316 (S5, ep. 6)

Ms. Hawking: “This is how they found the Island.”

Thoughts:

• Jack’s eye opens wide, and with that, we’re suddenly and inexplicably back on the Island, in a moment that directly mirrors the very beginning of the first episode of the series. Doc Shephard goes from Atheist to True Believer during Season 5, and Jack’s return to the Island here feels something like rebirth/reawakening, especially when you factor in the head-first dive (the head-first dive being Jack’s all-around favorite move in life, in general) as a literal and figurative ‘leap of faith.’ 

• By my reckoning, Jacob seems to give five “gifts” in the season finale. He gives Jack an Apollo bar after an argument with his father. He gives Kate the lunchbox she’ll later use as a time capsule. He gives Sawyer the pen that he’ll use to write his letter. He gives Jin and Sun a blessing. All of these are given prior to the crash of Oceanic 815. But Jacob also gives two “gifts” to people after the crash – he gives Sayid the gift of life, assuming that when he stops Sayid he’s preventing Sayid’s death, and not ensuring Nadia’s. Finally, he gives Hurley Charlie’s guitar case after Hurley is sprung from the clink. The case has travelled with him to the Island as we can see here. We haven’t seen the case opened, so anything could be in it.

• Tacked to the wall of The Lamppost is a photo of the Island taken by a US Army camera in 1954 – presumably the same crew that Hawking herself helped to kill.

• Hawking tells us that The Lamppost is constructed over “a unique pocket of electromagnetic energy,” echoing the description of the Swan Station. These pockets appear to be connected.

• The decision to place The Lamppost in the basement of a church is an intriguing one. It provides, in essence, a mirror image of the Temple on the Island and it raises the possibility that other ‘holy’ sites around the world (including, I assume, Ayers Rock/Uluru in Australia) are also resting atop these “unique pockets.”

• Are we to assume that the man who plotted the mathematical course to the Island back in the 70s was Daniel Faraday? That timing doesn’t add up – Dharma is active on the Island when Faraday arrives in the 70s – so I guess not.

Desmond: “Daniel Faraday – your son – sent me here. He wanted me to tell you that he and all the people on the Island need your help. He said that only you could help him. He didn’t say Jack, he didn’t say Sun, he didn’t say Ben; he said you.”
Hawking: “But I am helping, dear.”

• That’s three times in two episodes that a character has questioned the point of, or made a comment on the validity of, sending/bringing everyone back to the Island. In “This Place Is Death,” Jin demands that Locke tell him how bringing his wife back will help and Locke has no answer for him. Daniel comments to Charlotte that the notion of bringing people back to stop the flashes goes beyond the realm of science. Desmond asks the same question in a different way during this episode, pointing out that Daniel didn’t ask for Jack or Sun or Ben – he asked for Eloise Hawking. Rewatching this scene it’s hard not to notice Hawking’s weird demeanor. Is it simply the knowledge of what’s to come that has her seeming so suspect? Or is she hiding more than we know? We know that Hawking is already aware of her son’s fate and is willfully moving the right pieces into play. Is she doing this to ‘preserve the universe/timeline’? Or is this the equivalent of Anthony Cooper swindling a kidney from an easy mark?

• Hawking tells them that they need to recreate the circumstances of the original crash as closely as possible. I have to wonder why, as it sounds very much like the castaways will essentially be trying to ‘trick’ the Island into letting them back in by duplicating their accidental arrival. What makes all of this odder? Hawking’s insistence on giving Jack Locke’s suicide note in private, as well as telling him that he must put a pair of his father’s shoes on Locke’s feet. Why can’t Ben and Sun hear these things? Is it because Hawking and Widmore are working for Jacob, and are engineering some kind of backdoor defeat for the MiB at great personal cost? Or is it because they’re working to advance the MiB’s agenda, in return for something?

