Lost Episode Guide: A Tale of Two Cities

 

A lot of people have problems with what would be the first part of Season 3 of Lost in particular. I think a large part of this reason is that fans of the show had not yet caught on to what the writers did in the teasers of every season premiere since the second one.  In the opening teaser, Cuse and Lindelof would essentially tell us without telling us where most of the focus of the season was.

In Season 2 we opened in an unfamiliar location that appeared to be some kind of bachelor pad in the 1970s.  Then there was an explosion, the figure in the pad began to prepare himself and we realize that we were still on the island and in fact we had been in the hatch whole time. The writers told us effectively that Season 2 was going to be predominantly about the hatch and everything connected to it and while there was considerably more to it than that, we did spend the lion’s share of the season in it.

The teaser of A Tale of Two Cities takes a similar approach. We open on the eye of an attractive blonde woman who appears to be a modern house, but she’s also listening to a retro classic Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’. She seems upset, but goes about her business, burns her hand on her cooking and then sets up for a book club. When she opens the door, we think we’re in the suburbs.  As the book club goes on, the woman involved seems to be taking abuse about the novel in question – I wasn’t sure at the time, but it turned out to be Carrie – and she seems particularly upset when she hears ‘Ben’ wouldn’t read this on the toilet. Then just as she reaches her threshold, the house starts to shake and it looks like an earthquake. Then everybody starts running outside. Ethan comes out from under the house, we see Goodwin appear and out of his own home comes – Henry Gale.  They look in the sky and we see Oceanic 815 split apart in the sky.  Everyone looks stunned at this, but Henry snaps into authority, orders Goodwin to run to the beach and Ethan to go to the fuselage.  He makes orders to not get involved and to make ‘lists’.  Then he looks at this woman who we now know is Juliet and says: “I guess I’m out of book club.”  The leader is Ben, and just to make sure of it, we now realize we’re going to be spending much of the season with the Others.

Juliet is, with the exception of Kate, the only female character on the series who from beginning to end is fully formed, has a meaningful character arc and who seems completely realized.  Yet for reasons I never comprehended, she received the same amount of hostility that Kate did over the series. There is clearly logic to this – we know up front Juliet is ‘One of Them’  and based on everything we’ve seen in the first two seasons, we have absolutely no reason to be anything other than evil incarnate. (With one exception and we’re going to see her again real soon.) But the writers make it clear from the moment we first see Juliet that she seems like an outsider here. We know nothing of her backstory and won’t for a bit but based on everything we see in the teaser; you get the feeling that Juliet seems as unhappy to be on the island as all of the Oceanics.  She might live in a house, having electricity, a gas stove and even a book club but we get the feeling right away that she seems to be a prisoner as much as the three people who were taken captive in the Season 2 finale.  Her cage is just a little nicer.

Like so many fans (and critics) I instantly trusted Juliet, though in this case it was because I knew the actress who played her. Elizabeth Mitchell had been working in Hollywood for awhile before she appeared on Lost – she had played Kim Legaspi, the psychiatrist who eventually helped Kerri Weaver realize her sexuality on ER (still a big deal when it happened in 2000) and had played the eventual Mrs. Claus in the sequel to The Santa Clause. I’d been a fan of The Lyon’s Den, an intriguing NBC legal drama that had been cancelled after merely eight episodes and I’d seen her in intriguing guest roles on House and Boston Legal. Her work as Juliet on Lost, however, would launch her to the fame she deserved and she has worked on several brilliantly done series over the next decade.

Perhaps that is the reason, even though I should have known better, that I thought Juliet was trustworthy from the start. I kept thinking that even through her conversations with Jack when, like him, we should have thought she was the enemy no matter how sympathetic she seems. We definitely should have thought it her first encounter with Sawyer after his attempted escape when she says: “Hey” and that tases him without a second thought.  We should have thought that when she calmly looks at Jack’s file (the first sign we have gotten that the Others are not so much omnipotent but connected to the outside world) and tells him his entire life story.

What made me believe that Juliet was a good person was her interactions with Ben.  There’s clearly some hostility between them in the teaser and it becomes very clear when Jack has a knife to Juliet’s throat and Ben seems indifferent to her being killed. (Granted both he and Juliet do know something Jack doesn’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that when Juliet tries to escape drowning, Ben essentially locks the door in front of her.) And its very clear in the final scene after Juliet has managed to have broken Jack a little and Ben tells her he’s done a good job. Juliet just says: “Thanks Ben” in a tone that’s ice cold.  Whether she hates herself for what she’s just done or whether its because she doesn’t like that Ben’s happy she did it isn’t clear, but we can tell the last thing she wants in Ben’s praise. In hindsight, this is the first clear sign we get that Juliet is not onboard with anything going on.

After the teaser we spend much of the opening finding each of the three captives. Each wakes in an unfamiliar place. Jack fins himself in a glass cage, sees an open door and immediately tries to walk to it before he bangs into a glass wall. He then bangs on it, starts yelling and hanging from the ceiling. (We’ll get back to him.) Kate wakes up in a bathroom, where Tom is around and asks her to shower, and then provides her with a change of clothes. Sawyer wakes up in an actual cage – but he’s not alone. There’s another cage across from him, and another person in it. The cage is clearly designed for a scientific experiment, which Sawyer finds out the hard way. Eventually the kid – who we find out is Karl – helps break out of the prison and Sawyer and he go their separate ways. The jailbreak ends up with both being recaptured, Sawyer is returned to his cage and Karl is forced to apologize before he is hauled off to parts unknown. (We will not find out who he is or where he is, but its worth noting near the end of the episode we get a very big hint, particularly if you listen very hard to the noises when Jack wakes up. We will hear them again.)

