Wading in the Velvet Sea

She Took a Midnight Plane Going Anywhere

Like most “Lost” freaks, I went instantly to the online anagram generators once I saw “Herarat Aviation” pop up onscreen. Yielded jack squat. A Google search mentioned something about it meaning “hirsuite” in a foreign language I couldn’t decipher. So the Others are hairy? I don’t get it. I think Goodwin was finely quaffed, if you ask me.

We catch up with Juliet on her way into Mittelos Inc, and watch her, in a nice visual touch, be literally enclosed behind bars as she starts her new life with the Others. Two things stood out in this initial scene for me. One, Richard Alpert makes it pretty clear that beneath the seemingly naïve researcher lies a person who’s more than willing to go beyond what’s “acceptable” in society for the benefit of achieving her research goals. Secondly, the sedative itself implies, perhaps, something beyond merely “we don’t want you to see where we stash our nice shiny sub”.

Essentially, what I have in mind is some sort of Bermuda Triangle set-up here. It’s been essentially implied all along, given the island’s hidden nature from radar. But take it a step further: what happens when a person approaches the island’s unique electro-magnetic field? We’ve only to date seen one instance of this, and that was Oceanic 815, thanks to Desmond’s lack of pushing the button in adequate time. We only see the submarine at the Pala Ferry docks, we don’t see it “cross over”, as it were, the boundaries between the “real world” and the “Island Triange”, as it were.

After all, clearly biology works differently on the island. If it didn’t, there would be no need for Juliet to come in the first place. Something about the island inherently affects a person’s physical makeup. It affects their psychological makeup as well, as seen in many episodes in the past. But this episode featured the physical effects, primarily, especially when it comes to the birthing of children.

Oh Baby, Baby, How Was I Supposed to Know?

Well, as predicted by nearly everyone after “Not in Portland”, Juliet was brought on the island because The Others can’t have babies. We knew that. What we DIDN’T know was that The Others could conceive on the island; it’s just that every expectant mother died somewhere in the third stage. Previously I’d postulated that the Others were sterile, because, well, when you live atop a ginormous freakin’ magnet, that tends to happen. But nope, The Others could in fact conceive, just not procreate.

Which poses huge concerns about both the nature of the Others and their timeline on the island. A lot of the speculation this year concerning their existence on the island comes from “The Glass Ballerina”, where Ben Linus tells Jack he’s lived on the island his whole life. What I, and I assume many people, instantly thought that meant was “Ben was born on the island.” Which is of course is NOT the same thing. It’s a clever choice of words that can easily lead one to the wrong conclusion. Which is itself Ben’s favorite mode of discourse.

So, we have The Others, a group of people led by Jacob, who have an ongoing problem that no one on the island can give birth without dying. To date, we’ve only seen two people, by my count, who are “Others” or close enough to Others that are under twenty: Carl and Alex. We know Alex to have been abducted’ we don’t know Carl’s story. We’ve seen Others ranging in age from 30-55, by my rough estimate. We also know that variation members of The Others have been recruited over the years, and that several of them travel to and from the mainline. Which all leads to one huge freakin’ question: WHY DON’T THEY JUST LEAVE THE ISLAND DURING THE SECOND TRIMESTER AND COME BACK WHEN EVERYTHING’S HUNKY DORY?

Because it’s such an obvious question, there must be a good explanation for the answer. And the answer is that there are at least two people (Jacob and Ben) who have no interest whatsoever in anybody actually leaving the island. (Wait until the end of the review for my full explanation. It's a good one, promise.) There are probably more (as evidenced by Juliet’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” homage in “The Cost of Living”, where she implied a schism amongst the Others), and these people so far have the power over the comings and goings of people from Otherville to the mainland. Assuming Ben’s been there all his life, this means the Others have been there only as long as he has. That’s our base point for the timeline. It’s not possible to go a generation back with this group if none of them can bear children.

