SECRETS AND LIES
Whatever the Case May Be, Hearts and Minds, Special, Homecoming
We dance around in a ring and suppose.
But the secret sits in the middle and knows.
- Robert Frost
The secrets they found there.
Secrets kept.
Secrets stolen.
There were the secrets that others had left behind
And the secrets the Island wasn't planning to give up.
Recently Damon Lindelof revealed his own secret in an interview with USA Today. It seems all episodes on Lost are not created equal, and this batch contains the episode Damon considers "my least favorite episode of the show ever ..."Homecoming, I think, was flawed on almost every single level that an episode of Lost could be." It's true the quality flagged here and there in the first season. But maybe that's an occupational hazard of trying to put together a puzzle when it has to be kept a secret where all the pieces are being kept. It's easy to get a little lost.
I think Damon's being too hard on himself about Homecoming. Even a subpar Season One episode was pretty damn fun. Things jump out at you that you never noticed the first time, things there was no reason to notice. Like this scene from Hearts and Minds. Jack approaches Locke, who is sitting on the beach, looking out to sea.
JACK: Any ships?
LOCKE: Not yet. But I'm -- patient.
LOCKE: Not yet. But I'm -- patient.
I do realize this is most likely just a fortunate glitch, but when a story is clicking, those connections have a way of making themselves. I'm still giving even money that the final scene of Lost resembles something along these lines:
And of course I'm completely prepared to be completely wrong. How could I watch this show if I wasn't?
There were other foreshadowy moments, though none quite as glamorous. There was a tiny moment when Sun and Jin were discussing Claire's baby, just after Claire had returned from the jungle, and they gave each other a look that told us - even though we didn't see it then - that this was a couple where babies were a big issue.
We had NO idea watching that scene that we were being given our first signal that infertility and infidelity would one day define the story of Jin and Sun. But it was there, and it was fun to spot it. That's a big part of the fun of rewatching Season One as a visitor from the future. You get to see all the stuff that was always right there that you never saw before.
Another pleasure of a rewatch is just getting to watch - again - things you really enjoy rewatching. Like Kate and Sawyer jumping into the waterfall and frolicking and larking around like two kids. It is one of the most purely joyous moments of Season One.
It's sexy, but it's innocent.
It feels so natural. It looks so fun.
Until they bump up against those everpresent dead people that turn up everywhere on Craphole Island.
The discovery of The Case begins the quest for the shiniest secret of the batch.
What was in Kate's Case? And by extension what was the deal with Kate? She had been traveling under heavy guard with a U.S. Marshall. Aside from that, we knew that she climbed trees better than Tarzan.
She could track. She seemed to feel pretty comfy living in the wild. And that's about all we knew about her. Then as now, she's a very hard character to get a bead on. Finding out that she had this case, and that it meant so much to her, became a not so subtle metaphor for how much Jack and Sawyer both wanted to find a way to get inside her ... head.
This episode, coming on the heels of the epic sex-ay kiss in Confidence Man, was the next chapter in the LOST Love Triangle series of stories. It starts out light and bubbly with the waterfall romp.
Then it shifts into a hotter, more sexual vibe as Kate and Sawyer wrestle for The Case
That's when it all starts disintegrating into a long, miserable slog towards Jack finally letting Kate have her lost Cracker Jack prize. And in the end, it's still a total secret what it all means to her.
As a matter of fact, according to this 2006 interview with ABC, Damon Lindelof regarded Kate's toy airplane as "probably the single biggest regret that we have as storytellers. "
Our intention was always that there be a second flashback story that revealed that that plane was part of a time capsule that she shared with a childhood sweetheart. She was responsible for the childhood sweetheart's death when she was on the run and, therefore, the plane had great emotional investment. And we would hear "What's up with the plane? What's going on with the plane? When are you going to pay off on the plane?" Then we paid it off and people still are asking us. So in the finale that year the marshal gives this big sort of monologue about, "You want to know about this f--ing plane? I'll tell you, God damn it!"
It goes to show you how much forethought those guys were putting into Kate's storyline. Like ... none. The plane meant nothing. It just showed that Kate was clinging beyond all rational measure to a childhood trinket. But let's let bygones be bygones, shall we? This episode, the cleverly named Whatever the Case May Be was a fun one, at least for the first half. It could almost be considered a kind of litmus test for shippers. For example, if you like your romance flirty and hot and where the girl gets to be on top sometimes,
then you just might be a Skater.
