Back to the Island: The Myth of the Others As Explained By Juliet Burke

 

 

Anyone who watched Lost knows that one of the most important moments in its run came in Solitary. In it Sayid encounters Danielle Rousseau, the Frenchwoman who recorded the transmission that had been playing in a continuous loop for sixteen years. Danielle has been living on her own ever since then and is clearly mentally disturbed by her solitude. Throughout her ‘interrogation’ of Sayid she keeps saying that “are you one of them?” When Sayid finally asks who she just says: ‘The Others’.

Eventually we will learn that there is a population who have been living on the island long before Oceanic 815 crashed. The show will spend a lot of time talking about them and in Season 3 actually look at them in depth. But even when we see behind the curtain there’s a lot we never know for sure about them.

For one: what do they call themselves? The Others is the term Rousseau uses and the Oceanics more or less adopt it for the remainder of the series. More often the survivors – and later on the Tailies who have been pillaged by them – just use terms like ‘them’ and ‘they’. We later learn the Dharma Initiative referred to them as ‘the Hostiles’ and given how they behave towards everybody else, it seems the most fitting term they’re ever given.  Ben will refer to them as the native population but we’ll learn later on that most of them have been brought to the island.

Nikki Stafford will eventually write that the Others aren’t really that different from the survivors and that’s more accurate then she might have suspected at the time. One of the major criticisms about the early seasons was how few questions the survivors of the crash asked about each other or the island. The longer the show goes on, it becomes very clear that the Others themselves don’t ask many questions once they come to the island either. The clearest difference between them and the Losties is that they believe they are there to protect the island from invaders and yet paradoxically keep them from ever leaving. This is a contradiction that none of the Others we meet, even among the hierarchy, ever see fit to answer.

And they are always defensive about the horrible things they do to the survivors. Throughout the entire series they will attack, abduct and even kill members of the Oceanic survivors and each time they are called on it, they will essentially use ‘what-about you guys?” on the survivors. The fact that we see at the opening of Season 3 Ben send spies to a plane that has exploded to invade the groups, gather intelligence and ‘don’t get involved’  never seems to matter. The idea of diplomacy never occurs to them – and as we will learn when the island starts skipping through time in Season 5 that has been the way of them for decades if not centuries.

There is no way to look at the Others at any point and not think of them as something akin to a religious cult. Indeed they even have a deity that they served blindly named Jacob. None of them have ever seen him except for Richard, who asks as his mouthpiece but his mere name is enough to shock them into obedience. We will learn that they’ve been receiving ‘lists’ from him for decades and have all been blindly following those orders for years, never even actually having to meet him. During Season 3 it is implied that Ben has been talking to Jacob all this time but we’ll eventually learn that this is a lie. It is the one that is clearly the basis for Ben’s leadership – which by the time we finally meet him is becoming shaky – and its worth noting that Richard is part of the group at the time but he never contradicts Ben.

Eventually by the time we finally learn Richard’s backstory in Ab Aeterno we will learn that Jacob has been bringing people to the island for centuries for a larger purpose. However over that period they have all died, whether at the hands of themselves or the Smoke monster. Richard asks Jacob why he doesn’t step in and Jacob says simply if he gets involved, it’s pointless. When Richard points out the obvious, Jacob offers Richard a job – to be his representative on the island to deliver messages between him and the people he brings. He grants Richard immorality but he never tells him at any point in the next 140 years why he’s been bringing people to the island in the first place. He has been assuring Richard that he has a plan, one which he has a part into play in and at a point in the future he will reveal it. Richard agrees to go along with this, right up until the point he lets Ben and ‘Locke’ to see Jacob and as a result Jacob is killed. A new group of people, represented by Ilana, have been told about this for years and have come to the island along with the Oceanics for their own purpose but we learn that Jacob has withheld critical information from them  - including about what happened to John Locke. Therefore by the time they get to Jacob’s sanctuary with this information it is too late to do anything about it.

I’ve always had more than my share of questions about the Others and they’ve only deepened with each rewatch. But it wasn’t until I read Back to the Island that someone was raised to me that even after twenty years had never occurred to me: Did the Others have any real purpose at all?

Noel Murray asks this question quite a few times in the episodes he reviews for episodes in Season 5 and 6. His most succinct summation comes in the penultimate episode ‘Follow The Leader’:

“What were the Others actually doing on the island? Aside from the ageless Richard, the folks we see camped out on the plains or usurping Dharma structures don’t seem to have much of an agenda outside of protecting the island. They have a temple, but we don’t see much worship. They have a hierarchy, but no one seems very happy about it.”

