LOST 031 - The Great Hinge
LOST 031 - The Great Hinge
Unpacking the TV show LOST — Season 3: Episodes 16-17
This essay is cross-posted on Substack from The Reframe.com.
Shall we LOST? Let's LOST.
Previously, on LOST: Oceanic Flight 815 crashed crashed crashed on a big old island. A lot of the passengers lived lived lived and set up camp together. A lot of stuff stuff stuff has happened since, but what you mostly need to know today is that there was already a group of people living on the island; our heroes the Oceanics call them The Others, and they are a strange group with strange factions, and one of those factions appears to be living in the facilities of a scientific community called The Dharma Initiative. I'm going to talk about them a lot today.
The Others like to do experiments. They also like to do abductions, especially of children, which has not ingratiated them to our heroes. A few of our heroes, after some adventures that involved a number of things—including spiking a football and getting abducted once or twice—are on their way back to the beach, with one of The Others (wry fertility doctor Juliet Burke) in tow. She's been abandoned by all the other Others, is her story, for the crime of betraying The Others in aide of our heroes. Is she telling the truth? Who can say? She's inscrutable. She cannot be scruted. Try to scrute her. You'll fail. I didn't mean for that to sound gross. Let's move on.
On this island there's also a smoke monster in the woods and ghosts and doomsday clocks and submarines and ... look, never mind, I'll explain as it becomes necessary to do so. But I should mention that there is a Scotsman who is unstuck in time and can now see future possibilities, all of which appear to involve the various deaths of an Oceanic survivor named Charlie. This is an ongoing and seemingly endless series of deaths that Des has been so far successful in his attempts to prevent. This effectively means that Charlie is now in a sort of Schrödinger's end-of-life care situation, attended to by a quantum hospice nurse who apparently has lost all the buttons on his shirt.
OK? Let's observe and then believe, as is our wont.
O B S E R V A T I O N
As you may have picked up, we're in the back half of Season 3. What's going to happen in this series of episodes is a single event (the landing upon the island of a parachutist), which is going to kick off a set of events that will drive the action going forward for the rest of the series. It's not exactly signposted (one character will see this event as vitally significant, but a) he's going to misinterpret what it means, and b) characters finding events vitally significant is a daily event on LOST island, which c) effectively hides the event's importance), but from a narrative perspective, this moment is the great hinge. Up until now, the story has been about the Oceanics and their struggles to get off the island, and while the growing hillock of mysteries have been intriguing and/or frustrating (milage certainly did vary among the fans), the main question for both the characters and the fans was how and when are these people going to be rescued from the island?
But the parachutist is from a boat—a freighter. The freighter is on an expedition to the island. And the expedition is (we will discover) funded by the little-seen and quite mysterious billionaire tycoon and former Others' leader Charles Widmore, father to Penny, who is the love of the time-displaced Scotsman Desmond's life. Widmore is locked in a battle with current Others' leader Ben Linus over control of the island, and this tactical thrust of Widmore's is going to run the main action from here until the end of Season 4. Also, its outcome will define the course of the rest of the series, with so few pauses (plot-wise anyway) that we might think of this moment as the unofficial start to the next season, and we might start to think of this moment as the sneaky end of the first half of the show and the start of the second.
The story is about to become about great battles over the future of the island, the human species, and reality itself, being waged between characters with a far greater understanding of the stakes and the rules, who themselves act (often without realizing it) only as proxies for battling entities of almost unimaginable powers who have (and who will in some cases remain) unseen and unknown, and who I have been speaking of as The Adversary (that's the black smoke) and The Island.
The great narrative question of this story is very soon going to stop being how and when are these people going to be rescued from the island? and become something quite different.
What that new question even is will be revealed in time. In time, quite literally, and over time, and throughout time.
Whoo boy. These episodes have a lot to unpack. The standard three episodes would be a longer entry than I want to contemplate. I'm only going to do two.
Brace your girdles and warm your griddles, kiddles. Let's go.
