The Choice is Yours

Last week, I titled my review, “Choosing Sides.” On second thought, should’ve held onto that for a week. Because last night, with dead Jacob and not-so-dead-Fake-Locke serving as captains, teams were truly decided.


And the result was, quite frankly, one of the best non-finale episodes since The Constant. What emerged last night was a much clearer picture of LOST’s endgame. And from what I can tell, it has to do with deliverance from evil, self-actualization and being careful what you wish for. I'll get to all that at the end of the article. But first, let's talk about what we saw.

Cry Uncle

Last night’s alternate reality storyline focused on Sayid, the tortured torturer whose love for Nadia and moral ambiguity apparently were not sacrificed in this iteration of his life.

All in the Family
In the world where Oceanic 815 didn’t crash, Sayid’s essential make up has remained the same: he still served as a Republican Guard “interrogator,” he still cares for Nadia and he still can’t decide whether he’s a lover or a fighter. But, at least initially, this version of Sayid is strong enough to let go of the love of his life. However, he doesn’t let her too far out of his sight, as his own brother has married her and they have two lovely, precocious, boomerang-wielding children.

Sayid, meanwhile, is content to play the role of favorite uncle. He brings the kids presents from his business trip to Sydney, but even they can see through his veneer and sense his love for their mother. (Kind of icky, by the way).

What we’ve seen in the alternate reality are characters who have – to varying degrees – coped with their assorted demons. Sayid temporarily quelled his dark side by resigning himself the uncle role, realizing that he was too violent, vicious and dark to be what the love of his life needed. Or, in his words, “I can’t be with you because I don’t deserve you.”

Let the Hate Flow Through You
But whereas characters like Jack and Kate seem to be more fully combating their flaws in the alternate reality, characters like Sayid (and perhaps Claire) can’t fully silence those demons. In Sayid’s case, his brother’s careless mistake of taking a loan from the scariest mofo on the planet forces him to give in to his inherent darkness. His brother implores him to intervene – even playing the “for Nadia’s sake” card – and Sayid can only manage to refuse to step in until his brother is hospitalized from a “mugging.”

At that point, Sayid got all Sayid on everyone’s asses. After being involuntarily included in a meeting with Keamy, Omar and one of their henchmen, Sayid got pushed a little too far. Even after Keamy caved and absolved the loan, Sayid’s darkness overcame him, and he cooked up a carnage omelet in the kitchen of a restaurant, murdering all three men in cold blood.

Granted the grace to let go of his anger in this alternate timeline, Sayid nevertheless reverted to what was comfortable to him: violence. I’m going to come back to that in a little while. But first…

Trapped in the Closet
Okay, it was a freezer. But Jin! Wondering what happened to him after his TSA airport arrest? Here’s what. Jin was being held by Keamy and his men, and lucky for him, an angry Iraqi just turned his luck right around.

Did the introduction of Jin into this story arc seem random to anyone? Me, too. Until I remembered who Jin works for: Mr. Paik. Remember, Jin was delivering a watch (and cash, apparently) to Mr. Paik’s business associate in Los Angeles. And who is a known business associate of Mr. Paik? Charles Widmore! And (last question) who do we know Martin Keamy to have worked for in his checkered past? Widmore.

I think Jin’s detention at the airport angered Widmore’s henchmen (Keamy and Company), and they were holding him until he could recover the funds lost in the process. And that’s when Sayid unwittingly rode in to the rescue.

What becomes of them from here is a story for another week. And I bet you’re expecting me to brandish my old, “Oh, character connections mean the storylines are going to converge, see, see, look how right I am!! Look!” chestnut. Well first of all, I don’t talk like that. And secondly, I’m not going to say that. I'll have you know, I’ve got a different theory about the significance of the alternate reality. I’ll tell you as soon as I’m done breaking down one of the coolest on-Island storylines in recent history.

Which Sayid Are Ya On?

“There’s a war coming.” Or so we’ve been told. Until last night, I wasn’t sure how much I believed that. Ha! Let’s get ready to rumble.

Rough Night, Huh? Everybody’s Kung-Fu Fighting.
“For every man there is a scale. On one side of the scale there is good. On the other side, evil. This machine tells us how the scale is balanced. Yours tipped the wrong way.”

