clues. Though as you point out the “clues” are more infuriating and potentially confusing than one might hope. Who are those dudes with British accents and U.S. Army fatigues threatening to cut off Juliet’s hand? Obviously, whenever they are at this particular moment, there were more than just the Others on the island. But does it mean anything? The army fatigues? The British accents? The medieval forms of torture? Likewise with strange jewelry shop woman (look, see how good I am being about spoilers!!) – does it mean anything that she is dressed like a wizard/nun/monk and operating her pendulum and sophisticated computer device in the basement of a church? And by the way, what do you think Ben was praying for as he lights his colored candle? I do assume, given the dialogue between her and Ben, the “event window” refers to the time frame when the Oceanic 6, plus Ben and Locke, can return to the island (she says: “you’ve only got 70 hours.” And he says, “That’s not enough time. What if I can’t get them all to go back?”).

All of which leads to the big question as we prepare for the final season: which details matter? Will we eventually learn the answers to all these infuriating mysteries (and brace yourself, it only gets wilder from here) or not? And I suppose another bigger question: does it really matter? I have to admit, all I’m really looking for is some overall closure. What is the island? How does it work? Why does it matter? What is up between Ben and Widmore (digression: did that scene in Widmore’s bedroom during season 4 remind you of the Job story? When Ben talks about how Widmore has changed the rules and how much he’d like to kill Widmore but they both know he can’t do that, it felt like two cosmic forces hashing out what is allowed and not allowed, caught in a lockhorn showdown where some other cosmic force prevents them from killing each other. I’m not sure which one would be God and which one Satan/the Advocate. Loose association anyway…). Who are the Others? Why were the people on Oceanic 815 chosen? You know, just the big looming questions. If they never explain what the British gents wearing U.S. fatigues mean, I think I can live with it.

OK, I didn’t even touch on the lying theme or the scene with Hurley’s mother, but I concur with your analysis. I do wonder if there is a clue in Charlotte not remembering her mother’s maiden name, but that might be an unfair conjecture because short of espousing a spoiler theory, it is going to sound like a red herring. Like so many of the details we are trying to track.

K

—

Kathryn,

Just a quickie to say, yes, I absolutely thought of Job with the scene in Widmore’s bedroom and even blurted out to my husband, “Oh my goodness, now we’re in the Bible and he’s Satan,” or something like that, only to realize that I didn’t really know which one I meant when I referred to Satan!

I know we’re both theologians and thus bound to see things like that, but if we both saw it then, yes, I think it was probably there on some level!

OK, on to episode 3!
N

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Episode 3: Jughead

Dear Natalie,

Let me reiterate how fun it is to re-watch this season and actually try to put the pieces back together again! This episode wasn’t as flashy (ha!), but we did learn some crucial information.

Starting with the fact that the folks in military fatigues who ambush our survivors aren’t military at all – hence explaining the hodge-podge of accents. They are, in fact, Others, on the island in 1954. We learn that during the 1950s, the U.S. Army came to the island to perform tests, but that the Others eventually killed them. Not, however, before they left a leaking atom bomb. Daniel, playing along that he is a military scientist, tells them he can disarm the bomb and he convinces Richard that he is not on a suicide mission by declaring his love for Charlotte. When Daniel and Ellie get to the bomb, Daniel realizes it is too instable to disarm and tells Ellie they have to bury it. He promises her if they bury it all will be OK, because he is from the future and knows that the island is fine in 50 years. Which means that the island we know and love has always had a buried atom bomb on it! When Locke goes head first into the Others’ camp to confront Richard, we learn that the overeager Other who killed his comrade is the young Charles Widmore – so Widmore, whatever happened later, started out as an Other on the island! In other news, we learn that Charles Widmore funded Faraday’s research for 10 years prior to sending Daniel to the island and that when Daniel’s experiments went horribly awry on a woman named Teresa Spencer (who now lies comatose in bed, traveling, mentally, through time), Widmore picked up the tab for all her medical care. When confronted by Desmond, we learn that there is some connection between Widmore and Faraday’s mother (at least he knows where she lives) – which happens to be L.A.! Finally, we learn that things are definitely not all right for Charlotte, who passes out at the end of the episode with a killer nosebleed.

In addition to two very big reveals – Widmore was an Other on the island as a young man and is the funder of Faraday’s research and Faraday’s mother lives in L.A. – we got several other fun pieces of the time-puzzle filled in. We learn that Richard only came to visit Locke as a young man in foster care because the older Locke told him to do so when he met him before he was born in a time flash. This raises again the question of control of destiny and changing the future. It does not appear Faraday is right and nothing our characters do can change anything in the past; in fact, it appears that Locke’s destiny was in some way determined by the actions of his future self in the past. We also learn that Locke considers his allegiances with the Others now – they are “his people” no matter what point in time he is in. This, too, suggests that relationships survive time travel – at least in so far as they define the person who is aware of them. In thinking about the choice of Enlightenment philosopher names for some of our characters, it is interesting to note that both Desmond David Hume and John Locke/Jeremy Bentham are the two characters with deepest ties to the Others, who use the language of the Enlightenment (Latin) to communicate – I don’t think that little tidbit was a throw-away, but something to hold on to as we wait to learn in season 6 more about just who these “Others” are.

One thing I definitely learned was that I didn’t actually miss the Oceanic 6, who were completely absent from this episode. I am way more caught up in what is happening on the island then with their lives off the island. Realizing this, it made me think a lot more about the Others in general – who they are, why they are there, where they come from – and that makes me want to understand better what our Oceanic friends have to do with this much older, much more fascinating struggle to protect the island. If I can get my head around this by the end of season 6, that might be enough for me.

K

—-

Hey Kathryn,

Thanks for the recap – so much happens in episodes now that between keeping track of events and when they happen in time, I’m pretty confused much of the time!

First of all, I loved Desmond’s visit to Oxford.  Was that not the most curiously helpful custodian you’ve ever seen?!  It’s moments like this in Lost that make me wonder if they’re just doing exposition in a heavy-handed way trying to move the plot along, or if something more is going on.  Was that really a custodian?  Or is he, like our jewelry store employee who has come to mean so much more, also going to return later?  There’s just too much to keep track of (that’s not a complaint, but rather a declaration of how much fun my brain has with this show!).

I love your reflections on our Enlightenment philosophers and the Enlightenment language, and am right there with you wondering if that’s going to mean something more also, and how it’s going to relate to The Others.  This connection is heightened, of course, by the fact that Latin isn’t so much the language of the Enlightenment, as Juliet says, but of the Medieval/Renaissance periods.  If anything, with the Enlightenment figures invoked in this show, straight up, boring English would be the Enlightenment language…so the writers of Lost are definitely taking some liberties here to play their own literary games!

And yes, how fascinating to learn that Widmore was once an Other – and, apparently, an Other who left the island.  How on earth does this relate to his life’s mission to return?  And as an art history major and yoga practitioner myself, I couldn’t help but notice the giant mural on Widmore’s office wall when Desmond came to visit him.  At first I thought it was a Basquiat painting, but then I saw the word, Namaste, written on it and realized that’s so not Basquiat’s style.  So how does this Sanskrit word (note: Sanskrit being the liturgical or worship language of Hinduism and Buddhism as well as one of many official languages in India…much like the use of Latin, a worship language of Christianity and an ancient language of Europe) relate to the Indian water bottle that washes up in the next episode?  There are so many visual clues hidden in this show, I love it!

Ok, and I can’t help but mention the gorgeous silver dish sitting on Widmore’s desk – it’s a Calvin Klein dish that is a couple of years old.  I know this because it’s the only really extravagant thing my husband and I put on our wedding registry and it sits on the coffee table in our living room…always as a center-piece, but from now on as a creepy reminder of the powerful and evil(?) Widmore!

You’re right about not missing the Oceanic 6!  At the end of this episode I couldn’t help but notice how nice it was not to have Jack and Kate’s whiny, self-righteous presence making everything overly-dramatic and annoying.  And as Sawyer and Juliet get closer to each other, I wonder again and again why they’re both still so hung up on two annoying kids like Jack and Kate!  Sawyer and Juliet are so badass in their own right – I think it would be best if they just hooked up themselves!  Also, with the absence of the Oceanic 6 and Sawyer running around the jungle, I had to wonder if the decision to take Jack off the island and leave Sawyer on it was made by the writers according to plot, or according to which of them looks better cleaned up back in the real world and which looks better sweaty and dirty and running around with guns!

ox,

Natalie

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Episode 4: The Little Prince

Dear Natalie,

So this episode takes us squarely back to the Oceanic 6 and the race against the strange astronomer/scientist/mystic woman’s clock – as well as various other side plots and machinations that promise to stand in the way of any easy unified return to the island. Kate learns that Ben is the one trying to take Aaron away from her – and just when you can feel the tension on the pier heat up (is even Jack beginning to second guess his new discipleship?), we see Sun looking calm, cool, collected and poised with a deadly weapon and an assassin’s mission just a few feet away! We still don’t know who attacked Sayid or why the fake nurse had Kate’s address in his pocket, and we don’t know how the group will get Hurley to join in. Though Mr. Norton assures Ben that Hurley will be out of lock up by morning, presumably in time to be kidnapped or persuaded to join whatever return-to-the-island plan comes next.

On the island, somewhere or several moments in time, we learn that Charlotte isn’t the only one affected by the flashes. Miles starts to suffer from nosebleeds too, and very enigmatically and poignantly, Daniel asks Miles if he has ever been to the island before, suggesting that duration of exposure might cause more severe reactions. We know this is the case with Charlotte, who already told Daniel she was trying to find where she was born when she first arrived back on the island, and it was the case with Desmond, who was also badly affected by a kind of time-induced vertigo in season 4 – he spent years on the island in the hatch. When Juliet’s nose starts bleeding, the duration hypothesis seems pretty well-near proved, leaving open the question: when was Miles on the island before and why doesn’t he know it?

We also get another fun twist in the time-travel/can you change fate debate when Sawyer stumbles upon Kate helping Claire deliver Aaron in the jungle. Were you as struck as I was by her speech about Aaron belonging to all of them now? A definite nod to the current custody drama and a reminder that Kate’s loyalty and love toward Aaron are not just a latent maternal instinct but spring also from a deep communal sense of responsibility. Locke and Sawyer are the only two who realize when they are in time – and both of them refuse to interact with their former selves or the former selves of their friends and lovers, but for very different reasons. Sawyer embraces a fatalism – what’s done is done and there’s no changing it. Locke embraces a similar fatalism, but out of respect for the particular passage of time that has made him who he is now. This is another whole wrinkle in the time traveling dilemma – even if you could change the past, should you want to? What constitutes a person, anyway? A continuous consciousness? A single cortex? A sense of memory? The actions that we engage in and suffer throughout our lives? Our relationships? Can you have any one of these things if your experiences are substantially altered? On the other hand, as we saw last episode, at least one of the experiences that made Locke who he is now includes Richard coming to him in foster care as a young boy. But we know that that only happens in the course of Locke’s life because the future Locke tells Richard to do so back in time. Meaning the action of interfering is integral to the person Locke is, who is a person who will interfere with the course of time if it means fulfilling his destiny (getting Richard to trust him and tell him how to leave the island).

Finally, we have two strange occurrences on the beach: 1) the remaining island survivors head back to the beach only to discover their old camp in ruins, clearly abandoned at some point back in time. When they realize the zodiac is gone (I thought the objects they had with them in the flashes stayed with them??), they discover some fancy looking multi-person canoes, and they take one of them to head around the horn of the island, only to be shot at by an angry group of unidentified people, following them in the other canoe. [Is it a spoiler or just a hint to say “pay attention to the Ajira airlines water bottle found at the bottom of the canoe”?] Thankfully, there is another flash that takes the group into a raging storm. They aren’t the only lonely soles fighting to survive on the open sea – there is a group of French-speaking survivors of some kind of crash in a life boat, who pull a water-logged Jin from a floating piece of wreckage. Presumably poor Jin has been floating at sea since the boat blew up, flashing through time unconsciously. The episode ends with the revelation that these French rescuers are the scientific team including Danielle Rousseau, who is heavy with an unborn Alex (giving the final lie to any claims of Ben’s to be her father). I have to say, it was shocking all over again to see the fresh, innocent face of this Danielle and to think of the wild jungle woman she will become.

OK, this is going on too long and has mostly dealt with plot synopsis and a few intriguing questions and points. It is so hard to speculate or ask too many questions without giving away things you don’t know yet! But I look forward to hear what you might have thought, watching for the first time…especially what you are making of the time-traveling dilemmas.

K

—

Hey Kathryn,

No, it’s not a spoiler to tell me to watch that water bottle – I was already tempted to do so after the Indian art references in the last episode, and am glad to have the affirmation.  Don’t laugh, but like Desmond, Daniel and our other time-spinning characters, any ‘constant’ I can catch in this nosebleed-inducing mess is welcome! Hint away, my friend!

