At the end of the first act of
this episode Sawyer spots Jack. It’s the first time he’s seen him in the flesh
since Kate, Jack and he were kidnapped at the end of Season 2 and it’s the
first time the rest of the camp has since the failed rescue mission for Walt.
Everyone reacts with joy. There
are embraces from everybody. Just like
at the cookout in Lef Behind, for a moment everybody has forgotten how
hopelessly screwed they all are.
Everyone is clearly just as happy to see Kate and Sayid back.
(Interestingly not only does no
one notice Locke isn’t here, but it is not until that evening that anyone even
asks where he is. Notably, that person is Desmond, who knows Locke the least
well and who saved his life when the hatch imploded. After Jack tells them what
Locke did, none of them mention him again and the camp basically forgets him
until the end of the season. The castaways have often shown bad short-term
memory when one of their own disappears but this is particularly harsh. )
There is clearly happiness. Sawyer even hugs
Jack. And then Sawyer sees Juliet. And everyone becomes hostile. Not just to
Juliet but to Jack.
Jack’s attitude towards Juliet
throughout the last several episodes has understandably been scrutinized ever
since. Jack not only spends the entire episode defending bringing Juliet’s
presence, he openly defends her from having to answer any questions. Similarly when Kate demands to know what
happened the week he was with the Others, he gives the bare bones explanation.
Kate clearly doesn’t buy it, with good reason: we’ve know Jack well enough by
now to know that just keeping his head down and doing what he was told is not
something we associate with him. When he tries to defend his actions to the
group by telling him that he made a deal with Ben to get on the sub, he makes
the situation worse: everyone knows enough about Ben to know that you couldn’t
believe a word he says and Jack’s decision to believe him doesn’t help his
credibility. When he tells Charlie to
let Juliet help Claire and Charlie acts with incredulity, he tells him just to
trust him which is ironic. Jack may not have blood on his hands the way that
Juliet says Sayid and Sawyer do but his moral authority is just as suspect. We
all know that the people Jack trusts are few and far between.
So why does Jack seem so
willing to trust Juliet without question? The theory at the time and for the
next season was that Jack and Juliet were having an affair. He certainly spends
the rest of Season 3 and much of Season 4 clearly trusting Juliet more than he
ever did Kate. Ben ‘revealed’ that he
planned to use Juliet to get invested and perhaps he did. I think the connection is that of kindred
spirits. Before Claire’s condition is resolved Jack tells Juliet that if this
doesn’t work, she’ll be on her own. Juliet says: “I’ve always been on my own,”
and while she is lying about practically everything else, in this she is being
completely truthful. When we remember what Jack’s tattoo said, we can
understand why Jack would feel a kindred spirit.
Elizabeth Mitchell’s work in
Season 3 is a master class but in this episode she takes it to a whole other
level. In ‘Not in Portland’, we had
trouble trying to conflate the broken and fragile woman who we saw trying to
find her freedom with the ruthless Other who can coolly tell Tom to kill Sawyer
and Kate and shoot Danny Pickett in cold blood. In ‘One of Us’, Mitchell keeps
us guessing trying to figure out which part of her personality is the true face
of Juliet. We know that, emotionally,
she is an honest person but like everybody else, she is an Other and we have no
reason to trust her. When Sayid demands to know who she was, Juliet tells him
point-blank that if he knew the truth, he would kill her. Sayid is non-plussed
but then asks quite simply: “What makes you think I won’t anyway?” Juliet may be telling the truth about the
nature of what’s she done, but she’s gambling on Jack being able to take fire
for her.
When she gets back to the camp,
Hurley goes out to see her, and he is as close to being passive aggressive as
we’ve ever seen him be. For him, he bluntly reminds her of what the Others did
to them, does not seem embarrassed that he’s been sent to watch Juliet and when
he tells her what happened to Ethan, he could either be apologizing for what
happened to her friend – or gently reminding her of what happened to the first
person the camp learned was an Other. That’s pretty cold for Hurley.
The rest of the camp doesn’t bother
to hide its hostility. Even Jin’s attitude when Juliet asks about Claire’s
condition is pretty cold. (Maybe even he can pick up this an act.) Kate clearly
doesn’t believe the story that Juliet tells her about what happened to Claire.
(Then again, given the way she looks at Sun when she learns what happens to
pregnant women on the island, she has a reason to be.) When Sawyer and Sayid
confront Juliet at the drop point, Juliet shows the part of her that’s an Other
by choosing to shame them for being bad people rather than admitting they might
have a point. It’s actually frustrating
that neither man choosing to call Juliet for using the party line the Others
have been using since the survivors showed up: that none of them have the moral
authority to demand information. Considering that Juliet spent the entirety of
the last episode lying to Kate about what happened to her, they have enough to
call her on it already.
