Lost Rewatch: Fire + Water

 

 

This episode, to put it mildly, has a divisive reputation among fans and even some historians of Lost. In the first volume of Finding Lost, Nikki Stafford put it rather bluntly that she considered it by far the worst episode of the first two seasons. Considering that were very few episodes in the entire series that she hated outright, that says a lot about her opinions towards it. By contrast in the second edition of Lost’s Hidden Treasures another compendium about the series, at least one fan of the show thought that this was one of the ten best episodes in the first four seasons of the series.

I myself am divided on it. I’ve never regarded it very highly either at the time or years after the fact. And don’t get me wrong: it’s never going to be at the top of my list of some of the great episodes of Season 2. At the end of the day I think it’s just another in a long stream of episodes that started with The Hunting Party where the series either seems to be running in place, showing regulars acting deeply out of characters, and dealing with storylines that are ultimately pointless for the series. That all being said, I don’t think its as terrible as critics like Stafford seem to have thought it was at the time and compared to some of the other episodes in Season 2, it’s actually far more ambitious than some of the other ones.

I think that part of the reason that this episode has such a bad reputation is because of how it portrays Charlie. Charlie was an early fan favorite in Season 1 who many people very quickly grew to love because of his struggles, his relationship with Claire and how much of an everyman he seemed to be on the island. Since the beginning of Season 2, however, Charlie’s been heading in a bad direction. He’s been treating people unfairly, he seems both overprotective of Claire and Aaron, and yet is judgmental of her, and he seems inexplicably jealous of Locke’s involvement with the two of them. Two episodes ago, Claire learned that he was carrying statues with heroin in them, and understandably she was horrified. Charlie’s been stewing for the last couple of episodes and now it all seems to come to a head.

There’s also the timing of this episode which might have hurt people’s opinion of it: we had this big confrontation with the Others the previous episode and it ended with Jack suggesting to train an army. Now all of that has been dropped and we seem to be going backwards on an episode involving Aaron, who seemed vitally important in the Season 1 finale and, since the hatch was opened, pretty much seems to have been forgotten. (Sad to say, this is fundamentally a larger problem the series will have with both Aaron and his mother for the rest of the series.)

But on this rewatch, particularly coming after the incredibly messy and overblown The Hunting Party, I actually think that it holds up far better. It’s a lot closer, in fact, to many of the episodes that we got in Season 1 which suggested that there was something deeper to the presence of the characters on the island. I think the real reason some of us rejected it at the time may have been actually voiced by Charlie himself to Locke. Charlie has been accused of having a mean streak this season and it will certainly become more apparent in the next few episodes, but when he expresses his frustrations to Locke it’s clear this isn’t one of them. Kate did see a horse just two episodes ago and several other people – including Locke – have had some kind of hallucinatory experience in the jungle. Yet when Charlie goes through the exact same thing, everyone suspects he’s on drugs. That Locke himself takes this position is extremely hypocritical considering that he himself had a bizarre dream that led him to the Beechcraft.

And it’s interesting to contrast Charlie’s dreams with some of the others we’ve seen so far. Locke’s have fundamentally been a combination of his past and the future, and in a sense that’s what we get in Charlie’s first dream where he’s opening presents on Christmas morning and keeps having visions of the pressure his own family put on him. This is the only picture we get of his mother Megan, and it’s possible he’s projecting here. That said, based on the image we get of his father, it’s pretty obvious that he never approved of either he or Liam’s dreams, and that had to be just as much of a burden.

The second dream is perhaps the most striking we will see in the entire series. Many of the dreams and vision we will see on the show will have a spiritual quality but Charlie’s is the only one where religion is the most directly invoked. The image of his mother and Claire together is that of a Renaissance painting and the fact that he hears the sound of a dove crying -  an image that Eko will reference near the end of the episode – clearly indicates a far more religious faith than anyone we’ve met on this series other than Eko.

The bigger problem with the story is, as with everything involving Aaron, it is unimportant in the scope of the series and it seems to make Charlie look deranged or on drugs. We will never know for certain if Charlie was using during this episode (I myself don’t think so) but Charlie himself is willing to at least consider the possibility he’s going mad.

I think it is telling that Charlie goes to Eko after he sees Locke; Charlie has a habit of being drawn to men of faith on the island, and they’ve already bonded over the trip to the Beechcraft. And Eko is the only person who does not dismiss what Charlie has seen or heard as a sign of insanity but rather as the possibility that the island is telling him that he does have to save Aaron.

