TUIW Conversation: Lost – “Dr. Linus”

Each week, after taking a couple days to digest the episode and read what the blogs are says, we’re going to have a TUIW Conversation about Lost to try and unpack the episode, bounce theories off each other, and see if we can’t figure out what’s going on with our favorite group of TV castaways (sorry Gilligan!)

Jonah: This week on Lost, we got a bit of a gear shift, with all the jerkiness and forward progression that implies. Team Jacob is united (and back on the beach), Charles Widmore is back in play, and we got some tantalizing hints about key pieces of mythology (especially Richard Alpert, whose stuff I’m especially excited to unpack). But before we get into that, let’s talk a little about this week’s emotional core: Ben’s redemption. AlternaBen got the opportunity to make the right choice and save Alex, while regular Ben went further down the path of his own redemption. I’ve read a lot of criticism of how these scenes played out (too on-the-nose, that Ben could have just blackmailed the Principal into giving Alex the recommendation too) and I agree with some of it, but it all still worked really well for me, thanks in no small part to Michael Emerson’s typically strong work. What did you think of Ben and AlternaBen’s journeys? Did they work for you? And do you buy into Ben’s redemption?

Michael: I do buy into. Ben has already been a character that needs to be needed. When his power with the Others was usurped, he sought it from Jacob directly. When that didn’t work, he followed Smokey. If Team Jacob wants him, he’ll be about as loyal as anyone they can find. What interested me the most was his decision to go with Team Jacob rather than Team Smokey, who showed up in Locke’s flesh to court him. I kept thinking about the parallels between Ben and Sayid, two characters with evil pasts that both lost the person they loved the most, Nadia and Alex respectively. Both were faced with the choice of who to go with, Sayid choosing Smokey, and Ben to Jacob. In both episodes, the AlternaCharacters were faced with decisions to do good or evil, and at the same time they decided on the Island, they decided in AlternaLA. Coincidence? I don’t think so! Either way, we have our teams set up, with Jin and Kate the two wild cards (both seem to be with Smokey out of circumstance, not choice). Which one is stronger? Team Smokey is obviously bigger, but Team Jacob has some mystical protection around them. Who do you pick, at this point, to be the stronger team?

J: I wouldn’t bet against the team that is impervious to dynamite. All things considered, I think this part of the season has been about stacking the odds as much against Team Jacob as possible, which will make their triumph over evil that much more satisfying. Although that does get at one of my concerns with this episode: the moral simplification that seems to be going on. Never has Ben seemed as redeemed (I’d hesitant to say he’s full-on good, but he certainly does seem to have become a good guy) and Widmore as evil as those last few minutes (especially the dark music and Widmore’s far more sinister delivery and behavior). I guess it never occured to me that, as we neared the end, things would need to become more morally straightforward, but that seems to be what’s happening. One of my favorite things about Lost has been its moral ambiguity, and yet, within the span of a couple of episodes, we’ve gotten a lot of talk of “good and evil,” and the line seems to be a lot clearer between good (Jacob, Ben, Jack) and evil (Smokey, Widmore). Will Lost pull the rug out from under us again? Am I frittering over nothing? Or does clarifying the mythology necessarily mean clarifying the moral sides?

M: I think there’s still a little more ambiguity than there seems. Are characters like Claire or Sayid truly evil or are they just claimed by evil? What about Sawyer, who’s motivated by grief? Is Ben truly good or just happy to be somewhere that will have him? I think these questions will become more clear as the war starts to move on. I think it’s time to move into the territory you touched on at the top, what do we make of the events at the Black Rock? The inability to kill oneself went back to Season 4, when Michael and Jack struggled to do it off the Island. Locke was also interrupted out of nowhere by Ben just before killing himself in Season 5. So it’s not the Island preventing it, but Jacob. So…what does that mean? Finding out more about Richard Alpert could shed more light on that, but I’m just curious as to why Richard doesn’t age, yet Kate and Sawyer, touched by Jacob as kids, did. What exactly you get out of the whole Black Rock incident? I’m I the only one as flustered by the whole thing?

J: What I loved about the Black Rock sequence is that it hinted at the big picture, without fully giving it away (kind of like a free sample for the rumored Richard Alpert episode coming in a couple weeks). I’m a little disappointed that, if people touched by Jacob can’t kill themselves, that kills my theory about Jack and Michael being unable to kill themselves because they had to be alive for Jack and Co. to travel back to the 1970s, but oh well. I do think, though, that Jacob’s touch may affect different people in different ways. He seems to have picked Richard for some kind of job, different from the one he has for the Candidates, and that job may give him the ability not to age, while Kate and Sawyer continued to. Or maybe it has to do with being on the island combining with Jacob’s touch. In fact, maybe everyone Jacob touches gains some kind of ability (Miles and Hurley can talk to the dead, Locke can walk again) and it just changes from person to person. Alternately, it could simply be that Jacob represents and controls the island’s powers (like healing people; remember, his touch seemed to bring Locke back to life in “The Incident”). Meanwhile, the other big stuff for me, from a theorizing point of view, was from Roger Linus’ cameo. There’s no way he and Ben could have made it off that island before the nuke went off so…what happened? Could it be that the bomb isn’t what separated the two timelines? Is something else going on? Can the writers find a way to make the flash-sideways even more confusing?

M: I think that’s one of the biggest questions that will ultimately play into the way this show is resolved in a lot of ways. My idea is that in Timeline X, 815 never crashed, so they never set off the bomb, so therefore whatever happened in Timeline X is only related to the Original Timeline because it created it. Meanwhile, the Original Timeline is proceeding in its own “real time” (whatever that means for Lost). That may sound super confusing, and it is. I do think there’s a connection between the two, but I think the past of Timeline X is completely split from the Original Timeline. I do still want to know why Jack, Kate, Sayid, and Hurley ended up in the 70s, which I’m thinking will be a big step towards figuring out Timeline X. My big theory on that is because they needed all the Candidates in the same time period. That would make Jin the “Kwon” on the wall and not Sun, and explain why only those four time traveled. We’ll see on that one. In the meantime, we’re a third of the way through the season, which is where we’ve heard from the cast things start to move forward. The lines are finally drawn, the stakes are there, it’s time to watch the war begin.