By Todd VanDerWerff
Back when I reviewed the first part of the Battlestar Galactica two-part coup series, “The Oath,” I introduced a critical conceit called “8-year-old Todd.” Now, 8-year-old Todd comes from the idea that an episode of television can be so skillfully, perfectly, shamelessly entertaining that it leaves you feeling like a kid, grinning goofily at what just went down. There’s time for critical analysis, sure, but what you really want to do is just break down the episode in order of awesomeness. “The Incident” was so entertainingly winning for so much of its running time (a few minor character caveats aside) that I’m pleased to reintroduce the 8-year-old Todd rule and say that it is most definitely in effect. “The Incident,” written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and directed by Jack Bender, is a hell of an end to what’s been Lost’s best season, the perfect capper to a season that wandered all over the map of space and time and then wandered even more.
So before we get to the deep stuff, let’s just talk about the awesome. Check it. The episode began as though this was a backdoor pilot for a Waiting for Godot/Lost spinoff, introducing us to the actual factual Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) and his counterpart, dressed in black (Titus Welliver). (Also, because I am just that unoriginal, I am going to calling him Esau for the time being, which beats “Man in Black” or “Blackie.”) Jacob then wandered through a long series of flashbacks, as though he were Billy Crystal in an Oscar-opening clip montage. Sayid (Naveen Andrews) dismantled a hydrogen bomb! There were shootouts galore, and just when you thought the last shootout was not going to significantly improve on the earlier one, everybody rolled up in a van and started firing away! Sayid might have died! Locke (Terry O’Quinn) turned out to be not who he said he was, and the “What lies in the shadow of the statue?” folks had the corpse to prove it! Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) was ripped away from her love and then blew up a hydrogen bomb with a rock! (A ROCK!) And, most importantly of all, Sawyer (Josh Holloway) kicked Jack (Matthew Fox) in the nuts!
So with that out of the way and our reptilian brains properly tickled, let’s turn to matters of more thematic import. Lost is a show fairly obsessed by notions of duality. It’s right there in the “Pilot,” where Locke takes young Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) aside and discusses backgammon with him, how it has its pieces, light and dark. From there, we’ve tiptoed through dualities drawn between science and faith, good and evil and fate and free will. Hell, most of our characters are defined largely through the various ways they form tiny little dualities of their own with other characters. Jack is the polar opposite of Locke until he isn’t. Jack and Sawyer war for the affections of the same woman, just as Kate and Juliet do for the affections of the same man. In the world of Lost, we are not so much independent human beings as we are potential pawns in various games where we only think we can choose the side we play on. All of those backgammon pieces in the “Pilot”? They’re pretty much us, in the worldview of the show.
That said, “The Incident” latches on to these ideas of duality and keeps trucking past the point where it makes a thematic point and eventually seems as if it will gobble up the show entire. What else are Jacob and Esau, in their white and black clothes, but the backgammon players made incarnate? And in their short discussion, they tie together a lot of disparate thematic elements in the show in a rather satisfying way and also suggest that the series is going to be more like BSG than I think anyone on either writing staff realized. The entirety of the speech between the two could be boiled down to “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again,” and the two of them lay out that the conflict for the Island has been a truly ancient one, stretching back well before the 20th century battles between Ben (Michael Emerson) and Widmore (Alan Dale). As the two watch an approaching ship (most likely the Black Rock), they hope that this time, it will be different. This time, death and sorrow won’t follow immediately. And, of course, we know they’re wrong. They’re stuck in an eternal loop, unable to break out of it until something changes.
To some degree, grounding the entire story in two characters we only meet 19 episodes from the end of the story is a risky gambit. There’s no guarantee that we’ll embrace these characters enough to justify the show’s abrupt shift to including them as major characters. That this scene works as well as it does speaks to Pellegrino and Welliver’s performances (playing concepts more than characters) to be sure, but it also speaks to just how giddy it makes us to see Lost try something so off-the-wall and ambitious. Even in answer-giving mode, the show can completely throw you for a loop.
Jacob and Esau get down to another famous duality, really – that of God and Satan. But they’re not really representative of those characters as we think of them. They’re much more like the very basic concepts of God and his opposite that we see in the earliest known monotheistic writings. The discussion between the two feels, for all the world, like the opening passages of Job, where God and the character that will later evolve into Satan place bets on what will happen if Satan is allowed to do whatever he wants to the titular character. Here, the two aren’t betting about making some guy’s life a living hell, but they are betting that eventually, the cycle of violence and despair will break, will lead to some new sort of understanding. There’s also a sense in this scene of the relationship being so old, so outside of contexts we understand that it takes on a sort of mythic feel of its own. In this case, less is definitely more.
