Lost Rewatch On VHS: The Last Recruit

 

VHS NOTES: We see ads for The Losers, the flawed but occasionally brilliant graphic novel adaptation starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Idris Elba and the horrible Ridley Scott adaptation of Robin Hood with Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett. As the season finales draw near, we also see end of season ads for Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Desperate Housewives and a preview for Happy Town.

 

The more I have watched and rewatched Lost over the years, the more I think I know what it’s really about. All of the larger themes, all of the characters, all of the stories come down to two basic concepts: do you lead or do you follow?

The title itself suggests as much. Lindelof and Cuse told us while the series was still on the air that all of the characters were not just physically lost but emotionally so. And in either case once you realize that you have two choice. You can either wait for someone to tell you what you’re next steps are – in other words, you can follow – or you can take it upon yourself to figure out how to find a way through -  or lead.

Once we understand that the conflicts at the center of the major stories on the series make more sense. This is true of every character and I’ll briefly touch on it here but its always been true of Jack and Locke. One of the many ironies of these two men who were at loggerheads on everything over the series was how alike they were and that’s true of a fundamental concept: neither of them were suited for leadership but neither could follow.

Recall their first major conversation in White Rabbit where Jack is following what he thinks is the ghost of his father into the jungle (we now know what that is) Jack is convinced that he’s being led by something impossible and Locke famously tells him: “What if it is?” When Jack says it isn’t, Locke replies: “Even if it is, let’s say that it’s not.”

Locke is urging Jack the only way he can become a leader is if he follows this path to its end.  The irony isn’t that Jack nearly died doing so but he had gotten lost in the first place. Once Jack finds his father’s coffin in the caves he smashes it, perhaps thinking that symbolically it will rid him of his baggage. (It didn’t, obviously.) After that Jack made his famous speech which ended: “live together, die alone.” This made him the official leader of the group for the rest of the time he was on the island.

But while Jack acted as the leader, he lacked the skills he needed to survive in the wild. Every time he went on a trip into the jungle, he was supposedly the leader but he was always relying on someone else to guide him: Locke, then Kate when they chased Ethan, Rousseau when they went to the Black Rock and then to the radio tower, Michael when they went to save Walt, the sat phones when they went into the jungle. Jack was always in charge but he was always at the mercy of someone else to find where he was going and you get the feeling that was at the heart of so much of his belligerence. Even when he was leading, he was following.

The irony of Locke being the one to tell Jack to lead is because he never followed him. Even in the early seasons when they were more in tune, Locke knew he had the advantage of being a hunter and Jack never liked that. Even the fact that he believed in destiny is somewhat ironic when we consider his catchphrase: “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”  Locke believed he was on a path, that everything was happening for a reason. But his personality was such that as much as he believed in following a path, he personally rejected the idea of not being able to make his own way. Locke wasn’t suited to lead others because he was following the island but because he couldn’t understand why he was doing it; he was constantly angry at having to make these choices.

Though much of the series was centered on these two styles of leadership, there have been constant examples of other characters who might have been better suited to it. Sayid was able to take steps towards leadership even before Jack was, and there’s an argument his history in the military would have provided him with a better set of skills to survive then a doctor with no supplies. Sawyer famously told Jack about their contrasting styles of leadership: Sawyer thought things through and Jack reacted. It’s just as true for Sayid: he was always more pragmatic and clear-headed than Jack during their time on the island, never letting emotion cloud his judgment, always compartmentalizing the irrational to get them through the present crisis. But because of the prejudices that still existed on the island as much as the real world, people chose to follow Jack. Sayid’s training as a soldier made him more suited to be the ideal follower.

Kate, like Locke, had many of the same abilities to survive in the wild and was probably as qualified to lead. But just as racism caused people to pick Jack over Sayid, sexism caused everyone to pick any of the men over Kate. That suited Kate just fine, I should mention, and she was a good follower – literally. When it came to following orders, particularly from Jack, she never listened and ended up following him into the jungle. This ended up costing the survivors and Jack more then we could count. That sexism, I should add, was also an external issue. When Kate started challenging the leaders in the 1970s – such as when she decided to save a thirteen year old Ben after Sayid had shot him  and told Jack that his plan to drop an atomic bomb in a pocket of electromagnetism was crazy -  the fanbase of Lost got angry because she wasn’t following these men and letting them do these horrible things.

