Season
5, Episodes 5 and 6- “This Place is Death” and “316”
Summary:
As
Jin struggles to understand his situation, he leads Rousseau’s team towards the
radio tower. They are soon attacked by the smoke monster, killing two. More of
them go down a hole to follow it, and Jin flashes forward in time, and Danielle
is gone. He follows fire smoke to the beach where she has killed her remaining
teammates after claiming the monster made them sick. She tries to shoot Jin too
but he flashes just in time, and runs into Sawyer’s group. The flashes continue
and Charlotte’s condition gets worse, as she rambles incoherently. Locke wants
to push to the Orchid but Faraday wants to stay behind and take care of
Charlotte. She says they can find the Orchid “at the well.” She tells Faraday
she grew up on the island and that Faraday told her as a child that if she came
back to the island she would die. She then succumbs to the illness for good. The
others reach the well and Locke heads down but another flash sends him tumbling
to the cave below. He is injured, but is led the rest of the way by Christian
Shephard. He tells him he needs to assemble the Oceanic Six and find Eloise
Hawking. Locke enters the frozen wheel room and gives it another push, and is
engulfed in a bright light. At the marina, Sun threatens to kill Ben, but he
claims Jin is not dead and that he will take them to someone who can get them
back. He takes Sun and Jack to Eloise Hawking’s church where they run into
Desmond. Despite not having everyone, Eloise tells them to get started.
Eloise
takes the group to the pendulum room, which is used to track the island’s
potential locations. Desmond is angry at being manipulated by Eloise and
leaves. She tells the others that they have to be on Ajira Flight 316 and
replicate the original flight as much as possible or the result will be
unpredictable. She tells Jack he needs to take something of his father’s and
give it to Locke to recreate the original flight. Jack goes to see his
grandfather and finds Christian’s shoes which he can give to Locke. Kate
decides she wants to go back too. Ben calls Jack to ask him to retrieve Locke’s
body from the butcher shop. At the airport, he finds Ben and the rest of the
Oceanic Six boarding Ajira, which is being flown by Lapidus. In the middle of
the flight they experience turbulence which grows into a bright light. Jack
wakes up on the island and finds Hurley and Kate. They are found by Jin in a
DHARMA van and jumpsuit.
Review:
Sun’s insistence on killing Ben makes
little sense considering there is no way for her to know that Ben is
responsible for killing Keamy – and thus, setting off the bomb. The only person
other than Ben who could have told her was Locke, but he never visited her as
Jeremy Bentham. “This Place is Death” gets its title from one of Charlotte’s
death-ravings, and it is one of the most forced, awkward lines in the show that
does not incite the level of panic that it is meant to. Charlotte’s death
frustratingly comes right after she is found to have an interesting backstory
to explore, and although she is the main character whose death would probably
be the least impactful, we still needed someone to bite the dust during the
time jumps in order to make Jack’s “very bad things happened” proclamation have
any weight. If they do not solve the problem, this is the fate of all the other
characters we love.
The most memorable part of “This Place
is Death” is Jin’s brief adventure with the French crew and it packs in most of
Danielle’s story in a short amount of time, which simultaneously makes it
exciting but also a bit too full. The monster’s brutality is on full display,
but also its cleverness, in ripping Montand’s arm off instead of trying to yank
him away from his friends. We spent many years wondering if we were going to
see Danielle’s backstory, and almost all of it was stuffed into about one
episode (barring Alex’s kidnapping in “Dead is Dead”), giving us little time to
breathe or expand on her character or that of her comrades. Danielle’s death in
season 4 complicates the ability to get flashbacks, and Jin can’t be with her
too long or else she would recognize him from 16 years later. But there should
have been a way to stretch this over two full episodes, if only to give more
context to the “sickness” situation. But it speaks to how fun these scenes
still are that I am rating the episode a 9.5.