Episode 16: ONE OF US (Juliet): In which the away team of Kate, Jack, and Sayid return to Oceanic Beach with Dr. Juliet in tow, and nobody trusts her except for Jack, who places her under his protection in typically annoying Jack fashion. Annoying because it prevents Juliet from giving us the viewers specific answers about The Others that we, like our heroes, would very much like to have. Typical because these sort of thing is a completely consistent Jack character trait, where he makes a show of his loyalty to somebody or other (coincidentally usually a pretty lady) by rather performatively refusing to ask them to give a perfectly reasonable accounting of their past motives and actions.
Anyway, that's Jack. Sayid on the other hand is a very practical former military interrogator, so normally Juliet would be as tortured as fried fuckin' chicken, but luckily for her she pulled this shit while he was in a transitional period. Juliet exercises her right to remain silent, and skates by on a crooked little half-smile.
In flashback, we learn some things that were hinted at in a previous Juliet episode.
We see Juliet brought to the island probably via submarine after taking a powerful sedative and (its suggested) being kept unconscious for an indeterminate time. I say "probably" because its possible that the sub itself is a ruse and was never used as anything but misdirection for those who Ben Linus doesn't permit to leave the island, which is most of what he refers to as "his" people. (For a while in the initial run I was convince the island might be only reachable by flight.) However, Michael and Walt got off the island in a boat, so it's reasonable to assume that the submarine is a viable option—one that makes for quite a jolt as you leave the gravity of the sphere earth and enter the alternate gravity of the interlocked sphere of the island—if I'm right about the question of where the island is, geographically speaking.
The main problem being dealt with by the Dharmic Others is a sort of exploding infertility on the island, by which I mean women can get pregnant but they explode. All pregnant women without exception die on the island, and Juliet has been helpless to stop it. This is a big problem for The Others, and we'll get into why during the Belief section. But it's why they kidnap kids (and pregnant ladies like Claire), and it's why Juliet—a scientist whose less-than-ethical experimentation has managed to effect a miraculous breakthrough in fertility—is perhaps The Others' most vital recruit, and I think the only recruit we see who was maybe not drawn by Jacob but by somebody else ... but that's a story for another day.
Speaking of Claire, there's a crisis back on the island! Claire is sick! The illness is mysterious! Juliet diagnoses it as postpartum complications related to the island's mysterious effects upon pregnancy, which Juliet claims she is able to fix with medicines cached near the same Dharma station where Others' doctor Ethan (RIP) took Claire when he abducted her back in Season 1 (after breaking all the bones in poor Scott or Steve's neck and arms and fingers, and I mean, come on, first do no harm, doctor). Sayid and Sawyer team up to try to bully her into giving answers before she gets the cure, but she bluffs them down by delivering some very accurate sounding hints suggesting very detailed knowledge about their deepest secrets, and they look abashed and consterned.
Claire's rescue is a save-the-day moment that ingratiates Juliet to the Oceanics—one that is almost immediately revealed as a fake out. In fact, this trust building crisis was orchestrated by Others leader Ben Linus, who (we learn via extremely recent flashback) has been manipulating Juliet to keep her on-island far longer than what was initially pitched to her by agents of Ben-fronted corporation Mittelos bioscience. Juliet is effectively Ben's prisoner, under the implicit threat that if she leaves, Ben will allow her sister's cancer—which Ben has convinced Juliet he can cure—to return.
And Ben can make people sick or well, it seems. It was him who made Claire sick (with an implant! one which he apparently controls!) and then made her better again. Or anyway he told Juliet that was what he was going to do and it happened just as he said.
In flashback, Juliet is going along with Ben's plan, and Ben says he'll see her "in a week." Yikes! Nefarious intent! She's a double-agent at worst, and completely self-interested at best. Jack says he trusts her because he can tell that, like him, all she wants is to get off the island, but while this is true, it's actually the reason she's working for Ben even if she hates his guts. Jack's dumb for a smart guy sometimes, guys.
Back on the Oceanic beach, Juliet smiles and sets up her tent—"one of us" as far as our heroes are concerned. Duh-duh DUN.
End of Episode 16.
Episode 17: CATCH-22 (DESMOND): Time to turn our eyes back once again to our favorite time-displaced Scotsman. Desmond and Charlie and Hurley and Jin trot through the jungle. Charlie and Hurley are Tarantino-ing about a footrace between Superman and The Flash, and then Charlie steps on a booby-trap trigger and shthhhhhhhwippp! he gets an arrow right through his charlie's apple. He's dead, as usual. Neck-st!
