Lost Episodes 1x19-22
“Deus Ex Machina” to “Born to Run”
“Deus Ex Machina” to “Born to Run”
If there’s one thing these episodes do, it’s show the kind of tonal variation Lost can produce.
While this series obviously owes a huge debt to that one, “Deus Ex Machina” might be the most Twin Peaks episode of Lost ever made. This is the one that really takes all the weirdness on the Island and leads into it. Then the show follows it up with “Do No Harm”, practically an episode of ER set on a desert island. It’s not just that it has a medical focus; every story turn is propulsive, fulfilling ER’s promise of a blockbuster movie pace in an hourlong drama. “The Greater Good” and “Born to Run” then settle back into the show’s normal rhythms, and feel like they’re holding back a little before the finale.
For all that Lost is one of the key shows in pushing TV towards more serialisation and more “cinematic” qualities, this is something where its power is very much rooted in television. Every episode of Lost feels like its own thing even as the overarching narratives are very serialised. This felt like it was from another planet while the show was airing but looks a little quaint now (in a good way). This is a big part of why the “Golden Age of TV” was so potent: it hit that sweet spot of embracing serialised and cinematic elements while still having the grounding of traditional TV storytelling. Lost has both, and you need both to do episodes like this.
Let’s start chronologically. “Deus Ex Machina” is the latest in a trend of flashbacks to avoid giving the definitive story, and instead create room for further flashbacks. It helps that this is the best one of those. But for a few nodding winks, the flashback essentially ignores that Locke ends up in a wheelchair and tells a new story about him being conned by his father. The implicit idea in “Walkabout” was that the chair was not the root of his personal problems, but rather a symbol. “Deus Ex Machina” makes this explicit. Locke is the oracle on the Island, he’s the guy who knows everything and casts himself as the spiritual leader. He’s engaged in long conning everyone else into his grand visions because he was once the conned himself. Maybe the greatest tragedy is that he’s come to believe the chair was always his curse and the Island his savior. As the episode shows, his problems go back much further than that. He believes his legs give him the power to be a kind of just version of his father.
That might be more true than even he realises. Locke gives up his kidney for Anthony Cooper, and Boone gives up his life for the hatch. I don’t know how far back the show had planned to kill Boone, but it doesn’t feel like much was left unsaid with him (other than his last words which were, literally, unsaid). Boone was desperately looking for a purpose on the Island, from stupidly thinking he could challenge Jack for a leadership role to trying to save Joanna out in the ocean. Consciously or not, Locke cons Boone into being his pet. Whoever Boone is or was, he now exists only to further John on his destiny. It’s really gross manipulation that I don’t think either man really understands.
Maybe Jack does. John carefully omits information about the accident because Boone’s life is less important than his destiny. Jack might not know exactly why he’s being lied to, but as soon as it happens, he’s read Locke’s intent. Whatever John is doing out there, he’s prioritising that over basic safety. In Locke’s mystic quest logic that’s perfectly justifiable. He’s playing by biblical rules. But to Jack it’s unforgivable. Jack is living in the real world and the number one priority is keeping these people alive. He’s right, obviously. But Lost is good at raising it in such a way that it feels like a philosophical debate and not “fucking hell, this guy is letting people die in his cult leader ramblings”.
Jack’s backstory also gets retconned here a bit. It’s not exactly a shock to learn that a guy who looks like that has taken a girl home before, but an entire failed marriage arc is a hell of a thing to drop in. This will get expanded on in season 2, but for now it’s just kind of a thing we’re introduced to.
“The Greater Good” is, unfortunately, not as good as those episodes. It fails to answer the single most important question any episode of Lost can have: “why is this a Sayid-centric?” The action of “Do No Harm” suggested it should be Shannon-centric. The biggest event of the hour is Shannon pointing a gun at Locke. The entire story is broadly about what Shannon does, told through Sayid’s eyes. It makes no sense! Give us the Shannon material!
The Sayid arc we do see again denies us the definitive take on the character. This feels like the start of a rot that would really set in during the second and third seasons, before the show would intelligently change course and reinvigorate itself. This time, it mostly mirrors his arc in the episode, challenging on how far he’d go for love. It’s a kind of typical Sayid-centric in that his great love for Nadia is stated over and over but never depicted. I don’t think Lost ever really articulated why Sayid loves her. It simply told us he does. To be honest I’ve been long inclined to read their relationship as Sayid pining over this fantasy woman he’s constructed in his head more than the real Nadia who actually existed.
“Born to Run” is another treading water episode, and that’s a little frustrating. We see a third Kate flashback but, again in fitting with this new mode of withholding information, we still don’t find out what she did. The idea the show is building is that each character’s flashback is essentially a running story that we might check in on every dozen episodes or so. They’re going to hit a hard ceiling in terms of the stories they can tell in this mode, but that’s another newsletter.
Kate’s past adventure does pay off a mystery we dealt with in “Whatever the Case May Be”, as we meet Tom, the “man I loved/killed”. This kind of serves to show Kate the kind of life she could have had if not for whatever it is she did. Lost has spent all season asking us which is the “real” Kate: the useful Islander or the fugitive. Here it offers her a glimpse of the “other” version of herself, the one who settled down and lived a normal life. But that was never her. The impulse to run predates her crime. Whatever she did, however she drove her mother to be terrified of her, she would’ve done it anyway. Sometimes you have a choice, and sometimes you were always going to do the thing.
On-Island, the meat of the episode is in the writers trying to construct a way to get the important conflicts to happen in time for the finale. Many serialised shows have to do these moving the pieces episodes every now and again. The two big events the audience has been waiting for are opening the hatch and setting sail on the raft. The show deals with the first one relatively easily here, with Jack discovering the hatch and taking a firm “open it” position. Locke had been convinced for a while that Jack would be a thorn in his side, but this is a misread. Jack is concerned about practicalities, and the practical evidence says open it. The case for not opening it is fear of what goes bump in the night.
The raft needs a bit more action. Redshirt Dr. Arzt gives us a deus ex machina (you know, like the episode title) that the raft needs to set off soon. Just in time for the season finale! Subsequently, Kate wants on the raft and will do whatever it takes, just as Michael gets poisoned. Everyone points the finger at her before the reveal that it was Sun, in a failed attempt to keep Jin safe. This is all a little hokey, but it does serve the purpose of really isolating Kate and raising tensions with the other survivors (as well as clearing the house on the question of who knows whether she’s a fugitive).
Of these four episodes, two of them are sure fire hits while the others have their moments. This, my friends, is what a 25 episode season of television looks like. In the modern landscape, the desire would be so strong to whittle it down, to make every episode as good as “Deus Ex Machina”. But you can’t have “Deus Ex Machina” in a 10 episode season. It’s the little diversions, the chances for experimentation, that make TV great. Lost had that. Few current shows do.