Sawyer was the odd man out on the island for much of the run of the series, never following Jack, always being unpleasant. There’s an argument much of it was a front: when the chips were down Sawyer was willing to follow in order to save other people’s lives or do what he could to help people. When the island started blooping through time, Sawyer took charge in a way he never had before and became a genuine leader in the Dharma Initiative. But by the time the Oceanics came back, he was basically using his leadership in order to follow the Dharma dream even though it ended in a pit of bodies.

There’s an argument from the start that Hurley always had the skills to be the leader he is as we approach the end: while he might not have been the smartest when it came to education, he had a good head on his shoulders and he always wanted to help people. Even though he was scared most of the time, he was always willing to follow Jack and his friends through the dangerous jungle because he wanted to help them and he thought if he was funny, they wouldn’t be scared. In short because Hurley was always a good follower – always putting everyone else’s wellbeing ahead of his own – he was the best suited for leadership, which is where he finally is.

The rest of the survivors who made it this far have never been so much group leaders but following for their loved ones. Claire followed everyone for the first three seasons because she was pregnant and because she was a mother. Once she lost Aaron, she lost her way and has not had anyone to follow all this time. Sun and Jin have always needed each other, more so since they came on the island. Jin once said: “Where Sun goes, I go” and that’s been true throughout the series. Sun has gotten on a plane and risked not seeing her daughter because she wants to find Jin. Jin has been following Sawyer, then Jack because he wants to find his wife.

This conflict has applied in a sense to Ben Linus as well. He has been a leader on the island for years but he was just as much a follower. Like everyone else on the island before the crash Ben has been leading in Jacob’s name but he has been following a man he never saw. Everyone we’ve met seems to have been following Jacob for years – and in Richard’s case that’s a very long time – but they never knew what his plan was and most never even saw him. Ben was manipulated by the Man in Black to killing Jacob but his genuine frustration at having to follow him for thirty years without ever meeting him was the most real thing about him to that point.

Ben has been Widmore’s nemesis for nearly thirty years and Widmore has been a leader for nearly as long. Widmore, like Locke, was not a good leader because he was never a good follower. Based on what the writers told us Widmore spent decades on the island and he was never a good follower from the time he was a young man to the point he was forced into exile by Ben. It would seem that he has amassed all his money so he would have the power that people would follow him willingly and in Season 3 he got a freighter to go to the island with the sole purpose of getting Ben off the island so he could have it again. Because he was a bad leader he gave everyone who got on the freighter conflicting information, it was never clear who was in charge and perhaps its not a huge shock that as a result almost everyone on it ended up dead. Now Widmore’s led another group of people to the island and while he seems to have realized he had to come himself this time to give the orders, his followers are ju6t as incompetent and idiotic as before. This doesn’t say much for Widmore’s leadership skills.

Which brings us to Jacob and the Man in Black. We learn about Jacob entirely through flashbacks and in Ab Aeterno it’s clear that while he may be the god of the island his leadership style has been that of the Old Testament type. Jacob commands absolute loyalty but its clear that its basically for a larger purpose. He convinced Richard that he had a plan, a plan which he would explain at a certain time but he never did. Ilana, who was his most loyal follower, came to the island based on her loyalty to Jacob who told her Richard would know what to do and Jacob hadn’t told him anything. As Richard made clear: “Jacob never tells us what to do!” And that must be extremely frustrating for all the people who have spent all this time following him.

The Man In Black, in Locke’s form, told the Others at the start of Season 6: “I’m very disappointed. In all of you.”  It’s possible, given his contempt for Jacob, that he’s upset that they have followed a man blindly for so long without question. Throughout Season 6, he’s been taking on the marker of leadership to all those left behind, offering all of these lost souls  - including those who are still around the crash – a chance to leave the island. In a way he’s offering them a chance to be found. None of the people who are following him trust him but based on what they have since learned – that Jacob has been guiding them all their lives, forcing them to follow him without them knowing it, and leading them to the island – they are reluctantly following him. Many of them have wanted someone to tell them what to do and, ironically using the form of a man who didn’t want to be told what he couldn’t do, they are now altogether again.