And then we cut to Des on the beach, because this was another flash from the future. But here's the twist: This time, Des doesn't want to prevent the fatal future, he wants to bring it about, which he does by recruiting the people he saw in the flash-before-his-eyes, convincing them to go on the expedition that he saw, enticing them a tale of rescue, while leaving out the parts that involve arrows and throats. What makes Des willing to bring this grim-for-Charlie future about? Because, though the details are murky, Des sees that this is a future that brings him back to his lucky Penny. There's going to be a helicopter. And a parachutist. And then ... somehow ... a Penny! Except, it has to go just the way he saw, or he can't be sure it will go that way. So he goes about convincing the exact people he saw that they have to go with him, and discouraging anyone he didn't see from going. (Does this remind you of the instructions that The Others gave Michael last season? The very specific list of people he had to recruit? It should. Let me get back to that.)
Meanwhile in flashback, we see that Des was engaged to another lady but left her in the lurch to go take an oath of silence at a monastery. (It's a brotherhood, or, if you like, a brothahood. It is suggested, rather hilariously, that this is why Des calls people "brotha," which is probably the least necessary origin story since Jack's tattoos). Anyway, the head brotha'—who likes to talk about Abraham and Isaac and sacrifices and other thematically resonant things—kicks Des out of the order, on the grounds that Des has a different destiny. Significantly, in this scene, we see, on the brothahead's desk, a photo of him and a familiar face: it's the (as-yet-unnamed) Eloise Hawking, aka the mysterious lady at the jewelry store who put Des on his path and told him that the universe has a way of course-correcting. So these two know each other, hmmm. As Des leaves, he meets none other than Penny, who is there to pick up some of the brothahood's lovely wine. Their now-clearly-orchestrated love commences!
Back to the island, and cutting to the chase: The Gang Tries to Kill Charlie. Desmond's fateful team traces their path to the fatal1 location. And there's a helicopter! It's all happening! However, in the end Des can't bring himself to let Charlie die. He saves the little guy for another day, throwing his certain reunion with Penny to hazard.
The confused heroes and the dejected Desmond go to find the parachutist. It's a figure, hanging from a tree, unmoving. We're clearly meant to believe that Penny's dead because Charlie is alive. But when they cut her down, she's neither dead nor Penny.
We ain't never seen this lady before in our lives.
End of Episode 17.
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B E L I E F
There's a lot of details worth digging into. Probably worth reiterating that I spoil the hell out of this show, particularly in this section. I suspect today's entry is going to be more spoilery than most.
Based on what is observed, let me tell you what I believe.
1) The pregnancy thing. Let's start with the major piece of plot-driving mythology in One Of Us: the fact that pregnant women die on the island. This is going to continue to be a plot element for a while, because one of our main characters—Sun—is pregnant, and then it will stop being a plot element as much, because the organization trying to solve it—The Dharmite faction—will essentially cease to exist, which means their efforts to "solve" it will cease to exist. So, in true LOST fashion, there's never going to be a moment where some character lays the whole thing out. However, in true LOST fashion, we can puzzle it out, mostly, if we are willing to pay close attention. Let's observe, and see if we can answer the questions why do pregnant women die on the island? and why is this such a problem for people who can get on and off the island?
And puzzling this out really goes deep into what we can figure out about The Others. It's almost like a cable we can follow into the jungle like some half-remembered future answers. Whoa.
To talk about the pregnancy thing, I'm going to have to talk about a LOT of things that haven't yet been revealed, and also we're going all the way back to the core of the buried understory. Look to the very first entries if you want to understand much more about all these claims I'm making about the buried understory, or just stay with me and trust me. Or go make a sandwich and tune me out. I'm not the boss of you.
I want to start by noting that in the world of LOST a major them is the ways in which groups are defined by who leads them.
And we do have groups, and we do have leaders.
