Lost Rewatch: Adrift

 

As I mentioned before the abduction of Walt was something that was basically forced on the writers in Season 1. The fact that Walt spends much of the season gone was an inevitable consequence and it was just as likely that Michael was going to have disappear at some point. What I find far more reprehensible – and even the most devoted fans of the series found annoying – was how much this destroyed Michael’s character in the process.

This becomes clear immediately in this episode. Michael should be focused entirely on the possibility of surviving – they are, after all, adrift in the ocean and there’s now a fricking shark beneath them. Sawyer is bleeding from a gunshot wound (which he makes works in one of the most gruesome scenes on the series so far) and Jin is nowhere to be found. Yet all Michael cares about is what has happened to his son, which while understandable takes all of the characteristics about him that are already hard to deal with and magnifies them exponentially.

Look at this from the perspective of Sawyer. He just tried to protect Walt from being kidnapped and took a bullet for his trouble. Michael just began to drown and Sawyer manages to pull him out of the wreckage. He then performs a poor man’s CPR and Michael finally starts breathing. In the last five minutes, he’s done more selfless things than he’s done in the entire first season. And the first thing Michael does is start screaming for his son, admonish Sawyer when he tells him to save his energy and do everything for the rest of the episode to blame all of his troubles on Sawyer. Sawyer screams for Jin? He’s wasting his energy. Sawyer tells him he took a bullet trying to save his kid? He was trying to save himself. The shark shows up. It’s because Sawyer’s bleeding. He tells Sawyer to get off his raft, and then acts like a petulant child when Sawyer gives a very logical explanation as to why Walt was taken. If Sawyer were to put a bullet in Michael during this episode, I honestly wouldn’t have blamed him – it would have gotten Michael to stop whining.

At the time of Adrift’s first airing many fans complained that the flashback didn’t really add anything new to Michael’s backstory. I disagree. What it tells us is that Michael, unlike what we saw in Special, did not just go quietly when Susan wanted him to surrender his parental rights, and he was willing to put up a fight. The scene where Michael is being deposed fundamentally shows just how dirty Susan is willing to play when her lawyer asks questions that she knows for a fact that Michael can’t answer because he hasn’t been in his son’s life. The attorney is doing a lawyer’s trick and baiting Michael into trying to say he’s an unfit father when in fact Susan is the bad guy here – she’s trying to take the child away from his father because she knows just how badly this will look in court when it comes out exactly why Michael is filing the injunction. Similarly the scene in the episode is another example of why Susan is a great attorney (but a horrible mother). She knows how bad things looks for her and rather than fight it out in court where she knows she’ll lose, she is attempting Michael into guilting him into doing ‘the right thing’. There is, of course, nothing right about what Susan is doing: we already know her maternal plan amounts to providing Walt with the best nannies. She wants to do what’s best for her; Michael wants to do what’s best for his son. Susan manages to sell him that they are one and the same.

In that sense, the final scene where Michael says goodbye to Walt makes much more sense: Michael did not want to give up his son then any more than he did here. Both on the island and in the past, Michael did what he thought was best for his son and in both cases all they have brought him was pain. That is why we see this flashback so that when Michael collapses in grief at the end of the episode, we understand the full context of it.

Admittedly the more interesting story that is being told is back in the hatch, where we now see what happened after Kate screamed for help. Locke went down the hatch after her and now he and Kate run into Desmond. Henry Ian Cusick gives the first of what will be many extraordinary performances on Lost as Desmond. In this case, the viewer is trying to figure out how this lighthearted man we saw in Jack’s flashback not only ended up on the island, but now is apparently stir-crazy and perhaps not that far removed from actual crazy. In that sense, Locke is the perfect man to talk to him first. (Though seriously, John? Anyone who grew up on a playground knows the answer to that ‘password.’)

Locke ‘betrays’ Kate (though in this case, it’s because he knows she’s more qualified than him to break out of restraints) and both of them start getting a look at parts of the hatch. (Yes, I know it’s a station, but the writers call it hatch, move on.) Kate happens to have been put in the pantry and the look on her face as her urge to escape and her urge to take in all of this food do a battle on her face. Eventually, she does what anybody in this situation would do: she grabs a candy bar, wolves it down and stuffs as many chocolates as she can in her pockets, and then she tries to get through the vent in the wall.

Locke is in the meantime basically telling Desmond about more or less the last season of the show and trying to deal with Desmond’s very strange questions. He handles ‘the world’s still out there’ fine but is baffled by ‘Has anybody gotten sick?” (As we shall learn at the end of the season, those were actually perfectly reasonable questions for Desmond to be asking.) Then we hear that beeping that opened the season, but this time we see the source. It’s a computer that looks like you would have used to play The Oregon Trail when you were in grade school and Desmond orders Locke at gunpoint to type in six very familiar numbers and then press ‘Execute.’  Locke for the first time so far seems incredulous and asks a logical question: “What happens if I do that?” but chooses not to argue with the man with the gun – something we shall see, Jack has a problem with (and in fact we’re about to see it again.) It’s worth noting that Locke genuinely seems surprised that Jack has shown up; for all his talk that Jack believes in destiny and just doesn’t know it, he’s pretty convinced that the latter would prevail over the former. This may be the only time in Season 2 it does.

Adrift ends with the current taking them back to the island, and Sawyer saying resignedly: “We’re home.” This is one of the larger themes of Season 2. The survivors spent much of Season 1 trying to escape the island; for better or worse, they will spend almost all of Season 2 trying to get used to their new home and see what – and who – are on this island.

There is one exception to this rule: Michael. One of his last lines is: “I’m gonna get him back.” This will be Michael’s drive for all of Season 2 and its worth noting he does achieve it. The cost will be any redeeming any aspects of the character, his relationship to the rest of the survivors and by the end of the season, his soul.

The last theme comes in the last minute. Jin appears on the scene with his hands tied to a plank of wood, hollering in Korean until he repeats one English word that they all understand: “Others.” The last shot of the episode tells us that Jin is right – as he knows it. There are other people, and the viewer has everything reason to assume that this is our first real look at the enemy and perhaps that Michael and his son will be reunited sooner than we think. This is misdirection as well, but its one that will take a series in a different direction for much of Season – one that you genuinely hoped the writers would have been more willing to follow through with.

The trailer for next week’s episode reminds us that Lost is the Emmy winner for Best Drama. The fact that this would be the only one it ever received was less of a mystery considering some of the other TV series that were airing around this time.

Rewatch Notes: Ads for the new dramas Commander In Chief, Invasion (both of which initially received critical raves and huge ratings) are prominent. We also see an ad for what the final season of Alias (Sydney’s pregnant!) and the new series will be The Night Stalker. The most interesting film preview we see is for David Cronenberg’s silently disturbing and underrated thriller A History of Violence, which released for Oscar contention but went most unrecognized by the Academy.