What They Died For (S6, ep. 16)

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” – Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor

Locke “Maybe this is happening for a reason. Maybe…you’re supposed to fix me.”

Six years ago, out walking across town with my then-girlfriend now-Lovely-Wife, we came across an enormous bus stop ad for a new show on ABC. “I saw a commercial for this,” she said as I peered skeptically at the poster. “It looks like something you’d like.” I’ve never told her this (hi, honey!) but I was unconvinced. The guy from Party of Five? A TV show about people stuck on a desert island? How interesting could that possibly be?

That questions been answered many times over for me over the course of Lost’s six year run, and What They Died For serves as yet-another example of the show’s wide-armed ambition and capacity to weld Deep Thoughts with pulp fiction. In many ways, it represents the culmination of much of what Lost has been saying since the beginning. It’s an hour of television that plumbs the depths of characters that have been admirably explored and shaded in appropriate grays, that makes explicit some of its larger themes, that celebrates the kind of “What the hey, let’s toss a polar bear in there” mentality that made the show so weirdly distinctive to begin with, and does it all of this with an economy, a narrative propulsion, and a sure, steady hand with the rather steep emotional hills contained herein.

Here is Communion made literal, sacrifice made willingly. Here, with 2 ½ hours left to go, is Jack’s fateful choice made. We all knew (or suspected) it was coming, that Jack would take this step. In the end, the decision and what followed felt spare and quiet – a foregone conclusion rendered poetic by its unavoidability and its silences. This is a point (not the point) that the whole show has been building toward – a point wherein, depending on your point of view, Jack’s need to fix things either transcends it’s often-petty, daddy-issue-driven origins or succumbs completely to them.

Because, here’s the thing – there’s TWO AND A HALF HOURS LEFT TO GO (had I mentioned that?). What They Died For knocked away what are arguably the most pressing pieces of character mythology and left us with a feature film’s worth of story to go. What the heck happens now? And how do we reconcile the fact of Jacob’s involvement in the lives of the Castaways (to whatever extent, since that’s still entirely ambiguous) with the notion that this is a “good” guy who is doing the “right” thing by having Jack take over for him?

Well, there’s always the possibility that we can’t. There’s the possibility, with one (giant-sized) episode left to go, that Jacob is wrong. We may discover that the Light doesn’t need a guardian, or that it needs to be guarded in a much different way. We may discover that Jacob was wrong to want to guard the Light – wrong about doing whatever it took, including mass murder, in order to ensure its safety and continued life.

Or we may discover that the cost is worth the reward. We may discover that, ultimately, protecting the Light is necessary, and that sometimes horrific acts and the constraint of free will are tools used by people motivated by an ultimate good, and that this kind of morally gray area is reality; that sometimes good people do bad things for good reasons, and vice versa.

When we first watched Jacob flitting around interacting with the Castaways in Season Five, he was engrossed in the book “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” by Flannery O’Connor. More than ever this book seems like a hyper-deliberative choice. Some of O’Connor’s favorite subjects were the cost of redemption, the flawed nature of “good,” the violence that comes before and after moments of grace, and the fundamental, existential lack of truth in this world.

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.” – Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

I’ll be quoting O’Connor throughout this piece, potentially helping to illustrate what may be the show’s philosophical/ethical “justifications” for Jacob’s actions, and potentially just finding an excuse to run some wonderful quotes with serious applicability to Lost. 

Despite this, the column overall is surprisingly light on references to Apocryphal works, dead Philosophers and the rest of my usual topics. The writers dropped the heavy stuff in a few places, but overall this felt far more geared toward emotion and character work than cute allusions. I enjoyed that about this episode, frankly. As we reach The End I find myself just wanting to give myself over to the experience of this episode and meet it on its own terms. I consider that success.

What They Died For allows Jacob to answer the question of why the Candidates are there, and may even serve as a prophecy for what’s to come – letting us know ahead of time what it is that some of these still-kicking people have chosen to die for. But it seems to me that Jacob’s answer to question that Kate poses isn’t the whole answer, or even the real answer at all. The real answer to the question of what these Castaways have died for is in Sawyer’s eyes as he gazes out to sea in silent sorrow and watches an orange life jacket wash its way to the shore.

