LOST: BACK TO THE ISLAND: SEASON 6 EPISODE 8

There are three Lost-significant books resting atop Sawyer/James’ bureau: Watership Down, A Wrinkle in Time, and Lancelot. All three novels have been seen on the show before – and all were seen being read by Sawyer. As for their potential significance to Lost, here are some quick facts:

A Wrinkle in Time deals with time/space distortions called “tesseracts,” which allow people to travel vast distances in the blink of an eye, involves the struggle of children against a formless entity called “IT,” who wants to control their thoughts, and casts the struggle between IT and those children as a struggle between God and evil.

Watership Down is about bunnies, as Sawyer’s described it. More specifically, it’s about a ragtag group of rabbits who flee their home warren to find someplace new and safe to live. The story of their journey mirrors the journey of Moses and his people in Exodus, the Black Rabbit in the book recalls the Smoke Monster, the rabbit Fiver’s visions recall Desmond’s “flashes,” and the dictatorial leader of the enemy warren in the book resembles a pre-confessional Ben Linus.

I rambled on about Walker Percy’s novel “Lancelot” in the Rewatch Column for Season Two’s “Maternity Leave.” Feel free to wade through that column, or just read this excerpted summary:

The novel concerns the title character’s theological/philosophical quest for “The Unholy Grail” – i.e. true sin, true evil. Its main character has been jailed for murdering his wife and three others, and the near-entirety of the novel is a diatribe from his perspective. “Lancelot” operates as a dark mirror to the title of the book we see Jacob reading in the Season 5 finale – Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” This is not an accident

O’Connor and Percy have been compared and contrasted more than a few times, both of them ‘Southern Gothic’ authors fascinated by themes of sin and redemption. In the book “Peculiar Crossroads,” author Farrell O’Gorman examines the two authors and discusses their continued influence (considerable), their similarities (also considerable) and what O’Gorman considers to be their essential ‘Christian Existentialist’ outlook

The title of O’Connor’s novel is a reference to the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit Priest/Philosopher/Paleontologist/Geologist (!!!) credited with inventing the term “Omega Point” to describe “a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe appears to be evolving.” This is, in the view of O’Connor and Teilhard, a moral, spiritual, and intellectual rising up toward a kind of universal consciousness (another Lost reference to the idea of a universal mind, Philip K. Dick’s “VALIS,” will be popping up later on down the line). You can read up on a ‘secular’ version of Teilhard’s Omega Point by taking a look at Raymond Kurzweil’s “The Singularity Is Near.”

From the (very very) brief encounters the audience has had with Jacob, it would seem that the Island’s resident Christ/Ra-figure is attempting to achieve this convergence in some as-yet-unexplained way. As he tells the Man In Black, “It only ends once. Everything that happens before that is just progress.”

By contrast, the title character of “Lancelot” could stand in for the Man In Black and his argument that “it always ends the same.” Lancelot believes that the Omega Point that the universe is evolving toward is not a higher level of consciousness, and is not the cooperative model envisioned by Teilhard, but is instead a state of primal selfishness. These two opposing viewpoints set up another mirror between the seasons

“We should not mistake Lance’s proposal of a new ethical absolute as Percy’s own. It serves, if anything, to confirm Lance’s damnation. All his talk about stern morality and knightly intolerance is nihilistic to the core. For it is based on the graceless conclusion that only such moral supermen as himself can put an end to the universal buggery. Anyone finding themselves encouraged by this courtly righteousness should remember that as Lance slits the throat of his wife’s lover he feels nothing except his neck itching.” – Author Ralph Wood, in a 1977 review of “Lancelot”

• It’s a nice touch that Charlotte, who’s an Archaeologist, unearths Sawyer’s carefully-buried past by digging through his drawer. That said, it’s really weird that she goes digging through his drawers like that.

