Lost Recap: Lighthouse

 

Matthew Fox has almost never gotten the credit he deserves for the reason Lost was such a success, either at the time and not much in year’s past. Countless members of the cast received multiple Emmy nominations and awards over the show’s run but Fox received his first – and only – one in the final season. And no matter how great his work as Jack Shephard was season after season, he was never as much of a fan favorite as Locke or Hurley in the early season or Desmond and Ben in the later ones. All of the characters had times when it could be hard or even impossible to like them and some took a huge amount of abuse (Kate in particular) but I noticed in Hidden Treasures that in a list of the ten bottom episodes of the series, three of them were Jack centric.

I always found this hard to comprehend considering how brilliant Fox was over the course of the series. But in retrospect the obvious reason is that Jack Shephard was trapped by the rules of television at the time.

The series opened on Jack and we spent the first ten minutes essentially following him. According to the rules not only of network television but basically all television that has followed in cable and streaming dramas since, the first character you meet is going to be the lead for the entire series. There have been exceptions over the years  - we didn’t meet Scully until five minutes into The X-Files or Mulder until ten minutes in, and the first character we met in Damages was Ellen but the series made it very clear that the lead was Patty Hewes = but that is the rule and its been basically a cliché as long as I’ve been watching TV from The Practice to The Crown. (There have clearly been exceptions over the years I’m not thinking of but that is the standard.) It was a different story because Lost was an ensemble show but Jack always appeared in more episodes than any other character in every season.

The bigger problem was that Jack was hard to like. Not an antihero the way that Tony Soprano or James McNulty had been before or Don Draper and Walter White were later on. The trouble was Jack Shephard wasn’t a ‘Difficult Man’ in the definition of the term. He was too good to be a villain but too self-righteous and prickly to meet the definition of a hero. No one had any trouble liking Sawyer even though he was a criminal and mean or Sayid because he was a torturer but for some reason we didn’t like Jack because…he tried too hard.

It didn’t help that unlike most of the characters in their flashbacks when we learned that there was far more to meet the eye then at first glance and we could see several of their behaviors change over the course of time, Jack’s flashbacks basically showed him to be the same guy each time. In quite a few of the flashbacks he was actually doing morally good things: taking the high road when Christian forced him to lie after killing a patient while being under the influence; performing a miracle allowing a woman was going to be paralyzed to walk again – yet somehow they always seemed to be counterbalanced by a pig-headed, unreasonable irrational man on the island. When Locke screamed: “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” we all loved him. When Jack did what people told me couldn’t do on the island, we all hated him. Jack Shephard faced a double standard by fans that few characters on the show  ever did.

It is true that so much of Jack’s backstory was less interesting than the flashbacks we got for so many of the other characters and I think that may have been by design. Every time we saw a flashback of any of the other characters, we knew there was a part of their lives and characters that they weren’t showing on the island. Jack’s character, by contrast, was basically the same in each flashback. He would try to do the right thing, usually out of his desire to fix things; he would inevitably make things worse and he walked away more miserable. We also saw him in a combative relationship with Christian and while so many of the characters on the show have daddy issues, we often seemed to find Christian more in the flashbacks then we did Jack, mainly because his secrets were more interesting.

Jack got chosen the leader early in Lost’s run a job he didn’t want and wasn’t particularly skilled at.  Once he got the job he was in two contradictory position: he was challenged with every decision he made but he refused to entertain points of view that weren’t his. Jack’s leadership might have made sense under ‘normal circumstances’ but the island was anywhere but normal. Perhaps that was the reason everyone followed Jack instead of Locke: they were fundamentally compartmentalizing what they saw and Jack was willing to let them because he denied anything that didn’t fit into his world view.

What was frustrating the longer the show went on is why everybody kept following Jack season after season because when push came to shove, Jack’s instincts were never right. And whenever Locke pointed that out, he dug in and argued that Locke was crazy and anyone who agreed with him was also crazy. Jack told both Desmond and Locke that pushing the button every 108 minutes was an act of lunacy because it was just an experiment. He was as wrong to think that as Locke was to not push it anymore. Jack thought he could trust Ben, a man who had lied to him for weeks about everything that if he performed life-saving surgery on him, he could leave the island. He was wrong about that. Jack believed the freighter folk were there to save them but when Ben and Locke said they were dangerous, he ignored what Hurley had told him and said they were crazy. Jack was wrong again. Finally when Locke told Jack that if left the island, it was going to eat him up from the inside Jack told him he was crazy – and even after becoming a drunken, drugged out mess who was seeing the ghost of his dead father, when Locke told him he needed to come back, Jack told him he was crazy.

