The Candidate (S6, ep. 14)

“Shout it aloud, do not hold back; lift up your voice like a trumpet. Declare to my people their rebellion and to the house of Jacob their sins. For day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God….Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists. You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high. Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard…Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.” – Isaiah 58:1-12

Jack: “James – we are going to be okay. You just have to trust me.”
Sawyer: “Sorry, doc. I don’t.”

Trust isn’t an easy thing to give someone, even when we’d like to think that it’s something that we’re capable of granting. Trust is essential in any community, whether it’s your home, your neighborhood, your office, your government, or a ragtag group of Castaways forced to live together on a weirded-out Island. Trust depends on faith, and faith can be false or true, shallow or deep, earned or unearned. To survive in this world, we need to learn how to trust, who to trust, and above all, we need to learn the value of that trust. The above passage from the Book of Isaiah has much to say about the quality of faith and trust that the God of the Bible demands – a faith that inspires each of us turn to our fellow man and help them in their hour of need, that inspires each of us admit to our sins and “let go” of them. It demands Communion from us, in the simplest, most human sense of the word. It’s that Communion – a sharing of trust and resources and basic compassion – that will allow the Castaways to repair their broken selves, and perhaps, repair the “Broken Walls” that seem to exist between the off-Island and on-Island universes.

Before we launch into this week’s typically-ramshackle ramblings, I’d like to take a moment to say a sincere thank you to everyone who reads this column every week. It’s largely because of your responses and comments that I find this gig so rewarding, and I’m happy to announce that when Lost leaves the airwaves (so to speak) I’ll be sticking around on Chud’s main page. Exactly what I’ll be doing will remain a mystery for now since, like Lost, I enjoy leading people around all willy-nilly in the hopes of some sort of eventual revelation. Here’s what I will tell you: it’s going to require your participation, and it’s going to be a lot of fun for me (and, I hope, for you). If you’ve enjoyed my ramblings on this show I think you’ll be pleased. If you haven’t enjoyed them, I can promise you renewed pain and discomfort. Special thanks to the Marvelous Eileen Bolender, who works each week to take these ramblings and get them up on the site for you to read, and to Chud’s Benevolent Despot, Nick Nunziata, for allowing me to hang around and harangue you all for the foreseeable future.

And since I’m in blatant self-promotion mode, might I suggest that you shoot me an email and express your interest in my to-be-self-published book on the philosophy, theology, literary references and themes of Lost? You will not be bound in any way by doing so, and you’ll make a frazzled, sleep-deprived obsessive very happy.

Enough of this. On with the show!

Thoughts:

• Congratulations, Lost. You have wrecked me. Not content to limit the carnage to one, or two or three people, The Candidate swept Sayid Jarrah, Sun and Jin Kwon, and (probably) Frank Lapidus off of the game board and into death’s arms.

I haven’t been this angry with my television since the 2004 election.

But there’s “I’m so angry ‘cause you’ve let me down,” and then there’s “I’m angry ‘cause you’ve frankly reminded me of my emotional susceptibility to fictional characters on a television show designed, ultimately, to sell soap.” My anger falls definitively into the latter category. In other words, I’m still very much enjoying this ride despite the show’s apparent intentions to kick my feelings around like a soccer ball at recess.

As the final season winds its way to the finish line (already? Really?), the general sense I’m getting is that some folks are continuing to love this ride, unabashedly, without reservation. Some folks are still enjoying it, but with reservations. Lastly, some folks have soured thoroughly on the whole enchilada. That’s as it should be. Art is subjective, after all, and that’s one of its greatest strengths.

Maybe this isn’t working for you. Maybe this whole season is a wash, and Lost is done for you. That’s just fine by me. As I’ve said before, a story is what it is, and you either dig it or you don’t.

I mean, let’s be honest: this is a television show. It’s not a cure for cancer, and it isn’t Infinite Jest (i.e. an entertainment so viscerally, mercilessly, perfectly entertaining that it renders us a nation of drooling Anthony Coopers, unblinking and transfixed). Whether it’s “great television” or “a disappointment” at this point is subjective and infinitely arguable. What it is, inarguably, is ambitious. With a capital A.

And that’s to be celebrated, goshdarnit.