As I mentioned, The Others are fractured into semi-allied but mostly untrusting factions. One faction we can call the Temple faction, because they live in a sequestered area within which is a huge temple and is largely living without what we would call modern technology. We'll barely see them. They're shy. Another faction is the Dharmite faction, which is using science extensively in order to manipulate various aspects of the island. The Temple faction is led by a man named Dogan, who we won't see for a long time. The Dharmite faction is led by Ben Linus. There are off-island factions as well, who I suppose I'll call Widmorians and the Lamposters, led by individuals—Charles Widmore and Eloise Hawking—who themselves used to be on-island leaders of what appears under their tenures to have been a more unified group of Jacobians. All these factions have different agendas and different methods for achieving them, and all are defined in part by their leaders.
And all have been, to one extent or another, infiltrated and corrupted by The Adversary.
The Others are Jacob worshippers, which means they all worship a man named Jacob. This is why, as we go on, I will more and more frequently refer to them not as Others but as Jacobians. Jacob is indeed a man, we'll eventually learn, much like any other man, and he is maybe more flawed than many men (he may or may not have pissed on The Dude's rug), but he's been chosen by an entity known as The Island to be the representative within reality of The Island itself; he's a repository of The Island's nearly limitless powers over reality, and a vehicle in some way of The Island's consciousness. The Island does this because (it is strongly implied) It is a scientist, or anyway It is interested primarily in observation and progress, which makes It unwilling to interfere with its experiment, the scope of which appears to be reality itself. And—because people often mirror their leaders—Jacob, led by The Island, is just as disinterested in interfering as his master. So Jacob has appointed a proxy named Ricardus (Ricardus? I barely know us!) to be his representative on the physical manifestation of The Island, (which is the island itself).
I think it's very likely that Ricardus, who was in his previous life a practicing Catholic, believes that Jacob is, essentially, God. He certainly seems to have taught the group of people who have come to the island after his appointment to worship Jacob, which is what they seem to have done over the decades or centuries, even as they became compromised and corrupted and splintered into factions. All the factions have differing levels of mistrust of one another, though all will be seen cooperating to a greater or lesser extent with one another, probably because of their shared religion.
It's worth pointing out that The Others are in factions in the first place because another very powerful entity, who I call The Adversary, is very interested in seeing humans who come to the island become corrupted and violent and self-destructive: first, because The Adversary would like to see the humans destroy the island, which would end reality itself; second and most importantly, because The Adversary is engaged in a millennia-spanning argument with The Island in which The Adversary is trying to prove to The Island that humans are unworthy of ... something unspecified, which I'd rather talk about another day, but it might be productive to have that question in mind while you're watching. For now let's just say that it will be made quite clear that it's precisely because The Island doesn't agree with The Adversary over this matter that The Adversary wants to end existence, because The Adversary is a petty bitch and is sick of The Island's shit.
It's also worth pointing out that the role of representative of The Island's power and The Island's consciousness is itself factional. Jacob holds the greater share, but there are very strong indications that the full share of this role (and its attendant power) once was held by The Adversary, who still holds some partial share of it. So, while The Adversary has been constrained by Jacob, It still has a great many powers over reality that it can influence.
The island heals people, we know.
All are guided by Ricardus and drawn there by The Island for purposes that they can either seek or deny, as part of The Island's experiment. All factions see themselves as the true worshippers of Jacob. All factions have, to one extent or another, been corrupted by The Adversary as It attempts to prove Its' point to The Island. And all factions reflect their leaders perspectives and tactics. To the degree that these leaders are still aligned with Jacob and The Island, they reflect those entities. To the degree that these leaders have become corrupted by The Adversary, they reflect that entity.
And no leader of any faction has become more corrupted by The Adversary than Ben Linus. (Though I think Charles Widmore runs a reasonably close second.) This is why it's so strange that Ricardus is known these days as "Richard Alpert," and appears to be off-island, working closely with Ben Linus.
Wow, what the hell does that have to do with the questions why do pregnant women die on the island? and why is this such a problem for The Others?
a. One of the core parts of island life is a freedom from disease. People on the island don't get sick. If they were sick when they arrived, they get better. I want you to imagine the strength of a religion that can actually deliver on the claim of guaranteed health.
We'll see that The Adversary is actually quite good at ridding the island of humans. There was a time when It could simply murder them, and even after It was no longer permitted to do this, Its powers were such that It could easily divide and enthrall them and get them to kill each other. In fact, this is something It's still pretty good at. However, I believe that the existence of Ricardus and the worship of Jacob has resulted in a self-sustaining and multi-generational culture of human beings continuously occupying the island for the first time since the conflict between The Island and The Adversary began, or at least since the time of the ancient Egyptians.
