LOST: BACK TO THE ISLAND: SEASON 6 EPISODE 9

The Doctor: “This is worthless.”

• Lost is fond of double and triple meanings in its dialogue, and this line is no exception. What, exactly, is the Doctor really referring to here? On the surface, the answer is the necklace itself, which appears to be gold, and thus at least somewhat valuable. Unless the necklace is actually made up of Iron Pyrite then, it has some monetary value.

It’s really faith itself that’s represented in Isabella’s cross – a faith that Ab Aeterno openly questions from multiple angles and in multiple ways. This continues to be my favorite aspect of the season so far. I like that Lost paints the act of faith as something hard-won and difficult to maintain. I love that “faith” in this narrative is not reducible to one creed, or religion, or culture, but is instead a kind of universal struggle for meaning and hope and acceptance. Richard and Ben’s episodes have illustrated this struggle beautifully.

•  In desperation, Richard struggles with the Doctor and kills him when the man’s head slams into the table – a moment that might echo the moment where Desmond bashed Kelvin Inman’s head against the rocks. Despite Richard’s claims to the contrary, there’s little that’s accidental about the panic and the raw anger that we see in Alpert’s movements. Perhaps Richard didn’t “mean” to kill the Doctor, but he certainly seemed determined to do whatever it took to get that medicine.

• Speaking of our favorite Absentee Scotsman, this episode strongly resembles that now-classic Penny/Desmond installment, “The Constant,” in terms of its romantic yearning and the emotional reunion we witness by episode’s end.

• Even if Isabella had lived, there’s no way to know whether the Doctor’s medicine would have saved her. How much was Isabella supposed to take? Is the medicine administered by syringe? Mixed with water? We don’t know, and neither does Richard.

• The portion of the Bible that Lost visually references in this episode is Luke, chapter 4. Visible during a brief shot, the following, famous passage can be seen: “No prophet is accepted in his own country.” I could spend all day tying that particular quote to Lost’s narrative in a bunch of different ways. Instead, I’ll point out the thematic similarity between this verse and the supposed meaning of Jack’s Bai-Ling-procured tattoo: “He walks among us, but he is not one of us.”

More interesting to me is the verse that comes almost directly before this one – a verse that’s contained in Luke 4, and which I believe holds the philosophical key to the redemption of these characters in their personal struggles and misfortunes. I’ve been pushing this particular theory from the beginning of my re-watch, and I see that Jeff Jensen over at EW seems to agree with me. What’s the key? Three words: “Physician, heal thyself.”

• The priest who comes to hear Richard’s confession is an odious-seeming fellow named Father Suarez. I’m not a Catholic, but I’m fairly certain that Priests do not go around denying God’s absolution to people, even when those people are admitted, accidental (?) murderers. Suarez appears to see the potential profit in Richard from the moment he notices Alpert reading an English Bible, and so I can’t help wondering whether Richard has been “set up” here in the sense that Suarez has intentionally removed Richard’s hope in God’s forgiveness so as to “soften him up” and make him amenable to enslavement. After all, if Richard were assured by a man of God that he was forgiven, would he have agreed to be a slave?

• It’s difficult to tell if this priest has “good” intentions or “bad” intentions. He seems not at all troubled by Richard’s impending death and (according to this greasy, suspicious fellow at any rate) damnation. Yet, by delivering Richard into slavery he saves Alpert’s life and gives him a chance to do penance. Is this a “selfless” act? Or does the money that this man receives for every acceptable slave that’s found among the almost-damned serve as his sole motivator? Is it a little of both, some white, and some black? I’d like to say that it is, for thematic reasons, but to be honest, this guy seems like the sort of fellow to sell out his own mother for a bucket of chicken and a skin magazine. Notice that this particular man in black shares a similar Modus Operandi with the Island’s Man in Black: both leave Richard alone and jailed, contribute strongly to his sense of hopelessness and his desperation, and both offer him a way out of his chains that serves their own purposes, not his.

• To escape death, Richard enters voluntarily into slavery, and finds himself brought to the Island. If this sounds familiar, it should. Dogen similarly entered voluntarily into “slavery,” by entering into Jacob’s service and coming to the Island.

Whitfield: “This man is now the property of Captain Magnus Hanso.”

• Richard is bought by one Captain Whitfield, on behalf of Captain Magnus Hanso – the owner of the Black Rock, and the ancestor of Alvar Hanso, the founder of the Dharma Initiative. Captain Whitfield’s name, as Back to the Island commenter “Capnnarcolepsy” points out, is a possible derivation of Widmore. Whit for Wid, and field for more, or moore. What I like about this possibility is that the name Whitfield literally means “White field,” while Widmore’s surname, though not as easily “translated,” can be seen to mean “Wide boggy marsh,” implying a kind of degradation in the family line. If Widmore and Hanso both had ancestors aboard the Black Rock it would explain in part how both characters might have discovered the Island – by attempting to find the place that these men vanished to.

• It’s never been clear whether the Black Rock intended to sail to the Island or not, but from the evidence on-hand in this episode, it seems the answer’s no.