You don’t have to like Lost’s final season to admire its ambition – and you don’t have to give up any critical faculties in order to do so. Yes, there’ve been missteps, mistakes, and decisions made that you, hypothetical-and-nonspecific-reader, may be up in arms about. But (and this is just me and my humble opinion talking here) its okay that Lost is imperfect. It’s okay that Sun and Locke end up at the hospital at the same time, despite that apparently not working out chronologically for some reason or another. You can always find mistakes in art. There’s nothing profound or earth-shaking about that. It’s like finding Nicholas Cage in a questionable film. You don’t question it, you just accept it. Art, like Nic Cage, is imperfect. And art, like Nic Cage, sometimes enjoys punching people in the face while wearing a bear costume.

…What was I saying?

Oh. Right. The essential point is this: I won’t try and talk you out of deciding that you don’t like Lost anymore. But I will encourage you to try and enjoy it while it lasts, warts and all. It’s going to be a while until something as interesting as Lost comes down the network pipeline again.

Locke: “I know you.”

• Crossed consciousnesses continue to get sizable play in this episode. Locke’s line here is obviously designed to remind us that off-Island Locke “knows” Jack more deeply than his brief, knife-retrieving airport adventure might suggest. Throughout this episode it feels as though Locke is coming close to an Oceanic realization, close to understanding just why it is that he knows Jack Shephard – but he perhaps intentionally denies that Oceanic connection the same way that he denies Jack’s help. He resists Jack’s offer of “Candidacy” for a new procedure because, as we’ll learn here, he’s punishing himself.

This is a powerful idea, and it’s one that Lost conveys powerfully well over the course of this episode. What phrase have I been peddling, here and yon, back and forth, since this whole darned column began? Physician, heal thyself. Locke can’t heal, emotionally or physically – in any way – until he allows himself permission to “let go.” Ironically, it’s Jack that underlines this for us at the episode’s end.

• Jack’s been taken to Hydra Island, where Sayid patiently awaits his return to consciousness. Notice that theme popping up here again – Jack literally awakens, arising from unconsciousness, and that act mirrors the ways in which he spends this episode slowly “awakening” to the coincidences of the off-Island universe, and to the “destiny” he senses on the Island.

• Sayid seems more himself in this episode than he has in any other. Is it strict coincidence that his gun-cleaning stance so clearly recalls his prayer stance from seasons’ past? Recall the last time you saw Sayid knelt like this.

Sawyer: “No way I’m gettin’ back in those cages.”

• Widmore intends to place Sawyer and Kate back in the Bear Cages that they inhabited back in Season 3. Sawyer seems….nonplussed about returning. Remember the Bear Cages? Listening to Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof talk about it, you’d have thought that those episodes of Lost represented their direst hour. But I disagree. I mean, I’m not going to argue that the six-episode “pod” of Season 3 episodes that featured Sawyer and Kate in Bear Cages represented some high-point in the show’s narrative. But what I will argue is that the Bear Cages represented a moment wherein the show’s fascination with imprisonment, self-determination, Skinner Boxes, and manipulation was made extra-explicit, in ways that have deepened the thematic power of Lost’s central narrative. Given how Jack’s arc has progressed this season, I suspect people are going to get some added value out of his Shark Tank Incarceration scenes.

• Sawyer’s line here speaks to the advancement of the Castaways in general. They’re tired of being caged – in many senses of the word. In that way, they share something in common with the MiB.

Widmore: “You may not believe it, but I’m doing this for your own good.”

• Widmore’s actions in this episode seem to put him back on the side of the apparent-Angels, as he attempts to keep the Smoke Monster from reaching the Candidates. His brand of heroics allows for saving Kate’s life, but it’s made clear that he doesn’t “need” her. Why doesn’t he need her? Because her name’s been crossed out. We have no clue at this point just why it is that her surname was taken out of competition on the cave walls (and we get confirmation from Sawyer that her name was on the walls – something that we didn’t see firsthand when he and Anti-Locke were down there), but it seems as though you can lose your Candidacy without dying in the process.

Jack: “That was three years ago… you just remember that?”
Bernard: “Of course I do, Jack.”

• Jack goes looking for clues to Locke’s surgery aversion and runs into good ol’ Bernard, who has been so capably played by Sam Anderson over five seasons. I’ve always loved his character, and it’s good to see him popping up here. Like Charlie and Desmond, Bernard acts somehow “enlightened” during his conversation with Jack – he gives the impression of someone who knows more than he’s letting on, someone who has, perhaps, experienced a dip in the waters of Oceanic feeling. Are Rose and Bernard married in the off-Island universe? Has the combination of True Love and Tragedy (Does Rose have cancer?) rendered him capable of seeing that he and Rose have found “the good life,” together on the Island? Or is Bernard simply “aware/awake” enough to know that he should help the Good Doctor continue on his road?

