TV COLUMN: 'LOST' - SEASON 6, EPISODE 13

“The Candidate” Wasn’t Revelatory or Even Classic...

By: Josh Moorhead

May 6, 2010

Jack stood wet in the darkness. Damp in trouble, heavy with what he’d had to swim past, grating grains of sand all over because of what he’d crawled through. That great ocean that, in times of light could be so calm, in times of hope could hold such potential, was too silent now. Too vast. Too dark. It had no sympathy. No certainty. In the night, it was unforgiving, not understanding; it was more like doom.

Sometimes the ocean is like that. Even in the brightness of day, a whip-lashing tide or an underestimated wave can pick you up where you bury your feet, and roll you and twist you and turn you, and you open your eyes on the beach or still under the water, uncertain of how you even got there and fairly certain that it was not where you wanted to be.

Oh am I talking about Lost in this above-my-pay-grade I hesitate to call poetry? I suppose. But I’m also talking about life because I’m also trying to crack the code of Lost still. But the code no longer, as I’ve been saying and we can all tell, is a theory of what happens next or a planted literary reference or scientific theorem. Lost is a story. Flawed certainly, imperfect, and I’m sure, in time, will be dated — but hey, all in all, it’s pretty darned good. I’d say it’s verifiably great. Personally, I doubt I’ll get another experience like it in the many years my yonder. But Lost is a story…by people who read other stories and moved to LA and got jobs and eventually found themselves with the assignment to make an island show interesting. Regardless of how it ends now, they can check that off. But stories — most stories — are about something. Lost definitely has been. But what is that thing? As this story draws to a close, what do we take from it?

I believe we take the ocean. I believe we take what happened on the sub. I believe we take a conversation between characters that has flipped sides since it began. I believe Lost, in its exaggerated, otherworldly way, is about life.

Tuesday night’s episode, “The Candidate,” seemed to be a lot about letting go. Jack pleaded with Sawyer to let go on the sub, to trust and not to try and literally take the situation into his own hands. Jack asked for Sawyer to believe. When Sawyer didn’t well, the danger wasn’t only not averted, it was accelerated. What do we leave out of our own hands? When do we believe?

In the powerhouse scene in the hospital as Locke rolled away, Jack caught him. They had a brief but moving conversation where Locke said he lost his legs and his father in a plane crash that was Locke’s doing. Jack implored him to let go. “What makes you think it’s so easy?” Locke asked Jack. “It’s not,” Jack assured.

At least twice this year I’ve alluded to the fact that we’d see some reference to the season two conversation where Jack asked Locke why it was so easy for him to believe and Locke said it had never been easy. This wasn’t exactly how I expected it, but it’s good that Lost can still do the unexpected. Still, this alternate Locke couldn’t quite bring himself to let go, just as season 2 Jack couldn’t bring himself to believe.

But in that first conversation, in season two, in the hatch, Jack had the tugging feeling that he should. He remembered he had met this stranger, Desmond, before. As Locke rolled away in this week’s episode, we saw him fight his urges to believe what was beyond him. He seemed to recognize Jin. He seemed to sense something deeper about his relationship to Jack. In his sleep, he talked about the button; said, “I wish you had believed me.” That was his suicide note to Jack, by the way, in season 5. And as Locke rolled away in doubt, Jack repeated the phrase to him. Jack can save him from his crippled state. But Locke had resigned himself, perhaps was punishing himself, to be crippled. How often do we decide to stay in our shortcomings?

Worth noting: Jack and Locke also talked of their pops in this scene. It was interesting that, in this alt, Locke robbed his Dad of his ability to walk while Jack’s dad seemingly died the same way he originally did. We were also reminded that Christian in the sideways is still a missing body. I don’t buy that load of smoke Smokey shoveled us our last episode about being Christian whenever Christian was seen. No, I believe the lost body of Christian is a reality straddling specter, that the Christian that lead Jack to water is the Christian that went missing in the sideways and somehow links these realities. Bad idea: coming back to add this paragraph after I already finished the article. End aside.

By the way, Terry O’Quinn (you play Locke, if you’ve forgotten), for Emmy consideration this year, I suggest you just submit the tape of this scene. Locke has had some truly great moments over the six years of Lost, but this brief scene may have been the best-acted of them all.

Left and right Tuesday night, characters in the sideways world were having epiphanic moments (yes, I’ve invented a word — no it’s not patented; yes, you can use it. No you don’t want to? FINE). It seemed everybody around had been on flight 815. But what the heck did it mean?

