When I saw this episode
originally, I thought it was one of the best of Season 4, certainly among the
three or four best of the season. So I was dismayed and shocked when I
purchased the Season Four version of Finding Lost and learned that Nikki
Stafford considered it ill-conceived and one of the weakest of the
season. Considering that in there are very few episodes in the entire canon
that she out and out dislikes, that says a lot about her opinion of it. She would make a partial atonement for it by
the end of Season Five but she never entirely corrected.
I think part of the reason for her
dislike is that the inevitable disappointment any episode would bring that came
immediately following The Constant – when you’ve just seen one of the greatest
episodes in the history of television, it’s inevitable that whatever follows
will be anticlimactic. There’s also the argument, not without merit, that the
major action of the plot – Juliet heading after Dan and Charlotte towards the
Tempest – seems both a disappointment at the time and in relation to how Season
Four ends, irrelevant to the larger plot.
But if you remove the trek to the
Tempest, I’d argue that this is a hidden gem among Lost episodes, in
part because it deals with one of my bigger issues with Season Four overall and
does a lot when it comes to the psychological of several critical characters
and their relationships. Throw in the
fact we finally get an answer as to who is behind the freighter and there’s a
lot to recommend it.
I will admit a large part of my
love for this episode comes for my undiminished admiration for Elizabeth
Mitchell’s work as Juliet. Any episode
that puts her at the center is going to be one I feel great affection for and
considering that this is the final episode we get focused entirely on Juliet,
there’s a lot to be said for it on its own right. Mitchell delivers her best
performance of the season and gets to show the kind of range she did in so many
of her best episodes in Season Three. We’d get to see her do it quite often the
rest of the way, particularly in Season Five, but rarely does she get to do the
full range of emotion we see here.
This episode also deals with the
biggest problem I have with Season Four as a whole: what happened to the
Others? Throughout the first two seasons they lingered as the boogeyman
throughout the series, and in Season Three we got to peek behind the curtain
and learn a lot of their secrets. But when at the climax of Season Three the
Oceanics massacred ten of their people at the beach, the Others became
basically insignificant for the remainder of Season Four and to an extent, for
the rest of the series. We will get to see quite a bit of them in Season Five
in a different context and more of them in the final season, but from this
point on the show’s writers don’t seem to think they deserve to be given the
same consideration as they got in the first half. There are obvious reasons for that as we go
forward, but in a larger sense they don’t entirely align with much of what
happens the rest of the series: it’s as if Darlton and company, having decided
to focus on far larger conflicts in the second half of the series have decided
to ignore so much of what the major one was in the first. Considering the overall strength of the
second half, that might be a minor objection but there are times I find it
lacking.
One of those reasons is based in
characters. Juliet chose to betray her people at the end of Season Three but
the Others never acknowledge it going forward. Ben didn’t say anything to
Juliet in Season Four and when Harper shows up here, there’s no mention of it
at all. However perhaps Juliet chooses
her course of action out of guilt.
Harper tells her that Ben wants Juliet to stop Dan and Charlotte from
what there doing and tells her to take her gun and shoot them. She also tells
her that ‘Ben is exactly where he needs to be.”
There’s a lot of debate that will never be resolved as to whether Harper
is alive or dead when Juliet sees her, given that the whispers came just before
she appeared. However, at this point the
whispers are fundamentally symbolic of the arrival of the Others and there is
the fact that Jack sees Harper just as clearly as Juliet does before she
disappears.
There is also the fact that for
all of Harper’s discussion, Ben has not been in contact with the Others,
something he is very clear about when John asks him. (We’ll get to that in a
minute.) Part of me wonders even now if this was ever Ben’s idea in the first
place. As we see very clearly in the
flashbacks Harper has every reason in the world to hate both Juliet and Ben,
and it’s not like she was ever a nice person to begin with. I’ve often wondered if Harper was acting of
her own volition and wanted to send Juliet to her death. Harper is, after all, a trained therapist and
she knows the workings of guilt as much as anything else. Perhaps she’s hoping
Juliet will end up dead, either by the gas at the Tempest (which would be
poetic justice) or at the hands of Charlotte or Daniel. When you consider the interpretation we get
of the whispers, you can understand why Harper would be indifferent to whether
Ben actually is doing what Dan says he is planning.
