One of the reasons I'm such a fan
of Back to the Island is because St. James and Murray are exactly like
me in a key respect: they are both critics and fans. The latter comes into play
because (like me) they've clearly rewatched Lost several times before
they wrote this book. (For the record I'm at seven, which means its well past
time I rewatch it again.) Like me they seem to enjoy rewatching the show in
order to find out details that we missed the first (or the fourth, or the
twelfth, or the hundredth) time around.
The reason I know this is because
when I read their book the first time I realize Emily and Noel make me look
like a piker. They've picked up on details about Lost that I missed,
perhaps because I haven't been looking for them. Much of it has to do with the
symmetry that the writers so subtly that the fan probably doesn't notice,
within individual episodes, within the season or even within the series as a
whole. Once you see them, you're like any good fan wondering: "How the
heck did I miss that?"
And the reason was something that
rarely gets discussed in television and certainly not in shows like Lost: the
writers were very subtle at their jobs: "…the show's dedication to
answering its mysteries only insofar as the characters care about them
always kept it on the right track." That may have left the fans somewhat
disgruntled but it also is the main reason why Lost is a masterpiece in
a way so many of its often failed successors were not. Darlton knew that at the
end of the day the long-time viewer of Lost – and I was one of them - cared less about having everything neatly
checked off but far more about what happened to the characters as the show
progressed.
Perhaps the best way to
illustrate this is with an episode I mentioned in passing in an earlier article
where this worked the best: 'The Life And Death of Jeremy Bentham." This
episode we airs at the exactly halfway point of Season 5 is one of the
highpoints not just of the season but the entire series. In 2009 Entertainment
weekly ranked it as one of the top 10 episodes on TV that year and I've always
agreed with them.
Let me explain why it’s a
masterpiece: 17 year spoiler warnings ahead
At the end of Season 3 we saw
that Jack had read an obituary and attended a funeral of someone that he and
Kate both knew whose death shook him profoundly, but not her. By the end of
Season 4 we're told that 'Jeremy Bentham' was the person in the obituary, that
he came to see five members of the Oceanic 6 as well as Walt and told them that
they needed to go back to the island. In the final shot of Season 4, after Ben
has told Jack that they all have to go back to the island he says: "We're
going to have to bring him, too." Finally we see who's in the coffin – and
its Locke.
After the viewer spent the next
eight months getting their jaws off the floor we spent the first half of Season
5 watching the Oceanic 6 being assembled slowly and very reluctantly to get on
Ajira 316. Ben had taken possession of the coffin and made it very clear to one
of his followers that "if they don't bring him on the plane, all of this
will be for nothing." We learn as the season unfolded that John killed
himself but every time Ben talked about it, we knew he was keeping secrets.
This became clear when Ben gave Sun Jin's wedding ring to tell her that Jin was
still alive. Ben had just been caught in a lie about never seeing Locke when he
came back and the viewer had just learned that Locke never went to see Sun
because he was keeping a promise to Jin that he would not bring Sun back to the
island. This was the viewer's biggest hint that Locke didn't commit suicide.
During the flashes that took
place on the island in the first several episodes we watched as John was told
by Richard (at some indeterminate time in the future) that the Oceanic 6 had
all made it back to civilization and that Locke was going to have to bring them
back. Asked how he was supposed to do that Richard told him: "You're going
to have to die." As the flashes continued Locke was clearly trying to find
out how he would leave the island and how to convince them to come back. By the
time we reach 'This Place Is Death' Locke manages to convince everyone that
they need to go to the Orchid in order to stop the flashes. At this point it's
becoming clear that every time the island skips in time, it's starting to cause
the castaways to come unstuck in time and if they don't stop the time-jumping
they will all die horribly. Charlotte begins to succumb the quickest of those
who are still in Locke's party – by this point it's down to Jin, Sawyer,
Juliet, Miles, Dan and Charlotte – but they're all starting to suffer
nosebleeds and headaches.
Locke ends up trying to climb
down a well where we see a wheel that we've seen before. At the end of Season
4, it was frozen in ice and Ben ended up going down that path and moving the
island because Jacob said it was the only way to save it. Ben had told John
that the person who moves it can never come back.
Locke has broken his leg fallen
(we actually see his exposed shinbone) and while he is in pain a man he's seen
before – 'Christian Shephard' – tells John he's here to see him the rest of the
way. He has to gather all his people and go to see Eloise Hawking. Locke tells
Christian that Richard said he would have to die. Christian says: "That
why they call it a sacrifice."
Locke then manages to get the
wheel right on its axis and then turns it. As he does 'Christian' shouts:
"Say hello to my son!" Locke screams "Who's your son?" (Poor
Locke. No one tells him anything.) Locke's actions, as we learn have stopped
the island from skipping through time and its landed the remaining survivors in
the time of the Dharma Initiative. As Juliet realizes "We're already
saved." I've dealt with the ramifications before but now that I've done
that lead up its time to get to Jeremy Bentham.