• Kate was the focus of many of my favorite scenes in this episode, which is something that typically isn’t the case. What is the deal with Claire and Sayid? Should we just assume that they’ve given in to their darker impulses, and that this whole “infection” business is just a metaphor, essentially? Is there more to it? Sayid’s passive, not-quite-disinterested stare as Kate’s about to have her throat slit is chilling. The Sayid we’ve known would never have let that happen. Surely there’s more to his inaction than just nihilism? The uncertainty that the show seems to have intentionally created around this issue is starting to tick me off. It’s hard to know whether we’re supposed to feel bad for Sayid (because he’s not in control, the “infection” is), feel disgust toward him (because if he is in control, then he’s simply stopped caring) or something else entirely. And it’s hard to get dramatically invested in this without that knowledge – at least, it is for me.

• What’s your verdict on Anti-Locke’s intervention? Was it genuine? Did we just see the Man in Black lose control of his recruit? Or did we see Anti-Locke conning Kate, scaring her with Claire so that he could step in and save her, earning a little trust, or at least a moment of time to speak with her (and what was Dogen’s warning? If you allow him to speak, it is too late?)? Just what is it that he says to Claire privately? Does he threaten her and demand she apologize? Or does he tell her that he needed to slap her to make it look convincing to Kate, and that he’s grateful to her for trusting in him even though he mislead her (because, I imagine he’d say, he was really just trying to give Claire something to hold onto – and that something really had to be burning hatred for a group of (in this case) relative innocents, because hate seems to be what has defined this man for a long time)? It really seems as though it could be either, and I like that O’Quinn looks as if he might be genuinely rattled by Claire’s sudden desire for some murderdeathkill.

Sawyer’s discovery of the Ajira bodies eerily mirrors Locke’s discovery of the Dharma Purge mass grave. Is this meaningful? I suspect it might be. We still don’t understand why it was that the Purge was eventually ordered, nor whether Jacob actually ordered that Purge. Is it possible that the Man in Black was responsible for that act of mass homicide? It’s implied (though left agonizingly open) that Anti-Locke killed these people, not Widmore (there’s no blood around the bodies, no bullet holes, and no obvious cause of death, which to me says “Death By Smoke Monster”). If the Man in Black orchestrated the Purge, what does this in turn say about the rest of the orders that the Others have been carrying out? Do the Others function as go-betweens for both Jacob and the MiB? Were they duped into thinking that their orders were coming from Jacob/the Island? Or did Jacob actually order the Purge?

Zoe: “I’m the only one left.”

• I’ve seen a bunch of comments from people comparing “Zoe” to Tina Fey. I think that this says something semi-interesting about how we process our entertainment: There’s apparently room in our collective head for just one woman with dark, near-shoulder length hair and bookish-yet-stylish glasses at a time. And if you think about it, Really Famous People never have an equally Really Famous Person who looks substantially like them. If there’s another, lesser-known actor who looks somewhat like the Really Famous Person, that less-known actor will always “look like the Really Famous person” because there’s only room in our heads for one of these people at a time.
 
If you’re a likable/talented actor, but aren’t yet Really Famous and there’s another actor who is basically indistinguishable from you in appearance and/or name, neither of you is getting Really Famous in the Hanksian or Nicholsonian sense of the term. This is the Dermot Mulroney/Dylan McDermott Dilemma. If you’ve got someone else who you kinda-sorta look similar to (or share a too-similar name with), but not Mulroney/McDermott similar, then both of you get to be slightly more famous than the other, but only for brief alternating periods of time, and never at SuperFamous Levels. This is the Applied Rule of Thomas Jane/Josh Lucas Dynamics (see also: The Pullman/Paxton Parallel).

• Charlie’s terrible brother Liam shows up at the police station, looking for his brother. This is in sharp, surprising contrast (so far) to what we’ve seen of Liam before on this show. I’ve talked about Liam before, and what a tremendous douchenozzle he is. That Liam would never fly from Australia to LA just to bail his brother out. Which makes me wonder – is Liam there because he loves his baby brother? Or is he there for a more selfish reason?