• Some folks have pointed out that we saw what appeared to be the Black Rock floated calmly on placid waters during the first scene of Season 5’s “The Incident.” How is it then that the ship arrives on the Island on a prototypical Dark And Stormy Night? There are a few possibilities: (1) They f*#!ed up, forgot their continuity, and/or decided to rewrite it after the fact. Given that Lost’s resident continuity-man, Greg Nations, was a co-writer on this episode that seems unlikely. (2) the ship we saw in Season 5 wasn’t the Black Rock, but was instead an earlier/later ship, or (3) the ship WAS the Black Rock, and was anchored some miles from the shore during a calm morning/afternoon. That night, a storm/Tsunami came through and blew the ship straight to the Island, ala The Tempest (the name of one of the Dharma Stations, and the name of Shakespeare’s play about a magical Island – more on this below, and you can find more about these connections in past Rewatch Columns).According to the latest podcast, option 3 is the correct one, and it makes thematic sense. Like Prospero in the Tempest, Jacob seems to have used a storm to bring a ship to “his” Island.

• Some folks have also asked how likely it is that the Black Rock could smash Tawaret’s statue by smacking into it. I think it’s pretty likely, actually. Consider: Tawaret’s statue has been standing by the sea for what may amount to centuries. Wind-erosion and salt have presumably both been eating at the stone for that entire time. Add to this the fact that the Island appears caught in a Tsunami/Tempest, is being battered by multiple waves the height of the statue itself, and is struck at it’s top by several tons of solid wood and metal, and you have a recipe for statue-shattering that’s based firmly in physics.

And setting aside the practical reality of this moment, the moment’s symbolism is, for lack of a better word, nifty. We’ve seen that Jacob and the Man in Black’s philosophies have been represented by black and white stones, and we’ve seen that the statue of Tawaret is “Jacob’s statue,” in that he makes its foot his home. So, symbolically, the image of a large Black Rock smashing Jacob’s weirdo house is both fitting and kind of awesome.

• Speaking of good ol’ Tawaret, remember that this particular Egyptian goddess was seen as “one who protected against evil by restraining it.” That’s essentially the function that the cork analogy serves – restraining evil in order to protect against it.

• It’s the little things that make me a happy camper. Little things like the fact that the same tree we see here leaning up against the side of the beached Black Rock s still present, and in the same position, in the “present.” See this screencap from Season 1:

• Captain Hanso apparently died at some point between the smashing of the Tawaret statue (the destruction of an “idol”?) and the ship coming to rest in the middle of the jungle, buoyed by what looks like a wave of tremendous size and power. Killing Hanso off-screen is somewhat disappointing to me. Why do that?

Whitfield: “We are shipwrecked in the middle of the jungle. We have no fresh water, and limited supplies – and there are only five officers left.”

• To men of Whitfield’s day and station, these slaves are Others – not quite human, and not deserving of the same chance for life that he believes he deserves. I’ve talked at length about how ideas of Others and Othering suffuse the show on multiple levels, and if you’d like to refresh your memory just type “Others,” “Sartre,” “Lost” and “Chud” into your search field. You’ll be rewarded by far too much verbiage.

• Whitfield’s casual slaughter reminds me of the variety of ways in which human beings can react in extreme situations, and it makes the castaways from the initial Oceanic look like an army of relative Gandhis next to this cold-blooded bastard. I wondered for a brief moment whether Whitfield had become “infected,” and was acting on Smokey’s orders by killing the crew, but it seems unlikely. And this line of thought lead me back to something completely tangential, but also potentially interesting: Remember Nathan, the tail-end survivor with the bathroom difficulties who was suspected of being an Other during the events of “The Other 48 Days”? What if he kept stealing off into the jungle because he’d been “infected,” or was chatting with the Man in Black?

• Before Whitfield can kill Richard, the Smoke Monster appears, in yet another effective “attack sequence.” Of all the Smokey attacks so far, this is probably my favorite. It plays like a run-aground Jaws, with Smokey slithering about around the outside of the ship as we hear and catch brief glimpses of the carnage it causes.

• I found Richard’s slow struggle in the belly of the Black Rock to be riveting stuff, thanks again to Carbonell’s dedicated performance. I alo found it thematically-relevant. Jacob does not appear to Richard or help him in any way – at this point in Lost’s narrative, the Island’s resident “God”/Scientist figure firmly believes that people should be left to make their own decisions without any interference at all from him. To steal Locke’s line from season one, “Struggle is nature’s way of strengthening it.” Like the titular Moth from the Charlie-flashback episode that line comes from, these castaways have been left by Jacob to work their way free of their prisons/cocoons/bear cages in order to see them emerge as stronger people on the other side. Looked at in a certain light, this is essentially Natural Selection. The strongest survive on the Island, and the weak inevitably perish (and notice that there’s a conspicuously-CGIed butterfly that floats by the camera in this episode, again reinforcing the idea of beauty emerging from struggle).

• The sight of a boar eating the bodies of the dead is chilling, stomach-turning stuff. Lost is never afraid to go for a good gross-out moment, and I’ve always enjoyed that about the show.

• Isabella’s “ghost” appears to Richard, only I think we’re all in agreement that it’s actually the Man in Black assuming her form. Isabella tells Richard that they’re in hell, and it would seem that, in “scanning him,” the Man in Black has read Alpert’s mind in the same way it seemed to have read Eko’s.

• I really like many of the individual shots in this episode. One example: the way that the camera films only the writhing “top” of Smokey’s body as it makes its way down the stairs and into the ship’s hull.

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