Before asking him to go kill Flocke, Dogen dismissed Sayid as pure evil – an accusation that spawned an excellent fight scene. But later, we saw Dogen issue a challenge to Sayid. Much in the same way that we saw Alternate Sayid (and, hell, Sayid for the last five seasons) torn between his violent nature and his desire for serenity, Dogen moved the first pawn last night. He challenged him to prove his inner goodness, and Sayid took the bait. A little word of advice to Sayid: if somebody wants you to prove you’re not evil by stabbing a man, you are probably being played.


You Sayid Goodbye, I Say Hellooooooo, Claire!
Before Sayid can embark out on his journey, Miles warns him that whatever brought him back from the dead, it wasn’t the Temple Others. You could just see it in Sayid’s face: he knew right then that he wasn’t about to prove himself a good man. That “darkness” Dogen told him about was no myth, and he knew it.

Just then, a visit from Claire! Or, as later described by Miles, “Right, Claire. She just strolled in here a couple hours ago, acting all weird. Still hot though.” Hands down, the line of the night. And I couldn’t agree more. Before Claire entered the Temple, though, did you catch her asking Flocke why Jin or Sawyer couldn’t deliver the message? That was a nice little nugget of confirmation that Sawyer is indeed allied with them, and Jin is along for the ride, for now.

Claire’s mission seemed a little empty, didn’t it? What, she was just supposed to tell Dogen to come out and play? Regardless, it didn’t work. Instead, this is when Dogen altered Sayid’s mission plan to include the dagger-through-the-heart strategy. In the mission briefing, though, Dogen tells Sayid that Claire is under the influence of a “trapped” man who is now free because of Jacob’s death, and who wants to destroy every living thing on the Island. Most ominously, he declared, “He is evil incarnate.”

Pretty heady stuff. And it seems that, no matter where Sayid goes, he has someone simultaneously pulling him toward good and evil. Within 30 minutes, Dogen went from banishing the “evil” Sayid to challenging him to prove his worth. The survivors did this to Sayid early on in the series – wanting him to be the caged pit bull most days, but expecting him to channel his torturer instincts when needed, at the drop of a hat. Even his army commanders in Iraq – and the Americans he worked with during the war – tried to play both sides of Sayid’s psyche.

I think Sayid’s moral ambiguity is both a product and a reflection of this kind of treatment. I actually still think he’s a good guy. But when you’re capable of what he’s capable of, people don’t want to use that for good. Even if they like you. And if you get told you’re a “violent man,” enough times, you start to believe it. In Sayid’s case, he’s taken it to heart.


Well Hello, Claire(ice)
Meanwhile, Claire is attempting to lure a sociopath’s dog into a dungeon. Okay, she’s just chilling down there waiting for her “friend” to come set her free. If you didn’t get a clear, “It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again,” vibe from this scene, then I congratulate you on having a mind that doesn’t automatically take you to the darkest place possible. And also on getting much more sleep than I did last night. Because that was just terrifying.

Claire seems fairly well at peace – if not “all there” – while sulking at the bottom of that well and murmuring the lyrics to “Catch a Falling Star,” (the song she requested Aaron’s adoptive parents sing to him before she decided to keep him, and the song that was sung to her as a child). And then Kate has to come and snap Claire right back into full-blown crazy mode by revealing that yes, in fact, she had taken Aaron off the Island and raised him. Good move, Austen. If there’s one piece of advice that I can very confidently give to anyone in the world, it’s this: no matter how hot a chick is, if she’s crazy, don’t go out of your way to piss her off.

But Claire didn’t snap like I thought she would. She almost seemed to pity Kate, telling her, “I’m not the one that needs to be rescued.“ Claire seems more interested in revenge and validation at this point than she does in a mother and child reunion. And with the Others removed as prime suspects in Aaron’s abduction, Kate has just become enemy number one. If I were her, I wouldn’t turn my back on Claire. Hell, if I were anyone, I wouldn’t turn my back on Claire. She’ll put an axe right through your heart and make a poop baby. You don’t come back from that level of crazy.


