This episode, of course, would
have a place in Lost lore for finally revealing how John Locke ended up
in a wheelchair. (The previous week’s promo had assured us as much.) But that
is far from the only reason The Man From Tallahassee is one of the masterpieces
of Season 3.
For one thing, it is a near
certainty that this is the episode that would earn Terry O’Quinn an Emmy for
Best Supporting Actor in a Drama in 2007.
It would have been hard to argue that there is an episode this year that
shows O’Quinn to the full range of his emotion: the flashbacks alone would seem
to have guaranteed him a win. But the more times you rewatch the episode (this
at least the seventh time I’ve done so since it first aired) the more you
realize that there are layers that even the most devoted viewer may have
spotted at the time.
The flashbacks shows that Locke is
now at what he thinks will be the worst part of his life: he has no
woman in his life, he has no friends and is suffering from severe depression.
The melancholy in him is so great that he tells the bureaucrat in the initial
flashback that he sees no need to even go to therapy any more, even though he
does not believe his condition is ‘temporary’.
We see him pushing a TV dinner on a tray with the TV on and not really
watching it when Peter Talbot shows up at his door, asking questions he does
not want to answer. (It wasn’t until at least the third time I watched the show
again that Patrick J. Adams’ presence in the role seemed to matter at all: it
was only at that point that Suits was something resembling a success.)
The flashbacks show, just like all
of Locke’s flashbacks, how he keeps making the wrong choice. When Peter tells
him his suspicions of Anthony Cooper – which Locke knows better than anyone are
justified – rather than tell him the truth, he hides what he knows. He then
decides to confront Cooper and demand he leave Mrs. Talbot, which he has to
know is a bad move. People questioned why Locke believed Cooper, considering
his track record. I think its clear despite everything the man has done to him,
there is a part of him that genuinely wants to believe there’s something
redeemable about him. Then the police show up on his doorstep and tell him that
Peter is dead. Again he is faced with
the decision to tell the cops what he knows, and again, fatally, he decides to
confront Cooper. Cooper takes the opportunity to con him one last time – and
this time Locke is pushed out an eight-story window.
The common thought at the time of
this episode and beyond was that when Locke goes into see Ben, John still
hasn’t realized that Ben is just as much a con man and manipulator as his
father is. Now it’s very clear at the
end of the episode Ben needed to this happened and that he wanted John to do
this. But each time I watch these scenes, I’m still never convinced of it. I’m
not necessarily saying John has the upper hand, but I’m not sure he’s being
used.
To be clear, the scenes between
Michael Emerson and Terry O’Quinn will be the source of some of Lost greatest
moments: we saw as much in the interactions between ‘Benry’ and Locke in the
hatch. At that point, it was very clear Ben was capable of manipulating Locke.
In Season 3, that doesn’t make Locke particularly special: we’ve already seen
him manipulate Kate, Jack and Sawyer when they were on Hydra Island, it’s
pretty clear he’s been manipulating Juliet for a while, and we’ve already seen how good he was at
bringing out the worst in Sayid. (Interestingly while Sayid comes to the
barracks with Kate and Locke, he never lays eyes on Ben once: this will be the
only season the two never so much as see each other.) So the obvious conclusion
is, even with a gun to his head, Ben has John right where he wants him.
The thing is, when you look at the
episode it’s clear Ben has John right where he needs him, and I think
John knows it throughout their scenes in Ben’s bedroom. Hearing John’s dialogue
throughout, its clear Locke is holding Ben with contempt. This is also a clear
sign that something in Locke has changed: when Alex walks in the room, John
puts a gun to her head without hesitation, even though he does not yet know of
their relationship. This is also the first time we’ve seen without question
that while Alex may not be Ben’s daughter, he clearly loves her like
one. Even if he thinks he is in control of the situation, he does not want Alex
to become collateral damage. Every time the three are in the room, Ben clearly
wants to get her out of harm’s way; his remark that his daughter currently
hates him is a jibe directed out of protection. Throw in the fact that while
she’s getting the pack, he keeps looking at pictures of her when she was
younger, and we know he has her best interests at heart.
It's also worth noting that while
Ben is trying to persuade John to do what we wants, there’s never any
indication that Locke believes a word that comes out of his mouth. He mocks the
idea of the ‘magic box’, he snickers at the idea of this hurting Ben’s
reputation with his people, and he views Ben’s behavior as leader of the Others
with nothing short of contempt. And it’s worth noting that Locke clearly knows
that he has a card in his hand that he didn’t before. When Ben tells him how hard it was for him to
be in the hatch and express his amazement at the fact that Locke was walking
when he had no right too, I think he’s telling the truth. And Locke immediately pounces on that fact.
Ben is still in a wheelchair a week after being operated on. Locke also asks
the question Ben has to have been asking himself: if on an island where people
recover from injuries so quickly, how did he, a person who has lived on the
island his ‘whole life’ develop a fatal tumor on his spine. Every time Ben tries to poke at Locke’s weak
spots, John deflects, and when Ben tries to ask why John is angry, Locke’s rage
is very real. He calls Ben a fraud and a cheat; that he’s taking the island for
granted. When Ben asks how he possibly
can know more about the island than him, Locke has a perfect rejoinder:
“Because you’re in a wheelchair and I’m not.”
The general consensus at the time
was that even when Alex told him that her father manipulated people, he didn’t
wake up and realize he was being used. That actually brings me to a question
that has never been answered to anyone’s satisfaction: did Locke
actually blow up the submarine? We see him go into the submarine to be sure,
but we never see him plant the C4. The next time we see him, he is soaking wet,
which would make no sense if he planted the C4 in the sub. While we see an
explosion, to be sure, we don’t see anything that looks like wreckage. In the
Lost Encyclopedia, the writers actually state that it was never confirmed the
sub was destroyed. The only proof we seem to have is that we never see the sub
in the present again, but since this is Lost that means very little.
