LOST: THE REWATCH COLUMN: SEASON 5 EPISODES 5 & 6

This Place Is Death & 316 (S5, eps. 5 & 6)

This Place Is Death (S5, ep. 5)

Locke: “Richard said that I was going to die.”
Christian: “Well I suppose that’s why they call it sacrifice.”

Look at that – I blinked, and the premiere of Season 6 is suddenly two weeks away. We’ve got some ground to cover. Let’s beat feet.

Thoughts:

• When Sun tells Ji Yeon “Anyong” before she hangs up, I half-expect an Arrested Development cameo.

• Is that Hurley’s voice reading The Numbers off as one of the French folk tries for a signal? Will Hurley’s end be his beginning, and will he prove to be ‘the cause of his own suffering’ by starting the transmission that will bring him to the Island, yet another echoing iteration of “Locke’s Compass” – the creation of another loop? Recall Hurley’s words from much earlier in the season: “Loop, dude, loop.” Silly dialogue? Or key to the show?

• By Rousseau’s timeline, her crew arrives toward the end of Dharma’s reign, approaching the Purge.

• Rousseau is PREGNANT. She’s, like, Claire-Pregnant. And in some ways, the two characters mirror each other. Young Rousseau is a lot like Claire – sweet, open, intelligent, fiercely protective – and if Claire had been left alone like that, with a bunch of hairy-eyeballed Others circling around trying to nab her baby, she might’ve started building elaborate death traps sooner rather than later. Come to think of it, Claire’s been gone a while now. Will we discover she’s been living alone on the Island all this time? Her appearance in “Jacob’s” cabin raises the possibility that she’s dead, but having her vanish beforehand makes that possibility less likely. Both women seem somehow affected by the Island when they arrive on it – Rousseau experiences sudden, seemingly-intense pain.

Montand: “First a boat, then a helicopter. Next thing you know, he’ll be talking about a submarine.”

• HAHA! See, it’s funny because there actually IS a submarine. Ah, slightly-undercooked irony. The Island is not a fan of unintentional comedy, as we’ll shortly see Montand’s arm depart his body.

• Jin wants to try and find his camp after seeing a young Rousseau, which is kind of weird at first, until you realize that he’s got NO idea what’s going on. If it were me, I’d probably head back to my camp too.

Montand: “This is what happens when you bring women. She’s probably off chasing butterflies.”

• HAHA! …I’m unusually inclined to see this dude’s arm get ripped off.

• We see the Monster rip/blow a tree out of the ground – something it hasn’t done in a while (Season 1 maybe?). Is it ‘geysering’ up from underground, blowing the trees from their roots? Or is it pulling them up from above? The Monster also makes a new noise for us: it’s like the sound of someone knocking at a door, or the ticking of an enormous clock.

• The wall we see isn’t the actual Temple, its apparently just part of a wall surrounding that yet-to-be-seen place. The crack in the wall that Montand is pulled into, and into which the other French folk follow him, is I think the same place where Locke and Ben will enter later in the season – Smokey’s apparent lair.

• I’ve talked before about Rousseau’s apparent inconsistencies – the ways in which the story she tells in Season 2 do or do not match up with what we see in Season 5. The truth of the matter is that at this point, having arrived here after several seasons, I don’t feel the need to try and make these two things fit exactly. Most of what Rousseau says, and most of what we see, does line up. Are there weird areas? Yes. But I’m disinclined to go into great detail about them. Take a look at the first few pages of the Rewatch Thread if you want – the topic’s amply discussed.

• The hieroglyphic markings around the crack in the wall haven’t been translated accurately to my knowledge. According to Lostpedia, some of them match the symbols in the Wheel room, meaning that they’re meant to stand for “resurrection.” There’s also the symbol for shelter (Ben calls the Temple a sanctuary at one point).

• Montand’s arm has decomposed, but it’s unclear how much time has really passed in Jin’s flash. I’d guess that it’s been a few weeks at the least.

