LOST: THE REWATCH COLUMN: SEASON 5 EPISODES 3 & 4

Jughead and The Little Prince (S5, eps. 3 & 4)

Jughead (S5, ep. 3)

Richard: “My name is Richard Alpert. I assume you’ve come back for your bomb.”

Thoughts:

(Desmond’s mistaken belief that the ‘chest-shake’ had replaced the ‘hand-shake’ in society was soon soundly beaten out of him)

• Penny’s giving birth, making their son the fourth child of a major character on the show, and emphasizing the generational aspect of this saga, something I’ll mention again briefly below.

Desmond: “Look- right out there, beyond where you can see, there’s an island. And it’s a very special island. I left it a long time ago. Never thought I’d see it again. It’s called Great Britain.”

• Cute misdirection, writers.

• A trip wire in the jungle ensures that more of the extraneous castaways are blown to bits, reducing the group to just the regulars.

• The Others of the 1950s ambush Miles, Charlotte and Daniel with bows and arrows, indicating that they were the ones raining flaming death down on everyone in “The Lie.” Leading them is a young Eloise Hawking, who we saw last episode as the grey-haired monk/scientist/Angela Lansbury impersonator. On Rewatch we know that Daniel’s her son, and her first question to him seems to gain a little ironic weight with knowledge of her role in the events to come: “You just couldn’t stay away – could you?”

• And just like that…Bernard and Rose are gone. They vanish after the events of “The Lie” and won’t be seen again until season’s end.

• Penny brings up the question that was asked in the column for “Because You Left”: If Daniel appeared to Desmond years ago, in Desmond’s past, why didn’t the wild-eyed Scot remember that until he woke up two nights ago? It may have something to do with the fact that according to Faraday, Desmond is ‘uniquely, miraculously special.’ What does that mean?

• When Penny gives him that cool look as he’s leaving, the full weight of all the times that Desmond has run settles over things. That’s something I didn’t appreciate the first time through.

• Penny asks Des to promise her he won’t go back to the Island again. When he asks why he’d want to go back, she doesn’t answer. Is this because the answer should be obvious to Des (he’s always running off and leaving her, really)? Or is it because Penny knows something Desmond (and the audience) do not?

Locke: “Who are these people?”
Sawyer: “Well, gee, I didn’t have time to ask that, with Frogurt on fire and all.”

• Again: cute. Juliet, Sawyer and Locke have two Others captured at the same time that young Hawking is holding Miles, Charlotte and Daniel for questioning, creating a mirrored situation between the two on-Island groups.

Miles: “We just walked over a fresh grave.”

• Miles feels the sensation of a fresh grave beneath him – four dead US soldiers. He receives their dates and causes of death just by passing over them, again hinting that his while his powers may be death-dependant (he can’t ‘read’ the living), they are probably also time-related.

• The Others’ camp is again shown to be tents – specifically the commandeered tents of the US Army – further suggesting their hermit-crab-esque living philosophy (we’ve seen them force out two groups now , the US Army and Dharma, and in both cases they end up living in those groups’ prior ‘shells’).

• The first interactions between Daniel and his mother are tinged with irony. Her willingness to shoot him here at the first sign of provocation will obviously come into play again later in the season. Her disbelief at the idea of time travel is amusing, and it’s interesting as well. Both Richard and Ellie seem incredulous at the concept, and it calls into question their evolution on the Island (Richard’s especially). As of the 1950s, Richard appears unaware of the Island’s time-related properties. At what point does he discover them? When Locke first appears to him? Does this mean that, as of the 50s, Jacob didn’t know of the Island’s unique properties? Or that he wasn’t sharing them with Richard? How much, then, do the Others truly know about their Island?

Desmond: “Faraday–the university says there’s no record of him.”
Custodian: “Well, can you blame ’em? I mean, after what he’d done to that poor girl?”

• I’ve got very little memory of whether Daniel and Theresa’s story is explicated on later in this season. Why does Daniel experiment on her? Did she agree to it? Did she insist on it? Was he aware of the consequences? Did his own self-experimentation take place before or after hers?

And is it strict coincidence that this woman’s name is Theresa – the name mentioned in Locke’s vision of Boone (“Theresa falls up the stairs – Theresa falls down the stairs”), the name of a woman whose mind seems to be going up and down the figurative stairs of time?

I’m guessing that coincidence is exactly what this is, but if not, it’s an intriguing little connection and a hint that the show knew they would eventually reach this part of the story way back in Season 2.

• The fact that Oxford is apparently going out of its way to cover up Faraday’s association with them suggests that Widmore may have bought their silence.

Richard: “We didn’t start this, friend. Your people attacked us. You come to our island to run your tests, you fire on us, and what, you expect us not to defend ourselves?”

• The US Military has apparently opted to use the Island in order to test one of their hydrogen bombs – something they did with reliable frequency during that decade. Their appearance, and the details of that appearance, creates an interesting mirror-effect. The military’s arrival in the 1950s mirrors the freighter’s arrival in Season 4 to a large degree. Both are ships carrying high explosives and armed, trained men who invade the Island. And when we think back, we realize that this was true of the Black Rock, at least in part. That crew brought cases of dynamite to the Island, dynamite we’ve seen used twice on the show. Does this mean that we should expect some of the Black Rock crew to have been trained mercenaries/fighters? I’d imagine so.

Sawyer: “So who taught you Latin?”
Juliet: “Others 101. Gotta learn Latin–language of the enlightened.”