(And in keeping with the show, once the sub has been ‘killed’, we actually see
it a lot more.) Indeed, the only reason a major storyline for the back half of
the show makes any sense at all is if the submarine still exists.
And I question whether Locke
really thought he was being used even then: he makes it very clear that if he’d
wanted to, the C4 could have been removed from the pack well before Ryan gave
it to the Alex. Consider the exchange between them in the last scene. Locke
says: “you wanted it to happen.” Ben says: John made his dreams come true.” Neither
one says the sub has been destroyed.
Now consider Ben’s actions after
John leaves and Jack and Juliet enter. He seemed almost warm in his attitude
with Locke; he is clipped and cold here. He tells Jack he will let his friends
go ‘once you leave the island.’ Ben’s
hold over the Others has been tottering for a while, and he clearly needs a
power play to do so. He clearly has a
play in mind to get what he wants from the camp and in order to do so, he needs
Juliet back in his corner. The only way he can make this work is for it to
appear like she has no choice. We’re never entirely sure what Juliet knows and
when she knows but the next two episodes will demonstrate that she is clearly
capable of being as duplicitous as Ben when it comes to getting what she needs.
She may not like playing the villain but she’s willing to do it. (If there is a
flaw in her character, it’s that from this point on we will only see the two of
them together in flashbacks or indeed with the rest of the Others from this
point on.)
Ben also very clearly needs to
keep manipulating Locke. He does know that John is special and that he needs to
keep him nearby. It’s not clear if he’s doing so to necessitate his healing or
because he wants to keep a very clear threat to him at his side, but he does
know that he has to convince Locke to stay. That’s clearly why ‘The Man From
Tallahassee’ factors into this. Locke spends the entire episode not believing
anything Ben says. But when he sees his father tied up in a locked room, it’s
the first time he thinks maybe there’s something to it.
The episode also shows, in smaller
doses, the blindness of other characters. Ever since Kate and Sawyer fled Hydra
Island, Kate has been determined to rescue Jack, and won’t listen to an
argument against it. In the last two episodes, she’s increasingly refused to
accept that Locke might be a threat to her rescue mission and when she sees
Jack galivanting with the Others and shaking hands with Ben, she denies the
evidence of her eyes. Even when Kate goes into Jack’s ‘home’ and he doesn’t
look the least bit happy to see her, she still sticks to the idea that Jack
needs to be rescued.
Now I fully admit in the scene
between the two of them it does look like Jack seems to have defected himself.
But when Jack points out that he told Kate not to come back, the best
defense she can offer is: “I didn’t think you meant it.” That he was willing to
sacrifice his freedom for hers should have registered for Kate but it’s pretty
clear that she was fundamentally driven by her guilt for sleeping with Sawyer.
She doesn’t yet know that Jack saw the aftermath (she will soon) but as we see
now, this is Kate’s fatal flaw. As often as she runs away, she keeps coming
back for the ones she cares about, and its always disastrous. The consequences
are just as painful here as they have been in her flashbacks.
Sayid doesn’t really factor much
in this episode – except in a way that demonstrates his ability to interrogate.
When Alex shows up to get Locke’s pack, Ryan Pryce (who we’ve heard about
before but until this episode haven’t seen) is guarding Sayid. In three lines
Sayid tells Alex he knows who she is, that he met her mother and that the
Others have been lying to her. Maybe
this his way of vengeance against Ben: by now he knows that Alex is with the
Others and that Ben is raising her as his daughter. What better way to hurt him
by placing the seeds of doubt about everything she believed about her life? Of
course, he might just as easily be doing this for Danielle, who clearly could
not come to the camp to face her daughter. (The expression on Rousseau’s face
when she sees Alex for the first time is one of the best moments in Mira
Furlan’s entire career on Lost.)
That brings me to one last moment.
Locke walks away from the sub just as Jack and Juliet are being guided to it.
Though we don’t know it, this is one of only two scenes between Jack and Locke
in the entirety of Season Three. Jack has not seen Locke since the attempt to
rescue Michael, has not had a conversation with him since John and Eko went out
to the jungle to trail Henry. The only
exchange is not friendly: “What are you doing here, John?” A moment later, it
appears the sub blows up. When we next see John, he is handcuffed to a pipe and
he’s clearly been beaten. It might well have been the brutal Pryce who did it,
but just as many people suspected Jack could easily have been the one to do it;
the Others would have had no problem letting him do their dirty work.
Perhaps that is the real reason that Locke
chose to make it look like he blew up the submarine, even if he didn’t. Locke
may not believe a word Ben says, but unlike his fellow survivors, he alone
believes the island is not something to escape from. Ben will talk in a later
episode of John needed to make an ‘offering’, and I’d argue by this action, he
has made it. He has now permanently severed any relationships he had with his
fellow survivors; from this point on, those who ally with him will do so
reluctantly and never completely trusting him. After this episode Locke
fundamentally disappears for much of the rest of the season, and this is
clearly done deliberately. When asked if he is with the Others, Jack says: “I’m
not with anyone.” By doing what he does at the end of the episode, Locke has
essentially assured that he will never truly be with anyone again.
The next episode is ubiquitous to
the entire series. However, recent events have made me decide that I think that
it is far more important to a larger context.
VHS Note: In commercial we see
a promo for the DVD release of Children of Men an underappreciated film
at the time now considered one of the classics of the era. We also see a promo
for Grey’s Anatomy talking about the George-Izzie hookup – which I think
even Shonda Rhimes wishes she had never done.
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