LOCKE: “If we move right now, we can break your people out, run for the plane, and be off this island before Widmore knows what hit him.”
JACK: “They’re not my people. And I’m not leaving the island.”

• In an episode that’s chock-a-block with interesting snippets of dialogue, Jack’s response to Anti-Locke here is the most interesting to me, personally. This is a huge, seismic shift in Jack’s character. Through six seasons of this show, the Castaways have without a doubt been “Jack’s people.” He led them like Moses, attended to their woundings and their crises. Shephard watched over the Castaways like a Shepherd watches over his flock, and that hyper-attuned concern led to quite a lot of suffering, both for himself and for the Castaways as a whole. Jack’s heart has always been in the right place but he’s been the equivalent of a driven-to-the-brink helicopter-parent.

And it’s through Jack, primarily, that we as an audience can wrestle with and ultimately understand – even appreciate – Jacob’s hands-off philosophy. Jack’s always been a hands-on guy, but his journey over the past two seasons has been about letting go – about realizing that his desire to fix everything himself is both self-destructive and just plain destructive. We’ve taken a good hard look at Doesoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground this season, and I’d like to bring your attention back to that novel’s narrator, who insists that human beings will do the opposite of what’s “good” for them simply to assert free will. Humanity will choose to do the opposite of what it’s told, because it’s in our very natures to want to shake off the “chains” of expectation and command. Jack’s experiences this season are backing this up in a major way (we’ll get further into this a little further down in the column).

Jack: “Why should I trust you?”
Locke: “Because I could kill you, Jack. Right here. Right now. And I could kill every single one of your friends. And there’s not a thing that you could do to stop me. But instead of killing you, I saved your life. And now I want to save them too.”

• That’s a terrible reason to trust someone. You should trust me because I haven’t tried to kill you?

And yet, that line of reasoning is perfect for what Anti-Locke’s true game plan really is. His words are a mixture of reassurance and menace, and he’s painted himself overall as someone who won’t hurt the Candidates – for now – but shouldn’t be trusted worth a lick. That’s a perfect combination to spur the Castaways into trying to abandon him.

Sawyer: “Feel like we’re runnin’ in circles?”

• That’s because you are, Sawyer. Lost’s narrative is circular on any number of levels (like an Ouroboros, one might say), from the fact that it’s characters spend three seasons getting off the Island, then working to get back, then attempting to leave again, to the way in which they “loop” backward through time to the 70’s, to the ways in which the characters’ arcs loop, taking them back to the people they were before allowing them to move on again. It’s clearly intentional, and it’s impressive for the way in which the journeys of the characters, circling and “reincarnating,” evolving or refusing to do so, also reflect the structure of the show itself, and the circular nature of the narrative.

SUN: “I have your ring.”

• Sun and Jin get a quiet moment together in the eye of the storm, just before fate (otherwise known as the merciless pen of Lost’s writers) separates them forever. Sun’s comment here reminds that, if I’m recalling things correctly, she also has Charlie’s Dexter Stratton ring. I guess she’s never going to get a chance to deliver it to Claire, who’s probably too crazed to care about it at this point anyway.

• And can I take a moment here to address those of you bemoaning the fact that “all” Sun and Jin have done is search for each other over the seasons? I don’t get this complaint. At all. To my eyes, Sun and Jin Kwon have been one of the best-realized and most inspiring married couples I’ve ever seen on television (Zoe and Wash from Firefly also spring to mind, as do each of the couples on ABC’s genuinely-terrific Modern Family). I don’t particularly care that they weren’t given much else to do, because I felt (and feel) that what they were attempting to do – reunite and finally spend five frickin’ minutes together – was so universally-relatable. On an Island full of Polar Bears, Smoke Monsters, talking Hurley Birds, mysterious Hatches, and age-old secretive battles between opposing philosophical forces, the first and last thing on my mind would be “where’s my wife?” It would NOT be “what is the meaning of these strange occurrences?” Why? Well, because while I’d certainly be interested in that weirdo Smokey thing that keeps flitting around and killing folk, if only in the how-do-I-avoid-dying-at-the-hands-of-sentient-smoke sense, all I’d truly CARE about would be ensuring that the person I love is safe. And with me. Because who’s going to make my life worth living on the weirdo tropical Island? It ain’t no bear, that’s for sure. As always, your mileage may vary.

Great Hurley Line: “Annnnd…we’re dead.”

• Smokey and his Bandits attack Widmore’s Hydra compound, and if you were hoping for a drawn-out or protracted battle at this point you were disappointed. I never tire of seeing the Smoke Monster rip through Redshirts.

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