• The scene between Rousseau and Robert is phenomenal stuff in my humble opinion. I can absolutely buy Rousseau going more-or-less batty as her crew starts turning into Pod People and a mysterious Korean blinks in and out of existence.

• So what’s happened to Robert and the boys? My money was on some kind of Room 23 ‘rehabilitation,’ where they were all brainwashed into being Others. But Room 23 isn’t under the Temple, and we’re specifically shown them going down into it, implying that whatever happened down there is linked to their Pod People behavior.

• The good of these segments far outweighs the bad for me. We get just enough of Rousseau’s experiences to get us salivating, and that’s really enough from a ‘whetting the appetite’ standpoint – but it’s in places like this that I miss the show’s longer seasons. With 22 episodes to churn out instead of 16, more of Rousseau’s story would likely have ended up in the mix.

• James and Jin’s reunion is sweet. It’s pretty amazing to me how organically the character of Sawyer/James has evolved from Season 1 up to this point.

• Charlotte’s fluency in Korean comes up again. Is it possible that she worked in some capacity for Paik Industries before joining Widmore? We know now that Paik and Widmore are golfing buddies. If Paik were aware of Widmore’s interest in exotic animal collars of Tunisia, he might have brought the collar that Charlotte found to Widmore’s attention. Utter idle speculation on my part.

• Ben and Jack reveal their plan to go back to the Island as Sun reveals her intent to blow the top of Ben’s head higher than an Indiana tornado. This news does not go over well. While some folks complained that the return to the Island took too long, I’m really appreciating the sense that trying to get these people to cooperate on anything at this point is like trying to herd cats.

• Dan agrees that it makes empirical sense to try turning the Wheel in order to stop the flashes, but points out that bringing people back to do the same thing ‘leaves science behind.’ I’m fascinated to see how Lost resolves some of the questions about faith that its let flower over the course of the show. The end of Season 5 reveals Locke’s faith to have been seemingly-tragic (though we shouldn’t count out a reversal of fortune for him), and while Lost draws liberally and openly from spiritual/religious sources, there’s typically something seemingly-ominous about the signs and portents we’ve seen and sensed. Faith, in the context of this show, can be dangerous – it can be a weapon.

Hurley’s mother admonished him in “The Lie” that “Jesus Christ is not a weapon,” but that’s exactly what Locke becomes over the course of Season 5. He walks a Christ-like path of anointment, trial, sacrifice, death and resurrection, all for the apparent purpose of killing one man. Jesus Christ is a weapon in the wrong hands, both in real life and, more subtly, in this show’s Locke-as-savior narrative.

• Charlotte collapses and starts spouting the gobbledygook, talking in Korean to Jin. She warns him not to let them bring her back, and that “this place is death.”

And in a sense, this place IS death, Underworld. We’ve seen it hinted at, time and again.  A place guarded by Cerberus the Smoke Monster, where unseen unearthly voices haunt the trees. Anubis, Guardian of the Dead, represented in the Temple, “Underworld” spelled out in the Swan Station hieroglyphics, the ‘ghosts’ of the dead interacting with the living, a place from which there is no easy exit or entrance. That the Island echoes the concept of mythological Underworld is no accident, I don’t think. I believe that what Lost is hinting at, and may make explicit next season, has to do with the Island being an inspiration for many cultures’ ideas about the afterlife and ‘other realms,’ such as Atlantis, Fairie, Utopia. And in another, more literal sense, Charlotte’s dying and the rest of them are headed there in a handcart, so of course this place is death to her.

• Ben’s van reads “Canton Rainier,” an anagram for “Reincarnation.”

• I love the way that Ben slams on the brakes and gives Jack and Sun a good verbal lashing. I have no idea whether to believe that Ben is being truthful about what he’s had to do. I’m still not clear on whether the agent we’ve seen trying to drug Sayid and Kate is Widmore’s or Ben’s, but I seem to recall that it’s Ben who sent them. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate his claim, but still.