Then Locke ended up dying and Jack admitted he was wrong – but decided that Ben was now trustworthy. Even when he learned Ben had arranged to expose Aaron’s parentage  to bring  Kate on board, he went with Ben instead of her. By now Jack who had spent four seasons saying that there was no such thing as destiny believed it was now his destiny to take the five people he’d gotten off the island to get on an airplane that would lead them back there even though so many people had died already so they could get off it. He told everybody they had to go back to save the ones that were left behind. Then they blooped back to 1977 – and no one needed saving. In fact, their mere presence destroyed in a few days everything that they  had spent the last three years building.

Then Dan showed up and told them they were not destined to come back to the island and they never had been. This shook up Jack, who’d spent the last few days convinced the island was their destiny. So when Dan told them that they could make things so that none of the next three years ever happened, and all they had to do was drop a hydrogen bomb on an electromagnetic pocket at the time of an incident, he naturally signed on automatically. He was firm to that devotion even though no one else was and most of them thought he was crazy now. But he was sure that this was absolutely the right thing to do and dropping the bomb was the reason he’d come back.

And it didn’t work. (Apparently.) Now as a result Juliet is dead, Sayid appeared to have died but has come back wrong and Kate the woman, he claims he did this for in the first place, just left the Temple to go after Sawyer. All roads have led him here but every time he took a turn, things kept getting worse and Jack finally faces the truth he’s been avoiding for six seasons – though for fans we’ve known it far longer.

 Jack has spent five seasons convinced that if he tries hard enough, he can fix things. He thought he could save Boone so badly he was willing to drain his own blood into it and Boone died anyway. He thought he could trust Michael to help rescue his son and it led to Libby and Ana Lucia dying. He thought if he could get everybody off the island things would finally be whole, and more people died. He thought he could have a happy family with Kate, but the ghost of Christian and his own guilt destroyed that. He thought by putting Sayid in the spring in the temple it would fix him and now it seems death would have been a kinder fate. And now alone with Hurley he admits the truth about everything: he has been the one who needed fixing all along, and not even this magical island can do it. Jack sounds defeated in a way we’ve never heard before and it’s some of the best work Matthew Fox has done in the entire series.

In the previous episode Sawyer said that Locke was always scared, even when he was pretending he wasn’t. Like so much else, the same could be said of Jack. Both men dealt with things that they didn’t understand very differently: Locke thought it was destiny and Jack just compartmentalizing. This got harder to with each successive season but Jack was a master of denial and as the leader he had to keep us his front. For four seasons everybody followed Jack because he sounded like he knew what he was doing and, despite an increasingly unimpressive track record, they kept doing it. By the end of the flashforwards Jack was a drunken, drug addicted mess who thought his dead father was everywhere and wanted to kill himself. When he screamed at Kate they had to go back, she understandably thought he was crazy and by the end of the flashforwards he was so desperate he started following for the first time – and he chose to follow Ben.

He tried not leading when they got to Dharmaville and let Sawyer steer the ship. But Sawyer was reacting and all he cared about was keeping what he had. Jack followed Dan because he said he had a plan which was, honestly, crazier than anything Locke had ever suggested. It’s possible Sayid went along with what happened because he hoped it was a suicide mission; that Jack was doing it with no intent for the consequences doesn’t speak highly of his impulses.

But he’s still alive and he keeps spending the present reminded of his mistakes. His last big decision – to allow the Temple to heal Sayid –  appears to have failed spectacularly. Jack has no idea what to do next. However when Jacob comes to Hurley and tells them that he has to bring Jack, Hurley knows his friend well enough to know that Jack will dig in if he asks.

Jacob, even dead, is clearly just as manipulative as he was in life. He gives Hurley a mission to follow that turns out to be completely on false pretenses – it seems to be just to get Jack and Hurley out of the Temple after spending so much time and energy just to get in.

