Lost Rewatch on VHS: D.O.C.

 

Before I begin this review I must deal with one of the most gaping plot-holes in all of Lost.  By the end of the episode Juliet calculates that Sun and Jin’s child was conceived on the island roughly eight weeks ago.

Now Nikki Stafford has written very eloquently that Juliet is not the best fertility doctor on certain issues, but this is bigger than that.  According to the Lostipedia, by the calendar dictating by the series, Sun and Jin’s child was conceived roughly near the end of Season 1, right around the time of Deux ex Machina. At that point, Jin had learned that Sun could speak English and had moved from the caves to the beach to help build the new raft. The two of them did not speak again until Jin left the island in Exodus and they did not see each other again until Collision, when they reconciled. Even if you allow a major error on Juliet’s part and say the baby was conceived then Sun didn’t realize she was pregnant until The Whole Truth which was less than eleven days later. Few ultrasounds, much less a pregnancy test, could deliver a positive result that quickly.  So either Juliet got the D.O.C wrong or the writer’s really didn’t do their homework. I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

Anyway… on to the episode.

We’ve known ever since we saw Juliet’s flashback in One of Us that Sun was a time bomb. When Jack approaches Juliet in the opening of the episode, Sun is suspicious even though Jack is basically being a good doctor. It honestly speaks more to the general distrust everyone has of Jack now that Sun seems him as untrustworthy.

But Sun is not to be deterred when someone she loves is in danger and she does what no one has tried since Sayid and Sawyer were shamed by Juliet in that same episode and outright demands to know what the Others are doing with children. We know we can’t trust Juliet either but when she learns that Sun is pregnant she is so genuinely shocked by this that she gives Sun a straight answer and tells her that pregnant women on the island die.

Just as with Left Behind, this is another female-centric episode. It’s fitting that the story centers on Juliet and Sun: by this point in the series we know that these delicate seeming women are both capable of being brutal and lying to people’s faces outright. It’s been devastating over the last several flashbacks about Sun. For the first season and a half of Lost we loved her because it seemed like she was the puppet of her parents and had married a good man who had become a monster. Then in The Whole Truth we saw that she was meeting secretly with Jae Lee, in The Glass Ballerina we learned that she’d been having an affair with him, her father learned about it and it led to Jae Lee’s death. Now in ‘D.O.C’ chronologically the second of Jin and Sun’s flashback, we learn something that almost undoes every good thing we have ever thought about her.

We now get confirmation that she always knew who Jin’s father was and has clearly been hiding it from Mr. Paik. Now when a woman claiming to be Jin’s mother and a prostitute threatens Jin with exposure, she pulls back the final curtain on the lies we’ve suspected. She has always known the kind of monster that Mr. Paik is and has essentially put up a front to the world. We might have suspected as much in so many of the early flashbacks when she worried about Jin working for her father but this is something else entirely. In order to protect her husband she says she will continue to say nothing… but as a result, her father takes this as an action to put Jin in his service.  Now the words that Jin heard before he got on the plane in Exodus – ‘You are not free. You never have been and you never will be’ – take on a far more painful meaning. Jin has never been free because his wife made sure he wasn’t.

And as a result, it blows up a fair amount of the sympathy we have for her in the previous flashbacks.  Yes, it must have been terrible to live under Jin’s rage but the fact that she helped it come to be makes it seem like buyer’s remorse, her turning to Jae Lee seems selfish and her decision to escape buyer’s remorse.  When she tells the woman claiming to be Jin’s mother that: “My husband thinks you are dead. Do not make me have to make that a reality” it is a note of power – but part of you wonders why she did not simply ask that problem to be solved instead of something that would cause suffering to the man she loved.

Now on the island Sun is vulnerable which leads her to trust someone she a few hours ago called a liar. Even knowing what we already do about Juliet and what we learn at the end of the episode, Mitchell is such a brilliant performer that we don’t question her motives now. We’ve already seen just how much of an emotional prisoner Ben Linus has made her and how devastated her job has become in her time on the island. So I genuinely think Juliet does want to give good news again when she takes Sun out to the Staff.

