Lost Rewatch: Stranger in A Strange Land

 

Since none of us like this episode, let’s talk about some TV history before we get to why this is such a train wreck.

I think the ‘bottle episode’ came into existence when Homicide was created in 1993. The third episode of the season ‘Night of The Dead Living’ took place in the squad room on a hot summer night with no air condition. There were no phone calls and everyone was just dealing with personal issues more than anything else. This was just a novel concept that NBC executives took it out of its run and made it the season finale. (NBC would frequently do this throughout the show’s run. In retrospect, almost all of the times they did so involve bottle episodes.)

As Peak TV began in earnest in the 21^st century, the bottle episode became more appreciated and admired. Some of the greatest episodes in TV history are essentially bottle episodes – I’m thinking of Buffy’s ‘The Body, The Sopranos ‘The Pine Barrens’, Mad Men’s The Suitcase (considered by many the gold standard) and Breaking Bad’s ‘4 Days Out’. Later examples would probably include ‘The Lawn Chair’ on Scandal ,  ‘Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?” on The Americans  and ‘Bagman’ on Better Call Saul. That doesn’t mean they’re all gems or even make sense in the context of the series – I remember an episode of Dawson’s Creek where Katie Holmes essentially spends the length of the episode with a robber in an ATM whose sole purpose of existence seems to be that his love story is more or less the same one that she herself has been living through.

Now you would not think that a series such as Lost, which is essentially serialized from beginning to end could have a bottle episode. Admittedly there are individual stories that seem not to have a connection to the overarching plot of the show but most of them are in the first season where the writers were working out what they wanted to do. That’s why I was a little surprised in the last week to find on an internet link listing the worst ‘bottle episodes’ in history to find this one listed as one of the worst. Now, strictly speaking there’s another episode this season that also qualifies as a bottle episode that I will safely consider as one of the worst and most pointless of all time. But in hindsight, I think the qualification of ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ as a bottle episode makes sense – almost entirely because the writers seemed to go out of their way to make sure it was.

First let’s get this out of the way. This episode does not stink because of the flashback at its center. I am willing to acknowledge everything that people say about is true: the story at the center really doesn’t tell anything we don’t already know about Jack, Bai Ling’s performance is truly miserable, the fact that it seems to only tell us the origin story about Jack’s tattoos is not something we needed to know. The thing is, even now, I’m willing to give it more of a pass than some of the other ones we’ve gotten in the first two seasons (in retrospect, I’m not sure if we really learned anything new about Kate in ‘Whatever the Case May Be’ or Charlie in Fire + Water) because at least unlike so many of the flashbacks we’ve had, we can at least understand the framing device at its core and its more logical then some of the ones we’ve had before. Jack was an outsider in Thailand, something he could never adjust do despite his relationship and ended up being marked as an outsider forever. In the story on Hydra Island Juliet, who we’ve already seen as an outsider among the Others, has committed an unpardonable offense in her people’s eyes and while she survives execution, she ends up being marked an outsider forever at the end of the episode. At least the writers try to bring things together with the two stories. It’s everything else that makes Stranger in a Strange Land a complete mess.

Let’s start with what many people see is the problem: the character of Isabel. Honestly, this I blame more on the writers than anything else. Diana Scarwid is a fine actress and she clearly makes an impression in her scenes as the ‘sheriff’. There are many people who at the time of this episode thought every aspect of the investigation was staged by Ben to make Jack more invested in the Others. As we shall see later on in this season, there is strong evidence this wasn’t the case: there is a pecking order in the Others and Ben does not have all the authority he has seemed too. Later on in the series, the idea of someone marking judgment on the rest of the Others will actually make this storyline seem even more plausible.

No in this case, we must blame the writers for creating such as intriguing character and then deciding to make this her only appearance. We never even learn for certain what happened to her after this. (The DVD extras in fact tell us that Isabel died at the end of the season, and I have a feeling we know when.) This is one of their weaker decisions.

Something even more horrendous comes with the character of Karl. In hindsight, Karl is the recurring character whose entire presence on this show is never explained by the writers and, given the number of appearances he ends up making, really seems like a wasted opportunity.

For starters: who are Karl’s parents? We already know the island seems to have a focus on children, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that Karl is the only person on the island close to Alex’s age. Where are his parents? He never talks about them at any point, and considering what he has been put through by Ben and the leadership of the Others, you’d think they’d care about him, but the only person who seems to is Alex. How much does Karl know about what the Others are doing? It’s clear from the start that the Others have no problem using children in their work, so Karl must at least partially be aware of this. The fact the writers choose solely to use him as a love interest for Alex – and honestly, not that much going forward – is a waste of opportunity.

And its even more maddening to see how Kate and Sawyer handle Karl in this episode. Kate is right when she tells Sawyer that Karl could have led them back to the Others. Even if he couldn’t have, this is the first time in the series that the Losties have an Other who would be inclined to help them going forward or at the very least, answer some of their questions about what’s going on involving the island.