And when we understand Jacob and Esau in that context, it makes so much more of what happens in the episode’s 2007 storyline – where Locke leads Ben, Sun (Yunjin Kim) and assorted Others to meet with Jacob, though he does not tell anyone but Ben he’s going to kill him – take on a strange, ethereal quality. Ben, when he confronts Jacob, is confronting the Island’s absent God, the one who left them all and issues bizarre directives through Richard (Nestor Carbonell). In his absence, as he wove a tapestry that seemed to depict much of what had happened, Esau was allowed to wander the Island and cause mischief. Jacob made random visits to the various Losties at pivotal points in their past, always touching them (not for nothing did the tapestry depict its central figure radiating out beams of light to touch numerous smaller people), but never stepping in and directly interfering. He even gives Hurley (Jorge Garcia) the option of not returning to the Island if he so desires. (And good God, that Hurley flashback scene was just a tremendous piece of acting and writing.) Esau, then, who may as well be the Devil in our little passion play, does what he can to cause mischief, to undermine Jacob’s authority (indeed, the episode suggests that HE may have been the man in that mysterious cabin, NOT Jacob, who lived beneath the statue). And when he returns to take the form of Locke, he manipulates Ben into finally killing Jacob, the one he has wanted out of his life for so long. It’s an impassioned and moving scene, featuring some of Emerson’s best work, and it resonates with the cries of millions of people who ask God why he seems so silent in their suffering. When Ben thrusts the knife into Jacob’s heart, Lost signals that it’s left any concept of explicable science fiction behind. We are firmly in the grasp of religious fiction now, and only our passion and faith will save us.
There’s another famous duality reflected here, though not in the way you’d think. The duality of Jesus Christ – both god AND man – is a central one to the story of Western civilization. Lost has seemed to flirt with making every single one of its characters into Christ figures at one point or another but has always stopped short of doing so. Perhaps that was because they were saving their ultimate Christ figure for the final season. John Locke died and was resurrected, yes, but we’ve found now that he was resurrected not as himself but as an image of Esau, the murderous demigod hoping to bump off the benevolent Jacob. Much has been written about how sad it will be if this is the end of Locke’s storyline, if the poor guy really was as much of a dupe as he always thought (since most of Esau’s plan hinges on convincing a whole mess of people that Locke is more important than he actually is), but I don’t think Locke is now merely a villain. He is a god, yes, but he is also a man, since Esau has clearly downloaded most of Locke’s emotions and thoughts into himself. Somewhere in that soul is a duality that will struggle, I think, for the soul of the man who attempts to encompass BOTH sides.
The other half of the episode dealt with events in 1977, which were where the episode got most of its action-adventure rocks off. Here, we saw Sayid take a gutshot but keep on ticking, so intent was he on helping Jack rewrite the future. Here, we saw that great shootout at the Swan station and the terrifyingly cinematic sequence where the drill poked through into the pocket of electromagnetic energy (whatever that means) and touched off the incident. As metal tumbled into the hole, killing regular cast member, recurring player and extra alike, the show caught a bit of the magic that it had in that amazing sequence when the Hatch imploded in the season two finale (and, come to think of it, that whole sequence was mirrored in its entirety here, right down to how it all ended).
If there was one thing I didn’t like in the episode, though, it was here, where the characters made some illogical choices that leaped out of character, solely because the show needed them to be in a certain place at a certain time. I just never bought that Juliet would be so angered by Sawyer looking over at Kate at a certain point in time that she would essentially abandon her common sense, much less that she would try to give him the old, “I love you, and you love me, but you love someone else more” speech (even with that awkwardly shoehorned in flashback to her parents’ divorce). Nor did I buy that Jack would try to blow up the Island because Kate was no longer his girlfriend (well, OK, THAT I kind of bought, but I found it baffling that Sawyer didn’t call him out more for it). The silly stuff with this love quadrangle nearly dragged down this entire 1977 plot, but it was more than saved by the sequence when Juliet, dragged by chains into the abyss, is saved by Sawyer and as the two tearfully proclaim their love to each other, forces beyond their control drag her out of his grasp. This was a terrific scene, one that paid off the Juliet and Sawyer relationship while still allowing the show a chance to refocus on the Jack-Kate-Sawyer triangle if it really wants to (sigh).
There’s much more that could be said about “The Incident,” but the highest praise I think I can pay is that it’s finally brought me around to the idea that the producers have known where this story was going for a very long time. If they didn’t know exactly at the very start, they had a damn good idea of what they were headed toward. There was a lot of stalling in the middle there, and the story was very much saved by the ability to set an end date, but “The Incident” is the kind of episode that steps back and lets you get a look at the whole tapestry for a moment or two and lets you realize just how well-woven it really is. “The Incident” isn’t my favorite episode of the show (I skew more towards the weird, hyper-personal episodes like “The Variable” or any Desmond opus), but it’s the kind of episode that enriches and deepens nearly everything that came before. It was good TV and a great capper to a wonderful season.
