"Lost" (10:00-11:00 p.m.)
Growing from its lead-in by 8.2 million viewers (12.3 million vs. 4.1 million) and by 279% in young adults (5.3/14 vs. 1.4/4), "Lost" won Wednesday's 10 o'clock hour, as well as being the top scripted-program of the night across the adult demographics: Adults 18-34 (4.8/14), Adults 18-49 (5.3/14) and Adults 25-54 (5.8/14). In fact the ABC drama has won its hour in the key Adult 18-49 sales demographic on all 13 telecasts since entering its new time slot.
* "Lost" saw increases over its week-ago deliveries in Total Viewers by 3% (12.3 million vs. 11.9 million) and Adults 18-49 by 6% (5.3/14 vs. 5.0/13), drawing the show's largest audience and matching its best Adults 18-49 performance in 7 weeks - since 3/14/07.
* "Lost" improved the hour for ABC over the same night last year by 5.0 million viewers and 89% in Adults 18-49 (7.3 million & 2.8/7 on 5/3/06).
Source: Neilsen
Showing posts with label The Brig. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Brig. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Saturday, May 5, 2007
The Brig by J.Wood
Another indepth review of The Brig by the always interesting J.Wood.
Anthony Cooper had a problem: Why be virtuous when no one is watching?
Living LostJohn Locke had a problem: Anyone who believed something without having sound reason for that belief was more interested in his own desires than he was in truth.
Anthony Cooper and John Locke had a problem: Locke wasn't dead, as Cooper had reason to believe, and Cooper didn't have the moral sense to be as virtuous as Locke wanted to be.
These are some of the subtexts crawling through the jungle undergrowth of the nineteenth episode of season three, "The Brig." This was the first episode of the season to contain only island flashbacks, similar to the second season finale, and the tripartite narrative — Locke's story with the Others, Locke getting Sawyer to kill Cooper, and the happy campers hiding Naomi Dorrit from Jack — each advanced a different perspective on trust and manipulation. With the bevy of referenced philosophers interested in social organization, like Cooper and Locke, and the introduction of a character whose name recalls Charles Dickens' serial satire of mid-19th C. government, we may be reaching a breaking point in the social experiments occurring on the island; the Others have tramped off to who knows where, and the collectivist keepers of the beach flame are starting to turn on each other (or at least their previous leader).
Although the three narrative threads are fairly distinct, the general themes of this episode permeated throughout. Each of the threads opens on the eye-shot, but rather than the single, opening eye we're used to, it's two open eyes, and twice they're Locke's. It's almost as if we're being told his eyes are now open. What are they open to? Locke was once the hapless rube, inadvertently fouling up whatever relationships he was in and never quite attaining the self-awareness to learn from past mistakes. He was the kid who tried too hard to be liked. But something has shifted deep within him. After taking on Charlie, then Walt, and then Boone (and to an extent Mr. Eko) as protégés, Locke has moved on to Sawyer. In the past Locke taught by telling; now he does it by showing, by taking his charge through an experience. In a way, Sawyer's experience is helping him to become more Cooper-like — not Locke's father, but the philosopher taught by the 17th C. Locke. The philosopher John Locke was associated with three different Anthony Coopers, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Earls of Shaftesbury. In 1666 the philosopher became the secretary and personal physician for the 1st Earl, and once saved his life in an emergency surgery. The elder Cooper was a political high roller and one of the richest men in England; he was affiliated with the colonization of North America, and employed Locke to write the first fundamental constitution of the Carolinas. When Shaftesbury's grandson came along in 1671, Anthony Cooper the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, grandpa Shaftesbury put philosopher Locke in charge of the 3rd Earl's education.
Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, TimesThe 3rd Earl became a decent philosopher in his own right, and is noted for being the first English philosopher to identify the "moral sense." As discussed in the post for "The Man From Tallahassee," the 3rd Earl's work suggests he's a kind of mirror-twin to Lost Cooper; in Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit, the philosopher argued that an individual needed to employ reason in order to bring his competing appetites into balance, while Lost Cooper indulges in his appetites. In Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, the philosopher Cooper defines the moral sense as an innate ability to determine the value of an action. The moral sense extends beyond culture, he argues; if everyone in your neighborhood was stomping on kittens, even though it's socially accepted, your moral sense would still tell you it's wrong. He extends this notion to a near Foucault-like panopticon sense, when he claims if one asks "Why should a man be honest in the dark?," that person already has a problem with virtue. In other words, your moral sense should tell you to act virtuous even when no one's looking. Lost Cooper is morally senseless, or perhaps he has an immoral sense; when Locke removes his gag to help him breathe, Cooper bites the hand that frees him. He doesn't even have a real identity, so in a way, no one is ever really looking at him. Sawyer, however, has slowly been edging his way toward developing that moral sense over the course of a few episodes.
But the elder Shaftesbury, a Protestant and Locke's patron, was a bit of a conniver. He had spent time in prison, and was implicated in a false-flag plot to kill the Catholic King Charles II, known as the Rye House Plot. The idea was to spread word of a plot to kill the king and replace him with his Catholic brother, thereby generating anti-Catholic sentiment to capitalize upon. However, there was no assassination plot; the only plot was a Machiavellian/Rovian con to develop anti-Catholic wrath, which the Protestant elder Shaftesbury used to gain broad political support. Shaftesbury used that support to push a bill excluding the king's Catholic brother from ever taking the throne through the House of Commons (it failed in the House of Lords). Talk about your long cons — this is an Anthony Cooper worthy of Lost Cooper's namesake. The elder Shaftesbury went on the run, left for Holland with Locke in tow, and died shortly thereafter.
Second Treatise on GovernmentSo it's rather appropriate that Lost Cooper is shackled in the brig of the Black Rock, a slave ship. Philosopher Locke reasoned in his Second Treatise on Government that when someone intends to violate someone else's right to life, they've instituted a state of war against that person. He also reasoned that the only legitimate form of slavery arose from the state of war; if one acts aggressively towards another with intent to violate the other's right to life, he forfeits his own liberty and can be rightly enslaved. Lost Cooper has definitely acted aggressively toward Lost Locke; he took his kidney and his spine, and tried to take his life. As such, Lost Cooper forfeited his rights, and can legitimately be enslaved by Lost Locke. When we see Lost Locke keeping Lost Cooper in a slave ship's brig, in slave chains no less, we're seeing the philosophy being enacted at about 30 frames per second.
Little DorritBut the connotations extend to Dickens' tale Little Dorrit (of Naomi Dorrit). Little Dorrit was first printed serially in nineteen episodes, and "The Brig" happens to be the nineteenth episode; the writers are developing a Yeats-like fascination for number symbolism. The setting of Little Dorrit is Marshalsea, an English debtor's prison where Dickens own father spent time. The protagonist, Arthur Clennam, spends his later years in the debtor's prison after losing his money to a scam artist named Merdle (and if you know some French, you get the image). In Merdle, we get the sleazy echo of Lost Cooper, whose own scams put Sawyer on a path to prison. Like Cooper, Merdle hides his true identity — no one knows where he comes from, and why be virtuous in the dark? We'll most likely see more Merdle-like figures, however, as Merdle was also a major financier, which recalls shadowy back-figures like Mr. Widmore. But when Sawyer is locked in the brig with the enslaved Cooper, he comes full circle. Sawyer has gained that moral sense, and is learning to act beyond reward or punishment, beyond the Others' attempts at B. F. Skinner-like behavior reinforcement. He doesn't actually need to kill Cooper; at this point letting Cooper live or die wouldn't seem to change anything materially in his own life. But you can argue Sawyer also takes a step beyond good and evil. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that for an individual to attain full potential, everything evil in that person's life was as important as everything good and moral. The individual has to accept and overcome those opposite (and apposite) forces in order to realize one's full potential. By killing his namesake, he kills the thing that shackled him for thirty-some years, sends the thing to hell, and frees James Ford from Sawyer's chains. (It'll be interesting to see if he keeps the name.)