And it’s clear that none of them were ever considered as a replacement for Jacob either; not Ben, not Widmore, not even Richard. So much of the fighting during Season 4 seems to be about whether Ben or Widmore, both former leaders of the Others get to run it. Both end up getting exiled from it as a result and both spend years trying to return to it. But in the past we see that they both answer to Richard to some extent, so what is that leadership really worth?

There are many ways to look at this particular perspective and later on I’m going to look at their history. But I think to start it’s worth starting with the Other who based on what we see of Lost is the character who we get our first glimpse of Season 3 through and who more than anyone else gives us a window into the Others: Juliet Burke, played exceptionally for three seasons by Elizabeth Mitchell.

If you’ll forgive some gushing (and if I can’t do it here, where can I?) I always felt that Mitchell’s work on Lost was at least the equal of Michael Emerson’s as Ben and on certain occasion, even better. I’m not diminishing Emerson’s work – his work was one of the great performances in the history of television and in a future article I will elucidate on it. But the fact remains Emerson had a burden that Mitchell didn’t. His character was from his first appearance and well into the second half of the series essentially the antagonist of Lost, if not the outright villain. His great gift which he used to extraordinary skill was not just his ability to lie but to make the people who knew he was lying and that he was untrustworthy doubt him long enough to tell another web of lies.

Juliet didn’t have that burden because we knew her from the start. The opening of Season 3 shows us Juliet playing Petula Clark’s Downtown (a song chosen, like most of Lost’s, for dramatic irony), straightening up her home, cooking muffins which get burnt, and preparing furniture for book club. It’s clear she’s trying to lead a normal life; it’s also clear she’s very unhappy. The mood at book club is unpleasant – one of her guests says that Carrie which she makes clear is her favorite book, is one Ben wouldn’t read in the toilet. She takes this more personally then you think and then a moment later the house starts shaking. Not long after that everyone runs outside to see Oceanic 815 breaking apart in mid-air.

This not only establishes that we’re going to be spending time with the Others but it really tells us a lot about Juliet: she may be part of the Others community but it’s clear she’s not exactly thrilled to be here. A lot of what worked during the segments on Hydra Island in the six episodes that opened the season was watching the scenes with Mitchell establish Juliet.

And what was clear was that she was very different from the Others we’d met during the first two seasons on Lost. Everyone we’d met seemed determined to treat the survivors as an invading force who they could mistreat, kidnap and abuse with impunity. Juliet was clearly willing to go along with these manipulations – we saw her tase Sawyer and hold a gun on Kate when he stepped out of line – but she was the first Other we’d met (with one exception) who seemed to less committed to this cruelty than everyone else.

And while it was clear that nobody was exactly happy that Ben was the leader of the Others Juliet never bothered to hide it during those first six episodes. We saw her constantly flaunting Ben’s authority in private and critically in public. When a fellow Other was shot and Juliet was called in to save her – this was the first time we knew she was a doctor – she realized she was in over her head and broke protocol, calling Jack into scrub in. This clearly angered Ben and even her husband but to Juliet saving a life trumped Ben’s rules. When Colleen died it clearly broke her a little and even Jack was willing to console her.

So even before the first episode centered on her the viewer was on Juliet’s side despite the fact she was clearly ‘one of them’. When we learned that Not In Portland was going to give the first flashback of an Other that Lost had ever given everybody was thrilled. No doubt we thought we’d learn what Juliet had been doing as part of the Others. And the opening minutes of the teaser seemed to play into that. We saw Juliet on a beach crying. She walks into a building with flickering lights and Ethan, the first Other we met says hello. She goes into the room and there’s a woman sleeping and a record skipping and Juliet turns it off. The woman stirs, it’s clear she’s ill and Juliet gives her some treatment. We’re on the island.

But no. We’re actually in Miami and Juliet opens the window and we see a plane fly by! The writers have tricked us again. (I don’t know why we’re shocked that they can still pull this off.) We’re going to learn how Juliet ended up coming to the island. And that just makes her story even sadder. You see even by now we’ve begun to suspect that everyone who got on the plane was being drawn by the island. Juliet is the first person we meet who is brought not by the island’s needs but by The Others. And more importantly she is the first person we meet who has clearly been brought by false pretenses (it’s not until the end of the flashback that she learns that the company she’s signed up to join is ‘not in Portland’) and has been essentially held against her will. In the present she tells Jack she’s been on this island nearly three and a half years (she was promised she would only be there six months) and she wants the same thing that Jack has been promised. She wants to go home.

Based on the flashbacks in the episodes centered on her, the interactions she has with her fellow Others on Hydra Island and the discussions she has about her time with them, there’s a very strong possibility that Juliet was one of the last people that Ben Linus recruited to be one of his people. And based on the conversations she has about them over her three seasons as a regular it’s pretty clear that Juliet was neither fully accepted by them. Perhaps it might have something to do with seniority but it’s just as likely her own attitude towards the island didn’t help.

