Lost Season Four: There's No Place Like Home
When
the producers of Lost negotiated an “end date”
for the ABC drama with network executives, it laid the potential for
the final forty-eight episodes to be a revealing, rapid-paced, roller-coaster-of-a-ride
to the finish line. Freed from not knowing how long the series would
last and the uncertainty of when to answer the multitude of perplexing
questions, co-executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse could
finally take off the gloves and bring Lost to its full fruition.
Based on season four, it appears that such lofty expectations have indeed
been realized.
The initial
episode—appropriately entitled “The Beginning of the End”—picks
up where the revitalized season three left off, with the imminent rescue
of the survivors of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815, coupled with the knowledge
that a flashforward, heavily-bearded Jack Shephard needs to “go
back” to the island on which he was once marooned. But we quickly
find that not everyone achieves rescue, as the ensuing flashforward
of fan-favorite Hugo “Hurley” Reyes reveals that only six
passengers make their way back to civilization. More importantly, the
flashforward is filled with cryptic references—Hurley denies ever
meeting fellow Lostaway Ana-Lucia Cortez, an apparition of
deceased Charlie Pace declares “they need you,” and Hurley
himself pulls a bearded-Jack when he tells the good doctor “I
don’t think we did the right thing; I think it wants us to go
back”—all alluding to a fabricated lie told by the media-dubbed
“Oceanic Six.”
On a television
show already firmly based on mystery, Lost built the foundation
of season four on two new mysteries: who are the Oceanic Six and what
really happened to them? The “lie” itself was finally heard
in episode four, “Eggtown,” when Jack took the stand in
fugitive-on-the-run Kate Austin’s murder trial: “Only eight
of us survived the crash. We landed in the water. I was hurt, pretty
badly; in fact, if it weren’t for her I would never have made
it to the shore. She took care of us, she took care of all of us. She
gave us first aid, water, found food, made shelter. She tried to save
the other two but they didn’t….” As for the identities
of the Oceanic Six, they were slowly revealed through a series of flashforwards
that kept fans speculating to the very end (and beyond) until they were
finally confirmed as Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid Jarrah, Sun Kwon and
Claire Littleton’s son Aaron.
As for
“how” the Oceanic Six were able to get off the island, that
was saved for the season’s three-part finale, “There’s
No Place Like Home.” The title alludes to L. Frank Baum’s
The Wizard of Oz, and it is not the first time that Lost
has borrowed from the classic tome. Season three, for instance, had
episodes entitled “The Man Behind the Curtain” and “Not
in Portland,” both which either directly or indirectly inferred
a connection, while Other’s leader Benjamin Linus had taken the
moniker Henry Gale, the name of Dorothy’s uncle, as his own when
captured in season two.
Right from
the start of “There’s No Place Like Home” it becomes
apparent that the “home” in question is not the idealistic
Kansas that Dorothy returned to from Oz. On the cargo plane to Hawaii,
the Oceanic Six are not joyous about their rescue but, rather, sit in
quiet shock instead. They in turn find themselves at a press conference
in which they are forced to lie: “absolutely not” Sayid
responds when asked if there could be other survivors from their flight,
while a tense Sun reluctantly states that her husband, Jin, died in
the initial crash.
If any
happiness was found off-island by these survivors, it is a short-lived
happiness. Sayid, for instance, is reunited with Nadia, the woman he
rescued from execution and then searched eight years to again find,
only to have her murdered—according to Ben, at least—by
new uber-villain Charles Widmore. The grief from Nadia’s death
quickly turns to vengeance as Sayid becomes, in essence, Ben’s
“hit-man” in the unfolding conspiracy regarding the island.
The apparent death of Jin in the finale also has a vendetta-like effect
on Sun, who not only leverages her monetary settlement from Oceanic
Airlines into a controlling interest in her father’s company (Mr.
