From the Field

The Outsider’s Guide to Lost’s Last Season: Episode Eight

March 24th, 2010

I wonder if Lost’s creators sit down to watch the episodes as they air. I imagine the two of them sitting together—there’s two of them, right?—on a sagging couch in the dark somewhere, the light from the TV illuminating their lumpy bodies. They watch the recap of the previous week’s episode and joke about the number of times they had to re-shoot a particular scene. One of them pours out a bottle of wine and they both settle back into their seats, the cushions adjusting to comfortably fit what has become their own special Tuesday night ritual.

But tonight, it’s different. Tonight, they are electric. They’ve waited so long for this episode to air! They are pitched forward, their hip bones barely connected to the front edge of the couch cushions. They are giddy with the thought of Lost’s faithful finally learning the darkest and oldest secrets of The Island! They exchange elated sidelong glances as they quickly sip their wine and wait.

Welcome to Hell

The episode begins! Richard sits with the rest of Jacob’s Candidates huddled around a fire on the beach, each of them in quiet repose. They are contemplating what to do next, though Richard is of little help. Jack implores him, and Richard berates him back:

Cut to commercial! I can practically hear the exultant cries and the clinking of glass coming from the creators’ couch somewhere out there in the world. The episode comes back from commercial and we have traveled some hundreds of years back in time to meet Ricardo, Richard’s prior self, who tries desperately to care for his deathly ill wife. Ricardo rides half a day to a doctor who refuses him help. In his rage and desperation he kills the doctor, returning with the medicine to find his wife already gone on to the great ship in the sky. He crumples to the floor and is soon cast into jail for his crime.

Feasting on the Bones of Richard’s Backstory

“Feast, you hungry throng! Feast on the meaty bones of Richard’s backstory. Feast until your maw is slick with the juices of Richard’s despair and regret!” The creators are swept up in their work, hooting and cheering and spilling cheap wine on an already soiled carpet. The episode is a film unto itself! An hour’s worth of storytelling that could easily stand on its own as a tale of tragic loss and devilish games. They are proud, and rightly so.

The episode continues with Ricardo granted reprieve by an opportunistic priest who sells him into slavery and puts him on a ship to The New World. It isn’t long before the ship is caught in a storm at sea and is shipwrecked on The Island. The shipwrecked crew kills what’s left of the slaves before coming to Ricardo, who stands shackled to the ship and unable to save himself. It is then that the Smoke Monster attacks, killing everyone on the ship but saving Ricardo for unspoken reasons.

Lost’s creators have opened a second bottle by now, and they are becoming overly complimentary of one another. They high-five with fervor as the episode then spins into a series of drowsy scene fades that mimic Ricardo’s lapses in and out of consciousness. He wakes and tries to carve his shackles away from the wall of the ship. He wakes again to find a boar shoving his snout into the rotted belly of the dead man next to him. He wakes once more to find Isabella, his dead wife, there to take care of him. She is soon eaten by the Smoke Monster, and he cries out in helplessness before he succumbs once more to his body’s thirst, hunger, and pain. He finally wakes to find a man dressed in black, a man who—like Zombie John—is possessed by the Black Smoke. He is, in other words, evil incarnate. El Diablo de The Island. But he denies as much, and sends Ricardo out on a mission to stab a man through the chest with an elaborate dagger. This, he says, is the only way for Richard to reach salvation and find his way back to Isabella.

The man he seeks is Jacob, and after a fight on the beach they befriend one another and Jacob lets him in on The Island’s greatest secret. The Island, he says, is like a bottle of wine filled with the most evil of spirits. Jacob, by comparison, is the cork that keeps all of that evil from spilling out into the world. He is the yin to the devil’s yang, the white stone on the balanced scale of good and evil. And he needs help—Ricardo’s help, to be specific. He cannot promise the return of Isabella, he cannot absolve him of his sins, but he can grant him eternal life and a special role in the guardianship of The Island. A deal is struck, and the devil is disappointed.

The Players, the Pawns, and the Playing Field

The creators are so stoked, man. They are so psyched right now! The entire microcosmic purpose of The Island played out in this, the turning point of Richard’s backstory! The choice between good and evil, an element of free will and personal incentive, and The Island, the blank canvas upon which it all plays out. Jacob joins The Man in Black on a hillside after Richard has made his choice, and they regard each other with the same formality shared by master-class chess players. Jacob hands The Man in Black—El Diablo de The Island—a flask of wine. “Enjoy it,” he says, “while you pass the time.” Jacob leaves, and The Man in Black smashes the wine flask against a tree, a not-so-subtle nod to the coming war between The Candidates and Zombie John’s army of followers.

The episode ends with Richard—modern-day Richard—crashing through the jungle and unearthing Isabella’s necklace that he buried there as Ricardo some hundreds of years before. He calls out to El Diablo de The Island, promising his services in exchange for passage out of hell and off The Island. But Hurley arrives and does his best impression of Oda Mae Brown by channeling a Ghost-like reunion between Isabella and Richard. Richard is renewed, and returns to Zombie Jacob’s fold.

Two bottles of wine consumed, the episode at a close, and the creators lean back on their couch with the contentment reserved for men who have accomplished great feats. This was the story within the story, a tale that might stand on its own were it not such a critical linchpin for the rest of the slowly unraveling epic. We have now reached the halfway mark for this final season, and if the water cooler talk around my place of work is indicative of Lost’s followers and their waning enthusiasm, this episode provided a much-needed jolt and gave the series’ creators a collective sigh of relief and a rightfully-earned clink of the wine glass.

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