The Little Prince (S5, ep. 4)

Thoughts:

• The episode’s title is a direct homage to Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s novel “The Little Prince.”

“Prince” is a novel I’ve never read – the story of a young boy living on an asteroid named B612. That asteroid contains three volcanoes, one of them dormant (just like the Island’s volcano). The Prince’s sole company on B612 is a rose.

At one point, Prince finds his way to earth, landing in the middle of the Sahara desert, where his interactions with the narrator and the stories that the Prince tells this narrator create the shape of the story. There are a number of parallels between “Prince” and Lost, including the way in which the narrative perspective shifts during the course of the book’s chapters, similar to the way in which Lost’s narrative ‘hooks’ – the flashbacks, flashforwards – shift as the seasons progress.

Much of the novel is concerned with the human condition on a deceptively-simple level. Merchants discuss the ridiculousness of humanity, how people rush from place to place, never stopping to savor where they are or to contemplate where it is they’re going. The Prince meets a flower who tells him that men on earth have no roots, and that this lets the wind blow them around and make life hard for them. This parallels the personal struggles of the castaways who seem to drift through their lives and the way in which the castaways seem hardwired to long for some undiscovered country.

When the Prince arrives on earth, he meets a snake, who claims that he can send the Prince “back to the land from whence he came.” The land the snake refers to is the land of death – creating a parallel between this being and the Island’s Smoke Monster.
 
At one point in his wanderings, the Prince discovers rows of rose bushes and feels sadness, as he’d thought his rose was the only one in existence. This is a total stretch, but it makes me wonder whether this foreshadows the possibility of multiple worlds on Lost.

Lost’s obsession with loops – loops in time, loops in character evolution, loops in narrative – has suggested that the show may be influenced by Stephen King’s Dark Tower saga (and if I’m right about the happenings of Season 6, the show’s overarching narrative will owe a debt to King’s Weird West magnum opus). If so, The Little Prince’s magical rose offers another potential cross-narrative reference. There’s more, but you’ll have to wait for my book in order to read it. Apparently, enough of you would like to see that happen, and so it’s going to. You’ll be able to pre-order a copy right here on Chud, should the gods continues to favor me.

• Sun is receiving intelligence from an unknown source – presumably Widmore. She gets pages of data, photos of Jack and Ben, and a box of chocolates which hides a handgun for her use.

• I love the way that Juliet deals with Sawyer. Calling him James, she has the air of a patient wife or mother. And it works. You can see the beginnings of their connection in those moments.

• Charlotte’s contracted Captain Trips. Daniel describes the problem by explaining that it’s neurological, that our brains have an internal clock and that the flashes throw the clock off. That’s neat, and quasi-plausible-sounding.

Mr. Norton: “You are going to lose the boy.”

• The scene between Kate and Ben’s slimy lawyer is great. I love the way Kate shakily lays out her deal, and the way in which Mr. Norton just decimates it, pushing it aside like Kate’s just slid a plate of garbage in front of him. Kate has no choice. She has to run now, has to get on that plane if she and Aaron want to remain together. Ben’s trapped her as effectively as a rat in a maze.

• Locke realizes that they need to return to the Orchid – since that’s where the flashes started, maybe that’s where they can be stopped. He’s right, and he’s now pointed straight at his sad ending and headed toward it on rails. Locke’s journey here is, it should be said, more than a little reminiscent of Christ’s (and Apollo’s, for that matter). He’s following the will of an unseen, largely-inexplicable ‘god,’ he goes to what he thinks is his death willingly (if pitifully) and he’s resurrected roughly three days (72 hours – Fiona’s ‘event window’) after Jack views him (I’m not clear on how long Locke’s been dead at that point). Keep in mind that the Narnia books are a key reference point for this season, and that Locke’s death and resurrection represents a kind of dark mirror to Aslan’s fall and return. Similarly, Jacob’s death at the hand of Anti-Locke at the end of this season contains that same sense of Aslan-esque knowing self-sacrifice, with Jacob seeming almost satisfied with his own death.

