Everything in pop
culture has anniversaries. The debuts of singers, albums, and songs. Broadway
debuts. Film debuts. Anniversaries of landmark movies. Video games. And yes, TV
series.
But in all my
years of perusing both entertainment journals and the internet it has been rare
for me to see articles commemorating anniversaries of landmark TV episodes.
There are reasons for that of course: every nine to ten years critics will
frequently start to rewrite lists that they’ve long established. In my lifetime
TV Guide has already done so no less than five times. Usually one celebrates
the show or the actors or the writers rather than individual episodes of that
show, which is justifiable and logical. And it’s not like it’s never happened:
TV Guide has done so on numerous occasions and when Entertainment Weekly was
still a print journal it had reunion issues that dealt with anniversaries of
landmark TV episodes. I have no doubt had it survived longer they would be
doing so today.
As someone who
has recently realized that he’s now spent nearly twenty years trying to write
about television and nearly a decade doing so for this site, I may not be
uniquely qualified to write about episodes that are among the greatest I’ve
ever seen but as someone who has made multiple lists over the years, I’m as
qualified as many. And if I’m being really honest, I just want an excuse to
write about some of the greatest shows of all time and some episodes that, even
when I was first watching them years ago, I knew, somehow, that I was watching
history. Or maybe I’m feeling old and I want to make some of my readers feel
just as old. Two things can be true.
What follows will
be an ongoing series of articles that will deal with some of the landmark
episodes of television I’ve seen during my lifetime that will be celebrating
significant anniversaries during 2025. However a couple of ground rules,
self-evident to my readers they may be.
First of all, I
intend to play fair. I’m not going to use absurd justifications to write about
my favorite episodes of television for bizarre reasons: I will not write about
seventh anniversary of Teddy Perkins or the twelfth anniversary of Ozymandias.
No every episode will be at least ten years old and I will be working in
multiples of five. And because I want to be fair to anniversaries, I’m going to
exclude streaming for the foreseeable future. Whenever possible I will include
the streaming service that is airing the episodes I’m discussing.
Second, at least
for the moment, these are episodes that have aired in my lifetime and while I
could get cute I’m going to stick with 1990 as the absolute end point for how
far back I go in this group.
Third I will
acknowledge upfront that there will be an overlap with some of my previous
tributes to TV over my career at Medium. There will be articles about The West
Wing and X-Files though not always the ones fans of both shows might think will
be included. I don’t think I’ll get much complaint in this regard.
And let’s just
remember we may age but great television, like any art form, never goes out of
style.
So let’s get
started and to help ease into this transition, I’m going to begin with an
episode I was planning about writing about for a separate retrospective anyway.
Lost:
Ab
Aeterno
15
Years Ago We Learned Everything We Needed
To
Know About The Island
(Really)
In the review of the
Season 6 premiere of Lost Emily St. James says Lost
“works best in
one of two modes, going all in on inexplicable mystical hooey, or going all in
on rigorously defined scientific principles. It’s at its strongest, however,
when the two play off each other, when the show never quite lands on either
side of its science/faith dialectic. For better or worse (Season 6) all but
announces, “We’re going all in on the mystical hooey, folks.”
St. James says
that this might sound like complaints but they’re really not. And it certainly
wasn’t for me. Because well before the final season Lost had finally
defined itself as part of the sci-fi/fantasy genre. And well by that point I
knew all too well that no sci-fi/fantasy show can air for very long before by
necessity it has to go all in on mystical nonsense or its really not a
sci-fi fantasy show.
The greatest
sci-fi shows prior to Lost were X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Angel, all of which made it clear almost from the start that they were
going to be far more about mystical nonsense that defined scientific
principles. This was the critical storyline behind so much of the remake of Battlestar
Galactica, it was there in Smallville and there was quite a bit of
it in Alias. Later shows like Fringe would strike a greater
balance but the mystical nonsense was always there and Lindelof’s follow up
show The Leftovers didn’t even pretend there was science involved with
what we were seeing.
The reason Lost
managed to avoid this was because for far longer than it should have it
managed to avoid the label of sci-fi fantasy. That may be the most unexplained
mystery: how so many viewers saw the pilot where a monster caused trees to
rattle and ripped the pilot of the plane out of the cockpit and left him in a
bloody mess and yet managed to think “there’s a rational explanation for that’.