• As seen in the picture at the top of this column, Sawyer takes a good look at himself in the mirror and doesn’t like what he sees. So he smashes that thing good. I’ve talked your ears off about the whole “mirroring” thing on this show, and I’ve pointed out that in each episode a character takes a look at himself in a mirror or reflective surface, which in turn serves as a possible visual metaphor for the themes of reflection in the show, the “mirroring” that takes place in it, and for the way in which the off-Island and on-Island “universes” reflect each other. Here, we’re looking at Sawyer as he shatters the glass of his reflection in the literal sense, and then spends the remainder of the episode struggling to open himself up to his friend, Miles. Like Jack in “Lighthouse,” Sawyer needs to smash something literal in order to reevaluate himself. This recalls everything I’ve been talking about with regard to Sartre, the concept of the Other, Aldous Huxley’s notion of Good Being, etc., et al. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just pop “Lost,” “chud,” “rewatch,” “recap,” and any of the above terms into your Google search field. You’ll be swiftly rewarded by an avalanche of my purpled prose.

• Sawyer talks to Zoe, the apparent “last survivor” of the Ajira flight. But it becomes clear that, like Sawyer, she didn’t arrive on the plane. And with that, we get STILL MORE new characters, which are fine if they’re going to be cannon fodder for whatever conflicts are coming, but less fine if they’re going to take time away from the characters we already know and care about. I suspect it’ll be the former.

Anti-Locke: “Have you ever had an enemy – someone that you needed to hate? Very powerful, isn’t it? Claire was devastated without Aaron. She needed something to – something to keep her going so, I gave her something to hate.”

• And that, to bring things back to my thoughts from earlier in the column, seems to be the crux of the Man in Black’s M.O. He runs on negative energy, and he encourages others to run on it as well. Which is why I’m so baffled by the way he can seem so open and understanding. It’s led me to think a little bit about his mindset, and I’ll get into that down below.

Anti-Locke: “You referred to me as a dead man. I am not a dead man. I know what you’re feeling, Kate. I know what you’re going through.”
Kate: “And how do you know that?”
Anti-Locke: “Because…My mother was crazy. A long time ago, before I looked like this, I had a mother just like everyone. She was a very disturbed woman. And as a result of that I had some growing pains. Problems that I’m still trying to work my way through. Problems that could have been avoided, had things been different.”

• Anti-Locke sounds genuinely emotional as he doles out a few pieces of his back story, and we’re left wondering about the significance of this. First, for a show that’s chockablock with Daddy Issues, not much attention has been paid to the Mommy Issues bouncing around. And maybe we should be paying attention, because while the Bad Dads have been hogging the spotlight, the Bad Moms have been popping up all over the place. There’s Kate’s mom, who turns her in and starts out willing to testify against her daughter. There’s Boone’s mother, who cuts Shannon off from the family fortune entirely. There’s Walt’s mom, who takes Walt away from Michael entirely so she and her new husband can move three times in something like ten years, from Amsterdam to Italy to Australia, working their way up the law firm ladder and assumedly leaving Walt to be raised by a succession of well-paid nannies. There’s Locke’s real mother, who’s mad as a hatter, and works with Locke’s con-artist father in his bid to nick Locke’s kidney. And then there’s Eloise Hawking – a woman who drove her son along a path that she knew would kill him. There’s also, as you know, the whole issue of Island maternity, and the fact that mothers who get pregnant on the Island end up dying. When Anti-Locke tells Kate that his mother was crazy, it could just as well be the “real” John Locke talking. I don’t mean that literally – the Man in Black was speaking abut his mother, not John Locke’s. But remember that John Locke’s mother WAS crazy. And remember what it was that Anti-Locke/the Man in Black shouted at that creepy/mysterious Peter-Pan-like boy: “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”

These weird shared character traits make me think that John Locke and the Man in Black were a “perfect fit” in more ways than we’re aware of just yet. They’ve both got that (don’t tell me what I) can (‘t)-do attitude, they both had crazy mothers, they both suffered a loss of some portion of their freedom. Anti-Locke, like Season 1’s Classic Locke, is an alternately spooky and empathetic figure. A self-appointed leader with issues he’s suppressing that have hinted at an inner instability. They’re spiritual kin in a way.