Jack: “Ben is on our side.”
Sayid: “The only side he’s on is his own.”

• We learn that Jack has been suspended on allegations of substance abuse (that’s new info, yes?). He’s severed all ties to life off the Island at this point. Hurley’s call from the clink, hilariously telling him that “Ben’s never gonna get me now, thanks dude,” continues to affirm my love for the beneficent Buddha of Lost.

• Ben shows up at the hospital, asking about Sayid, just as one of those pesky fake-nurse-actual-assassins shows up to bag and tag our favorite Iraqi. Another fun fight sequence ensues (there are a lot of these this season, comparatively speaking. I appreciate them) and we get an address from the assailant: 42 Panorama Crest, Kate’s address. It’s Ben that’s set all of these attacks up, right? He’s trying to round everyone up as ‘easily’ as Locke, loading their bodies into his van and taking them off to a corral for when they wake.

• Ben and Sayid go off to get Hurley, while Jack motors off to grab Kate. They’re to meet at Slip 23 – another instance of the Numbers. I’ve been asked to keep my eye out for weird continuity changes in the scenes at the Slip, and I’ll comment on them as they come up.

• I love the dynamic between Sayid and Ben, even if it’s not entirely clear to me right now why Sayid’s done such a 180 on Ben.

• Sawyer and Co. see a shaft of white light carving the night sky. They’ve landed at the point in time where Locke was pounding on the Hatch during season one and its window erupted into light. We know now that at this point both Locke and Desmond were teetering into despair, and that each unknowingly saved the other at that moment.

• Miles gets his first nosebleed, foreshadowing his infancy on the Island. The longer you’ve been on the Island, supposedly, the sooner you start with the bleeding and the hemorrhaging and the babbling. Daniel suggests that this is due to degree of ‘exposure,’ presumably to electromagnetic energy and/or radiation.

• It was on this night that Aaron was born. Sawyer watches from the shadows as Kate helps Claire with the birth, and we realize that this means he was there all along. The show’s taken the time to point us at seemingly-significant times in the Island’s history. Is Aaron’s birth significant? Or is the night of the Swan’s illumination the significant portion, with Aaron’s birth more significant for Sawyer’s glimpse of Kate? It’s impossible to know.

• And with that, they do the Quantum Shuffle again.

• This is the first time Kate’s seen Jack clean-shaven in a while. And we see Jack trying to help by listening – by insisting that Kate talk to him, which is a different kind of Jack, really. He’s stubbornly insistent, but not in that wild-eyed, Overlook Hotel way we’ve seen him lately. That’s a nice change of pace, even if he’s about to slip right back into that mode.

• Locke shares the Hatch story with James (let’s call him James now, since everyone else is starting to). The Hatch is where Locke’s Island faith was first tested, his encounter with the literalization of a false idol. Recall Season 2 (which mirrors Season 5 in numerous ways – see the Season 2 columns for some instances, and stay tuned for more here), in which we saw Locke fall under a weirdly religious devotion towards the Button and the Swan. We talked then about how the act of pushing the Button could be analogized to Skinner Box experiments, and how Locke’s eventual disillusionment with the Button resulted in a changed man. That’s the Locke of Season 5, and it’s why he’s so dismissive in the conversation he has with James. He doesn’t need to go back there literally or figuratively – he’s progressed past that point in time, and he’s evolved in his thinking since he was the man pounding on the Hatch door.

• James and Locke’s conversation brings up the possibility and the desirability of trying to change the past. James suggests that someone could use the opportunity to try and change things, to do things differently. Locke sees it the other way: he needed all his experiences in order to make him who he is. Their viewpoints express fundamentally different, equally-interesting and (at this point) equally-valid philosophical positions. Their conversation has direct bearing on the direction of this show. Will Season 6 somehow reset the timeline, giving the castaways another shot at whatever it is they’re seeking (something that The Little Prince novel reminds us is usually unknown by the seeker)? Will they remain where they are, the sum of their experiences?