If, on the other hand, you're more of a navel gazing no fun mopey type,
Seriously, it's wrong to generalize. There's more nuance than that to both these stories. The differences between them, however, are striking. Sawyer bargains with Kate over The Case, and only wants her to tell him what's inside. He's not even asking to see it. He's curious, not about what's actually in The Case, but only why it means so much to Kate to have it.
Except that stupid plane, of course.
When Sawyer and Kate have their close encounter with corpses, they're as weightless and playful and graceful as a pair of dolphins.
When Jack and Kate go grave robbing, they're gagging and tearing up and trying not to retch all over each other.
Was this stuff deliberate or did the writers not see what they were doing? Even when it came to month old dead people, Sawyer and Kate managed to make it look sexy. Jack and Kate had peaked too early with all that hot and heavy verbal copulation. By this episode they had already moved on to the numbingly miserable bad marriage phase of the relationship.
he left her to have a good girly cry. When it comes to these two ships the biggest secret for me still remains: Why did anybody like watching Jack and Kate? And more than that, what were these writers thinking when they dreamed up this shite? One possible answer? It's an aspect of season one that makes fanboys a little uncomfortable, I've noticed, but I'll say it anyway. The explanation for Season One Jack & Kate, as far as I'm concerned, was the not so pretty thread of misogyny that ran deeply through much of the early characterizations.
Jack, despite being as highstrung as a tripwire, was portrayed as the reasonable man, the decent guy, the great doctor who had every right to control and discipline the white trash brat, Kate. Kate was the liar and the criminal who deserved to be treated with suspicion and resentment. We had seen her use her feminine wiles to rook the bank manager,
Kate used sex, heavily watered down with tears when necessary, to get whatever she wanted from life. I'm not sure if we were supposed to be distracted by the way she handled a gun into thinking she was kickass,
because in the story we saw on the Island, Kate was playing the naughty child begging for the good graces of her mad daddy Jack, as traditional and demeaning a female role as there is. If Kate were a singular case, maybe I wouldn't have noticed it so much. But Sun was also a liar. In fact, she was such a liar that she asked Kate, right after she stopped lying about not speaking English, "Have you never lied to a man you've loved"? As if to say that lying and loving went automatically hand in hand for women.
And on Season One LOST, unfortunately, they did.
Shannon lied to Boone to take his money, and then she duped him into quasi-incest sex, and then she dumped him with about as much warmth as an ice shower.
In the twisted world of fanboy-written romance, the undeniable undercurrent is that girls, basically, suck. You can't trust them. They lie and they'll screw you over first chance they get. It's a throwback to the mother of all misogynist archetypes - Eve, the devious manipulator who tricked poor Adam into losing innocence, immortality and the most prime piece of real estate in mythological history.
As in the Bible, there are exceptions made, but basically only for women that weren't considered sexually desirable. Or available. The innocent madonna Claire was sacrosanct. Never more so than when she was playing damsel in distress, which is a female role fanboys can all get behind.
And no one could ever say a bad word about Holy Mother Rose, comforting her boy Charlie in this jungle Pieta.
So while it was being well established that hot girls are all sneaky ass bitches, what story were we being told about the boys?
What they had instead was John Locke, their resident fatherless mystic crackpot - boar expert, dreamweaver and most likely a hardcore devotee of the Iron John School of Mythopoeic Manhood . Iron John is an interesting fairy tale to read if you have a minute, with echoes of LOST that are quite striking and lyrical.
"I am Iron John, and was by enchantment a wild man, but thou hast set me free; all the treasures which I possess, shall be thy property."
Walt met with Locke secretly, every chance he could get, trying to glean the secrets of manhood that Michael seemed so uniquely inept at teaching.
Locke had been mentor to Charlie as well, imparting to him the wisdom of bees and boars and the fine art of kicking a monkey off of one's back. But the young man Locke was most invested in was his partner in hatch finding, that dreamy boy Boone.
Since time was of the essence, and Boone was a pretty limp subject to start with, Locke was forced to resort to his homemade Instant Manhood Recipe. He bashed him over the head and then slathered his open head wound with hillbilly LSD that he mixed up himself, right on the spot.
