Lost Episodes 1x11-14, "All the Best Cowboys..." to "Special"
Sorry it took a while, but here are some more Lost reviews!
So this one’s on me a little, and on the world a bit. In case you’re reading this way in the future, as of May 2020 the human race is in the midst of a pandemic. Time feels like it no longer has any meaning, and I got behind on my promised Lost reviews. Here’s a catch up round.
All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues
The generally accepted story is that while other shows can take months or years to figure out what they are, Lost got there instantly. The moment Jack opened his eye, the series had an absolute purpose of vision, bringing in its best work right out of the gate. That’s mostly true. An episode like “Walkabout” absolutely stands as one of the show’s best. But there are things that Lost took longer to learn how to do. There are examples of attempts at things that proved much more successful later on.
“All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues” is one of those attempts. Post-pilot, Lost has gone into a slower, more introspective, mode of storytelling. It’s been very much a show about a bunch of people working through some shit while stuck on an island. “All the Best Cowboys” wants to take it up a gear. This episode has a lot of running through the jungle while Michael Giacchino indicates to us that it’s Very Important. It’s the first episode of Lost that could call itself a thriller, and it’s not wholly successful at it. The show would go back to this well over and over again, producing some outstanding hours of TV (a personal favourite would be season four’s “The Shape of Things to Come”). But this isn’t quite there.
I think my biggest issue is that, for all it tries to indicate otherwise, it’s kind of light on incident. This is probably less of an issue for first time viewers, but there’s a lot of running around here chasing clues and very little actually revealed. I understand the show likely wanted to keep him mysterious, but it’s beyond frustrating that we learn so little about Ethan after such a cliffhanger last week. There’s very little here in pure plot terms that’s advanced. The show still wanted to keep a clear episodic structure, so I get it on one level. But come on. Cut to the chase!
We have another Jack centric, which feels like a strange choice considering half the cast haven’t had their first episodes yet, but the hunt for Ethan wouldn’t lend itself to a Boone flashback. Jack is the leader, and that’s again the conflict of the episode. If “White Rabbit” was about him rising to the occasion and proving he Has What It Takes, this time we see that he maybe doesn’t always have what it takes. In many ways, his father would have been a better leader in Jack’s shoes. He’d offer calm in the moment. Crucially, he’d be able to delineate tasks, letting Locke and Kate search for Charlie and Claire while he better organised a more coordinated response. Jack is haunted by his father’s failings and responds with a need to do everything himself.
Of course he does eventually step up to the plate by doing the one thing he’s actually qualified to do. And this is the thing Jack can’t see. A great leader has to understand everyone’s role and delineate. Locke outright tells him to “be the doctor, let me be the hunter”. But he just can’t. Jack has to be the one who fixes his own (at least in his head) mess. He can’t see the bigger picture at all.
But enough about Jack in a difficult episode for him. Kate is something of a voice of reason alongside him, and it’s notable how poorly they get on. For all that he’s been cast as the villain of the Island, Sawyer has never treated Kate this badly. If there’s anything Jack can’t see because he’s so clouded by single-mindedness, it’s that Kate really is useful here, and he should let her take the lead.
The other major plot is with Boone and Locke. Does Boone “win” this episode? I think he might. In his time on the Island so far, he’s been in an almost desperate quest to prove he can be Jack. Boone wants to be the hero rescuing women from drowning in the ocean. He wants to be the first person to launch a search party. He wants to be The Protagonist. Locke provides him with a different sort of role model. There’s an obvious parallel between the two in the way he talks about his own life. Back in “White Rabbit”, Boone angrily insists to Jack that he is just as capable of leading by stating “I own a business”. But with Locke, he admits he’s just running a wing of his mother’s empire through nepotism. It’s the first time since the crash that he’s able to stop pretending and just be himself.
I wish I had more to say about “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues”. Its iconic status was earned at a time when Lost made anything seem possible. Ethan was so thrilling because they showed so little. The Others could be anything. Looking back all these years later, it feels a little too much like an appetiser. I want more. The show will get there, but for now this episode feels frustrating.
Notes
“All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues” is another Javier Grillo-Marxuach script. He’s a noted Star Trek fan, and Boone’s redshirt speech feels very him.
Stephen Williams directs his first episode of the show, and he’ll be sticking around for a while. There was a lot of direction to do here, and he does a good job of keeping a sufficiently thriller-esque tone. The image of Charlie hanging from a tree is genuinely haunting.
Some of the other scenes, especially involving Sawyer, dump a lot of exposition. More recent shows have ditched this, but I do think a well executed exposition scene is vital to help the audience follow a serialised show.
Whatever the Case May Be
“Hi, my name is Grace Robertson, and I’m kind of a little bit of a Kate and Sawyer shipper.”