I have to start with Sun.  Her chilly, tough-chick self is totally scary and totally awesome to me.  I even found myself wondering if she was the one seeking to expose Kate’s false maternity.  As she pulled that gun out of the box of chocolates, I thought how far she had gone down a path into the ruthlessness that Jin too had once trod.  And I found myself wondering that if her and Jin were ever reunited, would she be able to find the love again that had driven her to such a willingness for brutality?  I recalled Jin’s slow return from killer to lover after they landed on the island, and how beautiful that process of redemption had been, and wondered if we would see something similar happen with Sun if she were afforded the chance (and found herself willing) to return also.

Of course, all these thoughts were silly thoughts because as far as we knew, Jin was dead…which was why it was doubly satisfying when the French crew found him.  I felt that with his rescue we encountered not only his salvation, but also the possible salvation for Sun from this drastic woman she has become (while still all along loving the current arc of her drastic brutality!).

The central line in the episode for me – played for humor, but I think revealing something deeper – was Sawyer’s shout into the sky as they shifted through time: “Thank you Lord!” and then as they shifted to a torrential downpour, “I take that back!” I wonder if there is some sort of fate or will to the way in which the shifts occur.  There is always this play in Lost between the idea of destiny or blind fate and the idea that something, someone, is in control of everything (bolstered of course by our discussion of the Panopticon in previous episodes, but also connected now with Kate’s address on Panorama Crest – another location named for an all-seeing quality).

Shifts through time happen at significant moments: just as John Locke is about to figure out how to leave the island, or just as someone is about to be shot or killed.  And the weather on the island-shifts tends to match the weather back in our world (note the storm on the island as the scene shifted to Kate and Jack outside the hotel with clouds gathering overhead).  And so the repeated maternal references in the episode also seemed to connect shifts through time – Claire birthing Aaron revealing Kate’s belief in a communal responsibility for him, as you said, as well as the maternity battles back home and Danielle’s arrival on the island full with Alex (not to mention the previous episode labor of Penny with her and Des’s kid).  Am I reading too much into these narrative parallels?  Is this just for effect and literary play, or does it too have a deeper meaning?  Or are they trying to say that even in utter randomness, the human desire for narrative will produce a pattern?

On that parenting note – I have to say that in the scene on the boat between Kate and Jack as she is trying to convince him that she should pretend that Aaron is hers and they are preparing to prepare to lie to the world, her stellar parenting move of sitting at the edge of the boat, holding a baby without a lifejacket in the middle of the night did make me laugh out loud!

But perhaps the funniest line of the whole episode was Ben’s straight-faced admission to Sayid in the van: “that’s my lawyer”.  It’s not supposed to be funny but, oh my, it is!  Ben’s almost inhuman way of operating in the world with a dryness atypical of American shows cracks me up…and I love it!

Ok, I’ll stop there as this might be the longest post we’ve ever written!

Natalie

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Episode 5 – “This Place is Death”

Hey Kathryn,

Oh my, too many questions!  This was a packed episode (aren’t they always?).  On the island we have Jin and the French getting to know each other as the French are pegged off one by one, either by the monster or by Danielle.  We knew from the first season that Danielle killed her friends because she thought they had ‘caught the disease,’ but to see her do it – that was painful.  Your observations in your last post were dead on.  It’s difficult to encounter the fresh faced – even childlike face – of the young Danielle and imagine the hardened woman she becomes.  It’s also confusing to wonder if the Danielle of season 1 showed any signs of having known Jin all those years ago when she first landed on the island…does he become a part of her history (like John sending Richard to see him as a child), or does Jin get implanted into her memory in some version of meta-time (as Daniel manages to do to Desmond)?

Jin’s next flash takes him back to Sawyer and the crew and, I gotta say, their reuniting misted me up a little!  One question plaguing me this season is why the shift in Sawyer’s character?  For the first three seasons he only looked out for himself, but with his heroic leap from the helicopter at the end of season 4, he seems to care more about others (all others, not The Others) than anyone else in the show now as he gradually steps into more and more of a savior role.  Ok, so our band of flight survivors and scientists head for the Orchid where Locke is told by Jack/Claire’s ghost-dad that he (i.e. not Ben) needs to move the island, spin the wheel, whatever.

Of course, in this process Charlotte dies, only after recovering a memory (like Desmond did in his dream?) of Daniel warning her of her death on the island.  Which makes me wonder again how these implantings of memories work.  At first I thought Daniel could give a memory that awakens Desmond mid-dream because the two were each other’s ‘constant’s.  In other words, their connection, in a strange way, transcends time, and so they are able to play with time as they are in relation to each other.  But if Daniel can do that with Charlotte too, does that mean that they too are each other’s ‘constants’ or does it mean that time (in Lost, anyway) can be transcended by anybody?  At leasttime in the sense of points of time that connect to each other…ack, now my nose is bleeding.

So, anyway, while Charlotte is now dead, with Lost we know that death isn’t always the end and so we still have hope that she’ll come back…as a memory; as a ghost; in the real world; God knows where!  Oh, and right before she dies she makes reference to Geronimo Jackson, the band that gets continually referenced throughout the series, but which also remains a mystery.  So now we’ve got two characters – Charlotte and Widmore – who lived at least portions of their early lives on the island and who have made it their life’s mission to get back.  But why?  Is it just curiosity for Charlotte and greed for Widmore, or is it something else?

Back in the real world, Kate storms off on Jack, as does Sayid.  Sun postpones killing Ben for proof that Jin is still alive, which he gives in the form of Jin’s wedding band, procured from John (and which, ironically, Jin had given John to prove that he was dead, not alive).  Ben takes Sun and Jack to a church to meet with Eloise Hawking to find out what they should all do next.

Of course, we’ve all figured out by now that Eloise is also Farraday’s mother (sure, different last names, but both the last names of prominent physicists – Daniel taking the name of 19^th century physicist Michael Farraday and Eloise taking the name of 20^th century theoretical physicist, Steven Hawking).  The surprise, in fact, is not that the jeweler is the mother is Eloise – but rather that Ben looks surprised when Desmond shows up and makes this connection for him!  It turns out there are things even Ben doesn’t know!

Now, here are my questions about Eloise/jeweler/sorcerer/mother/… – The actress portraying Eloise looks an awful lot like the young actress who played Ellie in the previous episode.  Ellie was the ‘other’ who led Daniel around by gunpoint…and so now I wonder if Daniel was being led around by a younger version of his own mother.  Ellie. Eloise.  I don’t know, but I think this could be the same person.

Also, what’s going on with the continually prominently displayed lettering on the van that Ben is driving around: Canton-Rainier carpet cleaners?  A quick internet search has yielded numerous sites pointing out that this is an anagram for re-incarnation. Seems worth noting.

Oh, and why, why is Jack/Claire’s dad John’s guide?  What is up with that?!  He seems to embody Jacob at times, so they are playing with Biblical images of a great patriarch, but also a failed patriarch as he fails both Jack and Claire.  But how is John connected to this?  Is it an affirmation that he is ‘the chosen one’ for lack of a better term?  If memory serves me right, we’ve had two real-world dads appear on the island in ghost type form – Jack/Claire’s and John’s own in season 3.  So why is an island on which conception equals death also populated by ghost-dads?

Which leads me finally to wonder, who is Charlotte’s dad?  Is it Richard?  Her mother left the island, but her dad could still be there (in as much as ‘still’ has any meaning at this point).  Between all the characters now shifting through time and space, we’re verging on that awful possibility with such narratives that someone is going to accidentally end up hooking up with/falling in love with their parent, child or sibling without knowing it.  Eeps, I sure hope not!  But as both Charlotte and Daniel remain seemingly fatherless characters with mothers who were possibly both on the island at some point and now are not…I have to wonder if there is a reason we never saw them kiss after he admitted his love for her!

Ok, let me know what you thought!
ox,
Natalie

—

Hello Natalie,

Yes, this was quite a packed episode! Whatever brewing guesses we might have had about the identity of Faraday’s mother are confirmed in Eloise Hawking (and yes, very weird about Ben seeming surprised at this info. Hold that thought for an episode or two!!). And we learn, perhaps most interesting to me, that Charlotte grew up on the island as part of the Dharma Initiative. I am with you on the strange mindbender of her memory of Daniel, but I wonder if something a bit more straight-forward is going on here (straight-forward for time travel that is): since we know that Charlotte grew up on the island so that she was really there at some earlier moment, and we know that Daniel is moving through time, perhaps he will encounter the young Charlotte in the midst of his time travels. It is hard to say why she never remembered this before, but if she were very young, perhaps it was one of those buried and latent memories that only came to her as she is mentally wandering through her whole life (her final words, after all, are the words of a small girl: “I’m not allowed to have chocolate before dinner”).

But as we see how this sequence might play out, we still have the question of why she and Charles Widmore want to come back. The fact that Widmore was on the island as an Other and Charlotte was there as a Dharma Initiative person raises new questions for me about the relationship between these groups. In earlier seasons, it was a big revelation to the Oceanic survivors that the DI folks were not, in fact, the Others. I am curious to see what we might learn in the series finale about the relationship between these groups, and potentially how this might map on to the cosmic struggle between Ben and Widmore.

Like you, the sudden appearance in season 4 of Christian Shepherd (talk about a loaded name!!) is some kind of spiritual guide to Locke and either Jacob himself or a proxy for Jacob. I have a suspicion that his role as Jack and Claire’s father (and Aaron’s grandfather) will matter – and this is not a spoiler hint, but a real guess about season 6 – but it is not clear to me what it is. I am also not convinced that he is Jacob, but if he is a proxy for Jacob than the name symbolism is even more interesting – Christian is pointing the way to Jacob, not vice versa as we might expect in traditional Christian typology.

Final two points in response: Rousseau and Robert on the beach was truly terrible. As Robert tries to talk her into lowering her gun, I was totally on her side, imagining her already as the slightly deranged wild woman of earlier seasons. It was easy to imagine that somehow the trauma of the smoke monster and the abandonment on the island nearing the term of her pregnancy unhinged her. But when she does start to lower her gun and Robert pauses only for a second before raising his own, I was shocked (and I’ve seen this before!). She is not suspicious and paranoid for no reason: her lover/husband was just as prepared to shoot her. No wonder she is coming unhinged! Secondly, Sawyer! Yes, something very cool is happening here as he comes into his own as the group’s leader.

I have no comment on the Eloise/Ellie hypotheses…

More soon!
K

********************

Episode 6 – 316

Hey Kathryn,

So this episode consists mostly of our Oceanic 6 friends trying to make their way back to the island and, for the most part, succeeding.  Somehow Kate loses Aaron (and adds an annoying refusal to talk to Jack about how. Ever. Seriously Jack, no. Kiss, kiss. They have sex. It’s all melodrama and full-on Jack and Kate annoyingness).  The loss sends her back to the island.  Sun, as we know, is already in because she wants to get to Jin.  And Sayid and Hurley mysteriously show up at the airport (Hurley in true sweet Hurley form buys 78 seats on the plane to stop the standby passengers getting caught up in their danger).  Eloise tells Jack that he needs to recreate as much as he can from the original flight and so somewhat incomprehensibly he needs to put his dad’s shoes on Locke’s feet.

This, to me, felt like the most this show has ever asked me to suspend disbelief.  Seriously.  I can handle time travel and all the rest, but Jack’s dad’s shoes on Locke’s feet are going to get them back to the island?! I struggled with that one.  Regardless, the connection I mentioned in our last post between Jack/Claire’s dad and Locke is more deeply forged in this move as, perhaps, John is now to walk in the footsteps of Jack’s father, or something like that.  Other allusions to the original flight: Hurley carries a guitar like Charley’s and he reads a Spanish comic book in the waiting area just as Walt did on the island in season 1, and Sayid is mysteriously in handcuffs, as was Kate in the first season.

But two mysteries remain – why is Ben all beat up?  And who is that other guy – the creepy one who gave his condolences to Jack in line and then appeared as the only extra passenger in first class?  He is surely going to appear again.

You were right – Ajira airlines (and their water bottle allusion from last episode) are already taking a more significant role in the show…but is there going to be more than this?  Will the Oceanic 6 become the Ajira 12, or something??

Of course, we have the biblical allusion – or more so, the biblical pop culture allusion – with the title of the show and flight number of the plane: 316.  John 3:16, so often held aloft on cards at baseball games, references the need to believe to be saved, just as Eloise instructs Jack that the most important thing he can do if he wants to return to the island – if he wants to go home – is believe.  Belief is the passage between worlds in the New Testament and, it seems, in Lost too (Ok, so I gotta give props to my husband for making that connection – theologian that I am, I totally missed it!  Thanks, Tyler!).

Oh, and did you notice the old black and white photograph from the US military on the island in 1954 in Eloise’s office…just how long has she been tracking this island?  What other images lingered in her office that I didn’t even notice?