When Jack asks The Man In Black why he’s in Locke’s form, the Man In Black is as dismissive at the start of the season of Locke: “Because he was stupid enough to believe he was brought here for a reason, because he pursued that belief until it got him killed, and because you were nice enough to bring back his body in a wooden box.” He is similarly dismissive about Locke being the only person who never wanted to leave the island: “John Locke was not a believer. He was a sucker.”

The Man In Black has never been trustworthy in anything, and its safe to say he’s lying about why he needed everybody together to leave the island. But the thing is, everything he says about Locke is absolutely true. Yes Locke was right about the island bringing them there for a reason and he did pursue that belief until it got him killed – in fact, he thought his death was the only way he could save everybody and all it has done is put everybody on the island in more danger than they’ve ever been. And Locke was both a believer and a sucker: Ben Linus proved it over and over and he certainly was manipulated by the Man In Black. Locke spent his entire time following the island with no idea as to why and for all intents and purposes, he was just a pawn all his life. The Man in Black isn’t entirely wrong to treat Locke with such scorn; the fact that he was right about so many things doesn’t discount the fact that most of the time he did everything the wrong way.

Now Jack, face to face with the man he spent his entire life opposed to and who has finally come to belief Locke was right about the island, isn’t sure what to do next. But it’s clear something has changed about him. A cynic could argue that when Jack decides near the end of the episode to stay on the island, he’s doing so because UnLocke wants to leave so badly: as we all know Jack and Locke never agreed on anything when they were alive. But it’s worth noting that when Jack makes the decision to stay, he’s staring out at the water the way that Locke did so frequently, the way Jacob said you sometimes had do. He knows that there has to be more than one reason why UnLocke wants them all to leave so badly and until he figures out what that reason is, he thinks the best thing he can do is stay.

However, you can’t exactly blame Sawyer for telling Jack to get the hell of his boat. Sawyer’s been through as much of a ringer in the last two weeks that Jack has been in the last three years. He knows that UnLocke can’t be trusted and he clearly doesn’t trust Widmore either. He’s fine with leaving the island, he just wants to go with his friends. Sawyer is clearly taking more of the live together, die alone approach at this point and Jack’s position – to go back into danger – is hardly the most logical one.

That doesn’t mean he’s not reacting instead of thinking things through. When he tells Kate that Claire isn’t coming back with them, he has clearly gone a step too far. The only reason Kate got on the plane in the first place was to bring Claire back to Aaron (something she told Sawyer just a few days ago) and for Sawyer to take the decision out of her hands shows hold broken a part of him is.

Both Evangeline Lilly and Emilie De Ravin do some of their best work in this episode. Claire has seemed more like her pre-feral self in the last couple of episodes, particularly around Jack at the opening. It’s clear she’s broken in quite a few ways but that’s to be expected. The scene where she tells Jack the reason she’s with UnLocke  - “because he’s the only one who hasn’t left me” is incredibly sad, made all the more so by the fact immediately afterwards Jack seems completely willing to do it again.

And after two seasons of the fans having issues with Kate (for reasons which as I said were misogynistic) the scene where she tells Claire that the only reason she came back was to bring her back to her son – while at gunpoint – is one of the most selfless things she done in the entire series. Of course not long after that Jack jumps off the boat and she immediately wants to go back. But Sawyer makes it very clear that the time to go back is over.

It's been heartbreaking watching Sayid ever since the events at the Temple. Naveen Andrews’s does some remarkable work throughout these episodes as he plays a man who really has lost everything. The man who used to walk through the island with purpose just walks by motor control; there’s no emotion in anything he says anymore.; he doesn’t even seem to care what happens around him. If Sayid has been claimed by the smoke monster, it’s not the same kind of claim that was with Claire. Claire’s emotions are clearly still present, even if driven to insanity; Sayid doesn’t seem capable of caring about anything.

