Lost Rewatch on VHS: The Candidate

 

VHS NOTES: We see ads for what will be the final season of Oprah Winfrey’s legendary talk show. We also see trailers for the most recent Resident Evil film and the brilliant Ben Affleck Boston heist film The Town which would earn an Oscar nomination for Jeremy Renner.

 

I must now make a personal admission. I believe my initial visceral reaction to the series finale as well as the final season of Lost was prejudiced by the immense agony I underwent during the final minutes of this episode.

That’s hardly the most unreasonable response. I’ve rewatched Lost half a dozen times since the series ended in 2010 and no matter how many times I do the last fifteen minutes of this episode always hits you like a kick in the teeth, With each subsequent rewatch I’ve come to accept a bitter truth. There’s an argument that everything we’ve watched in the final season of Lost – perhaps to this point in the entire series –  essentially led up to the long sequence in the submarine, where all of the remaining candidates are trapped in an enclosed space with a ticking bomb and no possible escape.

It's worth remembering that, even in 2010, the average viewer wasn’t used to this kind of character death on TV. The Sopranos had been measuring out the deaths of regulars to little more than one or two a season over its run and not until it’s final season did the body count start truly getting heavy. OZ had been averaging such a high body count over its run that by the time Augustus Hill, the narrator of the series, was killed before the final season began, the viewer shrugged it off. Six Feet Under’s series finale had been the natural conclusion of its five year run and was a perfect note, and for all the foot soldiers that were part of The Wire and Deadwood, very few regulars died during the course of it.

Buffy killed off many recurring characters but no series regulars until its series finale. By the final season of 24 you were used to being introduced to regulars who didn’t survive the day and no one was prepared for Breaking Bad, much less Game of Thrones by the end of the 2000s. In short, the idea of a final season of a series having the highest possible body count was unheard of by the time the final season of Lost aired.

I should mention that in 2010 I was still having a very difficult time adjusting to when any TV series would kill off characters I was attached to. It had been a body blow to me when Rita Bennett had ended up the final victim of Trinity at the end of 2009 and it took most of Season 5 of Dexter for me to recover. (The series never truly did. I had taken the loss of Lem in Season 5 of The Shield very hard but since it seemed the natural progression of the series I stuck with it. Other deaths had been dealbreakers with me for other shows. Adriana’s death in Season 5 of The Sopranos had been enough for me to make a break with the series before the final season. And George’s shocking death at the end of Season 5 caused an irrevocable break between me and Grey’s Anatomy – and essentially everything Shonda Rhimes did from that point forward. After the series finale of Lost ended and the deaths of series regulars became something to be expected rather than a shock I eventually developed a harder skin, which is a necessity to get through any series in Peak TV.

Even after six seasons of watching Lost it had always been something of a mixed bag with me as to which deaths on the series affected me more. Boone’s had been shocking because it was the kind of death that the viewer wasn’t used to for series television. Most of the deaths in Season 2 didn’t have the same affect on me because at the time I thought all had been poorly planned out. (Later evidence suggests I might have been right on that.) Eko’s death hit me the hardest in Season 3, Nikki and Paolo seemed like a waste of time and Charlie’s was a huge blow. With Michael, it was hard to measure the affect because it had seemed like a waste to bring him back just to kill him. Locke’s death didn’t seem like one we had to accept because of his resurrection (and in a sense Season 6 still doesn’t seem to have done so).

But from that point on the deaths started seeming more personal because either the characters were fan favorites or because they’d been around awhile. Dan’s death cut us particularly hard because we’d just learned who he was and Juliet’s may have been the most gutting for me since Eko died because I had always been a huge fan of hers. In hindsight the writers actually spent much of Season 6 luring the viewer into a sense of complacency the closer we got to the end of the series. Ilana had blown up just two episodes ago  but because her character had seemed like a wasted opportunity few of us felt it.

And it’s worth noting that the pattern of Lost should have told us that we are going to see a heavy body count. In the final episodes of Season 3, not only did we see Charlie die but twelve Others were killed off, including Tom and Mikhail. At the end of Season 4 most of the people on the freighter were dying left and right, in the season finale the mercenaries were all killed off and in the season finale the freighter exploded and Michael and Jin (supposedly) were killed. In Season 5 we saw most of the Dharma Initiative security we’d gotten to know over the period die in the Incident, Juliet had fallen down a pit and Jacob was killed. The viewer should have been expecting that we were going to get a bloodbath if only that’s how we knew the show worked by now.

