Lost Rewatch on VHS: S.O.S.

 

One of the flaws with Lost that nobody ever seems to bring up was actually mentioned indirectly in the first part of the Season 1 finale. Arzt, who we had only met two episodes earlier, had come to the Black Rock and was bitching to Hurley about how nobody ever took him seriously.  He reminded Hurley that there were over forty of us, they were all important and that he knew a club when he saw it. He then promptly blew up five minutes, none of the regulars seemed to stop and mourn, and when Jack told them that he didn’t make it back, there was nothing resembling the memoriam that when one of the major characters died.

Now I suppose you could make the argument that Lost had a large cast to begin with and that it could not bother to try and expand the cast to include the other survivors of the crash. This argument does not remotely hold up to scrutiny as each season – with the exception of Season Five – would introduce a new group of regulars and recurring characters. All of them, however, would come from a different clique on the island; only once in the entire series did the writers even attempt to introduce new characters from within the camp and it was one of the most famous disasters in the series’ history.

The flaw in the argument, however, comes with the characters of Rose and Bernard, who are among the non-regulars on the show with the most appearances – they each appear in twenty episodes. Part of this is due to the talent of L. Scott Caldwell and Sam Anderson, two of the most experienced character actors in Hollywood. Throughout the series to this point, they have been capable of revealing so much with only a few lines of dialogue per episode. But it’s also due the level of care the writers show with both of them. Throughout Season One Rose’s certainty that her husband was alive despite the evidence was as an example of faith and goodness that managed to propel many of the regulars into action. When we learned in Everybody Loves Hurley that, in fact, Bernard was alive, it was one of the most moving moments in the series so far and it was telling that the reunion of these two characters we barely knew resonated as much as the reunion of Jin and Sun who the viewer was far more invested in by now.

So the fact that the writers chose to stop the major action of what was going on in the hatch and focus on Rose and Bernard for an episode never bothered me as much as it irked some of the other fans at the time. And every time I rewatch S.O.S. I am profoundly impressed by the level of work – and frustrated as to why the writers never thought it worth the effort to even try this with any of the other background characters, save as comic relief for the rest of the series.

And it’s not like there wasn’t precedent for this kind of thing throughout Peak TV during this era. OZ would eventually manage to get some superb drama out of story arcs with several background characters that had barely been used for four or even five seasons; The Wire had already perfected the use of characters that didn’t seem important in the first season but were vitally important in later ones and while it was never done with the same quality 24 was frequently brilliant at bringing characters who had only been in the background for a few episodes in every day and putting them in the forefront in future ones. They had already demonstrated this with Chloe O’Brian who didn’t show up until Day 3 and while Season 2 was going on one of the greatest moments in television history occurred when Edgar Stiles, the chubby tech who we had only been introduced to in Day 4, died in front of the audience – and many survivors at CTU. If you ask any long term fan of the show that death was one of the most painful in TV history – and we’d already seen David Palmer and Michelle die at the season premiere.

But even by this time in Lost’s run the viewers’ attention was beginning to pull away from the survivors of Oceanic 815 and the mysteries of the island. Even Nikki Stafford, who showed remarkable insight throughout the series towards the shows mysteries, showed a distinct lack of compassion as the background characters began to become less important in future seasons. By the time they were getting picked off in rapid fashion in Season 4, she actually wrote at one point: “They will not be missed.” By this point, the viewer was a member of the club.

This is maddening because the story of Rose and Bernard is one that makes you remember there were other survivors and it was very possible they might have interesting stories to tell. We certainly get this when it comes to Rose and Bernard as the writers keep pulling the rug out from under us on everything we think we know. We’ve thought until now that Bernard and Rose have been married for thirty years; in fact, they only met six or seven months before the Oceanic crash.  And their love story is just as deep as some of the ones that will develop on the island and in many ways, far more so. Never is this more clear when Bernard proposes to Rose in the restaurant – and she tells him that she has cancer and that she has maybe a year to live. Bernard takes this all in, and then says: “You never answered my question.” The love in both of their eyes when she finally accepts is one of the most profoundly moving of the entire series.

In many ways Rose and Bernard’s flashback stands apart from all of the ones we will see in the series. By this point it’s very clear that the flashbacks feature some of the darkest aspects of the regulars past and even the happy moments – Jack’s marriage to Sarah, Locke’s choosing Helen over his father – are always going to be wrecked by a later one or the fact that they’re on the island in the first place. But Rose and Bernard’s is practically the only exception. It doesn’t seem that way at first: when Bernard takes Rose to see Isaac of Uluru to try and have her healed, we see Rose lose her cool for the first time in the series: “I didn’t ask for this!” she shouts at her husband.  She clearly doesn’t believe this will work, and that’s why she doesn’t seem that bothered when Isaac tells her he can’t help her.  She has no intention of telling her husband; she just wants to enjoy the time they have left together.

Except…Rose has a secret that blows even what we know about Locke out of the water.  She actually hints at it directly when Locke comes out of the hatch to talk with her.  Rose is her normal no-nonsense self with him and tells Locke he’ll be walking around in no time. When Locke, who’s not in a good mood, tells her it’ll be a few weeks, she tells him “We both know better.” A look of genuine surprise crosses Locke’s face.