And what does Sawyer do? He lets him go. Kate may be misguided as to why she’s angry at Sawyer but this is short-sighted of Sawyer himself. Considering that the two of them were locked in adjoining cages and that he risked his life to save Karl, you think he’d at least be curious as to why Ben locked up in the first place and why he was being tortured. But he doesn’t even ask him that, reducing it all to a discussion about love.

And after this Karl disappears. Seriously. We don’t see him until the season is nearly over. We never find out where he went or how he found Alex in the first place. Lost itself never seems to have much use for him for the rest of his existence on the show except to move the plot forward or to use him as a background character.

Then again, much of what happens in this episode shows the fundamental lack of curiosity among the Losties themselves when it comes to possibly getting answers about their captivity or the Others behavior. And in both cases, the reasoning is fundamentally nonsensical. When Kate asks what happened to the kids that were taken, Karl tells her: “We give them a better life.” Kate says: “Better than who.” Karl: “Better than yours.”  Not only is this false logic, we will later its completely false: we’ll eventually see the kids near the end of the series, and there’s absolutely no evidence their lives were any better from being taken by the Others.

When Jack is being held prisoner near the start of the episode, Tom seems genuinely surprised when he asks: “What kind of people do you think we are?” When Jack repeats the laundry list of offenses that we’ve seen them commit, rather than acknowledge this Tom argues that Jack is throwing stones. The fact that everything the Losties have done against the Others has been purely out of reaction to acts of aggression by the Others is just right out there to say – but Jack never calls Tom on it. The fact that the Others have spent the entire series run to this point regarding these starving, traumatized survivors of the plane crash as an invading force is by far their most obvious hypocrisy and one of the biggest flaws in Lost is that none of the survivors ever call them on it.

This actually brings me to a footnote in Lost – Cindy’s arrival in the middle of the episode. Jack recognizes her from the plane and can’t understand what happened to her. Neither can the audience. It has been less than a month since she was taken by the Others and now she is, for all intents and purposes, fully indoctrinated to their ideology. (It’s never clear whether Zach and Emma have been as well; perhaps they have been given false promises for good behavior.)  In Season Three of Finding Lost, Nikki Stafford wondered openly why, after talking calmly and maturely to everyone else from the Others in this episode – and for a change, getting honesty from them – that he didn’t do the same with Cindy. I actually found Jack’s rage completely understandable, given the circumstances. Before the plane crash, he got a drink from this woman. Ana Lucia no doubt told him what happened to her while the Tailies were coming to join them. And now here she is, acting completely as if all of this is normal and with no real concern for the people she left behind. Jack’s rage is excusable.

What isn’t excusable is that while we see Cindy again later this season and indeed a couple of times later during the series, we never get an explanation as to how this happened. Is there some kind of brainwashing experience we never learn about with outsiders? What caused Cindy to fully join the cult of the Others in such a short time? This is a big gaping plot hole in Lost that the series never deigns to explain. The fact that it involves a minor character doesn’t excuse because of what she represents.

But perhaps the most frustrating part of this episode is how it ends. Juliet tells Jack that they’re leaving Hydra and going what Ben calls ‘home’. We don’t see Jack for another three episodes, and when we do he appears to have been indoctrinated himself. The series never attempts to explain what happened to Jack in the week or so he was gone and considering Jack’s attitude when we rejoin him even after the fact, it’s frankly maddening that he never thinks to share what happened to him with anyone. He’s been invited to the evil lair and he never thinks the heroes might want to know what happened. I have a feeling this particular flaw is one that even the most virulent defenders of Season 3 can’t forgive.

If there is any part of Stranger in A Strange Land that works out, it’s the acknowledgement of the new love triangle that’s being formed in the final minutes. When Kate tells Sawyer she doesn’t feel guilty about abandoning Jack, Sawyer calls her on the real reason she wants to go back. Kate does not know yet that Jack saw her and Sawyer together and she thinks that Jack’s sacrifice was done out of love for her. She feels guilty as a result of that fact and that at its core is what will drive her decision to turn around the moment they get to camp. Sawyer claims to have accepted that she did because he felt he was a dead man and that her heart is with Jack. He will spent the next several episodes in denial on that point.

Neither know that on the other side of the island that, in a funny way, Ben’s machinations have worked. Jack is invested in Juliet now, despite Ben’s own words that Juliet will always be ‘one of us.’ (The fact that in a sense this has never been true is something Ben has to know.) It’s never clear if their connection is romantic or similar to that of Sawyer and Kate’s forced captivity – they are, in different ways, prisoners of Ben Linus. Or maybe Jack is dealing with heartbreak and he needs to bond with Juliet over it. (It won’t be the last time we see that happen with Juliet.) Whatever the reason the episode ends with the viewer hearing what the viewer will eventually recognize as Juliet’s theme. It’s stirring imagery to: as we see all sorts of heartbroken couples walking through the jungle, looking out at the stars, or standing on a boat heading towards an unknow destinations. It’s a truly stirring moment. It’s a shame that everything that has gone previously is such a train wreck.