Paik being one of the two people she blames for her husband’s
death), but she also proposes an alliance with Widmore. Hurley, meanwhile,
has reverted to his post-island afflictions of “cursed”
and “crazy.” As for former fugitive-on-the-run Kate Austin,
she alone appears to have found happiness as a stay-at-home surrogate
mother to Aaron.
And then
there is Jack Shephard. Lost is an epic story with a scope
and grandeur that few television series have ever exhibited, a modern
day Dr. Zhivago or War and Peace in terms of ambition.
And just like with any epic populated with numerous characters playing
a wide-variety of roles, there is always one individual upon whom the
over-arching narrative rests; for Lost, that character is Jack.
He was, after all, the first of the survivors seen in the pilot episode,
and eventually assumed the position of “leader.” More importantly,
in a show that continually raises both philosophical and spiritual issues,
Jack has been the “science” side of the ongoing science-versus-faith
debate with fellow Lostaway John Locke. Although a case could
be made that Locke, not Jack, is the central character of Lost—or,
at the very least, it’s a shared role between the two—events
in the finale point to Jack Shephard indeed being the focal point upon
which the Lost universe revolves.
Although
always on opposite sides, Jack and Locke are even more divided in season
four, with the remainder of the Oceanic 815 survivors openly choosing
between the two competing leaders in the very first episode. It was
also a season where Jack Shephard’s best-laid-plans fell apart
at the same time that John Locke’s fate went on the rise. In the
episode “Cabin Fever,” for instance, Richard Alpert—the
never-aging Other—had an ongoing interaction with Locke from the
moment of birth, alluding to a destiny of leadership on the island for
the latter that finally arrived in “There’s No Place Like
Home.” As for Jack, he morphed into a damaged individual attempting
to reconcile his promise to get everyone off of the island with the
knowledge that his actions at the end of season three had put all of
their lives at risk. And while he eventually did find rescue for a small
handful, the cost involved the death of many and the abandonment of
the rest.
“There’s
No Place Like Home,” however, also offered a glimpse of Jack Shepherd’s
possible evolution from “man of science” to that of “man
of faith.” In one of their many—although apparently last—debates,
Locke says to Jack, “It’s not an island; it’s a place
where miracles happen,” to which Jack responds, “There’s
no such things as miracles.” But as the episode progresses, and
events unfold leading to rescue, doubt begins to seep in for Jack, first
when Locke (via Ben) succeeds in “moving the island” in
a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t moment right in front of Jack’s
eyes, and then later when Kate comments that Aaron’s survival
during their escape was a “miracle.” Jack eventually even
listens to Locke’s plea to lie about their crash, although he
offers his fellow survivors a different reason for doing so than simply
“protecting” the island.
In the
end, we see just how broken of a man Jack Shephard has become through
a flashforward that harkens back to the previous season’s finale—the
heavily-bearded, pill-popping spinal surgeon is distraught over the
death of the enigmatic Jeremy Bentham. Bentham has apparently visited
other members of the Oceanic Six, but it is only Jack who believes him.
“He told me that after I left the island, some very bad things
happened,” Jack explains to Ben in the final scene. “And
he told me it was my fault for leaving, and said I had to come back.”
“Who
is Jeremy Bentham, the man in the coffin?” became a mini-mystery
in the final episode, and the answer inevitably turned out to be none
other than John Locke. Considering Jack’s new mantra of “we
need to go back,” it would appear that Locke was finally able
to persuade the rival “man of science” to his way of thinking
through death, and perhaps in doing so revealed the convergence point
for all of Lost’s ongoing mysteries: the transformation
of Jack Shephard into a “man of faith.”
Give the
producers and writers credit: after nearly eighty episodes, at a point
when typical television shows usually fall into predictability, the
ABC series continually finds new ways to keep fans guessing, debating
and speculating. Answers are slowly revealed, only to then be replaced
by equally compelling ones. Suffice it to say that Lost constantly
keeps its audience on its toes and in eager anticipation for the next
installment.
Anthony
Letizia (June 9, 2008)
