Wading in the Velvet Sea

I bring this all up since “High Fidelity” re-introduced the concept of the “Desert Island Top Five” into my life, and tonight’s episode of “Lost”, entitled “Greatest Hits”, set out to create the Mother of all Desert Island Top Fives. As such, the show had me in its grip, pretty much from moment one, until the ending completely and utterly pissed me off. Whether or not this feeling of pissed off-ness is good or bad I’ll leave until the end of this review.

Five To One

Charlie Pace. What we’ve know about him before tonight: semi-famous rock star, decent human being, weak-willed and ultimately a junkie before crashing on Lost Island. On the island, he turned from junkie to recovering, shivering rehabber to Ethan killer to wannabe dad to almost baptizer to Sun kidnapper to church builder and finally back to not-really-a-dick-kinda-there-oh-and-by-the-way-the-Island-wants-your-ass-dead.

What we learned tonight, however, adds great dimension to his character. He once saved Sayid's ex, Nadia, from being mugged. He earned his place as “the man” in his family. Um, he jumped in a public pool. He avoided the Noid. He let the dogs out. He sank my Battleship. He did a lot of things, people, but the point is this: the show wanted very much for us to know that Charlie Pace was the inspiration for Enrique Iglesias’ epic ballad “Hero”, only, by and large, this tact failed to win me over.

Not that his actions and intent on the island weren’t heroic, not by any stretch of the imagination. What he did showed in fact just how far his character had come, so near as I could tell. The journey from a well-meaning but ultimately weak boy to the man who clocked Desmond with an oar is an interesting journey and one well worth taking, but to me, the flashbacks almost did a disservice to that arc by nailing each beat with the Hammer of Major Importance, narratively speaking. Each flashback scene was a big “GONG” where I wanted more of a triangle’s “ting”. The island scenes? Total ting. Flashbacks? Might as well call it “The Gong Show”. (Does this mean Chuck Barris is Jacob?)

Charlie’s flashbacks to this point have always pointed to this disconnect between Charlie the Dreamer and Charlie the Liver. Remember his tattoo? “Living is easy with eyes closed.” And that’s how Charlie’s lived a lot of his life, without regard for the world around him, choosing to focus solely on music, then fame, then drugs. Only when meeting Claire does his singular focus extend from an inward gaze to an outer gaze. Again, a journey well worth taking, and one well worth watching, but tonight’s flashbacks pointed towards Charlie’s status as HERO as opposed to simply an utterly selfless person. There’s heroism in that lack of selfishness, don’t get me wrong, but to GONG me with “You’re a hero, and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise” just takes me out of the beach scenes this week, which were plenty powerful without Charlie attacking someone with his guitar in a London alleyway.

As for those beach scenes: these are the type of scenes that “Lost”, and long-form narrative shows such as it, can achieve that no other medium can: the accumulated interest in characters that we’ve watched over the course of years yields emotional results that simply cannot be duplicated in any movie, episode of “Law and Order”, or yes, even “Blues Clues”. I’m not the biggest Claire/Charlie ‘shipper in the world; in fact, I’m not on that ship at all. I’m over here on the Norwegian Cruise Line, playing shuffleboard with Bernard and Rose (sorry, the game lasted a long time, that’s why you didn’t get to see them until tonight).

But the scenes between these two tonight were wonderfully understated, with both seemingly aware this would be their last time together, but neither willing to state the obvious. The room also got misty when Charlie hugged Hurley, I will admit. It’s scenes like this that make years debating hatches, polar bears, and mathematical equations that predict the end of the world worth it. Without such emotional connections, the show becomes an academic exercise in philosophical namedropping, overly complicated plot twists, and hieroglyphics.

Which is why the last few seconds, while shocking, completely dismantled all that emotional investment earlier in the episode.

Glass Houses

It’s appropriate that the underwater hatch is named “The Looking Glass”, since so much of “Lost” can be seen as a game of chess. (“Through the Looking Glass”, Lewis Carroll’s novel, is loosely structured like a chess game.) Charlie, like Alice, is a pawn in a structure greater than he can comprehend. And just like Alice, Charlie ends up held at gunpoint by The Others.