Some other thoughts:
House contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark and co-host of the podcast TV on the Internet. His writing also appears at The AV Club.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Lost Thursdays: Season 5, Eps. 16 and 17, "The Incident, Parts 1 and 2"
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Best episode of Lost, or maybe any TV show. The show is working on a totally different level than we were led to believe. The opening scene was brilliant. The two endings were brilliant and just ambiguous enough. The character scenes were pitch-perfect. I don't even think we'll be returning to the same world come season six. And how awesome is it that Locke explaining backgammon to Walt in the first episode – showing us a black piece and a white piece – reflects on the opening scene here – Jacob in white and his rival in black. Totally mindblowing. Bravo. FADE TO WHITE.
I loved most of it. Most of it.
The love quadrangle character arcs? Um...silly? Kate shifted her loyalty so fast it made my head spin, and Jack making this all about a girl? Silly silly.
But then Juliet's acting--she sold that "death" scene so well.
You think we'll see Jacob wake her up down there, like he did John? I sure hope so.
Good stuff, for the most part.
"It's a wonderful foot" and "I'm a pisces:" So funny.
I dunno, I thought it sucked because I didn't want Juliet to die. I'm just dead tired of the stupid Jack/Kate/Sawyer love BS and even if Juliet's detonation of the bomb keeps her alive in an alternate future next season, it means Sawyer isn't with Juliet. I'm completely over that crap.
And Jack's flashback of the Count to 5 speech wasn't as suspenseful as I assumed it was back in Season One when Jack used it to calm Kate down.
The Jacob stuff was cool, but once Juliet went down the hole, I sort of stopped paying attention as to whatever was going on with Locke and if Esau took over Locke's body or whatever. It had been a great season for me this year and it has sort of been ruined when one of the best actors of the show (Mitchell) has possibly been killed off for good. Maybe she'll appear in an alternate reality next season or am I thinking of Fringe now?
I loved the part where everyone goes into the jungle to talk about their relationships while Sayid bleeds to death. ::shakes head no::
Otherwise, yeah, awesome.
Many people will never like it, but I thought the "love quadrangle" was pretty great, and the characters changing their minds was very believable under the odd circumstances. Don't think Jack's entire decision was just about a girl... but that was more about him using one personal example to explain a very big decision that was obviously not just because he failed with Kate (what I like about their relationship is how blurry it was, like who would succeed with her anyway in the setting they're in?). Last, I think there may be a reason why Juliet set the bomb off when Jack's efforts seemed more akin to Michael not being able to kill himself (which was really Michael not being able to change his course because without him, no one time travels to the times they've already lived). Juliet's actions my be tied into the fact that Jacob appeared in every flashback except hers.
Also, I think it'll be nearly impossible for them to show previews for next season because I'm guessing the entire last season is about this grand contest that's been going on forever and not just whether or not they're still on the Island or in a certain year.
JD, Elizabeth Mitchell's departure was a horribly kept secret, as she's a regular on the new remake of the series V. That said, she maintains she'll return for guest spots in season six, so maybe she's not dead.
Esau is the smoke monster. That's how he acted like Locke/Christian/Jacob.
"The part where everyone goes into the jungle to talk about their relationships while Sayid bleeds to death" would be ludicrous if they weren't about to set off a bomb that wipes them all off the map. Which is twice as ludicrous, I guess, but it works for me.
This was an episode that really shows how good serialized television can be.
It adds so much to the Lost mythology that my head is spinning from all the possibilities.
So, that opening scene. How great was it to have Silas Adams from Deadwood talking philosophically to Rita's ex-husband from Dexter?
So, let's start with the soap opera. I thought that scene between Sawyer and Juliet was just heart-wrenching. I loved them together as a couple. It was great to see Sawyer mellow throughout this season through his relationship with Juliet.
I was so irritated by how pissy Jack was when he got into it with his Dad after the Count to 5 bit. Lost struggles mostly with how to handle Jack, and this episode just continued that for me. Kate doesn't love me anymore so I need to blow up the island and destroy everybody else's experience because I wanna! And everybody else, despite butt-kicking and arguing, basically all supports Jack in the end? I dunno, I just can't buy it. I like to think that all the non-Jack people regretted how things turned out as Jack dropped the bomb. Literally.
So, the motivations of Jack/Sawyer/Juliet/Kate were by far the weakest, most inexplicable parts of the episode and the reason I can't bask completely in the glow of this episode.
I have more to say about the 2007 storyline, but that'll have to wait.
I think it's important Juliet wasn't met by Jacob. I think she was one of the many casualties of the larger mythology, Richard mentioned the fertility issue being a waste of time in S3 and Juliet clearly had no grand reason for being on the Island ala Locke or even Jack. I think she's definitely dead, but all the other Losties go back to 2007. I haven't decided yet after just one viewing but this is definitely a 10/10 and most likely my second or first favourite episode of Lost (the other contender is Through the Looking Glass).
