Friday, February 17, 2023

Lost Rewatch: All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues

 

Still trying to figure out how they came up with that title after nearly twenty years. I’m not going to deny how right it is for either Jack or most of the characters on the series, but its very unwieldy. Onwards.

The divide between Jack and Locke will be one that fundamentally defines Lost for much of the run. After so many rewatches I was always pretty clear when it happened and what caused it. This time I’m more inclined to think that had Oceanic 815 crashed anywhere else in the world, the divide would have happened regardless, not so much because of who Locke is but who Jack is.

Because the moment Claire and Charlie go missing Jack and Locke go out after them and from the beginning, well before the hatch, Jack refuses to listen to anything Locke has to say. Even at this point in the series, this shouldn’t stun us: Jack had already decided that he will not take any challenge to his opinion seriously. But even in a scenario where John is completely rational, Jack refuses to agree with any points he makes, even based on what Sayid has just told him. Locke tells Jack to go back so they can get prepared; Jack charges on ahead and gets completely lost. When the search party finds him and Locke takes responsibility for what happened with Ethan and clearly defines their roles and why his is more important, Jack charges ahead. When the trail splits up and Locke urges them to stay together, Jack insists on splitting up even though it is more dangerous.

This self-righteousness then gets directed at Kate, who really should have known better when she told Jack she had a skill that might be valuable on the island. Immediately after he decides to take advantage of it, he’s not with Kate five minutes (in episode time) before he both blames for not being as good at Locke, but for holding out on him in the first place. Then when she tells him the truth about something and demands he reciprocate, he doesn’t even consider it.  Then he encounters Ethan in the jungle and when he beats him up and warns him to stop following him, Jack nevertheless tries to fight and is knocked unconscious. You could make the argument that Charlie is nearly killed because of Jack’s persistence; even after suffering severe injuries and being urged to go back by Kate, he keeps plunging ahead. Even his relentless decision to keep trying to save Charlie after Kate tells him to stop is just another sign of his self-righteous stubbornness. The fact that it miraculously works (and from what we will later find out, how much credit we can give to Jack is a matter of debate) doesn’t change the fact that Locke was fundamentally right about everything he told Jack in the first place.

And honestly, it’s hard not to be on Team Locke at this point. His decision to go back to camp and recruit help is the right call. His decision for marker detail is something any tracker would do. When Boone asks him about something personal, he tells him the truth (though Boone doesn’t believe him). And he tells Boone the trail has gone cold and gives him a chance to go back. It’s small wonder that Boone ends up gravitating towards Locke at this point and away from Jack; up until now Jack has dismissed him when he offers help and only helps him when he needs something desperate. Locke treats Boone as an equal, even though he knows it’s dangerous.

With many of the flashbacks it will sometimes become difficult to find the connection between what we are seeing in the past and what relation it has to the events on the island. It does not help that for the characters who get multiple flashbacks, they will be shown in a non-linear chronology. In the case of the one we see here, its pretty clear that it takes place well before the one in White Rabbit and that this is the precipitating event that leads to Jack going to Australia to find his father. His mother told him that he had to do this, and we now see why: effectively Jack made the decision that ended Christian’s career, and he clearly self-destructed from that point on.

Christian Shephard will end up being one of the most prominent recurring characters on the series and the role he plays in connection with Lost will shift dramatically throughout the run. For almost the entirety of the series, we will be inclined to see Christian as a monster, someone who was incapable of being a loving father, who put endless pressure on his son, and the one man whose approval he desperately wanted but could never earn. As we shall see going forward, this is the only flashback involving Jack where Christian expresses to his son how proud he is of him as a doctor and a son. It is worth noting that we are inclined to doubt the honesty of his revelation, considering the circumstances of it: he is basically telling Jack that he needs to put his name on a report that is covering up Christian’s very clear malpractice.  The fact that he is doing so following utter denial about what happened in surgery, expressing that he is still fully qualified, and basically bullies Jack before finally telling him how proud he is, makes it completely understandable that Jack would have doubts about his honesty.

Even given what finally happened, I still find it hard not to sympathize with Jack’s actions at the time. Yes, he might have done it because he finally wanted to prove he was a better person than his father to himself but given Christian’s actions from the start of the first flashback to the last lie he tells the board before Jack confesses, any other doctor in his position would have been guilty of similarly bad faith had he not done otherwise. The fact that Jack was the attending surgeon’s son must have made the decision infinitely harder, and the consequences that his father was telling him the truth about how his career was essentially his life – well, I do understand why he was so determined to make sure his father’s funeral the minute he landed in Los Angeles.

At a certain point, it will be argued that Jack’s main issues with Locke will be acting out against his father as much as anything else. But as this episode has illustrated every action Jack takes on the island  is just his way of saying: “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.” The key difference is, because he’s the leader fewer people are telling him anyway.  This blindness nearly gets him killed for the first time. It is far from the last time he will put lives at risk because of his own stubbornness.

It is likely that this realization would have been far more obvious at the time had it not been for Michael’s equally irrational hostility toward Locke. This is one of the first (but far from the last, unfortunately) times that Michael’s own stubbornness makes him look completely horrible as a human being. Because of his jealousy towards Walt’s idolization of Locke, he continues to moan about him and refuses to hear him. You get the feeling that Michael’s decision to form a search party of his own is just something he’s saying to look big in front of his son: when Locke says that is a good idea (and let’s not kid ourselves, it is) Michael not only doesn’t do it, but he also bitches and moans to Hurley about how badly Locke is treating him and then again orders Walt not to listen to him. We never learn if Michael actually did follow through with his own search party, or if it ended up getting anywhere.

In this episode, a pattern begins that will eventually become maddening in later seasons: the disappearance of a lead character, and after a great deal of initial action, the camp basically goes back to business as usual and there’s no real attempt to find them until they end up getting dropped back in the show’s lap. It is at times like this that you really question how much Jack’s speech was actually just words: for all the commentary about living together, the camp will rarely make much effort when it comes to making a fellow survivor doesn’t die alone. At one point, a joke will be made about how only certain characters are considered important by the camp, referring to the regulars. There’s an argument as to the validity of that point, and it starts here.

Of course, to be fair, the viewer could be forgiven for not caring as much idea. We’ve essentially gotten a lot of information dumped in our lap, including confirmation there are more people on the island. And in the last two minutes, Boone and Locke make the discovery that will change the course of the series – that this jungle has something made of metal in the ground. It is hard to blame the audience for losing interest in the search for Claire for the next few episodes; we’ve known since the Pilot that there’s more to this island than meets the eye, and now we have proof that everyone eyes have not been seeing everything that’s on the island.

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