OK, maybe the last bit isn’t quite a parallel structure after all.

Here’s what I’ll say about The Looking Glass: while it opens up a few hundred new possibilities, narratively, for the show, I was ready for the Charlie Pace door to close for good. He’d EARNED that ending. Very few people on “Lost” leave when they are ready to go. Eko sorta kinda maybe was ready, but his was more like Serrano in “Major League”, what with his “Eff you, Smoke Monster, I do it myself”. Boone and Shannon didn’t seem ready to bite it. Ditto for Ana Lucia and Libby. About the only person who wanted to die was Mikhail, and he couldn’t even do THAT right. So for a show that’s not afraid to kill off major characters, to NOT kill one off is in fact the shocker.

But to me, it’s a bit of a cheat, since we are audience members have been manipulated into thinking, “OK, this is the last time I’m ever gonna see Hurley with Charlie. The last time. Last time. Woo boy, um, wow, it’s getting, uh, misty, in here, and ohmyGod Charlie just hugged him…must be strong, can’t cry, The Girl will smell weakness and then it’s a weekend filled with going over dozens of options for the wedding invites, hold it together, damnit,” and…what? I’m not the only one who thought that, right? Point is, we’re ready. Like Charlie, we’ve made our peace. We held our collective breath when he went underwater, or at least I did, because underwater scenes make me claustrophobic and so I couldn’t breath while he couldn’t breathe, and then, um, we ended up in a recycled set from “Deep Blue Sea”.

Bwa?

Now, it’s still possible that Desmond’s prophecy will come true, and that Charlie will have to get all James Bond on us to eventually press the yellow lever and remove the blocked signal. I’d probably pay good money for a scene like this:

Charlie: Do you expect me to talk?
Cindy the Stewardess: No, we expect you to…return your tray to its full and upright position!
Charlie: Huh?
Cindy the Stewardess: It’s a metaphor. For dying. Oh come on, I worked on that for like, a week. Not like there’s anything else to do down here.
Charlie: Is that really you, Cindy The Stewardess?
Cindy the Stewardess: Unclear, the gun was blocking my face, but that insanely awesome "Lost" recapper Ryan McGee thought it looked like me. Lord, he's not only smart, but really good-looking to boot.

And if so, great. But the show’s on emotional probation for me, at least for the time being. Now, let’s talk about our newest hatch for a bit, shall we?

‘Twas Brillig, and A Brand New Hatch

OK, so we’re up to how many now? Let’s count. The Swan, the Pearl, the Flame, the Arrow, The Hydra, the Staff, and now, the Looking Glass. Pretty soon we’re going to find the Richard, and inside will be the original Apollo along with five Cylons. Or, you know, a naked gay dude. Could go either way.

The Looking Glass, we’re told, suppresses any radio signals leaving the island. Ostensibly this has been set up after The Purge to ensure that the Numbers (or really, anything else) could no longer be transmitted from the Island to the mainland. However, since we’ve seen contact between The Others and the outside world, it’s safe to assume that The Other have the capacity to turn this blocking on and off (or at the very least reroute it somehow). To do any of these things means that they need to maintain at least low-level staff there at all times, and thus, the Indigo Girls With Guns appearing at the end of tonight’s episode after Charlie’s little dip.

Now, having said all this, a number of questions appear. The biggest of all is: did Juliet knowingly lie when she relayed Ben’s story of how the Looking Glass flooded after, you guessed it, an “incident” some years back. You know, I’m just gonna start overusing the word “incident” in everyday conversation, pretty much irrelevant of context or meaning. You know, like, someone will ask, “Did you print that document out for me?” and instead of saying, “There was a paper jam,” I’ll answer, “There was…an incident.” Just to try it out. My guess is I’ll be punched in the neck before day’s end. Just a theory. But I digress.

The station itself is not flooded, but manned. Question is, how? We know that submarine blew up, right? Locke blew it to bits, right? Maybe, maybe not. Two ways this could go. One: those people have been stranded down there since the events in “The Man From Tallahassee”. Two: Locke in fact did not blow up the submarine, as evidenced by the curious fact that he was soaked to the bone after disembarking the submarine. In any case, it’s unlikely that The Indigo Girls With Guns swam down like Charlie did.

