Lost Rewatch on VHS: Cabin Fever

 

It is been very hard this season – honestly since halfway through Season Three – to be on John Locke’s side. We’ve been sure since Walkabout that Locke is central to the fate of the survivors and the entire understanding of Lost and as we have learned his backstory, it’s very clear how tragic he is.

The problem has been that Locke’s defining characteristic on the island – his utter devotion to it and his certainty in his destiny – has become harder to rationalize the more people he puts in harm’s way. It has been framed that so much of the series is about the difference between Jack’s rational thought and Locke’s belief in destiny and that is true. However, in the last two seasons Locke’s faith has increasingly become of that fanatic. He made it very clear he is the protector of the island and anything else is secondary to it. His actions divided the camp at the beginning of the season and his group quickly learned that John’s protection involved unquestioning loyalty and that he had no true plan as to what to do. We’ve already seen countless time how dangerous Locke’s faith is to people around him, and it turned out to be disastrous for his people when Keamy came to the Barracks. The last of his followers abandoned him after the carnage ended and Hurley most certainly would have gone with him had Locke not held him at gunpoint.

When Locke is leading Hurley and Ben to the pit, Hurley theorizes the reason that the three of them can see the cabin and no one else is because they are the craziest. Hurley is usually right without knowing it on so many things and he’s dead on here too. All three of these men have seen things that the rational people on the island – not only Jack – would dismiss as hallucinations but they have accepted as real. Hurley, however, is the only one (in the present) who chooses to look at it as a sign of insanity. Locke and Ben, who as we know very well have many connections in how they lived their lives before they came to the island, have chosen to see these signs of insanity as proof of something akin to a religious experience. That so many religious leaders bring death in their wake is a parallel that the show doesn’t have to actually say; we’ve already seen what has happened to both Ben and Locke’s followers throughout the course of the series.

Cabin Fever is one of the more undervalued episode in the second half of the series because it retells John’s story in a different light, as well as brings together many themes that we have seen in the first half of the series and will be gathered together effectively in the last two seasons. Throughout the series Locke has been certain that the island is not only his destiny, but also that of everyone on the island. The flashbacks in this episode are the first concrete proof that John has been right about this all along. Just as important is that these flashbacks show two critical parts of Locke’s character: his constantly making the wrong choices, and the fact that he will always listen to the wrong people.

In the opening we learn that John was  born incredibly premature and yet after months of struggling to survive, he somehow came through alive. His mother, who in her few scenes is clearly not stable, rejects him at the moment she first is supposed to hold him, and begins a life of which he will never be picked by anyone.

The next flashback is by far one of the most critical scenes in the series. We saw Richard Alpert looking at baby John in the hospital and barely took that in. Now we see John at five being visited by ‘Dr. Alpert’ who claims to run a school for special children and he thinks John is one of them. John is idly playing backgammon and there’s a picture of a man being devoured by a pillar of smoke. Richard is clearly impressed by them.

He then presents John with six objects: a comic book, a baseball glove, a vial of sand, the Book of Laws, a compass and a knife. He asks John “which of these are yours.” John looks at them for a period. He takes the vial of sand, then he takes the compass (which will become critical in Season Five) and then he takes a long look at the Book of Laws. Richard looks thrilled as he considers this. Then John takes the knife. From the moment the episode ended we have been trying to figure out why, considering how central knives have always been to Locke, why Richard says this ‘didn’t belong to him’. We will never get a clear answer as to why the knife was wrong and why the Book of Laws was right (we never even find out what that book was) but all we need to know is that it was the wrong choice and that Richard walks away disappointed.

(It is worth noting that Richard was supposed to play a bigger role in Season Four but Nestor Carbonell was cast in the CBS drama Cane in 2007. Because of the deal, Carbonell was forbidden from making guest appearances on Lost. Like many series in the 2007-2008 season Cane ended up being a victim of the WGA strike of 2007-2008. While this was a bad thing for a promising drama, it was beneficial for Lost as Carbonell was able to return to the show for the final half of Season 4 and was able to resume his integral role to the secrets of the show for the final two seasons.)

The question everyone was asking at the time was: how was it that Richard looked exactly the same in the 1950s as he did in the present (and, minus the shaggy hair, in 1973) The most plausible theory (as plausible as anything is in Lost) was that Richard had learned about John’s importance in the present and had traveled back in time to test Locke as a child to see if he was special. The eventual explanation will end up involving time travel – just not for Richard.

We then see Locke as a teenager and its very clear he was bullied. Once again, he gets a chance to be recruited when Mittelos (which we know represents the island) wants to recruit John for a science camp. John is defiant in accepting his destiny (and uses his old catchphrase) but in this case it’s probably understandable. We’re never going to know why John was bullied as a teenager – teenagers are evil bastards, as we all know – but its also clear that John’s determined to be accepted for something he can’t be was evident in him even as a child. His inability to accept who he is just drives him in the wrong direction.

The final flashback is the most enigmatic because there is no clear explanation. John is in physical therapy not long after he was paralyzed and he has an encounter with none other than Matthew Abaddon. Right now we know that Abaddon is connected to Widmore but he seems to know things about John that Widmore has no way of knowing. He treats Locke with a certain reverence. Maybe it is because Abaddon comes to John at what he thinks is his lowest point and treats what he did as miraculous that John actually decides to take him seriously.