Now, the show takes place in late 2004. The real question here is Ben’s age, in terms of getting to that base point. We see, thanks to video footage from the Pearl on the day of the crash, that as of that day, time on the Island moved in synch with time in the real world. So we can’t do some “well, maybe time for Ben is like dog years, so maybe he’s as old as Yoda” or something foolish like that. And I can’t simply go off Michael Emerson’s IMDB page to ascertain Ben’s birthdate, because half the kids playing teenagers on “90210” were on Social Security and getting into movies at half-price. So none of that silliness here. I’m going off the assumption here that Ben’s in his mid-thirties, which would mean that for him to say with a straight face that he’d been on the island his whole life, he would mean that he only remembers life on the island, not anything previous to arrival, which means he would have been a few months to 3 years old, roughly, upon arrival, which places his arrival somewhere in the early 1970’s. i> This happens to dovetail nicely into my theory that he is in fact not named “Benjamin Linus” but in fact “Benjamin DeGroot”, and that Charles DeGroot is Jacob, and that they both arrived on the island as part of the initial landing of the Dharma Initiative, and that when the Others left Otherville in last week’s episode, they all went to pay Ben’s daddy a visit.

(Updated Thursday morning: I now realize that Juliet says the major problem seems to be at conception, which means people impregnated OFF the island could theoretically give birth ON the island. Danielle, Claire, Sun, etc. But the timeline, by and large, luckily still holds for my "Ben is a Degroot" theory.)

It’s Not a Tumor…Well, OK, Yea, It’s a Tumor

Since, however, absolutely no one gets along with their father on this show, it’s probably a good thing to assume that Jacob and Ben are not on the same page. And this boils down to the tumor on his spine.

“Why did Ben get a cancerous tumor?” has turned into one of the defining questions of the entire season. Indeed, how interesting a question you find that has a lot to do with how much you’re enjoying the season. As we’re finding out, just about every damn thing that’s happened on the show stems from this one thing happening. The butterfly effect from those initial x-rays has rippled into the events we saw tonight. Everything derives from that one revelation.

While the ret-conning that marked “Exposé” left me non-plussed at best, I did enjoy tonight's ret-con explanation for the first few minutes of this season. I wanted to know why Juliet was sad when we first see her. I wanted to know the source of tension between her and Ben. I did NOT want to know what part of the beach Paolo was on when the plane went down. Big difference there. More importantly, the scene in Ben’s house that precipitated all that tension in “A Tale of Two Cities” served an important purpose: Ben was scared and confused by the diagnosis. It was a first for him, and indeed the Others, and served as a further explanation for his curiosity with Locke in “The Man From Tallahassee”.

Essentially, the Island has started to fail him, and he doesn’t know why. While he wasn’t born there, he does consider it his home, and fancies himself and those who live in Othersville “special”, maybe even superior. So to be diagnosed with cancer is to admit he’s not superior, that he’s in fact normal, and this is something he cannot abide. And here comes Locke, all miraculously healed. The juxtaposition is killing Ben. And even though Ben has the superior intellect, and the manpower behind him, and the homefield advantage, he doesn’t have the ability to commune with the island the way that Locke does. So he’s taking him to Jacob to find out why, and more importantly, how to essentially steal that communion back and restore to its “rightful” place.

(Note: if we find out Ben’s schitzo and that Jacob’s merely a sock puppet he talks to when he gets super agitated, or if he pulls a Smeagol/Gollum thing out of the hat, that will cause me to turn off the television and rock back and forth in the corner for a few years. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.)

(Also, quick note---look how quickly the cancer spread from initial diagnosis through surgery...that sucker GREW. It did not mess around at all. The picture shown just above is what Jack saw earlier this year, NOT what Juliet showed Ben tonight. Tonight's image showed a more localized tumor, if I'm not mistaken. Must be something important about such aggression growth. Can't quite put my finger on it yet, but I did want to note it in case you have better ideas than me. Which is often the case.)

JuLIEt

Weird that the word “lie” sits right there in her name, isn’t it? OK, not really, you're right. But it's after midnight here, cut me some slack.

One of the ongoing sources of confusion in the show lies in Ben’s assertion to Michael that they are the “good guys”. Doesn’t make much sense, especially with various Lostaways straight up listing every awful thing the Others have done to them over the course of the last 80+ days on the island. (Then again, Juliet countered with a nice “he who lives in glass houses and tortures people/kills Robert Patrick should not cast stones” argument herself.) What constitutes “good” for Ben has always been in question.