(Maybe that were as good as the castaways at compartmentalizing.) And if that
didn’t prove the point, the final minutes of Walkabout really should have
confirmed it for every viewer. It certainly did for me.
The reason Lost
was able to dodge the label as long as it could was because the writers
were in the first half of the series very skilled at keeping the mysteries
hidden whether it was based on the early struggles to survive, the mysteries of
the flashbacks or the arrival of the Others. Because the show was superb at
always having more to reveal you could explain why so many people could remain
in denial about the kind of show Lost was for so long. That more or less
became impossible by the time the second half of the series was even partially
finished but in all honesty I’d figured it out during Season 3. And anyone who
watched Lost knows why.
I will confess
when Nestor Carbonell made his first appearance in Juliet’s flashback in ‘Not
in Portland’, I thought Dr. Alpert would be, at most, just another Other. And
nothing in the next several episodes we saw him in did much to dissuade me from
that. He seemed completely loyal to Ben in a way that many of his followers
weren’t and he’d been off the island the day that Oceanic 815 fell from the
sky, so how important could he be?
That changed for
all of us in The Man Behind the Curtain. When we first see Ben in the present,
he’s looking at what he says is a birthday present. Almost offhandedly he says
to Richard: “You do remember birthdays, don’t you?” To be fair I would be distracted
by the confrontation between Ben and Locke that followed and the flashbacks of
Ben arriving on the island as a ten year old as part of the Dharma Initiative.
So there we are
all feeling sympathy for this sweet little Ben running into the jungle, looking
for his dead mother. Then we hear the whispers and there’s…Richard, looking
exactly the same as he does in 2004. (Yes he had ragged clothes and shaggy
hair. They hadn’t worked out his signature style yet.)
Now there were a
huge number of WTFs during that classic episode but the moment we saw Richard
looking exactly the same in the distant past as he did in the present, all
pretense that this show could have some kind of defined scientific explanation
at the end was gone. Maybe there was an explanation as to how Locke had been
instantly able to walk after being in a wheelchair for four years but Richard
looking the same as he did while Ben grew up? No, there was some next level
mystical hooey going on and we all knew it.
As Season 4 began
in January of 2008 the fans of Lost had many questions which we wanted
answered. One of them – where was Richard during this season – had a simple
one: he was on another island.
In TV Guides list
of highly anticipated shows of the 2007-2008 season was Cane, the saga
of a Latino family working together to run a rum business. Jimmy Smits was the
lead character and Carbonell was cast as his brother-in-law. It was one of the
most star-studded casts of any series that season with Rita Moreno, Hector
Elizondo, Poly Walker and Jason Beghe all with lead roles. It was highly
regarded at the time and was one of the first network series to have a
prominently Latino cast. However because it aired on CBS, his Carbonell from
doing guest spots on a rival network.
A month into the
2007-2008 season, the WGA went on strike. As a result many superb shows were
never given a full season pickup and by the end of the calendar year Cane was
cancelled. However it turned out to be a break for Lost: by the time the
strike was resolved in January of 2008 the writers had time to finish writing
the truncated fourth season. With Carbonell now free, they wrote him back in to
the final four episodes – and the first one only deepened the mystery
surrounding Richard.
‘Cabin Fever’ was
centered on John Locke but it wasn’t like the flashback episodes we were used
to. Instead it made direct something that had only been implied in the previous
three seasons: that at least for Locke, he had been supposed to come to the island.
During his flashbacks we saw Richard at his birth and visiting him at age five,
claiming to be for a ‘school for special children’. He performed a ritual that
seemed to be trying to figure out if five-year old John was ready to come to
the island. He looked exactly the same in 1956 and 1961 as he had in 1973 and
the present. The theory at that period(elucidated by Nikki Stafford in Finding
Lost) was that Richard was time-traveling to key points in Locke’s life.
Considering what I’d seen before I didn’t buy that. My theory was that someone
on the island had known Locke was special even when he was born and Richard had
been sent to find out. I was right about that (though I won’t dream of telling
you who it was who sent him) but it didn’t answer my question: what was up with
Richard?
