If you look towards me this morning and see a mushroom cloud blooming on the horizon, don't panic: That's just my mind being blown by the latest in a series of top-notch Lost episodes. Last night, "The Brig" was like a box of highly unstable Black Rock dynamite blowing up in my mind. I'm not sure amid the billowing black haze just how much damage has been done to my vast collection of precious conjectures, but I do know this: I really don't have any idea anymore where the heck this damn show's going.
And I like that.
There's much to say about this dense tale of vendetta and vengeance, enslavement and liberation, and schemes within schemes within schemes. Simply, "The Brig" was the story of two damaged lost boys, Locke and Sawyer, desperate to be free of the awful man who made them and named them. War looms, we are told, in the form of an invading band of deadly, baby-wanting Others (or at least the threat of war; that's a big difference in these perception-manipulating, truth-bending times), but it seems that the intensifying possibility of civil war is more likely to rip apart the castaway community.
Here are the most salient developments of last night's episode.
Kate and Sawyer's sad and sweaty affair is destined to end in heartbreak. I'm sure that there's plenty of SawKat fans out there who got a kick seeing that the Fugitive Girl and the Killer Con Man are still keeping each other warm at night, or at least part of the night; it seems Kate is the kind of girl who gets suspiciously antsy for her own bed after a booty call. I think I prefer Kate and Sawyer to Kate and Jack; the latter coupling always seemed kinda forced to me, while the former pairing has dramatically earned a shot at life. At the same time, I think these two have a long way to go as individuals before they could ever make it together. Kate is clearly attracted to the shaggy cad, but there's no romance here, just exploitation. It reminds me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's season 6, when the lost-on-the-inside heroine foolishly decided to start knocking boots with redemption-starved Spike. I doubt SawKat will end up imploding as darkly as they did, but it will end. Both Sawyer and Kate need more spiritual reconstruction before they can have any kind of truly intimate relationship.
The whole thing about Sawyer going painfully barefoot throughout the entire episode probably has some deep symbolic significance or some illuminating literary antecedent, but I'm too tired to look anything up, please feel free and let me know.
The moment where Anthony Cooper bit his son is the key to understanding his baiting, bizarrely antagonistic behavior. In the flashbacks, we learned what happened after the climactic "Dad?" moment in "The Man From Tallahassee." Locke, stunned to find his demonic father bound in a boiler room in Othersville, reached to remove the gag despite Ben's protestations. Sure enough, Anthony Cooper rewarded him with his best Cujo impression, snapping at his son's hand and biting him like a rabid dog. A rather rude way of saying hello to your own flesh and blood, don't you think? Cooper kept up the inhospitable antics throughout the episode — mocking his son's gutlessness, shredding Sawyer's letter — and it seemed to me he was trying very, very, very hard to bait these guys into killing him. The question is: Why?
Maybe he thought he was stuck in a bad dream and hoped getting killed would wake him up. Maybe he really did believe he was in hell and wanted his demons to get on with the whole punishment part; at least that way, his inexplicable abduction and mad tropical-island ordeal would start making sense to him. But my guess is that Cooper just wanted someone, anyone to put his sick little life out of its misbegotten misery.
The execution of Anthony Cooper inside The Black Rock was just freaking awesome. Let's just simply celebrate this scene for its raw, heartbreaking, soul-shattering intensity. If nothing else, let us praise Josh Holloway for his furious performance. How I wanted him to kill this man. How I wanted him to not kill this man and instead forgive him. How I loved this scene for presenting without judgment some very complicated ideas about justice, personal responsibility, and how people become the people they become.
In the aftermath, I felt appropriately conflicted by the complex dynamics of the episode. Is Locke a hero or a villain for the way he manipulated Sawyer to commit the murder he couldn't do himself? Have these men purchased some liberation — or have they sealed the deal on their damnation? Regardless, I look forward to seeing how both these guys grapple with and rationalize their actions. Watching Locke march into the jungle with his father on his back, it was hard for me to know if Locke had finally found himself or if he was more lost than ever.
There's some more stuff that happened in the episode, but I'm running late and have to give this up. There's the revelation that Jack isn't the dupe of Juliet that we thought he was, that the Hero of the Beach seems to have been hatching some kind of master plan all along. That was all fun stuff, but pure plot stuff, and all setups for things to come.
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