Lost Episode 5.15 History Repeated by Luhks

In a few short months, the network television show Lost will complete its initial run. As time passes, people will begin to look back on the series from its proper historical context. Lost might be regarded as the biggest cult television phenomenon of its era. However, even the show’s biggest fans must admit that ABC’s Lost most likely will not be remembered as the best dramatic series of its decade. (The cable-television triumvirate of The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men, will take the gold, silver, and bronze medals, in some order.) Within its own genre, though, J.J. Abrams’ Lost probably has ensured its spot on Mount Rushmore alongside Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, and Chris Carter’s The X-Files. Tracing the history of those four shows reveals a great deal about the evolution of the medium. When The X-Files was peaking in the 1990s, writers were beginning to shift away from the same creative mindset that had prevailed since the 1960s, that each episode operates as a self-contained, one-time broadcast. The ambitious X-Files team struggled mightily in their early attempts to convert their Monster-of-the-Week drama into a Grand-Mythological-Saga. Over time, technological shifts have changed fundamentally the way in which the artists are approaching the medium. After syndication, DVR playback, streaming media, and most importantly the DVD market, television programming carries a more permanent life than ever before. Today’s Lost writers operate with the understanding that their episodes will continue to exist long after their transitory time slots. Any fan would be naïve to believe that everything was planned from the beginning, but Abrams and Lindelof certainly understood that their Pilot was a Beginning that would lead to a Middle and an End. Each episode no longer needs to operate as an individual short story within a compilation, but as interconnected chapters in one great novel.

Lost Episode 5.16 The Dark and The Light by Luhks

There are only two types of Lost fans: those who watch the show for the Characters, and those who watch the show for the Mythology. The statement I just made is, of course, a false one. It reflects a gross generalization, which oversimplifies the complex motivations of a wide spectrum of individuals into two categories. Look no further than the Season Five finale, The Incident, for evidence that the definitions of ‘character’ and ‘mythology’ overlap each other as to make the classification nearly meaningless. Jacob, the central force lurking behind all Lost mythology, is in fact a character. Nevertheless, that exact thought has probably crossed the mind of every person reading this article, in one form or another, at some point in time. Our world is so complex and chaotic, that if we never made such generalizations, if we never drew such dividing lines, then we could never understand anything. All science, art, and even language depends upon a binary choice between ‘X’ and ‘not-X’. Even when we stare into a random and meaningless abyss, a Rorschach inkblot, we instinctively need to find some greater meaning within it, to find some pattern in the black ink on white background.

Lost Episode 5.14 The Hole in the Heart by Luhks

All five seasons of Lost follow a parabola of sorts, with highest points of action at the beginning and end of each year’s collection of episodes. Season Five literally opened with a lot of flash, a razzle-dazzle series of time jumps backward, forward, and sideways. Eventually, the drama settled down into a smoothly-curved valley inside the happy yellow houses of the 1970s Dharma Initiative. Episode 5.13 Some Like it Hoth, which closed with Miles peering into the window of the Chang home, represented the last fleeting moment of domestic tranquility before the Island accelerated back into crisis mode. The Variable revamps the show’s conflict quotient, without using any Because-You-Left-style or Constant-style time travel. Instead, it relies on the old Lost tools of the trade: a tragic series of flashbacks, a handful of twists and reveals, and a desperation plan to get everyone back to where they are supposed to be. Along the way, Jeremy Davies provides the year’s best performance (by any cast member not named Terry O’Quinn), during both his first lead effort and his swan song. The Variable is one of those rare achievements that succeeds both as a character study and as a thrilling piece of plot development.

Lost Episode 5.13 Nobody's Perfect by Luhks

With only three episodes remaining, the grand canvas of Lost’s fifth chapter is coming into view. Even after several months, the season premiere still seems like a fresh part of the collective consciousness. As with its season-opening predecessors, the first scene of Season Five established the overarching tone for the story that followed. Man of Science, Man of Faith began with button-pusher Desmond peering up from the Swan station at Locke and Jack above him. A Tale of Two Cities introduced trouble in paradise for Ben and Juliet in the Others’ village. The Beginning of the End highlighted the tenuous return to civilization for the Oceanic Six. Because You Left shifted the spotlight away from the core group of characters into the Chang family home. Nearly every element of that scene hinted at the story elements to be explored over the next few months: the inner workings of the Dharma Initiative, the ongoing war with the Hostiles, time travel, the famous Hitler hypothetical, dead characters reborn, uncovering ancient ruins, false identities, domestic tranquility disrupted by crises, mothers, fathers, and children.