And thirdly: how did this station survive the purple sky? We’ve been led to believe that all communication from the island had been dismantled. Hell, I’m surprised the radio tower still works. We know the underwater beacon that guides the submarines in has been rendered useless as well, so we can use the “maybe purple skies don’t affect underwater electronics”. Maybe the Looking Glass runs on water power. Maybe it’s run by that Dharma Shark spinning a water wheel. Who knows?

Lastly: what purpose could an underwater hatch serve? What experiments could be conducted there? Is it merely a way-station for the submarine? Or does the title evoke the dual nature of the Island: a distorted mirror of the real world? Is it in fact the gateway between their world and ours?

Boom Goes the Dynamite

Back on the mainland, Jack was busy coming up with Incredibly Bad Plan To Save Us All #43. Poor Jack. He tries. I mean, he really tries. He even pulled the same trick Angel did during Season 5 to fool the Senior Partners, what with his “I’m gonna act mysterious until I have a climatic confrontation with everyone during which I reveal I’ve rocked all along” routine. But it’s clear he comes up short. From the previews, I called that he would team up with Rousseau, and that her dynamite-stealing mission to the Black Rock was tied into “Operation Blow Ben Up Good”. That being said, I had to laugh at Jack’s attempt at shock and awe by blowing the crap out of a tree. After I stopped giggling, I had two thoughts.

1) Dude, like, I’ve seen how long it takes to stack that unstable dynamite. Can’t you just say, “I have lots of dynamite, see? Big ol’ pile. But I won’t waste any of this precious, possibly game-changing cargo just to make you slightly soil yourself.”

2) I wonder if Locke’s still alive in that mass grave, and heard that explosion, and said, “Hey, that’s MY job! I’m the one who blows things up on this Island!”

With the time table pushed up a day thanks to intel from everyone’s favorite Room 23 graduate, Karl, Jack leads everyone to “safety” (ie, into a trap, most likely) while staying behind the shoot the dynamite are: Sayid, Jin, and Bernard. Hrm. OK. Not the Three Musketeers I would have chosen, but that “Bernard, Get Your Gun” sequence was supposed to quell our fears that this might be a bad idea to include Mr. I’m IN a Tree And I Can’t Get Down, who ranks just slightly higher than Mr. I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up on my list of potential snipers.

As for why Operation: FetusSnatch was pushed up a day, well…

Grave Concerns

"The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget."
“Through the Looking Glass”

The short “6 hours ago” scene served not only to provide a reason when Karl Ironman’ned his way over to the Island only to be tackled by Sayid The Island Gladiator, but to show just how spooked Ben was by his experience with Jacob and Locke. While not the first scene we’ve seen in present Island time between Ben and The Others without a Lostaway present to potentially mitigate any conversation, it did show a man at the very end of his rope, grasping at straws, seeing his power slip through his hands like so much sand through one’s fingers.

Richard Alpert put up a touch of defense, but all in all, we saw that even at this juncture, Ben still holds sway over a good chunk of the Others (especially the trigger happy ones), and by pushing his plan up a day, showed one very, very important thing:

He knows Locke ain’t dead. In fact, he may know that Locke cannot in fact die on this Island.

Think about it: when he left for the Cabin of Dismay, he was fine with the timeline of his plan. But the events in the Cabin (specifically, Locke’s hearing Jacob) proved to Ben that his window of opportunity was slim to none. Taking out Locke merely delayed him, it didn’t kill him. While Locke may be “immortal”, for a lack of a better word, he’s not fully in control of The Others yet, psychologically. This operation, to take the women of the Lostaways, is essentially his last big gambit. His last chance to maintain control. His last chance to create the Island he always wanted.

Problem is, in this rush, in this desperation, he’s likely to make a false move on the chessboard. And while Jack may not be able to checkmate him, look for Locke to do so before the season finale is over.

***

So there are my immediate thoughts of “Greatest Hits”, an episode I thought for sure would mark the end of a seminal “Lost” character and instead served as primarily a deck-setter for the monster 2-hour finale next week. I’ve spat out my thoughts: now it’s your turn. Lay out your thoughts, reactions, and predictions below!

And always, check here for all things "Lost".