Both Yunjun Kim and Elizabeth Mitchell give brilliant performances. There’s the same distrust we saw between Kate and Juliet in Left Behind but that gives way to raw honesty for both Juliet and Sun. Both women know that Sun is facing death and that leads to raw honesty on the part of both of them. Juliet tells Sun exactly how horrible her time on the island has been in a way we don’t think she’s truly confided to Jack yet and tells her where the women were brought to die. Sun opens up about how Jin was infertile before the plane crash and her affair with another man. When she tells Juliet that she loses either way, I honestly think Juliet might have been willing to let this go as much for her sake as Sun’s. And the genuine smiles that cross both woman’s face when they see that Sun has a healthy baby is incredible in part because we’ve rarely seen any moments of pure joy on this island. Immediately it is tempered when Juliet tells Sun she conceived on the island, but Sun is genuinely happy to know that she is having a child with Jin.

And there’s something incredibly devastating when we watch Juliet return to the locker room and leave a recording about Sun’s pregnancy, referring to her as Kwon and detachedly tell Ben exactly how she got pregnant and what the next steps are.  Then she turns the recorder off, and brokenly whispers: “I hate you.” Once again we get a look into Juliet’s face and see that she’s never bought in to the island’s dream. (A later feature called Missing Pieces will reveal that this was a turning point for Juliet and where she makes the decision to defect. )

Jin would no doubt be horrified to learn the fate of his wife, but on the other side of the island he and his party of friends are dealing with another crisis. The pilot is suffering from a severe injury and may be fatally wounded. And things get bad to worse when we are greeted by…Mikhail.

Much has been written about how Mikhail seemed to miraculously recover from his cerebral hemorrhage and speculation would be that he might be immortal. (Something he seems to be saying when confronted.) Later on, we will be told that the pylons at the fence were not set to a lethal level, and eventually we will learn that there is a control panel that allows that to happen. Still, it really looked like he was dead when we last saw him, and later events will cause us to wonder if there’s more to it than that.

Desmond makes a deal with the devil when Mikhail says that he can help fix the pilot, who seems to speaking in any language but English. Charlie wants to kill Mikhail very badly (we all know how experienced he is with it) and its clear that just letting Mikhail go would be a bad idea as he leaves with the satellite phone the first time he departs. Yet again someone from the party says Mikhail needs to be put down; yet again someone chooses to ignore it. It’s really hard not to blame Charlie for his frustration with Desmond at the end of the episode when he tells them we can’t just keep letting them go.

And the fact that Desmond is now basically parroting the Others moral arithmetic is really hypocritical of him. I realize he’s very concerned and distracted -  a woman has fallen from the sky with a photo of him and Penny and knows who he is by sight, after all -  and obviously this is by far their best chance for rescue.  But it does not change the fact that the last time the survivors had a chance to be rescued, the Others literally blew it up. Now Mikhail knows that there is a stranger on the island, that she has a satellite phone (way to go, Hurley!) and by extension  that outsiders are on the way to the island.  He will pass that information on to Ben in just a few episodes.  His decision to let Mikhail live is just as foolish as Sayid’s decision not to kill him when they first took him prisoner.  (And consider what Desmond has been trying to prevent this season, he might very well have signed Charlie’s death warrant right now.)

Of course, when the episode ends we may have more to worry about then just that. Because the pilot regains consciousness and the ability to speak English. She and Hurley start to have a conversation  and when she learns who he is, we learn something that seems to be working opposite to the fan theory the writer’s have been denying since Lost began.  The wreckage of Oceanic 815 has been found…and there are no survivors.  Now we will learn in Season 4 that there’s more to the wreckage than meets the eye – and that she herself probably knew going in that she was going to meet those survivors.  We’ll deal with this directly when we get to Season Four, but unfortunately it doesn’t help that while we get to know this woman a bit more by the end of the season, the writers never truly clarify who she is or what her mission was.

But right now, we’ve got bigger things to worry about. Hope may seem to have come but there’s clearly a threat coming from within the island. The next few episodes, however, will change the dynamic remarkably as we learn that while the Others are clearly a threat, the hierarchy that we have come to believe was rock solid is starting to crumble, which will lead to some increasingly violent actions well before we get to the season finale.