Lost: The Substitute
a.k.a. Man plans, God laughs
What good is faith if you can’t even cross your front lawn with dignity?
It’s difficult, so early in the season, to gauge the importance of the connection between characters on the Island and their personae in the alternate-reality. So I enjoyed the emotional resonance they were able to tie between two completely unrelated entities named Locke and the sad corpse quickly decaying into crab-food on the sand. Burying the original Locke in the earth is a pretty heavy nod to his subtext underpinning the two concurrent stories in the episode. Those of us watching know that the John Locke who embraced faith (a belief that things work out, that he was important) marched serenely to a pathetic, lonely death. Alterna-Locke is frustrated and trapped in his wheelchair. Dark Locke is frustrated and trapped on the Island. Both sullenly seethe with the same self-interest that the original, more serene Locke had in spades… but they seem to be coming around to the idea that you can’t expect shit to get done if you don’t have somebody help you along. Both seem to feel it’s fundamentally flawed to march to a system where effort goes unrewarded. Where does faith alone get you? Strangled to death. Bloodied and suspended in a sack like Richard.
Every single one of the Others has, at one time or another, lauded Jacob for choosing to bring them to the Island and trumpeted the righteousness of being there. Then they spend eons sitting around, playing at odd experiments, and dicking about with quasi-religious ceremonies. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if each and every one of their names was scrawled on the inside of that cave, crossed off and tossed aside, abandoned. These guys might be sitting around and waiting for nothing, and a cynical Sawyer feels that in his bones. In the end, it might be better to never have your name written on that ceiling at all (and I noticed some names missing). When Dark Locke says (possibly as a lie) that the best choice is to stop waiting around for some invisible asshole to finally decide if you’re worth all that faith you’ve been pouring in, it’s got to be incredibly seductive.
My favorite thing about this episode, and it was a great one, was a humane sense of absurdity in how easily our hopes can be subverted and reduced. Of COURSE the sprinklers tick on when you’ve fallen helpless on the grass. And of COURSE you’re shouting encouragement to students running back and forth and back and forth while you sit there without the use of your legs. And for all of the Island Ben’s worship of “the rules,” it’s heartbreaking to see his alternative self parallel that by railing against the improper use of a miserable little coffeemaker. The world is a big, random place… it would be nice to think our actions had some meaning in the end, horrifying to think that they don’t. For all the seductive talk Dark Locke offers on giving easy answers, I can’t help but think that this faithless creature is a walking perversion of everything the original Locke stood for.
• That was a great “Evil Dead” POV tracking shot as Smokey trundles through the jungle.
• My friend Tim points out that Sawyer sobers up awful goddamn fast for some cliff-scaling.
• Who’s the blood-caked towheaded kid appearing in visions to Dark Locke and Sawyer, murmuring about how he can’t be killed because of The Rules? Aaron and a young Jacob are good theories. Maybe it’s the Island manifesting as a young Sawyer, declaring that his candidacy effectively makes him off-limits to a smoke monster murder.
• I can’t imagine it’s a good idea for Dark Locke to leave that Island. This entire season is built on balancing between parallel structures… killing off one side of an equation and setting the other side free might result in very bad things.
• The idea of a Candidate to protect the Island seems to be singular. Those other names were destined to eventually be crossed out by Jacob’s hand. I guess that people learning to work together is progress and the key, eventually negating the idea that only one person can have faith and destiny.
• Lost inhabits a peculiar space in its final season. The most die-hard fans love it and can’t wait for the damned thing to be over already.
Comments
I just want to point out that apparently Don Mattingly and Peter O’Toole were candidates. I find this hilarious.
Don Mattingly’s now-retired number? 23! Clearly, the smoke monster is the reason behind the fuggin’ Yankee’s domination of the American league. And Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole, was 222 minute long — the number written in front of his name! Perhaps the Tunisians were supposed to use polar bears to win their liberation from the British.
THIS MEANS SOMETHING.
Also, Christ, I love your reviews of this show, Justin. You make them interesting.
I agree about Jusin’s reviews. Awesome.
This was a good episode. The thing I’m finding with each episode of this season is this: I’ve never been one who wanted, expected or demanded that everything that happens on this show have an explanation. And I didn’t go into this season expecting that everything would get wrapped up in a nice, neat little package. I expected a lot of loose ends.