Lost Episode 5.12 Kill Ben, Vol. 2 by Luhks

Although it might seem odd to reveal a story's ground rules just before the final chapter, Lost has always thrived by revealing things out of order. The titles of episodes 5.11 and 5.12 make for an intriguing pair. Whatever Happened, Happened recycles the words spoken by Lost physicist Daniel Faraday twice already this season. In due course, the equally redundant phrase Dead is Dead was also spoken by Ben midway through this episode. These two titles express rather explicitly two main rules of storytelling that have been established and tested over the course of the series. In order to maintain the dramatic weight of any chapter, two principles are necessary. First, the past cannot be changed. Second, death is permanent. Only in science fiction do these basic tautologies of life need to be proven. The life-threatening injury to young Ben Whatever Happened, Happened provided a not-so-subtle lecture followed by a not-so-subtle demonstration of that first rule. The main plotline then went to great lengths to prove that Ben’s gunshot did not kill him, but helped transform him into the man he became, even with some unnecessary amnesia ex machina thrown in to eliminate possible inconsistencies. Again, for the second straight week, the powers that be were asked to judge whether Ben Linus had a right to live. As an child in the hands of adults, and as an adult in the hands of Island gods, the end result turned out to be the same.

Lost Episode 5.11 Kill Ben, Vol. 1 by Luhks

Thus far, Season Five of Lost has been a veritable bloodbath. During the first ten episodes, characters have been slapped, shot, stabbed, scorched, smashed, shredded, strangled, skewered, spinally-snapped, sonically-showered, and stricken with sci-fi sicknesses. Episode 5.10 He’s Our You was one of the most violent episodes in recent memory, not just in terms of its physical brutality, but also the wounds inflicted on the psyche of Sayid Jarrah. The final scene ended with the cold-blooded attempted murder of a 12-year old boy, struck down with a bullet through the chest. The follow-up, Whatever Happened, Happened, reveals the domino effect set off by that event. Episode 5.11 shows no further acts of violence, but instead focuses on the combined efforts to save young Benjamin’s life. On Lost, no good deed ever goes unpunished, and the rest of Ben’s adult life is Lost history. Repairing his body is itself a destructive act. Mr. Linus can look forward to thirty years of lying, kidnapping, and murder on a massive scale. The adult Linus would undoubtedly be back next week to add further crimes to his lifetime total. Of course, if you adopt Hurley’s theory about being erased from existence, then Ben’s personal path of destruction would be incomparable to the harmful effects of changing history, by letting him die. Regardless, though, episode 5.11 provided sixty minutes of relative peace within a season of escalating bloodshed.

Lost Episode 5.10: Natural Born Killers by Luhks

The tenth episode of Season Five arrives with the perplexing, pronoun-filled title He’s Our You. Taken out of context, the name seemed to suggest what many Lost viewers have theorized for years: the existence of multiple timelines. The potentially misleading title of the episode’s main literary reference, A Separate Reality, suggests something similar. This week’s cliffhanger ending, in which Sayid shoots a 12-year old Benjamin Linus in the chest, tested the limits of Lost’s timeline consistency. In the early seasons, moving through time served only as a metaphor for the mental journey of Lost characters, but literal time travel has become the primary plot device of the current season. The concept of symbolic character doubling has also permeated the story since the beginning. If the Lost characters obtain the power to change their past, then the days of Parallel Sayid lording his cowboy hat over Regular Sayid might not be far behind. To borrow a few words from Meet Kevin Johnson, Season Four’s similarly themed exploration of human freedom: NOT YET. The beloved Lost universe took one to the chest, but space-time remains intact as long as little Benjamin keeps breathing. The audience must continue to accept the most unpleasant elements of the timeline, because even minor change would erase the good elements along with it. As James reassured Juliet early in the episode: “Nothing’s changed.”