And in the final flashback we get it. Rose does something that almost never happens on the show: she tells someone the truth. She tells Bernard that ever since she landed on the island, she knows that the cancer she has is gone. When Isaac told her that there were places of energy that could heal her, she dismissed it: she now knows that the island is one – and that it’s healed Locke the same way its healed her.

  But does that mean that Locke is not as special as he thinks? This is the first time that the series has suggested that perhaps Locke’s miraculous healing is not something that happened only to him. When Claire said she was worried about Aaron being sick, Jack said: “Has anybody gotten sick?” and we basically just shrugged it off. But its been two months and while many people on the island have died of violence, no one seems to have developed as much as a fever in that time. There have been exceptions, of course – the Marshall’s wound went septic, and Sawyer nearly died of an infection – but in a place where you can’t go to the ER if you develop chicken pox, Jack hasn’t been quite as busy as he should be.

Bernard in the meantime spends much of the episode hitting on something you’d think the audience would have remembered: why haven’t the survivors been making any efforts to get rescued in Season 2? In the first season, there was a contingent that was devoted to living on the island, but there was just as big a one determined to find rescue. Now in Season 2, everyone seems just fine living on this island for the rest of their lives. When a parachute drops from the sky with food in it, nobody seems to even have noticed – or even cared- how it got there. Sayid, who spent much of Season 1 leading the rescue effort, sees the pallet drop – and immediately goes into the hatch, intent on exposing Henry’s lies and further interrogating him. Jack is basically doing the same this episode, still focused on Henry and Charlie seems to have moved on from all this to helping Eko build a church! It’s hard not to feel Bernard’s frustration when not only does he fail to win Eko over, but he won’t even let him borrow his building supplies.

When Bernard gathers his team to suggest the idea of building an S.O.S. sign big enough to be seen by planes, you can see that some of the people in the background are nodding along. Then Rose shows up and suggests may be we should run it by Jack first, Bernard does was so many people on the island have done and asks why we need to ask his permission.

I have to say, even knowing why Rose doesn’t want to get rescued, I find her attitude in this scene extremely selfish. When did she decide that she had the right to speak for everybody else on the island? To be fair, given how we see many of the rest of the characters react, she might actually have been speaking for most of them. Charlie and Eko show no interest in helping, Sawyer, who was all in on getting voyage on the raft basically tells Bernard to get lost and Hurley eagerness runs out when it seems he actually might have to work. Jin’s attitude is more perplexing, considering how much work he did to try to build the second raft, and how his wife might want to give birth in a hospital but it does seem very odd that no one really seems that committed to getting themselves saved and more interested in what’s going on with Henry.

Jack, in the meantime, seems to have decided to try and do something proactive – though again, it’s not exactly a well-thought out plan. About a week ago, he was determined to train an army to attack the Others but he basically gave up on that as soon as Henry showed up. Now he’s suddenly remembered that Walt exists and has decided to exchange Henry for him. Ana Lucia tells him flat out this is a bad idea, but Jack barely listens.

Jack is now back to pretty much being full on self-righteous in this episode: he harangues Locke about the button, is unpleasant towards Henry as he changes his wounds, dismisses Sawyer when he asks him for a gun, and when Kate thanks him for bringing her along, he goes out of his way to tell her he asked Sayid first and is bringing Kate because the Others have rejected him. He softens the blow slightly when he says they didn’t want him either, but when Kate tells him about the medical station they found last week, Jack immediately says: “When were you planning on telling me this?” Credit to Kate for calling him on it and demanding to know when he was going to tell her about Henry, and naturally Jack never acknowledges his mistake, tells her this is where the line is, and starts screaming for “them”. Kate tells him they’re not there, and he clearly doesn’t listen: the last scene of the episode takes place at night, and he tells her he’ll start screaming when he gets his voice back. I give credit to the director for the shot where Jack is out in the jungle and the camera circles him, screaming. It’s a callback to White Rabbit when Jack was in the jungle, convinced he was seeing his father, and we thought he had gone mad. He now looks just as mad here, and there’s no sign that he will stop unless he gets what he wants.

Locke, in the meantime, is spiraling himself. He has lost faith in the button and is now frantically to draw the map he saw for a few seconds when he was pinned down. One of the most memorable scenes comes when he pounds on the door, pleading with Henry to tell him if he really pressed the button or not. The look on Emerson’s face as he grins is the first look of unadulterated evil we’ve seen on Henry’s face so far. Locke seems to regain focus when he has a conversation with Rose, but he had to leave the hatch for that. We know as long as it has this hold on him, his faith will continue to bottom out.

The episode ends with shots of couples – Jin putting his hand on Sun’s belly, smiling; Sun looking pensive. Hurley and Libby are messing around clearly in love, Bernard and Rose, who have decided that they can be happy forever as long as they’re together. Kate apologizes for kissing Jack; Jack for the first time admits he might love with her. And then out of the jungle comes the last person they – or we – were expecting: a despairing, frantic looking Michael. We know we should be glad to see him, alive and unharmed. But the last time we saw him he was determined to find Walt, and there’s no sign of him. We should be relieved but we are wary. And it will turn out we have every right to be.