Wading in the Velvet Sea

The Flashback

This week’s flashback served one of the two purposes a flashback should serve. In this case, it provided backstory to what a character was doing on the island that could not be adequately explained on the island except through needless exposition. (Although the new Lostie is one I’ve dubbed Sally Exposition, since she just walks around narrating everything to Eduardo Enojado, a man so pissed off at his lot and so verbal about it that…we’ve um, never seen him until a few days ago.)

The tension of Eko’s dual life---as holy man, as gangster---came to a head in this episode, both on and off the island. Off the island, the stunning visual of a man in a priest’s clothing holding a gun and knife, both rife with blood, gave the show an amazing visual metaphor for the character. On the island, Eko’s confession that he in fact was NOT confessing to any sins showed his complex relationship with his religious upbringing. While he seems to believe in sin and punishment, his is a thinking outside of orthodoxy (at least orthodoxy in which he was raised). Instead of merely blaming fate for his life, he in fact claims ownership of his own fate. And in doing so, he points out that sometimes an immoral act can in fact be moral if done with good intentions.

Many people would agree with that. A colossal smoke monster that can take the form of one’s dead brother before tossing him about like the freakin’ Sandman of Marvel Comics fame would not be one of those people, apparently.

No Smoking, Please

We saw more of Smokey tonight than we’ve seen in possibly every other episode combined. Smokey was a DIVA, y’all.

I’m tempted to say a lot of things about Smokey, but each one is inherently flawed in some way. First things first, though: Smokey had many chances to toss Eko about the jungle like a ragamuffin before it finally did, but never chose to do so. (Or, alternatively, the person controlling Smokey chose not to do so, depending on your own interpretation of the monster.) So, something about Eko’s declaration that he would not confess triggered something that sparked a change in Smokey, one that saw it grow to insanely large proportions. Large enough to, say, rip a pilot out of an airplane cockpit, filet him, and leave his carcass up in a tree.

But even if the pilot’s death’s mystery was solved, we can’t account for why Smokey would kill the pilot. If we assume Eko’s “path”, his journey towards making peace with himself as his actions, a peace gained not by blindly asking for forgiveness he did not feel he needed, but in fact confirmation from within that he could honestly answer the boy’s question of “Are you a bad man?”…I mean, if we assume all that, coupled with many previous deaths on the island that coincide with someone finally finding inner peace…and couple THAT with knowing that Smokey appears differently to Locke than to Eko….then Smokey works off emotion, right? It works off feelings of guilt, compassion, terror, beauty…its battery is the human psyche.

So why does it appear white to Locke but black to everyone else? (Remember the backgammon metaphor from the pilot? Stuff like this is why I give the show 17 benefits of doubt. They knew from minute one how to tie that in with the monster.) After all, in the last episode of Season 1, more than one person sees the wisps of black smoke. It’s not that it appears as white light to Locke and black smoke to Eko and a giant bag of heroin for Charlie and so forth and so on.

But let’s take this further, something hinted at in this episode. When notYemi says, “Why do you speak to me as if I am your brother?”, the implication is that it’s just another form of the monster. If so, coupled with the fact that the producers have said that we saw the monster in Season 2, but we just didn’t know it…is there a limit to how many forms Smokey can take? Can it be Kate’s black horse and Charlie’s drug dream and Jack’s father and Hurley's imaginary friend and a host of other things we haven’t thought of to date?

The big problem with Smokey being emotionally-actively at its core, however, is The Others. We haven’t seen any interaction or mention of Smokey among The Others. But here’s food for thought: we’ve always assumed they dressed like hillbillies and moved silently through the jungle to avoid detection by The Losties…but what if it’s all to avoid Smokey? Just food for thought. Mostly because anything else on this topic would be me talking so far out of my ass you’d all become amateur proctologists, and really, who needs that?