It means rescuing damsels in distress.
And then it means, when you lose the thing you love the most, you must suck it up and "let it go".
It was one of the most pathetic flashback stories ever told on LOST, small and weak, but it revealed a central secret. For Charlie, manhood was going to be about "taking care of someone".
It didn't work out with the daughter of the guy who bought the paper company in Slough (shoutout to the British The Office ), especially after he was caught stealing Winston Churchill's cigarette case,
but he was determined to make it work out with sweet little Claire. He mourned her loss and tortured himself over his failure to save her.
Then he read her diary and got real happy because he found out she liked him,
which felt like a wildly inappropriate reaction considering at the time she was still missing and in the clutches of the dreaded Ethan Rom. (Come to think of it, maybe I can see why this is Damon Lindelof's least favorite episode.)
He gently coaxed her back to reality after she survived her trauma.
Killing Ethan left many secrets hidden, at least for another year or so. We wouldn't know how Ethan got all those scratches on his face.
We wouldn't know what happened to Claire or why Ethan took her or who he took her to. All that would have to wait because Charlie had decided to be judge and jury, to give Ethan what he "deserved". Charlie's story, as always, circled back to Catholicism and judgment, and to the biggest secret of all - the secret of Faith and why it means so much to some people and seems so totally irrelevant to others.
Turns out Sayid was down with that "love the one you're with" mentality all the way.
That's one thing I think we all can agree on.
And speaking of Sawyer, how did he rebuild his shelter up beach when all he carried with him on the great migration was a backpack?
It was still a secret, a cool one, why 815 passengers kept showing up in each others flashbacks, like Sawyer during Boone's visit to the Sydney police station. Come to think of it, it's still a total secret what those pre-crash connections are going to mean in the end.
And we are able to wonder now, with all our wonderful hindsight, whether it was coincidence or fate that Kate was robbing a lockbox 815
was that the Island reaching out to shape his fate the same way the gun he bought refused to kill him?
Was the cartoon about the Penguin with a Sunburn a secret nod to the mystery of a Polar Bear on a South Pacific Island? Is there some meaningful secret behind the cognitive dissonance of Antarctic creatures existing in tropical climates?
Why was the unluckiest boy in town the one wearing the shirt with the four aces?
Here's a secret I don't expect any answer for, but what was up with those slimy greenish greyish guava seeds that Jack gave to Kate?
Was it some kind of squicky method of asexual seed transfer, sort of like second base for verbal copulators?
When Scott was killed, they reminded us again that nobody remembered if he was Steve or Scott and thus the ongoing secret of the redshirts continued. How many of them were there? And why were they always lugging heavy things in the background and never allowed to talk to any of the A-team?
The A-team meanwhile was beginning to put together its own cabal of secret keeping. Jack and Locke had a discussion about whether to tell the group what was threatening them, a question that would be troubling throughout the story. As late as Season Three, Jack still felt it was his private prerogative whether to tell the nameless redshirts that they were about to be murdered in their beds. In this episode it was decided, as would become a habit, that the ever so brilliant elites would henceforth make all life and death decisions for the blissfully ignorant masses.
By far the most intriguing secrets of course were the secrets of the Island. And there were juicy ones throughout these episodes. The Black Rock that Claire told her diary she had seen in her dream was a potent source of mystery. There was of course the Black Rock ship, which had only been vaguely referenced by Rousseau, but that we now know is an ancient slave ship that is inexplicably moored in the middle of the jungle.
Nothing much was made of the magnetic anomaly, except to show us that Sayid was on the case of trying to grok out the Island's secrets, but it was something that would come back again and again.
Most spectacularly when Desmond had to pass through the magnetic moat on his way to the freighter and it mindwarped his consciousness and sent it skittering all over the timespace continuum.
But I still don't think we've scratched the surface of how magnetism is going to figure into the final solution. Magnetism is a geek subject, and a surprisingly complex one to understand, but I do hope it all means something that average dummies like me will be able to comprehend in the end.
"Rupes nigra et altissima" = "very high black rock"
But the Black Rock has other mythological connotations, especially in Hawaii, where there is an enormous black rock cliff called the Puu Kekaa. It is believed that this is the place where Lost Souls would take the great final leap into the afterlife. This ritual is still played out for tourists today.