Lost: The Complete First SeasonLost Locke can't do this; like his namesake, he can't bring himself to act against the natural rights of another being. He may desire it, but he can't reason it, and Locke is now more interested in truth than his own fantasies. However, desire is a funny thing on this island; if you're not careful, you might get what you don't know you want (like a horse in the jungle), and it was seemingly Locke's desire that brought Cooper into the metaphor box (although Cooper had a different story to tell). So Locke does it Ben-like, and by manipulating Sawyer into killing Cooper, with a little bump by Alpert, both Locke and Sawyer get what they need. It was hardly easy for Sawyer, but like Locke told Charlie in season one's "The Moth," struggle is nature's way of strengthening you. In Sawyer, Locke may have found his true protégé, and certainly a soul brother.
And in Locke, Ben may have found his, as well as his enemy — yet another mirror-twin. It's getting harder to tell if Ben is playing Locke, if Locke is playing Ben, and/or if Ben knows Locke realizes Ben is playing Locke, and Ben wants him to think that. Ben even appropriates Locke's line, "Don't tell me what I can't do, John." Locke now appears to be special, like Walt, and like his own crazed mother once told him. When Cindy tells him the Others are excited to see Locke because they've been waiting for him, we hear echoes of Neo and New Zion; Locke is jacked into the island like it's the Matrix.
If you believe Alpert, Ben is losing favor as leader of the Others and set Locke up to fail in front of the Others by not killing Cooper on that very old-looking stone post. But Alpert's namesake, we should remember, is the Harvard psychologist who in the 1960's dropped out to become the spiritual seeker Ram Dass; if there is an echo of the psychologist in the dark-eyed Mittelos representative, this is a man who understands how both the mind and the soul work, and is pushing Locke along a certain path. If Alpert is still aligned with Ben, then his double-talk to Locke suggests that Ben knows Locke knows Ben is playing him, and Ben wants it that way. So when Locke fails to sacrifice Cooper for entrance into the Others, he may — like Abraham with Isaac — have passed a certain test. Locke may have finally forged his self-consciousness into self-awareness.
The only tests now are who to trust and when to show your hand. Locke tells Sawyer he's heading off into the interior, Rousseau-like, on his own, but we see him carrying Cooper's carcass. He may be heading off to join the Others, or he may be off to be his own Ben, but he's not ready to reveal certain information or motives. Neither is Jack and Juliet, who have something to tell Kate regarding Naomi; nor is Rousseau, who continues to turn the jungle into a DMZ and comes and goes like a jungle zephyr. Strangely, Locke doesn't even question why she shows up at the Black Rock looking for dynamite, perhaps because he didn't want an audience, and clearly, neither does Rousseau. And we need to question the convenient tape recorder; was this a plant by Ben? How did Locke get it?
And why did Hanso — or Mittelwerk standing in for Hanso — fake the Oceanic 815 wreckage?
The OathI'm going to let the John Lescroart book The Oath slide a bit. It was briefly seen on Ben's tent shelf, and is a kind of murder-mystery-potboiler that echoes Bad Twin, and Bad Twin was an exercise in seeing how far we the audience could stretch a an idea beyond credulity. Lindelof once warned of mistaking colorful rocks for easter eggs, and Bad Twin was certainly colorful The Oath feels to me like one of those moves.
(I'd like to thank Liz Kelly and Jen Chaney of the WashingtonPost.com for inviting me to write about "The Brig" with them today. The article is here, and they've cordially linked back to the wonderful Powells.com.)
Recap by J.Wood
Living LostJohn Locke had a problem: Anyone who believed something without having sound reason for that belief was more interested in his own desires than he was in truth.
Anthony Cooper and John Locke had a problem: Locke wasn't dead, as Cooper had reason to believe, and Cooper didn't have the moral sense to be as virtuous as Locke wanted to be.
These are some of the subtexts crawling through the jungle undergrowth of the nineteenth episode of season three, "The Brig." This was the first episode of the season to contain only island flashbacks, similar to the second season finale, and the tripartite narrative — Locke's story with the Others, Locke getting Sawyer to kill Cooper, and the happy campers hiding Naomi Dorrit from Jack — each advanced a different perspective on trust and manipulation. With the bevy of referenced philosophers interested in social organization, like Cooper and Locke, and the introduction of a character whose name recalls Charles Dickens' serial satire of mid-19th C. government, we may be reaching a breaking point in the social experiments occurring on the island; the Others have tramped off to who knows where, and the collectivist keepers of the beach flame are starting to turn on each other (or at least their previous leader).
Although the three narrative threads are fairly distinct, the general themes of this episode permeated throughout. Each of the threads opens on the eye-shot, but rather than the single, opening eye we're used to, it's two open eyes, and twice they're Locke's. It's almost as if we're being told his eyes are now open. What are they open to? Locke was once the hapless rube, inadvertently fouling up whatever relationships he was in and never quite attaining the self-awareness to learn from past mistakes. He was the kid who tried too hard to be liked. But something has shifted deep within him. After taking on Charlie, then Walt, and then Boone (and to an extent Mr. Eko) as protégés, Locke has moved on to Sawyer. In the past Locke taught by telling; now he does it by showing, by taking his charge through an experience. In a way, Sawyer's experience is helping him to become more Cooper-like — not Locke's father, but the philosopher taught by the 17th C. Locke. The philosopher John Locke was associated with three different Anthony Coopers, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Earls of Shaftesbury. In 1666 the philosopher became the secretary and personal physician for the 1st Earl, and once saved his life in an emergency surgery. The elder Cooper was a political high roller and one of the richest men in England; he was affiliated with the colonization of North America, and employed Locke to write the first fundamental constitution of the Carolinas. When Shaftesbury's grandson came along in 1671, Anthony Cooper the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, grandpa Shaftesbury put philosopher Locke in charge of the 3rd Earl's education.
Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, TimesThe 3rd Earl became a decent philosopher in his own right, and is noted for being the first English philosopher to identify the "moral sense." As discussed in the post for "The Man From Tallahassee," the 3rd Earl's work suggests he's a kind of mirror-twin to Lost Cooper; in Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit, the philosopher argued that an individual needed to employ reason in order to bring his competing appetites into balance, while Lost Cooper indulges in his appetites. In Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, the philosopher Cooper defines the moral sense as an innate ability to determine the value of an action. The moral sense extends beyond culture, he argues; if everyone in your neighborhood was stomping on kittens, even though it's socially accepted, your moral sense would still tell you it's wrong. He extends this notion to a near Foucault-like panopticon sense, when he claims if one asks "Why should a man be honest in the dark?," that person already has a problem with virtue. In other words, your moral sense should tell you to act virtuous even when no one's looking. Lost Cooper is morally senseless, or perhaps he has an immoral sense; when Locke removes his gag to help him breathe, Cooper bites the hand that frees him. He doesn't even have a real identity, so in a way, no one is ever really looking at him. Sawyer, however, has slowly been edging his way toward developing that moral sense over the course of a few episodes.
