LOST Revisited- Season 3, Episodes 3 and 4

Season 3, Episodes 3 and 4- “Further Instructions” and “Every Man for Himself”

Summary:

After the hatch implosion, Locke wakes up mute and finishes building Eko’s church into a sweat lodge. With Charlie standing guard, Locke enters and eats some paste, and hallucinates Boone in the hut. He is taken on a wheelchair ride through an airport and sees the castaways in various situations before climbing up an escalator and finding Eko’s stick. Now able to speak, he tells Charlie he is going to save Mr. Eko.  They encounter Hurley, who tells them what happened with the Others. Hurley finds a naked Desmond, who references Locke’s “speech”. Locke and Charlie track a polar bear into a cave, and an injured Eko is rescued from the bear. Returning to camp, Locke tells everyone they will save their friends, and Hurley looks curiously at Desmond. Flashbacks show Locke picking up a hitchhiker named Eddie and arriving at a commune. The people there discover Eddie is a cop who has been investigating their pot-growing business. Eddie reveals Locke was chosen by the force as a prime target because he was easily influenced.

While in prison for conning Cassidy, Sawyer meets Munson, who allegedly stole millions from the government, and claims the warden is looking to acquire it. Cassidy arrives and tells Sawyer he is the father to a girl named Clementine. Munson asks Sawyer to help move the money but Sawyer takes the info to the warden in exchange for a reduced sentence and a deposit made for Clementine. The sub returns to the Hydra and Colleen is dying of Sun’s gunshot wound. Jack is brought in to operate on her with Juliet, but she dies on the table. Sawyer is taken, strapped to a table, and seemingly operated on. Ben tells him they inserted a pacemaker and that if his heart rate gets above 140 bpm his heart will explode, so he should stop acting out. Pickett beats up Sawyer in retaliation for Colleen and forces Kate to admit that she loves him. Desmond constructs a pole in front of Claire’s tent, which acts as a rod for a lightning bolt, saving Charlie and Claire. Ben takes Sawyer to the top of a hill where he reveals there is no pacemaker and that they are on a different, smaller island.

Review:

“Further Instructions” is just a very odd episode. On the one hand, the objective is very simple, and Locke’s return to island mystic is a welcome development, but on the other hand there are writing problems all over the place. The lodge vision with Boone has the infrastructure for a fun idea; the characters in the airport are all grouped together based on were they currently are in the story, even if Locke himself never received that information. But it feels like they were looking for an excuse to shoehorn Boone into an episode again, and he doesn’t really do that much. Why does Locke need to build a hut, sweat himself into a trance, and go through this weird dream just to figure out that he needs to find the dude who was with him when the hatch imploded?

They use the event of Locke’s “speech” to set up Desmond’s clairvoyant powers but it’s actually not a speech at all: he just tells people they’re gonna look for their friends and to take care of Eko. “Not a bad speech,” Charlie says, which means his standards for both “speech” and “not bad” are incredibly low. It was just a little quip in order to get Hurley to remember his earlier interaction with Desmond. This episode introduces Nikki and Paulo. I use the word “introduce” very loosely, as they just kinda show up. I understand that the characters have been living with them for weeks, but the audience still needs that introductory phase. There is a deleted scene where Claire encounters them having sex in Jack’s tent, which I guess could have helped a little with that? I don’t know, it was never going to be an easy problem to fix. I actually don’t mind Nikki and Paulo, so you won’t see much badgering of them in this blog.

Then we get to the flashback. You know, the one where Locke was a pot farmer and picked up a hitchhiker who was actually a cop? This is a bizarre chapter in Locke’s history that doesn’t seem to fit very much with what we know of Locke’s character, and the stakes are so low. The whole “Are you a farmer or a hunter?” theme was hit over our heads, as they desperately tried to find a story that would parallel the current island action. It’s a valid question – Locke has spent much of his life being passive (farmer) and used his time on the island to become proactive (hunter), but it’s just so obvious here, and no story involving hippie commune pot farmers is going to be taken that seriously. It’s a black-eye in the otherwise-great Locke backstory. I still rate “Further Instructions” just a tad higher than the first two episodes because it features the fun characters, and bonus points for the homemade flamethrower.

“Every Man for Himself” also suffers from some questionable writing that seems designed to force a certain idea. Sawyer is acting out, and Ben needs to find a way to control him so he fakes putting a pacemaker in him that will explode if he gets too heated. This seems slightly implausible given their resources, so the premise is already flimsy. And the trick lasts a grand total of less than one episode because Ben then shows him the island, proving that he couldn’t escape even if he fled captivity. So why not just do this from the start, Ben? He claims, “The only way to gain a con man’s respect is to con him” but I just don’t think it’s a great con to begin with, so it rings hollow. The only thing that happens with this is that the beeper goes off when Kate is changing clothes, thereby poking harder at the Sawyer/Kate romantic tension, which makes me think that was the whole point of the pacemaker in the first place.

Worse than that, Pickett is irate after Colleen’s death, and rushes outside to pummel on Sawyer. He’s pissed, and he’s heartbroken, and he wants some sort of revenge but the only way to talk him off the ledge is…….for Kate to admit she loves Sawyer? That’s the magic code? Why does he need that? I guess what they’re going for is that his heartbreak is so painful that he can’t bear to see anyone else go through the same ordeal, so he’s looking for an excuse to stop beating up his valuable prisoner. This does not jive with our understanding of Pickett up to this point, so, again, it just seems like a way to get Kate to admit she loves him.

The flashback throws too much at us with too little time to ingest it. Bill Duke as the warden had potential if they decided to dig further into Sawyer’s prison time, but he’s given too little to do here. The Munson plotline is forgettable. There’s a brief diversion to the main camp where Desmond builds a lightning rod to save Claire (i.e. Charlie). This is more impressive than the Locke speech thing. But how odd would it have been if one of our main characters died because of a random lightning strike?

Connecting the Dots:

The skeletons in the bear cave were wearing Pearl Station shirts. I am only to assume that they died in the Purge and their bodies were missed by the Others.

Ranking:

1.      Further Instructions (7/10) (The “theme” of the episode is weak and hit over our heads. But a welcome reprieve from Hydra.)

2.      The Glass Ballerina (7/10)

3.      Every Man for Himself (6.5/10) (The flashback is not developed enough for us to care, and the pacemaker plot is nonsense. The second island reveal, and Desmond’s bizarre behavior, keep this one afloat.)

4.      A Tale of Two Cities (6.5/10)

Next time: Eko and Smokey enter the WWE, and Kate does boring Kate stuff.