I’ve suggested that the show will combine the two possibilities – sending the consciousnesses of the people at the Jughead explosion back in time to some earlier point, where they will retain at least partial/instinctual memory of what they’ve done and who they’ve been, while giving them the chance to relive and potentially change their choices this time around (call it the Castaway reincarnation theory, or the Quantum Leap theory, or the “probably wildly off-base” theory.

• James, Locke and Co. come upon the castaway camp, which is trashed and abandoned. At this point, when James refers to “our people,” he’s really just referring to Rose, Bernard and Vincent. The rest of “his” people have been shot, blowed up, shot with flaming fricking arrows, and probably some got dysentery or some other horrible thing happened to them because they don’t have speaking lines and are thus, like Stallone, expendable. Really, he should just say “where are Rose, Bernard and Vincent?” Because everyone else is pushing daisies at this point.

• They discover the Hydra Island canoes on the shore – presumably the same ones we saw James and Kate using in Season 3, so he should probably remember them. The Locke group has shifted back again to post-Ajira time, around the same period in which an injured Locke received his compass from Richard. These boats were used to ferry Anti-Locke, Ben, Sun, Frank, Ilyana, Brom, and the corpse of John Locke (I love you, Lost) to the main Island. That means, then, that James and the real, alive Locke – as opposed to the corpse of John Locke or the fake ‘ghost’ of Locke (I hate you, Lost) – have “just” missed seeing those folks.

• Locke and Co take one of the canoes out to circle to the Orchid. As they’re paddling along another boat appears in the distance behind them, and begins shooting at them. I don’t know that we definitively learned who was in that other boat – but can we assume that it’s Ilyana? Since we know that Ajira’s crashed, and we know that she and her crew are bringing Locke’s body to the Island, then it makes sense for her to shoot at what she’d think was the ‘fake’ Locke, right?

• Jack and Kate mistakenly believe that Norton’s client is Claire’s mother. Jack now knows she is Aaron’s grandmother, and that Aaron is his nephew. He tells Kate that he can ‘fix it,’ but of course, Jack doesn’t even know what he’s trying to fix (another echo of that portion of The Little Prince). In actuality, Claire’s mother has no idea that Aaron may be Claire’s child.

• In one fell swoop, Dan Norton’s arranged for Hurley to be exonerated and released. In order to make the grade to be Ben Linus’ lawyer I’d imagine you’d have to be one intelligent, merciless sonofabitch. If Lost does a spin-off, I think they should try creating a procedural around Norton’s firm in which shady, Island-related lawyers cut backroom deals and try cases like “The People v. Smoke Monster.”

• Locke and Co. come across Rousseau’s wreckage, and we cut to her team floating in an octagonal raft, evoking the Dharma wheel shape, which in turns evokes the frozen Orchid Wheel, and the star “brand” we’ve seen.

• They recover the unconscious body of Jin, who, for the second time, is involved in an explosion on a boat where he narrowly avoids death. Season 5 again mirrors Season 2, in that both seasons reintroduced Jin after the explosion, having left the question of his death up in the air from the previous season.

• Ben, Jack, Sayid and Kate met at the docks. Ben reveals that he was trying to take Aaron, and we see that Sun is watching this exchange from her car with a sleeping Aaron in the backseat, before she exits the vehicle with the previously-seen handgun. Sun’s an outstanding babysitter, no?

• We end with Jin discovering the identities of Rousseau and her crew, and I look forward to revisiting that story in the next episode. Rousseau and Co. most resemble the tail-enders to me, and I think those groups serve as an intentional mirror of each other. In both cases, a group wrecks on the Island, helps to save other survivors, suspects that one of their number is not who he says he is, and eventually have that belief confirmed. Both Rousseau and Ana Lucia are driven to kill the Other(s) that they discover among them. Both groups die out entirely leaving only one eventual survivor: Rousseau/Bernard. These are interesting parallels, and their reflective quality also gives us a sense of events repeating themselves, in obvious and in subtle ways.

