Collision (S2, ep. 8)

Ana Lucia: “I guess you could say I’m one of those people that’s just better off alone.”

Ana Lucia’s flashback and on-Island breakdown represent a new apex of Feel Bad Television for Lost. The previous holder of Most Depressing Episode was “Homecoming,” otherwise known as The Episode Where Charlie Vomits Into A Copier Machine And Steals Winston Churchill’s MacGuffin ‘Cause He’s A Sodding Junkie. Congratulations, “Collision.”

With that said, it’s a pretty great episode.

Thoughts:

• Ana and her therapist have been meeting for four months, another instance of the Numbers (possibly Apophenia) at work.

• Sayid and Eko throw down in the jungle and the inner 80’s action flick fan in me is sated once more.

• What I feel most for Ana Lucia at this point in the re-watch is pity. And I take back some of what I said about her emotional range – her face when she says “I know what I’m doing” is something to watch.

• Jack and Ana Lucia are mirror twins in many ways, and here we have another: Where Jack has deep-seated daddy issues, Ana’s got deep-seated mommy issues. There’s a sitcom in here somewhere, I just know it.

Where Jack does what is arguably the right thing and reports his father’s drinking, it ends up causing a deep rift in their already-shaky relationship.  Conversely, when Ana does the wrong thing and murders a man it ends up causing a deep rift in her relationship with her mother. Except that typical concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aren’t necessarily what you’d imagine them to be on the Island, where Locke is asked to execute his conman father in order to win leadership.

• Ana Lucia’s mother is played by Rachel Ticotin, also known as Melina in Total Recall.

Hurley: “There’s no way you’re hitting it that far…”
Charlie: “Hurley – the woman’s on bloody steroids.”

• Golf makes it’s long-awaited return to the Island. Watching the castaways casually interact, without the threat of Space/Time collapsing all around them or without menacing and theatrical Pretend-Hillbilly Ninjas with itchy neck-snapping fingers breathing down their necks or whathaveyou, is fun. There’s a playfulness to the scenes that helps levy some pretty depressing storytelling on the Tailee/flashback side of things. 

Rose: “Jack, nice to see you out of the Hatch – you could use more sunshine.”

• Good old Rose continues to reinforce the notion that a ‘good’ life on the Island is a life lived in nature. She also reinforces the feeling that the Hatch, with its darkened corridors, ominous humming, enigmatic button, and as-yet-undiscovered history of violence and self-assisted suicide, is not a ‘good’ place to be.

• I’ve suggested that the Hatch stands in to some extent for the subconscious, and the deeper into S2 that we get the more this metaphor seems slightly more plausible. There’s a dreamlike quality to the Hatch – a purposeful unreality.
 
• Charlie mocks Hurley’s wealth, and Hurley off-handedly dismisses the subject completely. He places no value on it, finds it ‘cursed,’ and on this Island there’s no need for it. He’s freed himself from a desire for most material things (although food remains a nemesis). This would arguably be an enlightened state of sorts, and if we’re feeling less spiritual and more agnostic, it could arguably be a state of freedom. Does this perhaps explain Hurley’s ability to find Jacob’s cabin? To see ‘ghosts’? Does the fact that he seemingly overcomes his bad luck when his fortune is taken posthumously explain why Jacob visits him post-Island, and not in Hurley’s younger years?

• Sayid seems karmically doomed to be forever beaten and tied up. He even seems to realize this, wondering out loud whether Ana Lucia is meant to kill him.

• Eko carries an unconscious Sawyer back to Jack and Kate, and they take him to the Hatch, where Eko and Locke meet for the first time. Sitting at the computer terminal, Locke looks much like the box company employee he used to be, and again, there’s the feeling that something about this Hatch is wrong.

• Note that the clue in Locke’s crossword puzzle is “Enkidu’s Friend,” and that the answer is “Gilgamesh.” Gilgamesh is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, surviving written epic in human history, and it contains the story of two heroes who sound, in some ways, much like Eko and Locke. When they meet, one black, one white, there’s a sense of wary recognition.

Jack (to Kate): “Nice job. I never learned the whole ‘whisper in the ear thing’ in Med school.”

• The Kate-Jack-Sawyer brouhaha continues to simmer. At the moment, its Kate and Sawyer 1, Jack 0.

• This is probably an inanely obvious observation to make, but the more I listen to Locke and Jack argue-talk, the more that they start to sound like two halves of the same man, arguing with himself.

Eko: “What do you want? Peace? Revenge? Justice? And you are going out with all these guns.”

• Once again it becomes clear to Jack that he has yet another connection to this Island. No other 815er is as bound up with so many other people on the Island. He met Desmond and Ana Lucia off-Island, pre-crash. He crashed alongside his half-sister, who has given birth to his nephew, his dead father landed on the Island and now appears far less dead.

• Then there are the more tenuous connections. Jack is connected to Sawyer through Sawyer’s encounter with Christian, pre-flight. Jack is connected to Shannon and Boone through their father, who he chose not to save on the same night that he saved his future wife’s life. Are there others? Does this mean anything? Given Jack’s role as the ostensible hero of the show I’m inclined to think that yes, it does mean something. Will we discover that Jack and Jacob are related?

Ana Lucia: “I feel dead.”

• Ana losing her child seems to foreshadow what’s to come in the narrative regarding mothers, the unborn, and the dangers of pregnancy – another mirror. Violence, visited on mother and unborn child echoes violence visited on mother and unborn child.

Sayid: “What good would it be to kill you if we’re both already dead?”

• Sayid espouses a kind of purgatorial fatalism with Ana – the enlightenment of the self-condemned. He understands Ana better than she appears to understand herself.

• Vincent the dog is clearly an agent of unmitigated Evil. Walt was his owner, and was kidnapped by the Others. Shannon became his owner and was shot. Michael becomes his owner and ends up being manipulated into murder. He’ll bring Charlie’s heroin Mary statue to him, like the veritable Snake in the Garden… I half-expect that when he’s off-screen he’s crafting crude death-traps to eliminate the rest of them.

• The reunions of Bernard and Rose, and Jin and Sun, are very sweet.

• The reunion of Jack and Ana is obviously less so (although there’s a wonderful moment where Ana lingers in the background, shyly, as Jack and Sayid exchange wordless looks). They stand across a gulf of space, changed people since they saw each other last. Like an alarming number of people on the Island, what Ana Lucia wants is to die – to be punished. And on this Island, a Solaris-esque place where what you want can be made manifest, she’ll get her wish.

You can catch up on what you’ve missed by visiting www.LostTheRewatch.blogspot.com, where I’m in the process of posting all of the re-caps written so far on one easy-to-navigate blog. You can also visit the Lost: Rewatch thread here at Chud, where a phenomenal group of people dissects and expands upon these rambling thoughts in a fun and enlightening way every day.)