Charlotte: “I know more about ancient Carthage than Hannibal himself.”

• Ancient Carthage was located in the same area that we saw Charlotte working in when we first met her – what’s now Tunisia. We know now that Tunisia is also the apparent location of a wormhole in space/time – one that appears to lead from the Wheel in the Island straight to the Tunisian desert.

Charlotte: “Turn it up…I love Geronimo Jackson.”

• Charlotte knows where the Orchid is – because her consciousness has returned to the point in time where she was a child on the Island? Geronimo Jackson makes its first appearance on the show in a while courtesy of Charlotte’s dialogue. Fittingly, the band was introduced in Season 2, which Season 5 is mirroring.

• Having the Orchid ruins vanish just as Juliet says “what are the odds that this thing would be here?” is a little cutesy, but it’s smart writing as well. The characters establish their sense of place through locating the Orchid, which Locke has already visited. Without that structure, the group would have had to have stumbled around and randomly into the well. Showing Locke the Orchid orients him (like a compass, one might say) to find the well in a logical way. What do you suppose the structures surrounding the well are supposed to have been?

Charlotte: “Then, when I got back to England and I asked about this place, she’d say it wasn’t real – that I’d made it up.”

• There’s another echo of the Narnia series, from the lips of Charlotte Staples Lewis. It’s as though Charlotte’s spent her adult life looking for the right wardrobe – the one that would take her back ‘home’ to a land that adults pretend not to believe in.

Locke: “You….What are you doing down here?”
Christian: “I’m here to help you the rest of the way.”

• Locke descends into the belly of the Island via the well, echoing his descent into the Swan at the start of Season 2. Once again he has his leg injured, an echo of the way he found himself hobbled while digging out the Swan. This time around the injury is worse than ever – the bone sticking straight through his leg (I know its fake, but geez).

Christian appears to Locke down there, as Locke nurses his godawful broken leg near the same spot where Dharma will one day build its ‘silly experiments’ chamber for the Orchid.

• Christian has a habit of lugging old lamps around with him, and that both the cabin and the Wheel room were shown to have these lamps prior to him appearing.

• Christian’s demeanor with Locke is, again, spooky and the opposite of benevolent to me. Interestingly, he gives Locke Ms. Hawking’s name and location, tells him that all of Locke’s friends must come back together, and impliedly agreeing that Locke is going to die, and that it’s what he/the Island wants.

Locke has become the sacrifice that the Island demanded.

• Christian directs Locke to the Wheel and tells him to ‘give it a little push,’ but also tells him that he ‘can’t’ help Locke up. Is this because he isn’t able to physically touch Locke, as a ‘ghost’? Is it because he’s not allowed to touch Locke, according to ‘rules’ similar to Ben and Widmore’s? In a sense, Christian’s attitude in that moment is the distillation of Locke’s philosophy in The Moth: ‘struggle is nature’s way of strengthening us.’ So is Christian’s refusal actually a kind of (really, ridiculously) tough love? Or does ‘Christian’ simply not want to help him?

I suspect that Christian actually can’t help Locke, either because he’s physically unable to, or because there are ‘rules’ preventing him from doing so. So how exactly is Christian helping him the rest of the way? I’d argue that it’s by encouraging him. The Island or, more accurately, whatever force it is that’s been communicating with Locke, is Locke’s Constant, in more ways than one. Mostly, the Island has never left Locke, has always encouraged Locke, has emphasized to him that it thinks he is ‘special’ and that he has a destiny. In other words, it’s been the father that Cooper never was, the mother that Emily never was. It’s given him legs where his ‘real’ father took them away. It’s given him purpose – something he’s wanted and hungered for his entire life. Are there many groups easier to use than the abjectly-grateful?

• Check out the “316” recap after the page break!