“316” is a bit odd, and easily my least
favorite of season five. There is no explanation for why they must replicate
the original flight and what the “windows of opportunity” are – it’s all a lot
of hocus-pocus but at least they establish what has to be done instead of
making it purely random. The Lamp Post being built over an interconnected
pocket of energy is also…er…something? I guess it’s just a tool to determine
how and when the flight must reach its destination, since they would otherwise
just be running around blind. Ben lays out Jack’s ultimate arc in his Doubting
Thomas story, as Thomas was suspicious of Jesus’s resurrection until he personally
touched the wounds. Jack has been skeptical not just of the island’s powers but
of its ultimate purpose, and must experience everything to remove all doubt
about his destiny.
I don’t think opening the episode with
Jack on the island was the right choice. It neuters almost all suspense from
the adventure, so we end up watching a series of travel preparations. And it
all happens within one episode, so there’s really no rush whatsoever. Further,
why introduce Jack’s grandpa when someone like Margo would work just as well?
Grandpa Shephard looks barely older than Christian, so that’s a weird casting
choice (and I don’t know if, at this critical juncture of the game, we want to
be spending time getting shoes from a character we’ve never met before and
never will again). Also, everyone joining the flight feels a little convenient
if we haven’t seen their decision-making process. Kate is doing it to reunite
Claire with Aaron, but that’s not spelled out until later in the season, so her
presence here is confounding. The same goes for Hurley, but his actual reason
(Jacob persuaded him to) is supposed to be mysterious and unknowable, so I
guess it gets a pass. If we had seen everyone’s “aha moment” to book a flight
on Ajira, this would have been a more powerful sequence. As it stands, it feels
too passive for such big plot advancement. Interestingly, Jack is the only one
who returns because he needs the island, not for some external or personal
reason.
Connecting the Dots:
The monster drags Montand into an underground
tunnel outside the temple. We hear him shouting once he is dragged down, but
it’s unknown if it’s really him or if it’s the monster impersonating the
recently-deceased Montand and trying to lure the others to their death. It
seems too quick for that, so perhaps it really is Montand.
The “sickness” is a tough nut to crack.
Danielle believes the other team members were infected and they were killed, so
they are clearly not the monster impersonating them. The best example we have
to cross-reference with is Sayid in season 6. Perhaps infection can only occur
at (or under) the temple – the reason why is not something the Lost writers
were interested in addressing. We get very little of what the infected
scientists acted like, other than Robert trying to kill Danielle. Danielle
later falsely stated the Others were the carriers, which is clearly wrong,
unless she believed Jin’s presence infected them. The most likely answer here
is the writers retconned her original claim. More on the sickness in season 6.
The wells were built by an ancient
civilization (possibly even Claudia’s people) when they noticed their compasses
went weird in certain spots. This led to the knowledge of the electromagnetic
source. It’s unknown what they did beyond discovering it. At some point between
time jumps, the well was filled in, either naturally or man-made.
There are some confusing aspects as to
MIB/Christian’s presence in the wheel room. First, assuming that the cave and
above-ground are always in the same “time”, that means we see the monster take
Christian’s form long before Christian even existed. So perhaps the frozen room
and tunnels exist outside of the timeframe of the above-ground island. This is
never commented upon by a character though, which makes it a theory without
much evidence. Secondly, it is not firmly established how MIB knew Locke would
be there. If we presume this is post-815 MIB, then maybe he was waiting there,
knowing that they had to go back to the wheel in order to stop the time jumps.
Maybe the frozen wheel room is perpetually the “true present,” immune from time
jumps.
Inside Hurley’s guitar case is a large
wooden ankh with a message, meant to prove they were here on orders from Jacob.
Jacob gave him the case after he left the jail.
Ranking:
1.
Jughead (10/10)
2.
This Place is
Death (9.5/10) (The episode is packed with island mythology and a pivot to a
new goal for the O6, plus a major death. Minor ticks off the score for rushing
through the science team story.)
3.
Because You Left
(9/10)
4.
The Lie (8/10)
5.
The Little Prince
(7.5/10)
6.
316 (6.5/10) (A
very unique episode, which starts interesting, drags in the middle, and is
somewhat stunted at the end thanks to the cold open.)
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