Yeah, the motivations all worked for me too.
I think Jack's "leap of faith" was more than a selfish move even though Sawyer questioned that for us. There's something about how he says to Kate that he's 'never been more sure about anything' coupled with the fact that he explains Aaron very well, and not only that, but he echos Jacob by saying that at least it will be Claire's CHOICE. For me that was incredibly convincing to go along with the fact that I think it's hinted that Jacob had something to do with making sure they all ended up at that point to do what Jack was going to do.
Juliet says to Sawyer it's not just because he looked at Kate. She already knows how Sawyer will respond to that simple statement as 'Oh, just because I looked at her, c'mon.' But that's not what she meant really. For Juliet I think it started to crumble days ago, and she hinted at this. They were done "playing house," and I can understand her also taking that leap of faith instead of just going back in the sub, which she questions despite Sawyer's intentions of "starting life in the real world." It's just something I could tell Juliet was never sold on, even if she did love him.
I thought Sawyer telling Jack to just go get Kate was a final closure for their relationship; he genuinely would have been fine for Jack to be with her. I dunno it just all seemed very genuine in the midst of setting off an H-bomb to alter the course of history. The moment was building...they all were on the fence...and they took that leap. It was more than just a love quadrangle for me and people changing their minds (because they weren't really dead-set on anything nor did they have time to be in the first place).
Plus, again, I still think we'll learn Jacob had a lot to do with 1977. Loved the white-out...reminded me of a sort of "reset." Then again, Jacob says at the start that 'it'll only end once'; I think he's referring to the series finale in season six. Everything in between is "just progress." Oh, and Mark Pellegino knocked it out of the park, delivering on what was the most mystifying character in the five seasons of Lost. I'll understand if he is somehow dead, but I really hope there's a way to see more of him. Something makes me feel we'll see scenes even farther back than the Black Rock, such as, uh, when the statue and all the Egyptian structures were built, and why. Definitely my personal favorite episode of the series. It'll be hard to stop thinking about.
For me, next to the Evil Locke/Jacob/Ben final scene and Sawyer/Juliet over the precipice, the most devastating, but profound scene was right after Jack drops the bomb, the expertly cut snapshots of Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and Juliet looking back and forth at each other with insanely nuanced expressions. All four should win an ensemble Emmy for those 10 seconds alone.
Also, I wonder -- though I'm sure others have already covered this -- what we should make of Ben's name vis-a-vis Jacob. In the biblical account, Benjamin (literally, "son of my right hand," that is, "son of my strength") is the twelfth and final son of Jacob/Israel, the coddled favorite and the one Joseph exploits to get Jacob to Egypt. Both Saul (Israel's first king, a failure) and the apostle Paul (whose original name was Saul) were descendants of Benjamin. Finally, after Jacob and Esau's ugly parting, in Genesis 32-33 we find them in reconciliation.
What does any of that mean for the show? Probably little to nothing (although Ben being the "favorite son" is curious at the very least). You never know how much they're going to play on, though.
What an amazing piece of television. The last twenty minutes was absolutely thrilling.
The only thing I have to add beyond what's already been said is that I got a bit of a norse mythology vibe from the black clad 'eternal'. Loki in particular.
From Wikipedia: "Loki is a shape shifter and in separate incidents he appears in the form of a salmon and a mare. Loki's positive relations with the gods ends with his role in engineering the death of the god Balder."
Hmmmmm....
I agree, Alana. Jack didn't even bother to say, "FYI, Sayid's bleeding to death in the van!"
But overall I thought the episode was fantastic. The love quadrangle is my least favorite part of the show, but Holloway and Mitchell were so damn good during her death scene that it made up for it.
The revelation of Jacob and how it shifts the ongoing mystery of the show. I am now quite strongly convinced that the show will tie everything together and answer most if not all of the big questions in season six. I'm very excited.
Great T.V., but the 1977 material all hinged on convincing the audience these characters take part in a plan to blow themselves up with a nuclear bomb. Hmmm. hard to swallow.
Perhaps Season 6 will begin with the plane landing in LA, but THE CHARACTERS REMEMBER THE EVENTS FROM SEASON 1 - 5!
They've stopped the plane from crashing, but that's it. They still lived those experiences, and cannot unlive them.
Michael: I'm willing to go along with them blowing up the bomb because it's Faraday's idea, and they clearly all understand that Faraday always had more of an idea of what was going on on the Island than they did. It was the secondary, more character-based motivations that didn't work as well for me, particularly on the part of Juliet.
(Though, as mentioned, that scene where she gets dragged into the pit overrode most of those issues, so it's all good, Lost!)
John Strong has called it: Esau is definitely the smoke monster.
I for one am crushed that Locke is dead. What the HELL!