If nothing else, logic should have told us that Lost was not going to end with Sawyer’s plan to take the sub by force. Not only does nothing ever go as planned on this show but it would have been fake. Would we have liked to see an ending where all of the candidates essentially sail off into the sunset while UnLocke shakes his fist and says: “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling candidates”? That Claire and Kate would go home to Aaron and Jin and Sun would go back to Ji Yeon? That we’d end on another flashforward with Jack and Kate sitting on a front porch telling their grandchildren about the island where they first met? It would have been a happy ending to be sure, but it would have been untrue to the show.

There’s also the fact that there are still three episodes and four hours of the show to go. And much as we’d like the characters we love to get away on the sub, we also know they’re not all there. Do we really want to leave Claire to the mercy of UnLocke for the rest of her life? Where are Richard, Ben and Miles (we haven’t seen then since they left for the barracks?) Widmore’s crew has just been slaughtered (again) but he’s still alive, so that wouldn’t be resolve. Desmond’s fate can’t just be to stay in a well. And as we’re reminded in the flash-sideways, we still need to find out what happened to Rose and Bernard on the island.

No the show had to end on the island. And even if the title of the episode wasn’t a giveaway, in our heart we know how this has to play out. One of the five remaining candidates has to agree to be the next Jacob. What that means and why they have to has yet to be revealed but we’ve spent this season being told its important so someone has to take the role on. And UnLocke pretty much implied in The Substitute that the only way to get off this list was to die. He wasn’t being entirely truthful but based on what we saw on the wall of the cave and the lighthouse coordinates, that has pretty much been how it has played out for centuries and it was going to play out this way too.

So in our heads and in our hearts we knew there was going to be some more death of people we loved in the last few episodes. That doesn’t mean we were prepared for how it happened.

In Finding Lost Nikki Stafford writes that this episode is about trust. We don’t exactly need to be told this: the word is mentioned several times, usually by Jack, Locke or Sawyer. I have to tell you another reason I had a problem with the ending may have been I couldn’t believe these characters were truly bonded by their experience because the one thing they clearly didn’t do during the series run was trust each other. Not about the secrets they found on the island, not about their own backstories. They were always divided throughout the show and one of the major divisions came over their lack of trust. It’s one of the reasons so many people on this show were bad leaders; they always trusted the wrong people or the wrong things.

I’ve now come to see that when it comes to the survivors that wasn’t exactly there faults. As we saw in their backstories over the first three seasons, whenever the survivors gave their trust to anybody – especially the people who should have cared about them the most – that trust was violated. This caused many of them to not trust themselves and it sickened the relationships within their own lives and they became more and more isolated throughout it. Everyone was broken before they came to the island and it’s never clear whether that was because of Jacob’s influence or why he chose them in the first place.

This got worse as the series continued. When the Others made their arrival, they could direct their distrust to them as the enemy. Ben Linus was never trustworthy, not even to his own people so they didn’t really trust each other either. We’ve seen in the island bloops that this mistrust goes back decades and that the people who have been in charge before – specifically Widmore and Eloise Hawking – didn’t trust anybody either. Richard served as the advisor to them but he answered to Jacob. Everybody trusted him without having seen him and they have followed him blindly. We’ve seen how that turned out for everybody since then. On the island trusting blindly is just as likely to get you killed as now trusting anybody.

When the Oceanic 6 got off the island Jack convinced all of them to lie about where they’d been since the crash. All of them were reluctant to do so but they did because they were in shock and they trusted Jack. The bond they formed fell apart quickly because the lie rotted that trust. Eventually five of them got on Ajira 316 not because any of them trusted Jack anymore but for their own reasons (except for Sayid who was tricked). While they were gone Sawyer managed to take charge of a group of survivors and get them to trust him to keep them alive on the island. That worked fine for three years – and then the moment the Oceanic resurfaced in Dharmaville the clashes in personality made trust impossible very quickly.

No one trusts the Man In Black and at the end of the last episode they all tried to get away from him to leave the island. James thought he could fool Widmore but Widmore had been doing this longer than him. Widmore, of course, has never been particularly trustworthy and it doesn’t seem like he’s thought things particularly well. His idea of protection for the remaining candidates is to stick them into the same rusty cages that Sawyer and Kate spent three years in behind a sonic fence and hope nothing went wrong. Setting everything else aside Kate was able to break out of those cages the first time, this wasn’t going to work well anyway.

