Lost Rewatch on VHS: The Package

 

What’s particularly remarkable about the story of Jin and Sun Kwon, both at the time Lost aired and in its aftermath was how radical it was in almost every way we’d seen married couples in TV before and almost never have since.

The biggest difference at the time was of course the language barrier. In 2004 the idea of not only having two characters speak not only entirely in a foreign language but have it be the one they spoke in during the majority of the series was unheard of. (Many executives hated it at the time.) In the aftermath certain series would make strides forward in this: Breaking Bad had many characters do so and it would take this further in Better Call Saul,  in Jane The Virgin characters frequently talked to each other in Spanish nearly as often in English and much of The Americans would proceed with characters talking in Russian to each other for whole sequences of the episodes.

The bigger difference was how the story of the Kwons was so different: almost every love story on TV before and in the majority of the cases since would take a very long time to get to marriage and almost as soon as the rings were on, they’d start having marital strife. The idea of a happy marriage was a foreign concept before the era of Peak TV began and it actually got worse going forward: as much as the quality of writing has improved in television, it invariably finds the stability of marriage incredibly dull and must introduce complications. Series like Parenthood and Friday Night Lights were aberrations and while the marriage of the Jennings eventually became a love story in The Americans it’s worth noting the marriage itself was founded on a lie to begin with. Lost flipped the script by having the Kwon marriage on the verge of breaking up before the series began – and having the conflicts that follow end up making the couple remember why they loved each other in the first place.

Even the rules of what we expected a married couple to be were constantly reversed and it is a credit to both the work of Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjun Kim that each season we kept learning new things that made us reverse what we had previously thought. At the start of the series Jin appeared to be the dominant, angry Korean husband and Sun was the submissive wife. And then as we learned the backstory of each character, we saw the reverse was true: Jin was a gentle man who had hated the person he became and Sun was the much stronger woman who might have been far less deserving of our sympathies than we thought at the start. It’s a credit to the writers that the more we learned about them this didn’t matter as much as whether the Kwons would still love each other after everything.

The Kwon’s love story was always determined by class, shame and being prisoner. Jin was a poor son of a fisherman who wanted nothing more to improve his station in life and become his own man. But he could never escape the reminder of his past. Sun was the daughter of a wealthy Korean businessman whose ambitions for her own life were constantly being squashed by the will of her parents. Somehow they found each other, fell in love and ended up getting married. But their happiness was always a captive of their pasts.

Not long after they married a woman who claimed to be Jin’s mother appeared and told Sun that unless she was given money she would reveal her son’s past and that this disgrace would be something Sun’s powerful – and criminal  - father would not forgive. To protect Sun she came to her father for the money but in doing so she put Jin in pawn to her father, something he never learned about.

Jin had agreed to work for Paik and for awhile that meant the legitimate side of his business. However, he would be ‘promoted’ and learn the consequences of what working for Sun's father was. He hated what it made him become but in an effort to protect Sun from hating her father – not knowing she already knew who the kind of man he was – he deflected his feelings onto her.

A gap grew between the two of them and they stopped speaking. Sun reached out to Jae Lee a man she had been once considered to marry to learn English with plans to escape to America. The relationship grew romantic and they planned to leave together – but Mr. Paik learned about it and destroyed it. Independent of each other, both Jin and Sun got on Oceanic 815 planning to make breaks from her father: the difference was Jin was planning to leave with Sun. But in the airport bathroom, Jin found out that Paik’s father knew of his escape plans and had no intention of letting it happen. “You are not free,” he was told. “You never have been and you never will be.”  When the plane crashed Jin was carrying it with him and it affected his behavior during the first days.

To protect her husband Sun hid her fluency in English from everybody except a select few. She and Jin were isolated during that period and because we only saw them talk to each other, it’s hard to know how things went. Both of them found ways to contribute even with the language barrier: Jin used his skills as a fisherman to provide food for the group; Sun grew a garden to help provide medical supplies.        Then to protect her husband Sun revealed her secret at the worst possible time – and for the rest of Season 1, they were estranged again.