So when he goes to the well to kill Desmond, we don’t think anything will stop it. Desmond is still calm but there’s a sadness to it when Sayid points a gun at him. For the first time in half a season Sayid shows emotion when he tells Desmond that he’s been promised to see the woman he loves again. When Sayid tells him that he’s been brought back from the dead, we see the first hint of desperate hope in his eyes for we don’t know how long. But when Desmond confronts Sayid with something he doesn’t want to face, there’s a sign of conflict. We don’t know yet if Sayid is lying to UnLocke when he tells him why he took so long but when he tells UnLocke “You can check if you like”, it’s the first sign of the old Sayid we’ve seen all season. UnLocke looks at Sayid for a long time, but he can’t read his lack of emotions.

And of course at the end of the episode we get something we’ve been waiting for since the end of Season 4: Sun and Jin finally, finally reunite. That they both are able to speak in English to each other for the first time is one of the most profoundly moving moments we’ve ever seen on Lost – and it’s immediately undercut by the fact that Sawyer has been double-crossed.

In the sideways world the passengers lives begin to collide. Locke ends up at the same hospital needed surgery at the same time Sun and Jin arrive there. We’re hardly surprised that its Jack’s hospital they both end up at or that Locke is the one who goes into surgery. Jack is already reeling from the fact that’s he just met Claire, who was in his father’s will and has found out that she’s his half-sister – something he never found out until after he left the island.

Meanwhile Sawyer, having finished booking Kate, is called by Miles to investigate the murders that happened at the restaurant. And Sawyer manages to snare Sayid and no doubt bring him back to the very same station.

Some of the characters are recognizing each other more easily then before, though its increasingly obvious. Kate calls out Sawyer for not arresting her at the airport (there’s an irony) and Sawyer actually laughs it off. When Sun sees Locke she starts shouting out: “It’s him!” in Korean, but we’re not sure why she’s so upset. (There may be an explanation at the end of the next episode that works in conjunction with the ending.) But the most important part comes when Jack enters the surgery, looks down and sees Locke and says: “I think I know him.”

Jack knew Locke better than almost any of the other survivors before Locke died. And that is in large part because they disagreed so virulently about everything. The reason that Jack is having a harder time dealing with the Man In Black being in Locke’s guise – perhaps more than any of the other survivors – is because he did know Locke better than anyone else on the island. He might not have known how he got in the wheelchair or his family life, but he know how Locke saw the world and what he believed and that is the most important thing.  He knows that Locke had a serenity about him on the island that Jack has never known in his entire life, even though he couldn’t tell why. He knew that Locke had faith in him to be the leader before he did – even though Locke never chose to follow him and challenged him every step of the way. And he insisted that they were brought to the island for a reason – and Jack has just learned in no uncertain terms that Jacob did bring them to the island. Locke never knew the reason why and Jack doesn’t know it now.

But when Jack tells Sawyer that the last time he left the island he felt like ‘a part of him was missing’, that’s a huge deal for the man who spent all of their time on the island trying to get them off it. Jack is admitting to Sawyer that his leadership was wrong and has always been wrong.  And though he doesn’t know yet what UnLocke is up to, he knows that the only way that he can figure it out is to do the hardest thing in his life: follow him.

 

IF YOU BELIEVE THE ENDING: I actually don’t have much of an issue with the problems with the timelines as we can see how horribly skewed they are. The biggest problem I have is the presence of Ilana.

Now I can understand why she might be here if it was an alternate universe and it would make more sense: with the island no longer in her life, Ilana seems truly at ease and happy in a way she never seem when she was working for Jacob. But the fact that she seems to be there in the presence of Claire and Desmond makes no sense because when she was alive she didn’t know either of them. She did know Jack slightly, so there is logic there in an alternate universe: here she is reuniting a family. But it seems like fan-service for the sake of fan service, Ilana was never important to any of the major characters on the island and this just seems as pointless as showing Ethan being a physician given the context of the ending.