I Will Follow You Into the Dark
I won’t spend much time on Flocke and Sayid’s jungle conversation, because while it was unbelievably powerful, it was also fairly straightforward. One set of dialogue I do want to make sure you keep in mind, though, is this:

Flocke: What if I told you that you could have anything you wanted? What if I said you could have anything in the entire world?
Sayid: I would tell you that the only thing I ever wanted died in my arms. And I’ll never see it again.
Flocke: What if you could?

Yeah, remember that.

That offer was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Sayid; the final shred of evidence he needed to believe that his only path to deliverance was one shrouded in darkness. He returned to the Temple with the stark, confident message that, “There is a man in the jungle…he wants you to know that Jacob is dead. And because he’s gone, none of you have to stay here anymore. You’re free. The man that I met is leaving the Island forever. And those of you who want to go with him, should leave the Temple and join him. You have until sundown to decide.”

With that, Sayid tossed a mental grenade in the room. The Temple entered full freak-out mode, with the Others forcing themselves to instantly make a metaphorical version of the decision Sayid has wrestled with all his life: do I take the easy way out, even though I believe it to be evil? Or do I stick it out and do things the hard way, because I believe it to be the right way? Most of them chose the easy way out; to follow Flocke to freedom, off the Island.

But some chose to stay. And I’m really glad they did. Because what ensued was a scene that I will always look back on as one of LOST’s finest. In fact, I’ll call it the best scene since Michael shot Ana Lucia (mercifully) and Libby (tragically) in Season Two. Yes, that good. That powerful.


Let the Bodies Hit the Floor
Just when you were starting to like Dogen…

The surly Temple Master opened up to Sayid toward the end of last night’s episode (and, as it would turn out, his life), explaining that he was brought to the Island as part of a sinister bargain with Jacob. Jacob agreed to save Dogen’s son's life after Dogen injured him by driving drunk after baseball practice. In return for the gesture, Dogen agreed to come live on and serve the Island, and his only remnant of his relationship with his son was that tattered baseball we’d seen him rend between his hands for the last few episodes. Did Dogen’s plight remind anyone of Juliet’s? A loved one saved by Jacob in return for a life of servitude to the Island? Me, too.

It was pretty touching, actually. But not for Sayid, who figured he’d do Dogen the favor of ending his Island captivity by drowning him in The Spring. Sayid’s darkness and evil was in full effect at this point. And when Lennon got in the way, you knew he was next. Even the previously un-frighten-able Ben Linus backed away from the bad man when Sayid told him it was “too late” for him to be saved. Pure, unadulterated, dark evil.

But nothing compared to the fate that awaited the Temple dwellers who didn’t take Flocke up on his offer of escape. Earlier in the episode, Flocke told Claire, “I always do what I say.” He wasn’t kidding. Flocke went out for a smoke, and came roaring through the Temple with reckless abandon. Kate would’ve fallen victim to it had Claire not gotten her out of the way. But all the Temple Others that stayed around were wiped out.

The only other people who escaped Smokey’s wrath: Ilana, Frank, Sun and Ben – who arrived to the Temple just in time to almost die – as well as tag-along Miles. Their narrow escape salvaged a thin sliver of hope for Team Jacob, but things don’t look good.

Because while the Avengers were slipping out the Temple’s backdoor, the newly-formed Team Flocke was assembling outside of the Temple. As LOST serenaded us with Claire’s ethereal rendition of her favorite nursery song, we saw her, Sayid and Kate tread through the carnage left by Smokey. In a gorgeous slow-mo execution, they united with Flocke and his new Temple followers. And off they went, to catch a falling star. I need to reiterate: best scene in a long time, possibly ever. That was about as cinematic as TV gets.

An Offer You Can’t Refuse

For the first five weeks of Season Six, I’ve posited the theory that the inevitable convergence of our two storylines (the one where Oceanic 815 crashed and the one where it didn’t) would be a result of all our characters’ connections in the alternate timeline. Somehow, Jack + Locke, Kate + Claire, etc. would lead to a reconciliation of the two realities.


I am – at least temporarily – abandoning that theory in favor of a new one.

Last night, Flocke told Sayid that he could, “Have anything you wanted… anything in the entire world,” by following him. When Sayid replied that the only thing he wanted (Nadia) was dead, and that he’d never see her again, Flocke’s retort was loaded with significance: “What if you could?” That grabbed me.