The reason that the viewer spends
all of One of Us still on Juliet’s side is because of the flashbacks. We
already knew at the end of Not In Portland that Juliet had been promised that
she could go home. Now we see the backstory behind it and it is as
heartbreaking as anything we’ve seen the survivors go through. In a way, it’s
worse because while none of them had a choice but to come to the island, Juliet
made the decision to come. It may have been under false pretenses but as we see
just before she drinks the orange juice, Juliet had countless opportunities to
turn back and she kept pushing them away. Indeed Richard actually asks her this
before she finds herself on the sub. (In hindsight what we learn about her
transport to the island is a foreshadowing of a major part of Season 4.)
The scenes between Michael Emerson
and Elizabeth Mitchell are among the highpoints of the season and show Emerson
doing some of his best work. After Sabine dies Juliet is upset but becomes
sadder when Ben makes it clear that he won’t accommodate her demand. I have
never truly believed when Ben tells Juliet that Rachel’s cancer has returned;
I’ve always suspected that this is just another one of his mind games. He knows
that Juliet would do anything for Rachel, and he knows that by promising her a
cure that he can get her to follow him. We don’t know if Juliet believes in
Jacob the same way everyone else on the island does, but her faith is
unselfish: she’ll do it to save someone she loves.
Then (after learning that Juliet
and Goodwin have been having an affair!) comes an even better scene where
Juliet tells Ben that he has cancer.
This is the first time we’ve seen Ben look truly afraid all season, with
good reason. It’s not just the fact that he might be dying; it’s the fact that
he got sick in the first place. Juliet
turns on him with a righteous fury and Ben is unnerved. He knows that his
control over his people has never been ironclad, and this is clearly another
sign of weakness.
Then there is a repeat of the
opening scene of Season 3…except it continues. Ben takes Juliet to the Flame
where Mikhail is waiting. Ben’s reaction when it becomes clear Mikhail doesn’t
have his walkie on is hysterical. (And it raises a question: was what we
saw when Sayid approached the station in Enter 77 completely an act?) It’s also
pretty clear that the Flame is how the Others have all of the information on
the survivors: the satellites did work and Mikhail was using them the whole
time. Then Juliet gets to see her sister
(after, of course, Ben shames her for calling him a liar). Juliet is so
grateful to see that her sister is still alive and that she has a nephew that
she is willing to forgive Ben his sins for the moment. (Sadly, this is as close
as she will ever get to going home.)
By the end of the last flashback,
we are still in Juliet’s corner despite her behavior in the camp. She’s been
lured to this island under false pretenses, the groundbreaking research she did
has been a failure (we will learn in two episodes the extent of the horror
show). She was promised she’d been in a facility near Portland in six months; she’s
been trapped on an island for three years.
She has been emotionally manipulated by Ben for all that time. She has
tried to do her best to live something of a normal life – again we see her
listening to CDs and trying to have a book club – but its clear that, with the
exception of Goodwin, she is fundamentally an outsider here. The writers constantly denounced the theory
the island was purgatory during its original run. Juliet has no reason to think
it is anything other than Hell. Jack is
right when he says that Juliet wants to leave as badly as the rest of them.
Except…that isn’t the last
flashback. The last two minutes we see Juliet settling into the camp intercut
with her last meeting with Ben, and undercuts everything we’ve seen in the
flashbacks. She has done everything Ben
has told her to do. And she has no real
problem when discussing the use of Claire as a chip to get her in with the
camp. We don’t yet know the purpose of
her infiltration, but when Ben says at the end of the episode: “See you in a
week”, we know that he’s planning something far worse than a few abductions.
If there is a flaw in the episode,
it is that we don’t understand why Juliet would go along with another of Ben’s
plans, particularly after her opportunity to go home blew up. Even if we accept
the theory the submarine wasn’t destroyed, Juliet has no reason to take
Ben at his word: she knows better than anyone how much of a liar he is. Another
flaw is one that may not have been one the writers were planning at the time:
the scene between Ben and Juliet have is the last one they will ever share
together in the present. I honestly
would have liked one sometime in Season 4 if there had been at least one scene
in the aftermath of Ben’s plan. (Of course that doesn’t mean we won’t see them
together again…and not just in Juliet’s past.)
In another sense, perhaps the most
telling scene in the final moments comes when Juliet is looking at the
survivors in the camp when she fixes her tent.
She looks at all of them with recognition even though she hasn’t met
them. She’s read their files, after all. Then her eyes fix on Desmond…and
there’s no recognition. For the first time we wonder if Desmond is on the
Others’ radar at all. Ben knew the Swan
existed but he never knew who was pushing the button; Desmond was gone by the
time we saw him and Juliet looking in the monitors in the Pearl. During their conversations we never heard
even a mention of Desmond. There’s no sign Mikhail knows who he was, and if he
did he never got a chance to pass the information on to Ben (though their paths
will be crossing again very soon).
The teaser of the next week’s
episode shows that Desmond has seen a flash of a series of events. These events
will be critical to the final stretch of Season 3 and indeed for much of the
next half of the series.
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