Something Nice Back Home & Cabin Fever (S4, eps. 10 & 11)

Something Nice Back Home (S4, ep. 10)

“I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is: who in the world am I? Ah, THAT’S the great puzzle!” – Alice in Wonderland

Usually, I try and link the introductory picture for the column to some semi-iconic and/or meaningful moment in the episode itself. And while the above picture is certainly meaningful to the episode, marking as it does Jack’s willful slide into substance-abuse and weirdo paranoia, I’ve mostly decided to feature it because it’s a pretty funny shot of Matthew Fox.

To sum up: substance abuse problems are not funny. But Jackface? Always hilarious.

Thoughts:

• There’s a lot of back-and-forth in Something Nice Back Home between the characters. Instead of dwelling on that, let’s go over the highlights in the larger narrative and mythology. Someone else can go over the nuances of the Kate-Sawyer-Jack-Juliet “love quadrangle.” I’m all about the ooky-spooky ‘spirits,’ the literary allusions, and the cheap jokes. That’s what I’d be getting paid for here, if I was getting paid. Which I’m not.

• Jack’s reading to Aaron from Alice In Wonderland, a book that, along with its “sequel,” “Through The Looking Glass,” has been referenced on this show numerous times. The chapter Jack reads from is entitled “The Pool of Tears,” and it’s the chapter in which Alice spends some time experimenting with psychedelics – err….I mean, “cake” and “drink.” As a result of all of Alice’s size-changing, she ends up very tiny, and comes close to drowning in her own tears, ala Stevie Wonder. There are echoes of Jack’s emotional journey in Alice’s predicament: like Alice, Jack can’t seem to make himself ‘fit’ in his new life, no matter how much he works at it or takes tugs from his own special ‘drink me’ bottle. Like Alice, Jack comes perilously close to drowning in his own sorrow. Finally, the passage that Jack reads seems to comment directly on the sorts of identity issues that I’ve argued are at the heart of Lost. “Who in the world am I,” Alice asks in “The Pool of Tears,” and that question is one that the characters on this show have been forced to confront (or have willfully chosen not to confront) as they struggle to go from the caterpillars they’ve been to the moths they long to be.

• Why didn’t I pick a shot from this scene in which Kate’s ass is displayed like a float in the Thanksgiving Day parade? That’s an excellent and thoroughly valid question. The answer is that any such shot I could have grabbed would have obscured the painting that’s hanging in the hall. I like it for asthetic reasons alone, but it also reminds me of Christian standing in the surf just after Jack rescues Boone from drowning in Season One. And what was the name of that episode, you ask? Why, it was “White Rabbit” – a name that directly ties in to the Alice in Wonderland allusions of this episode.

• The shot of Miles finding Rousseau and Karl buried in the Island soil gives me a little gooseflesh. It’s one of the most gruesome moments in the show from my perspective.

• Jack’s sudden appendicitis in this episode mirrors the tumor that Ben developed in Season 3. I’ve talked a lot about the way that Season 2 mirrors Season 5, and Season 4 has been mirroring Season 3 in similar ways. In a sense, Season 4 inverts many of the narratives of Season 3 – those who loathe Ben Linus are suddenly working for him. The striving heroism Jack displays throughout Season 3 becomes a mirrored helplessness in Season 4. By the end of Season 3, Jack is near-insane with the desire to get “his” people off the Island, a madness that’s counterbalanced by a similar desperate desire to go back once he’s left. By the end of Season 4 we understand the reasons for that, more or less, and both states of desperation reflect each other. Jack’s appendicitis, in this light, seems like another of these arguably-intentional reflections. Rose and Bernard comment on this more-or-less directly when they talk about Jack having “offended the gods.” It does seem as though, like Ben, Jack was struck ill when he disobeyed the will of “the Island.” In that sense, Ben and Jack are mirroring each other.

• Adding potential fuel to that fire is the scene showing Jack examining a patient’s X-ray – an X-ray that shows a tumor in roughly the same location as Ben’s tumor – mirroring that event subtly.

• Christian appears in this episode with the apparent intention of freaking Jack way the f*** out. He arguably succeeds. In this first of two brief appearances, he does nothing more than stand up and walk away from Jack in the background. Chud Message Board commenter “Farsight” has intelligently argued that Christian is a benevolent ‘apparition,’ but despite the intelligence of those arguments I’m not inclined to agree with them. In this episode, and especially in the next episode, “Christian” comes off as a mischievous and untrustworthy. At this point in time I don’t believe that Christian is benevolent at all. I’ll argue that point in greater detail further down in the column.

