Wading in the Velvet Sea

Oh, Brother

I know I shouldn’t be as tickled as I was by the revelation that Desmond uses the word “brother” from his time spent in a monastery, but I did grin like an idiot at the ret-con of it all. Because only, do you think the writers broke out the Season 2 story arcs and said, “Around the last third of Season 3, we’ll reveal he was in a monastery?” I think the writers do know where they are going, but I refuse to believe they plotted this out so far in advance. (As evidence to support my theory, I present to you Exhibit A: Nikki, and Exhibit B: Paolo.)

Desmond’s in a monastery that makes wine under the name Moriah Vineyards, named after the mountain God ordered Abraham to take his son Isaac to be killed. Catchy name, as Desmond astutely noted. I can only assume “Pompeii Pinot Noir” and “Vintage Vesuvius” were already copywritten. The metaphor of Abraham’s struggle served to tie into Desmond’s struggle to serve Fate, a force equally as strong in his life as God was for Abraham. I don’t meant to imply in any way that God doesn’t exist for Desmond; He just takes a back seat to fate. (Whether or not God exists on the Island, however, is a question that I’ll deal with shortly.)

The reason Desmond was in the monastery in the first place? He essentially drank himself in a blackout before an impending marriage to Ruth (I’m thinking her brother beat the holy hell out of him at the bachelor party, but that’s fanfic for another day), woke up in an alley, saw a monk, and justified his way into sneaking out of a marriage he didn’t fully believe in. “We dated for six years,” says Ruth, which is Hollywood code for “He didn’t want to marry her in the first place” or “Desmond’s totally gay.” Given the Penny storyline, however, we can assume the former. So Ruth’s analysis of the situation was correct, I believe: Desmond simply was scared to marry her. He never found God, as evidenced by his slurpage of the vintage 1995 cabernet sauvignon immediately after his encounter with his ex.

The head monk’s assertion that the monastery was in fact just a point upon his eventual journey, however, took a MONSTER turn in the last flashback, as the camera suddenly pointed to a picture of the monk with none other than everyone’s favorite creeptastic clock store employee, Ms. Hawking.

Watch Her Closely

Immediately after seeing the world’s worst Photoshop job displaying the monk with Ms. Hawking, we learn that Charles Widmore is a major benefactor of the vineyard. Coupling these two pieces of information, along with Desmond’s Abraham-like desire to strip himself of worldly things in order to better himself as a human, to move beyond a coward, and you find some interesting territory. Was Desmond in fact marked for his trip to Isla Crapola? Was he identified as a potential candidate by the head monk, who, after seeing Desmond survive the vow of silence, pass word onto Ms. Hawking, who passed word up to Mr. Widmore, who arranged the meet-cute with Penelope in order to set in motion events that led to him pushing a button on the island?

All of this seems a bit much, I know, but what if Desmond’s not the only one with flashes? After all, the producers have gone on record as saying that Desmond in fact went back in time in “Flashes Before Your Eyes”, yet Ms. Hawking seemed to know all about his future. Maybe she too gets glimpses of things to come, the way things are meant to be. Maybe she, along with Charles, set him upon a path that would lead to him pushing the button ad infintum as some form of penance that he himself could never release himself from?

Reach Out and Paint Faith

Which leads us all the way back to the mural inside the Swan Station.

Remember that creepy painting? I’ve placed it over to the right there. Notice, among other things, the “108”. Of course you noticed it before, as one of The Numbers. And 108 popped up tonight, in the form of 108 cases of Moriah Wine bottled in 1995. But Jeff Jensen figured out a potential new source of the meaning behind “108”, one I think is worth exploring here. I’ll paraphrase what he said, and add what I can to the discussion, as I think it’s essential both to Desmond’s character and what’s going on on the Island itself.

Jensen found a Nietzsche text entitled “The Gay Science”, which is itself a series of numbered manifestos and mini-essays. Here’s what Essay 108 says:

''108: New struggles — After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave — a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.''

I don’t take this as far as Jeff does (he think this points to Dharma potentially trying to abolish the notion of God from the collective unconscious to essentially create the world in Lennon’s song “Imagine”), but I do like the idea of the Hatch, for Desmond, being his version of Moriah, the place of ultimate sacrifice and shedding of his worldly exterior to create the new, improved Desmond, the “Superman” of Nietzsche’s theories. Which is why the Superman/Flash dialogue had a double-meaning tonight: Desmond’s both, in a lot of ways, though not in a literal comic-book way. He’s coming into his own Nietzschean Superman while being to move through vibrations (electromagnetic anomaly after effects, anyone) just like the Flash. Hell, the damn visions are called “flashes”; I don’t think this is a huge stretch here.

And yet, while having a distant relationship to these two iconic super heroes, Desmond’s long felt powerless. He spent three years in the Hatch, trying to purge the shadow of the outside world, of his cowardice, with a reminder every 108 minutes of that shadow’s omnipresence in his life.