At the end of Season 1, Jin went on the raft because he felt he had to save his wife and for the first time in a long time, they clearly started to talk each other. Sun didn’t know if she’d ever see her husband again – and when the raft was blown up by the Others that looked like a possibility – but in one of the few purely happy moments in the show’s history they were reunited in the middle of Season 2.

 Their relationship on the island slowly became one of the strongest bonds on the entire series, mainly because they were finally communicating. When Sun found out she was pregnant she was scared her chickens had come home to roost – Jin had been sterile before he came to the island. But Jin believed their pregnancy was a miracle. Sun didn’t know yet it was also a death sentence.

Sun and Jin were less prominent in the first third of Season 3 but once Juliet came back to the camp and told everybody pregnant women died on the island, they became central to the story in a dark way. When Sun learned the baby was Jin’s she was joyful even though she knew it also might mean a death sentence. When the freighter came to the island Jin and Sun knew more than anyone they had to get on to save the life of Sun and their child. Jin was willing to die at the hands at the Others if it meant Sun was rescued. The freighter was called…but then it looked like that rescue was not on the agenda. Again Jin made it clear getting Sun off the island was his priority and that his life meant less to him.

The two of them got to the freighter only to find it had been loaded with C4. In what was the most heartbreaking moment of the entire series to that point, the freighter blew up with Jin still on it and Sun let out a scream Lost fans never stopped hearing. That Jin was later found to have survived the explosion was meaningless because by that time, we’d seen what it did to Sun.

After becoming part of the Oceanic 6 Sun returned to Seoul and gave birth to Ji Yeon. The divide was the most geographical of the group and the most deliberate: with the exception of Hurley coming after Ji Yeon was born, there’s no evidence she even spoke to any of the rest for the next three years. Instead, she made it clear whose daughter she was buying out her father’s company from under him,  tracking down Widmore on his own turf and making it clear she wanted to kill Ben Linus.

It was deeply upsetting watching Yunjun Kim during the first half of Season 5. The loving, tender woman we’d seen throughout the previous four seasons seemed gone forever. In her place was a cold, ruthless manipulator, working to maneuver Kate into a position that she could find and kill Ben. Then she tracked him down and put a gun to his head – only for him to tell her Jin was alive and show her his wedding ring as proof.

Ben used this as a chip to get Sun where he wanted her. What he had no way of knowing was that when Jin had given Locke his wedding ring, he had done so in order to make sure Sun never returned to the island. He couldn’t comprehend why Locke wanted to bring everyone back: even if the flashes hadn’t been happening, as long as Sun was pregnant (which she was at the time of them) the island was a death sentence. As much as Jin wanted to see his wife again, he yet again put his wishes aside for her safety.

When the Oceanics got on Ajira 316 and the plane made it to the island, Sun was the only survivor who didn’t go back to 1977 to learn that her husband was still alive. This was probably a necessity for the show, but it did much to diminish both characters importance to the rest of Season 5: aside from knowing English, Jin was more of a bystander in all the action in Dharmaville and Sun spent much of the present, hoping to find someone who would tell her how to get back to her husband. In Sun’s case, she was being used as a pawn by the Man In Black more than anything but the fact that she now seemed more useless than she was when we didn’t think she spoke English didn’t do her any favors.

And sadly this has continued throughout Season 6 for both of them. We’ve been told that a Kwon is a candidate but the fact that no one – not even Ilana – knows which Kwon – has made them less significant then the ones who are still alive. That said, it’s worth noting that of all the remaining characters Sun’s reaction to this is the most human: she doesn’t give a damn about destiny or what all of this truly means, all she wants is to find her husband and go back home. Jin’s position is more precarious – he’s in the hands of UnLocke and he knows how dangerous his influence can be – but his basic attitude towards the endgame is the same: whatever grand game Jacob and the Man in Black have been playing for who knows how long is irrelevant, all he wants is to get back to his family.

Much of my problems with Season 6 was in large part because of my devotion to the Sun-Jin love story and while I’ve come to an accord about how it played out, it doesn’t change the fact that in the final season the writers continued to blunder throughout the story. It was one thing for the two of them to be kept apart by time travel but once the bomb was dropped, it really seems like the writers kept coming up with increasingly implausible reasons to keep them apart. First the survivors Sun was traveling with starting going to the Temple just after Jin had left to go look for Sun. This led to Jin getting trapped by Claire and now he’s with Locke’s group of survivors. Then Sun and everybody went back to the beach and Jin left to go looking for her – only to be tranquilized by Widmore just as he was about to head there. Now he’s in Widmore’s camp (and to be clear, Widmore himself is irked by the fact of his followers actions) where he’ll be for the rest of the season.