What fun to see Lapides again!  Do you think he’s still flying the plane, or did he flash too? It’s hard to know.  Who exactly made it to the island?  We’ve got Hurley, Jack and Kate accounted for, but no Sayid, Sun, Sayid’s guard, that other guy or Ben (or Lapides).  Did they all make it?  Where are they?

And where, sorry – when – on earth are we now!  How is Jin driving the old VW that Hurley fixed up and which we’ve seen various Dharma agents driving.  Why is he in Dharma uniform and why is his hair so long?  He seems to recognize his friends, but the recognition is not complete and, of course, he hasn’t seen Sun yet.

Oh my, am I becoming the hopeless romantic I usually resist being when I just can’t wait for Jin and Sun’s reunion?  Perhaps it’s not a romantic heart that wants it but a curious one – how will their shifts and changes over the last few years impact their coming back together.  Will Jin even recognize this harsh Sun?

Ok, I’ll leave it there for now!

Ox,
N

—-

Dear Natalie,

Finally – enough of the prep, enough of the countdowns, the Oceanic 6 (minus Aaron) are back on the island. Or, as you point out, some of them are. What became of Sun and Sayid (much less Ben, Lapides, and the other passengers) is still a mystery. The bright white light and whoosing noise that overtook the plane in mid-crash suggested a time travel flash, but that would not explain why some of the island’s former inhabitants flashed and others did not.

But before we get to their return and reunion with the Dharma Initiative version of Jin, let’s go back to that weird church and the somewhat hooky plot with Jake’s dad’s shoes. Props to Tyler from me too – I did not catch the John 3:16 reference, but I definitely think it is there (so much for two theological minds aimed on the same subject…). What did catch my attention was the explicit bible lesson that Ben gives Jack in the church. Once again, we catch Ben in prayer and then watch him light a candle – what is up with that? And what kind of church creates a shrine out of Doubting Thomas (a church that houses a strange scientific lab in the basement, perhaps?)? Until this moment we have had virtually no direct references or discussion of Christianity – not since, so far as I remember, Mr. Echo was on the scene baptizing Aaron. Here we have Ben explaining the little known story about Thomas (his bravery and willingness to die with Jesus in Jerusalem) and the famous story about his need for empirical proof of the resurrection. When Jack asks if Thomas was ever convinced, Ben says of course he was and that we are all convinced eventually. As Jack meditates in the pew, we are, of course, supposed to think about his own difficult leap of faith – placing the shoes of his dead father on the body of a dead Locke with the hopes that this will get them back to the island. Of course we seem to know more than Jack: we know that Christian is not in fact dead, or is at least still living some intermediaries life on the island. This knowledge is, I think, supposed to help us make the connection between Doubting Thomas and Jack – if Locke is going to be a proxy for Jack’s dead father, there is a good chance that he will be resurrected too. Which means there is something more profound going on in this seemingly silly act of the shoe swap.

Whatever the deeper symbolism, the shoes seemed to do the trick. At least a few of them made it back to the island in one piece and they encounter the surprise of Jin wearing a DI get-up. I won’t even try to pretend to speculate, since I actually know what this is about. But it is a great ending and a totally mind-cuss to be explored more soon!

One last thought: what do you think was up with Ben reading Ulysses on the plane? This is traditionally the great modernist novel about the loss of faith and the pursuit of meaning in a new fractured urbanism – is it a clue that Ben, despite all his professions to the opposite, is not in fact the believer he claims to be?

Oh my. Let the games begin!

K

*****************

Episode 7: The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham

Dear Natalie,

Re-watching this episode, I was kind of surprised to remember that they gave us the basic arc of Locke/Bentham’s time off the island in such a straight-forward manner. We learn that there is a specific exit from the island, in the desert of Tunisia. Charles Widmore is watching this exit (and presumably sent those warriors on horseback to take out Ben when he first exited as well, but we don’t know that for sure) – and he makes direct contact with Locke, telling him that he too was tricked by Ben to leave the island and give up his position as leader of the Others. We also learn that the Others fancy themselves defenders of the island, but we are not told anything else about who they are. Charles offers to help Locke round up all the Oceanic 6 and tells him that there is a war coming to the island and that Locke needs to be there to assure that the right side wins. Who that side is, of course, is a mystery.

Not to be outdone, Ben is watching Locke’s progress with Widmore and takes the drastic action of shooting Matthew and eventually killing Locke. It is hard to see how we are not supposed to think Ben might somehow be the “good guy” here – though why it is so important that he kill Locke himself, and not let him just commit suicide, is unclear. Does he kill him only because Locke mentions the name of Eloise Hawking, which takes Ben by surprise? Or does Ben only preserve Locke for a short while to try and exhort information from him (he does leave, after all, with two crucial pieces of info: that Jin is still alive and that Eloise Hawking can help them get back on the island)? What does it mean that Ben doesn’t know this about Eloise, even though he does know who she is? If we remember that just before Locke left the island Christian told him that he, not Ben, had to be the one to leave and bring the others back, and that Christian gives Locke, and not Ben, the information about Eloise, it is clear that Ben is usurping Locke’s place, and probably not for any good. Why does Ben need to be the one to round up all the others and lead them back? And why does this require him to kill Locke, thus fulfilling Richard’s prophecy that Locke’s death will bring the others back?

We also have the slightly heavy-handed theme of Locke wondering if he is important or not, with the climactic moment coming when Jack tells him he is suffering from delusions of grandeur. Far more interesting to me than the John/Jack showdown, was the revelation that Locke told Jack that his father is still alive – or at least acting as some sort of intermediary on the island. This means that Jack knew about his father when he performed the shoe swap, meaning he might have anticipated/hoped for something as improbable as John’s resurrection when he struggles to believe what Eloise tells him. If there is a connection between Jack and Doubting Thomas then there is also a connection between John and Jesus, a point that seemed very subtly reinforced when we are told at the beginning of the episode that John was discovered standing in the water, seemingly coming from no where (does that sound like a baptismal/resurrection image to you?). What all this has to do with Ben’s van with the anagram for re-incarnation, I am not sure, but I am betting something.

Final thought: Ceasar and Ilana – who are they and what do they have on Sayid and were they trying to find the island?! That opening scene, where we see Ceasar riffling through an office and then we realize that he is on the island, at an old Dharma Initiative office, took me by surprise, even for the second time.

I can’t wait to hear what you thought of our dear Jeremy Bentham’s wanderings and what you think is going to happen next!

xoxo,

K

—

Hey Kathryn,

Considering how much I love Locke, I’m surprised to say that I wasn’t crazy about this episode.  Perhaps it’s because it was so straightforward?  I’m not sure.  But you’ve definitely raised a few points here that I want to follow up on.

The first is this Widmore/Ben cosmic battle of good and evil without us knowing which is which.  This type of ambiguity is one of my favourite aspects of the show, and we often see it with Ben’s actions most clearly.  Characters put their trust in Ben, only to feel betrayed, but then find themselves needing to put their trust in him once again (Locke is such a case in point for this!). But what I love is that in the desperation of trying to do all the things they find themselves needing to do, these characters throw themselves into these necessary trust relationships again and again, even when the evidence is stacked against trusting anyone.  I like this because I often tire of the over-done theme in tv shows where a character has “trust issues” (and even names them as such) and just needs to be brought out by the right person.  Despite the normal guards so many of us put up, I think this ad hoc tossing about of trust is much truer to the way in which most people I know operate…because good and evil are never black and white or absolute, but rather good and evil are context specific and often have strategic implications that require us to act with elements of each with each action we perform.  I would actually be quite happy if we never knew which one of Ben and Charles were truly good and truly evil and, instead, they both continued to function as ambiguous agitators in the struggle of life.

Ok, on to John, Christian and the shoes – how, how had I forgotten or not pieced together that Christian was also in a coffin on the plane and had gone through some type of resurrection?  We’ve had so many dead characters/ghosts/whatever-beings milling about the island, I just sort of slotted Christian into those types of apparitions without thinking that there might have been an actual path that he took to the island.  By that I mean, I just unconsciously suspended disbelief on the explanation of how he got there rather than noticing that they had actually (in a backhanded way) told us how he did.

We see again in this episode that there are many paths to this island (how’s that for a nice “all paths lead up the same mountain” view of the world’s religions?!).  When the Ajira flight crashes, some end up as survivors on the ground (Caesar and Ben included – answering one of my questions from last time); our Oceanic 6 (or at least the accounted for ones) do some sort of flash; and John comes back to life – he resurrects.  It seems then that with our original Oceanic crash, we had at least the first and third of these scenarios.  I wonder if we had the second??  Either way, it seems that neither Christian nor Locke’s resurrections were flukes, but that this is a thing done – and that Eloise knows how to do it.  And so my reflections on Locke and the shoes being some sort of ‘following in Christian’s footsteps’ came more true than I expected!  He followed Christian’s footsteps on the path through death into life/second life/I don’t know what.

And yes, we have two episodes in a row in which Ben finds out something about Eloise that surprises him.  First that she’s Faraday’s mother, and now that Locke has been sent to see her.  I enjoy this non-all-knowing Ben; watching him figure out some of the pieces of the puzzle alongside us.

My favourite random part in the episode – Widmore’s total transparency about the name he gives John Locke/Jeremy Bentham.  Up until this point, the fact that characters’ names line up with real life names or make allusions to them has been treated as a literary device.  No one thinks or mentions that they are named for famous philosophers, scientists, religious motifs, etc.  Nor did we expect them to!  Part of the play of the allusion is the character not being conscious of it.  But Widmore puts it out on the table – literally – with his own passport joke, and in noting that John’s parents gave him a mocking name too.  John has no response and, I wonder, then, if he doesn’t even get the joke.  It’s a moment that gives Charles Widmore a more meta-quality or a quality to being both in the world of Lost but also outside of it somehow.  He participates in what’s going on, but can see the action from our perspective too.  It was a wake up to the viewers who weren’t already checking names to start doing so.  It was an affirmation to those of us who’ve been puzzling about the names.  But I feel like something even more interesting happened there in that it was also a wake up to us that he might know things about all these players that his opponent, Ben, has no knowledge of. Which is going to make this coming war quite scrappy and fun!

Funny – for an episode I wasn’t crazy about, I sure had a lot to say!

ox,

Natalie

**************

Lost Season 5, episode 8: LaFleur

Dear N,

At last, some answers in the time traveling puzzle! And a chance to see just what sort of fantastic leader our wise-cracking con man Sawyer can be! The movement back and forth from the “present” in the 1977 and the moment in 1974 when the island remainders Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, Jin and Daniel realize they are stuck back in the flow of time was really fun for me, even if it did slow down on the mind-bending time travel and stick to a slightly more conventional unfolding. Best of all, we are inside the Dharma Initiative, back in the 1970s before the Others’ hostile takeover/massacre. I loved each step of the way as Sawyer, so cocky and yet not nearly as annoying as earnest, honest Jack, exercises the skills of a lifetime of lying to save those he has come to care about. This show is a lot about leadership – what qualities make a leader and how do you get others to follow you – and it is about time we got to see Sawyer’s take on the subject. Sure, he can’t perform a blood transfusion of his own blood using nothing but a sea urchin’s spike, but the wily way with which he improvises is far more pleasurable to watch, and just as awe-inspiring to me.

Before I get ahead of myself, a brief plot synopsis, just to keep us all on track: in this episode we learn that as soon as Locke disappears down the well, the flashes through time stop. This happy news is confirmed by the very sad realization that since she died, Charlotte’s body has stopped traveling in time with them. Sawyer is determined to wait it out until Locke returns. It just so happens that when they are is 1974, at the peak of the Dharma Initiative. They save a Dharma woman whose husband has just been shot by two of the Others (called the hostiles by Dharma folks – and believed to be indigenous to the island by them, which is interesting to note). Through some fast talking, including confronting Richard with the news that he is waiting for Locke’s return, Sawyer buys the crew some time, which apparently, turns into full time jobs, houses, and Dharma jumpsuits. Three years later (1977), Miles, Sawyer, Juliet and Jin are fully integrated into Dharma life and clearly do not expect the return of Locke or anyone else, when Jin comes upon Hurley, Kate, and Jack recently crashed from Ajira 316.

Besides the spotlight on Sawyer’s leadership skills, we get to see Juliet and Sawyer in love. I so wanted to say something a few posts ago when you started wishing they’d get together. Aren’t you proud of me for keeping my mouth shut? But there you have it – I don’t know about you, but I really believe their relationship in a way I never did with Jack and Kate, or even Kate and Sawyer. Their tender scene in the kitchen felt the most like a genuine couple and less like a soap opera of anything we’ve seen and I’m totally cheering for them, second time round and all. Unfortunately, the episode harped on the “big question” of how Sawyer is going to feel when Kate returns. As Horace asks him, is three years really enough to get over someone? Sawyer seems quite sure until the episode closes with a lingering look passing between him and Kate on their reunion. I don’t normally yell at the TV, especially when I’m watching reruns, but I wanted to scream at him not to fall for her freckled melodrama. Here’s hoping that Sawyer was right in his comments to Horace.