That’s understandable because Juliet was recruited to resolve a fertility issue with the women on the island: pregnancy was a death sentence if you conceived on the island. During her three years nine women died under her care and no matter how much she made it clear she couldn’t solve the problem on the island Ben refused to let her leave until she did. She was essentially held hostage by Ben who told her that her sister’s cancer (which had gone into remission before she left) had returned and that if she stayed on the island Jacob would cure it.

But by that point we know how manipulative Ben is and that he is more than willing to lie to his own people to serve his needs. It is far more likely that Juliet’s sister’s cancer never came back and Ben spent the next two years using it as something to hold over her. When she found a tumor on his spine she accused him of lying to her about her sister’s cancer being cured. He showed her Rachel in Miami playing with her two year old son Julian and claimed her cancer went into complete remission. But he needed to keep Juliet on his side and he probably just used that as emotional blackmail too. At one point during Jack’s captivity she tries to persuade him to do the surgery by saying if Jack were to let him die, no one would mind. This turned out to be a fabrication on her part but its still completely understandable: by that point Juliet probably wouldn’t have minded if he died under the knife.

Juliet clearly never committed to the dream that Ben had been telling his people about Jacob. in a flashback when the two of them are having dinner Juliet asks why they took Zach and Emma, two children from the tail section. Ben says almost absently: “Jacob wanted them.” Juliet changes the subject, not because Jacob’s name has the same effect on her as everyone else but because she’s been on the island long enough to know that there’s point arguing when Jacob’s name is mentioned. Tellingly in all of her conversations with the rest of the survivors once she joins their camp she will tell many secrets about her time with them but she never mentions Jacob at all. During the final season Sawyer learns about Jacob for the first time which means Juliet never shared that with him. She clearly thought it was a lie that Ben had spun.

The reason that I always trusted Juliet, even during the second half of Season 3 when Jack brought her back to the camp, was that while she engaged in some of the what about-ism when she was challenged by the Oceanics she remained fundamentally honest. When Sayid demanded she tell him what they did, she looked him right in the eye and said: “If I told you, you would kill me.” She didn’t deny how horrible her people were or pretend that the rest of the survivors were as bad. She knew how horrible her people were and she didn’t hide it. It is true that she had her own agenda and was engaged in deception with Ben but even when she talked about it with him in the final flashback, we could see she clearly hated herself for doing it.

Juliet was there to find out if any of the survivors of the crash were pregnant, something we already knew. When Sun confronted her on this in D.O.C. she was clearly shocked and immediately told her what would happen to her. She took Sun to the Staff station to find out if Sun had conceived on the island (I’ll deal with that in a different story) and when she did she left a message to Ben about her progress. But after she turned the tape off she said: ‘I hate you.”  Not long after that she confided in Jack she was a double agent and told him that the Others were going to come to the camp to abduct Sun and all the pregnant women. Three years of losing patients and the prospect of another woman dying was too much for her. From that point on, she was firmly on team Oceanic.

We already know that during this period Ben’s grip on the leadership of the Others is beginning to loosen, in large part because he has a tumor on his spine on an island where no one gets sick. While this is going on Richard has begun to look towards Locke as ‘special’ and its clear the moment John shows up in the camp that the rest of Ben’s people think so too. Ben is clearly using Juliet as a last-ditch attempt to hold on to his power. When she betrays him at the end of the season  - an event that leads to ten of his people being killed on the beach – it’s a blow he can never recover from, and one of my few disappointments of Lost is that the two never interact again. (Well, in the present.)

But perhaps the most telling thing that makes it clear Juliet was never truly an Other comes in Season 5 when she has become part of the Dharma Initiative. She knows that a thirteen year old Ben is part of the Initiative (boy I’d have loved to see that meeting) but she seems to have dealt with it – until Sayid shoots Ben and leaves him for dead. The only doctor available at the time she does everything in her power to save the life of the young Ben, including helping Kate had him over to the Others to save his life. It’s not until they’re on their way to the hostiles that Sawyer asks the question why they would save the boy who when he grows up will do everything in his power to make their lives miserable, Juliet most of all. According to Sawyer she tells him: “It’s wrong to let a kid die, no matter who he grows up to be.” By that point we get our final confirmation on something we’ve known for a long time; despite what Ben said about her Juliet was never truly “one of us.”

That is the clearest perspective of what the Others was from the last person we know was a follower of any kind. In the next article I’m going to deal with the leaders of the Others and how they may have never led much of anything.