But the elder Shaftesbury, a Protestant and Locke's patron, was a bit of a conniver. He had spent time in prison, and was implicated in a false-flag plot to kill the Catholic King Charles II, known as the Rye House Plot. The idea was to spread word of a plot to kill the king and replace him with his Catholic brother, thereby generating anti-Catholic sentiment to capitalize upon. However, there was no assassination plot; the only plot was a Machiavellian/Rovian con to develop anti-Catholic wrath, which the Protestant elder Shaftesbury used to gain broad political support. Shaftesbury used that support to push a bill excluding the king's Catholic brother from ever taking the throne through the House of Commons (it failed in the House of Lords). Talk about your long cons — this is an Anthony Cooper worthy of Lost Cooper's namesake. The elder Shaftesbury went on the run, left for Holland with Locke in tow, and died shortly thereafter.
Second Treatise on GovernmentSo it's rather appropriate that Lost Cooper is shackled in the brig of the Black Rock, a slave ship. Philosopher Locke reasoned in his Second Treatise on Government that when someone intends to violate someone else's right to life, they've instituted a state of war against that person. He also reasoned that the only legitimate form of slavery arose from the state of war; if one acts aggressively towards another with intent to violate the other's right to life, he forfeits his own liberty and can be rightly enslaved. Lost Cooper has definitely acted aggressively toward Lost Locke; he took his kidney and his spine, and tried to take his life. As such, Lost Cooper forfeited his rights, and can legitimately be enslaved by Lost Locke. When we see Lost Locke keeping Lost Cooper in a slave ship's brig, in slave chains no less, we're seeing the philosophy being enacted at about 30 frames per second.
Little DorritBut the connotations extend to Dickens' tale Little Dorrit (of Naomi Dorrit). Little Dorrit was first printed serially in nineteen episodes, and "The Brig" happens to be the nineteenth episode; the writers are developing a Yeats-like fascination for number symbolism. The setting of Little Dorrit is Marshalsea, an English debtor's prison where Dickens own father spent time. The protagonist, Arthur Clennam, spends his later years in the debtor's prison after losing his money to a scam artist named Merdle (and if you know some French, you get the image). In Merdle, we get the sleazy echo of Lost Cooper, whose own scams put Sawyer on a path to prison. Like Cooper, Merdle hides his true identity — no one knows where he comes from, and why be virtuous in the dark? We'll most likely see more Merdle-like figures, however, as Merdle was also a major financier, which recalls shadowy back-figures like Mr. Widmore. But when Sawyer is locked in the brig with the enslaved Cooper, he comes full circle. Sawyer has gained that moral sense, and is learning to act beyond reward or punishment, beyond the Others' attempts at B. F. Skinner-like behavior reinforcement. He doesn't actually need to kill Cooper; at this point letting Cooper live or die wouldn't seem to change anything materially in his own life. But you can argue Sawyer also takes a step beyond good and evil. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that for an individual to attain full potential, everything evil in that person's life was as important as everything good and moral. The individual has to accept and overcome those opposite (and apposite) forces in order to realize one's full potential. By killing his namesake, he kills the thing that shackled him for thirty-some years, sends the thing to hell, and frees James Ford from Sawyer's chains. (It'll be interesting to see if he keeps the name.)
Lost: The Complete First SeasonLost Locke can't do this; like his namesake, he can't bring himself to act against the natural rights of another being. He may desire it, but he can't reason it, and Locke is now more interested in truth than his own fantasies. However, desire is a funny thing on this island; if you're not careful, you might get what you don't know you want (like a horse in the jungle), and it was seemingly Locke's desire that brought Cooper into the metaphor box (although Cooper had a different story to tell). So Locke does it Ben-like, and by manipulating Sawyer into killing Cooper, with a little bump by Alpert, both Locke and Sawyer get what they need. It was hardly easy for Sawyer, but like Locke told Charlie in season one's "The Moth," struggle is nature's way of strengthening you. In Sawyer, Locke may have found his true protégé, and certainly a soul brother.
And in Locke, Ben may have found his, as well as his enemy — yet another mirror-twin. It's getting harder to tell if Ben is playing Locke, if Locke is playing Ben, and/or if Ben knows Locke realizes Ben is playing Locke, and Ben wants him to think that. Ben even appropriates Locke's line, "Don't tell me what I can't do, John." Locke now appears to be special, like Walt, and like his own crazed mother once told him. When Cindy tells him the Others are excited to see Locke because they've been waiting for him, we hear echoes of Neo and New Zion; Locke is jacked into the island like it's the Matrix.
If you believe Alpert, Ben is losing favor as leader of the Others and set Locke up to fail in front of the Others by not killing Cooper on that very old-looking stone post. But Alpert's namesake, we should remember, is the Harvard psychologist who in the 1960's dropped out to become the spiritual seeker Ram Dass; if there is an echo of the psychologist in the dark-eyed Mittelos representative, this is a man who understands how both the mind and the soul work, and is pushing Locke along a certain path. If Alpert is still aligned with Ben, then his double-talk to Locke suggests that Ben knows Locke knows Ben is playing him, and Ben wants it that way. So when Locke fails to sacrifice Cooper for entrance into the Others, he may — like Abraham with Isaac — have passed a certain test. Locke may have finally forged his self-consciousness into self-awareness.
The only tests now are who to trust and when to show your hand. Locke tells Sawyer he's heading off into the interior, Rousseau-like, on his own, but we see him carrying Cooper's carcass. He may be heading off to join the Others, or he may be off to be his own Ben, but he's not ready to reveal certain information or motives. Neither is Jack and Juliet, who have something to tell Kate regarding Naomi; nor is Rousseau, who continues to turn the jungle into a DMZ and comes and goes like a jungle zephyr. Strangely, Locke doesn't even question why she shows up at the Black Rock looking for dynamite, perhaps because he didn't want an audience, and clearly, neither does Rousseau. And we need to question the convenient tape recorder; was this a plant by Ben? How did Locke get it?
And why did Hanso — or Mittelwerk standing in for Hanso — fake the Oceanic 815 wreckage?
The OathI'm going to let the John Lescroart book The Oath slide a bit. It was briefly seen on Ben's tent shelf, and is a kind of murder-mystery-potboiler that echoes Bad Twin, and Bad Twin was an exercise in seeing how far we the audience could stretch a an idea beyond credulity. Lindelof once warned of mistaking colorful rocks for easter eggs, and Bad Twin was certainly colorful The Oath feels to me like one of those moves.
(I'd like to thank Liz Kelly and Jen Chaney of the WashingtonPost.com for inviting me to write about "The Brig" with them today. The article is here, and they've cordially linked back to the wonderful Powells.com.)