Kate gets handled with kid gloves when she is taken to see Ben.  Ben provides her with a nice breakfast and is polite about it when he tells her to handcuff herself. However Kate hasn’t started eating when he starts the head games. “Why did you mention Sawyer before Jack?” he says casually when she asks for her friends.  Ben clearly knows something about the triangle which he couldn’t have learned while he was in the hatch. And when Kate asks why she’s been brought her, he is honest – for Ben.  He says that he wants to give her a nice memory because the next two weeks will be very difficult. He’s not telling the truth about the timeline, but he’s not kidding about the rest of it.

By this point in the series’ run, a lot of people were frustrated with Jack’s character and his behavior going forward would, if anything, make people think less of him. And it’s hard not to watch him in this episode and not see why they’d be irritated. It was one thing to watch Jack being self-righteous, dismissive of everyone’s concerns as immaterial, refuse to share information and be a total jerk in Season 2. In a very real sense that attitude more than anything helped lead him to this very point.  But at the very least (and it is least) it could be justified by the fact that he was in charge.

Now Jack is being held prisoner. He has no leverage to negotiate; nothing to bargain with. Juliet has all the power, and she spends most of the episode trying to be polite to him, offering him food and water, telling him that he is dehydrated and that its in his interest to eat and drink. And Jack spends the entire episode somehow acting like he’s in charge, that somehow he can irritate Juliet into giving him information. Even when Ben tells him that if Jack opens the door he will kill them all, he still does it.  I have to tell you when Juliet clocks him near the end of the episode, I was on her side: Jack’s behavior deserved more than a punch in the face.

Many people argue that the flashback we see in this episode is another one in the long saga of Jack flashbacks that don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about him, particularly in relationship to Christian.  I thought so for a long time myself, but I’m now inclined to think otherwise. We’ve seen in the last two seasons that Jack is stubbornly self-righteous, but this is the first time we’ve gotten a real sign of his obsessive nature and how it blinds him to reality.  Sarah has made it very clear she is leaving Jack, but Jack wants to know who she’s leaving him for. He calls every number on her cell phone. He even suspects his own father of infidelity and refuses to listen when Christian tells him to let it go. And you really wonder what Jack is hoping to accomplish. What good does he think will come of this? It won’t change Sarah’s mind and it won’t bring him any satisfaction.  Even when Sarah comes to see him in the final flashback, it’s as if he thinks that after everything he’s done, this will change her mind.

It's also the first sign we’ve seen of Jack’s utter determination not to believe the evidence of his own eyes and for the first time, we actually question how much of the problem between Jack and Christian is in Jack’s own head.  When Christian tells him how bad he is getting, Jack doesn’t believe. When Christian tries to mitigate things by saying he knows something about being obsessive, Jack calls him a drunk. He follows Christian in his surgical scrubs to an AA meeting and berates his father in front of them.  Even when he hears Christian has been sober for 50 days, he mocks this accomplishment and actually seems like he’s a drunk himself.  There’s a very good chance that after this interaction Christian crosses over from being a functioning alcoholic to one that can barely exist: it certainly sounds that way based on Sarah’s tearful description of his phone call. When Sarah tells him to look on the bright side “now you have something else to fix” there’s a rage in her voice that we’ve never heard from her before.  And the irony is, of course, that Jack has given up on trying to fix his father long ago and has no intention of doing so in the future.

When Jack asked Juliet if the Others are what’s left of Dharma she says: “It doesn’t matter who we were. What matters is who we are.” Jack told Kate a variation of this way back in Tabula Rasa, but as we all know he didn’t mean it, at least as far as Kate went. Now nearly two months later, Juliet tells Jack who he was.  Jack is given the opportunity to know the truth about Sarah, about what broke up his marriage, about what caused him to assault his father. The only thing he can ask is: “Is she happy?” Jack hasn’t believed anything Juliet said, but when he hears she is, it breaks him in a way we last saw when Desmond asked him what happened to Sarah.

The final flashback ends with Jack being bailed out of prison, but we know when it ends that he’s still in one. Now on the island, he’s in another prison and there’s no one coming to bail him out.  Perhaps part of the reason he is broken is that he realizes that he has no control over events and that his fate is in the hands of the people he has spent a season scheming against.

By contrast, when Kate is led into the cage opposite Sawyer at the end of the episode, the two looked relieved. They joke with each other, and Sawyer throws Kate the fish biscuit he worked so hard to earn. Their situation will change faster than Jack’s but at the end of the season premiere, they seem freer than he does.

 

VHS Rewatch Note: Some exceptional movies were being promoted on this episode. Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s debut in the rebooted James Bond was being promoted but hadn’t even be rated yet. Christopher Nolan’s underrated masterpiece The Prestige was advertised, Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and the eventual Academy Award winner for Best Picture The Departed.  There were also advertisements for several new ABC series. A lot of promotion was done for The Nine an intriguing series that followed Lost but wouldn’t last. Other series that were being promoted that would have a longer shelf-life were the Anne Heche vehicle Men in Trees, Brothers and Sisters and Ugly Betty. The latter two were critically acclaimed hits that would win Emmys for Best Actress for Sally Field and America Ferrara respectively in 2007.