This means that the fact that women on the island are dying isn't just a medical problem, but a spiritual crisis. Consider if you will how successful you could be at starting a religion if you never aged (Ricardus never ages) and could guarantee your followers freedom from disease and actually deliver on it. Consider if you will how the foundation of your religion would begin to crumble if you stopped being able to deliver on it.
In the same way that Ben's spinal cancer has demolished his credibility as a Jacobian leader, the problem of women dying would erode the credibility of Ricardus and even Jacob himself, which would erode the hold of the central unifying theme holding the Jacobian project together, which would end what unity still exists between the factions, which could lead to more and more circumstance that would end the existence of human life on the island or even the existence of human life altogether or even the end of reality itself.
That all by itself is enough reason for The Adversary to allow pregnant women to die on the island, as I believe it is strongly suggested throughout the series It has the power to do. (To give only the most obvious examples, we've seen It withhold the island's natural healing before, from the two individuals It most wants to manipulate: John Locke and Ben Linus.)
But there's more.
b. One of the core tenets of Jacobian living is total seclusion from the outside. People who come don't leave; people who leave aren't allowed back. I am of the belief that this is either a restriction given by Ricardus, who is interpreting Jacob's restriction upon The Adversary (which Ricardus is aware of) as generally applicable to everyone. Otherwise, it's something that The Adversary himself, who is restricted in that way, attempts to impose on everyone else.
There are real consequences to breaking this law. We'll later learn that Ben Linus seized leadership of his faction when he proved that Charles Widmore was breaking this edict. However, even though Ben finds it necessary to seem as if he's holding to this stricture, he very clearly makes exceptions for himself and certain of his followers to come and go as he pleases. (And this is just what we'd expect from somebody enthralled by The Adversary, who wants to leave the island almost as much as he wants to destroy it.) Enter Mittelos Bioscience, the Others-backed organization that appears to exist only to recruit Dr. Juliet Burke.
Question: if, as I propose, the edict of seclusion comes from High Priest Ricardus, and the reason he delivers that edict is that he believes it is Jacob's will ... why would Ricardus compromise his own position by leaving the island—secretly, I presume?
But we've uncovered the answer already. There is a serious crisis of faith among the Jacob-worshippers that Ricardus has spent generations leading. Jacob being Jacob, I expect that he isn't giving Ricardus any answers as to why it is happening. It's possible he's not even granting Ricardus an audience. So off goes Ricardus, looking for a solution wherever he can find it, aligning himself with the one person who seems to have a clue where to look.
I think it's likely this is why the Temple Jacobians tolerate Ben Linus and his scientific method. Unless they can solve this crisis, they won't be a continuously existing culture of humans living on the island throughout the generations anymore. They can't replace themselves without breaking their laws. They're scraping by now on abductions of those Jacob sends who are still young enough to be pliable.
Incidentally, we learn in "One Of Us" that Ricardus has probably been off-island for a couple years representing Mittelos.
So to sum up: The Adversary has created a genuine crisis of faith in the religion that It has spent centuries trying to destroy, and aligned that religion's primary leader with Ben Linus—who is most enthralled to It—and then shipped the only person who Jacob will see or talk to, Ricardus, off the island and out of the picture for years.
That's some pretty effective corruption-ing right there.
But how does The Adversary know to do this? For a likely answer, let's talk about Desmond.
2) Flashes Before Your Eyes. Desmond sees the future—kind of. He gets flashes. He sees bits and pieces for a moment. Imagine if you were in a turbulent ocean. Sometimes you're surrounded by great swells. Sometimes you rise to the top. At the latter moments, you can see, off in the distance ... a shape. Land of some kind. Trees. You don't know what kind of trees, or if they bear fruit, but you have a direction, and you're sure it's over there, because every so often the wave carries you high enough that you see it again. All you know is that if you head in that direction, you'll get to land. If you head in any other direction, you won't.
That's how it seems to be with Desmond. He got that way by being exposed to some of the electromagnetic energy at the center of the island, the very thing Jacob is charged with protecting, the very thing The Adversary wants to destroy.