He's always been the key character. How can he be dead? Strangled to death in a hotel room? That's it? I'm glad Terry O'Quinn (sp?) is still around to prove he's the best actor in the cast, but John Locke deserves more than an ugly mid-season death, passed off as suicide.
I'm sure season 6 will continue to hinge on Locke in some fashion. In damn well better. Like I said above, maybe if the bomb has kept the plane from crashing, Locke will land in LAX in a wheelchair, wondering how he got from that hotel room to being back on the plane & unable to walk.
We shall see.
I don't think we've seen the last of Actual Locke - he's the main character and Jack's other half!
I'm also starting to think that Juliet might not be dead after all. Yes Elizabeth Mitchell has a new job, and yes she had an epically sad death scene, but at the time of the flash (whatever that means!) she was mortally wounded but alive. As was Sayid. So the same thing will happen to both of them, right? And Sayid's way too important to not have an onscreen death, so I think they're both going to end up elsewhere and all better. Maybe?
Oh, Sayid is alive, I'm sure.
It was the most convincing motivator for the characters to blow themselves up with a nuclear bomb. It drove Hurly. Kate, who I like, disappointed me. I thought she was just going along to stop Jack at the last second. Why did she change her mind?
She wants to both get blown up & go to jail?
With flashbacks and time travel, I'm sure Juliet can return.
To Sawyer? Like Jin & Sun Lee, I hope so. But dead is dead.
I'm also kinda miffed that the answer to "What lies in the shadow of the statue" was not "Your Mama!"
Like the ending, but didn't love it, like the last two Lost season finales.
First, they basically announced how this would end a couple of episodes ago. Season three totally changed the whole game plan with the flash forward, it came from nowhere.
Second, this ending has no particular direction. The show can go anywhere from this. Everybody might live, they could all stand at LAX waiting for their flight. The third and fourth season finales gave us a direction of what was coming. We knew that Season 4 was going to be about getting out of the island and Season 5 about getting back.
It's really depressing that Locke has been dead for so long. I'm still hoping he will really come back to life, Walt's words to him in The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham haven't come true yet.
Well, I would not say that they haven't given us any hint of what's to come. Miles words still rings in my ears, what if it's their actions that causes the plane to crash in the future.
Thanks Todd for your eloquent analyses (of Lost, Breaking Bad, Rescue Me -- you got all the good shows). My wife and I think Jacob is from the future (maybe Aaron, all grownup) and time-looped into the far, far past, which naturally gives him godlike qualities -- he knows everything that's going to happen, he's ageless & immortal until he catches back up to his own time, and hanging out for a few millennia without frozen food or internet access has given him lots of patient, godlike wisdom.
Another prediction -- the Jughead ploy DID work, and next season will open with everyone back on 815, only this time with the (conscious or unconscious)memories of past lessons that will drive them to choose new choices and make new lives.
Man what a show.
Man, I hope to god the bomb didn't work because if we have to waste 5-6 episodes of season 6 getting back to the island again, I will be seriously annoyed.
Does anyone really want this show to leave the island again? Be real.
Have to admit,this was gripping television even though you knew how the cliffhanger would end but the news that Locke and Juliet are dead is devastating. Locke was the only remaining season one character I was seriously invested in. To find out he's Dark Locke now (not-so-clever comic book homage there) was really disappointing. And losing Juliet is just wrong. I loved when she took out the Other on the sub, effectively ending all debate. Classic Juliet moment.
One thing for sure: as long as Terry O'Quinn is on screen, he will kick ass as an actor, so I have that to savor.
I agree so much - I absolutely loved this episode! I'm so glad I got back on the Lost bus after getting off during season three. That was just so friggin' entertaining.
Also, I laughed out loud when you pointed to what was also my favorite part of the episode - namely, Sawyer kicking Jack in the balls. Amazing!
I even put together a Screen-Grab Reenactment of that glorious fifteen seconds, and every time I go through it, it has made my day a brighter place.
I'm so glad that this show is so good.
Great analysis of the religious parallels and dualities! I loved this line, "it resonates with the cries of millions of people who ask God why he seems so silent in their suffering. When Ben thrusts the knife into Jacob’s heart, Lost signals that it’s left any concept of explicable science fiction behind." Great stuff there, and exactly what I sensed in the scene too.
One of the things I found most interesting about this episode is how it turned our previous idea of Jacob (invisible, living in the cabin, needing help) entirely on its head. Now it appears that Christian/smokey have lied when he said he spoke for Jacob... now it looks like the whole "Locke is special" thing was a rouse all along. Fascinating, and unexpected! And a little of a stretch, seeing they're springing all this on us as we head into the very lat season lol, but we'll pretend not to notice that part. :P
And great tie-in with Waiting for Godot btw... but here who would be Godot??
Thank you so much for calling out the ridiculosity in the love quadrangle as you state. I just can't buy into the idea that both Juliet and Jack want to blow up the island because their feelings are hurt.