• And on that note – why exactly does Locke need to wear something of Jack’s father’s? After all, Locke was on Oceanic 815 originally so it isn’t as though the Island wouldn’t ‘recognize’ him. Why that specific detail? It’s talismanic the way it’s described, as if Jack’s being asked to hang an amulet around Locke’s neck, or somehow sanctify Locke for the journey. The show makes sure that neither Ben nor Jill the butcher/Other knows that Jack puts the shoes on Locke’s feet. Meaningful?

• Ben and Jack discuss Doubting Thomas, who refused to believe in the resurrection until he could touch Jesus’ wounds. I’ve discussed Thomas before, back in Season 2, and in the Too Much Information column on Gnosticism and Manichaeism.

• Grandpa Ray makes his first appearance on the show. He was first mentioned in “The Watch,” one of the ‘Mobisodes’ on the Season 4 DVD. It’s weird that they’d introduce him here, but it’s notable that he has the same sort of need for escape that all the Shephard men seem to share. I think it was Doc Jensen at EW who wondered if Ray was actually Jack, making Jack his own grandpa (and if the Rewatch thread commenters are right, Desmond may be his own grandpa as well – is ‘Charlie Hume’ actually a young Charles Widmore?). I hope this isn’t the case, and that Grandpa Ray is just Grandpa Ray.

Kate: “Why hold on to something that makes you feel sad?”

• Kate’s making Jack’s end-of-season argument here in miniature.

• Jack takes a leap of faith and places his father’s shoes on Locke’s feet. The episode lingers over this, watching Jack give up his stubborn realism to do something truly strange out of hope and belief. Jack’s residual stubborn-streak/dislike of Locke reasserts itself as he speaks to the dead man, but its clear that something is shifting inside of him.

• Caesar enters the show for the first time, offering his condolences to Jack in the Ajira check-in line. He’s played by Said Taghmaoui (of “Three Kings” and “G.I. Joe” fame). Mark Wahlberg is his main man. 

• Ilyana also enters for the first time, shown escorting Sayid through a special security door. She flashes a badge before she walks him through. I don’t know that it’s made clear what Ilyana does for a living. She effectively works as a bounty hunter when she brings Sayid aboard the plane, but she flashes a badge to pass the airport security.

• I love that Hurley buys up a bunch of the plane seats, trying to keep people from having to go with them to the Island, and I love that Jack doesn’t think about this for a moment – which might explain the truly uneasy look Hurley’s worn around Jack since Season 4. Nice shout-out to Lost writer Brian K. Vaughn with the glimpse of the “Y: The Last Man” comic book that Hurley’s reading.

• Ben’s  last minute arrival to the Ajira flight just might sum up much of his character arc on this show – the guy who’s always managing to scurry in on the action, to work the angles well enough to make a place for himself in destiny’s vessel.

• Jack finally bothers to ask what’ll happen to the other people on the plane when they enter their ‘event window,’ and Ben’s succinct “who cares” at least represents honesty on Ben’s part. We already know that Jack doesn’t care about the other passengers on the plane – he admitted as much at the end of Season 3.

• Frank J. Lapidus, the freighter pilot played by Jeff Fahey, is captaining the Ajira flight, which both recreates the original flight’s conditions (Lapidus was supposed to be 815’s pilot) and fails to do so (his buddy ends up piloting that flight). Supposedly, Lapidus continues to be important to the story in Season 6, and I’m looking forward to that as I think we can all agree that Fahey’s performance is terrific (and I say this as someone who has no affection whatsoever for Fahey as an actor). I’ll say this: he looks weird without a beard. I think I prefer Yosemite Sam Lapidus over Apple-Cheeked Lapidus.

Jack: “How can you read?”
Ben: “My mother taught me.”

• Even in casual conversation Ben lies like a rake. As he’s lying he’s reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that’s had ties with Lost for a few seasons now, in a few different ways, but which has only been shown onscreen as of now.