• When Juliet says that Latin is “the language of the enlightened,” it’s possible that she’s referring directly to the enlightenment: to thinkers like Locke and Rousseau, to scientists like Newton and Galileo. The Others have so far been portrayed as naturalists, as scientists, and as such this reference makes sense. It’s also possible that “the language of the enlightened” refers to the person speaking the language, as in Latin is the language that people who have been enlightened speak. We know that at least some of the Others are subjected to ‘treatments’ in Room 23. Is this how they’ve learned Latin well enough to speak it in conversation? Is this also how they’ve been ‘enlightened’? And is this ‘conditioning’ an unspoken reason for Juliet’s inability to convey even the simplest information about her time with the Others and their purpose? Because that inability is kinda infuriating to me.

Sawyer: “Are you crazy?! What were you thinking? Why didn’t you shoot him?!”
Locke: “Because… he’s one of my people.”

• Young Widmore’s impressive neck-snapping capabilities are showcased here to terrific effect, and as he makes good his escape, we see that Locke won’t shoot him just as he wouldn’t shoot the young federal officer who betrayed him in “Further Instructions.” Locke is weirdly non-specific about his killing code.

• We learn that Widmore was Daniel Faraday’s ‘benefactor’ off of the Island, helping to fund his research and to take care of the now-catatonic Theresa. This implies a few things to me: (1) Daniel is Widmore’s son, if not literally than certainly in the surrogate sense and (2) Widmore and Hawking may in fact be engaged in engineering the very “loop” that I suspect the castaways are trapped in. In fact, I suspect that Widmore and Hawking may have gone to the significant trouble we’ve seen them go through on the show thus far in order to ensure that this loop in time remains viable, semi-stable, preserved.

Why? I dunno. But it’s curious, is it not, that Widmore just happens to have Hawking’s number on file, and that this is now the second time that he has directed Desmond to people who are directly related to/integral for the time loop that the castaways have ridden throughout the first five seasons?

Richard: “Y–you answer to someone, don’t you? You follow a chain of command, right?”
Faraday: “Yeah.”
Richard: “Yeah, well, so do I.”

• Ah, but is that ‘someone’ Jacob? It’s left ambiguously unclear, and Jacob doesn’t seem like the sort of fellow to order mass killings (though he certainly could be – we’ve spent next-to-no-time with him). You know who DOES seem like the sort who’d be into some righteous bloodshed? The MiB.

Are the Others functional intermediaries between Jacob and the MiB? Does Richard serve, as some folks in the Rewatch discussion thread have suggested, serve as a kind of ageless referee/emissary for BOTH the Island’s mysterious ‘demi-gods’?

Jones: “Follow me? Their leader is some sodding old man. What, you think he can track me? You think he knows this island better than I do?”

• This might just be one of Locke’s most iconic moments on the show. I fucking love this line and the subsequent cut straight to a centered Locke casually scoping out the Others’ camp.

Locke: “How did you know Richard would be here?”
Juliet: “Richard’s always been here.”

• Up until now, Alpert’s apparent agelessness hasn’t been discussed within the show itself AT ALL. Alpert’s seeming-immortality was, up until this episode, almost totally speculative on the part of Lost’s audience. In Jughead we receive official confirmation that Alpert really is extremely long-lived at the least, and quite possibly immortal in some sense. There are a few things to note about the Intimations of Alpert’s Immortality: (1) We’ve so far seen Richard only within the bounds of the time loop that the castaways are trapped in. His ‘agelessness’ may be a side-effect of the loop itself, and may be limited to a specific period of time. (2) We’ll learn that Jacob “made” Alpert this way, indicating that the Island may have the power to grant people eternal youth, and suggesting that the legend fountain of youth may be related to the Island (remember that Florida, fabled site of Ponce De Leon’s fountain, is also situated near a Vile Vortice).

Great Ellie Line: “You may have Richard fooled, you can’t really expect me to believe that you, a British woman and a Chinese man are all members of the United States military.”

• Daniel instructs Ellie to bury the Hydrogen bomb, which she and the Others will appear to comply with (though why they simply stick it in an underground chamber, as opposed to sealing it off ala the Swan Station, is a mystery).

Richard: “I said… put the gun down, Widmore.”
Locke: “Your name is Widmore? Charles Widmore?”

• And with that we also receive official confirmation of Widmore’s past on the Island. Lost has become a true generational saga now, reflecting both the parents and children and the children of those children dealing with “ordinary” life struggles, as well as the apparent generational nature of the Island itself, and how its former children continue to squabble and struggle over this place.

• We learn that Desmond and Penny have named their child “Charlie,” presumably in honor of Charlie Pace, but also an echo of her father’s name. The designation, like most things on Lost, has a dual meaning – one side ‘light,’ and one side ‘dark.’

Richard: “Look, I… certainly don’t want to contradict myself, but… we have a very specific process for selecting our leadership, and it starts at a very, very young age.”
Locke: “All right. All right. What year is it right now?”
Richard: “It’s 1954.”
Locke: “All right. May 30, 1956–2 years from now–that’s the day I’m born–Tustin, California, and if you don’t believe me, I suggest you come and visit me.”

• With that, the time loop that Anti-Locke will create later in the season is completed. First, Anti-Locke directed Richard to give the ‘real’ Locke a compass, and instructing Locke to give it back to Richard. Locke does that here, handing it over to Richard and telling him when and where Locke will be born. The self-fulfilling prophecy has begun.

• Charlotte’s nose explodes, leaving her blood-caked and unconscious, and telegraphing the growing danger that those castaways left on-Island are now facing.

• Catch up on “The Little Prince” after the page break!