Desmond's Dilemma

For me, Desmond's groan said it all. It came at the climax of last night's outing of Lost, prior to the awful choice the episode had been building toward: Should he sacrifice Charlie's life for a chance at being reunited with Penelope, or should he put the Charlie's life and well-being ahead of his own self-interest and once again save him from predestined death? It was a damnable dilemma, and it gave rise to an existential growl congested with resignation, fury, self-loathing, and more. It spoke of being stuck between courage and cowardice, desire and duty, free will and fate — the clutch of tricky themes upon which this episode was built. It also spoke on behalf of an episode heavy-laden with deep thoughts and ominous subtext encoded in Biblical and literary citations, comic book references, and perhaps the most provocative hidden clue in the show's history. It's enough to make your brain explode — or implode, as is the case on Lost.

To be clear, this was one very amusing episode of Lost — that is, once you got past the opening sequence, in which Charlie tripped one of Rousseau's traps, took an arrow through the neck, gurgled up some blood and died in Desmond's arms while Hurley and Jin looked on in shell-shocked horror. I was totally taken aback by the violence but quickly recovered and realized that surely it must be a dream, which was sort of true — it was actually one of Desmond's precognitive flashes of the future, one that included glimpses of a blinking red beacon in the night sky, Jin (and then Hurley) pulling up a cable from the sand, and, most provocatively, a pair of legs dangling from a tree. Desmond's heart skipped — could this be Penelope, descending from the sky and bringing hope of rescue? Thus motivated to make sure that his vision would become a reality, Desmond began to round up all the participants that this scene needed.

Thus episode, "Catch 22," did a fine job at capturing the experience of Desmond's flashes and clearly telling the audience how they worked. He explained that it was like "a jigsaw puzzle, only I don't have all the pieces." Up until now, Desmond has been leveraging his inside knowledge to change Charlie's fate. This time, he believed that saving him would come at a price too precious to pay, namely a possible reunion with Penelope. Apparently, if you alter one piece in this jigsaw picture, you risk changing the picture on the box. Hence, Desmond's double bind.

Hurley, Jin, and Charlie went along with it, although none of them were hip to the awful twist involved in questing to find this newcomer from the sky. On the way there, Desmond's vision began clicking into place, the necessary events falling like dominos. They found the Cable, the super-size power line extending from an underwater sonar system to the now-destroyed Dharma station the Flame. And after a helicopter crashed into the ocean, they saw the red beacon, falling from the sky. Penelope's here, thought Desmond. In the jungle, a backpack was found containing clue fodder for theorists: a satellite phone with a seemingly of-the-moment menu; a copy of Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22, the darkly comic anti-war novel that coined the titular phrase — except that the book was in Portuguese (connection: the guys in the last scene of last season, scanning for electro magnetic anomalies for Penelope — they were speaking Portuguese); and inside the book, a copy of the picture snapped of Desmond and Penelope prior to their breakup (but only one copy of that picture is supposed to exist, and Desmond has it — right?).

And then, the moment of decision arrived. Charlie tripped the wire, Rousseau's trap activated, and Desmond issued his agonizing groan: "Arrrghhh — Charlie! Duck!" And with that, Desmond leapt at Charlie, knocked him down, saved his life, and according to Desmond's personal Theory of Relativity, the future shuffled its cards anew and recast the parachutist they soon found hanging from a tree — a young woman named Naomi. She wasn't Penelope, but since she did mumble Desmond's name; maybe she works for Penelope and has been searching for him. Perhaps she'll regain consciousness and tell us more. And having already seen next week's episode, I can tell you that she will. And that what she has to say is pretty...well, deadly.

Why did Desmond ultimately choose Charlie over Penelope? Some illumination was provided by the flashback. Going into this episode, there was rampant speculation that we would learn about Desmond's days in the Scottish army. Instead, we got a story about Desmond's days at a wine-making monastery. It seems that prior to meeting Penelope, Desmond wanted to be a monk. He believed he had been given "a calling." Reason to be dubious Number One: He received said calling after he woke up from a night of heavy drinking, in the middle of the street, with Brother Campbell standing above him. Reason to be dubious Number Two: Conveniently, said calling came one week prior to the day he was supposed to marry his then-girlfriend of six years, Ruth.

