''Lost'': Never Ben Kissed
Mar. 13th, 2008 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spicedogs
This is the time in the ''Lost'' season when we begin to feel the first tingle of antsy-pants impatience — where a simmering feeling blossoms into full awareness that nothing has really happened since the exciting, season-launching events of the premiere. Consider last year. As we entered the sixth episode, the Jack-Kate-Sawyer Hydra story line had advanced by baby steps, while back on the beach, Smokey had just bashed Mr. Eko to death. Not
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CRUSHED After Juliet turned Ben down, he arranged for her lover's death |
Well, be careful what you privately wish for. The best thing I can say about ''The Other Woman'' is that it tried hard to deliver the goods I wanted — maybe too hard. The whole thing felt forced to me — the sudden transformation of Charlotte and Faraday into Mission: Impossible secret agents; the overheated melodrama of Juliet's flashback; the groaningly contrived kiss between Jack and Juliet (Juliack?); the cliché ticking-clock climax in which catastrophe is averted with a proverbial second to spare. The story was kinda all over the place, as if trying to find something, anything to hook us — and fortunately, it managed to nab me with its Ben and Locke scenes (always killer, in my opinion) and the über-Other's mythology-expanding claim that the Big Bad behind the freighter (and maybe all of Lost) is none other than Penelope's father, Charles Widmore. It was almost enough to salvage the first truly subpar episode of the season. Some thoughts:
Stormy weather
''The Other Woman'' began with the Jack pack discovering that Charlotte and Faraday had disappeared into the jungle on an unusually rain-soaked night. According to the clues Lost has given us, this episode would seem to coincide with the tsunami that struck on December 26, 2004, an event that would only be relevant to Lost if you believe (as some do) that the Island is located in the Indian Ocean, not the South Pacific. So the severe rain shower that pounded the Island during the opening scenes could be a wink at the tsunami — or at least, tsunami theorists. But did the episode offer another coy allusion to that natural disaster? I refer to:
A Tempest by any other name (part 1)
''The Other Woman'' gave us a new Dharma facility, a power plant known as the Tempest. Much can be said about the name assigned to this station — beginning with this piece of insight, offered by reader Keith Stuart, who was inspired to do some pre-broadcast prep after reading about the Tempest in my Doc Jensen column on Thursday. Stuart reminds us that The Tempest is, of course, a famous play by William Shakespeare and that Lost seems to have much in common with the Bard's final masterwork: ''It is a comment on the Renaissance pastoral genre, in which the natural environment is often characterized as a restorative, magical force. In the play, the troubled royals are washed up on a strange island and find that they must grapple with the social and political problems of their normal lives, but within a strange new context of magic and disorientation. Sound familiar?'' Sure does! Keith thinks of Ben as Prospero, ''the magician at the center of the island's seductive madness,'' though he declines to say who's the equivalent of Prospero's imprisoned fairy, Ariel. Maybe he thought making a connection to Juliet was too obvious. Still, thank you, Doc Stuart, for doing all this heavy lifting for me/us.
A Tempest by any other name (part 2)
Of course, there are some of you who, when they hear The Tempest, don't think ''Shakespeare!'' but instead ''Robby the Robot!'' I refer to the 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet, loosely based on ''The Tempest'' and long-suspected of being a secret Lost text. Linda in Dallas offers this analysis: ''[In Forbidden Planet] astronauts from our time happen on a planet where a wise scientist and his daughter have harnessed the energy of the planet and are living in relative comfort. But it turns out that in harnessing the planet's energy, the scientist's 'id' becomes expressed through a strange monster. In Lost, we have an island with strange powers, harnessed somehow through the Hatch, but with violence erupting through the black smoke.'' I leave it to you, my friends, to excavate further meaning out of the film. I have an episode to recap.
Omniscient Ben strikes again!
The plot kicked in when Juliet encountered an old foil in the jungle: Harper, the Others' psychotherapist (''it's very stressful being an Other,'' Juliet later explained to Jack) and wife to Juliet's old Other lover, Goodwin. Harper — whose entrance and exit was accompanied by a choir of creepy jungle whispers (long time, no talk!) — had an urgent message from Ben. He wanted Juliet to track down and kill Faraday and Charlotte before they completed their mission of unleashing the deadly chemicals housed inside the Tempest. By episode's end, we learned Charlotte and Faraday were actually conspiring to do the exact opposite: Their mission all along was to neutralize the chemical stockpile in order to prevent Ben from pulling another Purge. Ben's mobilization of Harper raises many questions, not the least of which is ''Where are the rest of the Others hiding?'' It also suggests that either Ben can telepathically communicate with his people, or the surviving Others are executing orders Ben gave them prior to the events of last year's season finale, orders undoubtedly based on insight supplied by his freighter spy. As Ben told Locke, ''I always have a plan.''