“Hi, Grace”.
I didn’t mean to end up like this. I used to be so good and well behaved. I used to watch this show and think “Ugh, the stupid love triangle! Get back to the mysteries!” I used to live my life as a well adjusted, normal member of the Lost fandom.
But one rewatch, something changed in me. I started watching scenes of them together and couldn’t help but think “you know, they are kind of cute”. I wanted them to flirt. I wanted them to kiss.
I am so sorry for the pain I have caused.
“Whatever the Case May Be” may be (see what I did there?) the crux of it. See, this isn’t a great episode of Lost. It doesn’t add that much to the plot or the characters. But it’s a really good hangout episode. Even if it has a serious ending, the case feels much lower stakes than what we’ve seen so far on the show. It’s nice. It feels good.
Those kind of hangout stories tend to happen on the show without Jack. We can see it here with how much fun Kate has dealing with him compared to Sawyer. Everything that happens is Very Serious to Jack. He doesn’t have a lot of perspective to help him focus on what matters and what doesn’t. Sawyer, by comparison, is capable of enjoying himself. To him, getting the case open is mostly a fun game to kill time on the Island with nothing to do. It contains the truth about Kate, yes, but that’s a fun puzzle to solve. For Jack, it’s of critical importance. It’s life or death. Just chill out, Jack.
This informs the way they both treat Kate. Sawyer knows how to read Kate. He might not have all the details figured out, but he knows who she is. He made a living lying and reading people, and he can tell Kate does the same. She can’t hide who she is with Sawyer, but nor can he. Jack, on the other hand, has absolutely no sense of who Kate is. He can’t read people at all. He can read situations. He can understand things. But people? Forget about it. The mystery box of the case is important to him because he believes it will explain everything. He’s very desperate to find out concrete information about Kate because he just does not know. She might be who she appears, or she might be someone totally different. He can’t tell! Sawyer can tell.
As for Kate herself, she weirdly doesn’t get too much juicy material in her own episode. The flashback material is weak here, spending far too much time hiding the truth from the audience, and not nearly enough developing the character. It’s obvious that Kate is not going to be an innocent victim here, so the first twist doesn’t really land. The show tries to fool us into thinking we’re seeing what Kate did to become a fugitive, but that’s a mistake. The reveal can only be “this isn’t actually what she did!”, which can only be frustrating and disappointing. We really just learn two things here: that the toy plane is important to her, and that she lied to a lot of people about her identity. It’s not exactly shocking stuff here.
This is an issue Lost has with Kate. It often becomes too enamoured with the mystery around her past to just tell some straightforward stories about her. This is a real episode for the mystery box, with a literal case representing the “truth” about Kate which, fittingly enough, does not actually provide much of anything conclusive. In the long run, I think its influence on Lost is significantly overstated since it’s much more of a J.J. Abrams thing than a Damon Lindelof or Carlton Cuse technique. But this was still a point where Abrams was somewhat involved in the shaping of the show, and his storytelling fingertips are all over this one. The stuff that works here is the characters having a good time. I can’t help but feel the hour would be stronger with more of that and less mysteriousness around Kate’s identity.
Beyond this, the standout subplot is Shannon and Sayid’s. Almost all of Shannon’s scenes so far have been with Boone, who doesn’t exactly have the highest opinion of her. We’ll get into that some more next time. But Sayid doesn’t really judge her for whatever grievances held from the past. He just sees the one French speaker in the camp and asks for help. Granted, he’d be lying if he said he only wanted to spend time with Shannon for her translation skills. But she’s able to form a genuine bond with someone who doesn’t look down upon her. She gets frustrated, but it’s the first time since the crash that she’s living an actual life.
“Whatever the Case May Be” is not the most substantive episode of Lost. If you were finding hours from the first season to cut, this might be top of your list. But I do think it’s a good time on the Island. It’s nice. After such a weighty episode the previous week, it’s good to just hang out a little.
Notes
“Whatever the Case May Be” is written by Damon Lindelof and Jennifer Johnson, while it is directed by Jack Bender. Not sure I would’ve brought the big guns for this one.
Jack saying he “needed” to bury the marshall is an obvious retcon, but it makes for a more interesting character motivation.
The Charlie subplot feels like something of nothing and just reminds us he’s there. Rose drifts into the magical negro trope a bit, which isn’t what you want to see.
The characters moving camp due to a change in the tide really did happen, with the show no longer able to use the old location. We’ll stick with the new one for some time, but I kind of prefer the original visually, especially with pieces of the plane wreckage.
Hearts and Minds
Why does TV love incest so much?