The episode opens in the
aftermath of Ajira 316 ending up on the island. Ilana, one of the passengers
tells Caesar that they found someone who no one remembers for the plane. We see a man in a blanket who tells us "My name is John
Locke."
It's an indication of the kind of
series Lost was that what should have been the most stunning event in
series history to that point was essentially brushed aside by most fans,
including myself. The writers had spent so much time laying the groundwork for
the belief that the whole reason they were bringing the body of Locke back to
the island was for this very purpose. I basically remember seeing this episode
in 2009 and essentially saying: "Took long enough."
The reason for Life and Death of
Jeremy Bentham's power becomes more incredible every time you rewatch it (I
won't spoil that part of it in this article) but even if you belief that death
was just an inconvenience for Locke, it's still an incredible episode that Cuse
and Lindelof have created.
For one thing the episode is
essentially a giant flashback which tells us exactly what happened to Locke
from the moment he turned the wheel until he ended up dying. It's a globe
spanning journey that takes us across multiple continents, across America,
before ending in a dirty hotel room in Los Angeles. It lays the groundwork of
the epic struggle between Ben and Widmore which seems to be (as the viewer
believes) at the center of Lost. It tells us how Locke ended up using
the name Jeremy Bentham – and in keeping with the show its another in-joke for
all of us who spent months wondering why Locke chose that name. He didn't.
Widmore did. Jeremy Bentham is a British philosopher like Locke. Widmore says:
"Your parents had a sense of humor when they named you, why can't I?"
And most impressively it is one
of the greatest showcases for Terry O'Quinn as John Locke, who by the time
Season 6 debuted had been named by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 100
greatest fictional characters of all time, along with such classic TV characters
as Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, Dexter Morgan, Don Draper and Patty Hewes, all
among the greatest characters of TV's golden age.
This is how St. James describes him:
Across the run of Lost to
this point, Locke has been a figure with an almost tyrannical sense of purpose.
He, alone, can intuit what the island wants and he, alone, can make sure that
will is carried out. That quality makes him an antagonist, a necessary evil, a
messianic figure, a survivor, and a charismatic enigma at various points, and
at times, he's been all five at once. He is perhaps the single most
fleshed-out, well-developed character in this show and Terry O'Quinnis
remarkable at playing every little micro expression that might plausibly
flutter across Locke's face.
St. James this episode answers a
character question: "Who is John Locke, deep down?" And the answer
isn't particularly flattering: he's something of a dupe."
This would be a very reductive
analysis of John, were it not for the fact that O'Quinn himself felt as much
him as the series progressed. The show will actually twist the knife when it
reveals Locke's last thought as he died was: "I don't understand."
And it’s the saddest thing we've ever heard.
The show has spent four and a
half seasons basically establishing that Locke is a man who always believes the
wrong people, who always makes bad choices, who has endured the kind of family
life that is the worst of any character and who ended up in a wheelchair
because of his father. We saw in his last episode he was watched throughout his
life by the forces of the island and always walked away from it and ironically
when he was paralyzed ending up on the path that put him on it.
And this episode basically tells
us Locke's story in microcosm. He loses the island when he's booted off it. His
leg is broken so he is put in a wheelchair, which by this point we know is his
weakness, he travels which means he's literary being carried around by an agent
of the enemy and he fails to tell each of the castaways to return. Furthermore
each of them treats him with the kind of behavior that demeans his always
fragile self-worth: Sayid says he must have nothing to come back to, Kate says
he never loved anyone, Hurley, when he thinks he's dead just says: "No
biggie" as if he couldn't care less. And Jack, who by this point has
falling into drinking and drugs and is seeing visions of his father tells John
that he's a tired, useless old man. His last words were: "We were never
important."
St. James writes that his purpose
has been co-opted more bloodthirsty men but its worse than that. When we see
him in the hotel room as he prepares to hang himself as Nikki Stafford writes:
his face shows the weight of all these failures.
In Season 2 Locke delivered a
quietly devastating sentence in only three words: standing amidst a hatch that
was about to explode, he simply says 'I was wrong'. And in those three words,
he sums up every important decision he's made in his life. Now, in a quiet
room, the chaos is all happening inside Locke, and he looks at Ben, with the
red cord around his neck and says: 'I'm a failure'. Both of these brief
sentences are delivered with a conviction and absoluteness that Locke doesn't
show at any other time. These are the only times that believes what he's saying
one hundred percent.
And just to make it all the more
worse Ben then spends the next two minutes convincing Locke how important he is
and that he is a success to talk him off that ledge and get the rope off around
his neck. And then the moment he learns the information John has he immediately
strangles Locke with the very cord he was going to use to kill himself moments
earlier. Locke has been manipulated from having any choices in his life, and
now he doesn't even get to choose how he dies.