• Who was the Man in Black’s mother? Will we see her this season? Will she be a mirror of Eloise Hawking, who pushed her son Daniel Faraday down a road she knew to end in death? Will she instill in the young Man in Black an inflated sense of “destiny”? Will she tell him that he’s special? She would if I were writing this show. But I ain’t.

• I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that Anti-Locke chooses to talk about mothers with Kate, who’s still reeling emotionally from her quest to reunite Claire and Aaron and all that’s come with it. By circling that topic, he’s touching on what matters to her most now. He’s recruiting her, or so it seems. And his words at the end of the scene – that Aaron has a crazy mother now too – suggest that Anti-Locke thinks Claire isn’t fit to raise Aaron, or that he wants to plant that idea in Kate’s head. Because what have we seen Kate want more than anything? To be a mother. And what would she probably want more than anything? To be a mother again. Can Anti-Locke offer that to her?

• As I’ve already said, I’m struck by what appears to be Anti-Locke’s sincerity in his interactions with the castaways. This could all be an act, a mask he wears. But it’s just as possible that it’s not – that he’s sincere in wanting his freedom, in not caring about the Island, and in his feelings in general. This doesn’t mean that he won’t lie and sacrifice and do what must be done to achieve what he wants, but it does seem to mean that he’ll be well-mannered about it. And that brings me to my weekly dose of Things You Probably Don’t Want To Know This Much About:

“The worst corruption is a corrupt religion.” – Reinhold Niebuhr

“Anarchism is therefore not only a libertarian protest against unjust power. It is also a spiritual protest against corrupt religion….Of course the anarchist distinguishes himself from the Christian saints by implementing and corrupting his spiritual vision. It is nevertheless important to recognize the spiritual source of his politics and to know that it is a reaction of sincerity to hypocrisy. A utopian religion that seeks to eliminate all power from society is the curious stepchild of a religion that has given power a too uncritical justification.”

“Anarchism is, in short, a disease. It is the psychosis of infantile idealists who do not know what kind of a world it is in which we are living, what human nature is really like, and what the necessities of government are…”  – Reinhold Niebuhr, Catholicism and Anarchism in Spain

• Reinhold Niebuhr lived through harrowing times. He witnessed firsthand the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. He has been called a “Christian Realist,” in that he attempted to engage with the reality of the world around him as he saw it – a place with the capacity for infinite cruelty and horror, and a place with the capacity for imperfect Grace. If I can be so bold as to try and sum up some of his deep thoughts with a couple of shallow sentences: He did not expect the world to evolve naturally to a state of perfection, nor did he expect to see the Second Coming. He believed that mankind was responsible to itself, and capable of the creation of a better, if still irrevocably-imperfect society.
 
If you’ve never heard of Niebuhr, I’m not surprised. We tend to value volume over veritas when it comes to theological debate as a general rule, and when someone’s got bullhorns, power chords, a laser-light show and crazy costumes (Stryper!), you don’t pay a lot of attention to the guy with the acoustic in the corner (Niebuhr!). But Niebuhr’s worth paying attention to, and his books are readily available for your head-consumption through Chud’s Amazon.com link. Might I recommend the Essential Reinhold Niebuhr?

I pulled the quotes above, not in an effort to somehow tie Niebuhr’s philosophy into Lost (Niebuhr’s never been mentioned in the show), but because it nicely sums up my feelings at this point about Anti-Locke, aka, the Man in Black, aka, Smoke Monster, aka Peaches. It also helps me to sum up how I feel about Jacob and his Others. What we’ve learned about Peaches so far suggests a righteousness to his crusade. He’s spooky, prone to murder and manipulation, but the dude’s clearly feeling wronged. Deeply, deeply wronged. His anger feels sincere – a reaction to what he paints as Jacob’s hypocrisy. And his response – his choice regarding that anger – is a kind of Anarchism. He provokes the killing of the island’s “God”/”Christ”/”Aslan”/”President”-figure, destroys or converts that figure’s loyal followers, plunges Island society into chaos, plots to abandon abandon that society and dismisses Jacob’s “meaning” and value entirely, endorsing a self-centered outlook focused on getting what he wants most – personal freedom.