Charlie, Michael, Sayid, Jin and Sun. These characters ultimately chose how their lives would end. None of them chose their fate for the sake of the Island, or the Light, or Jacob. What They Died For is much simpler than that.

They died for each other.

Thoughts:

• Jack gains consciousness off-Island in the literal fashion – by waking up. On-Island Jack will also gain consciousness in this hour, but on an entirely different level altogether.

• Post-sleep, Jack’s neck wound has reappeared, and it looks worse. More evidence of a melding of the timelines? Of a bleed-through that’s physical as well as mental? It sure seems that way.

• It’s practically a given at this point that Juliet is Jack’s ex, yes? I imagine we should expect coffee to make an appearance in the final episode. Does this mean that the Second Snake theory might actually, improbably, be true?

• Claire joining Jack and his son for breakfast was an enormously warm scene to watch. Again, there’s a sense here that this off-Island world offers a chance at happiness for these characters – not a “happy ending,” because these lives are still complicated, still governed by human error and choice.

Voice: “This is Oceanic airlines calling to inform you that we’ve… located your missing cargo.”

• Desmond steps up in a major way in this episode, actively beginning to steer the Castaways toward some as-yet-unseen end. The goal of “awakening” these people is now obvious, but to what purpose we don’t know. Why would Desmond want Jack to go to LAX? Is it simply to get Jack to show up so that Desmond can facepunch/run over/otherwise ‘enlighten’ him? Maybe. But maybe not. More on this below.

• Kudos to Evangeline Lily, who does some of her strongest work in this scene. She looks godawful, and she comes across as profoundly shaken by what they’ve just gone through. Jack and Kate’s moment on the beach mirrors Season One, but reversed. Here, it’s Kate being sewn up. Jack says the Magic Word, “infected,” and I throw my arms up and scream.

“If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.” – Flannery O’Connor

Kate: “Locke did this to them. We have to kill him, Jack.”
Jack: “I know.”

• With that, the end-goal of the Castaways has been set. Their conversation with Jacob later in the episode will confirm the validity of it: Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Hurley are out to kill the Man in Black. But how do you kill something without true form, without real life?

You go to The Source, I’d imagine.

• Sawyer standing on the beach, watching the wreckage of the submarine washing up onto the shore, is just about The Saddest Thing In The World. Josh Holloway continues to prove he’s got The Goods, delivering the kind of guilt-wracked stoicism we expect from our favorite laconic con man. These people deserve long, steady, solid careers. Honestly, there’s not a weak link among them. Maybe some of them are limited in range, but all of them are very good at what they do. It’ll be strange to start seeing Sawyer popping up as the bad-boy love interest/intimidating ex to Sandra Bullock in films with titles like “Love and Devotion” (it’s from a song!) and “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” but he deserves the success. Evangeline Lily’s never blown me away, but she was very good in The Hurt Locker. So on and so forth. I wish them all well in future endeavors.

• I’m as sick of the Kate/Jack/Sawyer-go-round as most of you are, but this moment still killed me. It’s a wonderful moment for both characters, and so quietly played.

Jack: “If Locke wants Desmond dead, then we’re gonna need him.”

• Who’d have thought that Desmond would be so central to the Island and its mysteries? And yet, we really should have seen this coming. Since his introduction, Desmond has consistently been associated with the Island’s strange properties. It makes perfect narrative sense that he’d be acting as he does here – as the literal and figurative connective tissue in the story.

• Another quietly stirring moment: Sawyer’s wordless reaction to Jack’s words on the beach. The look of ache is on his face vanishes, replaced by the kind of grim surety that’s always marked Sawyer as genuinely dangerous despite his disarming charm. Shorter version: Anti-Locke picked the wrong good ol’ boy to f*ck with.

• Welcome back, Ben. We missed you. Michael Emerson elevates the game of every actor he plays against, and having Ben around guarantees a certain level of performance. He’s also, clearly, a hell of a lot of fun to write for. I’m not sure if this is simple coincidence or what, but What We Died For is the most overall-funny episode of the show in a while. That it manages this feat while also being a bunch of other things makes it even more impressive to me.

Desmond: “You want to know who I am?”