Friends, we are going to learn that The Adversary got the way It got by being absolutely bathed in the very heart of that light.
I think The Adversary can experience time like Desmond. But unlike Desmond, The Adversary is not a Scotsman who has lost the buttons on his shirt; The Adversary is instead a cosmic being of almost unimaginable power, who I think has the natural ability to see time in this way. He's not going up and down between the swells. He's perched in a tower. He doesn't need to find a Constant to ground himself, because he is a Constant. If this seems like a reach, I'd invite you to see if the rest of the series portrays The Adversary a being who is very comfortable moving through time to manipulate events, and I'd suggest that this portrayal is not a mystery, but rather it is the answer to many other mysteries.
"Maybe there's even a mother on that plane," Ben tells Juliet moments after the crash. How does he know? Well ... The Adversary probably knows. How? Because the survivors do arrive on the island, and, from any point in time, The Adversary can see them. And Ben works for The Adversary. Don't make me connect the dots for you.
Why did Michael last year have to bring exactly the list he was given by The Others? Well ... why did Desmond have to bring exactly the people he brought? Because in the future he wanted to inhabit, a sequence of events occurred, and in that sequence, those are the people who are there. In the futures where they aren't there, other things happen. Maybe we can pick out exactly what each of them does to bring that future about by being there, but even if we can't, it's just that simple. So, with Michael, there was a future that The Adversary wanted to bring about, and in that future, there were four exact people who had been captured by The Others. How did The Adversary know that? He looked and saw it.
Juliet knows a lot of things about Sawyer and Sayid. In fact all The Others seem to know a whole lot about everyone who's on the island. How do they know? Well ... The Adversary knows. Ben works for The Adversary. They work for Ben.
How does Ben know about Juliet's sister's cancer? Well ... you get the drill.
While I'm here: How does Ben cure Juliet's sister's cancer, when he couldn't cure his own? How does he cure Juliet's sister when Juliet's sister is off-island? My theory is that he doesn't. He was lying to Juliet about the cancer's return. He showed Juliet some faked charts, and then "cured" a cancer that never came back. What proof do we have that the cancer returned, other than the word of literally the biggest liar on the show, in thrall to the other biggest liar? What other proof do we need that he is lying, other than the fact that he is Ben "Jammin' the Truth" Linus? This is why we have to be very careful to Observe before we Believe.
Does Ben have an implant in Claire that makes her ill and then better? Well, she certainly gets ill and then better. However, the idea of implants never come up again that I recollect, and if Ben Linus had that technology it seems unlikely that he would need to engage in his other manipulations to get Jack or Juliet for example to do his bidding. I reckon that as a woman who actually did give birth, Claire is still at serious medical risk but is being healed by the island ... until she isn't being healed by the island, and Ben knows it will happen. How does he know? Well ... you get the drill.
It's worth contemplating that under normal circumstances, The Adversary shouldn't be able to make all women die in childbirth. Childbirth isn't without its dangers but it isn't a terminal condition. This suggests that there is a condition on the island that makes it that way—or at least would make it that way, if the island didn't have natural healing abilities ... or if a cosmically powerful being with the power to withhold that healing on an individual level wasn't withholding it.
There will be strong suggestions that the event that caused this condition on the island was the detonation on the island of an atomic bomb back in the 70s; which was the act that prevented the Dharma Incident from destroying reality, and also created the sequence-entering scenario that would eventually bring Desmond and The Oceanics to the island in the first place.
I'll get into this more some other time, but for now I'll just ask those of you who know ... who was it setting off the bomb back in the 1970s? Who is fated to create, in supremely ironic fashion, the condition that most likely led to the infertility crisis on the island?
Yes, and who wanted fertility doctor Juliet Burke to come to the island, anyway?
And to what purpose?
L O S T
Next Time: Daddy, Daddy, You Bastard, I'm Through
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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. His thirsty wanted whiskey, but his hungry needed beans.
By finding the buried cable into the ocean that Sayid found way back in early Season 1, which hasn't been mentioned since. I note this first because the submerged destination of the cable is about to become important, but second because it's just a tiny example of how much sharper and focused the show has become now that it is actually heading toward an end date. A great number of little mysteries that had been in a years-long holding pattern are coming back into the narrative.