Lost Rewatch on VHS: Something Nice Back Home

 

This episode is considered by some as the weak link in Season 4, at least among the episodes after the strike ended.  And I’ll admit there are some weak links, including a revelation that seemed huge when it happened and in hindsight was one of the biggest letdowns in the history of the series. But looking back, this one of the most emotionally gut-wrenching episodes in Season 4, certainly among the ones involving the Oceanic 6.

We’ve been put through the ringer in the last two flashforwards when we learned that Sun made it back to the mainland and Jin didn’t and last week when we learned that Sayid had found Nadia, then lost her forever – and with it handed over to Ben the rest of his soul. But I think the flashforward we get in Something Nice Back Home will break everybody’s heart, even those of you who never had much use for Kate and had trouble standing Jack. It certainly makes my heart break every time I see it, perhaps because I was more of a shipper for those two than I wanted to admit.

It's generally acknowledged that even though Jack is considered the central character of Lost, he is also one of the most polarizing. In part this is because of how good a job Matthew Fox has done at making Jack come across season after season as someone who is sticking to the idea of rational thought, even though every season cuts a larger part of it away from him. As a result despite all the pressure on Jack to be something he never wanted to be as well as his inability to relinquish control, we tend to see his understandable frustration and confusion as unlikable. Everything that people blame him for – being judgmental, withholding information from his friends,  the refusal to accept the evidence of what he is seeing – is something that almost all of the survivors are guilty of to an extent.  I think we take it out on Jack because he wears his heart on his sleeve and therefore can’t compartmentalize it the way so many others can.

Even as the episode starts and everything is falling apart, Jack insists that they are getting off the island.  Never mind the freighter folk never came to rescue them in the first place and there’s a good chance they are here to kill all of them, Jack is still trying to paint a sunny picture.  He’s clearly been suffering from something more serious than a ‘stomach bug’ for the last day but as we know with Jack, he can never admit a sign of weakness. Only when Juliet – the other doctor – tells him she knows what happening does he concede he has appendicitis.

Juliet manages to take charge in a way and with authority that Jack never could, and everybody listens to her and does what she says for the greater good. Except, of course, Jack who is still trying to stage manage the surgery. Kate isn’t entirely joking when she says she’s surprised he hasn’t taken it out himself already; you get the feeling that if he could have done that without anybody knowing he was doing it, Jack would have done just that. Juliet allows him the illusion of control, but it’s clear that even before the surgery is underway she never had any intention of letting him talk her through the surgery. (And you know, given how their last surgery went, maybe Juliet was afraid he’d punch out Bernard and demand to speak to the freighter on the sat phone.)

I grant you the lack of suspense in the outcome of Jack’s surgery would have been pre-determined even had the flashforward not been about him; we’ve already seen he gets off the island in two other flashforwards this season. The point is encapsulated in the conversation between Bernard and Rose as to why Jack is sick in the first place. (It’s interesting that Rose talks about them leaving the island even though she was determined to stay.)  Bernard is speaking in jest when he says Jack has angered the gods of the island but we all know there’s a very good chance that’s why this is happening: Rose herself knows just how significant it is that Jack has gotten this sick and what it means now. We would know by now this is a waste of time: Jack hasn’t listened to anybody telling him that he should stay on the island; he’s certainly not going to listen to his body telling him that.

There’s rarely been such a contrast between the actions on the island and the flashes off it. We actually get to see that Jack is happy in a way we’ve never seen him before. He somehow seems to have worked through his issue with Kate being Aaron’s mother, and the two of them are happy. Jack has become a surrogate father and he is in love. He’s even able to talk about Christian with something close to fondness in one of the flashforwards.

And then everything comes crashing down when Jack goes to see Hurley. If anything looking at Hurley we’re even sadder for him then we are for Jack.  It was bad enough that Hurley went to Santa Rosa because he thought he had gone crazy. Now he seems to have gone to a worse emotional place than Michael was. Michael only wanted to die; Hurley thinks he already is. Not just him but everybody who came back. Jorge Garcia’s scene with Jack is one of the best scenes he has done in the entire series. He seems so resigned to his fate that he doesn’t seem to even care that he’s having regular conversations with the dead any more.

On a private note, I kind of think Charlie is being something of a dick when he tells Jack: “You’re not supposed to raise him.” Now to be clear Hurley has no way of knowing that Aaron is Jack’s nephew. (It’s clear given Jack’s last line of the flashforwards that he does.) One can imagine it has taken a lot for him to emotionally work past this and the fact that he can be a father to Aaron must seem more than he thought. So Charlie saying this is truly nasty. (Then again, maybe he regrets he never got the chance.)

This brings us to another question that the show has never clearly answered: how is that the dead are visiting the Oceanic 6? Jack was already seeing the ghost of Christian even before he talked to Hurley and we’ll eventually learn Hurley has been seeing more ghosts than just Charlie. Considering that Claire sees Christian on the island (we’ll get to that) the consensus was that the two were connected. Now it’s very clear they couldn’t have been.

In the case of Jack, it’s pretty obvious why he’s seeing his father: guilt. Jack has always carried huge burdens before he got on Oceanic 815 and he did so on the island.  We don’t know the nature of how the lie came into being yet but even if it wasn’t about that part, he would be dealing with quite a significant amount of survivor’s guilt. The burden of lying to the world has clearly been significant for him, and you get the feeling the pressure must keeping up every time he does it. I have little doubt he might have been willing to brush off what he was seeing before as guilt – and then Hurley tells him someone will be visiting him too.