First, the name Ulysses is the ‘latin-ized’ version of Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey, whose quest to return home to his wife Penelope is mirrored in Desmond’s story on the show. Joyce’s novel is infamous for its multiple potential meanings, its depth of allusion and wordplay, and the way its narrative, like the narrative for The Little Prince, shifts and changes perspective. I’d never go so far as to say that Lost approaches the level of art that Ulysses achieves, but I’ll suggest that the similarities between Joyce’s work and the show are being purposefully highlighted. I suspect that Lost’s writers would also really just like to see more people reading Joyce.

• And with that, we’re in the 70’s, dancing to “Dharma Lady,” baking special brownies, and constructing secret facilities.

*****

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This Place Is Death & 316 (S5, eps. 5 & 6)

This Place Is Death (S5, ep. 5)

Locke: “Richard said that I was going to die.”
Christian: “Well I suppose that’s why they call it sacrifice.”

Look at that – I blinked, and the premiere of Season 6 is suddenly two weeks away. We’ve got some ground to cover. Let’s beat feet.

Thoughts:

• When Sun tells Ji Yeon “Anyong” before she hangs up, I half-expect an Arrested Development cameo.

• Is that Hurley’s voice reading The Numbers off as one of the French folk tries for a signal? Will Hurley’s end be his beginning, and will he prove to be ‘the cause of his own suffering’ by starting the transmission that will bring him to the Island, yet another echoing iteration of “Locke’s Compass” – the creation of another loop? Recall Hurley’s words from much earlier in the season: “Loop, dude, loop.” Silly dialogue? Or key to the show?

• By Rousseau’s timeline, her crew arrives toward the end of Dharma’s reign, approaching the Purge.

• Rousseau is PREGNANT. She’s, like, Claire-Pregnant. And in some ways, the two characters mirror each other. Young Rousseau is a lot like Claire – sweet, open, intelligent, fiercely protective – and if Claire had been left alone like that, with a bunch of hairy-eyeballed Others circling around trying to nab her baby, she might’ve started building elaborate death traps sooner rather than later. Come to think of it, Claire’s been gone a while now. Will we discover she’s been living alone on the Island all this time? Her appearance in “Jacob’s” cabin raises the possibility that she’s dead, but having her vanish beforehand makes that possibility less likely. Both women seem somehow affected by the Island when they arrive on it – Rousseau experiences sudden, seemingly-intense pain.

Montand: “First a boat, then a helicopter. Next thing you know, he’ll be talking about a submarine.”

• HAHA! See, it’s funny because there actually IS a submarine. Ah, slightly-undercooked irony. The Island is not a fan of unintentional comedy, as we’ll shortly see Montand’s arm depart his body.

• Jin wants to try and find his camp after seeing a young Rousseau, which is kind of weird at first, until you realize that he’s got NO idea what’s going on. If it were me, I’d probably head back to my camp too.

Montand: “This is what happens when you bring women. She’s probably off chasing butterflies.”

• HAHA! …I’m unusually inclined to see this dude’s arm get ripped off.

• We see the Monster rip/blow a tree out of the ground – something it hasn’t done in a while (Season 1 maybe?). Is it ‘geysering’ up from underground, blowing the trees from their roots? Or is it pulling them up from above? The Monster also makes a new noise for us: it’s like the sound of someone knocking at a door, or the ticking of an enormous clock.

• The wall we see isn’t the actual Temple, its apparently just part of a wall surrounding that yet-to-be-seen place. The crack in the wall that Montand is pulled into, and into which the other French folk follow him, is I think the same place where Locke and Ben will enter later in the season – Smokey’s apparent lair.

• I’ve talked before about Rousseau’s apparent inconsistencies – the ways in which the story she tells in Season 2 do or do not match up with what we see in Season 5. The truth of the matter is that at this point, having arrived here after several seasons, I don’t feel the need to try and make these two things fit exactly. Most of what Rousseau says, and most of what we see, does line up. Are there weird areas? Yes. But I’m disinclined to go into great detail about them. Take a look at the first few pages of the Rewatch Thread if you want – the topic’s amply discussed.