The early flashback scenes echoed with resonances to Lost episodes past. When Ruth accused Desmond of cold feet, I recalled how Jack struggled with jitters in the days before his wedding to Sarah. When Brother Campbell commended Desmond on completing his vow of silence as part of his monastery initiation, I recalled that Locke had a sentence of silence that was part of his reconnection process with the Island. And when Brother Campbell told Desmond that he was "one of us," of course, I thought of last week's Juliet episode, entitled "One of Us." All this in the wake of the most recent Desmond episode, in which his bid to get a respectable job with Penelope's father mirrored the almost-forgotten season 1 episode in which a smack-addled, post-Driveshaft Charlie tried to go straight by working for his girlfriend's Dad. Weird how this one character mirrors and twins a broad swath of others, from Jack to Locke to Charlie.

It's clear from the flashbacks that from an early age, Desmond has been driven by a desire for belonging and validation. At the same time, he also suffers from a profound case of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"'-itus. I'd love to know in a future episode what role Desmond's early life played in the formation of this personality; in his last episode, we were told he was left to raise his bothers after the death of his father. What happened there? Whatever the cause of his restlessness, Desmond seems chronically incapable of staying engaged, on mission, committed, for a prolonged period of time before something in him breaks down and spurs him elsewhere, usually into the bottom of a bottle. The lesson that Brother Campbell believed he needed to learn was the value of personal sacrifice, a lesson he illustrated for Desmond by citing the famous Biblical story in which God asked Abraham to kill his son Isaac as an offering. Abraham was torn, but was willing to do it — and at the last second, got a reprieve from the Lord himself. Talk about mirroring and symmetry: You can find this Biblical catch-22 in...Genesis, chapter 22.

In the end, Desmond couldn't cut it as a monk. The God/Abraham story bugged him, and besides, he had serious doubts about his own character. And so it was that he got himself fired from the monastery/winery after being caught sampling the product. But Brother Campbell saw the bigger picture, too; he told Desmond that he was surely being called to something, but it definitely wasn't monkhood. Of course, we were left to question Brother Campbell's own character thanks to a blink-and-you-miss-it Easter egg of monumental significance. There, on Campbell's desk, was a picture of him and the woman we know as Ms. Hawking — the creepy antique-store lady who, in the last Desmond ep, seemed to know all about his life, past, present, and Island future. What's the connection between the two? Has Desmond's life been orchestrated and manipulated from the very beginning? What was Campbell's true agenda for bringing Desmond into the monastic fold — to simply impress upon him a lesson about sacrificing his self-interest for the sake of other people, the greater good, or the higher power...

...or was it to facilitate his introduction to none other than Penelope Widmore? Turned out that her father is/was a rather generous customer/supporter of the winery/monastery. Which begs the question: How much does Papa Widmore really know about Desmond?

I suppose we should also talk about Sawyer and Kate having hot Island sex again, which I'm sure pleased all their fans out there. It was exactly the kind of reconnection the con man has been aching for since their last go around— especially after eyeballing Kate in her thong, a rousing sight which led to the hilarious request for some "afternoon delight," and even more hilarious, his offer of making a mix tape to get it. However, Sawyer would eventually learn that Kate's late-night booty call might not have been all about him> Earlier that evening, she had flirted with Jack to no avail, her oatmeal spoon seduction apparently not enough to entice the good doctor away from Juliet. This revelation put Sawyer in a double bind of his own: At what price nooky? Does Kate really dig him — or is he merely a consolation prize? And does he really want to know? In the end, he risked rejection and asked her to make sure she knows her own heart, and made his own feelings perfectly clear by giving her the next best thing to a mix tape he could find (or steal) on the beach: Bernard's copy of Phil Collins' greatest hits.

In the end, the episode was an intriguing, clever, altogether entertaining outing of Lost that didn't necessarily offer much in the way of answers or offer the same mythic wallop as last week's Juliet episode, but it did provide some revealing insights into Desmond and began to set the stage for the endgame of the season. Is a war on the horizon???