This is one of the most tragic
deaths in the entire show and even if you assume that John has survived it, it
doesn't make this moment any less painful. (On rewatches, of course, it becomes
all the more agonizing.) Which is why I surprised in her review of this episode
St. James spends so much time talking about something I kept missing all this
time: This episode explains the polar bears.
To be clear it's been telling us
for a while but because it never said, "This is why polar bears are on the
island', the idiot fanbase kept asking the question. (And I'm sorry Nikki, this
includes you: You had it as unanswered question in Season Five and I'm pretty
sure you didn't get it until the DVD's came out. No judgment, I made the same
mistake.)
We learned as early as 'A Tale in
Two Cities' that the Dharma Initiative brought the polar bears to the island.
That's what the cages Sawyer and Kate were being kept in. They had to solve
puzzles to receive their daily fish biscuit.
Now in Season 4 finale, we
learned beneath the island is the Frozen Donkey Wheel that allows the island to
move in space and time when turned. Dharma found out about it (that's confirmed
in the opening scene of Season 5). They must have figured it out and realized
that they needed an animal that could survive the cold.
Why not a human being? Well,
pushing the wheel is a one-way ticket off the island. The episode told us as
much in Charlotte's flashback in Confirmed Dead. She goes to the Tunisian
desert where the skeleton of a polar bear has been found with a collar from
Dharam on it.
Now in The Shape of Things to
Come we saw Ben end up in Tunisia wearing a parka. Five episodes later we see
how he got there (this is how Lost works) when he moved the wheel.
At the start of the episode the
final puzzle piece is filled in as Locke after moving the wheel ends up in the
exact same location as both the polar bear skeleton and Ben. Charles Widmore
makes this point explicit to the viewer (but, critically, not to Locke) when he
tells him "that's the exit'. By this point we know Widmore once lived on
the island and was exiled and has been monitoring this area for awhile for this
very reason. We knew that because the first time Ben showed up two Bedouins
appeared suddenly and seemed mystified as to how he arrived – but they were
heavily armed. When Locke is brought to Widmore, similar Bedouins do the same
thing.
St James explained all of this and
then says:
The thing is: Nobody ever sits
down and says any of this within the show itself. All the puzzle pieces existed
within the show, but they were spread out across three seasons of television
from the initial reveal of those polar bear cages to the final moment of Locke
crash-landing in the desert. What's more, if you didn't remember that, say,
Charlotte found the polar bear skeleton in Season Four, you'd be unlikely to
conclude 'Oh, hey, Locke landed in that same place. I wonder if the polar bears
were being used to move the island?" "You'd just think weird shit was
happening for its own sake.
To which I will proudly say:
"Guilty."
Lost has always had a reputation long
after it ended of never answering its fans questions. To be clear as Lostipedia
indicates and St. James points out, the number of mysteries involving Lost is
surprisingly small and mostly has to do with
character motivation. One could make the argument its because the writers
rarely explicitly spelled things out.
I actually think it has more to
do with the fanbase's expectations being so high that answers were rarely
satisfactory when that happened. We saw examples of this played out in Season 6
most notably when we finally learned what the whispers were all about. Hurley
and Michael explained it to the viewer a few episodes before the end, all but
spelling it out. And the fans were somehow more upset because to them
the solution was something they'd hypothesized on years ago.
I believe the reason this never
bothered me came in large part because of my experience as a fan of The
X-Files. As I've written in its own series of articles the show kept
building new layers to its mythology that often disregarded the previous ones
to the point that it was completely incoherent by the time we reached the
series finale. Chris Carter then decided to make the revelation of the
mythology the center of the series finale and it was among the most
excruciating two hours of TV I've ever watched in my life. It wasn't just that
all they were doing was restating the mytharc with no purpose to what was
happening in the present, it was that they weren't explaining how it all fit
together. It made the viewer wonder over and over: "How many years have I
wasted trying to understand this crap?" I certainly feel that way when I
run across 'The Truth' in reruns.
It would be glib to state The
X-Files is a masterpiece despite the fact it has an incoherent mythology
and Lost is one because it has a coherent one. To be sure Lost's
basic backstory is more comprehensible then The X-Files but there are
times even in the second half where you can see that the writers are making at
least some of it up as they go. But the reason Lost works is that always
remember that the characters came first and that the solutions to the puzzles
were only as important as they affected the characters. It wasn't a necessity
to enjoy Lost if you could figure out the mysteries, merely a bonus.
And that's going to be true the
next time I rewatch Lost. (I really have to get around to that, it's
been nearly two whole years.) Do I need to know that Jeremy Bentham finally
explains why there were polar bears on the island to enjoy it more? No. Will I
appreciate the episode more knowing it? Honestly, no. To paraphrase Locke at
the start of the series: I don't need to have a reason to know that certain TV
shows like Lost are masterpieces. Not everything needs an explanation to
be a classic.
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