Is it because brother-sister relationships are hard to write? There aren’t many examples of the medium getting it right. There are great shows about large families that contain brothers and sisters (Parenthood is my personal favourite), but a straight brother-sister dynamic? It’s just not seen much. For whatever reason it just seems harder than writing two sisters or two brothers. Add in the fact that you’ve cast two attractive actors with strong chemistry and the temptation is there, apparently. Even though you’re going to gross out most of the audience.
Let’s dig into it. The flashback this outing shows us Boone chasing after Shannon to rescue her from a supposedly abusive relationship. He pays off her boyfriend Bryan enough to disappear, until it’s revealed that Shannon set the whole thing up to scam Boone for money she believes she’s owed. Then we get the big twist: that Boone has been in love with his step-sister the whole time, and the two of them were intimate just before the crash.
I really don’t know why the Lost writers decided to do this. It doesn’t track with what we’ve seen of Boone and Shannon so far. His claim to Locke that she’s “smart and special in a lot of ways” does not track at all with the way he’s treated her on the Island thus far. Claiming they’ve always been step-siblings is obviously here to justify it, but again, that’s a retcon. As it is, we have Shannon telling Claire that Boone is her brother in the pilot, what, within 48 hours of them having sex? It’s weird and it’s gross and I don’t like it.
What makes it stranger is that the other flashback twist, that Shannon was conning Boone all along, is enough of a surprise to carry the episode. There’s no getting around it: a woman lying about being abused is not exactly the most progressive choice the show could’ve made. Lost is a show about conning and deception, and I doubt they intended to make some grand statement about domestic abuse, but still, putting the image of women lying about being beaten by their boyfriends out there is hard to forgive. What it does at least do is give Shannon agency in her own life story. We haven’t seen these flashbacks from her perspective yet, but the show is letting her become more of an active participant in events. She’s been screwed over and Boone doesn’t even notice it.
We get back to the present day and Boone’s central breakthrough in this episode is being able to get over Shannon. He was trapped in a cycle before the crash of not even love so much as obsession with her. It’s not exactly the most positive way to do it, but he needs to see her die so he can move on. The Island gives everyone a fresh start, and Boone has the chance to break out of his weird incest relationship thing. Whether he takes it is up to him, though Locke is certainly pushing for it.
Giving the bulk of Boone’s screentime in his own episode to a hallucination is certainly a choice. On a gut level I feel like the show violates the rules of a dream sequence by cutting to other storylines that are actually happening. It’s a cool fake out, but the show isn’t playing fair with this. They love pulling the rug from under our feet and I love it too, but you have to give the viewer a chance. Cutting between different strands like that makes it feel as though we’re getting a false promise that everything is real.
From Locke’s perspective, he’s really just fully made the turn here. Back in “The Moth” he was very much playing the cult leader, but we could see that he’s acting in Charlie’s best interests. Here, it’s much harder to justify anything he’s doing. He believes completely in the mystical power of the Island and he’s totally convinced it’s his destiny to open the Hatch. All other concerns just don’t appear to exist anymore for him. He’s pushing Boone along not for Boone’s own good, but in order to further the agenda of getting the thing open. Boone totally buys into Locke’s aura for now, but it’s something that the audience is being tested on.
Is “Hearts and Minds” a great episode of Lost? Not really. I don’t think it ever really manages to get us to see things from Boone’s perspective. I still kind of feel more sorry for Shannon after this. It does its best job of adding shades to Locke, and it certainly keeps things running along. Fortunately, the show has some much, much better hours to come in the second half of the first season.
Notes
“Hearts and Minds” is Carlton Cuse’s first credited script, which he wrote alongside Javier Grillo-Marxuach
It is directed by Rod Holcomb, a veteran of TV dramas. We see him again only once, all the way in season five.
Jack and Kate are... also in this episode, having completely forgotten what they were fighting over in “Whatever the Case May Be”.
Kate finding out Sun speaks English might be the strongest moment of this episode, and one that desperately helps give Sun more characters to talk to. Lost unfortunately doesn’t have nearly as many female friendships as it does male bonding, so it’s nice to get a little moment like this..
Hurley and Jin is also a cute moment, and one Lost has a lot more of. Jin can’t have actual conversations with any character except Sun, so these comedy bits are the best they can do for us.
Special
Michael is trying.
He wants nothing more than for Walt to be safe and happy. After being called out on it by Susan over and over again, he’s desperate to put his son’s needs first. If that means Walt hates him, so be it. He’s very bad at this, and can’t see that he just needs to treat his son as a human being. But there’s no doubt his intentions are sincere.