• Desmond Quantum Leaps back to Locke and Ben’s school, where it appears he’s about to try running Locke over again (and there’s a part of me that wishes this scene had happened earlier in the season so that the writers, never shy about telling a sick joke, could actually have done that – I would have found it brutally, blackly hilarious, personally, and highly illustrative of Locke’s overall lot in life, but it also would have been, I think, entirely too horrific, given how attached we’ve all gotten to the Island’s resident John the Baptist figure. Wow. Long parenthetical.). But before he can do that Ben comes to the rescue, ladling a rich layer of irony over the scene.

Desmond proceeds to beat the stuffing out of poor Ben, who’s a genuinely “good” person in the off-Island universe. This seems unfair but then, Desmond’s methods of spurring a dip into the waters of the Oceanic are kinda unorthodox. On Desmond’s fourth or fifth punch something shakes free inside of Benjamin Linus, and he experiences the same awakening of “Other” consciousness that Hurley, Charlie, and Desmond himself have all experienced. Doubling the irony, Ben’s flash is to the Marina dock where he tried, unsuccessfully, to murder Desmond and Penny. Sadly for Ben, the only fatality that day consisted of Desmond’s groceries, and Desmond proceeded to work Ben’s face like a prizefighter.

What’s interesting to me about Ben’s “awakening” here is where it seems to lead him. He experiences “enlightenment,” and suddenly he’s offered a chance at something that you could argue he’s craved his whole on-Island life: a family. A family with a wife that doesn’t die in childbirth, that wants to be with him minus coercion and creepy Cliffside threat-sessions and Oedipal issues; with a father who doesn’t get drunk and emotionally abusive every night; with a child that he can openly, deeply love, and will never use.

Great Miles Line: “Well, I lived in these houses thirty years before you did – otherwise known as last week.”

• As Ben, Richard and Miles reenter Dharmaville we get a potent reminder of Ben’s past. Miles senses Alex, using his still super-vague superpowers, and Richard reveals that he buried Alex after Ben turned the Wheel and left the Island. It’s a nice, understated moment that feels genuinely melancholy. It’s only slightly marred by the fact that I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why Richard would choose to bury her next to/under a picket fence. Did I miss the episode where Alex expressed her life-long love of the picket fence or something? Wasn’t it kind of difficult/awkward to bury her body there?

I digress.

Great Miles Line Two: “What’s that? A secreter room?”
Great Ben Line: “It’s where I was told I could summon The Monster. That’s before I realized that it was the one summoning me.”

• Great, great line. Do you think we’ll ever learn who told Ben about this? I hope so, but I doubt it. Lost’s end-game, as I’ve said before and will say again next week, involves a purposeful lack of disclosure (so far) about a great number of the show’s mysteries. Some of this is going to be answered in the finale, and some of the Answers we’ve been getting this season operate to retroactively answer other questions in a very sneaky, very admirable way (take, for instance, the revelation that The Smoke Monster has been impersonating the dead in part to try and kill/isolate the Castaways, and how that significantly alters the entire fabric of the episode “Dave” from Season Two). But some Answers just aren’t coming, and so far, to the best of my knowledge, they include (1) the identity of the outrigger that shoots at Sawyer in Season 5, (2) an explication on what caused the Island’s fertility problems, and (3) Infection. In some ways that’s really disappointing to me. I want more Answers and, most frustratingly, I think the show was capable of giving them to us without losing much more of the murky quality they seem to be intentionally aiming for. But at the same time, I’m very content with them choosing to leave these questions wide open, allowing us to fill in the blanks and create our own Answers. It’s strange, because both these things are true at the same time, and my enjoyment of the season as it actually is – not as I’d like it to be – hasn’t been negatively affected by this approach much. The Infection thing? I won’t lie. Bothers the heck outta me. But that’s because the writers intentionally pulled that whole thing straight back into the limelight this year, and then chose to write around it. For some reason, questions about the outrigger or the infertility are the sorts of questions that I’m weirdly okay with finding my own answers to (and I have, and I like what those answers are).Your mileage may vary, of course. And clearly it does, judging from the comments about the season. That’s cool.

This, though….I want an Answer to this. It’s not an important mystery in the context of the show as a whole but it’s interesting to me. I want to know whether the Monster itself told Ben about it, perhaps in the guise of Ben’s dead mother. Its clear Richard wasn’t the source of that particular information. Had Widmore provided it I’m sure Ben would have mentioned it. Was it, perhaps, Eloise?…