I also found the scenes with Jacob randomly being in everyone's life slightly laughable.
Of course, this show asks its audience to indulge a lot of these absurdities, but I am in agreement with you that it seems they did have a plan the whole time.
I'm along for the ride. Excellent post.
This recap and your thoughts on the different themes of duality are AMAZING.
Thank you so much for writing this, I really enjoyed it.
Joel E:
I was devestated as well, but John Locke is not just another character on "Lost." I have NO IDEA what they're planning for 6th Season, but I am certain that killing off Locke was part of a long range master plan on the part of the writers.
He's the lynchpin to the whole series, and whatever they're planning for the final season, I'm sure it involves a comback for this essential character. In fact, I expect the final season to not only involve Locke, but to hinge on him in some key way.
Every other character that dies gets a super dramatic, season finale, tear-jerkering send off, in which other characters grieve and say goodbye.
Locke got nothing of the sort. He was revealed as dead from suicide, then mid-season revealed as murdered (for reasons still unclear), then resurrected, then rerevealed as dead all along.
& that's it? He's really dead and that's the end of his character?
No way.
Season 6 will see not just the return of Terry O'Quinn, but John Locke himself, bringing the show back to the two central characers - Jack & John - and they're ongoing struggle over faith & reason, destiny & free will, etc, etc...
Regarding potential directions for season 6:
I appreciated that the show dropped the Jack/Kate/Sawyer love triangle in favor of a new one.
For the final season, I hope they move on from love triangles and use the strong love STORY'S they have already.
For instance, I can imagine Sawyer taking whatevery opportunity is available to him to search for Juliet, across time if necessary, convinced he can find her again some how.
Plus Sun Lee & Jin are searching for each other across time as well. And Desmon will have to leave his new family, presumably, to return to the action.
I wouldn't even mind seeing Kate & Jack tip toe back towards each other. But Sawyer/Kate/Jack? Please no.
Maybe a Sayid/Kate/Hurley love triangle? That could work.
Esau is definitely the smoke monster, certain clues gave it away although I wasn't smart enough to figure it out. The most obvious would be when bouncing through time Locke ran into Rousso on the beach killing the duplicates of Alex's real father. He had been taken away by the smoke monster and had received the sickness as Rousso had called it. It showed what Rousso had been talking baout but it didn't really say why it was trying to kill her. Maybe just practising manipulation? Who knows? Jack's dad coming back, although his body was gone from it's casket when the plane crashed, unlike Locke's. Also when Esau (as locke) took Richard back to the plane where he knew the real locke would be, waiting and needing the help to take out the bullet. How would the real Locke have known when he was gonna be there. He was bouncing through time, he had no idea when he was. Ben asked the same thing and it kinda confused me. Great episode, sucks that we're gonna have to wait until Feb to watch the rest of the series. Should be worth the wait tho.
Oh yeah and Locke taking Ben to where the smoke monster lived, he was s confident but then again Lock always was.
@Michael Whalen:
Terry O'Quinn will definitely be back but Locke the man is dead. Whatever he is now (or more accurately whatever is pretending to be him), the broken man given a second chance is dead. That's sad.
@Anon:
Maybe Locke wasn't special to begin with, but I seriously doubt the writers and producers are so incredibly callous as to do that. More likely Locke IS special and his being special is "the loophole." Essu/Smokie/whatever was just waiting for the opportunity to use him as a vessel for undoing Jacob's power.
I'm still not completely convinced Jacob is a good guy either. Note that he stopped Sayid so that Sayid's love could be killed, bringing Sayid back to the island. That doesn't seem like something Jesus would do.
Your likening to Jacob and Esau on the beach to a game of backgammon incarnate really resonated with me considering that Locke and Walt were seen playing a game of backgammon on the beach in the first season of LOST...
Another patriarchal-religious story...ugh.. Why is it always black v white, good v evil, my man god v your man god? Why always god the father? why not god the mother?? Oh, because men write the stories. Poor Kate and Juliet...background players in a mans god-world. Tiring. nothing new here.
Sawyer never proclaimed his love for Juliet, he only said "Don't leave me".
Still a tragic scene, though, with Josh and Liz seeming to have finally have dug up some chemistry somewhere and putting on some great acting.
I think you are wrong about Rose and Bernard. I think they may the only 2 brought to the island in its entire history that actually "get it." They are grateful for what it did (cure Rose) and rather than exploit or fight, chose to live peacefully. I think they may end up playing a much bigger role (if not symbolically as the skeletons in the cave).
Latest anon: Sawyer very clearly says, "I love you" while she's dangling from his hand. Granted, he's said this before, but the way he says it at this point makes clear that her prior concerns were moot.
Also, you didn't think Holloway and Mitchell had chemistry before?!