During Season 5
the island started to skip through time. By that point any fan of Lost knew
of the term ‘constant’ and based on what we saw during those time bloops
Richard seemed to be that of the island. It didn’t matter if we were in 1954,
2007 or in the 1970s (where we spent the second half of Season 5) Richard
always seemed to be the same age. We eventually learned from Ben that his
position was ‘an adviser to the leader of the Others – and he’d held that
position for a very long time.” That would seem to imply that Richard knew more
about the island then anybody and it explained why no matter what time period
he was in, he always seemed to be calm and unruffled as his signature
appearance - shirtsleeves rolled up,
dapper, and eyeliner in place. (That was the running gag on Lost from
the beginning of the series based on the dark eyebrows that Nestor Carbonell
had.) And considering during this season we’d seen previous characters
connected to the island from Ben to Eloise Hawking to Charles Widmore younger
but Alpert was always the same, that seemed a safe assumption.
But in the last
few episodes it seemed that there were limits to Richard’s knowledge in both
time periods. When Locke came back to the Others in the penultimate episode of
the season, Richard asked what had happened to him and Locke seemed surprised
he didn’t know. When Richard learned that Locke was dead and was now alive, it
alarmed in a way we’d never seen him before. And when the climax of The
Incident revealed that the real John Locke was dead, he was clearly stunned.
During Season 6
(at which point Carbonell went from a recurring guest star to a regular)
Richard became flapped the moment ‘Locke’ walked out of Jacob’s sanctuary and
said: “It’s good to see you out of those chains.” Stunned he said: “You.” The
man we would know only as in The Man in Black said: “Me”, beat Richard to a
pulp and dragged him into the jungle.
In their next
confrontation in ‘The Substitute’
Richard asked why he looked like Locke. The Man in Black said: “Because
he’s a Candidate.” Richard had no idea what that meant. And suddenly it became
clear that for all his apparent omniscience Richard had not been let in on
Jacob’s plan at any point. When we found him again in the jungle Richard looked
to be in despair. Jack and Hurley followed him to the Black Rock, the ship in
the middle of the island that had been a mystery since we’d first seen it in
Season 1. Richard then said he hadn’t been back there in a very long time. Jack
asked why he’d come there. Richard said: “To die.”
The scene that
followed in the Black Rock was one of Carbonell’s finest in the series. Jack
asked why he wanted to die: “I Agreed to follow a man for a long time – longer
then you can possibly imagine – because he was following Jacob” who had a plan
for him in which he had a role that would one day be revealed and now that man
is dead. “So why do I want to die? Because I just learned I lived my entire
life for no purpose.”
There’s a reason
I’m revealing so much of Richard’s story on Lost before I get to Ab
Aeterno. Fans of the show had been promised that during Season 6 we were
finally going to get an episode centered on Richard. We were also in the final
season of Lost and there were still so many questions to be answered. As
I’ve mentioned earlier Lost was a genre show and anyone who has been a
fan of genre shows knows all too well that they can be magnificent on the
buildup and when it comes to giving an explanation, it’s almost inevitably
disappointing. It had been true with The X-Files, it had been true with
the final season of Battlestar Galactica and we all saw how badly series
such as Game of Thrones would drop the ball in the following decade.
And by the time
Ab Aeterno was announced, we were into the second half of the season. By this
point we were getting more answers then we knew what to do with but we were
beginning to feel the show wasn’t going to come through. We’d spent the first
third of the season at the Temple, which had been part of the mythology of the
series since Season 3 and seemed to be a place of incredible significance. Just
two episodes before everyone in the Temple had been slaughtered by the Smoke
Monster which seemed an anticlimax. We’d been told the significance of the
numbers and while it did seem to explain a lot, fans were disappointed as they
are. And considering we were spending a lot of time in the ‘flash-sideways’
rather than revealing the mysteries of the island, there was some pushback
there as well. Many of those episodes were very rewarding but the patience of
the fanbase is a fragile thing and it was beginning to be stretched thin. We
needed Richard’s backstory to pay off.