His ’back-up’ plan seems to have been the wire the Ajira plane with C-4 to stop the smoke monster from trying to leave on it. Yeah, that was really bright. What was to stop everybody you were trying to protect from getting on the plane without UnLocke and blowing it up anyway? Honestly all of Widmore’s goons deserve to get killed for the simple fact they were dumb enough to come to work for this guy anyway. If we’ve learned anything over five seasons it’s that Widmore is not trustworthy.

In the flash-sideways after Jack performs surgery on Locke he has an opportunity to ‘fix’ Locke. Locke seemed reluctant to do when they first met, but now given an opportunity he’s repulsed by the idea. We don’t understand why until Jack tracks down Anthony Cooper (no I don’t think this is a flaw in the ending; I’ll get to that at the end) and he finally understand why Locke is doing so.

In a mirror version of the real world Locke was paralyzed in a plane crash. (This may also be an inadvertent mirror of the Pilot; Jack said he took flying lessons.) In the real world, Locke regained the ability to walk because of a plane crash. In the real world, his father caused his paralysis. In the mirror world, Locke caused a worse fate on his father. Now the viewer may not feel guilt about Cooper’s fate but its telling that Locke does. As we saw over and over Locke trusted his father no matter how many times it was clear he shouldn’t: there was always a part of him who wanted his father’s love no matter how obvious it was it didn’t exist. Locke couldn’t let go of his father’s behavior in the real world; he can’t let go of the guilt he has over his father’s in this one.

Jack is dealing with it in a similar fashion. He’s still reeling from his father’s death and the fact that he now has a sister. It’s clear in this world that Claire never met Christian in real life, which may be a subtle sign her life in Australia is better than it was in reality. After all, the only reason Christian ever visited her was because her mother was in a coma and he came to try and convince Claire to take Carolo off life support. (Which was clearly bad advice Christian.)

But it’s also clear Christian was trying a little harder to make up for it in death than he was in life. Claire was mentioned in his will, which wasn’t what happened in real life and he gives her a music box where the tune ‘Catch A Falling Star’ is played which we know he sang to her as a child. (The song doesn’t mean as much to her here as it does in the real world; I’m not sure what that means.) Perhaps that’s the real reason Jack makes an outreach to Claire the way he never got a chance to in the world. He knows she’s a link to his father and he needs to understand his family. As the episode ends Claire is capable of trusting Jack but Locke still isn’t. That’s actually fitting given how this episode ends.

In the final minutes of Ab Aeterno the Man In Black told Jacob in no uncertain terms that he intended to kill the Candidates because they seem to be the only thing preventing him from leave the island. Yet throughout Season 6 he’s had multiple opportunities to kill the candidates, individually and as a group, and he never has. He tells Jack that he could do it and there’s nothing he could do to stop him and given everything we’ve seen – and in this episode we get reminded of it very visually  - it’s hard to argue with him. So the question is why hasn’t he?

And now Jack seems to have realized why, though he doesn’t yet know the how. For whatever reason the Man in Black, whether as a smoke monster or corporeal, can’t kill the candidates. Perhaps Jacob’s touch is protection against that. But it hasn’t been any protection from fate intervening. We’ve seen names of countless survivors on the wall whose names were crossed off, and all of them died at the hands of either the Others, random chance, or as Jack puts it, killing each other. We can’t help but be reminded of the Man In Black’s cryptic message when we first met him: “They come. They fight. They corrupt. They destroy.” And that’s exactly what the survivors and really everyone on the island has done not just during the series but doubtless over the centuries. They have been eliminating each other with a kind of ruthless efficiency and that maybe the reason Jacob finally needed everybody in the last season to try and protect the remaining candidates. (Though of course he withheld why and how from each of them.) They were down to six at the end of Season 5 (well, five really) and now the Man in Black wants to get the last five in one blow.

And in order to do this he operates on their distrust of him. He knows Sawyer will take any opportunity to get off the island with his friends and to keep him off it. He also knows if Jack stays behind, then his plan is scotched so he has to get everybody to work together to take the sub but be prepared to work against him. Perhaps he’s hoping that when they try to take the sub some of the candidates will be killed in the attack but instead one of them shoots Kate.

(This too is a kind of misdirection. When Kate is shot we are expecting her to be the one to be killed given her condition – and considering her problems with the fans, some might have mourned her loss less than the people who actually die in this episode.)