Here’s what I think. Flocke has been talking for a few weeks about escape, deliverance, “freeing” himself from a “prison.” And now, he’s recruiting followers to escape with him. Last night, he told Sayid that he could escape to a world where Nadia was still alive, despite the fact that she had died years earlier, in a turn of events that ultimately led Sayid to his return trip to the Island.

My theory is this: your “escape” is an “escape” to an alternate version of yourself. More specifically, it’s an escape to the “best possible version” of yourself. If you’re Jack, you can escape to a world where you are a caring, loving father who is free of any substance abuse and at peace with your dead father. If you’re Kate, you can escape to a reality where you aren’t always on the run, and where your own selfishness and guilt doesn’t eat away at you constantly. Do these realities sound familiar? They’re the alternate realities we’ve seen portrayed, so far, for Jack and Kate.

And those realities are, in a sense, examples of the concept of “self-actualization,” a psychological theory defined as “the motive to realize all of one’s potentialities.” Put another way, it’s the best you that you can be.

That’s what Flocke is promising his followers: that he can take their soul, their consciousness, and free it from the hellacious conditions and travails – be they physical, mental or emotional – of the Island. That he can then implant your very essence into a world where your longest-held demons and deepest personality flaws are erased (or at lest muted). A world of self-actualization. Flocke is promsing to deliver his believers to an alternate, self-actualized version of themselves. Remember when Desmond's consciousness was leaping between worlds? I think this might've been what made him special - that he could, without any assistance, self-actualize and transport his soul/consciousness into an alternate version of himself.

[Important but possibly distractingly-complicated thought…] My limited understanding of Multiverse Theory and super-tricky-quantum physics tells me that, in theory, every decision you’ve ever made splits your reality. Stay with me. So, when I was deciding whether to go to TCU or SMU for college, I chose TCU. But there is a version of me that went to SMU, and he’s still out there in an alternate universe. My conscious mind stayed with the version of me that went to TCU, then moved back to Nebraska, started working at an ad agency and became obsessed with LOST. But the Multiverse Theory – which LOST appears to be dabbling in this year with its alternate reality storylines – holds that there is a version of me that went to SMU, got addicted to cocaine, battled depression over my inferior football team, took a job in finance and married a southern belle; and that version of me still exists. It’s just, my soul and my conscious mind exist in the me that’s writing this article right now. So, theoretically, there are countless versions of me living out alternate existences. It’s just, I’m only conscious of this one. Does that makes sense? I thought it was pretty good for 1 a.m. on a Tuesday.

[And now back to the theory…] So what Flocke is offering is to deliver you to the best version of yourself. But here’s the catch: nobody’s perfect. Even our “best selves” are inherently flawed. For Jack, he still can’t hold on to a woman despite all his triumphs as a father, son and surgeon. For Kate, she’s still on the hook for murder, despite her sincere attempts at atonement in her alternate existence.

Which brings us back to Sayid. What can Flocke deliver him to? His “best self” is still a murderer who can’t have the woman he loves. Or even, Claire. Her “best self” is still reluctant about her responsibility as a mother and unsure of how to handle her role with maturity and a level head.

As long as I’ve got my tinfoil hat on, I’ll offer an explanation on these two damned souls. They’re not going anywhere. Flocke needs someone to replace him, and it’s either going to be Claire, Sayid or Sawyer. Because for Flocke to free himself from his Island prison, he – like Jacob – has to find some willing soul to take his place. So he has cherry-picked the three most tortured souls on the Island (angry mother Claire, tortured Sayid and grief-stricken Sawyer) as his very own candidates, to take his place as the Island’s perennial pessimist.

All this sounds like I’m painting Flocke as the good guy, the guy who helps you live your best life. But as Maggie put it, I think following Flocke might be the Island equivalent of making a deal with the devil. If he is promising deliverance, what is it going to cost those who take him up on it?

And perhaps that’s the metaphor LOST is driving at. Yes, you can live your best life. But it may come as the result of tough choices you have to be prepared to make.

Time will tell. But for now, I’m telling Flocke that I’ll follow him into the dark. With fingers crossed behind my back.

Namaste.
Charlie