The turning point, naturally, was the turning of the key at the end of Season 2. The one event no one could have accurately predicted in the future. The thing that, in Desmond’s lingo, changed the picture in the box. (Is it a magic box? Hrm.) Turning the key was the, um key, to altering his fate. It changed his fate because for once, he challenged fate directly with his leap of faith upon turning the failsafe. Without that moment, everything is lost. And Penelope never finds the Island.

Aw, ‘Chute

Which, of course, we know she did. The end of Season 2 confirmed as much. Her story, however, to find the Island has all but been ignored this season. Until now. After all, that’s her helicopter that crashed into the ocean.

The big question, of course, is “Was she on the helicopter until Desmond saved Charlie?” That’s the butterfly effect type of question that will haunt Desmond, and it’s a question we should ask as well. In some ways, it’s silly to ask, since who else could it have been except for the mysterious woman we saw at the end of the episode? However, in changing the picture on the box (a rather gruesome one with a punctured Charlie neck in center frame), Desmond could have literally changed the parachuter. It’s worth noting again, at the risk of repetition here in my reviews, that the concept of “mind over matter” plays a huge part on the island.

Take the book that was in the backpack: Joseph Keller’s “Catch-22”. (Well, it was the Portuguese version of it, so that should basically tell you all you need to know about who this woman works for.) “Catch-22” as a phrase can be summed up as a double-bind. I’d say it meant “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”, but, according to Ben in Season 2, God doesn’t even know where this island is, so let’s leave damnation out of the equation for right now. Desmond’s Catch-22 was between seeing Penelope and letting Charlie die. He can’t know for certain he lost out on seeing Penelope by saving Charlie, but it will be hard to ever convince him she WOULDN’T have been there had he let Charlie die.

The parallels between “Catch-22” and “Lost”, and Desmond in particular, naturally run in fairly parallel terms. (It’s “Lost”, man, there’s a reason they used this book and not, say, “A Million Little Pieces” or “Grover’s Family Christmas”). On one, superficial level, both “Catch-22” and “Lost” employ a narrative device of flashbacks embedded with real-time events in order to further illuminate what we know about the present. Secondly, both feature war profiteers as largely unseen, but powerful forces shaping the fate of many unable to fully grasp the reach of these companies and how to escape them (the military/industrial complex of “Catch-22”, the Hanso Foundation and Widmore Corporation).

But there’s another more subtle way in which the two works are related. I’ll quote fairly extensively from Wikipedia for help on this, which may turn me into the Michael Scott of “Lost” reviews, but oh well:

Heller casts Yossarian as a modern day, anti-heroic version of Homer's epic hero Achilles, from the Iliad. …the comparison is made more subtly in a description of the chaplain's feeling of déjà vu:

But the chaplain's impression of a prior meeting was of some occasion far more momentous and occult than that, of a significant encounter with Yossarian in some remote, submerged and perhaps even entirely spiritual epoch in which he had made the identical, foredooming admission that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him.

Heller alludes to Hades in the Odyssey, where the hero Odysseus, meets a dead Achilles. In the underworld, Achilles asks Odysseus for help, but Odysseus cannot give it to him.

Both works begin with the central character refusing to fight. But whereas Achilles heroically re-enters combat in response to the death of his best friend Patroclus, Yossarian is goaded back to combat early on by mere bureaucratic pressure. Yossarian's heroic moment is characteristically anti-heroic: after the death of Nately, towards the end of the novel, he resolutely refuses to fly more missions.

Feeling of déjà vu? Feeling powerless to help someone from death? Resolutely refusing to do something as an act of courage? Sounds like Yossarian and Desmond have quite a few things in common, no? Amazing how I’ve constructed an entire paragraph using only questions, eh?

Course, the character of Homer’s that Desmond most closely related to is that of Odysseus, the man who spent years trying to get home while Penelope waited. This modern-day Odysseus, this modern-day Superman, the man who may have finally turned a corner when he imploded the Hatch. Only, in this version of the story, Penelope isn’t merely waiting for her love’s return. She’s not passive. She’s been actively searching for him. In the two weeks or so that have passed in this season on the island, she’s been prepping a rescue mission. Or at the very least, sent a messenger, to let him know she’s coming for him.

I guess that makes her Wonder Woman.

***

OK, kiddos, that’s my insta-take for the week. I didn't get into things like Jin's ghost-story or Kate's hate-sex with Sawyer, but oh well. Had bigger fish to fry this week. Feel free to leave yours in the comments below. I‘d also take a peek here at the concept of “eternal return”, something Jensen said he would bring up in his review tomorrow at EW. I don’t want to steal his thunder, but I’m pretty sure I know what he’s going to say, and I think it’s spot on. It’ll be a major topic for this weekend’s podcast. Verrrrryyy interesting stuff.

(And as always, you can check my “Lost”-centric page here, for links to my podcasts, reviews, and helpful links to other places in the “Lost” universe on Al Gore’s internets.)