Wading in the Velvet Sea

The Flashback

We catch Locke at some point past his last encounter with his father (seen in flashback last year). He’s living in a commune that clearly has a hidden agenda from Moment #1, given that Hollywood won’t allow anyone to live in the woods and not be creeptastic. He picks up a hitchhiker who looks like a cross between Ryan Gosling and Jesse Bradford, which freaks me out enough to cloud the truth: he’s an undercover cop chosen to single out Locke due to his being “amenable to coercion” (read: he’s a big dumb twit who will believe anything because, like Kim Jong-Il, he’s ornery…oh so ornery). Honestly, did Palpatine clone Stormtroopers from Jango Fett or John Locke? No wonder they fell for all those Jedi mind tricks.

The flashback served to illuminate Locke’s inherent need for a family: he has given up on his blood relatives, failed his commune family, but has a third chance on the island. His role as leader is illuminated by Boone’s statement (yes, Boone, very dead Boone, seen in the sweatlodge, and yes, I’ll get to that shortly) that he needs to keep the family together. Locke’s leadership role not only reintroduces Locke’s status as a hunter (not a button pusher/box collector), but also gives a psychological reason to take over the remaining Losties.

One more thing about the flashback: notice how quickly that rain stopped? Remind you of similar weather somewhere else? Namely, the island? I firmly believe the incredibly sudden starting/stopping of rain on the show will prove important by the end. After all, one of the stations on the Island deals with meteorology. It’s worth looking back and seeing exactly when it rains heavily on the show. It’s not a coincidence.

Drawing of the Three

Whereas the first two eps of this season dealt with the Kate/Sawyer/Jack trio, this week dealt with the fallout of the Hatch trio: Locke, Eko, and Desmond. All three seem to have gained peculiar abilities due to the blast. Desmond apparently can now see the future, and Locke/Eko can communicate telepathically. (The Desmond stuff seems clear enough, but exactly how Locke/Eko communicated when Charlie fetched water is still up in the air.)

For some viewers, giving them special abilities due to the explosion might seem like jumping the shark, but to me, it reverts us back to the notion that this island, separate from the hatches, is a fairly fantastical place full of elements outside our normal realm of understand. The visual of the imploded hatch served as a metaphor, I believe: they imploded the hard, confined spaces of the hatch for the open-ended atmosphere of the island. The one major interior scene, the polar bear cave, still felt organic and ancient (and mythological, given the Dharma shirt on the skeleton). Connecting their new selves with the Island reinforces the notion that this Island has special properties, ones The Others may want to protect at all costs.

And yes, we’re back to polar bears…one of the iconic images of the pilot, seen again when one attacked Walt, seen on the Pearl orientation video, and alluded to by the artist-formerly-known-as-Mr. Beardy. And thank the gods, the “Lost” producers actually spent money to make the polar bear less than completely God-awful as it did the first few appearances on the show.

In essence, this show felt like a return to roots: stripped of the hard sci-fi of Season 2’s hatch-centric theme, it returned to a survival action-adventure with a healthy dose of mysticism and awe affixed to it. While I stated earlier that I’m a huge fan of the evolving mythology involving The Others, I am primarily interested in them in terms of their relation to the island. As I’ve said before: this season will clue us into The Others, leaving Season 4 for the show to really explore this island, its history, its identity.

The Sweat Lodge

Brilliant piece of filmmaking there. I particularly liked how the metal detector sounded exactly like the 4-minute warning in the hatch to push the button. As if I needed another reason not to fly…now I’ll think the Hanso Foundation is trying to use me to change a core value of the Valenzetti Equation. Awesome.

As for Boone…oddly good to see him. And Lord knows he was infinitely more tolerable as a figment of Locke’s imagination than Mr. Mopey-Cuz-I-Can’t-Bone-My-Half-Sister. And it’s fitting that he appear, not only since he as a manifestation of Locke’s guilt makes perfect sense, but also as piece of symmetry: after all, last time we saw the hallucinogen used by Locke in this episode, he was applying it to Boone’s head in Season 1. People will pouring over that frame-by-frame to see how much foreshadowing was delivered in this scene.

Unanswered Questions

• What is the significance of the toy truck in the cave?
• How exactly did Eko communicate with Locke about his future on the island? Who has the special power?
• Are we to take anything away from the last flashback, in which Eddie tells Locke “he’s not a murderer” (exactly what Colleen told Sun last week) and that he’s a “good person” (exactly what Ben told Locke in the hatch last season?

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