Recap by J.Wood
Friday, May 4, 2007
The Season 3 Episode League Table
Here is the updated League Table following Wednesday's episode of The Brig. The Brig not only is the most popular episode so far in Season 3, it was also the most voted. It currently has over 7400 votes.You can see all the Polls for the episodes HERE.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Things I Noticed - "The Brig" by Vozzek69
Give us island flashbacks over real-world flashbacks any day of the week, The Brig was one of the best episodes yet. We had revelation (not so much, actually) and resolution (boy was there ever!) as one of the longest-standing issues of the show was brought to a intensely satisfying conclusion. This is what makes LOST so great - so many other shows would try to jam stuff like that into the final 2 or 3 episodes of the series, totally cheapening it. Our writers definitely know better. Things I Noticed:... An Old Place, Actually
Wherever the Others are going, it seems Ben intentionally planned a stop at the sacrificial pillar. The pillar looked old - older than the Black Rock and way pre-dating Dharma and the love bus depot. It was 4-toed statue old, which means we'll probably get some answers about the more ancient history of the island when the Others reach their final destination. Can't wait for Ben's flashback episode.
You Tell Me, You Brought Him Here
Ben saying this to Locke was a very big revelation, but his next words "We didn't" were even bigger. Cooper's story of being forced off the road would lead us to believe someone in Ben's crew went out of their way to get him, but Ben flat out denies this. There will now be fans of the 'Dharma initiative hired someone to rear-end Cooper and then bribed a paramedic to put him under and then kept him unconscious the whole time as they smuggled him to the island' theory... but personally, I still think he came out of the magic box.
Of importance here is Locke telling them he didn't bring Cooper to the island, which forces them to look elsewhere. Perhaps this causes Richard (either on Ben's orders or all on his own) to dig deeper into Sawyer's file and uncover the fact that it was actually James Ford who brought this personal demon to the island. And upon realizing this, a plan is devised to deal with that demon accordingly.
I Was Flat-Out Wrong
Regarding Cindy, the kids, and my 'watchers' theory... it seems I was totally, unequivocally wrong. Not only did we finally see Cindy with the rest of the Others this episode, but we also saw the kids too. This marks the first time we've directly seen children in the same company as Ben and Mr. Friendly, so I guess the "better place" for them that Goodwin spoke about was with right there with the Others. Which makes perfect sense, because they have electricity, ice cream, and unlimited hamburgers.
All kidding aside, I will say I'm still convinced there are watchers. I think they're responsible for the whispers, and I think they're not really 'there' in the conventional sense. I think Desmond's friend in the antique store is probably one of them. But Cindy and the kids? I was admittedly off on that one.
Sawyer's Got The Jimmy Legs
Kate's hit and run from Sawyer's tent was just another blow to their emotional attachment. Her use of Sawyer for gratification goes beyond the physical sexual aspect; he provides her with a more important temporary comfort. She sinks her face into her hands in an awkwardly "Uhhh, how do I put this..." moment, yet a second later she turns to kiss him with a ridiculously big smile. It's a put on. Her time with Sawyer is a distraction. I'm not saying she's in full-blown love with Jack, but she really doesn't know what she's feeling right now and is struggling with it more and more each episode.
You Gotta Really Wanna Be Here
Once again, belief and commitment are shown to be of monumental importance to the inner workings of the island. Ben all but beats Locke over the head with this, but somehow he's still skeptical. Locke has faith - great faith - but there's still a part of him that won't let go. There's still a part of him that needs to see the magic box, which as Ben verified this episode, was of course only a metaphor.
Ben attributes his being able to walk to Locke showing up. Developing cancer after he was sure the island wouldn't support such a disease, Ben had been questioning his faith. But seeing a walking, talking, dynamite-toting Locke before his very eyes renewed Ben's beliefs. This is interesting because it's a mirror image of what happened to Locke earlier this season. It took Eko's death for Locke to realize he'd strayed from the path of faith, and after that he was back on track.
Boone needed to let go of Shannon. Eko needed to let go of the guilt for his past sins (although it seems the island wanted him to atone for it rather than absolve himself). By the same token, Locke needs to let go of the one thing preventing him from becoming totally committed. As Ben puts it, Locke is "crippled by the memories" of the man he used to be. Since coming to the island, Locke has been the complete antithesis of that man. Only one last strand needs to be severed, only one last issue remains unresolved - Cooper. Ben means to help Locke fully realize his potential. Cindy's words were telling: "They're excited you're here. They've been waiting for you".
Keeping this in mind, I think Ben's now chumping his own men - Richard included. At this point Ben would much rather have Locke as his right-hand man, and devises a plan to go about it. Placing Cooper on the sacrificial altar was a win-win situation for him, the exact opposite of the Desmond's Catch-22 situation. If Locke commits the murder Ben gains another fully-realized loyal subject. If Locke fails, Ben publically re-asserts himself as king of the island, quelling any rebellious mutterings of the Others who might've wanted to rally behind Locke. And even failed, Ben has a use for Locke... once he gets him to kill Cooper anyway.
Was Richard sent by Ben to the hilltop to speak to Locke? I don't think so. Richard's anti-Ben interests seemed genuine. But did Ben know Richard would go see Locke (and subsequently bring him Sawyer's folder)? You bet. Because as I've said before, Ben is the king pimp badass of the island and the master of all plans large and small.
With that seed planted, Ben does exactly what he needs to do: he motivates Locke to kill Cooper anyway. How does he do this? By doing exactly the same thing Locke's father has done time and time again - ditching him. When Locke protests, Ben even uses his own line against him: "Don't tell me what I can't do, John". "But I thought I was special?" Nah, sorry man - you're not. We're going this way, you're go that way... if you wanna catch up with the cool kids again you know what to do.
Another thing worth noting: I don't think Ben was capable of killing Cooper, just as I don't think Locke could. "It's your mess John. Why would we clean it up?" Actually it's Sawyer's mess. Only he can clean it up. Ben now knows this (even if he didn't initially), which is why he sends Locke back to the 815 camp. He leaves the trail because he does want Locke to come back, but he wants Locke to return totally committed, so he can take his rightful place alongside him. "I can't wait to show you what this island can do".
Desmond's Caught Up In Believing
Jin, Hurley, and Charlie looked like the three stooges trying to keep Naomi a secret from the rest of the camp. Given Jack's behavior and Juliet's proximity, it's probably not a bad idea. Desmond however, seems very blindly caught up in believing everything Naomi says. Her whole mission seems a little tailor-made for what Desmond expected Penny to do, which was to organize someone to come looking for him. Throughout all the Naomi scenes Desmond's ear-to-ear grin is almost comical. Enter Sayid.
Sayid's Not
You gotta love Sayid. Everything out of his mouth is important, and he asks the best questions. "Did any of you actually see this helicopter?" The first week on the island this might've seemed an unusual question, but three months later it's totally logical. The others in Naomi's tent are too caught up in possible rescue to remember that nothing on the island turns out to be what it seems. Almost everything comes with a catch - and Sayid's vision is still clear enough to know this.
"I take it you have no means of communicating whatsoever?" Naomi smugly hands him the satellite phone, but in the end it turns out Sayid's right anyway. With the "interference" provided by the island, it DOES turn out she has no means of communication. In the end, Sayid's questions are founded. They almost always are. And just what the hell was Sayid digging, anyway?