And like Lost did
so many times during its run, it absolutely did. For all the disappointment
many had with the final season of Lost, no one has a problem with Ab
Aeterno. Alan Sepinwall in his chapter on Lost in The Revolution Was
Televised’ refers to this episode as one of the masterpieces in the entire
series run. It is the top rated episode
of Season 6 on imdb.com, ranking about the ten best episodes of the series over
all. I thought the same thing when I first did my list of greatest episodes of
the series: I ranked it with such masterpieces as ‘Walkabout’, ‘The Constant’
and ‘The Man Behind The Curtain’, for their respective seasons.
In the present
Richard is at his greatest despair. He’s just been told that Jacob apparently
told Ilana (Zuleikha Robinson) that once she came to the island Richard would
know what to do. Richard makes it very clear he doesn’t have any idea what to
do next and he tells everybody that the island ‘is not what they think it is.
The last line of the teaser is “we’re all dead. And this is hell.”
This seemed to be
an acknowledgement of a fan theory that had been going around since Lost debuted.
What the backstory would reveal, tragically, was that in the case of Richard
Alpert there was a part of him that not only has believed it but has spent a
very long time certain of it. He storms off into the jungle saying that he
thinks its time that they stopped listening to Jacob and ‘started listening to
him.” As Richard left heading to who
knows where Ben (Michael Emerson is brilliant, seeming more broken than
Richard) says that Richard didn’t know anything about the island. He tells his
listeners, detached, that he’s known him for thirty years and that Richard
doesn’t age. The last question before the whoosh we associate with flashbacks
is “How do you think that happened?”
Nikki Stafford
summarizes this episode as “We finally see Richard Alpert’s backstory, how he
came to the island and what Jacob’s purpose is. In other words…ANSWERS!!”
She went further
in her opening paragraph:
This was the
episode the hardcore fans have been waiting for – those fans whose faith in the
show has been unwavering, who believed the show was great but had the potential
to be sublime…who argued that while the show could be baffling at times
it was still an example of how satisfying television storytelling can be. ‘Ab
Aeterno’ is one of those rare hours that makes television worth watching.”
Ab Aeterno is a
masterpiece because it deals with the huge themes of Lost: science and
faith, destiny and free will, good versus evil – and puts them all at the
center of the character who has been on the island the longest and has found
every reason to wonder if he had any choice in any of it. It also uses another
powerful theme of Lost – romantic love – and takes in a different
perspective, arguing that it has the power to resonate even long after the
person you love is dead. And it centers on Nestor Carbonell in one of the great
performances in the history of the show and arguably of 2010 altogether.
Carbonell was not
nominated for an Emmy for his work in the final season, even though the show
received 12 nominations for its final season and Terry O’Quinn and Michael
Emerson were both nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama. The episode
was nominated for an Emmy for Best Art Direction for a Single Camera Series and
would receive nominations for Sound Editing from a professional guild. Like all
episodes of Lost it is a technical masterpiece in all the right ways.
The makeup and set design are extraordinary, and Michael Giacchino created a
new theme for the show that remains one the most haunting of that incredible
composer. And because the flashback takes place in 1867, it has the feel of the
kind of episode Lost hadn’t been able to do before: a Victorian love
story with traces of the Gothic Horror, all with the same themes we’ve seen
over and over.
Richard’s life
has been defined, like so many characters, by love. In his case the love of his
wife Isabella. She is dying of consumption when we meet her but Richard still
believes he can save her. He takes all his money in an effort to find the
doctor and rides through a stormy night.
The doctor he
meets has no intention of going out in the rainy night. He says he has medicine
that will save her life but it is expensive. Tellingly we never learn if the
medicine little better than snake oil (an enhanced version says it is) but it
doesn’t really matter; the doctor is the first person we meet to manipulate
Richard’s desperation. When he hands over Isabella’s beloved gold cross, the
doctor tosses it aside, saying its worthless. Desperately Richard implores the
doctor, who slips and breaks his neck – in front of a servant. Desperately
Richard rides back with the medicine only to find Isabella is already dead.