Speaking of Horace, we also see the birth of his son with Amy, the woman rescued by Sawyer and crew in 1974, facilitated by Juliet. I’ve been thinking about your reflections on birth and maternity in earlier episodes, and I think you are right: something is going on here. The idea of maternity and birth is laden with meaning throughout the seasons and that only seems stronger now. First of all, why can the Dharma women give birth on the island? What happens later to make safe, full-term reproduction impossible? Difficulties in childbirth can’t help but raise this theologian’s eyebrows. Add a definite, though as yet unspecified, moment when these difficulties begin and you have the makings of a solid fall narrative. The question is, whose sin brings it about and why?

OK, I am going on too long. This is where the season really picked up for me last time and I am pretty confident it will be the same the second time round. I still want more answers when it comes to Dharma and the Others, but I will be looking for new clues as we keep going.

xoxo,

K

—

Hey Kathryn,

You might not yell at the tv, but I do!  I was loving this James and Juliet get-together (and yes, I’m very proud of you for not giving it away – thank you!).  I love them because they make such a great team; there’s no dependence, just simple trust and willingness to believe in the other (Juliet in 1974 in Sawyer’s leadership, James in 1977 with Juliet’s obstetrics).  Why Sawyer would even consider going back to Kate when this episode – the episode where he gets with Juliet – is the first episode in which we’ve seen him really smile is beyond me (seriously, I was surprised by the look of a smile on his face and realized we’d never seen a genuinely joyful and not mean or sarcastic grin on him before).  So, yeah, while you don’t yell at the tv, I gave my screen a loud, “come on…argh!” before shutting it off in frustration!

All that being said, one of the (many) things that I can’t figure out with Lost is why whenever a leadership spot opens, we – or rather, they – assume that a man is going to fill it?  First Jack, then Locke, now Sawyer.  Once Locke disappears, everyone assumes that Sawyer will take the lead, but it’s Juliet who knows the island best and who has proven herself to be just as capable as Sawyer.  So what I can’t figure out is whether Lost is just a little sexist, or whether it’s attempting to portray the way in which things would really be.  By this I mean that as they play with notions of civilizations and their births and developments, and as our islanders have gone through various forms of development, is their own little patriarchy a comment on how they think civilizations actually come to be; that is, in a way that eclipses or denies female leadership?

So what has happened to Daniel?  Is he just in shock or is something else going on here?  His mind does seem really blown – is he just trying to figure things out or is something more cosmic taking place?  I loved the scene while Juliet, Miles, Daniel and Jin are waiting for Sawyer to come out from speaking with Horace and the camera is spinning, spinning around them – like a spin in space to accompany the spin they’ve been doing through time.  Daniel even says of their stuck-in-time, record-jumping moves, “The record is spinning again. We’re just not on the song we want to be on”.  But then just as he says this, he sees the childhood version of Charlotte running across the lawn.  And we get insight both into how Charlotte has a memory of Daniel once telling her that she would die on the island and how Charlotte and Daniel might have a deeper bond than simply their work for Widmore.  Furthermore, in addition to asking what has happened to Daniel emotionally or psychologically, we can also ask what has happened to him in the move between 1974 and 1977 – we didn’t see him in 1977 on the island.  So did he take the sub back?  And if so, why him and not the others?  What happens in those intervening years?

Now, on to the island birthing – yes, I really like your thoughts on the Fall!  How interesting!  So in Genesis chapter 3, the chapter of the Fall in the Bible, God tells Eve that women will suffer pains in childbirth because of her and Adam eating the fruit of knowledge.  I like this parallel you’re drawing, and I think it would ultimately be confirmed if the event that causes problems later down the road were some sort of knowledge-gaining event or some sort of disobedience to the design or way the island is supposed to work.  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see!

Oh, but wasn’t it lovely to Juliet finally able to deliver a baby!  The spectrum of emotions moving across her face as she exited the surgery was beautiful!

I was also intrigued by the necklace Amy pulled from Paul’s neck.  It’s an ankh, an ancient Egyptian symbol denoting eternal life or the key to life, and it is frequently held by Egyptian gods in images of them.  So why did Paul have this around his neck?  And what does it mean that the man whose death facilitates our friends’ entry into the Dharma initiative bore the symbol of eternal life, even as the man whose death facilitates the end to the flashes (John Locke) is himself being resurrected?

All questions, I hope, to be answered another time!

ox,

Natalie

***************

Episode 9: Namaste

Hey Kathryn,

Well, I was immediately excited to see that this episode is named Namaste considering my reflections on Widmore’s art just a few episodes ago (episode #3: Jughead).  We learned then that he was once an other, and in this episode the Dharma folks, in fabulous hippy style, all greet each other with Namastes.  Of course, as I noted before, this Sanskrit word is a greeting that refers to a notion of seeing the good in an other, in one’s fellow human – it’s like saying, “the good in me sees the good in you”.  And having Indian origin, I wondered before if Widmore’s painting with Namaste written in it was linking him somehow to Ajira airlines.  But now, being reminded of its common use by the Dharma initiative, and remembering that Widmore was an other, it makes me wonder if there is some more basic link or deeper connection between the Dharma folks and the others/the hostiles than we’ve previously recognized because we’ve been so distracted by their relationship of enmity.

And indeed, it’s difficult for me to even understand why this episode is called Namaste.  The word doesn’t play an obviously significant role, besides being the greeting used…so why name it as the descriptor of the whole episode?  Perhaps it seems strange to get so hung up on one word, but I can’t help but thinking it’s pointing to something more!

Ok, so recap – we open on the Ajira flight as it’s about to go down.  Our friends flash into the past, but we quickly realize that neither Sun nor Ben flashed with them. Now, it sort of makes sense that Ben wouldn’t flash through time, but I have no idea why Sun didn’t. Sun and Lapides start rowing from the island on which they’ve crashed to ‘our island,’ Sun having knocked Ben unconscious with an oar.  The two arrive at the former Dharma crew homes, totally abandoned and in disrepair, to find one light ominously on.  Who else but Christian Shepherd, our ghost-dad, Jacobesque, father of two main characters, comes out to greet them and tells them that they are to follow him on a “bit of a journey” (an understatement if I ever heard one seeing as they will need to traverse 30+ years!).

Back in 1977, with the parallel narrative, Sawyer, Jin, and the now Oceanic 3 reunite (sans Aaron, Sun and we’re still wondering where Sayid is).  Sawyer gets the three of them jobs with the Dharma initiative by pretending that they are some of the new recruits.  They all flash numerous, painful-to-watch, meaningful looks at each other throughout the episode that would get even the most unobservant Dharma goof wondering, yet somehow no one catches on that something strange is happening (except maybe Phil)…and these looks intensify when Sayid is caught prowling the perimeter and is imprisoned by Dharma, presumed to be a spy from the hostiles.

The two key info-pieces or a-ha moments we get occur when Amy tells Juliet that she and Horace are naming their baby Ethan and Juliet realizes that she has delivered her future friend who will, when our friends one day arrive on the island, be killed by them.  And I think it’s worth noting here that I love Juliet’s or, rather, Elizabeth Mitchell’s ability to act with nuance – unlike Sawyer’s sort of silly wistful faces and Jack and Kate’s overacted moments of recognition, Mitchell manages to communicate much emotion with only flickers of facial expression.  The other a-ha moment is when the child who brings Sayid his sandwich reveals himself to be Benjamin Linus.

But I think the point of the episode that I loved most is Sawyer’s schooling of Jack!  Jack slams him for reading a book instead of taking care of business, to which Sawyer responds that Winston Churchill read a book every night, even during the Blitz, and that’s what helped him to think.  Jack always reacted to things without thinking and, Sawyer points out, that got a lot of people killed.  Now that Sawyer’s in charge, it’s going to be a careful, thoughtful operation.  It’s a great exchange; one that totally puts Jack in his place!  And one that let’s the Oceanic 3 know that however it is they’ve imagined they’re going to save those who were left behind, those who were left behind are doing just fine.

Speaking of those who were left behind, though, I keep forgetting to ask this, but think it almost every episode – where on earth are folks like Bernard and Rose?!?  Our main characters got split between the real world and those who started flashing through time and then moved into Dharma, but what about our other named, but not quite main, characters?  Where/when are we to imagine them to be?

Ok, let me know what you thought!

ox,
Natalie

—

Dear Natalie,

I also loved the showdown between Jack and Sawyer – it was my favorite part of the episode! Everything Sawyer said to Jack seemed right on: Jack is the quick-acting, jump in the water, respond like a hero kind of leader. We’ve been watching Sawyer for all four previous seasons sit back, reflect, make up his mind more slowly – and often with a book in hand in some quiet corner of the beach. We’ve always known there was more going on than his don’t-give-a-damn attitude suggests, but it was so fun to see him vocalize his own prerogative as a leader and to offer his own critique of Jack’s style. I couldn’t help but wonder though if there different styles don’t have something to do with their different aims: Jack spent all his time as a leader trying to get folks off the island. Sawyer, so far, has been spending all of his time, trying to make life on the island safe and livable. I almost can’t help but feel like Sawyer has more of the life he’s always wanted on the island than he ever thought he could have off the island, and his style is to keep the status quo. Then again, after all Jack’s hard work to leave, he is the one who wanted to come back, so this might be further proof that Sawyer’s got the right idea. But this is something I want to track as I keep watching the season again.

Perhaps one of the most touching signs of this fundamental difference is the way Sawyer is trapped between wanting to maintain his life and love with Juliet and wanting to welcome back and take care of the returning survivors. The same nuance you recognized in Juliet when she is holding baby Ethan, I found totally heart-breaking when she greets Kate just in time to process her. Why is it I feel so little for Kate and so much for Juliet?

You are right: something is going on with the Namaste business (and that is not a spoiler!). I am not sure if it will add up neatly, but the recurrence of this Sanskrit greeting/blessing, coupled with the presence of the ankh and that crazy towering ancient statue our time travelers saw in one of the flashes, suggests that if nothing else, we need to pay attention to the wisdom found in these non-Western systems of meaning. We have a lot to go on with Locke/Bentham/Hume and the whole Western Enlightenment track, but these visual and aural clues suggest to me that even if there is not a definite philosophical school being gestured to, there is some sort of connection to the non-Western wisdom traditions.

Of all the strange mysteries that remain to be cleared up, the question of why Sun didn’t flash with the others is one of the most vexing to me. When Christian steps out of the abandoned Dharma house and tells Sun she has a journey in front of her (you are right, ridiculous understatement), I thought back to very early hypotheses about the show: that the island somehow represents a kind of purgatory, a purification between normal time and something like eternity. I’m not sure this theory holds for the show as a whole, but purgatory is often described as a journey, almost like Psyche or Hercules’ tasks of endurance in Greek mythology – as Dante describes it, a long journey up a mountain. It kind of worked for me to think that Sun and Jin have this long journey in front of them before they can find each other again.

OK, I’m saving other thoughts for the next episode, which is a real doozy!

xoxo,
K

**************

Kathryn!

What the what!?!  How did I not see that coming?  Sayid kills Ben – I don’t even know how to process this…what will that mean in time?  How is that going to affect all the other storylines?  Is it even possible to kill him like that?  Surely Faraday would say no!  Oh my goodness – is Ben now dead in his alternate temporal selves?  Is there a connection between Sayid shooting him in 1977 and Sun thumping him on the head leaving him for dead in the present time?  Too many questions, I know – but I’m brimming with them because I just don’t know what to do with this!!

Ok, why don’t I do a little recap to calm myself down.  We open in Iraq with a father trying to make his young son into a man by having him kill a chicken.  In a scene that is very, very reminiscent of season 2’s Mr. Eko killing a villager and becoming a child soldier in order to save his brother from that fate, Sayid kills the chicken for his brother, revealing his supposedly true nature as a killer.  The rest of the episode offers various proofs that Sayid is this natural born killer, culminating in his murder of the child Ben (was it shocking for you to see a child get shot like that?  I was surprised how not shocking it felt – as if we weren’t watching a child’s death, but rather that kid was a mere representative of the adult Ben we know).

Sayid, being held captive by Dharma, is aided throughout the episode by this young Ben (who, we learn, believes that Sayid is an other/hostile, and that Sayid will take him away to live with the hostiles a la Richard’s promise 4 years ago).  At the same time, Sawyer is doing everything he can to protect Sayid while Sayid messes up all his attempts.  Sayid is taken into the forest to meet Oldham (played by the fabulous William Sanderson!) who gives him a truth serum to ascertain his real identity.  Sawyer describes Oldham as a psychopath who is ‘our you’ – the title of this episode – meaning that he, like Sayid, is the community’s torturer.  Strapped to a tree in a cruciform position Sayid tells his torturers that he’s from the future and that they’re all going to die.