• And in the event there’s any doubt that this episode is definitively meant to be connected with the novel of the same name, take a look at the canister that Locke finds washed up with the rest of Rousseau’s crash-wreckage. Stamped on the canister in blocky black letters is the following: BESIXDOUZE.

What’s the significance of that? Take another look: Be-Six-Douze, otherwise known as….B-612, the name of the Prince’s asteroid.

*****

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Jughead and The Little Prince (S5, eps. 3 & 4)

Jughead (S5, ep. 3)

Richard: “My name is Richard Alpert. I assume you’ve come back for your bomb.”

Thoughts:

(Desmond’s mistaken belief that the ‘chest-shake’ had replaced the ‘hand-shake’ in society was soon soundly beaten out of him)

• Penny’s giving birth, making their son the fourth child of a major character on the show, and emphasizing the generational aspect of this saga, something I’ll mention again briefly below.

Desmond: “Look- right out there, beyond where you can see, there’s an island. And it’s a very special island. I left it a long time ago. Never thought I’d see it again. It’s called Great Britain.”

• Cute misdirection, writers.

• A trip wire in the jungle ensures that more of the extraneous castaways are blown to bits, reducing the group to just the regulars.

• The Others of the 1950s ambush Miles, Charlotte and Daniel with bows and arrows, indicating that they were the ones raining flaming death down on everyone in “The Lie.” Leading them is a young Eloise Hawking, who we saw last episode as the grey-haired monk/scientist/Angela Lansbury impersonator. On Rewatch we know that Daniel’s her son, and her first question to him seems to gain a little ironic weight with knowledge of her role in the events to come: “You just couldn’t stay away – could you?”

• And just like that…Bernard and Rose are gone. They vanish after the events of “The Lie” and won’t be seen again until season’s end.

• Penny brings up the question that was asked in the column for “Because You Left”: If Daniel appeared to Desmond years ago, in Desmond’s past, why didn’t the wild-eyed Scot remember that until he woke up two nights ago? It may have something to do with the fact that according to Faraday, Desmond is ‘uniquely, miraculously special.’ What does that mean?

• When Penny gives him that cool look as he’s leaving, the full weight of all the times that Desmond has run settles over things. That’s something I didn’t appreciate the first time through.

• Penny asks Des to promise her he won’t go back to the Island again. When he asks why he’d want to go back, she doesn’t answer. Is this because the answer should be obvious to Des (he’s always running off and leaving her, really)? Or is it because Penny knows something Desmond (and the audience) do not?

Locke: “Who are these people?”
Sawyer: “Well, gee, I didn’t have time to ask that, with Frogurt on fire and all.”

• Again: cute. Juliet, Sawyer and Locke have two Others captured at the same time that young Hawking is holding Miles, Charlotte and Daniel for questioning, creating a mirrored situation between the two on-Island groups.

Miles: “We just walked over a fresh grave.”

• Miles feels the sensation of a fresh grave beneath him – four dead US soldiers. He receives their dates and causes of death just by passing over them, again hinting that his while his powers may be death-dependant (he can’t ‘read’ the living), they are probably also time-related.

• The Others’ camp is again shown to be tents – specifically the commandeered tents of the US Army – further suggesting their hermit-crab-esque living philosophy (we’ve seen them force out two groups now , the US Army and Dharma, and in both cases they end up living in those groups’ prior ‘shells’).