What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing In A Hull Like This?
Rousseau's impeccably-timed appearance at the Black Rock was pretty funny. Apparently she's planning some commando-esque subterfuge of her own. As the grand master of island demolition, Locke gives her an approving nod. "Be careful, that stuff's unstable". Yah Locke, we know. :)
Ah, Okay... So We're Dead
Fantastic line. I'm sure many people gasped when Sawyer said it. And even though we know they're "not in purgatory" you have to admit Cooper's argument that they were all in hell was astoundingly convincing. "One minute I'm in a car wreck, the next I'm in a pirate ship at the bottom of the ocean". Pretty incredible, even by conspiracy theory standards. Not to mention we're once more teased with the "Are you sure it's an island?" line.
Two Men Enter... One Man Leaves
Initally I thought the Black Rock was an interesting choice for Locke's imprisonment of Cooper when it would've been just as easy to bind him to a tree. But after realizing his intent to lock Sawyer in there with him, it became the perfect place. It was great re-utilization of an awesome prop, and a cool nod toward the heady days of season one.
Judging from Sawyer's reluctance to kill someone again, Locke was right to imprison him with Cooper. Twice this episode Sawyer tells him "I ain't killin' nobody", and at the time he truly means it. The island has given Sawyer time away from his past life, a time to really think. We've seen him change drastically in these past 90 days, which is why it's so hard for him when the realization steals over him that he's finally, at long last, standing before the real Sawyer.
This was by far, my favorite scene of LOST. The intense hatred building in Sawyer was palpable, yet you could see him struggle. Three months ago he would've happily strangled this guy, but right now he was fighting it. Only Cooper's biting sarcasm and total defiance pushed him over the top. Tearing up that letter with contempt and indifference was the final straw, the last catalyst needed to push Sawyer beyond all control and reason. The kill scene was animalist - absolutely fantastic - and kudos to the writers for not providing a gun or a knife. Slaying the real Sawyer with his bare hands and finally realizing his ultimate goal was the coolest way for James Ford to fulfill his purpose... his reason for being on the island. Now let's just hope he doesn't get killed off, like many of the other characters who've 'let go' of their past.
Whether it be a purging final release from the hatred or just remorse for the killing, Sawyer vomits right afterward. Locke then delivers a line that potentially holds double meaning: "Now you can go back". Back to camp? Or back to someplace else now that Sawyer has resolved his inner conflict? Locke gives him the tape of Juliet's report, which he either stole from Ben or was allowed to 'find'. Either way, it was obviously Ben's decision that he have it. Apparently Ben wants the 815'ers to know and expect them to come for Sun. Will they? Dunno. Does Juliet know about this development? Probably not.
What's The Opposite of a Sleeveless Red Shirt?
A blue sleeved shirt, that's what. I think the writers are having a great time dressing Jack in all manner of stuff to keep us guessing. Or maybe they're showing us that Jack's playing both sides of the fence. This episode we certainly learned that Jack's playing something with the rest of the camp.
Some might be pissed at Kate's decision to rat out the whole Naomi thing, but I give her credit for her loyalty to Jack. In the weeks after the crash Jack did a lot of selfless things and took a lot of grief by taking up the reins of leadership. Kate remembers this. She still believes in him. Keep in mind also that Kate's one of the only people who knows that Jack's change in attitude may be due in part to what he saw on the video monitor.
Watching Kate tell them of Naomi, it was almost like watching a kid tell her parents she saw the boogeyman. Jack and Juliet (who looked straight out of a Pantene commercial this episode by the way) gave each other bemused, knowing looks. Juliet tried to score more trust points with "We should tell her", making Jack the villain when he refused. To be honest I'm not sure what's going on, but the one thing we learned here is that Jack and Juliet both know about it together. Next week it looks like we'll find out what that is.
More Than He Can Chew
Finally, at this point I'll say Locke will probably end up becoming Ben's Achilles' heel. Ben has a knack for getting people to do stuff without really getting them to do it, Locke included. However... I think Locke has his own agenda, and by coincidence I think that agenda happens to coincide (right now anyway) with the plans Ben 'has for him'. In the end, I think Ben's going to discover he made some very fatal errors with the recruitment of Locke. He's definitely not going to be like the others who follow him.
The Brig Recap - Getting even with Dad
Another great look back at last night's terrific episode by Jeff Jensen.
If you look to the west this morning and see a mushroom cloud blooming on the horizon, don't panic: That's just the Doc Jensen Laboratory for Lost Theories and Assorted Insanity going up in smoke. The latest in a series of top-notch episodes that have served as a pretty convincing rejoinder to a certain negative review of the show by a certain weekly entertainment magazine (for the record, my friend Gillian Flynn is an awesome critic whose frustration with the series is certainly not unwarranted, even if her opinion of it couldn't be more incorrect. But I digress…), ''The Brig'' was like a box of highly unstable Black Rock dynamite blowing up in my mind. I'm not sure amid the billowing black haze just how much damage has been done to my vast collection of precious conjectures, but I do know this: I really don't have any idea anymore where the heck this damn show's going.
And I like that.
There's much to say about this dense tale of vendetta and vengeance, enslavement and liberation, and schemes within schemes within schemes. Simply, ''The Brig'' was the story of two damaged lost boys, Locke and Sawyer, desperate to be free of the awful man who made them and named them. It felt like some neo-mythic, Cormac McCarthy-style apocalyptic revenge Western, set in the South Pacific — Blood Meridian on a lower parallel. It was also a snapshot portrait of a fragile society coming unhinged from suspicion, frustration, and fear. War looms, we are told, in the form of an invading band of deadly, baby-wanting Others (or at least the threat of war; that's a big difference in these perception-manipulating, truth-bending times), but it seems that the intensifying possibility of civil war is more likely to rip apart the castaway community before Ben and gas-masked fertility-cult commandos have a chance to re-enact The Rape of the Sabine Women. For those of you who like to view Lost as an allegory for our post-9/11 devolution, ''The Brig'' was certainly suffused with homeland insecurity and geopolitical jitters. This reading is unavoidable and valid, though it's tough to know how far to push it. Certainly a title like ''The Brig,'' a word for a military prison, is fair game for deconstruction. But how about that ending, in which Locke put his dead father in a sack and trudged into the jungle to meet his destiny? If I were feeling impish, I might try to forge a link between ''father in a sack'' and ''Baghdad,'' and then wonder aloud how our Iraq-fixated current Commander-in-Chief might interpret Lost's themes of failed fathers and screwed-up sons, burdensome legacies and clean slates. See what I mean about taking it too far? (I'm sooo getting wiretapped for that one.)
Maybe it's safer to stick with some ''facts,'' such as they are these days. (Again with the wiretap tempting!) Here, in my humble estimation are the most salient developments of last night's episode.