Flashbacks throughout the episode let us know how Sayid ended up in shackles on the plane.  He is being transported by a bounty hunter to Guam (only after the two have drunk MacCutcheon together, Lost’s fictitious brand of luxury whiskey, and only after they’ve made out a little).  He is shocked and terrified to find the rest of the Oceanic 6 on his flight as he did not intend to return with them – indeed, his presence on the flight is as much a surprise to them as theirs is to him.  And it makes me wonder if the unexpected presence of Sayid – who flashes through time with the rest – has some bearing on why Sun did not flash (a mystery yet to be solved).

Back in 1977, with the community having decided to execute Sayid, the child Ben creates a diversion that enables their escape into the woods where Sayid immobilizes Jin, gets away, and kills the kid.  The last couple of episodes have reminded us numerous times that the Dharma initiative gets wiped out by the hostiles and we know that this wipe-out is facilitated by a young (but not child) Ben forging an alliance with Richard and the hostiles.  So in running away with Sayid to be with the hostiles, Ben jumps the gun on his original path (leaving his village maybe 6-10 years ahead of the original schedule).  I know Faraday would say that events that will happen will still happen and, so, by that logic, the community will still get wiped out.  But if Ben the child can really be killed, then is it possible that Dharma is not going to get gassed anymore?  My mind reels!

It’s also worth noting that this episode reminds us that Sayid’s alliance with adult-Ben back in the real world was forged because he wanted to kill everyone who posed a threat to his friends.  And the conclusion to that task always remained fuzzy, at best.  It seems, now, that Sayid has attempted to complete the mission and kill the one, final person who he understands to be the greatest threat to those he loves – and kill him before he can even become a threat!

Oof, I think this will be a tough commentary for you to respond to without spoilers!  Sorry for that!!

ox,
Natalie

—

Dear Natalie,

Yep, this is a hard one to write without spoilers! I’m not going to say much about boy Ben’s shooting until my commentary on the next episode, so as not to give anything away. But I will say, I remember distinctly how shocking, mind reeling, and upending it was to see it for the first time! Not because, as you point out, it was a child being shot, but because it was Ben – mastermind behind everything, link in all chains, Ben – who was shot. I think I leaped out of my chair and say something like “what the what?!” but probably more parental advisory warning style.

Instead, I want to focus on Sayid. I agree that the opening shot of his chicken-killing episode as a boy in Iraq is supposed to set the stage for the “Sayid the natural born killer” motif of the episode, but what I found so moving about that scene is that Sayid does not kill out of a desire or love of killing, but to help his brother and to shield him from his father’s disdain. It is true that Sayid seems to find these acts of violence easier to bear, but not out of maliciousness, but out of care. Or perhaps he channels the relative ease with which he can confront and perpetrate violence into a means of helping others. As I watched his father praise him as a true man, the young Sayid’s eyes seemed already to carry a certain amount of sadness, as though praise for his violence was already a misunderstanding of his true intentions.

You already mention this side of Sayid, when you point out that all his killing for Ben was motivated by a desire to keep his friends safe. And also, let’s be honest, probably by more than a little anger and desire for revenge. When Ben comes to find him in the Dominican Republic, what Sayid rebels against is Ben’s interpretation of him as a killer who kills for pleasure’s sake (omg, I so want to say something else right now, but I am holding it in, holding it in…).

Besides watching Ben and Sayid play off each other throughout time, I really loved watching Sawyer try to keep it all together as Sayid refuses to play by the rules. Even more than in the last episode, Sawyer’s desire to keep the status quo of the life he has built for himself, and for others, is on display. Don’t get me wrong: I get the desire and given their situation, blending into life in Dharma was probably the very best move. But we know from the get go what Juliet seems to know or guess this episode: this life wasn’t meant to be. It was all a kind of play-acting (I’m not saying the emotions aren’t real, for instance between Sawyer and Juliet, but can they really think they are going to live happily ever after out of time? If nothing else there is the Dharma massacre coming down the line). Sawyer doesn’t want to admit this yet, and I empathize with him. But I also worry that it is a sign of weakness in his own style of leadership: he is very quick on his feet, but craves a stability that Jack, for instance, did not, and it might end up hurting those he is trying to protect.

I never did respond to your musings about the gendered nature of leadership on the island (episode 8, LaFleur). Mostly, I agree: the assumption that the group’s leader will always be a man is clearly absurd given how kick-ass so many of the women are. Like you, I kind of hope it is a meta-commentary on the sexism still rampant in society, but I mostly just think it is just another example of it. The fact that Ann Lucia was the leader of the other survivors group makes me think that they imagine they have dealt with the gender issue or just aren’t thinking about it. But we’ll see…

OK, on to episode 11 as soon as I can so I can finally say what I want to say without spoilers!

K

*************

Lost season 5, episode 11

Dear N,

So what I desperately wanted to say earlier but couldn’t is that, now that we know that boy Ben survives, what does it mean about his whole character development that he remembers being betrayed and shot by Sayid!! Having watched him be battered around and verbally abused by his father we know he has some serious trauma issues. And then the one adult he thinks he can trust shoots him in the chest?! Not to mention, what does this mean about his relationship to the passengers of flight 815? Does the Ben we’ve always known know Sayid as his would-be-killer? Does this explain why he singles Sayid out to do his dirty work and why he is so certain that deep down, Sayid is a killer at heart? And what about Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and especially Juliet? The young Ben would have known all of them. Does this mean that the adult Ben we know has recognized them all along, even if he doesn’t understand the time-traveling meaning of it all? Does his crush on Juliet, his insistence that she come to the island and his romantic pursuit of her as an adult stem from his deep-seated thankfulness to her for saving his life, or out of the self-interested desire to get her to the island in the first place so that she can undergo the series of events we’ve been watching, such that she ends up back in time, ready and able to save him when he is shot? Talk about complicated motives! How would one account for all of one’s desires if one was actively trying to ensure that the past as you know it happens by manipulating the present and future?!

I know that Hurley asks this question explicitly – how come the grown up Ben doesn’t recognize Sayid? – which baffles Miles’ otherwise very cogent explanation of time travel I mean, cogent as these things go. It is still a confusing premise, but I definitely thought this conversation was meant to help sort things out for us. The fact that the one puzzling piece is Ben’s memory or seeming lack of memory of the Oceanic survivors seems significant. Richard is supposed to solve this problem for us, telling Sawyer and Kate that Ben won’t remember anything once he is given over to the Others. Still, I can’t help but wonder if he does remember. Or maybe he doesn’t remember consciously, but the knowledge is lurking there, tying them together over time. From my memory, none of this is cleared up this season, but I am going to pay attention as we move into season 6.

In other news, we learn what happened to Aaron. After a scare of losing him in a grocery store – and of watching him be led away by a Claire look-alike – Kate finally seems to accept the fact that Aaron doesn’t belong to her and that she has to go back to the island and find Claire. Or something like that. To be honest, I am not sure I buy or follow this line of reasoning. It seems like an excuse to take us back to a preoccupation of the series: the abandonment (or neglectful abuse) of children. Think of how often this theme comes up: Locke was abandoned by his mother, Jack was basically neglected/abandoned by his (same for Claire), Ben was abused by his dad and effected his own abandonment, Aaron was going to be given up by Claire, was left in the woods by her, and now has been abandoned by Kate, Kate herself came of age in an abusive home, Sawyer has abandoned his daughter Clementine, and even Sun has left her daughter without the promise of seeing her again. I can’t help but think that given our earlier discussion of the problems of reproduction, there is something going on here. Who children belong to and how they are raised is a central preoccupation of the show, even though it rarely reflects on it. Or maybe the bigger question is: what makes a parent and what do children owe their parents? I haven’t worked out a theory about this, but one thought that keeps crossing my mind is wondering if there is a connection here with the name Jacob as the mysterious, illusive island leader/prophet/god. Though not an abandoned child, Jacob, in the Hebrew Bible, is a birthright stealer who wrests the paternal blessing from his father by trickery, suggesting that things are not aright in the child/parent relations. Not to mention, he is the son of Isaac, the poster child for questionable behavior of parents toward children. If you have other thoughts or theories, I’d love to hear them!

I also loved the confrontation between Juliet and Jack. Coming on the heels of his confrontation with Sawyer and his argument with Kate, Jack is seeming like a real loser, or at least a deeply confused man. Kate tries to call him into the role of action man that Sawyer criticized earlier, and Jack won’t accept it. Except that he tries to play the hero by telling Juliet that he came back to save them. When she counters with the fantastic line “we didn’t need saving” Jack finally admits he is back for himself, because he thinks he has a purpose. So now Jack is like Locke from the early seasons: searching, confused, kind of pathetic. The question is, is Jack on the path to enlightenment like Locke, if that is indeed what is happening with Locke?

OK, I’m going on way too long. Now that the initial shock of Ben’s shooting has worn off and you know he is going to live, what are you thinking?!

K

—

Hey Kathryn,

Well, my friend, I am amazed by your restraint!  I love your reflections on Ben’s relation to just about everyone.  I have to admit, I was only wondering about Ben and Sayid, but hadn’t made the connections to all the others.  The line you draw between him and Juliet is certainly the most interesting one to me.  And I think I come down on agreeing with your latter interpretation – I really wonder if Ben even had a real crush on Juliet.  I think now that his crush might have been a fake cover for his attempt to keep her alive so that she could travel back to save him.  That crush was one of the more vulnerable moments we’ve ever seen with Ben, and it perhaps wasn’t even vulnerability but instead was carefully calculated self-protection.  That would be such a complex way of manipulating someone were it the case, and certainly something I wouldn’t put past Ben.

The exchange between Hurley and Miles was priceless.  I’ve just been waiting for one of the characters to make a ‘Back to the Future’ reference, and I just knew it would be Hurley.  All joking aside, for our generation, that movie really does shape much of our imagination in regards to time travel.  As Lost alludes to and plays with so many different myths – Western Enlightenment, ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman, and Indian, to name a few – it’s only fair that it should play with some of our more treasured pop culture ones too.  And, in truth, using ‘Back to the Future’ as the explanatory mechanism sure helped anchor that conversation for me and make some of the time travel make a little more sense.  When Hurley tripped up Miles with the question about Ben, he wasn’t just tripping up Miles, but was actually letting us all know where it’s at (another reason why I think Ben did remember the Oceanic 815ers, despite what Richard said, and which further complicates the coming Dharma massacre).

This episode played with themes of belief again in ways I found quite interesting.  Most significantly, we have Jack stating a belief in the island rather than his own skills when called on to operate on the young Ben.  Sure, it might be a bluff, but he really seemed to think that the island would save Ben (or at least do what it was going to do), and that was a real development for Jack.  He admits that maybe the island wants to fix things itself and he wonders if his own actions have simply been getting in the way.  I saw this as the context for that great scene you mention between him and Juliet.  Jack can actually accept her statement that they didn’t need saving and admit that he returned for his own mysterious purposes because he has realized that this whole thing is about the island, not him.  Talk about an unexpected giving up of his own power – that’s so not Jack, and it made him much more interesting to me in that moment.

Furthermore, I think Jack’s realization relates to Kate’s.  As you know, Jack and Kate get on my last nerve.  But I liked both of them in this episode.  First Jack has his own realization that he’s not the center of the universe.  And second, we have Kate admitting her own selfishness.  At first, I was frustrated at her when she admitted that she took Aaron for her own needs, not to care for him.  But then I realized that based on the situation in which the Oceanic 6 found themselves, she did what she had to do.  She had to take Aaron, and she had to lie about whose he was.  And so she didn’t need to admit the selfish motives that tainted her decision.  Like Jack taking a step towards some sort of enlightenment and responsibility for his own selfish motives, so too did Kate.  For the first time in a long time, and perhaps only for a moment, I liked them again.

And if we interpret Jack and Kate in this way, we can certainly tie in their paths to self-discovery to our interpretation of Ben – all of them, in their own ways, were revealing intensely complex knots of motivation for why they do the things they do.  An interesting theme to track alongside the kids/parents one, I think.

One more thing – did you notice how Richard notes that he doesn’t have to answer to Ellie and Charles as he takes Ben away to heal him?  Of course, we expect him to mention Charles, but I continue to wonder what the connection with Ellie is.  I’m continuing to track this Ellie/Eloise/Daniel Faraday possibility and hoping it will bring the return of Daniel real soon!