• The first interactions between Daniel and his mother are tinged with irony. Her willingness to shoot him here at the first sign of provocation will obviously come into play again later in the season. Her disbelief at the idea of time travel is amusing, and it’s interesting as well. Both Richard and Ellie seem incredulous at the concept, and it calls into question their evolution on the Island (Richard’s especially). As of the 1950s, Richard appears unaware of the Island’s time-related properties. At what point does he discover them? When Locke first appears to him? Does this mean that, as of the 50s, Jacob didn’t know of the Island’s unique properties? Or that he wasn’t sharing them with Richard? How much, then, do the Others truly know about their Island?

Desmond: “Faraday–the university says there’s no record of him.”
Custodian: “Well, can you blame ’em? I mean, after what he’d done to that poor girl?”

• I’ve got very little memory of whether Daniel and Theresa’s story is explicated on later in this season. Why does Daniel experiment on her? Did she agree to it? Did she insist on it? Was he aware of the consequences? Did his own self-experimentation take place before or after hers?

And is it strict coincidence that this woman’s name is Theresa – the name mentioned in Locke’s vision of Boone (“Theresa falls up the stairs – Theresa falls down the stairs”), the name of a woman whose mind seems to be going up and down the figurative stairs of time?

I’m guessing that coincidence is exactly what this is, but if not, it’s an intriguing little connection and a hint that the show knew they would eventually reach this part of the story way back in Season 2.

• The fact that Oxford is apparently going out of its way to cover up Faraday’s association with them suggests that Widmore may have bought their silence.

Richard: “We didn’t start this, friend. Your people attacked us. You come to our island to run your tests, you fire on us, and what, you expect us not to defend ourselves?”

• The US Military has apparently opted to use the Island in order to test one of their hydrogen bombs – something they did with reliable frequency during that decade. Their appearance, and the details of that appearance, creates an interesting mirror-effect. The military’s arrival in the 1950s mirrors the freighter’s arrival in Season 4 to a large degree. Both are ships carrying high explosives and armed, trained men who invade the Island. And when we think back, we realize that this was true of the Black Rock, at least in part. That crew brought cases of dynamite to the Island, dynamite we’ve seen used twice on the show. Does this mean that we should expect some of the Black Rock crew to have been trained mercenaries/fighters? I’d imagine so.

Sawyer: “So who taught you Latin?”
Juliet: “Others 101. Gotta learn Latin–language of the enlightened.”

• When Juliet says that Latin is “the language of the enlightened,” it’s possible that she’s referring directly to the enlightenment: to thinkers like Locke and Rousseau, to scientists like Newton and Galileo. The Others have so far been portrayed as naturalists, as scientists, and as such this reference makes sense. It’s also possible that “the language of the enlightened” refers to the person speaking the language, as in Latin is the language that people who have been enlightened speak. We know that at least some of the Others are subjected to ‘treatments’ in Room 23. Is this how they’ve learned Latin well enough to speak it in conversation? Is this also how they’ve been ‘enlightened’? And is this ‘conditioning’ an unspoken reason for Juliet’s inability to convey even the simplest information about her time with the Others and their purpose? Because that inability is kinda infuriating to me.

Sawyer: “Are you crazy?! What were you thinking? Why didn’t you shoot him?!”
Locke: “Because… he’s one of my people.”

• Young Widmore’s impressive neck-snapping capabilities are showcased here to terrific effect, and as he makes good his escape, we see that Locke won’t shoot him just as he wouldn’t shoot the young federal officer who betrayed him in “Further Instructions.” Locke is weirdly non-specific about his killing code.

• We learn that Widmore was Daniel Faraday’s ‘benefactor’ off of the Island, helping to fund his research and to take care of the now-catatonic Theresa. This implies a few things to me: (1) Daniel is Widmore’s son, if not literally than certainly in the surrogate sense and (2) Widmore and Hawking may in fact be engaged in engineering the very “loop” that I suspect the castaways are trapped in. In fact, I suspect that Widmore and Hawking may have gone to the significant trouble we’ve seen them go through on the show thus far in order to ensure that this loop in time remains viable, semi-stable, preserved.

