Lost Rewatch: Maternity Leave

 

This episode doesn’t have the best reputation either. There is some justification for this. Last week, we were dealing with the arrival of Henry Gale and this week we’re suddenly dealing with Claire for truly seems to be the first time in all of Season 2. Furthermore, the impetus for the action – Aaron’s sudden illness – is dealt with by the end of the episode as if Claire worried for nothing, and the discovery of this new Dharma Station appears to be pointless because there is no vaccine after all this time. The flashback that we see is non-traditional in the extreme, and while eventually viewers will be more in favor these kinds of stories, the fact that we question the fundamental reality of what happen is off-putting.

But while I don’t think this episode is a masterpiece, I don’t believe it deserves to be considered one of the worst episodes of the series or even Season 2, as one major book on Lost does. In many ways, it’s actually more ambitious than a lot of the episodes we will get throughout the series because it’s another one of the frustratingly few ones that is, as Sawyer puts it, girls only.

It makes sense in a sad way that Claire has been essentially regulated to the background for Season 2. We’ve spent almost all of the episode in the Hatch or with the Tailies and Claire has been on the beach all that time. The few times she’s actually had more then a few minutes of screen time have been more based on her interactions with Charlie and Locke rather than as a character in her own right.  So I do admire, however heavy-handed the execution, the way that the writers try to put Claire at the story front and center.

The main reason I think Maternity Leave works as well as it does is because it is one of the few episodes where almost all the female regulars are used as characters in their own right and not extensions with male characters. After Jack sees Claire on the beach (and really does a half-assed job of reassuring her Aaron will be fine) Claire is worried about an infection. To be clear, she has been infected – by Rousseau.

Claire has been dealing with the fact that she can not remember what has happened to her during her abduction – and now she seems to be having flashes of repressed memories.  She ends up going to see Libby, the clinical psychologist. This is one of the only times we will see Libby independent of Hurley since she joined the camp, and its another example of what seems to be a wasted opportunity. We will never know one way or the other whether Libby is telling the truth about her psychology background, but in the few scenes she has with Claire she demonstrates a remarkable calm and detachment towards her and has a much better handle on how to deal with a frantic patient then, say, Jack has under similar circumstances.

Libby also claims that what Claire may be going through are essentially amalgams of several groups of memories, and there’s an excellent chance she’s right. Much of the interaction we see between Claire and Ethan does seem to have a dream-like quality to it, and many of the questions that he asks her are close to the ones Jack did when he talked about her pregnancy. It is, to say the least, highly unlikely that there was a mobile with planes like there was in Claire’s dream in Season 1, much less that it played Catch a Falling Star.

The most likely explanation of what we are seeing is that Claire is that what Claire is being injected with is some kind of sedative or drug to keep her docile and suggestible.  Ethan is clearly taking on the attitude of a friendly physician, and based on what we will later learn about the Others, he’s trying to convince Claire that giving up the baby is her idea. This is, to be clear, being solely because they have every intention of cutting her child out of her and throwing her away afterwards.

The part that is almost certainly real are the two last flashes when we see this black-haired girl wake Claire up, try to get her out of the Staff and then drug her and get her outside.  The girl never identifies herself but she is a teenager and looks around sixteen. We’ve already heard Rousseau had a daughter and in The Hunting Party Mr. Friendly told ‘Alex;’ to bring out Kate.  The implication is pretty clear and Rousseau herself seems to think this is a possibility even before Claire tells her about the girl who rescued her.

These memories, of course, come in flashes and the second one convinces Claire she has to go into the jungle after Rousseau. Kate goes to Sawyer and demands a gun (his reaction is one of the highpoints of the episode) and its interesting that it looks like Sawyer’s turn to villainy was never as deep as he intended. He immediately offers Claire medicine when he learns Aaron is sick and he doesn’t put up a fight when Kate asks for a gun. Admittedly, it’s the reminder that this story arc was pointless but will let that go.

This is also another one of those gems that Mira Furlan will constantly be capable of. We know that at the end of the day Rousseau is insane but there are always signs of the woman she once was. This is also one of the occasions where she seems to have the self-awareness of her condition that she almost never demonstrates.  When Kate threatens to shoot her unless she gets away with Claire, Danielle walks up to Kate and almost begs her to be put out of her misery.  It’s a heartbreaking moment, compounded at the end of the episode when she tells Claire that she didn’t find what she was looking for either.

The Staff seems to be another false flag operation, but as it turns out this will end up paying off later on. When Kate goes into one of the lockers, she finds the ragged clothes and makeup that we saw Friendly use in his previous encounters. This more or less confirms that the meeting Claire overhears between Ethan and Friendly is genuine and that this is the first time we see what he really looks like.  It also adds a wrinkle we haven’t considered: we’ve assumed to this point the Others dress in rags and pretend to be disheveled, but it appears that too is an act.

Which brings us back to ‘Henry Gale’. Jack’s ‘plan’ when it comes to dealing with the presence of him is apparently to cut everyone except himself and Locke off from using the hatch to hide him.  This is yet another example of Jack’s inability to think beyond the short term. He basically forgets any of his idea for an army in favor of containment, and we know he isn’t including Locke because he trusts him but because he doesn’t want to let him out of his sight either. Locke calls him on this and Jack’s reaction is to use the button against him. It’s a level of just how much the button has tested Locke’s faith that he doesn’t even bother to put up a fight.

Even in this episode there are signs that this will come to nothing. Eko ends up finding out about Henry and confronts Jack on it.  He refuses to listen to Jack’s spiel and makes it clear – gently – that unless he talks with ‘Henry’, he will make this public. Jack doesn’t mess around with him the same way he has with Locke; he already knows that Eko is not someone you can bully.

The scene between Eko and Henry is magnificent  in part because of how different it is from not only all the scenes with Henry but in all the scenes we shall see between the Others and the Losties. Eko is polite to Henry but does not for a moment try his sob story on him. The speech that he gives is both clearly a menace and apologetic. It’s the only time that one of the survivors apologizes for something that they have done to the Others (the Others have already made it clear that they have nothing to be sorry for and will keep doing so for much of the rest of the series). It will be a long time before we are ever able to read Michael Emerson’s poker face, but in the scene where Eko takes out his machete, and then cuts of the knots of his beard, I genuinely think he’s terrified.  Everyone else will spend much of Season 2 trying to figure out if Henry is telling the truth. Eko doesn’t even have to hear him to know he’s lying.

There has already been much written about how easily the Others seem to manipulate John Locke, but its worth noting that when Henry starts his mind games, Locke is pretty much open to manipulation. He doesn’t know what the button does but he has to keep pressing it anyway. He thought that he had saved Charlie; it now looks like he lost. He trusted Sawyer and Sawyer used him to take the guns from him. And in the previous episode, Jack forced him to choose between his determination and the button – and the button won.  Honestly trying to turn Locke against Jack is barely worth the head games; Locke has been a loner from the start, and he needs any ally he can get. That he has chosen to place that trust in someone who isn’t trustworthy shouldn’t really surprise considering just how susceptible he was to his father’s manipulations (and we haven’t even gotten near the worst of them)

The crisis that leads Claire into the jungle is averted when she returns to the beach and she is now more devoted than ever towards being with Aaron. But when she makes it clear that the two of them will never be apart, our heart does a lurch. We already known what happened to Rousseau and we know this island is not kind of mothers.