Ok, gotta keep going!

ox,

Natalie

****

Episode 12: Dead is Dead

Dear Natalie,

I’m sorry to keep harping on one theme, but this episode also revolved around questions of parenthood and child abandonment. We learn how it is Ben came to act as a father toward Alex and that Charles Widmore, whatever he might be now, was a harsher man back on the island (namely, Ben takes the baby and refuses to shoot Rousseau even that is apparently the mission Widmore sent him on). It is intriguing to me that as we try to piece together the duplicitous sides of Benjamin Linus he appears to have come into his leadership of the island both by questioning the more brutal methods of Widmore and by eventually having Widmore banished (by what process? Trial by smoke monster?). We learn that Widmore used to leave the island and has a child by an outsider (mark that one, my friend). Though the code of the island is still a bit obscure as is the relation of the Others to this code, even I can imagine this is not proper protocol. So we are left wondering if, at least at first, Ben didn’t have the greater good of the island in mind?

The whole episode, in a sense, revolves around the question of Ben’s guilt or innocence in relation to the death of Alex: whether Charles is right and Alex was meant by the island to die all along or whether her death is Ben’s fault. Interestingly, the return of the kick-ass Alex from the belly of the smoke monster doesn’t exactly answer this question, except to tell Ben his days of decision-making are over. He swears to follow Locke’s every command – though one thing we’ve learned is that Ben is not true to his word, sweat, tears, and fear in the moment aside. One of the things I’ve noticed watching this time around is how much the Ben we already know is present in his younger self: how much the scared, abused, scheming, passive-aggressive, angry, manipulative boy remains in the many-sided man. The fact that we watch Ben in an egregious case of duplicity as he plays Locke and Ceasar against each other (as well as telling Locke point blank that he expected him to rise from the dead while denying exactly this to Sun hours later) alongside his supposed soul-searching seemed perfect to me – both Ben’s are real, or rather there is no “real” Ben at all. Ben is the sum of his scheming parts and they all exist side-by-side.

On the theme of leadership styles, we see a similar reversal to the one happening with Sawyer and Jack in Locke and Ben’s relationship. But in both cases, I am not sure the old leader (Jack and Ben) will be prepared to follow meekly all the way to the end. I am interested in the new Locke: he is so sure of himself it is almost eerie. I guess that is what happens when you pass through death. What is most interesting is how, ever since the end of season 4, Locke has been on his own path, largely unmoored from the life of the other survivors. It is still unclear how his path into the mysteries of the Others fits with whatever it is exactly the Oceanic and freighter folks are up to – trying to stay alive and perhaps fulfill some higher purpose set by the island?

Finally, what did you make of the sudden turn of Illana and her crew into gun-toting self-proclaimed leaders of the remaining Ajira survivors? What does stand in the shadow of the statue?

xoxo,

K

—–

Hey Kathryn,

Another great episode!  Don’t apologize for continuing to push the parental themes.  I think you’re on to something really interesting there.  And I’m intrigued that you’re telling me to put a pin in that reference to Widmore’s family back in the real world.  I had simply assumed that they were referencing Penny.  But your advice leads me to think there’s something more going on.  Very interesting, indeed.

Or perhaps you were just wanting me to pay attention to the fact that Ben knows about Penny, as we finally learn later in the episode how Ben came to get all those ass-kicked injuries he’s been sustaining for a few episodes now (I do love it when Desmond shows up!).  Ok, I’ll stop guessing.

Now, perhaps unlike you, I took Ben’s promise to Alex to follow John seriously.  Taking on the responsibility of facing the smoke monster for his own selfishness seems like a genuine development of character to me.  Plus it seems to echo the ways in which Jack and Kate also came to a greater self-realization and confession of their own self-centeredness in the last episode and, perhaps, is developing another new theme.  Ben has been humbled, and I’m curious to see where this takes him.  Of course, I also agree with you that all these facets of his character make up the real him, or that the real him resides in them all…but I still take that moment as a moment of growth.

Even more interesting to me is Ben’s belief in John, which I also took to be genuine (even if I also think he spent most of the episode totally mistrusting John and contemplating doing him further harm).  Trying to get Sun to fear John echoed his trying to get Caesar to mistrust John earlier in the episode.  And so just as he then used Caesar to prove to John that he was on John’s side, I wonder if he’s similarly setting Sun up.  We know from an earlier episode that the story of Thomas and Christ captivates Ben.  And his statement to John that there’s a difference between believing and actually seeing recalls that moment back in the church in front of the shrine to St. Thomas when Ben told Jack that we all end up believing eventually.  I really think Ben, like Thomas, is finally believing.  Ah, but maybe I’m naïve.

The connection to that moment shared between Jack and Ben in the church is interesting too, though, because it was the moment when Jack had to decide what to do with his father’s shoes – does he take the leap of faith and put them on Locke’s dead body, or does he dismiss this all as foolishness.  Those shoes continue to intrigue me.  Did you notice that John took them off for the canoe ride to the main island?  What was that all about?  Surely he wasn’t just trying to keep his feet dry?  The idea of magic shoes seems a bit silly – but the Biblical idea of removing one’s shoes for holy ground might relate here.  Or they might be trying to draw our attention continually to the idea of some sort of path being forged.  I haven’t quite decided on the symbolism yet, but it certainly intrigues.

Ok, so did you notice the books on Alex’s shelf?  The recognizable ones are two key texts about the American slave trade, Roots (a tracing of family lineage) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (a book that deals explicitly with themes of families being separated as well as with reproductive problems), plus Flowers for Algernon, a science fiction short story about a man named Charlie (connection to our Charlie?) who undergoes scientific experiments to increase his low-IQ.  He gains the knowledge, but then loses it.  So how do these books relate to this ongoing theme of family, parents, reproduction and our ponderings about the upcoming event that will cause the island’s reproductive problems and its possible relation to a Biblical narrative of fall and the acquiring of knowledge?

Finally, seeing as we reviewed Avatar together a few weeks ago, it’s fresh in my mind and I’m noticing some connections here and wondering if we can name a cultural moment together.  We both noticed in Avatar how the religion of the Na’vi was something measurable, something tangible, scientifically readable, even technological, yet still spiritual.  And I suppose at times, the island on Lost feels like that to me.  They can send physicists to study it.  Even the smoke monster is both mysterious smoke and technological sound…and it functions as a security system, for goodness sake.  The religious views of the island grow out of all the major faith traditions from our own world (albeit, anchored in a largely Western mythology).  And back in the real world, with the activities of Eloise and others, we see a great blend of science, alchemy, religion and mathematics.  These images from Avatar and Lost are a far cry from the more boring picture of logic/science vs. spirituality that we both bemoaned in the recent Sherlock Holmes.  Indeed, they are more akin to the fascinating Illusionist of a few years ago.  As we continue to engage contemporary notions of spirituality in pop culture, this might be a theme to track!

Oh, and Illana and her friends? Hmpf.  No idea.  But I certainly don’t think she was employed by who she said she was employed by now to get Sayid on that plane.  The question then for me then is, was she employed by Charles or Ben?  It’s a tricky one to parse out seeing as both Charles and Ben could know what Sayid does to the young Ben.  What does stand in the shadow of the statue?  I don’t know that either – but it was most certainly a coded question that defines who is on what team…Lapides being on the wrong team, then, might make us lean towards Ilana working for someone other than Charles.  Oof, but I just don’t know.

ox,

Natalie

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Episode 13: Some Like it Hoth

Hey Kathryn,

Great episode!  I can no longer resist commenting properly on your musings about all the broken families in this show.  You mentioned so many in our previous post, but when I pondered it tonight, I realized I couldn’t think of anyone but Sun who had a stable two parent family and even her father was an crazy mob boss, so I’m not even sure that counts!  Everyone who remains (in some form) from (some form of) flight 815 comes from and/or produces some sort of family brokenness: Jack, Kate, John, Christian, Sawyer, Claire, Jin, Aaron, Sun, Daniel, Miles, Hurley, Ben…  And then when it comes to Juliet and Sayid, we just don’t know.

So tonight we had the pairing of Miles’ and Hurley’s broken relationships with their fathers: Miles, unwilling to forgive his, Hurley trying to teach Miles that forgiveness is the true path.  When we learn that Miles’ father is dead in a place where no one can reach him, I tried to resist thinking that the only other main Asian male character we’ve had besides Jin was his father, but it turns out my resistance was futile.  Chang is Miles’ dad, and, in a strange turn of events, Miles is inhabiting the island with his own baby-form self.  Another quirk in the time travel ripple!  I must admit that for a moment I was nervous that Miles was somehow going to be his own father…but Lost managed to sidestep another risky incestuous move!

We’re reminded again and again in this episode of Miles’ special gift and we get to see Naomi’s recruitment of him to Widmore’s special ops team.  Of course, he’s getting paid 1.6 million dollars, 16 being one of the island’s magic numbers, as we’re reminded in the creepy scene where Hurley watches his own lottery numbers being branded onto the hatch as it’s being built.  And we get to see Bram, the guy who was working with Ilena in the previous episode, try to kidnap Miles back in the real world to offer him a truer path to self-revelation than the empty promises of money that Widmore offers (let’s not even get into the naming, Bram, yet! This could be a reference to Bram Stoker, the famed writer of Dracula or, I think more likely, it could be a reference to the name, Abraham, the Biblical father of Isaac – who you mentioned in the last post as the biblical father of Jacob…to whom our island’s god-figure alludes.)  Again we get the question, “what lies in the shadow of the statue?” which again, I’m thinking even more now serves as a litmus test for who has a true or authentic relationship to the island.  I noted in our last post that Lapides was not on the right team, and now neither is Miles as he decides to join Widmore’s (and Lapides’) team.  So if these new folks – the seekers of a true path – aren’t working for Widmore, are they working for Ben, or is there a new faction in our cosmic battle?

What I loved most about this episode, though, was the bond developing between Hurley and Miles.  They both see dead people!  Or hear them or commune with them or play chess with them or whatever.  Either way, they have this weird gift/curse in common, and it was fun to watch them bonding…to see the different responses that could happen to these broken family situations.

In addition to these different ways of relating to absent fathers played out by Miles and Hurley, we also see their different approaches to dealing with time travel.  Whereas Miles doesn’t want to interrupt his own narrative path, Hurley is perfectly willing to try to pitch a script for The Empire Strikes Back (with some improvements) to Peter Jackson.  And, indeed, we have another beloved pop culture reference that helps us understand what is going on in the story – Hurley presses Miles to learn from Luke.  Don’t waste time being angry with your father when it’s all going to work out in the end.  Reconcile now.  Make things right…or we going to end up with something totally sucky, like Ewoks!

But these Hurley/Miles moments renew my question, how do the mysteries of the island relate to the real world?  Really, how do those numbers pass from the island to Hurley’s crazy friend to Hurley playing them in the lottery?  There is a real connection between the island and the real world – like the Jack/Claire thing and the relationship between Kate, Sawyer and Cassidy, to name only two examples.  This is the one question I *need* answered before the series ends.

And how will all of this relate to the coming massacre?  Will the interventions Miles makes with Chang have any bearing on that event?  At least we now have the answer to Daniel’s question so many episodes ago as to what kind of time Miles had already spent on the island – double time, it seems.

Best line in the episode – Hurley to Miles: “It will help with global warming, which hasn’t happened yet, so maybe we can prevent it!”.  You can always count on Hurley for that comedy relief.

Oh, and did you notice the Egyptian history being charted on the chalkboard that Jack was erasing in the Dharma classroom?  No deep meaning, just fun, I think – another clue to keep us on the Egyptian path of pondering.

Ok, and best moment in the episode – Daniel returns!  Yey!  I’ve missed him so.  And he doesn’t return in a “have to get to know each other again all over again” way, but rather in a way that recognizes Miles.  Thank goodness we’ll finally get to know what happened –why Daniel left and, more importantly, why he’s back!

So much to wrap up – so many questions and characters and fun paths to traverse!  I really. Really. Love. This. Show.

xo,
Natalie

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Dear Natalie,

Like you, I was totally aware of the broken families/estranged fathers and sons theme continuing, and I really enjoyed getting a glimpse into Miles’ past (both in terms of the flashbacks, and in terms of seeing baby Miles on the island). We still haven’t learned why Dr. Chang abandoned Miles and his mother, but we know that his absence, coupled with Miles’ preternatural “I commune with dead people” gift, left him pretty messed up and open to the mercenary offers of Widmore. Probably the scene that drove home to me just how much anger Miles carries toward his father was the scene with Mr. Grey – he punitively refuses him closure when he asks for a message from his dead son, sticking up for potentially neglected sons everywhere. While I loved Hurley’s message of forgiveness, a la Star Wars analogies, there is so much child-abuse/neglect I couldn’t help but sympathize with Miles’ harsher view of justice.

I also loved watching his secret gift in action. The fact that he, and only he, could have learned the truth from that dead body was so pleasurable to watch: it reminded me of wilely characters in old folk tales (“please, please don’t throw me in the briar patch”) – just when the heavy-handed authoritarian thinks he is putting Miles in his place, it turns out that giving him the dead body is the surest way for someone else to learn what is really going on at those drill sites.