 (This was a problem that Darlton realized early in the season. They realized it wouldn’t make sense to introduce so many new characters this late in the show so they would cut bait on it. This is one of the reasons some of us lost faith in the final season, guys.)

But Jacob also knows how much of a burden Christian was so he says the one thing to him that Jack always wanted to hear from him: “You have what it takes.” Jack is at rock bottom and he needs to know that somebody believes in him, even if that someone is dead.

Much of this episode parallels White Rabbit the first Jack-centric episode in the entire series. (Darlton has Hurley admit as much as he tells us that they’re going through the jungle for a reason they don’t understand.)  The clearest parallel is that of Jack and Hurley ending up in the caves, which we haven’t seen since the camp ended up back on the beach in Season Two after the hatch was opened. Jack comes face to face with his father’s coffin and tells Hurley the real reason he ended up here: something he was only able to hint at with Locke but not say directly.

Matthew Fox’s work throughout the episode is brilliant because we’ve never seen Jack like this in five seasons. Jack has always been about forward momentum on the island, moving from one crisis to the next, afraid to stop for too long. We’ve seen him self-righteous, angry, a drunken mess and sure of himself. But we’ve never seen him basically being pulled along the way Hurley does throughout the episode. It doesn’t help that he spends his time on the island being reminded of every one of his failures: Sayid coming back wrong and the fact that the woman he never knew was his sister might be just as bad (we’ll get to that); running into Kate and reminded of everything he threw away with her, stepping on Shannon’s inhalers and being reminded that he allowed Sawyer to be tortured in order to find them, coming face to face with his father’s coffin and admitting he smashed it to pieces. When he tells Hurley that he came back to the island because he was broken, he sounds utterly defeated. At this point he wants to see Jacob because he needs someone to tell him what to do.

When they reach the lighthouse of the title, Jack asked why they never found it before. Hurley tells them: “I guess we weren’t looking for it.” This resonates doubly for Lost. It’s possible that, just as with the spring, this place has been hidden from them and only with Jacob’s death is it visible. But there’s a larger truth as to Hurley’s words. During their first 100 days on the island, none of the characters looked at all of the strange things they were seeing and either dismissed them as just weird, chose not to share the information…and honestly didn’t spend a lot of time looking outside their field of vision. This is true not just in regards to the island but their entire lives: none of them have ever looked at the big picture or had many attachments. As UnLocke said Locke was the only person who realized how miserable the life he was living was and didn’t want to go back. Everyone else was so eager to get rescued, they seemed unable to realize that they hadn’t exactly had a great existence before they got on the plane.

But in the climactic scene of the episode we get confirmation that there might be a very good reason for this. The numbers that we saw Jacob assign in his cave appeared random; now it seems that they had a purpose. They were coordinates on the lighthouse. And despite what Hurley initially thinks, it was not to guide ships to the island (we’ll find out later that Jacob didn’t need a lighthouse for that) but for Jacob to look for people to bring to it. And when Jack looks into the mirrors and realizes that a man he only heard about yesterday has apparently been watching them their whole lives, the last of his belief system crashes down. For all Jack’s belief in destiny last season, you got the feeling he wanted to at least believe he had some control over it: when he decided to drop the bomb in the pocket, he thought it was something he was supposed to do. Now as he looks at the image of his childhood home everything falls apart. UnLocke basically told Sawyer exactly this in the previous episode but despite what we’d seen before, we didn’t trust the source. This is independent confirmation.

It's understandable Jack decides to shatter the mirrors in the Lighthouse. It’s the only action he has left to him; it’s an act of free will against a man whose controlled his destiny. That Jacob seems utterly untroubled by it when he appears to Hurley at the end of the episode is kind of insulting to Hurley who basically did all this without questioning anything.

It's telling that even after this Hurley doesn’t really get angry, even though Jacob speaks in very vague terms as to why he brought them there in the first place and seems far less troubled than Hurley is about ‘something bad’ coming to the Temple. (By the way Jacob, way to respect the people who’ve spent their lives blindly following you. I guess it’s only the new arrivals that matter as opposed to the ones who’ve worshipped you for decades. Thanks for all your service; as your reward, a horrible death is coming.)