Besides the obvious fate between our characters, I’m not sure I know. I still, deep down, want Locke to be the guy that takes over island duty. But that’s seeming less and less likely. I don’t know how these worlds merge. Might it be that when Jack takes over for Jacob he will watch over the castaways’ alternate lives? I can’t find this satisfying because it makes the struggle we’ve been watching for six years and the stories therein worthless. I still contend Locke has to give into the truth about what he saw and felt in his hospital coma. We are not done with “normal” Locke. I’m convinced.

And Tuesday night, seriously now, it’s seemed a greater certainty with every week, but this time around there’s no denying it: Fake Locke is one bad mother *watch my mouth!* SMOKE! Yeah, dude sucks. He put everyone we care about on a sub and tried to blow it to Hades. Thankfully, some survived. And I suppose it was somewhat inevitable that other characters would not by the end of this season.

So we say goodbye to Sayid, who performed a redemptive act as predicted. We say goodbye to Jin and Sun…and I’m pretty sure Lapidus. I don’t mean to be pithy, but my brevity here is indicative of a larger problem I and maybe some of you are suffering from. For lack of a better word, let’s call it “impatience.” We’re so close now to the end of this ride, I can taste it, and I’m less preoccupied with savoring the moments than barreling to the end.

I will mourn Sayid. And Jin. And Sun. But it will probably be when I re-watch the series within the next couple of years. As it goes tonight, I was sad, definitely, and touched too, watching Jin refusing to abandon Sun as they proclaimed love greater than life. But — and just a “but” here — should Jin have remembered what Michael told him the last time he was on a ship about to sink? “Go, you’re a father now.” Someone else will be raising Ji-Yeon.

With only a few episodes left, and with more and more specific a story to tell, more characters will likely be slipping away or into the background. (But be alert for Richard, Ben, and that crew to pop up at some pivotal moment sometime soon and do something heroic as Hurley did in the season 3 finale with the Dharma van.) The events on the sub did not particularly shock me, save for specifics. The way Lost has always worked and endings of stories usually do told me to be ready for some losses — I just wasn’t sure who.

It was nice having confirmation that Sayid did not kill Desmond. And it was interesting hearing him tell Jack “It’s going to be you.” That replaces Jacob? And can we be certain?

“Certain” seems to be my word of the night. If Lost is about life, perhaps it is about certainty — certainty that it’s headed somewhere, but uncertain of where or how. Our approach seems to dictate some of that, as do the characters. Certainty that these characters are connected, like many of us in life? Certainly (there I go again) it’s not true of everyone we meet, but I couldn’t help but feel like Lost was hammering something home when Claire told Jack “We’re strangers” and then he said, “No, we’re family.” 815 wasn’t just a flight — it was a club, a core. What are our flight 815s? Can we recognize it when something like fate — not in that there’s only one way for us to live our lives but in that there are passing moments that can decide how we will — are presented to us?

Jack seemed to be right when he said Smoke Locke wasn’t allowed to kill all of them but they could kill each other, and to prevent that they need only do nothing. Before I get too zen here, I for one do not endorse sitting on the couch in sweats covered in cheese-puff dust waiting for fate to knock on the door, but I do believe in a time and a place for everything, and that everything is a lot, is too much for any one of us to understand, so sometimes we’re best not fiddling and are best served believing instead.

I don’t know, I’m rambling now. Lost is this bomb waiting to explode in a few weeks, and the more I yap, the faster the counter moves, the less likely I am to defuse its puzzle, the more likely I am to have it kerblast in my face as I mess with it. I kind of feel as if Lost is this theater experience for us now — a bunch of people in a room watching it, and I keep talking over it and getting in and out of my seat, cutting off the view.

So I’m going to shut my trap here in a minute. “The Candidate” wasn’t revelatory, or maybe even classic Lost. It was important, but next week, with its promise of the Jacob/Man In Black story, is what we’re really hungry for, when the metaphor of pawns and pieces in a game of light and dark will be fleshed out. This week was Han being tortured, C-3PO being torn up, Luke going into the dark side of the force tree — all that stuff that’s important and necessary before the Vader/Luke duel we really want to see. So we wait as the time clicks on the bomb and as I stack metaphors and hope that it all works out and we survive. The audience. Maybe there’s a rule. Maybe Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof can’t screw us over. But we can screw over ourselves if we bicker too much Lost right now or after it’s done. We can’t leave yet. We are the candidates. When Darlton is done with Lost, we’ll inherit it, and its mysterious ability to move us will continue on in a different way for all of us. That’s what Lost is about. As we collapse on the beach soaked, sad and bleeding, confused, staring at that ocean we’re convinced has betrayed us with a shotgun wielding smoke monster sniffing at our sweat, don’t give up even as that ocean turns. We’ve almost finished what we started. And when it ends, we must interpret what it, Lost, means to us as we continue to do whatever we did in the episodes of our own lives. But for now, we’re not strangers. We’re Lost fans.