Lost Episode 5.09: Balance of Power by Luhks

Even by Lost standards, Season Five opened with unprecedented degree of Christian symbolism over its first seven episodes. In the first segment of that arc, John Locke watched the Virgin Mary fall from the sky; the final segment revealed his death and resurrection. The past two episodes have borrowed religious imagery from different sources, even further into human history. LaFleur of course embraced a number of ancient Egyptian influences. (In last week’s article, I overlooked another hidden reference. The new Dharma characters, Jerry, Phil, and Rosie, were named after The Grateful Dead, a band named for a passage from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which describes burial rites and the role of Anubis.) Episode 5.09 Namaste shifts its spiritual focus about 3,000 miles east, from the Nile River to the Indus River. The first frames of the episode show the now-familiar Flight 316, with its prominent India-based Ajira Airlines logo. The word ‘ajira’ has several translations in different languages, but it translates from Hindi as ‘Island’. The episode’s title comes from Dharma Initiative’s favorite Hindi phrase. The saying Namaste can express either a welcome or a farewell. Literally, it means: “I humble myself to you,” but, as with so many other Lost titles, this one proves to be more ironic than literal. The episode was filled with different greetings, with characters expressing varying degrees of humility towards each other. Throughout the numerous power struggles in the episode, the prevailing question seemed to be: who is humbling themselves to whom?

Lost Episode 5.08: Nothing Stays Buried by Luhks

As the Lost storyline inches ever closer to its narrative ending, it continues to reveal more of its chronological beginning. Due to the nonlinear storytelling format, The Beginning of the show’s timeline has transferred from one scene to another over the five seasons: Jack’s childhood in White Rabbit (which may have been preceded by scenes of young James and Eko); Ben’s birth in The Man Behind the Curtain; Locke’s birth in Cabin Fever; then Widmore’s flaming arrow attack of 1954 in The Lie. The opening scene of LaFleur, which coincides with the ending of This Place is Death, briefly takes the audience deeper into the Island’s past than ever before. Now, if you placed all Lost on-screen events in chronological order, there would be a new beginning. The first moments in our show’s history, millennia in the past, were the following: Locke fell down deep below the Island’s surface, while Sawyer tried to hold on; and Charlotte’s body gave a few last breaths, while Daniel tried to hold on. Although some even older event might take its place over the remaining episodes, the Lost universe now begins with Death.

Lost Episode 5.07 Another Life, Part Two by Luhks

Who is John Locke? There are many different ways to answer that loaded question. The easy answer is that John Locke is the greatest character ever to grace our television screens. While that statement may be true, the response is not quite complete and certainly not satisfying. So, who is John Locke? When Locke first entered the spotlight in Season One’s Walkabout, he set out on a journey of self-discovery. One would expect that an ordinary man would come to understand himself pretty well after fifty years, but Locke is still trying to find an identity. He features in every scene of Episode 5.07 The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham, as he interacts with characters both young and old, around the globe. Each of these characters offers him a different look into the mirror, to help him answer that same question he set out to answer before boarding Oceanic 815. Who is John Locke? As the episode begins, newcomers Caesar and Ilana set out to understand this mystery man before them. He has a name. He has memories. Even after all of his experiences, I doubt that John himself could offer an answer to that question.

Lost Episode 5.06 Another Life, Part One by Luhks

Legend has it, during Season Three, ABC reached a compromise when they decided on the show’s end date. (My memory might be incorrect, or the information might not even have been accurate in the first place.) The show’s writers wanted to finish the series with two more seasons, but the network of course wanted to keep its valuable product for at least three more. Their solution was to reduce the length of the final seasons, and divide up the remaining 48 episodes over three years. Then, the infamous writers’ strike complicated matters even further, and the fourth season became even shorter. The fourth season finale, There’s No Place Like Home, ultimately delivered plenty of excellent drama, but it did not provide quite the same sense of narrative finality as its three predecessors. Basically, the Season Four conclusion did not move into any new territory, but it merely filled the gaps created by the superlative ending of Season Three.

Lost Episode 5.05: Die Together, Live Alone by Luhks

I have had the privilege of writing about each Lost episode over the past two seasons. The show has produced some excellent episodes in that span, most notably Episode 4.05, The Constant. Desmond’s Season Four time trip (penned by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse) was by all means an outstanding achievement, an emotional and cerebral journey that reshaped the viewer’s outlook on the series. A full season later, audiences now have been treated with Episode 5.05, This Place is Death, written by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. This veteran Lost writing tandem brings it own unique blend of dark humor, introspection, and thematic connections to the show. In my opinion, This Place is Death is the finest Lost episode since the ending of Season Three, which concluded with the Kitsis/Horowitz classic Greatest Hits and the Lindelof/Cuse epic Through the Looking Glass. In its own way, this episode similarly alters perspectives on Lost’s past, present, and future. The Island means many things to many people, and quite possibly its most important meaning was expressed in those four words: “this place is death.”