An indeterminate
time later we see Richard in a cell, reading a Bible in English. (The episode
begins in the Canary Islands and everything we see is initially in Spanish and
subtitled. This is critical to the plot.) A priest comes to Richard to offer
last rites. Richard confesses to his crime and asks for absolution. The priest
says he can’t give it because he has committed murder and has no use for the
fact Richard didn’t mean too. He tells Richard the only way to do so is to do
penance and that because he will be hanged the next day, the devil awaits him
in hell. Long before he comes to the island science and faith have both failed
Richard. He truly believes that he has nothing left; his wife is dead and only
hell awaits him. He doesn’t know he’s been manipulated by the priest who has
decided to sell him in slavery to Jonas Whitfield, first mate aboard the Black
Rock.
The episode shows
every horrible detail of Richard’s journey and its very clear why he believes
he’s been dead and in Hell all this time. It’s not just that before a tidal
wave lifts up the Black Rock and throws into the jungle (it’s Lost, just
go with it) he sees the statue guarding the island and thinks it is the devil.
It’s that so much happens before the real point of his journey becomes clear.
Being on the ocean voyage in a bring as the ship is tossed about in a storm. A
shipwreck that kills most of the prisoners and the crew. Whitfield returning
below slaughtering everybody below deck and is only stopped by the sounds of
the monsters clearly slaughtering everyone above…before grabbing Whitfield and
staring Richard down. An unknow time chained to the ship with no food or water.
Seeing Isabella before him saying that the devil is here and that he’s taken
the form of smoke, then hearing it seizing Isabella and kill her again. People
has spent years sure the island was purgatory; Richard has every reason to
believe it is.
Then the Man in
Black comes below, offers him water and kindness for the first time in who
knows how long. When Richard says this is hell, the Man In Black tells him that
he’s afraid it is. He says he’s found the keys and they might work but if he
sets him free he has to promise to do what he asks.
Titus Welliver is
remarkable in his work here. At this point we’re still not sure if the Man in
Black is evil incarnate and we know Richard clearly thinks so. But it’s worth
noting how calm and kind he is when he tells Richard the only way to leave Hell
is to kill the Devil. He hands him an ancient dagger, tells him to walk right
up to the man he calls the devil, and to stab him through the chest. “Do not
hesitate,” he says. “If he speaks to you, it is already too late.” The viewer
knows that just a few episodes ago Sayid was given this same dagger and this
same set of instructions but to use it on the Man In Black in Locke’s form. It
didn’t work then; there’s no clear idea it would work here.
Richard goes to
the beach which has the statue which was Jacob’s sanctuary. We’ve never seen
this stretch of the island before in broad daylight so its stunning to look at
it. Richard makes an attempt but Jacob – far angrier then we’ve ever seen him
on the series – grabs him and asks him why he did it. Richard tells him he came
to see his wife again and that he’s in hell because this is the devil. Jacob
then grabs Richard by the head and dunks him in the water three times. This is
clearly a baptism but Richard is a reluctant convert: he tells Jacob to stop
because he wants to live.
Then they have a
conversation as Jacob offers Richard some wine. He asks what this place is and
Jacob gives an answer:
Imagine that this
wine is what you keep calling Hell. There are other names for it. Malevolence.
Evil. Darkness. And its all down here swirling at the bottom. Unable to get
out, because if it did it would spread. The cork is this island. And it’s the
only thing keeping the darkness where it belongs.
This is, for the
record, counter to what so many people have called the island over the years.
The Others have considered it a paradise and people have thought over it
because it’s valuable and something to be treasured. They’ve clearly gotten
this opinion from Richard, who’s never told them that. Then he explains why
he’s brought the boat here:
“That man who
sent you to kill me believes everyone is corruptible because it’s in their very
nature to sin. I bring people here to prove him wrong, and when they get here,
their past doesn’t matter.”
Pretty words but
again not the whole truth. He will say as much to the Man in Black at the end
of the episode. Jacob has spent centuries bringing boats and later planes to
the island because the Man In Black wants to kill him and he’s trying to find
someone to replace him. And as to the past, not mattering, if there’s one thing
we’ve learned watching Lost, the past absolutely does matter to
the survivors every day they’ve been here and it certainly has mattered to
Richard.
Richard asks what
happened to the other people who came to the island and Jacob says they’re all
dead. He doesn’t say whether the Man In Black killed them all or they killed
themselves; given everything we’ve seen on the show both are fully possible.
