Lost Season Four Finale: There's No Place Like Home
Season
finales of Lost traditionally accomplish two things: bring
the overarching theme of the season to a close while likewise setting
up a new focus with an unexpected twist. The first year, for instance,
was an introduction to the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 and the strange
surroundings in which they suddenly found themselves stranded. The final
episode offered a double-twist of “not alone” in both the
past and present tense, as the mysterious Others fully revealed themselves
with the kidnapping of young Walt while John Locke finally found the
means to open the equally mysterious hatch. Season Two expanded upon
those events with an exploration of the island’s mythology through
the Dharma Initiative, along with Michael Dawson’s quest to retrieve
his missing son. Bookended by the entering of the hatch and its subsequent
implosion, that season ended with Michael and Walt leaving the island
while Jack Shephard, James “Sawyer” Ford and Kate Austin
were in turn taken captive by the Others.
Lost
shifted its focus the following year to include these strange island
inhabitants as well as their de facto leader, Benjamin Linus. The season
concluded with Ben seemingly losing control of his position of power
as the Lostaways turned the tables on the Others, with the
added twist that the traditional episode flashback was in actuality
a flashforward showing another de facto leader, Jack, off-island and
likewise losing control as he screamed “we need to go back”
to fellow survivor Kate.
Having
revealed that Jack and Kate had indeed been rescued, the storyline for
Season Four was an exploration of both “who” else got off
the island and “how” the rescue was accomplished. While
the “who” part (a media-dubbed “Oceanic Six”
comprised of Jack, Kate, Sayid Jarrah, Sun Kwon, Hugo “Hurley”
Reyes and Claire Littleton’s son Aaron) was exposed through a
series of flashforwards during the first seven episodes of the season,
the “how” was left for this year’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 Ben 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.” He had previously been institutionalized due
to the guilt of stepping onto a deck filled with people that then collapsed,
killing three of them; could Sawyer’s leap from the helicopter
have had a similar effect? Sawyer, after all, retrieved Hurley from
the Orchid Dharma Station, causing Hurley to say not once but twice,
“Thanks for coming back for me.” And when chopper pilot
Frank Lapidus made the comment, “I’d feel a hell of a lot
better if we were a few hundred pounds lighter,” one can only
guess what was going through the mind of the overweight Hugo Reyes.
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; a
haunting dream, however, leads her to break down into tears while telling
the child she was “sorry,” suggesting that California is
not quite Kansas for her as well.
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 were 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) does indeed “move 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
from the helicopter crash 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 last 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 season finale, 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.”
Maybe once
that transformation has been completed, Jack and the rest of the cast
will finally find the happiness of a “no place like home.”
June 9,
2008