Could this non-stuntman's dive by the athletic Josh Holloway have been intended as a nod to Puu Kekaa?
As lovely a view as it was, it's also true that he was quite literally diving into the final resting place of lost souls. The Black Rock is one of those deep, multilayered symbols on Lost that means so many things it may almost be a moot point if it's ever pinpointed as meaning any one thing in particular.
In any case, Sayid, with the help of the less useless than usual Shannon, managed to piece together Rousseau's map into a diagram of the location of the signal tower, or so he hoped.
He was distracted, not just by Shannon's sexaliciousness, but also by the seeming nonsense the crazy lady had scribbled all over the map. In the end, the gibberish turned out to be derived from a song lyric.
Somewhere beyond the sea,/Somewhere, waiting for me,
My lover stands on golden sands/ And watches the ships that go sailing;
I know beyond a doubt/My heart will lead me there soon.
Rousseau's maps would continue to turn up when convenient for the plot twist du jour, and I know a lot of fans like to analyze them, but it has never struck me that knowing the exact specific geography of anything on this show is vital to understanding whatever the hell is going on.
"No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child."-Victor Hugo
Most fascinating - and frustrating - is the secret of the Special child, the manboy Walt. That great enigmatic character who disappeared so abruptly from the story after this first season. Walt had the power of parapsychology. Or telekineses. Or something like that, some conglomeration of mind control tricks and talents that even he didn't seem to understand he possessed.
We had seen in Tabula Rasa that he appeared to make the rain stop when Michael said he'd be looking for the dog if only it wasn't raining. But we saw much more of Walt's special powers in Michael's flashback episode "Special".
Back in Australia, when Walt was still living with his mom, he complained about having to study the birds of Australia. This was a special scene for two reasons. First, Walt wondered why he couldn't be studying the Birds of Egypt instead, and this marked the first mention on LOST of the great kingdom of Egypt that would figure ever more prominently in the mythology as time went on.
An Australian Bronze Cuckoo bird, the exact same bird Walt was not wanting to study anymore, crashed into the apartment window and died.
This had to be one of those reasons his unDad Bryan Porter wanted to hand him off to Michael the first chance he got. The kid was creepy.
Walt also seemed to be able to dream himself into his own nightmares.
Michael threw his comic book into the fire and Walt ran off. When next seen he was being attacked by his very own dreamed up polar bear,
and a heartfelt reunion for a father and son who at long last began to feel like family.
to Michael's childish glee about the baby on the way,
to Claire being left as helpless bait in the enchanted forest,
and Boone and Shannon's protecting one another from unseen demons like an hallucinogenic Hansel and Gretl,
Or maybe the clue was in Locke's command to Walt to just "see it". Seeing is serious business on LOST, as the constant parade of eye closeups reminds us.
Maybe Walt's ability to conjure up what he sees in his mind's eye is akin to the "wishing box" that Ben used to bring Anthony Cooper to the Island . Unless that whole thing was just an elaborate ruse to mess with Locke's mind, which come to think of it, it probably was.
It was a Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends #1 (1997), for all you trivia buffs out there.
Not being a comic book geek myself, I can't make any guesses on the relevance of that particular issue, if any, but I like that it has this kind of dialogue in it: "What we did half a century ago was bad, and what we did since then was further away from any type of forgiveness."
That seems to fit this show. Somehow.
One of the prettiest pages in the comic, the one the camera lingers on long enough for us to notice, is this one:
It shows a castle atop a snowglobe atop a magical city, sort of a "Cities in Flight" image. It also reminded me of this image from Season Five.
If this were the only image of a snowglobe we'd ever seen on LOST, it would make no impact on the repeat viewer. But the writers have made a point of scattering snowglobes throughout the landscape, albeit scantily. They're like rare bird sightings. They take a sharp eye and a lot of patience. There is one on the counter when Michael buys the fateful gun that refuses to kill him.
... I don't know. Something about the lost innocence of childhood, maybe, or the fragile vessel of our physical lifespan. Maybe it's like the snowglobe at the end of the tv show St. Elsewhere, where at the end they sprung on the audience, for no conceivable reason, the random notion that the whole series had existed inside the mind of an autistic child.
Or maybe it's about a controlled environment experiment, a metaphorical universe where human beings are forced to play out the wishes of a puppetmaster god.
It's coming baaaaaaaaaack.