Lost Episode 5.04: The Motherland by Luhks

In seasons past, the fathers of Lost have assumed center stage and pushed the mothers into the background. From the opening scene of Season Five, motherhood has started to play a more prominent role of the story. The first character shown on-screen was a woman who may or may not have been the mother of Miles. (The reveal of Miles’ long-term exposure to the island in this episode lends much credence to that theory.) Kate began the season with a pair of lawyers pounding on her door to remind her that she was not Aaron’s real mother. Locke began the season alone, until a statue of the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, fell from the sky. The Lie included a small reminder of Sun’s recent delivery, with the throwaway line that Ji Yeon is safely at home with grandma. That epsiode also culminated with an emotional exchange between Hurley and his mother. Thus far, Carmen Reyes is the only non-islander to expose the Oceanic Six Lie, and she accomplished that feat solely by virtue of maternal instinct. The opening scene of Jughead inducted Penelope Hume into the Mothers of Lost Club, and then chronicled Desmond’s attempts to track down the mother of Daniel Faraday. (If you accept the theory that the retro British Other Ellie is the current Space-Time Sheriff Eloise Hawking, then Faraday’s time-jumping may have linked him to his mother in a borderline paradoxical/incestuous way.)

Lost Episode 5.03: Beyond Belief by Luhks

Beginning with the initial episodes of Season One, Lost has been preoccupied with the idea of revisiting the past. The prevailing episode structure, designed around flashbacks for a single character, explored the connections between a character’s history and the present. As the story expanded, the show began to revisit its own past in different ways, by crafting a web of literal and metaphorical connections between each of its characters. Lost adopts the position that no character can be understood in a fixed point in space and time, but only in relation to the character’s past and to other characters. Season Five’s The Lie and Jughead adopt a new structure, which contains only a single flashback in the opening scene. The on-island events of the episode still take the viewer into history, but through the storytelling device of time travel rather than flashback. The resulting structure has a contradictory effect on the narrative: the relationship between the island characters and the past become quite literal; the relationship between the island story and the off-island story becomes more figurative.

Lost Episode 5.02 Two-Faced Liars by Luhks

Since the first season, honesty has always been a scarce commodity for Lost characters. For every instance of a character’s confession, it seemed that a few more buried secrets took its place. For every example of sincere cooperation, you could guarantee that a handful of cons, deceptions, and betrayals would soon follow. Things started on a small scale in the first two seasons, with petty crimes and infidelities scattered throughout the flashbacks and island interactions. Benjamin Linus, Juliet Burke, and the rest of the Others escalated the level of deceit as things moved into Season Three, and made the crash survivors look like amateurs by comparison. Season Four then introduced two massive global conspiracies into story: first, the staged flight 815 wreckage at the bottom of the ocean; and then the Oceanic Six cover story (a lie to conceal the other lie). Misdirection has become a way of life both for the characters and the Lost writers, who manipulate perceptions of truth with more skill than Anthony Cooper himself.

Lost Episode 5.01: Very Bad Things by Luhks

As a general rule when analyzing an episode, I try to refrain from mentioning Lost’s two executive producers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. There are many reasons that I try to follow this rule. First of all, the two producers are students of the Benjamin Linus School of Truth-Telling. Second, I disapprove of the manner in which they promote the show, essentially by declaring themselves as the definitive authority on its interpretation. No artist has exclusive control over the meaning of his work, especially not in an intensely collaborative process like television. Dozens of artists play a role in crafting each episode: creators, producers, directors, writers, cast, and even crew. Each artist himself rarely becomes aware of the full implications of his work. For better or worse, though, no one now can deny that Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have appointed themselves as the ultimate auteurs of this massive work. Season Five of Lost kicked off at 8 pm on Wednesday with what may prove to be an worrying sight for the future of the show: these two producers on the television screen, telling their viewers what the show is about. I realize that Lost: Destiny Calls was merely another clip show, intended to draw in casual viewers, but the show itself still struck me as odd. I am fairly sure they have done similar things before in the past, but even still, I cannot ever recall a time when Lindelof and Cuse made themselves such a prominent part of the viewing experience.