The problem is Charlie does what he has done so much of the time on the series and immediately try to act on it. Had he been willing to listen to Locke when he said that he needed to give Claire some time, she might very well have come around on her own – she does at the end of the episode even after everything that happens. But as we’ve seen repeatedly Charlie has never had the best impulse control, whether he’s on drugs or not – he clearly demonstrated that when Rousseau took Aaron and now he’s showing that’s it’s gotten no better.

Some have argued that Locke’s attitude towards Charlie is also out of character, both in his rude behavior towards his former charge and the fact he chooses to hit Charlie repeated at the climax of the episode. However, I wonder if in Locke’s case he too is dealing with the repercussions of the previous episode. When he chose to train Michael to shoot he must have known the implications. Jack spent much of the last episode tearing John down to the point, he actually blew up at him before the Others showed up. And it must have been as big a blow to him as it was to Jack and Sawyer to be forced to disarm and retreat at the end of the confrontation. Perhaps this is where Locke’s crisis of faith truly begins: when Charlie tries to get him to talk about how the island tested him, Locke talks as someone whose faith is diminished. This is made clear when Claire asks him about baptism and he dismisses it as ‘spiritual insurance’ Yes the fact that Charlie has lied to him about the statues no doubt hurts a lot too… but remember that one of the last shots of the episode is of him putting them in the safe. He knows how dangerous they can be but he never gives a real explanation why he never destroys them. Perhaps he has not truly given up on Charlie.

There are also other aspects of this episode I find far more appealing than what we got in the last one. Hurley is clearly crushing on Libby and when he confesses it in front of Sawyer and Kate, Sawyer teases him but not in the mean-spirited way he has so far. Indeed, in a truly wonderful scene, he acts as Hugo’s wingman, because he clearly knows Hurley will never be able to act on his own. Similarly the scene between Hurley and Libby is equally cute and charming.

In retrospect I find the scene between Jack and Ana Lucia on that same level. Ana Lucia is making more of an effort than she has in a while to engage with someone, and when she asks Jack “You hitting that?” it’s the first time she’s seemed normal since we’ve met her. (Jack’s clearly floored by that, mainly because she’s hit a nerve.) If there’d been more scenes like this, we could have really grown to like Ana Lucia.

Many also say that the flashback in this episode doesn’t really tell us anything knew about Charlie and Liam that we didn’t know before. I’d argue it clearly tells us more than we thought. Throughout the flashbacks Liam is clearly on the verge of barely being able to stand up straight or last a minute without a fix. Then in the last flashback he truly and utterly abandons the brother who got hooked on drugs because he couldn’t stand to see Liam broken and maybe wanted to get closer to him. This makes the flashback we see in Homecoming more painful because we now know just how Charlie got to the point we saw him in, and how utterly addicted to both fame and drugs he was to swallow his pride and go to Australia to see the brother who’d betrayed him so many times and did so one last one. Throw this in with how Charlie covers for his brother with Karen when Liam isn’t there to see his daughter born and how he sells the band’s soul to try and get them money for Liam and it’s impossible not to feel immensely for Charlie. Several flashbacks for other characters in the series the rest of the way will tell stories that seem superfluous. This one doesn’t.

And the final scenes tell us even more about what the long term plans for Eko must have been. When Claire went to talk to Locke about baptism, he basically brushed her off. When Claire goes to Eko with those same doubts, Eko uses the parable of John the Baptist and Christ to say that there is more to it than that. When Claire says she afraid what will happen to her if she isn’t baptized and something happens to her, Eko assuages her by baptizing both of them. It’s very symbolic that the last theme music we hear in the episode is one that we already recognize with Eko, because unlike both Charlie and Locke, whose faith has been lost, Eko still has his and now shared it with Claire. Of course as fans of the show know, Claire does that have a reason to think something might happen to her, but it’s more related to Earth than heaven.

So no, Fire + Water is not one of the great episodes of Lost, and it may not have delivered on the promise at its center anymore than some of the others this season. But I don’t think it’s a horrible one, either. We may not have liked it because of what we saw some of our favorite characters becoming, but I don’t think we gave it a fair shake. Many people were upset at how Locke behaved throughout Season 2, but it was pretty clear he was going through a crisis of faith. Why should we give so much grief to Charlie, a man who clearly had faith before he came to the island and was now going through a similar crisis?