• The hieroglyphic markings around the crack in the wall haven’t been translated accurately to my knowledge. According to Lostpedia, some of them match the symbols in the Wheel room, meaning that they’re meant to stand for “resurrection.” There’s also the symbol for shelter (Ben calls the Temple a sanctuary at one point).

• Montand’s arm has decomposed, but it’s unclear how much time has really passed in Jin’s flash. I’d guess that it’s been a few weeks at the least.

• The scene between Rousseau and Robert is phenomenal stuff in my humble opinion. I can absolutely buy Rousseau going more-or-less batty as her crew starts turning into Pod People and a mysterious Korean blinks in and out of existence.

• So what’s happened to Robert and the boys? My money was on some kind of Room 23 ‘rehabilitation,’ where they were all brainwashed into being Others. But Room 23 isn’t under the Temple, and we’re specifically shown them going down into it, implying that whatever happened down there is linked to their Pod People behavior.

• The good of these segments far outweighs the bad for me. We get just enough of Rousseau’s experiences to get us salivating, and that’s really enough from a ‘whetting the appetite’ standpoint – but it’s in places like this that I miss the show’s longer seasons. With 22 episodes to churn out instead of 16, more of Rousseau’s story would likely have ended up in the mix.

• James and Jin’s reunion is sweet. It’s pretty amazing to me how organically the character of Sawyer/James has evolved from Season 1 up to this point.

• Charlotte’s fluency in Korean comes up again. Is it possible that she worked in some capacity for Paik Industries before joining Widmore? We know now that Paik and Widmore are golfing buddies. If Paik were aware of Widmore’s interest in exotic animal collars of Tunisia, he might have brought the collar that Charlotte found to Widmore’s attention. Utter idle speculation on my part.

• Ben and Jack reveal their plan to go back to the Island as Sun reveals her intent to blow the top of Ben’s head higher than an Indiana tornado. This news does not go over well. While some folks complained that the return to the Island took too long, I’m really appreciating the sense that trying to get these people to cooperate on anything at this point is like trying to herd cats.

• Dan agrees that it makes empirical sense to try turning the Wheel in order to stop the flashes, but points out that bringing people back to do the same thing ‘leaves science behind.’ I’m fascinated to see how Lost resolves some of the questions about faith that its let flower over the course of the show. The end of Season 5 reveals Locke’s faith to have been seemingly-tragic (though we shouldn’t count out a reversal of fortune for him), and while Lost draws liberally and openly from spiritual/religious sources, there’s typically something seemingly-ominous about the signs and portents we’ve seen and sensed. Faith, in the context of this show, can be dangerous – it can be a weapon.

Hurley’s mother admonished him in “The Lie” that “Jesus Christ is not a weapon,” but that’s exactly what Locke becomes over the course of Season 5. He walks a Christ-like path of anointment, trial, sacrifice, death and resurrection, all for the apparent purpose of killing one man. Jesus Christ is a weapon in the wrong hands, both in real life and, more subtly, in this show’s Locke-as-savior narrative.

• Charlotte collapses and starts spouting the gobbledygook, talking in Korean to Jin. She warns him not to let them bring her back, and that “this place is death.”

And in a sense, this place IS death, Underworld. We’ve seen it hinted at, time and again.  A place guarded by Cerberus the Smoke Monster, where unseen unearthly voices haunt the trees. Anubis, Guardian of the Dead, represented in the Temple, “Underworld” spelled out in the Swan Station hieroglyphics, the ‘ghosts’ of the dead interacting with the living, a place from which there is no easy exit or entrance. That the Island echoes the concept of mythological Underworld is no accident, I don’t think. I believe that what Lost is hinting at, and may make explicit next season, has to do with the Island being an inspiration for many cultures’ ideas about the afterlife and ‘other realms,’ such as Atlantis, Fairie, Utopia. And in another, more literal sense, Charlotte’s dying and the rest of them are headed there in a handcart, so of course this place is death to her.

• Ben’s van reads “Canton Rainier,” an anagram for “Reincarnation.”