Given that Widmore was on the island at the same time as baby Miles, one has to wonder if that isn’t why he recruited him later. And of course, I want to know if and how the island might have caused Miles’ special gift. But it is still very unclear who Widmore is playing against and why Bram insists he is on the wrong team. Bram, by the way, is definitely a nickname for Abraham (Bram Stoker’s name was Abraham) and I agree, it is not a coincidence that we have an Abraham on the same island as Jacob. The question is: is Bram playing for the same team as Jacob, and if not, whose team is it?

In a completely different plot, I both loved and hated it when Sawyer punched out Phil. It was so decisive and reactive and there was something satisfying about him saving the day in that way. But this kind of reaction is exactly what he blamed Jack for, and the solution is far from permanent, meaning that Sawyer is finally going to have to stop protecting the status quo and start planning for an unknown future. I have been wondering if Sawyer isn’t able to resort to his preferred leadership style precisely because he has been leading under the conditions of civilization and society (as opposed to camping in the jungle or on the beach). It remains to be seen what he will do if that structure is taken away.

Final thought, why Ann Arbor? We’ve heard a couple times now that Dharma is based there and I just wonder what it means.

xoxo,
K

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Season 5, Episode 14

Kathryn,

Well, cancel all my excitement about Daniel’s return.  Sigh.  Why’d they have to kill one of my favourites?  Why don’t they just take Hurley and Juliet while they’re at it.  Boo!  At least they gave him an episode that revolved around him before they took him out.  And revolve it did!

We get two main plots – Daniel’s story on the island and Daniel’s story off the island.

Daniel on the island is attempting to avert the disaster that led to the creation of the hatch that led to the creation of the button that led to Desmond not pressing the button that led to flight 815’s crash that led to this whole tv show!  Perhaps I’m a little dense, but I didn’t totally follow Dan’s logic about constants vs. variables.  Even with some sense of free will and a notion of the significance of the present time over future/past time, they would still be changing the past by changing their own present.  Is it that those who move through time become ‘variables’ because they’ve been wrenched from linear time and thus are able to disrupt linear time’s constancy?  If that were possible, wouldn’t any notion of a ‘constant’ itself be questionable?  It’s all a little muddy to me.

Besides, all this becomes sort of pointless anyway when Ellie shows up and kills Daniel…and – woot! – did I call it or did I call it?  Ellie is Eloise is Daniel’s mother.  And I wasn’t even remotely surprised that Widmore was his father and indeed have been wondering if that were the case for the last few episodes anyway…So are we to think Daniel is the one who Widmore fathered off of the island, or Penny?  Who, then, is Penny’s mother?  It’s not Eloise, I don’t think.  So what we have here is another half-sibling duo (Penny/Daniel and Claire/Jack) who share a father who is largely absent from their lives and who has some sort of intense relationship of power and control to the island which, of course, continues our theme of absent/lacking/failed parental figures.  And it’s not just the dads – Charles and Christian are guilty of neglect, but Eloise knowingly puts a course of events into play that will kill her son!  In a strange way, this puts her in the same camp as Ben, whose actions get his own (fake) daughter killed.

Daniel is wonderfully complex in this episode.  I noted before that the moment when he is willing to act against his own logical, scientific beliefs is when he wants to save Charlotte and so runs to seek Desmond’s help.  Something similar happens in this episode – again, he’s willing to fight against what he thinks is true if it can have any impact of saving Charlotte.  Did you recall the line she says, “I’m not allowed to have chocolate before dinner”? The adult Charlotte says the same thing right before she dies, as she remembers Daniel’s visit.  But he goes even further than this – wildly admitting to Chang and others that he is from the future and exposing Miles as Chang’s son.  And this leads me to wonder – are all these disruptions signs that what happened happened?  Are they simply what happened?  Or are they signs of his presence as a disruptive variable?  Do they set new events in motion or maintain a status quo?

An even bigger puzzle for me is why Daniel, with the memory loss in the real world, is so disturbed by the 815 crash fake deaths.  I wondered it the first time we saw it, and I can’t say it’s that much clearer now.  Is it simply because he has known them through various moments through time, or is something else going on?

Of course, the other storyline back in the real world is Desmond’s.  Having been shot by Ben Linus (who was trying to shoot Penny, but is unable to do so when he sees her kid), Desmond is wheeled into an emergency room.  Eloise shows up to apologize to Penny because Desmond’s injury is her son’s fault and, for the first time in a long time, Eloise doesn’t know how something – Desmond’s fate – is going to turn out.  Penny assumes that Ben is Eloise’s son, but Ellie corrects her. So what’s the deal – how is this shooting Des’ fault?  My sense is that the culpability relates to Eloise’s inability to know the outcome and that somehow, Daniel’s act of free will, of living into his variability rather than sticking with his constancy (and remember, that he referred to Desmond as his “constant”) is being referenced here.  But what did he do?  What course of events?  And how does that course of events get to Ben on the pier with the gun?

Ben tries to shoot Penny because Charles had Alex killed.  Charles had Alex killed because Ben had him exiled from the island.  We don’t know why or how Ben got Charles exiled, but if it had something to do with the child he fathered off of the island, it might also have something to do with Daniel…but that connection remains to be seen.

Just 3 more episodes to go!

ox,

Natalie

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Dear Natalie,

You are right – this was a doozey of an episode! I loved having Daniel back, and even though I’ve seen the whole season and even though he gives Jack a stern talk about how any one of them could die (cue the ominous prediction), I still sort of don’t believe it. And how painful was it, as Daniel stares up into the eyes of his baffled younger mother, that he realized that she knew all along that sending him back to the island would end this way!

How freaky for Eloise, by the way, to watch her son grow up to look exactly like the young man she remembers shooting when she was younger! I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Eloise right now, but that would cast a bizarre and morbid light on one’s relationship with one’s son.

Though, the fact that Eloise remembers shooting Daniel, even though for Daniel the shooting is his present, not his past, only throws the whole constant/variable distinction into confusion for me. In a logic-bending way, Daniel’s shooting is both Eloise’s past and Daniel’s present: both what really happened (since Eloise remembered it and even sets in motion the events that will cause it) and what is yet to happen up until the moment it happens. Like most time-traveling paradoxes, Daniel seems to be playing into the hands of fate (if fate in this case is the sequence of events that has already happened) even when he thinks he is acting of free will. And in this sense it might be that even humans are constants some or most of the time. But they remain the only part of the equation that is a variable – capable of acting out of free will in a way that upsets the ordinary chain of events. As you say, however, we don’t know yet if anything Daniel has done is disruptive as a variable, or merely repetitive as a constant. To throw a little hint out there, this is going to make all the difference in the world when it comes to the start of season 6.

I am also very intrigued by the fact that Daniel is the child of Eloise and Charles, who are, as you pointed out, the only people on the island Richard doesn’t seem to have power over. Who are they and what does their one-time union amount to? When I offered you the hint about Widmore’s child off the island, I was mostly referring to the coming revelation of his relation to Daniel. I am not sure who the child off the island refers to. If I remember correctly, Ben does mention it is a child with “an outsider,” which seems to rule out Eloise. Unless she had already left the island and somehow Ben didn’t know about her, but that seems unlikely. I am sorry if my hint was more misleading that clarifying. I did start wondering about Desmond and Daniel’s time-spanning relationship, especially now that we know they are brothers-in-law. Which raises the question you’ve been asking: how does what happens on the island relate to/translate into the real world?

Final observation: we now have the remaining Oceanic survivors of 1977 in separate situations. Jack and Kate are out in the woods, having just watched Daniel get shot, and Sawyer and Juliet have been captured by Dharma, leaving the other survivors in peril. As you say, only three more episodes to go… and a lot left that can/will still happen!

xoxo,

K

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Episode 15: Follow the Leader

Dear Natalie,

It is getting so hard to talk about these final episodes without giving away the season finale and the various revelations along the way – but only two more episodes to go, so I will do my best!

This episode, as its title suggests, circles once again around the idea of leadership. In particular, we get back to Locke and his resumption as leader of the Others. He shows up, much to Richard’s surprise, and immediately takes Richard and Ben on a journey into the jungle, the purpose of which is to get Richard to confront an earlier Locke and tell him he will have to die in order to bring back the Oceanic 6. Once again, we see the limitations of Richard’s knowledge and power. He is not an omniscient being, showing up at exactly the right moment of his own volition, but merely a servant to the leader – as Ben says, a kind of advisor. It is also another reminder that everything we’ve seen happen so far is well orchestrated by careful choices. Twice now we’ve watched Locke tell Richard what to do to ensure that things will unfold the way we’ve seen them unfold. Which means the present as we’ve experienced is dependent upon the time-traveling future that leads back to the past. Once again – really confusing our sense of agency, fate, and free will.

An aside on this theme: Eloise decides to help Jack detonate the nuclear bomb, presumably to take back the shooting of her son. What we do not know is whether the older Eloise we know – the one who sent Jack back to the island in the first place – remembers helping Jack with the bomb when she was a younger man. If she does, it raises the question of whether or not everything Jack is doing, including whether or not his mission will be successful, is not just “what already happened” – meaning that even though he thinks he is creating something new in time, he might just be a patsy to determinism. If so, perhaps he is about to create the very incident he is trying to prevent and the whole chain of events as we know it is set in motion by his actions. Then again, he might be breaking the chain of events with something new, and that, my friend, seems like the big mystery for season 6.

But back to Locke. We have lots of clues that Locke is acting strange. Richard says so directly, and although Locke tells him it is merely that he has a purpose now, you’ve got to admit that he is acting a little funny. During the “previously on” we also have a return to Ben’s speech to Sun about how, whatever miraculous things happen on the island, dead is dead (“you don’t get to come back from that”). This could just be some exposition to let us know that the killing of Daniel (which we will see again) is really real, but I’m pretty sure it is also supposed to draw our attention to Locke’s strange “second-life” state. As leader, he announces to his people that he will lead them all (under Richard’s guidance) to see Jacob, with the intent of making transparent the hierarchies of knowledge and power that seem to govern the island. Of course, he then tells Ben that his real purpose is to kill Jacob, which also seems very un-Locke like. Did the image of Locke leading his people across the island sand have biblical resonance to you – Moses leading his people in the desert and all that? But Moses leading his people to Yahweh to kill him? Hmm…

Another central theme of this episode is whether or not it is desirable to wipe the slate clean. Both Jack and Eloise are attracted to this idea, but Kate is skeptical, both of the means and of the end purpose. Not only is detonating a hydrogen bomb a risky move to begin with, she isn’t interested in erasing the past. This is a fascinating theme to me because I find myself torn down the middle. In general, I’m not a big believer in the fantasy of new beginnings – what does it even mean to think of you who you are without thinking of the web of actions and relationships that have brought you to any given point? Yet, the fantasy is powerful, especially if one has experience as much loss and trauma as our dear Oceanic survivors have. The very fact, however, that Jack is being motivated to do away with the entire past that has made him who he is, makes me skeptical that it will in fact work. Not to mention, his headstrong desire to detonate the bomb reminds me of his similar desire to get the people off the island, and we all know how well that worked out.

Two other stray observations: I loved Dr. Chang’s questioning of Hugo (“So you fought in the Korean war?” “There’s no such thing?”). And what about the ominous intrusion of Kate into Sawyer and Juliet’s intimate moment on the sub? If Kate is forever going to haunt them, maybe it would be best if the past could just be erased.

Onward to the incident!
K

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Dear Kathryn,

So much in this episode – yes, I too loved Dr. Chang’s questioning of Hugo re: the Korean war and whoever the president might be in 1977.  That was great.  I also enjoyed watching Miles watching Chang get him (at least, the younger him) and his mother onto the boat.  I sort of knew something like that was coming (come on – Chang just seemed to love his baby son too much for his to be so sinister as Miles imagined).  The other small detailed I enjoyed was the narrator use of “30 years later” to take us up to our present day – a reminder that at this point in the game, time truly is relative.  Oh, and yes, John leading his people across the desert totally reminded me of the Israelites being led by Moses. But you’re right, Moses leading his people to kill Yahweh is certainly a problem, and it makes me wonder how much closer we’re getting to some event in which the god of the island is challenged by the leader of the people unto the people’s destruction – bringing together theologies of tribalism, hubris, Fall  and, perhaps, redemption into one great narrative.

As you know, I’ve been captivated by the Ellie/Eloise/Daniel/and sometimes Widmore story for a while now.  Ellie’s motivations are indeed complex and fascinating at this point, as you say.  And I also had to wonder if she’s actually pregnant with fetus-Daniel at the moment when she shoots adult-Daniel.  When her and Charles sneak a moment in quiet together, his hand moves immediately to her stomach while she talks and, not to be crass, but we certainly got a lot of buxom boob-shots off of her.  Sure, Lost has always enjoyed its low-cut tank-tops, but I wondered if we were supposed to learn something from those camera angles rather than just be titillated (pun intended) by them?