Anon before that: While I doubt there will be extensive tracts written about the feminism of Lost, I also don't think it's been especially unfair to its female characters this season (a prior problem with the show was that its females tended to primarily be seen only as love objects for the dudes to pass back and forth). Juliet grew a great number of new colors, and Kate finally found a mission separate from pretending to be a mother or being caught in the Sawyer-Jack diptych. She finally sort of came into her own this season, I'd say. Sun, of course, was completely wasted, but I have high hopes for season six.
Also, yeah, they didn't do much with matriarchal God archetypes, but, then, Lost is a melange of Western thought, ground together and shoved through a thick film of pulp trappings and boys' adventure novels. It hasn't radically changed up myth before this, so I don't really see why it would start now.
i hope juliet isnt dead. i cant even think straight when such a good character and actress dumped on in love and then gets killed off. i will be soooo upset if shes dead.
I thought this was a terrible episode. Horribly written and directed. I know this is Lost and I know that we have to sacrifice certain standards/expectations in order to enjoy it, but there was just too much crap going on simply for the sake of the plot.
• As if Jack would really mosey off into the jungle for a private chat with Sawyer while Sayid lies bleeding to death and the Swan site is about to explode. C'mon, MAN!
• I can only take so much incompetence in gunfights. I know its a standard TV trope, but there were too many security folks firing rifles vs Jack and his dead-eye aim with a pistol.
• No way Juliette made it to the bottom of that shaft. No. Fucking. Way.
• Speaking of the shaft, what happened to the crushing magnetic forces, both at the surface but especially at the bottom.
• Why would the Dharma scientist not immediately shut down the drill?
• The submarine was a huge retcon. Suddenly its huge, big enough to evacuate the entire Dharma initiative (well, except for everyone who stayed, which was pretty much everyone except for Miles and his mom). For a submarine that is now involved in a sudden emergency evacuation, it's surprisingly roomy, especially in the hatch entryway. It was just bogus and poorly written/designed.
• Why would the "good guys" carry that huge heavy metal box when all that was in it was a human body? Why not just build a litter and either put the coffin or just the body on it? This is even more infuriating when you consider the trouble it took to get that huge container on the main island.
• Jacob visiting everyone entirely begs the question of what connects everyone. It felt like it was shown in order to explain the thread that ties everyone together, but unless we get an explanation of why Jacob picked them, it hasn't accomplished anything. At one point I was thinking that maybe Jacob just went on a walkabout and touched some people's lives, but then he showed up at Jin/Sun's wedding (no accident), was waiting for Locke to fall (and did he keep him from dying?) and then explicitly reveals his decision to talk to Hurley. Hurley was after everyone visited the island though whereas everyone else met Jacob before the crash.
I'm terribly disappointed that the show doesn't seem to be revealing a story as much as forcing the telling of one. I'll still watch it and I'm not a hater (I did give up on it for a while back in Season 3 but here I am again!). But I was hoping for more and it isn't delivering.
Oh, I forgot to add that I think we have to consider Christian as another instantiation of Esau, right? It sure looked like Christian was in the cabin when Locke first went there and we've seen him play so many roles since then.
Another reason I'm disappointed in the show is that it isn't about plane passengers mysteriously crashed on an island any more. Maybe this was obvious to everyone before, but the Losties are becoming almost irrelevant to the story. It's about Jacob and Esau now: who they are, why they are, what transpired between them, etc. The Island is part of that, surely, but the Losties are just a chapter in the saga of those two.
The one thing I can't figure out is that if Locke was Esau, then why did he need Richard to show him where Jacob was living? Esau is seen walking upto Jacob at the base of the statue in the flashback'..so he already knew his wherabouts.
@Todd
What about Eloise Hawking? At the very least co-leader of the Others, and very respected back in the 50s (as seen in Jughead) That's gotta count for something.
It seems that this show has begun to exhaust itself. While Lost has thrived on mysterious and open-ended story telling, in seasons past plot lines and ideas nonetheless seemed to develop. Now I get the sense that the writers have taken our acceptance of quasi-random elements of the story for granted and gotten lazy.
Juliet's decision on the island, which essentially led to the most significant event of the season, is given credence by a quick, last-minute reference to the divorce of her parents when she was a child? Come on. Are the executives at ABC holding guns to the heads of Lindelof and Cuse as they attempt to write this show to its conclusion?
The physical presence of Jacob evoked classic elements of the show, yet we get almost no glimpse in to the depth of his character, as he is quickly and easily killed by Big Baby Linus.
Which leads me to another point- What the hell happened to my favorite character on the show? Ben, unwavering, deceptive, and always carrying out a master plan, has been reduced to a slobbering wuss at the sight of his dead daughter. Am I really supposed to believe that Ben gives a shit about anything? Was I the only one waiting, no, hoping for him to stab Phantom Locke in the back as they headed into Jacob's lair?