I also find the flashbacks in The
Other Woman wonderful to watch because it is the only insight we truly get as
to the society of New Otherton and the dynamics in play. It plays off how Juliet was isolated from the
start of her time coming to the island, how her despair started at the moment
she got there, how she never really went along with the message that Ben was
feeding her, and her affair with Goodwin which we saw playing out in One of Us.
But now all of this is given depth.
It’s pretty clear that Goodwin was
the only connection Juliet ever had on the island and that while Goodwin was
married when they began their affair, it is very clear that it was never a
happy marriage. We know that Juliet’s husband had no problem flaunting his
relationships in the aftermath of their divorce, and the implication is they
went on while they were married as well.
The fact that Juliet reached out to Goodwin in part out of loneliness
and whatever guilt she might feel at Edmund’s death is understandable.
When Harper confronts her in their
session about the affair, Juliet feels extremely guilty and clearly takes
Harper’s warning into account – but she does not end the affair. And its easy
to see why: when she comes out of the surf to see Goodwin, the smile on her
face is one of the most joyous we’ve seen her in the nearly two years we’ve
known her. Even the fact that everybody
seems to know about Ben’s crush on her – which has been hinted at throughout
the episode but never stated directly – doesn’t seem to bother him. And it also tells us a lot about how little
the Others think of their leader: “What can Ben do?” Goodwin laughs just before
Ben ends up sending him on the mission that ends in his death. The irony is, as
we’ve seen by now, is that Ben has less power over his people then he thinks
and that the crash is the beginning of the end of his power over them.
Of course, this episode is just as
much another showcase for Michael Emerson but it’s also a chance to get to see
him in a way we almost never do. We’ve gotten so used to seeing Ben Linus as
the Machiavelli of the island, the ruthless overlord and tormentor of the
survivors that it’s very striking to see him barely able to control his crush
on Juliet throughout the episode. It’s almost funny to see how the dinner party
starts with Juliet walking in and asking Ben how he’s doing and he says: “Never
better.” He has a tumor on his spine that might kill him, his daughter is
breaking away from him, his leadership among his people is tottering, but he’s
putting on a happy face in front of his girl. In context the scene where Ben
and Juliet talk about Goodwin and he gets a death grip on the knife that’s
carving the ham is hysterical – even though it’s immediately diminished by
their final scene together.
I have to say the scene when Ben
takes Juliet to find Goodwin’s body is a candidate for the worst thing he does
to a character on the island. His decision to take Juliet there is deliberate,
as is the dig he puts in at Harper as to why he brought her. And there’s something fundamentally nasty
about the fact that he just leaves Goodwin’s body there after Juliet says
goodbye: by the time we meet the Tailies, the body is still there. In The Cost
of Living, we saw how much compassion he showed to Danny’s wife; he showed none
to Harper’s husband.
That said, there’s also something
terribly human about Ben in this scene that explains just why he has kept
Juliet here for three years: he is in love with her. To be very clear, it is
the love of the abusive husband who considers his wife a possession but as we
know from Ben’s life, that’s the only love he’s capable of giving. Ben has already shown that the only way he
can show his love for Alex was by trying to control who she loved, and he’s
essentially done the same thing to Juliet.
Things are slightly better for Ben
in the present. Locke’s leadership has not gotten any better since last we saw
him. Claire of all people is starting to question how he is doing things and it
is a measure of where Locke is right now that he is just as bluntly refusing to
listen to her. When he tries to use the
spectre of Charlie on her, she calls him on it and it unsettles him.
Yet when he goes to see Locke in
the armory and Ben tries the same mind games that worked so well in Eggtown,
Locke does seem to have learned something. Ben is unsettled when Locke tells
him about the extortion, perhaps because he thinks Locke managed to get Miles
to talk. Whatever the reason for the first time Ben offers to help in exchange
for something resembling dignity. Locke has gotten what he wanted but he plays
coy and justifiably tells Ben he doesn’t believe him. This forces Ben to play a
card he clearly did not want to play.
It is here we get our first sign
that Charles Widmore has a connection with the island that is far greater than
his connection to Desmond. I don’t
believe that this worked in connection with the endgame of the series, but for
the next season and a half it played out like gangbusters. We should also note
that even as Ben reveals Widmore sent the freighter he goes out of his way to
deflect any part of how Widmore found out about the island. He lies about how
Widmore found out about it and when Locke asks a direct question, Ben deflected
and made the argument about Locke, which he knew would be enough to buy him
off. By making this about a threat to
the island, Ben knows Locke well enough to know that it’ll get him to stop
asking questions for a bit and give Ben freedom.