Kate and Sawyer's sad and sweaty affair is destined to end in heartbreak I'm sure that there's plenty of SawKat 'shippers out there who got a kick seeing that the Fugitive Girl and the Killer Con Man are still keeping each other warm at night, or at least part of the night; it seems Kate is the kind of girl who gets suspiciously antsy for her own bed after a booty call. (As far as chicks go, Kate can be a total guy.) I think I prefer Kate and Sawyer to Kate and Jack; the latter coupling always seemed kinda forced to me, while the former pairing has dramatically earned a shot at life. At the same time, I think these two have a long way to go as individuals before they could ever make it together. Kate in particular: She's clearly attracted to the shaggy cad, but there's no romance here, just exploitation. It reminds me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's polarizing season 6, when the lost-on-the-inside heroine foolishly decided to start knocking boots with redemption-starved Spike. I doubt SawKat will end up imploding as darkly as SlaySpike did, but it will end. Both Sawyer and Kate need more spiritual reconstruction before they can have any kind of truly intimate relationship.
The bickering, Black Rock-bound jungle trek of Sawyer and Locke = a postmodern variation of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce's Ulysses and/or an ironic fabulization of Naomi and Ruth from the Book of Ruth Or not. I mean, that's a big pile of quasi-intellectual crap, isn't it? Still, if you can do the actual hard work of fleshing out that sentence into a compelling, convincing 500-word essay, I'll publish the best one and give its author a year's subscription to Entertainment Weekly. (See? Now you're taking it seriously, aren't you?) Send it to JeffJensenEW@aol.com
The whole thing about Sawyer going painfully barefoot throughout the entire episode probably has some deep symbolic significance or some illuminating literary antecedent, but my deadline prevents me from doing the Wikipedia research needed to find it Another challenge for you. One hundred words. Best one gets a candy bar. JeffJensenEW@aol.com
The moment where Anthony Cooper bit his son is the key to understanding Bad Daddy's baiting, bizarrely antagonistic behavior In the flashbacks, we learned what happened after the climactic ''Dad?'' moment in ''The Man From Tallahassee.'' Locke, stunned to find his demonic father bound in a boiler room in Othersville, reached to remove the gag despite Ben's protestations. Sure enough, Anthony Cooper rewarded him with his best Cujo impression, snapping at his son's hand and biting him like a rabid dog. A rather rude way of saying hello to your own flesh and blood, don't you think? Cooper kept up the inhospitable antics throughout the episode — mocking his son's gutlessness, shredding Sawyer's letter — and it seemed to me he was trying very, very, very hard to bait these guys into killing him. The question is: Why?
Maybe he thought he was stuck in a bad dream and hoped getting killed would wake him up. Maybe he really did believe he was in hell and wanted his demons to get on with the whole punishment part; at least that way, his inexplicable abduction and mad tropical-island ordeal would start making sense to him. But my guess is that Cooper just wanted someone, anyone to put his sick little life out of its misbegotten misery.
Of course, this is assuming that Cooper really was who he said he was. Before ''The Brig'' blew up my lab (and I'll explain why in just a second, I promise), I had concocted a theory that Devil Daddy was actually the Monster in human form. The Dad-Dog Bites Son moment could be a clue: After all, Dharma's code name for Smokey was Cerberus (as in the three-headed watchdog of ell. My Cooper-Is-the-Monster hypothesis is consistent with my larger theory that Lost is basically Extreme Makeover set on Fantasy Island. The purpose of the Island is (or was) to bring people to enlightenment, to reflect back and break down the corrupt idols that rule our lives and dismantle and reconstruct the hollow false selves — or what sociologists call the ''looking-glass selves'' — that we forge and adopt in order to fit in and survive in society but that, alas, also smother and bury our genuine, authentic selves. My belief was that the Others and Smokey were/are mechanisms in this extraordinary self-help machine, although they may have gone a little haywire. You know, just like me. Seen from this point of view, the whole Anthony Cooper escapade was really some kind of liberating psychodrama facilitated by the Island for the sake of moving Locke and Sawyer further down the road toward Enlightenment and Actualization.
(What the hell did I just write? Good Lord, would someone please start a petition to have me removed from this assignment? I'll be the first to sign it.)
Let me try it again, in EW speak: Lost is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the Gene Wilder movie version of the story). The Island is the factory, Ben is Willy, Smokey is Mr. Slugworth, the castaways are the crummy little kids, Locke in particular is Charlie, and all these little adventures within the grand narrative are tests of character designed both to make everyone better people and to find one person specifically who can take over the operation when the current caretaker, Ben, retires or kicks the bucket. Next week, when Locke takes Dad's body back to Othersville (think: Charlie returning the Everlasting Gobstopper to Willy's office), I have no doubt that when Ben cuts the straps and opens up the bag, black smoke will come billowing out and Ben will start shouting, ''You did it, Locke! You did it! You passed the test! You're now a ruthless, by-any-means-necessary good-guy anti-hero, badass Nietzschean superman, a postmodern fire-bringing Prometheus — just like me! Here's the keys to the factory, you crazy kid!''
Or not. Probably not. Here's why:
The Others' campout idyll in the ancient ruins of ritualistic sacrifice has caused me to doubt my own theory-making mind Personally, I blame Ben. This man is a liar, a manipulator, a big-picture chess player who's always playing 23 moves ahead. He chooses the information that he reveals very carefully, and for very specific effect. With that in mind, consider: Why did he make a conspicuous show of Juliet's tape recorder? Why did he tell Locke about the plan to raid the beach and steal the castaway women? Why did he protest so much about the metaphorical nature of his ''magic box'' nonsense? And why did he use all that liberation-of-self blather — which I myself painfully utilized a few paragraphs back, if you recall — when he made the pitch to Locke to slit his father's throat?
My answers to these questions are all the same: I don't know! But I thought it was pretty genius to have Ben basically give coy voice to all the predictions currently out there as to where season 3 is heading (basically, a climactic Lord of the Flies rumble on the beach) and the self-help ideology that many viewers (or, at least, just me) believe motivates the Others. Look: I don't trust Ben. I have no idea when he's lying and when he's telling the truth. The only thing I'm reasonably sure of is that everything he says is for the purpose of impacting a character — and the audience. This is all to say that to hear Ben acknowledge all of our assumptions about what's at stake and where things are going has to make me wonder if all of our assumptions are wrong. Do the Others really intend to attack the beach and steal the women? If so, why did Ben tell Locke? Why risk letting him go back and warn the castaways? Don't you think Ben wanted Locke to steal that tape recorder? What's really going on here?
By the way: When Ben led Locke up to the platform where Cooper was tied like some Monster Island sacrifice, didn't you want to start chanting, ''Kong...Kong...Kong…''? This scene — an ironic, inverted staging of the Abraham-Isaac Bible story, which was referenced a couple weeks back in the ''Catch-22'' episode — was certainly the second riskiest moment on TV this week, right after Blake's beatbox version of Bon Jovi's ''You Give Love a Bad Name.'' Which is to say, this could have easily gone very silly, very quickly. But luckily, it worked, thanks to the acting of Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson and the accrued power of Lost's mythical storytelling language. The meaning was monumental but elusive, and not easily unpacked. But that scene was Sunday-school-simple compared with the climax of the episode:
The execution of Anthony Cooper inside The Black Rock was just frakking awesome If you wish, you can import all sorts of high-minded ideas to deconstruct this scene. Maybe some other time, we can talk about the relevancy of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic theory, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and the politically charged combination of characters named after Enlightenment philosophers, Mark Twain characters, and a iconic outlaw and his vigilante assassin (Jesse James + Bob Ford = James Ford, Sawyer's real name), all sharing a scene in which unstable explosives and patricide and talk of hell and damnation are involved. But instead, let's just simply celebrate this scene for its raw, heartbreaking, soul-shattering intensity — and for staging an hommage to the scene in Return of the Jedi in which Princess Leia chokes Jabba the Hutt to death on his slave barge. If nothing else, let us praise Josh Holloway for his furious performance. How I wanted him to kill this man. How I wanted him to not kill this man and instead forgive him. How I loved this scene for presenting without judgment some very complicated ideas about justice, personal responsibility, and how people become the people they become. Yes, the morality of all this is troubling and disturbing. So is our world. Which brings this full circle. Go ahead, flame me. You know where to find me. But please: Debate these ideas first. I think the show earned it.