His fervor in this is messianic; quasi-religious. And that desire to murder Jacob, to destroy the Others, to abandon the Island – to eliminate all of Jacob’s power from society – seems to grow directly from the pseudo-religious culture of Jacob and the Others, a society that inarguably gave power “a too uncritical justification.”

I’d like Jacob to be revealed as an essentially benign/benevolent guy at the end of this show, but there’s no denying that the people who served him were a corrupted group. In the allegorical sense, the Others were Jacob’s priests, but they weren’t angels. There was Ethan, the glassy-eyed hillbilly murderer of Season 1 (who, inexplicably, was never that bizarre and scary again). There was Pickett, the sadistic dude with a thing for Sawyer. There was Tom, who may have been Friendly in surname, but had no problem blowing up a boat with three people on it and stealing a boy from his father. And then there’s Ben (sung to the theme song of “Maude”).

You get the picture. Anywho, the point is that the Others exercised (and have continued to exercise) their considerable power on the Island without justification, explanation or apology. Their “religion” trumps any rights that the castaways might have in civilized society. This means that when Walt gets hauled off into the dark by greasy hobos in a souped-up bathtub Michael is left to imagine the absolute worst. Can you put yourself in that character’s place for a moment? Your boy was taken (Right! Out! Of your! HANDS!) by Deliverence-level-creepy men to god knows where and they’ve blown up your boat, not appearing to care one way or the other whether you die (maybe because they knew that Sawyer, Michael and Jin were candidates, and that they couldn’t die yet?), and left you in the middle of the ocean.
 
That’s some hardcore scary right there and Jacob’s Others do this kind of stuff all the time. Based on the evidence we’ve seen Anti-Locke isn’t wrong in his anger – the Others were a corrupt group controlled by a power-mad man associated with Jacob in some unspecified way, and Jacob’s machinations have resulted in bad ends for many people. Accountability is seriously lacking on this Island, and the “priest” caste seems to have gotten entirely out of hand. The “real” John Locke pointed this out back in Season 3:

Ben: “Why are you so angry, John?
Locke: “Because you’re cheating – you and your people! Communicate with the outside world whenever you want to, you – you come and go as you please…you use electricity and running water and guns…You’re a hypocrite! A Pharisee. You don’t deserve to be on this Island. If you had any idea what this place really was…you wouldn’t be putting chicken in your refrigerator!”

Ben and Co. have become decadent and corrupt, and the worst corruption is a corrupt religion. But despite the reality of this hypocrisy, Anti-Locke’s anger may ultimately be the anger of an infantile idealist – one who has soured on the promise of Jacob’s plan (and who is most likely the cause of his own suffering). I don’t doubt Anti-Locke’s sincerity, but I do question his sanity. His anger at the way in which the Island’s “God” figure has conducted himself has already prompted him to murder/help murder an extraordinary number of people, and its driving him to do something which we have been lead to believe will have profound consequences: leave the Island.

The Island isn’t “just” an Island, as we’ve heard Anti-Locke claim. The Island is something more than that. John Locke – the real John Locke – told us so. The Island is a place where miracles happen. We know this to be true because we’ve seen those miracles with our own eyes. On the Island, the lame walk, the sick are healed; men are made “immortal,” people visit the past, glimpse the future, experience visions. None of this means that the Island is “good,” or even worth saving. But it does mean that the Island is clearly not “just” an island. And leaving it will have consequences, consequences that Anti-Locke does not know or care about. Like the Anarchist, he has not considered (or does not care) about the practical realities of his actions. He’s too caught up in the mindset of revolution. If the Island is “necessary” in some way, and Jacob’s plan has a goal that’s meant to benefit someone, change something, avoid some catastrophe, then Anti-Locke’s actions have jeopardized that plan.

Which is to say: uh-oh.

YET-MORE LOSTY SCRUMPTIOUSNESS AFTER THE PAGE BREAK!