That’s also what’s part of this. Jack spent much of his time on the island dismissing the talk of Locke and Ben as that of being crazy and the last thing he needs is someone in an institution passing on (from the dead, no less) that he’s seeing the ghost of his father. It’s why Jack so desperately proposes to Kate that night; he’s trying his hardest to deny the reality of what Hurley’s said. And because Jack, just like Sayid, would rather bury his guilt than share his feelings with a therapist or even his fiancée, he decides to get drunk and start taking pills.

And as we all know Jack can’t handle it when somebody he loves has a secret. We saw his fixation on with Sarah even after she left him for another man; we saw him accuse his father of infidelity rather than let things go. Jack needs to put the blame on someone for his own failings. So even though Jack is keeping several big secrets from Kate, he decides to fixate his rage on Kate for keeping a secret from him. When she tells him that she’s doing a favor for Sawyer, his jealousy of him – which he managed to keep in check on the island – boils over and he takes all of his guilt on the nearest target. (For the record, he does so completely irrationally given what we find out.) The final minute of the flashforward is gutting because we know without having to look that Jack has in two minutes destroyed his relationship with Kate beyond repair, and it’s as devastating for her as it is for him.

Jack clearly degenerates very quickly after this, though how quickly is up for debate. The next flashforward chronologically must take at least four or five months after this one and by that point, he’s lost everything else: his job, his reputation and his sanity. How this happened we never find out all the details, but I’m guessing the guilt from screwing things up with Kate as well as continued visits from Christian played a big part. (We’ll see the final blow in Season Five.)

While the surgery itself is anticlimactic, this is another in the long line of powerhouse performances of Elizabeth Mitchell. It’s interesting to compare her behavior in the midst of a life-threatening surgery to Jack’s behavior in Do No Harm. She is completely calm and in control, giving orders to a group of relative strangers and is listened to with no real argument, both when it comes to medical advice and giving orders as to control the freighter folk. (Jin just nods when Juliet gives him a gun and tells him what to do.) She has to deal with a conscious patient but given who it is that’s worse and she can control him too. And then there’s her final scene where she tells Kate that Jack kissed her and that Jack is clearly in love with someone else – and after Kate leaves, she tells Jack she knows he’s awake. Even if you don’t ship Jack and Juliet, it’s hard not to feel for Juliet at this moment. I truly believe a part of her really is in love with Jack at this moment and this whole thing has broken her in a large way. The fact that Jack didn’t trust her enough to do this surgery on her own is bad enough, the fact she has to tell Kate that Jack’s in love with her has to be worse.

I’d also say that Something Nice Back Home is the moment that everyone on the helicopter officially becomes Team Oceanic. Daniel, of course, has always been trying to help the survivors more than any of his colleagues but here he makes it very clear that he is firmly on their side. Charlotte is still being stubborn and obstinate but when Jin calls her on her knowing Korean and demands that he take Sun off the island, she doesn’t hesitate before agreeing. (The fact that Dan is clearly falling in love with Charlotte is another thing that will break your heart.) Meanwhile Miles is still somewhat creepy but given his reaction when he sees Rousseau and Karl’s bodies, it’s clear that he’s over his head and that his only chance for survival is sticking with Sawyer. And we’ve never truly doubted that Frank is on the side of the survivors but when we see him for the first time (since Ji Yeon) he makes it just as clear he wants everybody to get out alive.

But now, of course, we must deal with what is now the biggest problem of the episode and frankly, one of the biggest problems with the show’s second half. Ever since we learned that Aaron was one of the Oceanic 6, our reaction was automatic: how did Claire give up the baby she has spent three and a half seasons guarding with her life? And the answer is…she seems to have just wandered into the jungle and left him behind.

The biggest theory throughout Season 4 and well into Season 6 was that Claire was, in fact, dead.  A lot of fans came up with a lot of supporting evidence to back it up and Darlton did nothing to confirm or deny it. Honestly that would have been a better solution than what we actually got.  Because from the moment Claire wanders in the jungle after her ‘father’, as far as Lost is concerned she might as well be dead.

It is possible there is a larger reason why Claire not only left the action of series for the rest of Season 4, was written out of Season 5 and then came back in the final season. But if there was, I have yet to think of it.  And it hurts the show badly. Claire was never utilized perfectly the first three seasons but when she was Emilie De Ravin used her well. Now after being connected to so many of the survivors in the last season, Claire is essentially erased from the larger storyline. Worst still is that the show never gives a good explanation as to why she was taken off the board in the first place only to bring her back. The final season spent too much time trying to tie up loose ends that didn’t tie up well and Claire, sad to say, ended up being one of them. (I’ll get to why in the final season.)

 And it doesn’t help matters that this episode also marks the beginning of the end of Aaron as having anything to do with the series. The show spent much of Season 1 arguing that Aaron was going to be part of the overarching story and then when he left the island, he stopped being significant to it at all. There will be some good moments where he connects to some of the characters going forward but you wonder why we spent so much time making him part of the Oceanic 6 in the first place.

Those flaws, to be sure, are down the road. (Though the end of that road is quickly coming.) And we can let it go for now because next week we’re going to get one of the best episodes of the season and one of the more undervalued one of the second half of Lost.