Monsters of Television

On thee thou must take a long journey:
Therefore thy book of count with thee thou bring;
For turn again thou can not by no way,
And look thou be sure of thy reckoning:
For before God thou shalt answer, and show
Thy many bad deeds and good but few;
How thou hast spent thy life, and in what wise,
Before the chief lord of paradise.
Have ado that we were in that way,
For, wete thou well, thou shalt make none attournay.
-Everyman

Is it okay to admit that I was a bit bored with the episode? It wasn’t that it was bad, because it wasn’t. Richard’s story has been the most anticipated of the season given that for three seasons now he’s been the mysterious gatekeeper, the man with an inkling of what’s been going on in the Island for the past 140 years. As this season as unfurled, it’s been clear that Richard perhaps had even less of an inkling, stuck in the dark as much as anyone else Jacob brought to the Island. And now with Jacob gone, Richard’s eternal life is at a dead end, with no master to serve and no exit. He’s in no position to tell anyone anything.

Instead the episode provides us with confirmation of a number of things: the Black Rock crashed onto the Island during a storm, swept inland by a swell. Richard, of course, was on the ship. (That the show makes a mythology joke by having a black rock destroy nearly all of Jacob’s abode is amusing.) It also makes clear that Jacob is bringing people to the Island.

Indeed, at the end of the episode my girlfriend shouted, “We have a premise!” And she’s right. Jacob has been bringing people to the Island to enact a morality play for the Smocke’s sake. Smocke, it appears, believes all people will sin, it’s in their nature. To prove him wrong, Jacob brings people to the Island and then claims a hands-off role: free will allows people to make decisions and they will make the right ones when faced with complicated moral questions (like when to torture someone for an inhaler).

This premise, of course, isn’t that far off from the purgatory theory that circulates about the show. The people on the Island are forced to act out a morality play for the sake two entities, in the process confirming or denying each’s hypothesis and redeeming themselves in some way, coming to grips with their own internal struggles. It’s been a consistent theme for the show from first season, and one this season, through its flash-sideways, has been toying with. However, the episode does pit our characters in both a personal drama and a struggle between two entities in a way that the show hadn’t previously hit upon so hard before. I’m struggling with that, but I’m trusting the show to invest in the characters more than that.

Jacob, utilizing wine in a bottle metaphor, says that the red wine represents evil, darkness, Hell. The cork is the Island, preventing the darkness from spreading and consuming the world. It’s noticeable that Jacob doesn’t include himself in this metaphor (though what the bottle represents is never mentioned), perhaps seeing himself as an inseparable part of the Island. This must be the case since, with Jacob dead, Smocke believes that he can leave the Island now.

So Jacob exists, it would appear, for two purposes. The first to keep Smocke in check, from leaving the Island. The second appears to be to annoy the hell out of Smocke by putting on an endless morality play. The Smocke that appears in the show’s present and then in his Man in Black form in flashbacks  doesn’t appear all that concerned with what people do. He just wants to leave. It begs the question: if you want to leave, then why are you killing people? Why are you putting the people Jacob brings to the Island in a position that forces them to make moral choices? Why not sit back and let things play out?

Because, the show tells us, that isn’t Smocke’s way. He gets involved. And he does. But his involvement seems more to be based on who he can possibly recruit to kill Jacob than any other philosophical concerns about the inner-nature of man. I need a clearer sense of Smocke’s motivations here (namely being how he came to be on the Island) before I can really accept this line of thinking.

I haven’t said much about Richard despite this being his episode. His flashback is nice enough, but nothing spectacular. Perhaps due to the show’s lack of time to give him space to breathe, his story concerning a dead wife and an accidental murder offers little beyond forced sentiment. The episode can’t really earn the touching moment it wants with Richard and his dead wife communicating via Hurley. There hasn’t been enough set up for Richard as a character for this moment to really hit an emotional core.

That said, Nestor Carbonell does his damnedest. The episode truly is his to do with as he pleases. Carbonell manages to make the two portraits of Richard feel radically different while still be recognizable as the same man. Make-up and costuming does help to a large degree, but through voice inflection and physique you can see Richard as a man who is chained by horrible things that he can’t possibly escape from, including a simply, seemingly unattainable desire for absolution, something all the other characters have a chance for.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• Soon, I suspect, we’ll get a clearer sense of Jacob and Smocke’s relationship. The best scene in the episode is the last one. Despite so little time together Titus Welliver and Mark Pellegrino have an enormous amount of chemistry, and the tension in that scene is thick.
• Dear Jacob: There’s no better sign of free will (no matter how manipulated) than getting stabbed by a follower. Stop being pissed at Ben.
• I’m not entirely sure why we’re praising the episode for being largely in Spanish. Early Sun & Jin flashbacks are in Korean for roughly the same amount that this episode is in Spanish (and Daniel Dae Kim isn’t a native speaker, but always felt like one).
• Widmore role’s in all this is…?