Lost Rewatch on VHS: White Rabbit

 

From the start of the series, one of the fundamental conflicts is that between Locke and Jack. And one of the greatest ironies is that while the two are almost eternally in disagreement about every aspect of life, they have more in common than neither want to accept. This becomes clear in the first flashback we see of Jack in this episode where we learn from an early age: “Don’t tell me what I can’t do’ was a motto that applied as much to Jack as it does to Locke.

There are a couple of codicils to this, one that has become subtly apparent in the early episodes, the other which is made very clear in the next flashback. The first is “no one can tell Jack what he can’t do – but everyone else has to do what he tells them.” This is what Jack spent his time on the island dealing with from the moment he started pulling people out of the wreckage, and it’s part of the contradiction that fills in so many of his problems. The people on this island need someone to tell them what to do and the majority seem to be pushing for Jack to be that someone. But as we have seen in the previous episode, even when he makes decisions for the group, he is immediately challenged on them. Matthew Fox will take a lot of heat for how he portrays Jack for much of the series, for being pig-headed and self-righteous,  utterly unwilling to relinquish his authority, and in the long run, a terrible leader. All of these arguments fail to point out that he never wanted the job in the first place and that he basically only got it by default. Early in the episode Boone shouts: “Who appointed you our savior?” And yet the minute Jack leaves the camp, rather than anyone else trying to step up, Locke asks what’s on everyone’s mind: “Where is the doctor?” Kate and Sayid do their best to step up in Jack’s absence, and Locke is more than willing to do the work when it comes to finding people. But at the climax of the episode when it looks like panic and chaos will win the day, Jack is the one everyone listens too.  Sayid more or less made this exact argument two days ago and was ignored. Jack says it, and its gospel (and what will become basically a running joke for the series going forward)

I’ve heard Jack’s speech dozens of times over many rewatches, but it was not until this last one that I realized what wasn’t in it that was in Sayid’s: hope. Two days ago, Sayid persuaded his small group of people to lie about what was on the transmission. Then he went back to the main group and said: “We’re not giving up hope.” For all of the unifying themes in Jack’s speech, at the end of the day, at no point does he mention rescue. This will be an overriding arc in Jack’s leadership going forward: he is trying to help everyone survive, while several of the others concentrate on rescue. In the next few seasons, viewers will wonder why the castaways make little effort at trying to get themselves rescued. That may be a consequence of how Jack leads. 

The other codicil is that the reason Jack doesn’t accept people telling him what he can’t do is, of course, he’s always had someone telling him he couldn’t do it. It doesn’t help that person was his father and he basically had been telling Jack that from childhood on.

There has been far too much written about Christian Shephard over the years, and I don’t want to add it to now. However, I will say one of the themes of Lost will be the inability to share almost anything, whether it be information, one’s past or ones feelings.  Few have tried to make the connection that part of this reason may be due to the other major theme of this series: parenting issues.  Is it possible that all of the survivors – indeed, almost every character we meet – was bad at the former because of the latter?  It is possible that a lot of the problems between Christian and Jack is because of  fundamental miscommunication, and that Christian was always trying to be a good father. But the problem is, every time he tries to say what he thinks is the right thing, he phrases it in such a way that it comes out as demeaning Jack. In our first flashback, Christian could have said: “Know how to pick your battles” or “Don’t try to win every fight.” Instead he tells Jack that if he tries he will fail “because (Jack) doesn’t have what it takes.” I don’t know how anybody could not take that as putting them down, especially after trying to save his friend from a beating.

On a related note, where is Jack’s mother in all this? This flashback is the one time we see her in Jack’s past and we barely see her thereafter.  She has to know better than Jack the man she married and she has to know all the pressure he’s put him other. But when she tells Jack that her husband has gone, she all but guilts into bringing him back, barely even able to work up a defense of her husband’s actions. “You know he is,” is basically the best she can say of him. Given everything we will learn about Christian as a human being, this strikes us as someone who has essentially spent her life at best ignoring or in a sense enabling everything he has done.  And the guilt trip works: even when Jack is in his father’s hotel in Sydney, with the evidence of his father’s drinking all around, when the concierge points out how drunk he was, he instantly defends him. The hold Christian has on his son will last beyond the grave, a point this episode makes very clear at the end when Jack’s smashes his father’s empty coffin.

Matthew Fox’s performance in this episode is magnificent.  He plays the entire episode as someone who is beginning to fray at the seams emotionally and who thinks (with good reason) he is going crazy. The scene in the jungle where he utters: “Where are you?” over and over, gradually increasing from a whisper to a scream is one of the best in the series. When Locke ends up rescuing Jack and asks: “Are you okay?” he begins to laugh for one of the few times in the entire series – and it is not out of exhaustion, but manic hysteria.

Then of course, there is the conversation between Jack and Locke afterwards, one of the several critical ones they will have during the course of the series, each time becoming more rancorous. It’s not hard to see why: from the start Locke is fundamentally questioning everything Jack believes in, and honestly I think the only reason this conversation isn’t angrier is because Jack is too exhausted to fight back. For the first time Locke brings up something that no one has discussed: “What if all of this was happening for a reason?” as well as the fact that the island is ‘special.’  There is a reason no one wants to discuss this, of course; they’re all struggling to survive and except for Locke, no one has any reason to believe that this place is anything but a hell. (In one of the prime examples of miscommunication, no one ever says this to John directly; perhaps because they think it’s self-explanatory.)

In an interesting twist, the teaser for this episode has John’s famous quote from this episode only in the trailer it ends a different way. “I’ve looked into the eye of the island, and what I saw was…” The trailer ends with the work magic, instead of beautiful. In hindsight, I wonder why this change was made aside from not wanting to spoil the episode. I don’t think it would have made much difference in context – Jack would have dismissed magic outright (Locke says the phrase at another point in their conversation) but he might have been more inclined to find that easier to comprehend based on what he was seeing than the idea that this island was beautiful.

By the end of the episode, order has been restored, both figuratively and literally. Jack has, for better and worse, officially taken over leadership of his group. He will start facing challenges the very next day and the lesser angels of his nature will again overwhelm him. As for the ‘mystery’ of his father appearing in the jungle, the show will drop it for so long that many viewers would very quickly begin to wonder if Lost had any intention of solving the mysteries it put into play. They would eventually resolve it, but by that time I imagine many viewers might very well have given up in the interim for that same reason. (For the record, I eventually theorized what Jack had seen might be in my first attempt at a book on this and the writers would prove I was right.)  Jack might have been the best person who could have kept the group alive. But as we shall see over and over again, he was the wrong person for them to survive here.