Lost Episode 4.12 No One Is An Island by Luhks

Every Lost season finale can only be described as a bittersweet event. The final episodes of the past three seasons all have offered a sweet, thrilling conclusion to a year of storylines, and set the stage for new ones. At the same time, the audience has no choice but to accept the bitter reality that they must endure many months of waiting before the story resumes. The audience is not alone in experiencing this range of emotions, as the characters themselves also experience both the pinnacles of joy (the Oceanic Six family reunions and Desmond’s rescue by the one and only Penny’s Boat) and the depths of sorrow (the division of the group and the apparent deaths of three classic characters: Michael, Jin, and Locke). The three-part Season Four finale, There’s No Place Like Home, lives up to the daunting reputation of its forerunners on both accounts.

Not surprisingly, There’s No Place Like Home borrows a number of key elements from its three outstanding predecessors. The structure of the episode most closely resembles Season One’s Exodus, another three-hour epic that chronicled the paths of multiple characters off the island. Other references to that first season finale also appear throughout the episode. The thrilling greenhouse showdown between Jack Shephard and John Locke makes a direct reference to the events of that episode, and revives the tone of their classic conversation outside the hatch. The ultimate night-time rescue of the Oceanic Six, floating on a survival raft at sea, provides a roundabout resolution to the raft scenes from the end of the first season, but with a completely different set of characters.

Lost Episode 4.11 The Alpha Male by Luhks

Throughout its four seasons, Lost continues to impress with its ability to juggle its storytelling back and forth across multiple time periods. By refusing to commit to just one specific time period, the show retains the ability to drift far away from the present in order to change our perspective of characters and events. Cabin Fever provides a perfect example here, as its opening frames transport the viewer farther back into the past than ever before. Chronologically, the birth of John Locke now represents the very beginning of the show’s narrative timeline. In the case of Cabin Fever, a series of flashbacks uncover revelations about Locke that would have been unthinkable during the early days of the series.

The show also demonstrates perhaps an even more impressive ability to jump around between different genres. This characteristic of the series has been no more evident than during the previous two episodes. The Shape of Things to Come consisted of fast-paced action and adventure from start to finish, while Something Nice Back Home offered an intimately detailed psychological drama. Cabin Fever contains a few instances of action and a few scenes of introspection, but it does not fit very neatly into either of those two categories. One might be tempted to classify this episode as science fiction, but on closer examination the story actually fails to incorporate many scientific concepts at all. Ultimately, this particular episode holds more elements in common with works of fantasy and mythology than anything else. As a whole, Cabin Fever almost serves as the equivalent of a superhero origin tale for the show's most iconic character, John Locke.

Lost Episode 4.10 Nice Guys Finish Last by Luhks

"Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle." - Jack Shephard

The tenth episode of Season Four, Something Nice Back Home, makes a considerable departure from the prevailing trends of the season. The dealings of Benjamin Linus played a significant role in each of the previous nine episodes, but Ben does not even have his name mentioned here. The episode serves almost as the polar opposite of The Shape of Things to Come, which immediately preceded it. Episode 4.09 concerned itself almost exclusively with external conflicts, while Episode 4.10 deals primarily with what is going inside each character’s head. The outcomes of the two main plotlines (Jack’s life-threatening illness and his relationship with Kate and Aaron) were never in doubt. Jack’s flash forwards guaranteed that his life was not in any real jeopardy and that his engagement with Kate was doomed from the start. This particular script tells its story using dialogue rather than action. The episode manages to tie together an impressive number of separate story strands into a coherent whole, and, in the process, sets the stage for the inevitable season-ending exodus from the island.

Lost Episode 4.09 Osama Ben Linus by Luhks

For better or for worse, The Shape of Things to Come is much different from almost any other episode of Lost. As the title implies, Episode 4.09 establishes many new trends to shape the remainder of this season and perhaps the entire series. Fan reception for this episode has been overwhelmingly positive, even though this episode barely resembles anything that preceded it. Many fundamental changes in the show’s nature are now undeniable. What began has an intimate ensemble drama with detailed character studies has transformed into an elaborate game board manipulated by two masterful super-villains, Benjamin Linus and Charles Widmore.