Why? I dunno. But it’s curious, is it not, that Widmore just happens to have Hawking’s number on file, and that this is now the second time that he has directed Desmond to people who are directly related to/integral for the time loop that the castaways have ridden throughout the first five seasons?

Richard: “Y–you answer to someone, don’t you? You follow a chain of command, right?”
Faraday: “Yeah.”
Richard: “Yeah, well, so do I.”

• Ah, but is that ‘someone’ Jacob? It’s left ambiguously unclear, and Jacob doesn’t seem like the sort of fellow to order mass killings (though he certainly could be – we’ve spent next-to-no-time with him). You know who DOES seem like the sort who’d be into some righteous bloodshed? The MiB.

Are the Others functional intermediaries between Jacob and the MiB? Does Richard serve, as some folks in the Rewatch discussion thread have suggested, serve as a kind of ageless referee/emissary for BOTH the Island’s mysterious ‘demi-gods’?

Jones: “Follow me? Their leader is some sodding old man. What, you think he can track me? You think he knows this island better than I do?”

• This might just be one of Locke’s most iconic moments on the show. I fucking love this line and the subsequent cut straight to a centered Locke casually scoping out the Others’ camp.

Locke: “How did you know Richard would be here?”
Juliet: “Richard’s always been here.”

• Up until now, Alpert’s apparent agelessness hasn’t been discussed within the show itself AT ALL. Alpert’s seeming-immortality was, up until this episode, almost totally speculative on the part of Lost’s audience. In Jughead we receive official confirmation that Alpert really is extremely long-lived at the least, and quite possibly immortal in some sense. There are a few things to note about the Intimations of Alpert’s Immortality: (1) We’ve so far seen Richard only within the bounds of the time loop that the castaways are trapped in. His ‘agelessness’ may be a side-effect of the loop itself, and may be limited to a specific period of time. (2) We’ll learn that Jacob “made” Alpert this way, indicating that the Island may have the power to grant people eternal youth, and suggesting that the legend fountain of youth may be related to the Island (remember that Florida, fabled site of Ponce De Leon’s fountain, is also situated near a Vile Vortice).

Great Ellie Line: “You may have Richard fooled, you can’t really expect me to believe that you, a British woman and a Chinese man are all members of the United States military.”

• Daniel instructs Ellie to bury the Hydrogen bomb, which she and the Others will appear to comply with (though why they simply stick it in an underground chamber, as opposed to sealing it off ala the Swan Station, is a mystery).

Richard: “I said… put the gun down, Widmore.”
Locke: “Your name is Widmore? Charles Widmore?”

• And with that we also receive official confirmation of Widmore’s past on the Island. Lost has become a true generational saga now, reflecting both the parents and children and the children of those children dealing with “ordinary” life struggles, as well as the apparent generational nature of the Island itself, and how its former children continue to squabble and struggle over this place.

• We learn that Desmond and Penny have named their child “Charlie,” presumably in honor of Charlie Pace, but also an echo of her father’s name. The designation, like most things on Lost, has a dual meaning – one side ‘light,’ and one side ‘dark.’

Richard: “Look, I… certainly don’t want to contradict myself, but… we have a very specific process for selecting our leadership, and it starts at a very, very young age.”
Locke: “All right. All right. What year is it right now?”
Richard: “It’s 1954.”
Locke: “All right. May 30, 1956–2 years from now–that’s the day I’m born–Tustin, California, and if you don’t believe me, I suggest you come and visit me.”

• With that, the time loop that Anti-Locke will create later in the season is completed. First, Anti-Locke directed Richard to give the ‘real’ Locke a compass, and instructing Locke to give it back to Richard. Locke does that here, handing it over to Richard and telling him when and where Locke will be born. The self-fulfilling prophecy has begun.

• Charlotte’s nose explodes, leaving her blood-caked and unconscious, and telegraphing the growing danger that those castaways left on-Island are now facing.

• Catch up on “The Little Prince” after the page break!