Tonight, we didn’t get a complete morality schematic, but we did learn one major no-no in Ben’s book: he doesn’t lie. (Least not to those he considers “equals”, but we’ll get to that.) His offense to Juliet’s assertion that he was lying about the health of her sister was so great that his risked his own safety to go to the Pearl (his “oh for fuck’s sake, Mikhail, don’t shoot us” bit was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on “Lost”, bless you, Drew Goddard) to prove that he was telling the truth. Now, one can always assume that the video was a fake, but I’m going to just state as fact (even though it’s obviously just a theory) that the video was true, because to me it gives great insight into his character.

Now, to say he’s forthcoming with the truth, or that he never leaves himself wiggle room to get out of a certain situation, is obviously not true. But in “Tallahassee”, we see that he would have had to let the two of them go on the sub, because he said he would. That word paralyzed Ben from further action. He could always say, and rightly so, that Locke blew up the sub, even though Ben did everything but light the dynamite for him. It’s important because it’s a morality we can also see in Juliet.

As for the finale, when the “dum dum DUM” ending of “aha, she IS still working for the Others, I knew it!”, an ending only surprising because it usually takes the show seven episodes to answer ANY question they pose: a lot of Juliet-haters on the ‘net state that she essentially only has one facial expression on the island: it’s a cross between “I’m annoyed you were dumb enough to say that” and “I shouldn’t have had two bran muffins for breakfast today”. And tonight I realized why she’s had that face all along: she’s learned Ben’s “say just enough truth with a straight face” technique and walled herself behind it over the last 3+ years on the island.

It’s as much a defense mechanism against The Others as against the Lostways. Take those first few moments in “Two Cities” again: a woman, privately crying, who a few minutes later hosts a book club meeting as if nothing were wrong. And that’s why, to me, it’s wrong to assume she’s COMPLETELY on board with Ben’s new plan. I am assuming Ben knows about Sun’s pregnancy and sent Juliet in for monitoring. Make Claire sick, save Claire, earn trust, get Sun to start taking her Dharma meds. As while Juliet agreed in principle to the plan, and has so far adhered to it, there’s no reason to think there isn’t an ulterior motive to it all. While Jack’s a stupid sap, I think he was right in saying that when the sub blew up, he saw in her eyes how badly she wanted to leave. With no house to hide within, Juliet must maintain her façade, her poker face, her only defense left.

An Island Never Cries

I’ll leave you with one last thought about Ben’s need for Juliet. All along we’ve assumed that the Dharma Initiative was established to save the world, that the Hanso Foundation funded them to change the Valenzetti Equation and thereby stave off annihilation. The Dharma Initiative would broadcast the core values of the equation (4-8-15-16-23-42) back to mainland, indicating how progress was going.

But we’ve also all along known about an “incident”. Something that changed everything on the island.

Well, what if the incident in question, the start of the Purge, was Jacob broadcasting not the numbers, but, “You know what? Screw the world. We like it here. This place is magic, and we’re setting up camp, and here’s we’ll survive the upcoming apocalypse. You all are on your own.” A fight ensues, the purge is successful, The Others are in charge, only…now they realize, once they’ve settled into their new lives, that no one can have children. The future of this new civilization is threatened. And THAT, people, is why no one left during the second trimester. The price was too high to sully the social utopia established by Jacob. That's why, in the "Lost Experience", the Hanso Foundation (without Alvar Hanso actually running things) is systemtically killing "precise genetic targets". And that’s why someone paid a psychic in Australia to put Claire on Oceanic 815. Somebody paid by the new benefector of the Others, and the man behind the actions in the "Lost Experience": Charles Widmore.

After all, the world is so very, very bad. But the Others? The others are good.

Right? Hrm, maybe I’ve been studying that Room 23 video too much…

(Hat tip to Doc Jensen on bringing up this part of the "Lost Experience" in his preview this week.)

(And before I sign off, note well: I've consolidated all "Lost" reviews and information onto one page: click here to be taken to "Lost" Central. You'll find a link to the podcasts, links to every review I've written this season, and a host of other "Lost" links as well. Namaste.)