Like every Jack-centric episode Lighthouse is about the Shephard family and this is true not only in the action on the island but in the flash-sideways. In the biggest difference between the two realities so far Jack, the man with the greatest daddy issues of all, is now a father himself. He’s already working through the problems of having to have a funeral with no body and his mother is upset about trying to find his father’s will when the episode begins. Now we see that Jack has an adolescent son and its pretty clear their relationship is full of awkwardness: a variation of the kind Jack had with Christian.

The contrast between Fox’s performances in the present and the flash-sideways are the most stunning so far. Jack seems far more put together than we’ve ever seen him. He turns down a drink when his mother offers it to him, he seems more relaxed in scenes with her and when David disappears he doesn’t panic and tries to remain calm, something Jack was never capable of doing in a crisis. But it’s clear there are still issues: like in the real world Jack is clearly divorced, though it doesn’t seem to be as hostile as the one in the original world. (Also given that the original timeline had Jack married for Sarah less than three years before the crash, it’s pretty obvious that he got married far earlier in this timeline though we don’t know who.) David doesn’t have the stability of his parents being together like Jack did and Jack clearly doesn’t see his son as often as he should.

But you can tell Jack wants to be a good father. When he listens to the message of himself on David’s machine while he was in Sydney, you can see the sadness as well as the first thought he had was to call his son and tell him he loved him. Combined with the conversation he has with his mother he goes to the conservatory to hear his son play and he’s truly moved. The conversation he has with David is short and perfect as Jack, who was always unable to say the right thing to anyone on the island, tells his son exactly what he needed to hear and what he wanted to hear his father say when he was alive.

We hear mention of Claire in Christian’s will though neither Jack nor his mother know who she is. But in this episode we get our first real glimpse of Claire since she wandered off into the jungle after her ‘father’ way back in Something Nice Back Home.

For all the ways the writers bungled Claire’s character before and in the endgame of the show, one can’t deny the power of Emilie De Ravin’s work in her initial appearances. We don’t recognize Claire anymore and not just because of her filthy hair and jungle clothes. The Claire we knew for four seasons was sweet, compassionate and loving to everybody. There wasn’t a bone of guile in her body, she was everybody’s friend, and was loved. Contrast that with the dispassionate tone in her discussion with Jin. She doesn’t seem happy to see the man she hasn’t seen since the group split way back at the start of Season Four, she is all business with him and calmly discusses the problem of ‘an infection’, ironic given that’s what Dogen said about Sayid two episodes ago. But even when Justin tells us that she’s clearly crazy  - and there’s fear in his voice – we don’t want to believe it, even after we see the squirrel baby of death that’s she had in her cradle for all this time.

Then she comes back into her tent and she begins to talk about finding Aaron, and the way she discusses first her father and then ‘her friend’, we know that she’s not quite there anymore. She is certain that the Others have Aaron, she talks about being tortured and branded and she doesn’t even listen to Jin any more. Yet right until the moment she sinks her axe to Justin’s stomach we want to believe that this is the same Claire.

But when the only major character we never saw commit an act of violence in five seasons casually kills Justin and matter-of-factly turns to Jin and goes back to having a normal conversation with him, we are forced to wonder if Dogen was telling the truth about being ‘claimed’. Given the way she talks with indifference about killing Kate if it turns out that she took Aaron and then tells Jin that the man who walks into her tent isn’t John ‘but her friend’ we are afraid not just for Claire but for anyone who comes in contact with her.

Because we know what that very bad thing is that’s coming to the Temple. And if sweet innocent Claire has fully succumbed to its lies then it makes us fear for what will happen to Sayid. And as we’ll find out in the next episode our fears will more than be proven correct.

 

IF YOU BELIEVE THE ENDING: Actually I have fewer problems with this than most of the others. Dogen’s presence makes sense in either interpretation. Even in their brief meetings its clear Dogen made a major impression on Jack and I could understand why he’d part of this. And considering we just met him three episodes again, it’s hard to argue that this is fan-service the same way so many of the later appearances will be. (When you learn how Dogen ended up on the island in the next episode, the ending makes sense for him as well.)