I Heard a Tumor…It Says You’ve Got a Broken Heart

OK, back in MindF#ck Village, we learn instantly that the tumor was indeed Ben’s, and a mystery introduced by the show got solved in the next episode, and after I woke up on the floor twenty minutes later, having passed out from shock, I rewound my DVR, watched it again, and saw, yes, Jack actually told Ben something Ben didn’t want Jack to know, and confirmed it with Juliet out of Jack’s ear range, which meant that the tumor was in fact Ben’s, and my grand theory that what we saw was Locke’s tumor was blown out of the water much in the way Michael’s raft was blown out of the water at the end of Season 1.

Which means it’s all some huge misdirect.

Not that I want it to be one, trust me. At this point, Ben’s plans are becoming so convoluted, and based on so many assumptions that couldn’t possibly come true as intended, that it’s started to feel unnatural. Starting to feel…well, scripted. And once you start looking back at what Ben did versus what The Losties did in response, and we’re talking like 47 things that had to go exactly right in order for Ben et al to end up where they were. And since the show loves to keep pulling the rug out from under us, I’m going to go out on one more limb here and say there’s something yet to be revealed.

Now, having made such a vague and seemingly unfounded statement, let me try to offer up a possibility of how this might not be as cut and dry as it seems.

The key lies with Ben and Juliet’s relationship. From Minute 1 this season, the writers have been sowing the seeds of dissention between the two. Juliet even mentions in her little iFilm once again her belief in free will (that movie scene gave me chills, props to everyone in “Lost” from writers down to actors down to editors for that little gem of a scene), so there’s precedence to what she says in her “let’s kill Ben” home movie. For her to even take this step, however, means that she has to buy into the tumor in the first place. And since Ben’s shown himself to be the expert in the long con, I simply won’t buy a man who’s been as secretive about his intentions to simply blab them out after Jack sees an x-ray.

Moreover, if Ben’s plan to receive surgery is “see a plane crash, find out there’s a spinal surgeon on it, infiltrate the group but only through mistrust, then finally show up myself, mindf#ck everyone, then kidnap the one guy I want, who now hates me and everyone I know, break him, and THEN get him to do my surgery”, well, that’s the dumbest plan I’ve ever heard. Even an HMO wouldn’t make you go through that many steps. What you do if this is the case is go there on Day 1 and say, “Yo, hi. Yea, we’re here too. Here’s how we got here. And I have this big honkin’ tumor, be a pal and help me?”

Moreover moreover…the island has curative properties, right? I mean, we’ve seen Locke healed, Rose healed, Jin’s sperm healed…and yet Ben has a tumor the size of my fist on his spine? Does Smokey protect the healing portion of the island, whereas Othersteria Lane lies on the non-healing portion? Worst. Zoning laws. Ever.

So, in summary: this is Ben’s ultimate long con to see where Juliet’s loyalties lie. If she aids and abets his potential murder, he knows where she stands, solidified his position of power, ousts her, squashes any dissenters for good, and moves on with things, either by killing her or exiling her or enslaving her. One of those things. That’s my take and I’m sticking to it until the show once again systematically goes in completely the opposite direction next week. (This doesn’t excuse the ridonkulous level of complexity that seems to be Ben’s hallmark. I bet it takes him a week to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’m just saying, don’t count out one of Ben’s henchmen knocking out Jack just before scalpel incision next week.)

(One quick note: it's possible that it's a dual con by Juliet and Ben, and they coproduced the video, but it's so small a chance and would require so much "ha ha, here's all this stuff we didn't show you and neener neener, you got PUNK'D" that I will mention it as a possibility only to mock it and by extension, any of you who might believe it. Which will make it that much sweeter for you if/when I get proven wrong here.)

Questions

A few questions not covered in this recap but of interest:

The flashback centered around vaccine deployment to the village. Is this potentially the same vaccine mentioned in the “Orientation” video from this summer’s “Lost Experience” game? In the game, a virus was engineered into a vaccine and delivered to several African nations, killing off the population in order to change the value of the Valenzetti Equation. Would this tie to the Hanso Foundation explain why the plane ultimately crashed on Lost Island?

What is the significance of the white robes The Others wore at the funeral? What is the real reason Jack was allowed to come?

Arr, there be pirates: who the heck was that guy on the monitor screen, and in which hatch was he?

"We're next"??????

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Thoughts, comments, and feedback below, please. All are welcome!