In the aftermath, I felt appropriately conflicted by the complex dynamics of the episode. Is Locke a hero or a villain for the way he manipulated Sawyer to commit the murder he couldn't do himself? Have these men purchased some liberation — or have they sealed the deal on their damnation? Regardless, I look forward to seeing how both these guys grapple with and rationalize their actions. Watching Locke march into the jungle with his father on his back, it was hard for me to know if Locke had finally found himself or if he was more lost than ever. The line from the Beatles came to mind: ''Boy, you're going to carry that weight/Carry that weight a long time.''
There's some more stuff that happened in the episode, but I'm running late and have to give this up. I'm going to leave it to you guys to discuss Naomi's statement that Oceanic 815 was found with the bodies on board (my theory: she's lying) and the revelation that Jack isn't the dupe of Juliet that we thought he was, that the Hero of the Beach seems to have been hatching some kind of master plan all along. That was all fun stuff, but pure plot stuff, and all setups for things to come. Truth is, I write this review today with a head foggy from cold and a mind scattered from joy. Yesterday, we received the wonderful news that my wife, Amy, is cancer free. We are thrilled. The only downside, obviously, is that such news can impair one's ability to fully engage a very complicated and demanding TV show. So I hope you will forgive me my failings this week, and come back next week with the confidence that I'll be back at the top of my game.
Jeff Jensen@EW
If you look to the west this morning and see a mushroom cloud blooming on the horizon, don't panic: That's just the Doc Jensen Laboratory for Lost Theories and Assorted Insanity going up in smoke. The latest in a series of top-notch episodes that have served as a pretty convincing rejoinder to a certain negative review of the show by a certain weekly entertainment magazine (for the record, my friend Gillian Flynn is an awesome critic whose frustration with the series is certainly not unwarranted, even if her opinion of it couldn't be more incorrect. But I digress…), ''The Brig'' was like a box of highly unstable Black Rock dynamite blowing up in my mind. I'm not sure amid the billowing black haze just how much damage has been done to my vast collection of precious conjectures, but I do know this: I really don't have any idea anymore where the heck this damn show's going.And I like that.
There's much to say about this dense tale of vendetta and vengeance, enslavement and liberation, and schemes within schemes within schemes. Simply, ''The Brig'' was the story of two damaged lost boys, Locke and Sawyer, desperate to be free of the awful man who made them and named them. It felt like some neo-mythic, Cormac McCarthy-style apocalyptic revenge Western, set in the South Pacific — Blood Meridian on a lower parallel. It was also a snapshot portrait of a fragile society coming unhinged from suspicion, frustration, and fear. War looms, we are told, in the form of an invading band of deadly, baby-wanting Others (or at least the threat of war; that's a big difference in these perception-manipulating, truth-bending times), but it seems that the intensifying possibility of civil war is more likely to rip apart the castaway community before Ben and gas-masked fertility-cult commandos have a chance to re-enact The Rape of the Sabine Women. For those of you who like to view Lost as an allegory for our post-9/11 devolution, ''The Brig'' was certainly suffused with homeland insecurity and geopolitical jitters. This reading is unavoidable and valid, though it's tough to know how far to push it. Certainly a title like ''The Brig,'' a word for a military prison, is fair game for deconstruction. But how about that ending, in which Locke put his dead father in a sack and trudged into the jungle to meet his destiny? If I were feeling impish, I might try to forge a link between ''father in a sack'' and ''Baghdad,'' and then wonder aloud how our Iraq-fixated current Commander-in-Chief might interpret Lost's themes of failed fathers and screwed-up sons, burdensome legacies and clean slates. See what I mean about taking it too far? (I'm sooo getting wiretapped for that one.)
Maybe it's safer to stick with some ''facts,'' such as they are these days. (Again with the wiretap tempting!) Here, in my humble estimation are the most salient developments of last night's episode.
Kate and Sawyer's sad and sweaty affair is destined to end in heartbreak I'm sure that there's plenty of SawKat 'shippers out there who got a kick seeing that the Fugitive Girl and the Killer Con Man are still keeping each other warm at night, or at least part of the night; it seems Kate is the kind of girl who gets suspiciously antsy for her own bed after a booty call. (As far as chicks go, Kate can be a total guy.) I think I prefer Kate and Sawyer to Kate and Jack; the latter coupling always seemed kinda forced to me, while the former pairing has dramatically earned a shot at life. At the same time, I think these two have a long way to go as individuals before they could ever make it together. Kate in particular: She's clearly attracted to the shaggy cad, but there's no romance here, just exploitation. It reminds me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's polarizing season 6, when the lost-on-the-inside heroine foolishly decided to start knocking boots with redemption-starved Spike. I doubt SawKat will end up imploding as darkly as SlaySpike did, but it will end. Both Sawyer and Kate need more spiritual reconstruction before they can have any kind of truly intimate relationship.
The bickering, Black Rock-bound jungle trek of Sawyer and Locke = a postmodern variation of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce's Ulysses and/or an ironic fabulization of Naomi and Ruth from the Book of Ruth Or not. I mean, that's a big pile of quasi-intellectual crap, isn't it? Still, if you can do the actual hard work of fleshing out that sentence into a compelling, convincing 500-word essay, I'll publish the best one and give its author a year's subscription to Entertainment Weekly. (See? Now you're taking it seriously, aren't you?) Send it to JeffJensenEW@aol.com
The whole thing about Sawyer going painfully barefoot throughout the entire episode probably has some deep symbolic significance or some illuminating literary antecedent, but my deadline prevents me from doing the Wikipedia research needed to find it Another challenge for you. One hundred words. Best one gets a candy bar. JeffJensenEW@aol.com
The moment where Anthony Cooper bit his son is the key to understanding Bad Daddy's baiting, bizarrely antagonistic behavior In the flashbacks, we learned what happened after the climactic ''Dad?'' moment in ''The Man From Tallahassee.'' Locke, stunned to find his demonic father bound in a boiler room in Othersville, reached to remove the gag despite Ben's protestations. Sure enough, Anthony Cooper rewarded him with his best Cujo impression, snapping at his son's hand and biting him like a rabid dog. A rather rude way of saying hello to your own flesh and blood, don't you think? Cooper kept up the inhospitable antics throughout the episode — mocking his son's gutlessness, shredding Sawyer's letter — and it seemed to me he was trying very, very, very hard to bait these guys into killing him. The question is: Why?
