As usual, before we get to the nitty gritty—yeah, I don’t really know what that term means, either—let me remind you all of what happened in these eight episodes.
Episode 3.1 (“A Tale of Two Cities”): In the past, Jack thought his dad was boning his ex-wife. It’s unclear if he was or he wasn’t. In the present, Jack is trapped in an aquarium and watched over by Juliet. Kate gets a sexy dress, and Sawyer gets himself a fish biscuit. How’d he do that?
Episode 3.2 (“The Glass Ballerina”): In the past, Sun did bone Jae! And then her dad sent Jin to kill him! But he didn’t. Then Jae jumped out a window and died. In the present, Sun kills Colleen. Yeah, Sun! I was waiting for you to become a badass.
Episode 3.3 (“Further Instructions”): In the past, Locke belonged to a pot-growing commune but was found out by an undercover cop. In the present, Locke has gone back to being an Island version of a Bible thumper—I’ll call him an “Island thumper”—and saves Mr. Eko from a polar bear.
Episode 3.4 (“Every Man for Himself”): In the past, Sawyer helped the government by conning some white-collar criminal out of $10 million. Also Sawyer knocked up his old girlfriend-slash-dupe, so he’s got a daughter. In the present, Sawyer is led to believe that he has a ticking time bomb in his chest, but unsurprisingly he’s been conned. On the other side of the island, Desmond apparently can see the future.
Episode 3.5 (“The Cost of Living”): In the past, Mr. Eko the priest killed three Bad Guys in his church. In the present, Mr. Eko refuses to apologize for any of his actions, because he did what he did in order to survive. The Island does not approve. The Monster kills Mr. Eko. Man, so now Bernard is the only back-of-the-plane guy left? Weak. Other things: some eyepatch-wearing guy is using a computer in one of the hatches, Ben Linus (nee Henry Gale) has a tumor that needs operating, and Juliet asks Jack to kill Ben.
Episode 3.6 (“I Do”): Nathan Fillion! Nathan Fillion! Nathan! Fillion! …And some other stuff happened.
Episode 3.7 (“Not in Portland”): In the past, Juliet the fertility scientist stole medical stuffs from her lab to get her sick sister preggers the same day the “Not Dharma Initiative” asked her to join the team in “Not Portland.” But the only way she could join them would be if her ex-husband—really, writers, you named him Edmund Burke?—got run over by a bus. So of course the Not Dharma Initiative arranged for that very thing to happen. In the present, Jack holds Ben hostage by nicking his kidneys and arranges for Kate and Sawyer to escape from the Mini Island. Or maybe we should call them “The Big Island” and “Other-ahu”?
Episode 3.8 (“Flashes Before Your Eyes”): In the present, watching this episode simultaneously got me interested in Lost again and made me trade in my Sayid and Sawyer Fan Club cards for a Desmond Fan Club card. Yeah! Desmond! Here’s what happened in the episode: In either the distant past OR the near past right after the failsafe key incident, Desmond either went back in time to right before he broke up with Penny OR had some wacky vision of what would happen if he tried to change the past but couldn’t. In the present, Desmond the Grey wakes up naked to find he has come back as Desmond the White. Desmond the White can see the future. More specifically, the future that has already happened. So the future-past. I dunno, go read Slaughterhouse-Five if you’re confused. Desmond the White was apparently sent back to save a hobbit. Uh, I mean, to save Charlie. If he can. But he probably can’t. And there go my Lord of the Rings parallels.
And so, in one fell swoop, Lost completely invalidated my post from last week. You know, the one where I said, “I don’t really see any evidence that Lost is run by a ‘fate principle’ blah blah blah determinism can suck it.” In the words of Mr. John Locke, “I was wrong.” With episode 3.8, there is now some evidence that the show is set in a deterministic universe. But I’m not going to go all out and say that the characters have no free will just yet. That would be crazy. First, we’ll have to wait and see if (cue scary voice) Charlie dies. Even Charlie dies, it doesn’t necessarily prove there’s no free will; it only tips the scales in that direction. But even if somehow it’s proven that fate is real in this universe, I’m going to bet Jack is going to go all John Connor and say, “no fate but what we make,” and try to alter the space-time continuum or something so he gets his free will back. “Hey, Fate! Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” It’s going to happen. I have foreseen it.
Now to your questions.
Question 1: You’ve been talking a lot about character and political theory and literary allusions lately. Why don’t you ever talk about the weird shit that’s going down on the Island? The four-toed statue, the crazy purple light, the smoke monster, the way Walt’s mouth movements never seem to match what he’s saying. What the hell is going on here?!