“Special”’s flashbacks in many ways follow the beats you might have expected. Michael’s girlfriend Susan is expecting, but money is an issue in the relationship. Michael is set to go back into construction to help pay the bills while Susan finishes up law school. Cut to a year or so later and Michael isn’t getting any construction work while Susan, now a fancy lawyer, wants to take Walt with her to Amsterdam. I say “wants”, but she’s already decided to do it. After 18 months, she tells Michael on the phone that she’s met someone else, Brian Porter. Michael then angrily insists he’s going to the Netherlands to bring Walt home, before getting hit by a car straight away. While he’s recovering from his injury, Susan returns to New York to “ask” if Brian can adopt Walt, which she frames through Michael’s selfishness. Cut forward again to days before the crash and Brian is at Michael’s apartment, telling him that Susan died of a “blood disorder” and that he’s desperate for Michael to take Walt off his hands. Walt, we hear, is different. He makes strange things happen, as we saw for ourselves with the bird in Australia. Michael thinks this is all bullshit, but heads to Australia to finally get his son back anyway. When meeting Walt, he makes up a story that Brian wanted to stick around but he insisted on taking his son back. It’s a lot of story this week.
To be honest, Michael’s backstory does feel a little bit incel. The working class schlub just wants to do what’s right for his family despite everything society throws at him, but the educated career-minded woman takes it all away from him and screws him over. Feminism, eh? May as well put on a clown costume and shoot some people. I understand this is a Michael centric and this is how he remembers it happening, but we really do need at least some sense of Susan’s internal thinking. While she apparently has all the agency in the battle over Walt’s life, the show doesn’t let her have much at all. She’s a road block to stop Michael getting what he wants, and in the process the show can’t characterise her as much other than a “bitch”. If there’s any non-Island character I ever wish we could’ve seen a centric episode for, it’s Susan.
There is another way of thinking about this. Michael is introduced to us as a presumed member of the black deadbeat dad stereotype, and here the episode completely upends this. As I said, he’s trying. Society dealt him a shit hand, but his desire to do right by Walt remains unwavering. He doesn’t get to make a real choice in his life for a decade until he decides to become Walt’s dad, and the Island gives him a chance to make it work. That’s at least one way of reading it. The much, much more cynical take would be that the only way they could tell the story of a black man on this show was by having him get screwed over by a black woman. I don’t know. There’s a lot going on here.
Speaking of things going on! So Walt is “special”. We think. We see it quite explicitly in the flashback, then we see Brian tell us it’s a thing, then we see Locke notice it in the present. And then Walt gets attacked by a polar bear right after reading a comic about one. But on some level, I find the idea that he’s just a kid more interesting. Brian projects all these fantasies onto him because he can’t deal with being a dad without the love of his life. Locke is a weird cult leader who has these strange ideas. In this sense at least, Michael is the only one who sees him as a normal boy.
As for Locke, he’s certainly at work building his cult here. He knows he needs Michael onboard for whatever plans he has with Walt, and acts with deference accordingly. We’ve never seen him show this much respect to another human before. That’s how I read it, anyway. The more complimentary take would be that he genuinely respects Michael’s boundaries and he’s a little bit scared of him. Boone has become totally subservient at this point, swapping a weird co-dependant incest relationship for a master-servant vibe. Great choice there, Boone. Very healthy. Locke “wins” here in that he does seem to have Michael onside now, but we’ll see where it goes with the raft plans.
The other notable subplot here is Charlie’s weird desire to get Claire’s diary. You know, Sawyer gets accused of a lot, but Charlie’s clearly doing something worse here. Sawyer tells everyone he’s worse than he is, barking worse than he bites. Charlie genuinely paints himself as a “nice guy” while doing some actual stalking that doesn’t sit well. #TeamSawyer
Notes
“Special” is written by David Fury. The show seems to be getting him in to write these detailed character history type episodes, and he’s doing a good job of it.
The episode is directed by Greg Yaitanes, making it his and Fury’s second collaboration after “Solitary”. I like how often he goes in for close-ups in this one, giving us a sense of just how wrapped up in his own world Michael is.
Surprise! Claire is back! It’s a reasonably effective cliffhanger if a little too telegraphed.
Spoiler Zone
The Whispers are very obviously supposed to be the Others here. It makes sense that they ditched that, but it’s still a jarring retcon.
Is Boone’s episode written with the knowledge that he’s to die soon? It doesn’t feel that way to me. It strikes me as introducing longer term Boone storytelling we never get to see.
“Special” feels like a really big case of Jacob pulling the strings. You could easily imagine a shot of him driving the car that runs Michael over, and I’m assuming the “blood disorder” was him, too (very Doctor Manhattan).
Walt’s arc is certainly a misstep on the show, and it’s obvious he was intended for greater things here. But honestly, it’s fine. I like that, for the most part, he’s just a kid.