A Good(win) man is hard to find
I was really looking forward to this flashback. The first two peeks into Juliet's past — ''Not in Portland'' and ''One of Us'' — were all-time keepers, in my book, and I thought they still left plenty to be explored, particularly the reluctant Other's romantic relationship with Goodwin and her turbulent rapport with Ben. But I was a little let down by what we got. I wasn't fond of the performance by Andrea Roth as Harper, nor was I fond of the lines written for her; she came off as too arch and unreal. I didn't like the revelation that the Juliet-Goodwin romance was an adulterous affair; it was a needless, underdeveloped twist that rendered Goodwin murky instead of complicated. And it ultimately didn't tell me anything about Juliet that previous flashbacks — and Elizabeth Mitchell's layered performance — didn't already establish or suggest. That said, I totally dug Ben's creepy loverboy act, culminating with the revelation that he had Goodwin infiltrate the Tailies in the hope that he'd get killed and thus be eliminated as a rival for Juliet's affections. I loved the part where Ben took Juliet to Goodwin's corpse, told her ''You're mine!'' then graciously allowed her to grieve by saying, with apparent sincerity, ''Take as much time as you need.'' If I haven't said so before, Michael Emerson is just genius in this role.
See? They haven't forgotten the kids!
I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the passing reference to abducted Tailie kids Zack and Emma during the scene in which Juliet and Ben ''enjoyed'' a ''romantic'' ham dinner together. Ben commended Juliet on her care for the kids. But it was the disclosure that they were kidnapped strictly because they were ''on the list'' that struck me. I used to have a theory that the Others swiped kids either because of their fertility problem or because kids tend to develop a magical, powerful rapport with the Island that isn't easily controllable (see: Walt) and the Others know that and try to manage that lest it become a problem. But if we are to believe Ben, it was merely a matter of faith — faith in Jacob's will, as revealed by the holy writ of the list.
Penelope's dad: Devil or scapegoat?
Ben continued to get under Locke's skin by needling him anew about his shaky leadership, which this week got tested in the unlikely form of Claire, who asked if she could have a go at interrogating MIA Miles. (Is he still gumming that grenade or what? I want to know already!) The Claire moment was another example of this episode's forcing things; the scene seemed to have been written just to give the actress something to do. (And I know this is an overdue, off-topic complaint, but I have to clear my conscience and say this: In retrospect, I think the show owed Claire one or two Charlie-grieving scenes. Anyway, I digress.) Locke got challenged once again, and Ben tried to work it once again, saying, ''Have they started the revolution yet?'' (How does this man know so much about what Locke is going through? Intuition? Psychic powers? Or just previous experience of being a disliked leader of faithless, impatient people?) But Locke managed to turn the tables on Ben by revealing he knew about the deal Miles presented him. This prompted Ben to play his supposed trump card: his claim (supported with surveillance videotape and dossiers) that they are united by a common enemy, alleged freighter master Widmore, who Ben says is desperate to find the Island so he can ruthlessly exploit it. Here's my question for you: Do you believe this? (I do.) And are you with me that Michael is going to be revealed as Ben's spy, or do you think we're being set up for a twist there? (Personally, I'm not completely sure.)
The (ugh) kiss
I liked everything that led up to it. I liked how Juliet pulled this frustrating episode together with her final speech to Jack. In the end, this was really a story about Ben and the lengths he will go to protect himself and the Island from his enemies. And the bad news for Juliet is that those extreme lengths might include manipulating her any way Ben sees fit, even leveraging her feelings for Jack, because after all, in Ben's mind, she belongs to him. If only Juliet had walked away after this speech, everything would have been okay. But no: Jack had to kiss her. Part of me can believe it: Juliet represents exactly the kind of Girl That Needs Rescuing that totally gets Doc Messiah hot — and ultimately leaves him burned. Look, I can buy the Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle; this dynamic makes sense to me. But adding a fourth party — even in the form of Juliet, a character I like very much — just doesn't work for me. I just don't think Jack would complicate his life with that kind of thing — not right now. It also seems to me that the last thing Juliet needs is more man trouble. Hasn't she learned anything from her backstory? Doesn't she know it never ends well for ''the other woman''?
SOURCE: Entertainment Weekly
