Season
1, Episodes 5 and 6- “White Rabbit” and “House of the Rising Sun”
Summary:
Flashbacks
show Jack learning that his father, Christian, ran away to Australia and
ultimately died from drinking too much. On the island, Jack chases ghostly
images of his father through the jungle. He finds an inland cave with fresh
water as well as Christian’s empty casket. A controversy over missing water
bottles at camp comes to an end when Jack returns with news of the cave.
Sun
and Jin’s courtship is shown, as well as Jin’s descent into violence upon
working for her father. Sun makes plans to leave him in America but changes her
mind at the airport. The caves are explored and concluded to be a safe place to
live. Locke helps Charlie find his guitar in exchange for his heroin. Jin
randomly attacks Michael and is cuffed to some wreckage until an answer can be
given. Sun reveals to Michael she can speak English and informs him it’s
because of the watch he found on the beach. Michael frees Jin, but the couple
moves to the caves.
Review:
White Rabbit is one of those rare
episodes that seem to get better each time I see it. Jack’s cat-and-mouse game
with his father, and struggle with his death, is well-structured. It gets
tedious the more they come back to this well in later stories but for now it’s
solid. His conversation with Locke is one of the best conversations they end up
having. The water mystery is so-so, and I would have preferred the tension in
the group occurred as a result of Joanna’s drowning instead. We’ve already had
jungle monsters, polar bears, and magic healing in the first four episodes, so
seeing “ghosts” doesn’t seem like a step too far, especially since we present
Jack going crazy as a viable alternative. But the main factor bringing this
episode up is that the flashback is not a drawn-out bore fest, instead allowing
island shenanigans to carry the day.
Sun is probably the least-prominent
character in the first five episodes, so it’s interesting that they chose her
as the fourth centric character. It was difficult to figure out their story
when they just had a few lines of Korean dialogue, so we needed this
early. Sun speaking English was also needed since they can’t be isolated out on their own when everyone else is doing stuff. So in that sense, having
it come so early was necessary, and I guess it fairly does the job of
humanizing Jin a little bit. The full redemption can’t come until his own
episode. Yunjin Kim is an underrated actress on Lost, and she always carries
the emotional heft of her storyline when asked to do it, but there’s just not
enough juice in the Sun/Jin history to allow it to compete with some of the
others. The present-day story is, again, just fine. The watch is a bit of a
MacGuffin but at least it sets in motion the Michael/Jin relationship that
eventually grows to be one of the more rewarding pairs when you remember just
how bad it started for them.
As for the cave exploration, I could
have done without the bees. The skeletons are also unceremoniously dropped
without another word until season 6. These survival subplots really slow down
the pace of season 1, but thankfully we get a new danger coming on the horizon
soon. On a side note, I’m impressed at how quickly Sawyer has become
defined, with all his nicknames and sarcasm and reading of literary classics. A
lot of the characters at this point are shades of what they will eventually
become for the long haul of the series but Sawyer is already there (antagonism
notwithstanding).
Connecting the Dots:
Charlie tells Jack he can’t save the
drowning Joanna because he can’t swim. We know later that he does indeed know
how to swim, and even claimed to be a local swimming champion. I can’t remember
if he admits to lying later on, but I’ll keep a lookout for that. In any case,
Charlie is pretty cowardly and passive – and, frankly, high – at this point, so
it fits.
Boone says he was a lifeguard but he
needed help swimming and was improperly doing CPR on Rose after the crash. Is
he just a liar? Or was he really just that terrible at that job? It helps that
Jack actually calls him out on it in the pilot.
We see the other half of the Sun/Jin
flashback in “…In Translation”, as he has just beaten up a man by request of
Mr. Paik.
Hey Kate, how about you DON’T ask Jack
about his tattoos, alright?
Man in Black confirms much later that he
was indeed the vision of Christian (Were ALL of those visions the monster? We’ll
keep track.), and it jives with what we later learn. If he knows that Jack is a
candidate, he has to find a way to kill him indirectly. By forcing Jack into a
wild goose chase, he leads him to a spot where he will eventually trip, tumble
down a hill, and fly off a cliff. It would technically be an accident as MIB
did not push him. However, Jack is saved by a branch at the last second.
Another question of note is what
happened to Christian’s body. Perhaps it was never put on the plane, in
conjunction with the airline’s rules. More likely though, the monster scanned
Jack while he was unconscious after the crash, found that Christian would be
the perfect manipulation tool, and quickly buried or hid the body so that it
would appear more plausible that Christian had been resurrected – and thus,
easier to manipulate Jack. Later on, Yemi’s body also disappears just as Eko
sees his image. Also, the last “Missing Pieces” mobisode seems to confirm that
MIB’s strategy with Christian and Jack began even before Jack woke up in the
first scene. I’ll devote a whole post to the mobisodes when we get to them.
Adam and Eve are confirmed as Mother and
the Man in Black in “Across the Sea”. It at least connects with the black and
white stones. But there’s another theory out there that has such hard evidence
for their identities that I feel nearly confident that it was the original
origin of the skeletons but the writers had to abandon it, presumably because
it would be hard to depict on the show. I’ll get to that when I cover “Not in
Portland”. But suffice to say it’s a more satisfying answer than the one we
got.
Jack’s comment of the skeletons being
about 50 years old is also baffling, unless the island’s healing properties
somehow makes decomposition occur at just 2.5% of the regular rate. Again, my
other theory fits with the 50-year guess much better.
Ranking:
1.
Pilot, part 1
(9/10)
2.
Walkabout (8/10)
3.
Pilot, part 2
(8/10)
4.
White Rabbit
(8/10) (Good Jack outing, but don’t get used to it.)
5.
Tabula Rasa
(7/10)
6.
House of the
Rising Sun (6/10) (Middling Sun/Jin episode. Definitely get used to it.)
No comments:
Post a Comment