Meanwhile Sun, who is understandably frustrated by everything that’s happening, ends up being approached by UnLocke. She runs away in terror and hits her head – and ends up being only able to speak Korean in a plot point so implausible even the writers (through Miles) seem to admit how ludicrous. When Richard returns and tells them that in order to save the world they have to destroy the plane, Sun finally gets to express her understandable fury and outrage at everything she’s been through since she came back to the island – and the writers don’t even give her the dignity of letting her express it in English. The viewer must be feeling the same frustration with the writers not just for this but for what they’ve been doing to Sun the last season and a half.

Thankfully this is mostly made up for in the flash-sideways world. (There are numerous flaws but as they don’t have to do with Sun and Jin, I’ll save them for the end of the article.) The writers seem to be signifying that the love story between the two was damaged by the circumstances of their marriage, as in this universe the two are clearly not married, but rather enjoying what they believe is a clandestine affair. It also illustrates the true nature of the power dynamic in the hysterical scene in the hotel room where Sun turns around the iconic moment of Jin telling her to button her blouse and has her use it as a way to seduce the quivering Jin. We’ve known in a sense Jin was always powerless before Sun; this seen just ,makes it clear.

But just as in the real world, neither could keep any of their secrets from Sun’s father. As in the real world Sun came with Jin planning to run away together and get out of the grip of their father. She had no idea the whole reason of this trip was because Mr. Paik knew about it and planned to have Jin killed. That the purpose of his trip was to give the very money to pay for his murder shows the cruelty of Sun’s father in a way we’ve never saw him overtly show for Jin in the real world; that he makes it clear his daughter was never going to have her own freedom as a result of it shows a malice towards her we never saw at all.

In the restaurant we see the sequence from Sayid’s flash in Sundown from Jin’s perspective (the first direct link between two flash-sideways so far). That Sayid shows no compassion for a man trapped in a freezer of a restaurant held by mobsters who very likely would have killed him tells us something about Sayid in this universe – and its genuinely unsettling. Perhaps it makes sense that was causes Sayid to react is when Jin shouts out “Free!”

Because not only is this one of the few English words he knows, it speaks for every character we’ve met on Lost during its run. Everyone who was on the plane was trapped in a world of misery when it crashed and they’d been a prisoner in that life so long that when they were granted freedom from it, all of them spent the next three seasons trying desperately to get back to that life. Kate was the most obvious example of this: the island was the one place in the world she didn’t have to run anymore but almost from the moment of the crash, she did everything to get back to civilization – and a new pair of handcuffs. Locke was the only one who realized he’d been free – in his case, from paralysis – but he chose to swear his loyalty to the island, which made him a prisoner of a different sort.

All of the Others has spent their lives in service of Jacob and while they don’t consider it a prison, they have subverted their free will. Ilana is one of the most devoted servants of Jacob and she has clearly subverted her own freedom to the absolute certainty of his purpose. In a sense her character is a representation of someone who is so certain in Jacob’s righteousness that no matter what she sees or hears, she is convinced it will work out because Jacob told her it would.  Richard told everyone that they were dead and in hell and despite that Ilana remained certain he would come back. When Hurley tells her he can find Richard she remains utterly calm in the face of everyone’s incredulity – Sun is just the most direct in her frustration. Locke was wrong to think that Ilana was Jacob’s bodyguard, but he was right in the sense that she was not free. The Man in Black has made it clear – both in Locke’s form and his own – that he is being held prisoner on the island and while we don’t trust anything else out of his mouth, his desire to leave the island is the most genuine thing about him.