Maybe he thought he was stuck in a bad dream and hoped getting killed would wake him up. Maybe he really did believe he was in hell and wanted his demons to get on with the whole punishment part; at least that way, his inexplicable abduction and mad tropical-island ordeal would start making sense to him. But my guess is that Cooper just wanted someone, anyone to put his sick little life out of its misbegotten misery.
Of course, this is assuming that Cooper really was who he said he was. Before ''The Brig'' blew up my lab (and I'll explain why in just a second, I promise), I had concocted a theory that Devil Daddy was actually the Monster in human form. The Dad-Dog Bites Son moment could be a clue: After all, Dharma's code name for Smokey was Cerberus (as in the three-headed watchdog of ell. My Cooper-Is-the-Monster hypothesis is consistent with my larger theory that Lost is basically Extreme Makeover set on Fantasy Island. The purpose of the Island is (or was) to bring people to enlightenment, to reflect back and break down the corrupt idols that rule our lives and dismantle and reconstruct the hollow false selves — or what sociologists call the ''looking-glass selves'' — that we forge and adopt in order to fit in and survive in society but that, alas, also smother and bury our genuine, authentic selves. My belief was that the Others and Smokey were/are mechanisms in this extraordinary self-help machine, although they may have gone a little haywire. You know, just like me. Seen from this point of view, the whole Anthony Cooper escapade was really some kind of liberating psychodrama facilitated by the Island for the sake of moving Locke and Sawyer further down the road toward Enlightenment and Actualization.
(What the hell did I just write? Good Lord, would someone please start a petition to have me removed from this assignment? I'll be the first to sign it.)
Let me try it again, in EW speak: Lost is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the Gene Wilder movie version of the story). The Island is the factory, Ben is Willy, Smokey is Mr. Slugworth, the castaways are the crummy little kids, Locke in particular is Charlie, and all these little adventures within the grand narrative are tests of character designed both to make everyone better people and to find one person specifically who can take over the operation when the current caretaker, Ben, retires or kicks the bucket. Next week, when Locke takes Dad's body back to Othersville (think: Charlie returning the Everlasting Gobstopper to Willy's office), I have no doubt that when Ben cuts the straps and opens up the bag, black smoke will come billowing out and Ben will start shouting, ''You did it, Locke! You did it! You passed the test! You're now a ruthless, by-any-means-necessary good-guy anti-hero, badass Nietzschean superman, a postmodern fire-bringing Prometheus — just like me! Here's the keys to the factory, you crazy kid!''
Or not. Probably not. Here's why:
The Others' campout idyll in the ancient ruins of ritualistic sacrifice has caused me to doubt my own theory-making mind Personally, I blame Ben. This man is a liar, a manipulator, a big-picture chess player who's always playing 23 moves ahead. He chooses the information that he reveals very carefully, and for very specific effect. With that in mind, consider: Why did he make a conspicuous show of Juliet's tape recorder? Why did he tell Locke about the plan to raid the beach and steal the castaway women? Why did he protest so much about the metaphorical nature of his ''magic box'' nonsense? And why did he use all that liberation-of-self blather — which I myself painfully utilized a few paragraphs back, if you recall — when he made the pitch to Locke to slit his father's throat?
My answers to these questions are all the same: I don't know! But I thought it was pretty genius to have Ben basically give coy voice to all the predictions currently out there as to where season 3 is heading (basically, a climactic Lord of the Flies rumble on the beach) and the self-help ideology that many viewers (or, at least, just me) believe motivates the Others. Look: I don't trust Ben. I have no idea when he's lying and when he's telling the truth. The only thing I'm reasonably sure of is that everything he says is for the purpose of impacting a character — and the audience. This is all to say that to hear Ben acknowledge all of our assumptions about what's at stake and where things are going has to make me wonder if all of our assumptions are wrong. Do the Others really intend to attack the beach and steal the women? If so, why did Ben tell Locke? Why risk letting him go back and warn the castaways? Don't you think Ben wanted Locke to steal that tape recorder? What's really going on here?
By the way: When Ben led Locke up to the platform where Cooper was tied like some Monster Island sacrifice, didn't you want to start chanting, ''Kong...Kong...Kong…''? This scene — an ironic, inverted staging of the Abraham-Isaac Bible story, which was referenced a couple weeks back in the ''Catch-22'' episode — was certainly the second riskiest moment on TV this week, right after Blake's beatbox version of Bon Jovi's ''You Give Love a Bad Name.'' Which is to say, this could have easily gone very silly, very quickly. But luckily, it worked, thanks to the acting of Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson and the accrued power of Lost's mythical storytelling language. The meaning was monumental but elusive, and not easily unpacked. But that scene was Sunday-school-simple compared with the climax of the episode:
The execution of Anthony Cooper inside The Black Rock was just frakking awesome If you wish, you can import all sorts of high-minded ideas to deconstruct this scene. Maybe some other time, we can talk about the relevancy of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic theory, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and the politically charged combination of characters named after Enlightenment philosophers, Mark Twain characters, and a iconic outlaw and his vigilante assassin (Jesse James + Bob Ford = James Ford, Sawyer's real name), all sharing a scene in which unstable explosives and patricide and talk of hell and damnation are involved. But instead, let's just simply celebrate this scene for its raw, heartbreaking, soul-shattering intensity — and for staging an hommage to the scene in Return of the Jedi in which Princess Leia chokes Jabba the Hutt to death on his slave barge. If nothing else, let us praise Josh Holloway for his furious performance. How I wanted him to kill this man. How I wanted him to not kill this man and instead forgive him. How I loved this scene for presenting without judgment some very complicated ideas about justice, personal responsibility, and how people become the people they become. Yes, the morality of all this is troubling and disturbing. So is our world. Which brings this full circle. Go ahead, flame me. You know where to find me. But please: Debate these ideas first. I think the show earned it.
In the aftermath, I felt appropriately conflicted by the complex dynamics of the episode. Is Locke a hero or a villain for the way he manipulated Sawyer to commit the murder he couldn't do himself? Have these men purchased some liberation — or have they sealed the deal on their damnation? Regardless, I look forward to seeing how both these guys grapple with and rationalize their actions. Watching Locke march into the jungle with his father on his back, it was hard for me to know if Locke had finally found himself or if he was more lost than ever. The line from the Beatles came to mind: ''Boy, you're going to carry that weight/Carry that weight a long time.''
There's some more stuff that happened in the episode, but I'm running late and have to give this up. I'm going to leave it to you guys to discuss Naomi's statement that Oceanic 815 was found with the bodies on board (my theory: she's lying) and the revelation that Jack isn't the dupe of Juliet that we thought he was, that the Hero of the Beach seems to have been hatching some kind of master plan all along. That was all fun stuff, but pure plot stuff, and all setups for things to come. Truth is, I write this review today with a head foggy from cold and a mind scattered from joy. Yesterday, we received the wonderful news that my wife, Amy, is cancer free. We are thrilled. The only downside, obviously, is that such news can impair one's ability to fully engage a very complicated and demanding TV show. So I hope you will forgive me my failings this week, and come back next week with the confidence that I'll be back at the top of my game.
Jeff Jensen@EW
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
What did you think of "The Brig"?
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