• Say what you will about Hurley and Jorge Garcia’s performance – I’m personally a very big fan, and the scene between he and Jack in this episode is suitably heartbreaking. Garcia ably renders Hurley as a man who’s visibly slipping, even as we the audience know that there are good (or at least actual) reasons for his behavior and his paranoia. His warning to Jack (delivered via ‘ghost’ Charlie, so who knows if its to be believed or trusted) is that Jack “isn’t supposed to raise him.” That’s an enticingly ambiguous statement which is also spookily specific. I assume it refers to Aaron, who Jack is currently raising alongside Kate. The question of just who is supposed to raise Claire’s boy has come up several times during the show, and there’s a definite sense that Aaron is somehow very important to the show’s overarcing story (It’s been theorized that Aaron is actually Jacob, but I’ll leave that brain-bender for another time). Jack displays a lot of uncertainty and vulnerability regarding his ability to be a father in this episode (and indeed, I’d argue that Matthew Fox does some of his best work on the show during these scenes) and it’s possible that ‘Charlie’ is preying on those insecurities. It’s also possible that Jack truly isn’t supposed to raise Aaron.

• Like Michael (and most, but not all, of the rest of the Oceanic Six), Jack is looping back to reengage in past questionable behavior. He’s begun reliving and reinstigating past mistakes in a manner that’s again comparable to concepts of reincarnation. His marriage proposal to Kate is a perfect instance of this: we see him propose only after he’s been shaken by his visit with Hurley – after he’s been told that he “isn’t supposed to raise him.”

• I love Jin. So very much. We discover that Charlotte can speak Korean (I don’t know that why/how she was able to do this was ever explained, or that it needs to be) and Jin uses that information to play badass enforcer on behalf of his friends. There’s no real reason for this screencap, except that I loved the seemingly-casual way in which Jin informs Charlotte that he’ll break Daniel’s fingers.

So, let’s talk a little more about Christian (but not too much more – see the column below on “Cabin Fever” for more thoughts on our favorite ‘ghost’): the second time he appears to Jack in this episode, it’s for just a moment – just long enough for him to say “Jack,” before one of Jack’s colleagues comes in and interrupts. It’s enough to seriously rattle Jack’s cage, enough for him to aask his colleague for a ‘script for Klonazopan (spelling?), the same drug he was taking for his appendicitis on the Island. Was that Christian’s entire purpose in showing up at that moment? To ensure his son would have a mental/emotional breakdown?

And what about that smoke detector? It goes off just before Jack sees Christian. Is that a hint that the Smoke Monster and the apparitions are connected? Or is it a red herring, designed to drive people like me insane? If it’s the former, it’s very clever. If it’s the latter, it’s clearly working.

• Miles seems kind of wigged out, and/or fascinated by, Claire in this episode. There are a number of hints to suggest that something has happened to Claire, but it’s not clear what that ‘something’ is. Claire mentions that she’s ‘stopped seeing things’ at one point in the episode, and we know that she mistook Sawyer for Charlie when he rescued her from the wreckage of her Dharma, Dharma cabana (the hottest spot north of etc, etc). We know that Miles appears to communicate with the dead, and his interest in Claire strongly suggests that she may be dead. But that’s, like, super-wacky as far as theories go. After all, if Claire is dead how is she hauling Aaron around? Consider:

While Miles’ gift centers around the dead, the revelation that he lived on the Island as a baby suggests that his gift is really about time in some way. It suggests that what Miles can sense are past echoes, in the way that some people claim to see auras.

So what might that say about Claire? It might suggest that the explosion somehow altered her ‘aura,’ and that Miles can sense that. It might simply be that, suddenly, Miles feels something ‘off’ about Claire. He seems eager to get Aaron out of her hands at one point, and he lets her walk off into the night with Christian, a man he’s never seen before.

• And what about that? Why does Christian appear now? At first, his interest seems centered around Aaron. When Claire wakes to find him by the fire he’s cradling Aaron like a grandfather would (which makes sense, given that Aaron is his grandson). But after Christian leads Claire away they leave Aaron behind. Which is, suffice it to say, extremely frickin’odd, yes? Leaving Aaron behind leads to his being taken off of the Island, ensuring that, for at least three years, Claire won’t be able to raise him, something that Richard Malkin – professional psychic/fraud – warned was of the utmost performance (only to then reverse himself of course. Lost, you make my head hurt). Why would Claire abandon Aaron? And why will she appear so unconcerned about him in the next episode? Something happened to Claire when the rocket went off – something that we’ll learn about in just under a month’s time.