• I love the way that Ben slams on the brakes and gives Jack and Sun a good verbal lashing. I have no idea whether to believe that Ben is being truthful about what he’s had to do. I’m still not clear on whether the agent we’ve seen trying to drug Sayid and Kate is Widmore’s or Ben’s, but I seem to recall that it’s Ben who sent them. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate his claim, but still.

Charlotte: “I know more about ancient Carthage than Hannibal himself.”

• Ancient Carthage was located in the same area that we saw Charlotte working in when we first met her – what’s now Tunisia. We know now that Tunisia is also the apparent location of a wormhole in space/time – one that appears to lead from the Wheel in the Island straight to the Tunisian desert.

Charlotte: “Turn it up…I love Geronimo Jackson.”

• Charlotte knows where the Orchid is – because her consciousness has returned to the point in time where she was a child on the Island? Geronimo Jackson makes its first appearance on the show in a while courtesy of Charlotte’s dialogue. Fittingly, the band was introduced in Season 2, which Season 5 is mirroring.

• Having the Orchid ruins vanish just as Juliet says “what are the odds that this thing would be here?” is a little cutesy, but it’s smart writing as well. The characters establish their sense of place through locating the Orchid, which Locke has already visited. Without that structure, the group would have had to have stumbled around and randomly into the well. Showing Locke the Orchid orients him (like a compass, one might say) to find the well in a logical way. What do you suppose the structures surrounding the well are supposed to have been?

Charlotte: “Then, when I got back to England and I asked about this place, she’d say it wasn’t real – that I’d made it up.”

• There’s another echo of the Narnia series, from the lips of Charlotte Staples Lewis. It’s as though Charlotte’s spent her adult life looking for the right wardrobe – the one that would take her back ‘home’ to a land that adults pretend not to believe in.

Locke: “You….What are you doing down here?”
Christian: “I’m here to help you the rest of the way.”

• Locke descends into the belly of the Island via the well, echoing his descent into the Swan at the start of Season 2. Once again he has his leg injured, an echo of the way he found himself hobbled while digging out the Swan. This time around the injury is worse than ever – the bone sticking straight through his leg (I know its fake, but geez).

Christian appears to Locke down there, as Locke nurses his godawful broken leg near the same spot where Dharma will one day build its ‘silly experiments’ chamber for the Orchid.

• Christian has a habit of lugging old lamps around with him, and that both the cabin and the Wheel room were shown to have these lamps prior to him appearing.

• Christian’s demeanor with Locke is, again, spooky and the opposite of benevolent to me. Interestingly, he gives Locke Ms. Hawking’s name and location, tells him that all of Locke’s friends must come back together, and impliedly agreeing that Locke is going to die, and that it’s what he/the Island wants.

Locke has become the sacrifice that the Island demanded.

• Christian directs Locke to the Wheel and tells him to ‘give it a little push,’ but also tells him that he ‘can’t’ help Locke up. Is this because he isn’t able to physically touch Locke, as a ‘ghost’? Is it because he’s not allowed to touch Locke, according to ‘rules’ similar to Ben and Widmore’s? In a sense, Christian’s attitude in that moment is the distillation of Locke’s philosophy in The Moth: ‘struggle is nature’s way of strengthening us.’ So is Christian’s refusal actually a kind of (really, ridiculously) tough love? Or does ‘Christian’ simply not want to help him?

I suspect that Christian actually can’t help Locke, either because he’s physically unable to, or because there are ‘rules’ preventing him from doing so. So how exactly is Christian helping him the rest of the way? I’d argue that it’s by encouraging him. The Island or, more accurately, whatever force it is that’s been communicating with Locke, is Locke’s Constant, in more ways than one. Mostly, the Island has never left Locke, has always encouraged Locke, has emphasized to him that it thinks he is ‘special’ and that he has a destiny. In other words, it’s been the father that Cooper never was, the mother that Emily never was. It’s given him legs where his ‘real’ father took them away. It’s given him purpose – something he’s wanted and hungered for his entire life. Are there many groups easier to use than the abjectly-grateful?

• Check out the “316” recap after the page break!