The season finale attempted to tie up too many loose ends and failed, aside from the cold, killer ending. Why should anybody really care about Ilana and her cohorts? It was nice seeing Rose and Bernard, but let's be serious, we don't want "nice" from Lost. Could they have possibly made their cameo any more hokey and borderline-nauseating? An appearance from Claire would have been more rewarding and could have offered insight in to the Jacob/Locke/Christian element.
Someone made an interesting point about the reincarnated Locke as an altered form of the reincarnated Christian. I would like to believe such an idea and hopefully this element of the story will be addressed in the next season. I would also like to know more about Jacob. Too bad he's dead.
Thankfully they killed off Faraday earlier so that we didn't have to continue to suffer through him nearly having a panic attack every time he spoke. But one less character should open up space to address other central characters- Widmore and Desmond, who have each had a profound impact on the island's fate, have been pushed to the background. Will they become more prominent in season six or fade into obscurity?
It is important that the viewers are able to distinguish between the elements of mystery and the elements of nonsense in Lost, because the mystery is what has made it special thus far. The last minute of season five may have been the best part because we are left with an intense feeling of wonder. The story can now theoretically go in any direction, more so than it usually does. Hopefully the writers decide not to just take it any direction, but give us a final season that feels more like the thoughtful and carefully executed ending to a dynamic, multi-faceted story rather than an improvisation on a story that may have gotten away from itself... Only time will tell.
*Notable mentions go to- Sayid's, "Nothing can save me."/ Juliet, Locke. and Miles - for continuing to be the most believable characters
Regarding Jack's motives - I don't think that he is blowing up the island because he lost Kate. IMO, his statement to Sawyer that he almost had Kate has less to do about his relationship with Kate than it has to do with the series of failed relationships throughout the course of his life. In the Count to 5 flashback with his father, we see his father believing in him but later see Jack attacking him. This scene was not just about inserting Jacob into Jack's past but about the dyanmic between Jack and his father. His time on the island has given him time to reflect on his relationship with his father and think "what if". Ultimately Jack is looking for redemption. He wants to learn from his mistakes and move on.
Regarding Juliet motive for blowing up the island. . .This is not a way to cure her lovesick heart. In the scene with Rose and Bernard, she has an epiphany about time being fleeting. She said in an earlier episode that they are done playing house. She initially want to stop the bomb so she could keep "playing house". But she had the realization that things had already changed.
I don't see the show as having begun to exhaust itself. Quite the opposite. It appears to me that the writers began to develope their master plan back in season 3.
Season 3 was apparently problematic for ABC. They wanted "Lost" to be a reliable hit into the next decade, but as the show stalled it's forward narrative the ratings went predictably down.
The writers say they proposed a solution - only 3 more seasons, each building dramatically on the last, until a big shocking finale that would command a huge audience.
Head writers Lindelof and Cuse stated that securing the 2010 series-end date "was immensely liberating" and helped the series rediscover its focus. Lindelof said, "We're no longer stalling." (from Wikipedia)
Forgive this conjecture, but it appears to me that what they decided on at some point while making season 3 was something like this:
"Jack and others escape, but Jack leads them back to the island."
"What could possibly drive Jack to do this?"
"Locke kills himself."
"That would do it, but we can't kill off Locke. Shannon, sure. Charlie, why not? But not John Locke."
"Wait...He comes back in seaon 6. We keep Terry O'Quinn around for Seasons 4 & 5 with flashbacks and this false resurrection."
"Okay, so Season 4 they escape. Season 5 they go back to the island and back in time where they seize the opportunity to change their fates."
"And THIS brings Locke back to life for final season, which takes place..."
Just conjecture, but it now appears to me that they've had this much planned for a while.
"Jack's motives" -> Nobody will ever know them ;)
btw: I found a Garcia-Interview, this morning. Maybe you like it
-> http://de.sevenload.com/sendungen/Lost/folgen/gprs6OP-Jorge-Hurley-Garcia-in-Muenchen?cp=se_9520_LOST_bl1
Love your thoughts on the episode!
Just what do you mean by "Come back, Desmond. All is forgiven"?
So, the Jack/Sawyer/Kate triangle will live on. Well . . . that gives me the incentive to avoid LOST in Season 6.
Good-bye LOST. You'll live on in Seasons 1-2 DVDs for me.
I did enjoy Season 5. The Incident 1/2 were very good and well written, as always. I like how the writer's foresight seemed to be natural, as if the destination had been mapped out since the beginning.
Also, I do hope that Locke's re-incarnated body is not just the Man In Black's being, but I hope it is Locke's as well. The character of John Locke has always been the most mysterious for me. In my opinion, Locke is the best character on the show and of course, Terry O'Quinn is a tremendous actor.
Hopefully, Locke will return as Locke. Confident, like he was before, not just out-right cocky like he is now as the Black Man.
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