The plan works perfectly from the survivors perspective: indeed Kate being shot helps more then he could not. Jack is a doctor above all else and he is not going to leave the woman he loves to die on the sub if he can help it. So he brings her on the sub, tends to her and Sawyer goes back to get Claire, he closes the opening when UnLocke charges it. This too was deliberate: Locke needed the sub to leave.

So when they find a time bomb wired with the C-4 on the sub, with no way to get out they are faced with two options: trust Jack that nothing will happen and risk them all dying when the bomb ticks down to zero or try to defuse the bomb and risk it blowing up doing exactly what UnLocke wants. And even if they were a more trustworthy bunch – hard to believe considering everything they’ve already been through -  it’s hard to blame them for giving into their fears. Everyone’s seen enough movies to know if a bomb has a timer, nothing good happens when it reaches zero. To go against that fear after the last six seasons would be even harder.

So Sawyer gives in – and the results are devastating. In the space of less than five minutes three cast members that have been part of the series since the pilot are killed. But even in their deaths the writers of Lost manage to write a fate for all three which is true to the characters even as it absolutely eviscerating to the viewer.

Sayid Jarrah has been one of the most tragic characters in the history of Lost and his arc during the final season has been devastating. Sayid has been walking zombie like ever since his resurrection at the start of Season 6 and it didn’t seem like any part of him was left. We see a hint of it when he (as we now know) lies to Locke about Desmond and again when he realizes the danger they’re all in. And when he sees the bomb begin to tick down, he does something he couldn’t manage to do the last time and face his fate. He calmly tells Jack where Desmond is and what they need to do, and then he grabs the bomb and runs off to his death. There might be a certain cliché by having the former Iraqi soldier become a suicide bomber, but in Sayid’s case this is redemptive – he is sacrificing himself to save the lives of those around them, not kill them. For a character who spent so much of his life on and off the island torturing and killing without mercy and who has spent the last season killing with total detachment, this may have been the only way he could redeem himself.

The more devastating losses, of course, are Jin and Sun because they only were reunited less than twelve hours ago after being apart for three years. This was the hardest blow of all to me because it did seem like the writers had toyed with us through all of Season 6. They seemed to be doing everything in their power to make sure that even though they were now in the same time period, they would never be in the same place. They finally get together and promise that they will never be apart. (That should have been a bad sign right there.) Then just as they get on the sub and plan to go home, the bomb traps Sun under rubble and there is no time for Jack and the rest to free Sun. When Jin stays behind, he knows he is going to die with her. We all do and it hurts like hell because the fan has been devoted to this love story since the series began and to see it end like this…well, it’s still painful.

But how else could it have ended? It hurts to write these words, but its true. Don’t get me wrong; it would have been great if this love story could end happily but we’ve watched Lost for six seasons, have any of them ended happily? There’s still hope for Desmond and Penny, but that involves whether Desmond survives the next few episodes, a big if. Jack and Kate’s love story self-destructed when they were off the island and Jack was willing to blow the island up a few days ago rather than have to live with having lost her. Every other love story to this point has ended with one or both parts of the couple losing that person and being left to deal with the grief.

So yes Jin could have saved himself and gone back to raise Ji Yeon alone. But would that truly have been any happier than the alternative? The Kwons love has endured so much over the last six years and its overcome so many obstacles. They’ve lost each other so many times and have always come back to each other. Was it so wrong for the two of them, having found each other after three years apart, want to at least end their love story on their own terms? We’ve spent so much of the show seeing that the characters have never had any real choice in their lives. Is it so wrong to want them to have free will over the last choice either of them will get to make? That’s exactly what Sayid did just a few minutes ago and that was unselfish. How is less so?

So Sun and Jin stay together for the last moments of their lives. They get to say those three greatest words to each other: “I love you.” They hold on to each other until the sub sinks, only death parting them. It wrenches your heart from your chest – and you do feel exactly like everyone else on the beach, like you want to cry your eyes out and will never be whole again. But so many of the greatest  love stories end in tragedy. Why should we have expected the greatest one of Lost be any different?

 

IF YOU BELIEVE THE ENDING: Actually I don’t have as many problems with this as you might think. Bernard’s presence actually makes sense if you consider that both he and Rose seem far more aware of what’s happening around them then the other survivors do. And Anthony Cooper being locked in to himself, unable to move or talk is actually the perfect fate for him given everything he did during his life. For the man who ruined lives with every word out of his mouth, he deserved to be completely at the mercy of others, aware of what they’re saying but unable to react. Now the fact that Locke loves him unconditionally – well, maybe he never got to know him in this world. That does seem to be the only way it’s possible.