Lost Rewatch on VHS: Lockdown

 

No one has ever ranked Lockdown as one of the great episodes in the show’s history or even in Season 2, yet looking back I can think of few episodes that are quintessentially Lost. It has everything the true fan of the show loves about it – extraordinary writing and directing, new mysteries revealed, old ones solved, a heartbreaking flashback, extraordinary performances across the board, and a twist at the end the changes the game. It’s also one of those episodes that many fans would have been grateful that they recorded in some form whether they were the watch it or not, and no doubt stayed up all night analyzing every single detail, rewatching it themselves. I’m pretty sure that I recorded it (the original tape has long since been lost) but I would have kept it to hear and see the last minute more than other reason.

Like so many of the best episodes of the series, it is centered around John Locke.  Unlike almost every other character in the series with the sole exception of his initial flashback, the remaining ones unfold in chronological order. (Nikki Stafford would point out that the viewer could tell this because of how Locke’s hairline was receding in each one; it’s slightly harder to tell than from the one in Orientation.) In this case Darlton makes no effort to hide the fact because Locke is still with Helen, and at the opening of the episode is about to propose to her. Unfortunately Helen tells him that his father is dead.

Now given how abominably Cooper treated him in the last two flashbacks, we would be inclined to view this as good news. Locke and Helen clearly go to his funeral purely as a decision to move on from what he put him through. The fact that they are the only mourners should have been a big clue something was up; the fact that the only other people who are interested are not there should have been another warning light. But sure enough Cooper drives up to see Locke at his job (I’ll get to that part of it in a bit) and tells John that he conned two men out of $700,000 and he needs his son to get the money out of the bank for him.

The final scene in the motel is absolutely devastating. Locke has come to give his father the money and Cooper is noticeably surprised, as he is when Locke tells him he did not do it for the $200,000 Cooper promised him. (We never learn for sure whether he came back and took it after the flashback.) Locke never tells Cooper why he did it, but it’s pretty clear that in his mind, this was his way to finally get past what his father did to him. It’s a way of proving to him his selfless (and given his actions, foolish) love for him.  And then Cooper opens the door and Helen is there.

Helen’s rage and disappointment in this scene is remarkable: she is the only person we’ve ever seen who truly has any faith in Locke and he has proven that at the end of the day, he will choose his father over her.  In a sense, the final moments of this flashbacks are the most despairing we will ever see in Locke’s backstory. The woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with has rejected him forever; the father he did it for doesn’t even blink as she leaves him behind. And as a signifier of his ultimate fate while he is kneeling in the rubble of his life, an airplane flies over his head with the Oceanic insignia on it.

The flashback alone would make this an exceptional episode but there’s so much more to it than that. Henry has overstepped his boundaries and both Jack and Locke are furious with him. Jack storms out of the hatch, trying to find Ana Lucia (but he gets distracted as we’ll see) and Henry tries to manipulate Locke, but this time he has pushed him too far and Locke picks Henry up and throws him into the armory, clearly wishing he had the wherewithal to pummel him into submission.

In typical Lost fashion, he is immediately shifted into a position where he is forced to depend upon him.  There’s static throughout the hatch and the lights begin to flicker. Henry tries to bait Locke and he gets pissed – and then the blast doors that Michael pointed out in What Kate Did start to come down.  Now Locke is trapped in one of the rooms and he has only Henry to rely on.

Many of the great moments in Lost going forward will come from the work of Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson. Separately they are incredible; together they are astounding.  This is the first episode in Lost’s run where the two men are put front and center and, as you’d expect, both of them rise to the challenge magnificently.

It helps matters immensely that before the crisis in the hatch begins, Darlton have basically led us to think for the first time that Henry Gale is who he says he is. Ana Lucia has found the grave of Henry’s wife and Charlie has just led them to the balloon.  We will never know how much Emerson’s character knows about the Swan (maybe the writers don’t either right now) but as the chaos of the events around them and the viewer unfold, he seems as shocked and bewildered as Locke does. When he asks John for his word that he will protect him when they come back, the viewer thinks that his concern is not because he has been lying but because he does not think it will make a difference. The viewer is inclined to believe him right now: it seems he has told Sayid the truth, and it still got him beaten to within an inch of his life. We’ve already overheard his conversations with Charlie and Ana Lucia and we have no reason to believe that Sayid will adjust his behavior with the truth.  Even the fact that he seemed to be toying with Jack and Locke a few hours ago now does seem like the actions of a man who is justifiably pissed at the last few days and wants to take the only kind of revenge he can.

It's pretty clear that Locke still isn’t sure when he lets Henry out of the hatch whether he can trust him but he doesn’t have much in the way of an alternative: he’s now as much a prisoner as Henry is. And in typical fashion for Locke, his best efforts very quickly lead to a much worse situation for him as one of the blast doors ends up coming down on his leg and he is pinned to the floor,  a situation that for Locke must be the worst kind of horror for him. Then there is the problem of the button. Locke has to now tell a complete stranger about the computer, then convince him to climb through a grate in the pantry, crawl down the pipes and enter the numbers into the computer. Considering how much the button’s faith has drained him, as well as what he witnessed the last time the time ran out,  it must be difficult for him to deal with this – and then have to watch as Henry slips and knocks himself unconscious just as the alarm sounds.