Over the past few weeks I’ve gotten this question or comment several times. There seems to be an insistence that my posts, while interesting curiosities, are focusing on the wrong things. That I am, as it were, missing the point. Maybe. But I think the fault is not mine alone. It is also the fault of the show.
It is my fault in that my mind tends to naturally head in the direction of political theory, literary theory, philosophy, and the like. You can look back at my other posts on other topics if you need proof of that. (Except this one.) But the show is at fault, as well. In order for me to overthink something (rather than “regular-think” it), I need information. I need to be able to understand the plot on a literal level before I can dig deep and get at the themes, the inconsistencies, the references, and so on. I haven’t yet tried to overthink the magical elements on the Island simply because I still don’t know what the hell they are. That’s the show’s fault.
That said, I can certainly try to regular-think the mythological stuff! Using my powers of deduction and cracked-out imagination, I shall attempt to figure out what is going on on this Island. My theories will likely be ridiculous and incorrect, but I am hoping you will find them an amusing diversion from your work.
So here’s my theory: time travel. Episode 3.8 was the first to point out time travel as a legitimate answer to all of these mysteries. Maybe the question isn’t “where is the island?” but “WHEN is the island?” I think Hurley made a joke along these lines at some point in the second season—just like Sawyer made a joke about the aliens. I’m willing to take both these jokes seriously.
How the first members of the Dharma Initiative got to the Island.
My theory is that the Island is located smack dab in the middle of some space-time anomaly, so that it actually exists in the distant past. The burst of electromagnetism that came out of the Island when Desmond failed to push the button several months ago pulled Oceanic Flight 815 into the anomaly. So where is the Island? Maybe it’s in the distant, distant past. Like, say, the prehistoric past.
Remember that the Dharma dude on the film strip never said, “push the button or the world blows up.” He just says it is “of utmost importance” that the button is pushed. That is quite different. So here’s my theory. It’s the 2001: A Space Odyssey theory. 1960’s SPOILER ALERT: In 2001: A Space Odyssey, an alien precursor race left creepy monoliths on and around Earth to evolutionarily bootstrap humans, thus bringing our species to more advanced stages of evolutionary development. For instance, at the beginning of the film, a bunch of apes find the monolith and immediately learn to use tools and weapons.
Desmond!
So let’s imagine the whole Island is a 2001-esque monolith. The Island’s weird electromagnetic properties bring species to new levels of development. Some weird four-toed aliens dropped the Island onto Earth to give humans sentience. They also transported a small contingent of humans there to protect the Island and make sure it remained working properly in the prehistoric past so prehistoric humans would remain on the right evolutionary path. That small contingent of people—who live in a time bubble in the distant past but have links to the outside world and the future—eventually named themselves the Dharma Initiative.
But the Dharma Initiative got greedy. They decided they wanted to see what happened if humans who were already sentient—20th century humans—were brought to the Island. This was The Incident–and for some reason it freed The Monster. But what happened to the 20th century people who were brought to the Island? Well, some of them moved up the evolutionary ladder. They developed psychic powers. This is how Walt was able to project himself around the jungle, and how Locke was able to “speak with the Island.” Now that Desmond turned the failsafe key, he got those powers, too.
The question is, what are they planning to do with these “special” psychic people? Does Ben Linus have some evil scheme up his sleeves? Maybe a scheme to bring down my imaginary aliens, possibly with an army of genetically-altered polar bears, and break into alien Heaven with all the “good” people on his list? I sure hope so.
And that’s my crack theory. Stupid, yes. Ridiculous, yes. But wrong? …Actually, probably yes. And don’t ask me why Locke’s legs started working again, and why Rose’s cancer went away. I have no freaking idea.
Question 2: I’m curious: what do you think is going to happen to Michael and Walt? Do you think Ben Linus will actually let them go home or what?
Well, if my above theory is correct—and I always assume my theories are correct, even when they are completely absurd—then Ben didn’t send them to a place but to a time. Either Michael and Walt will go home with no memories of what happened to them, or they’ll go home and realize the Island doesn’t exist in this time period. They’ll bring a rescue crew to the Island’s coordinates but won’t find anything there—just the weird energy signatures Penny’s crew found.
Question 3: As you said last week, John Locke is a very complicated character. What do you think he really represents? Is he supposed to be man in a state of nature, or is he just a wimp who lets his daddy push him around?
This is a very difficult question that I don’t think I’ll be able to answer in full today. So far, over the last six weeks, I’ve claimed that Locke is Jesus, Locke is man in the state of nature, Locke is Simon from The Lord of the Flies. In this week’s episodes, Lost gave us a new parallel: Locke is both Cain and Abel. Both the hunter and the farmer. Simultaneously loved by God and cursed by Him. Both a believer and an unbeliever.