(At this point I must take it upon myself to gently mock a theory that Nikki Stafford had regarding Abaddon in Finding Lost. She thought Abaddon was special because ‘like Alpert, he doesn’t age.” I didn’t buy in that at time and I’m kind of surprised someone as astute as she didn’t note two obvious flaws in her logic: 1) Lance Reddick was such a remarkable actor that he has been able to play almost any role he could without any clear idea how old the character he was and more importantly 2) it has been, at most, six years between the flashback here and the flashforward we see after Hurley has had himself committed to Santa Rosa. It would have been more astonishing if Abaddon were much older.)

Perhaps more than any flashbacks before what we see in Cabin Fever tells us very clearly that John is still making the same mistakes he did all his life: he is making the same bad choices and listening to the wrong people. You’d think given everything that just happened he’d reconsider his actions, particularly as the episode starts with the three of them wandering in the jungle with no clear idea who’s leading. But then Locke has another dream – another surreal exercise in which he encounters Horace who tells him where he needs to go and what he needs to do. And he doesn’t question any part of it.

As great as it always is to watch Terry O’Quinn dominate the screen, this episode is another showcase for Michael Emerson, in a way we really haven’t seen him before. Ben has always known what he was doing, always had a plan, always quick with a biting remark or a snide comment. But in Cabin Fever, he seems to be drifting. When Locke brings the two of them to the pit where the Dharma Initiative was left to rot and Hurley asks what happened to them, Locke just says: “He did.” Ben barely blinks but he’s clearly disturbed. And he’s so unsettled that when Hurley begins to ask questions about what happened, he answers him honestly and openly. He admits to shooting Locke, now admitting he should have known it wouldn’t have made a difference. He denies killing the Initiative but says it wasn’t his decision. When Hurley asks if he wasn’t his leader, Ben just says: “Not always.”

It's pretty clear that Ben is adrift because he is mourning so many losses. He is mourning not only the death of his daughter but the fact that the island has chosen Locke and rejected him. He tries to paint Locke as a cunning strategist when he manipulates Hurley but Locke snaps that: “I’m not you” and Ben just retreats. When Ben looks at Locke and says: “I used to have dreams,” there’s something very sad about that. And when Ben tells Locke that “Destiny, John, is a fickle bitch”, it’s very true that he’s talking as much about himself as anything else. When they find the cabin, Ben seems to be accepting his fate and we feel sympathy for him for the first time all series., (Which considering what we’ve seen him doing with Sayid off the island in his flashforward, is really impressive.)

The scene in the cabin is very powerful but its also frustrating because it shows yet again how easily John can be manipulated. John enters the cabin finds that Jacob isn’t there but someone who can speak on his behalf is – ‘Christian’. Rather than answer questions, Christian asks John questions and plays on the fact he’s been chosen. John should ask questions – such as how Christian knows Jacob, what the hell Claire is doing here and why he shouldn’t ask about it – but yet again he’s told they’re not important and what is important is ‘How does he save the island?”

To be fair, the island is very much in danger. It’s an open question as to how crazy Locke and Hurley are, but there’s absolutely none that Keamy has clearly gone insane. Only his insanity is infinitely more dangerous because he’s taken the approach of a psychopath.

You have to figure even Jack, given what has happened to his men, would decide that the next logical move is to fix the engines and get the hell out of there as fast as possible. An even more logical move would be to find Widmore and kill him for sending him and his team on with horrible intelligence on a mission that is very close to a suicide run. (There’s a very good chance that once Ben was back on the freighter, Keamy and whatever survivors were left would have been killed themselves.)

But in a blindness to logic that even Jack would be appalled by, Keamy decides to invoke the secondary protocol, which apparently only he was aware of. Then he tells Frank to gas up the chopper and tells the Captain that their plan is to ‘torch the island’. (That doesn’t track with what we learn of Widmore next season, but then again it’s just as likely he withheld information from Keamy too.) He then threatens Frank at gunpoint to fly the chopper and then clearly plans to keep killing people until Frank changes his mind. Frank has to know he’ll be killed no matter how this turns out, which is why he makes the decision to try and help the people on the beach. (And to be clear, if Frank had dumped the chopper in the ocean, it would have been as disastrous as it ended up being.)

There now only seems to be one move left. Sayid has taken the zodiac raft and is going to start ferrying people off the island. Desmond, notably, stays behind. He tells Sayid he has no intention of ever going back to the island, and this is a problem he will keep. (Willingly, at least.) The doctor gets his throat cut (a couple of minutes after learning he’s already died that way) and Gault, who has  now realized just how dangerous a mission he’s on has taken on the side of the survivors but Keamy kills him without even a blink. (I’m not sure Keamy’s thinking at all.)  And now Locke has a plan. He has been told that they have to move the island. Only on Lost will that not only make sense but end up being a critical plot point for the series going forward.

Cabin Fever is a brilliant episode because it encapsulates both in the past and the present, the tragedy of John Locke. He is still making the wrong choices; he’s still listening to the wrong people and he’s still blindly following directions even when they are absolutely nonsensical. We know for sure now, as John does, that he was supposed to come to the island. But we also know just as surely that’s always going to be enough to paper over any doubts he might have about his path. He still has no idea where he’s going: as long as it means protecting the island, he’ll follow any path, no matter how many bodies he has to climb over – or through – to get there. Ben tells him outright how fickle destiny can be, and as always he refuses to listen to someone who actually knows what he’s talking about in favor of blindly following fate.