Richard asks why Jacob doesn’t help them. Jacob says that they need to help
themselves and seems to find the idea of stepping in pointless. Richard is
almost certainly the first person who’s talked to him in who knows how long and
it may be why when he points out the obvious – that if he doesn’t the Man in
Black will. That he’s taken aback.
Jacob decides to
offer Richard a job to be his intermediary. Richard asks what he would get in
return.
Richard: “I want
my wife back.”
Jacob: I can’t do
that
Richard: Can you
absolve me of my sins?
Jacob: I can’t do
that either.
Richard: Then I
don’t want to die…I want to live forever.
Jacob smiles,
touches Richard and says: “Now that I can do.”
Richard goes to
the Man in Black who doesn’t seem surprised or even that upset by what
happened: “He can be very persuasive. If you ever change your mind, the offer
still stands.” He then hands Richard his wife’s cross, telling him he must have
dropped it. Richard looks down and the Man in Black is gone.
Weeping Richard
goes to another section of the island we’ve never seen, an tract with some
flowering trees. He buries his cross in the ground and with it his old faith –
and his hope.
The opening line
of Noel Murray’s review of Ab Aeterno asks the following question:
“Is it better
to reign in heaven then serve in Hell? What if you serve in Hell…but, you know,
really high up?”
And that in many
ways is what Richard’s been doing for the last 140 years: serving. Ever since
we started to spend time with the Others we’ve wondered why none of them ever
question what they’re doing, and now it’s clear this thinking comes from the
top down. Richard has acted as Jacob’s intermediary and every leader of the
Others that has followed has served at his pleasure as much at Jacob’s. All of
them have done horrible things in the name of the island – we’ve witnessed
many; far more are implied – and they’ve done all of them in the name of Jacob,
a man that only Richard talks too and who never questions his orders. None of
them seem to even have considered that Jacob has ever been telling them all of
what he knows; Ilana came to the island assuming as much and even after Richard
tells her he has no idea what to do next, she remains blindly – almost stupidly – calm in her faith.
Just a few
episodes ago ‘Locke’ told Sawyer Jacob’s modus operandi with the Candidates: “At
some point you did meet Jacob. Likely when you were very vulnerable. And as a
result, choice you thought were yours to make were never really choices at all.
He was pushing you…to the island.” That’s exactly what we see Jacob do with
Richard with one critical difference: Richard was never even told about the
Candidates, which seems to mean he was less important to Jacob then he has
thought for the last 140 years.
No wonder at the
end of the episode we see him go back to where he buried his wife’s cross all
those years ago. (Now there’s a huge grove of trees.) He ‘s ready to give up,
saying that he’s changed his mind and is ready to switch sides. It seems only a
miracle can save him…and one does in the episode that helps Ab Aeterno become
the classic it is.
Hurley somehow
has found Richard. Richard can’t understand what he’s doing here. And then
Hurley shouts out: “Your wife sent me!” Richard doesn’t believe him and Hurley
says: “She’s standing right next to you.”
The scene that
follows unfolds mostly in Spanish and Isabella says to Richard: “Close your eyes.”
And then suddenly Richard seems to be able to see Isabella. He can’t actually
see here but the words of her transcend the barriers of the real world and with
his heart he can see her. She does the one thing that no one has been able to
do long before he came to the island: absolve him of his sins. Not to God, but
the burden he’s been carrying about the fact that he truly believes her death
is his fault. She tells him the one thing he’s needed to hear all this time
that she knew she was going to die, and her last thoughts were of him. “We have
always been together, my love,” she says in Spanish. “And we will be again.”
I won’t reveal
the end of the episode because it’s less important then you’d think. What I
will reveal is that after this episode Richard becomes less incidental to the
overarching story in the final episodes of the series. In a sense that’s
fitting because he was never a Candidate, meant to know some of the rules but
never play the game. But there is one key detail that most observers might miss
even after several rewatches.
From the moment
he returns to the camp to the end of Lost, Richard is wearing the cross
his wife gave him. At a critical point in the series finale, he says: “I’ve
just realized I want to live.” His faith has been restored but it’s no longer
faith in Jacob but the faith he once had. He doesn’t want to serve; he has
something to live for. And that’s at the center of what makes Lost a
masterpiece.
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