Lost Rewatch On VHS: House of the Rising Sun

 

Before the episode began, there was footage talking about the Red Sox breaking the ‘curse’.  How soon from this point on would it become a plot point?

Lost has already demonstrated that is going to be about many things – mystery, suspense, good and evil, and the utterly strange. This episode is the first that openly discusses what will become one of the most important themes – love. It will do by looking at the two characters we know the least about so far but whose story will be the emotional in the entire series, equal parts tragedy and joy, love and redemption.

Sun and Jin have been separated from everyone else by a language barrier: by design the writers do not translate anything they say to any other character in order to make sure they seem more separate from anyone else. Based on the few times the two have interacted, the viewer would think that their marriage is little more than the typical Asian cliché of dominant husband and subservient wife, and perhaps they have never loved each other. The very first flashback of them will tell a story that is radically different from that.

This flashback is unlike any of the others we will see over the series, not just because it just features two of the characters but because it is a time lapse of a relationship. We witness what would make the plot of any typical romance, forbidden love, marriage, the deterioration of the relationship, violence, and a desperate break. Like many of the other stories these blanks will eventually be filled in over time, and many of the mysteries we see in this episode will be explained by the end of the season. (The same cannot be said for a couple of other ones that will occur in this episode.) One of the few things that is clear is that Sun’s father, still unseen, is a powerful and likely dangerous man. Sun clearly knows something about this when Jin tells her about working for her father in exchange for her hand and it’s pretty clear she has an idea of how dangerous he is when she meets with the designer in the penultimate flashback. We want to believe the best in Sun because of what we see her husband become. However, when Michael – and the audience – learn the secret she’s been keeping from her husband, it throws everything we might think about her into question. Right now, the audience assumes that she is keeping this secret out of fear of her husband, and we have no reason to doubt that based on what we see in the episode’s opening and when he comes home. But this has demonstrated how good Sun is both at lying and keeping secrets, something that we should have kept in mind the more we learn in subsequent flashbacks.

Other forms of love are on display. Jack and Kate spend the opening of the episode ‘verbally copulating’ as Charlie vulgarly but not inaccurately puts it. They are bantering and playful until they get to the caves and even beyond that, and it’s clear by now that everyone else is picking up on it. But we’ve already learned (and the series will sadly drive this point well beyond in to the ground) there are just too many things in their nature that keep driving them apart, far too many of them put up by each other.

In this particular case, however, you can’t exactly blame Kate for her position. In my previous column, I mentioned the key difference between Jack’s and Sayid’s speeches was that Jack’s, for all its unifying qualities, lacked any form of hope.  Sayid makes this very clear when Jack tells him about his plan to move everybody to the caves. Sayid’s blunt declaration: “When exactly did you decide to form your own civilization?” is one of the most direct challenges to Jack’s authority that he will ever get, and because Sayid’s is based on as much logic as Jack’s, it’s not one that he can as easily dismiss as he will Locke’s. (By the way, this is one of the few times that Jack and Locke will agree about anything with no fight at all. I honestly wonder if Locke had made the decision to live here whether Jack would have immediately decided to go to the beach.) The audience is aware at the end of the episode that this is the first fundamental division between all the survivors, but because there will be so much going back and forth between the two camps throughout the season (and by the second season, for other reasons it will be completely abandoned) it does not seem nearly as consequential either in retrospect or at the time. Indeed, many of the people who seem locked into one position right now will end up shifting to the other within one or two episodes.

Charlie is dealing with a different kind of love – or more accurately, desire. His addiction has been getting more obvious, and while we’re somewhat surprised Locke has picked up on it, it’s not that surprising in retrospect. Locke’s reputation as a lone wolf will become more obvious even within this season, but it is worth noting how much he makes the effort to try and reach out to people in need in a way that not even Jack does. And perhaps Charlie does have faith in a way Jack doesn’t, he finds it easier to take him seriously when Locke makes so many of his portentous announcements. Then again, when Locke tells Charlie he’ll find his guitar and he finds it the next minute, you might believe he has been blessed by a higher power.

Of course the deepest mystery at the center of this episode comes when Jack and Kate discover that there have been people on this island long before that transmission was sent. The mystery of ‘Adam and Eve’ will be the longest running one in the entire history of the series, one that the writers wouldn’t reveal the truth about until nearly the very end of the show. I don’t know whether it says more about the writers or the fans that when we learned the truth about it and the writers made sure it was clear, so many of the fans were still incredibly pissed. (Mythology fans are so hard to please.)

By the end of this episode, everybody is settling in their various camps and while I might have complained about the musical interlude before, I can’t exactly complain about how well the writers matched the song with the uncertainty of the mood going forward. The division that happens in this episode will not be as extensive or painful as many of the others to come, but when we look at the faces of Kate and Jack, the writers are telling us a simple lesson that the series will make clear: love hurts. The show will also make an argument that its worth in the end. How you come down on that may ultimately determine how much you think, at the end of the day, Lost ended up working.