Blerg Kate onto the sub with Sawyer and Juliet.  Seriously, folks, cut our girl Julie a break.  Sawyer was loyal to her in this episode as his love for her was evident (although I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the interrogation didn’t turn to beating her sooner?!).  Why complicate it with Kate?  Let those two crazy kids have a real stab at it – stock in Microsoft, Cowboys in 78, and whatever other scheme they may create along the way (hey – how about Ann Arbor being emphasized again as they sat on the sub discussing their future – good call, I’ll be watching it).

In terms of leadership, what intrigued me was how much the leadership is getting dispersed.  Sure, Juliet follows Sawyer, but Kate’s arrival makes me wonder how far that following will go.  And Kate, of course, refuses to follow Jack in the end and finally – for better or for worse – branches off on her own.  Sayid ultimately decides to follow Jack, but in a bid that has no anticipation of an outcome but rather finds some form of death in either option.  And of course we’ve got the folks blindly following John into the woods to confront their spiritual leader, Jacob, to challenge his very existence (did it creep you out how docile and obedient they were – really, no one wanted to question his motives there besides Ben?).  The interesting thing binding all these forms of leadership to me is the blindness they exhibit.  Folks are departing from and connecting up with various leaders, but with no sense of where their leader might actually take them.  And this connects to my previous ponderings regarding trust issues in Lost – folks are not afraid to blindly trust each other in this show, and I love that quality to their characters.  It’s so refreshing in a pop culture that takes trust issues to the mark of character depth!

Ok, so this episode really got me into thinking more about Richard.  First of all, seeing the two Johns so close to each other, but spanning 30 years, made me realize that Richard and John both have this ever-youth or fixed-age quality to them.  And it renewed my wondering as to why Richard stays forever young.  And, as is often a clue with Lost, it got me wondering about his name.  In real life, Richard Alpert is a spiritual teacher, born in 1931 and still alive.  Alpert was an early experimenter with LSD, who traveled with the famous Timothy Leary (of “turn on, tune in, drop out” fame), became disillusioned with academia and founded a commune of intellectuals (which hosted Allen Ginsberg and the Grateful Dead, among others); a commune that sought God or something higher through drug induced states.  Eventually Alpert left the drug philosophy behind to find his true purpose of ‘serving others’.  This servant role developed as he studied a spiritual path in India and earned the new name, Ram Dass, which means “servant of God”.  So like John Locke to Jeremy Bentham, the real life Richard Alpert too underwent a name change once his true purpose became clear.  And like our Richard Alpert, he lived an intentional life of servanthood to the Divine and to the Divine’s leaders.

So what I find interesting about our Richard Alpert (besides this servant to God/s narrative) in regards to our musings regarding the whole series is that his namesake blends together multiple religious traditions in his search for truth – Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, druggy, yoga, and various forms of meditation, to name but a few.  We’ve noted often how Lost blends the philosophies and spiritual paths of the world to make sense of the island, and now it seems that our most constant figure on the island (really, Richard is the only one who seems to stay there always) is named for a man who did the same in our world.  Very interesting!

Lastly – didn’t we think those temporal flashes were the island moving through time, not our people?  We have the play of constant and variable happening here in a very confusing way; too confusing to track.  But at the very least, we’ve got a great visual image of a variable (the flashing John with the bullet removed from his leg) and a constant (the resurrected John instructing Richard to remove that bullet) within meters of each other.  Perhaps further pondering on this would enlighten us further.

ox,

Natalie

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Episode 17: The Incident, part 2

Dear Kathryn,

What the what!?  Ok, let’s tackle this immense episode on a couple of fronts: first Jacob’s continued visits to folks in the real world.  First we have his appearance to Jack post the famous 5-second surgery.  Jack tries to buy an Apollo candy bar (these bars, like McCutcheon whiskey, are one of the many Lost products that appear again and again) that gets stuck in the machine.  Jacob shows up and gives him the bar…but only after Jack and his father tousle over who it is who doesn’t believe in Jack (note, an ongoing theme of belief, faith and trust).  So this is a pre-Oceanic 815 connection.  Second, Jacob picks Hurley up outside of his jail and convinces him to get on Ajira 316 – a post-island connection much like his one with Sayid in the previous episode.  The interesting connection here is that those of the Oceanic 6 who return to the island willingly – Jack, Kate, Sun – had all connected with Jacob prior to their original crash and those who did not return so willingly – Sayid and Hurley – only connected with him afterwards.

And then, perhaps strangest of all, we have Jacob’s connection with John.  At first, Jacob is simply sitting on a park bench reading Flannery O’Conner’s Everything that Rises Must Converge; a collection of short stories she wrote in the years shortly before her death.  Ok, so I haven’t read it, but a quick internet search reveals that it’s about the sinfulness of humanity that we often fail to see in our modern, secular world.  If that’s not one of the themes of Lost, I don’t know what is!  Then we see John fall from atop a building, and we remember that it was his father – who has also appeared on the island – who pushed him to his potential death.  Jacob immediately walks up to him, touches his shoulder, and John responds by waking – whether from unconsciousness or death, I’m not sure – for Jacob to apologize that this had to happen.

Speaking of books – did you notice the coffee table book while Juliet’s parents were telling her about their divorce (yet another example of a broken family)?  It was Mysteries of the Ancient Americas – again, a play on this theme of numerous ancient cultures coming together in our island mythology.

Of course, John/s is the most interesting character in this episode.  While the guy we thought was John takes Ben through the shadow and into the statue, Ilena and the others show up with a box that has our dead John/Jeremy in it.  And we learn that somehow – I can’t even begin to imagine how – the John who’s in the statue with Ben is not John at all but is the man in black who has found the necessary loophole to finally kill Jacob.  Ben, angry at Jacob, his god, for the years of silence – and really, at this point I can’t blame him – kills Jacob in a sort of desperate move.  Is this Esau defeating Jacob; Cain killing Abel, Satan defeating God…I don’t know.  But I was certainly struck by Dr. Chang’s observation that once the energy pocket is breached, “all Hell’s gonna break loose” – perhaps this has happened in a way even he did not imagine!

Oh, and in regards to our previous conversation – yes, I do think we were supposed to see John (or fake John) as a Moses figure as it gets affirmed by Ben’s description of John to Jacob: “he gets marched up here as if he were Moses”.  And if this temple is some form of Moses’ trek up Sinai/Horeb to receive God’s law, then the man in black’s ability to circumvent the rules to find a loophole is particularly ironic.

And if John is some sort of bizarro-Moses figure – we should remember that Claire’s baby Aaron is still off the island.  In the Biblical narratives, Aaron is Moses’ brother who God sends to help Moses lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt when Moses is too wussy to do so himself.  We might recall too that John was an early care-giver for Aaron.  There might be some connection here – at the very least, I don’t think we’re done with Aaron (or with Michael’s kid, Walt) yet!

For what it’s worth – what lies in the shadow of the statue? Besides a confusing Latin phrase?  Translation: He who will save us all.  So as we wait to see who’ll make it out of that statue, we have to wonder who will save them, and how he will do it?!

I’m sure you, like I, kind of loved that fight between Jack and Sawyer.  Finally – if they aren’t going to kiss and make up, at least they finally got to beat the crap out of each other.  But I have to be honest, the fact that every one of our friends’ – Jack’s, Kate’s, Sawyer’s and Juliet’s – reasons to support or oppose blowing up a nuclear weapon was whether or not it would or would not erase their romantic pasts was seriously starting to grate on my last nerve! I tend not to support detonating nukes at all – doing so or not dong so based on one’s romantic attachments is more ludicrous than most other reasons!

Which leads me to Juliet – had you told me when I started this season that Juliet was going to fall down a hole and die detonating a nuclear bomb, I would have been devastated.  She’s my favourite (her and Ben).  And I just love her.  But her fate is no different than anyone else on that island (in 1977) right now – and that’s certainly interesting.  So will we start the next season back in LAX waiting to board Oceanic 815?  I know the first episode of the season is called LAX, but with Lost, that could really mean anything!

Because we are of course left with Miles’ question – does the nuke prevent ‘the incident’ or is it ‘the incident’?  If it’s the former, then things might be set right (whatever right might be).  But if it’s the latter, then we really just begin in an eternal recurrence of the same; in the Western Modern tradition made famous by Nietzsche, but a concept that also pervades many of the world’s philosophies and religions.

Ok, I’ll stop there before I take up everything on which you may have wanted to comment.  Oh my goodness, I do not know how those of you who watched this when it first aired were able to wait so long for the season return!  I can hardly wait until tomorrow!!

ox,
Natalie

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Dear Natalie,

It has been a really awesome journey back through season 5 with you, and having to pretend I didn’t know what was going to happen or what we would learn (even just in this final episode) actually made me pay more attention to the small details and the interconnected themes, and that has been great. I am so excited to see what tomorrow night brings – what in fact happened in that great flash of white?!

But first: this episode totally floored me – again! The revelation in Jacob’s lair that John is not John, the cosmic showdown, the death of (a) god (?) – it was actually way more interesting to me than the nuclear bomb plot. Not to suggest that detonating a nuclear bomb isn’t significant and I don’t want to know as much as the next girl what it all means. But what I really want to know is who are Jacob and the Man in Black and what relationship do they have to everything else that is/has been/will go on?! I loved your suggestions of Cain/Abel, Jacob/Esau overtones. I had not really seen it, but I think the resonances are there. Using Locke’s body to persuade Ben to kill Jacob for him was the loophole, not discovering an ability to kill Jacob himself – and this seemed laden with suggestions of trickery and place swapping, much like the two biblical brother stories you draw our attention to. And like brothers locked in some cosmic struggle, they both share a common fear. With his dying breath Jacob tells not-John that “they” are coming; not-John looks startled and fearful, and then pushes Jacob’s body into the flames. So one big question to keep in our minds is who are “they”?

[A quick digression: my brother pointed out to me that there is no reason to think that the Man in Black hasn’t animated other dead bodies to get his work done. In fact, we have every reason to suspect that Christian – Jack and Claire’s dead dad, for whom John’s body was supposed to be a substitute – is just another proxy for the Man in Black. Which means that everyone who has met Christian and thought they were talking to Jacob’s spokesman has actually been talking to the Man in Black. Ilena confirms that Jacob has not been using the cabin, but someone else has – the Man in Black. Eloise, who we can assume might play for the same team as Widmore, is the one who insists that John’s body go back to the island, providing the Man in Black with his necessary loophole. If this is all true, than none of our islanders have been in communication (at least not on the island) with the real Jacob, and are following the destiny set in play by the Man in Black and his proxies. Thanks Michael for pointing all this out to your dense sister].

Unlike you, I did not find Ben’s confrontation with his god compelling or understandable. I found him incredibly pathetic. Sure, I get it: he has been ignored and abused, left to follow orders with no direct access to the main man. Still, he seemed like a selfish, sniveling whiner and I absolutely loved it when Jacob said to him “What about you?” One of the themes of the show so far has been how our lives are interconnected, and how, if in anyway an individual is special over and above the web of relationships that bind him or her. Ben has always had a hard time accepting this and even as a small boy wanted to believe he was special in a way that would give him power and access to knowledge. Jacob’s even-toned reply, asking Ben just why he should think he is special in the first place, seemed to me, not so much a taunt as a moment of grace that Ben ignored. At least a moment of grace as it might appear in a Flannery O’Connor story, which is why I absolutely loved the close up, lingering shot of that book cover and why it made so much sense to me that Jacob was reading it. You (or the web reference you found) are totally right: Flannery loved to make clear the sinfulness (often in deeply petty ways that add up to so much more) that is ignored or psychologized away by modern life. But she also loved to offer her characters moments of grace – chances to walk away from whatever selfish desires are driving them to destruction. Re-watching this time, I couldn’t help but think that this is what Jacob was doing with all his off-island encounters: offering our characters a small moment of grace, a chance to choose differently, a chance to think about their lives differently. When not-Locke says to Ben “everything will change once he’s gone” I couldn’t help but think that was right – but I’m not sure how and I’m not sure for the better.

OK, I am already going on too long. Let’s cut to the chase: the great white flash and what is going to happen next. As we discussed when debriefing over the phone, there is no reason to think that Juliet would die but all the other people on the island would survive. It was a nuclear bomb after all. But since Elizabeth Mitchell is not supposed to be back this season, we’ve got to think that whatever happens in that flash affects her differently. Like perhaps the flash is not the Incident, but really does reset time. Or even if it is the Incident, that the storyline we are supposed to follow is not the one that involves her time on the island. The title for the episode is not LAX but LA X, suggesting that this LA is not the LA we know/our characters know. Whether they are there because of or in spite of all that they’ve already done is an open question and your guess is as good as mine. I am very glad we only have to wait 36 more hours and I will be very excited to follow this next season together!

Let the countdown begin,
xoxo,
K