But as we’re now winding down I find myself remembering more things, and realizing how major they were, and wondering if they will answer it or just how many of these major things were just total larks of no consequence.
Kevin said:But as we’re now winding down I find myself remembering more things, and realizing how major they were, and wondering if they will answer it or just how many of these major things were just total larks of no consequence.
It’s this exact thought that’s really putting a damper for me on this season. We joked that at the current pace they’re moving, in order to answer even half of the remaining mysteries before the season’s over, they’re going to have to quick-scroll a bunch of text by you explaining everything. Lost fans will love it cause they’ll have to pause and rewind and look at screen caps to read it all.
I mean most notably for me:
Charles Whitmore: So is he just a minor character now in this whole thing whereas a season or two ago he was a massive part of it?
Ben: So first he and his group of people are the architects of it all and he is the supreme leader and now he’s pretty much an impotent pawn?
This whole new turn towards the island as a place where people get lured into and trapped by Jacob and the other guy (or maybe just Jacob). So what was the deal with the whole Dharma initiative and people coming and going as they needed/wanted to?
Maybe some of this will get explained but I’m starting to raise one eyebrow slightly at this whole thing.
I got less fiery about the potential for not getting all the answers once I noticed that they were starting to hardwire that directly into the show’s DNA (oddly, in episodes produced right around the time when they set an end date). Secrets and raw knowledge have been the ultimate currency on the show for a while now, and the most profound way that characters have been able to acquire and exert power over others. Jacob and the dark entity aren’t surprising to me, since there’s been consistent momentum on peeling back a layer of leadership to reveal that they tend to be uncertain and confused and in thrall to another layer of leadership above them. Sawyer, in particular, has been singularly uninterested in what’s going on behind the scenes (last season he still seemed to have no idea who Charles Widmore was)… so I guess it’s unsurprising that he’s possibly getting led astray by someone who knows more.
The greatest tragedy in the story thus far, it seems, is that the original John Locke died despairing for answers. “I don’t understand” has almost served as the show’s mission statement.
Twin Peaks had a great final episode, but it left the majority of its mythology unexplained. It took pains to answer a couple of the most important mysteries, but purposefully left the majority of its supernatural horrors ambiguous. I’m hard pressed to explain why this never really bothered me and why I’ve enjoyed trying to figure it out ever since watching the whole series.
I agree, Justin. And to be honest with you I was totally fine without finding out any of the explanations, because I thought the focus on each of the “castaways” (for lack of a better word) and their character development and fleshing out of their backgrounds was just so stinking well done and well written and well acted that all the other hoo-ha was secondary. But at this point it’s been so long since the actuality of those characters was in any kind of focus, and now that they’ve just shaken the whole thing up completely that aspect all seems to matter less and less.
This all makes sense, but I still can’t shake the crazy annoying though that we’re never going to find out why Hurley saw what’s-her-face in the institution.
John said:This all makes sense, but I still can’t shake the crazy annoying though that we’re never going to find out why Hurley saw what’s-her-face in the institution.
Of all the things that we still don’t know the answer to, THAT is your biggest question mark?
I dunno! It just bugs me. It was such a huge reveal and they’ve never mentioned or referenced it since.
Libby’s popped up in visions a few times in the last two seasons, so I’d imagine we’ll be seeing more of her… I certainly haven’t just checked (ahem) production notes online to see if she was cast in upcoming episodes or anything…
I actually think it’s really easy for the writers to gather up a lot of the less important mysteries and explain many of them with an off-hand line of dialogue or by showing a brief, previously unseen connection to something else. We don’t necessarily need everything to be spelled out for us explicitly.
I’ve been thinking, in the last couple weeks, that Hurley’s visions throughout the series might be explained as glimpses of people in the tangent parallel timeline (which would have existed since 1977, before he was born). We’ve already established, via Miles, that Hurley’s power is weirdly different from his much simpler ability to commune with the dead.
Kevin said:
Of all the things that we still don’t know the answer to, THAT is your biggest question mark?
Speaking of question marks, how much do you want to bet that the island is in the shape of a question mark with the Hydra island as the little dot at the bottom?