The thing is even knowing this
Locke still doesn’t try to come up with a strategy. He lets the group in on what’s happening but
as events head towards a climax at the barracks, he still doesn’t have any idea
what to do next. He now knows that
Widmore is on the freighter and that their orders are to kill everyone on the
island but that doesn’t seem to fill him with panic or planning. At the end of the episode when Ben walks out
in clean clothes, Sawyer and Hurley are dumbfounded and they have every right to
be. Ben has shared some of his information but only enough to help him. Ben
knows that danger is coming and his only action going forward is to protect the
people he cares about. The bloodshed that comes is as much on his hands as it
Locke’s.
Perhaps that is because he
believes what Juliet says at the end of the episode to Jack. That the people
who have come here have come to wage war and he’s going to win. The thing is, Juliet believes that because of
the immense psychological warfare he’s reigned on her, as well as the fact she
believes Harper when she said Ben would hurt Goodwin and Ben’s reaction when
she sees Goodwin’s body. Ben is not the
all-wise person she thinks he is Juliet proved just a few days ago that is the
case. Ben is all-too human; she saw as
much and we will see so again throughout the rest of the series.
There are also a few interesting
stories that in a sense build on the idea of love as a theme of the series.
We’ve already seen in as both destructive and healing in the flashbacks; we get
a sense of it in the present. Juliet spends much of the action leading to the
Tempest, trying to either manipulate Jack to just listen to her, and struggling
with her genuine feelings for him.
A lot has been written about how many people
thought the Juliet-Jack relationship throughout the series and this season was
heavy handed. I respectfully disagree.
Jack is dealing with the fact that while he declared his love for Kate a
few days ago, she chose to stay behind at the barracks. He doesn’t know she
spent the night with Sawyer, but he has to heavily suspect it. Juliet has been
open in a way with him that Kate has never been much of the last three seasons,
and she did choose to trust him with her secret. There’s clearly been some
chemistry between them for the last season and a half and Juliet’s always been more honest with him
than Kate has. It also helps she’s been there to help him deal with the ever likely
fact that the people on the freighter are dangerous and Kate hasn’t been there
at all.
We also know that Jack has always
been the kind of man who has to play the hero: we saw him do it with Sarah in
his flashbacks. His response to Juliet is that of someone who feels he has as
much as it is attraction. In a sense the Jack-Juliet relationship is one of the
great might have beens in Lost. Watch Mitchell’s performance throughout the
rest of Season Four and see how much of her behavior is based out of trying to
deal with Jack’s behavior in regard to her feelings for him.
And of course, we actually get a
great throwaway reference to something we might have forgotten. At dinner, Ben
thanks Juliet for being so good with the kids. He’s referring to Zack and Emma,
the two kids who the Tailies took in The Other 48 Days. Juliet seems to be the only Other who
actually cared for their well-being. For all the arguments of ‘giving them a
better life’, Ben doesn’t seem to care about the life they lost. When Juliet
says they keep asking about their mother, he tells her brusquely: “They’ll get
over it.” A lot of horrible things will be done in the name of the island but
this is one of the cruelest. Two
children who just wanted to go home to their parents will spend their lives as
part of the Others. We saw they’d been
indoctrinated in ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ but we never learn how much they
believe. We never even learn why they were on the list. Was it just because the
island has demanded children, the same way the Others took Walt? Considering
that so much of the reason people come to the island is because they’ve had
horrible childhood, there’s something sadistic about guaranteeing Zach and Emma
will because they’ve been taken away from their parents. That this has just been considered part and
parcel of the island choices makes it impossible for me to truly consider the
Others ‘the Good Guys’ no matter how much our opinion may fluctuate by the end
of the season.
Perhaps the threat of The Tempest
was a misdirection and perhaps it was being done to negate Ben’s power as much
as anything else. But considering how much we get to learn about Juliet, the
Others and our first glimpse at the Big Bad of the season, I don’t think anyone
should be disappointed. I never have been.
VHS Notes: Not much to report in this episode
though I did see ads for the DVD release of the Will Smith neo=classic I Am
Legend.
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