Then the timer runs out, we hear the same shaking we did before and everything goes dark – and then a light comes on. And there on the blast door is something that every fan must have been hoping we’d one day get: a map of the island. We only see it for what amounts to twenty to thirty seconds at most, but the fans spent as much time possible pouring over every single inch of it. This prop ended up having details that would be relevant to the show from this point on until very close to the end of the series (though in keeping with the series, only a handful of characters will ever know of its existence or reveal what they found on it). The map and everything about it will have revelations throughout the series – this season we will eventually learn who drew it and later on we’ll even meet that person.

Then the lights come on, the doors go up and Henry is still there. We can never truly trust what Henry tells us, but I actually think what he tells Locke about the blast doors is the truth. He entered the numbers, probably just before the figures began to change into hieroglyphics, but nothing changed. He then was about to crawl through the grate again when the blast doors went up. Locke wonders whether it was all a test and Henry says he doesn’t know – but we get an implication about why this happened in the first place.

On the beach, we’ve been distracted by Jack’s decision to play Sawyer at poker. This is a funny scene by any measure of the show (and both Kate and Hurley’s reaction is just as hysterical) but its interesting particularly how Jack deals with Sawyer compared to Locke. Whenever Locke and Jack are in the same scene together, Jack is always pissed at Locke because their fundamental disagreement is about their belief system. He is always snapping at Locke, dismissing every suggestion he has out of hand, no matter how reasonable.  When it comes to Sawyer, however, he always seems far more calm and collected. Maybe as much as they are rivals for Kate, he knows that much of Sawyer’s front is pure bravado. (There may also be an element of intellectual snobbery there; he seems surprised that Sawyer knows Phuket is in Thailand and can’t think that he would know what Amoxicillin does.) Then again, Jack may know that there are certain things he will have the advantage of, and he has no problem using them.  He knows that Sawyer has so much of a front he can’t ask for help even when he needs it, and he also knows that Sawyer never wants to look like the villain in front of the crowd. So Jack completely outmaneuvers Sawyer at poker, even when it comes to having a nothing hand. At this point Jack knows that no matter whatever Sawyer tries he can beat him and makes it very clear that he didn’t ask for the guns for stakes because he knows he’ll get them when he wants them.

Then there is the final scene when we get a hint as to why the lockdown happened. Up until now the viewer has been inclined to think that the Dharma Initiative has been dead and gone for decades. But when Jack and Kate find a parachute, they get the first sign that just maybe someone still has the lights on for the Initiative. However, this leads to one of the more annoying aspects of the episode. Considering that a parachute full of food has just appeared on the island, the next questions should be where did it come from, how did it get here and how did it happen with no one on the island noticing? Instead when this becomes general knowledge in the next episode, the entire camp – including everybody who found it – essentially shrugs it off as unimportant.

Mind you, they have a really good reason. Emerson and O’Quinn are extraordinary all the way through but the last minute of the episode is one of the great moments in Naveen Andrews’ tenure on the show. This is, for the record, why I saved the initial taping of the episode for a long period – it wasn’t so much the mystery I wanted to remember but the remarkable speech Sayid gives, coldly and calmly with the hatred barely suppressed as he makes it very clear that even after he found Henry’s alibi he still did not believe him and dug up his wife’s grave – and found the real  Henry Gale. Of all the revelations in this episode this one is by far the greatest. The writers have managed to completely misdirect us for the entire episode, and we have been reminded (as if we needed to be) that nothing on this island can be taken at face value.

 

Flashback Note: The woman that Locke is performing his home inspection on is Nadia, the woman that Sayid has been searching for. Of all the links between the characters we see in the second season, I think this is an error on the writers part. The flashback we saw in Solitary took place in 1997 or 1996 at the earliest. But if future flashbacks are accurate (and based on what Nikki Stafford will write I’m inclined to agree) this flashback has to take back in 1995 at the latest. We will later come to doubt time and space on this show, but there’s no logical way Nadia can be in California two years before she left Iraq. I think the writers screwed up here.

VHS Note: Among the previews I saw on VHS was an announcement for the final episodes of Alias, the other series most famously connected with J.J. Abrams. I ended up watching the rest of the run, and unlike many of the series that would follow, Abrams stuck the landing with this one. I’m not one who craves a reboot or a new season, but if Jennifer Garner and company decided to do another series, I wouldn’t mind.

One also sees previews for Grey’s Anatomy Season 2 (I think we’re about to meet Callie Torres and Meredith’s father) and ads for the DVD of Brokeback Mountain which had been upset by Crash at the Academy Awards a few weeks earlier. For the record at the time and now, I still believe Good Night and Good Luck should have won Best Picture.