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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