So I think the show’s writers want me to be confused by Locke right now! Remind me to come back to this question later in the series when I know more about John Locke. For instance, how did he get paralyzed? Well, I dunno! So I can’t answer your question, not just yet.
The Island thumper in action.
Question 4: What do you think about the postmodern telling of the tale—the flashbacks, the shuffled order of events, and so on?
I’m not quite sure I’d go as far as saying Lost is postmodern in nature. Flashbacks alone do not a postmodern text make. If Lost were a novel, you wouldn’t see them as flashbacks, anyway. It would just say something like, “When Sun was a little girl she broke a glass ballerina and blamed it on the maid.” That’s not really postmodern. That’s just a tense shift.
But then, “postmodern” is a tricky word to begin with. Back in college I took a course on fantasy and science-fiction writing. The first day, the professor said, “Don’t write anything postmodern.” That’s easy when you’re writing in standard speculative sub-genres, but sometimes there’s a real overlap.
Take something like “Flashes Before Your Eyes,” the Desmond-does-Slaughterhouse-Five episode. Is that postmodern, or is it sci-fi? The tale is told in a roundabout way. There are time jumps. You could say, “This is postmodern.” Or, you could say, “This is a simple time travel story.” Everyone seems to agree that Slaughterhouse-Five, which has a very similar premise, is postmodern, but that may be less because of the time travel stuff and more because o Kurt Vonnegut’s meta-literary conceits. Or take The Time Traveler’s Wife. Is it science-fiction, postmodern, or something else? I don’t even know anymore.
So let’s do away with these rather useless labels and just talk about how the nature of the telling in Lost affects the way I understand the text. Sometimes, I think the flashbacks are great. They give a very good insight on the way past affects present. We’ve talked time and again about how fate is a theme in Lost. Maybe cause and effect is another theme. Is cause and effect the same thing as fate or determinism? Someone else will have to answer that question, because I’m hungry and my brain is foggy.
Other times, I’ll admit, it seems like the flashbacks are there because A) the audience has come to expect them and B) it’s a good way to fill out an episode that doesn’t really have much going on in it. (See this week’s Kate-related episode, “I Do.”) But even then I still like the flashbacks, because I like to understand the different sides of a character. That’s something movies, being only two hours or so long, cannot do. Even a book cannot give the same depth of character five seasons of a show can provide. So kudos, Lost writers. Whether or not your flashbacks are postmodern, they are surely a nifty storytelling device.
Question 5: In some ways, Mr. Eko seems as paradoxical a character as John Locke. Do you buy his conversion from gangster to priest?
While I saw Locke as a paradoxical character, Mr. Eko never seemed that way to me. “The Cost of Living” explained his ethos perfectly. He believes, and has always believed, that if you do something to survive, God will forgive you for it. To him, the ends must justify the means. A little boy asked him if he was a bad man, but Mr. Eko has never believed in a simple split between Good and Evil like Yemi or The Others did. Thus there was no way to answer such a question.
So, as a child, Mr. Eko killed a man to save his brother, because he believed it was the right thing to do. God would forgive him for it. For the same reasons, he stole for his brother, because his brother was hungry. He became a gangster to save his brother’s life and soul. After he became a priest, he killed some three men to save his own life and to save the lives of the citizens of his village. All of this was noble in Mr. Eko’s mind. It was he had to do. The ends must justify the means.
Then he came to the Island. Like many others, he came to believe he was there for a reason—to push a button. This gave him another reason to believe he would be forgiven. If his whole life was leading up to this noble task of pushing the button, if everything that happened was part of a life God gave to him, then how could anything he did be considered evil? That’s the problem with fate, kids. If you don’t have free will, “good” and “evil” don’t really mean anything. Everything you do is in the service of God’s plan. Which must be good! As Satan sang in the South Park movie, “Without evil there could be no good, so it must be good to be evil sometimes.” (By the way, I think this may be a very important theme in Lost, so I’ll be coming back to this question in the future.)
Why'd ya have to kill of Eko, Lost? Now there are NO black men left on the Island. Was that your plan all along?
Long story short: No. I don’t see any paradox in Mr. Eko’s character. I think that when he was a gangster, he thought like a priest, and, when he was a priest, he acted like a gangster. He’s the Virgin Mary statue with the heroin inside. A complex character, to be sure, but not a badly-written one.
Next time on Overthinking Lost: How can Kate’s armpits stay so smooth when she’s been trapped in a cage for more than a week?
Remember, everybody: No spoilers, please.