And as we can see everyone else is dealing with their own forms of bondage. Sayid tells UnLocke in this episode that he doesn’t feel anything; that his resurrection has drained him of everything that made him a human being. Claire is trying to deal with the fact that even if she gets back to civilization the one thing she wanted  - Aaron – won’t recognize her and she may not be able to love him anymore. UnLocke doesn’t exactly offer the most encouraging words to either of his disciples when they express these problems. And in what was for me the biggest blow of all in this episode, we find out that despite everything he tried to do Desmond has ended up a prisoner again, of both the island and Widmore, the two things he spent his entire life trying to get away from.

But the episode also demonstrates that love might be the kind of thing that can cause us to break the chains that bind us. The Sun-Jin love story has always stood apart from all the other characters arcs on this island because unlike all the other survivors, they had each other when the plane crash and it has helped them through so many horrible times. When Jin finally gets to see the pictures of his daughter and his wife his expression is absolutely some of the best acting Daniel Dae Kim has done in this series. For the first time in three years he gets a sign of hope, and that the sacrifices he made were not for nothing. On a show where hope is such a hard thing to come by, it’s one of those moving moments.

And for all the flaws I have with the storyline of Widmore, particularly when it comes to the final season, there are scenes throughout it that almost make it word. Earlier in this episode we see Widmore as we’ve always known him, arrogant in the face of UnLocke, lying to his face about having Jin, and admonishing his inferiors for their mistakes (although to be fair, Zoe really deserves it) But then for the first time in the entire run of the series he does something genuinely compassionate: given Jin the camera and showing him pictures of his daughter, truly happy and his wife being a good mother.

Then he mentions his daughter and for the first time we hear something very close to regret. Widmore has spent more than half a century in service to the island and while the show has made it clear that he is a ruthless bastard on every occasion just like with so many of the characters we’ve initially seen as villains, we get a sense that there’s more to it than that. In Season 5, it was clear he cared about his daughter’s wellbeing in more than an abstract way; now for the first time we see that he really does realize how his service to the island has cost him the love of the one person he cares about. It might be stretching believability that he’s come back for saving the world, but to protect his daughter from dying – that we can believe.

In what will be his final major scene on the show, we even see a somewhat sentimental side of Martin Kearny of all people. It doesn’t quite track with what we see in Sayid’s flash but maybe there’s a part of him that does regret what he’s doing. He knows he’s going to have to kill Jin, but there’s a sorrow to it that seems genuine when he tells him: “The heart wants what the heart wants.” This has been one of the driving forces of Lost for much of its run, and the fact that its most psychopathic character is delivering that message doesn’t deny its power.

It's here we actually get the clearest difference between Jack’s new belief in destiny and Locke’s. Jack thinks that it means something that their names were written on the lighthouse wheel but he also knows – all too painfully – that love should matter more. And in an action that mirrors Locke’s promise not to bring Sun back to the island, Jack promises to help Jin and Sun get off it.

Of course Sun has come back to the island despite that. And if Desmond’s presence is any indication, love may not be enough if the island isn’t done with you.

 

IF YOU BELIEVE THE ENDING: This is complicated but bear with me. It actually makes more sense that Keamy and Omar are here in Sun and Jin’s flash. In the original universe, it was the actions of Keamy – well, his being killed – that led to the freighter being blown up and Sun believing Jin was dead the past three years. That Mr. Paik knows them actually makes sense in either universe, given what we know about Paik, these are the kind of people he’d do business with and considering that in the real world Charles Widmore was a business associate of his, he could have just as easily known them there.

But Mikhail? I know that after the hand grenade went off in his hand back in Through the Looking Glass most viewers were convinced he wasn’t actually dead. (They clearly never heard the extras on the DVD for Season 3.) But his being in this world makes no sense other than fan service. How does a soldier from Russia end up in LA thirteen years later as a mobster? And if the only reason he’s here is to translate Jin and Sun to Keamy and everyone else, why not use Naomi instead? I know the flash-sideways isn’t supposed to follow logic (does anything on Lost?) but in the real world Naomi actually knew Keamy and Omar and was clearly involved in the same unsavory activities they were. And considering she also knew every language, that same plot device would have made more sense. Naomi is one of the few dead characters over the years who makes no appearance in the flash-sideways and if you’re going to use an Easter egg, use this one. Honestly the only purpose Mikhail seems to serve is to get his eye shot out in this world, which is nice except it does nothing to explain how he lost in the real one.