[SPOILERS] The penultimate episode (well, if you consider next week's two-part finale an extended instalment), and we're once again seeing all the characters move into position ready for a big climax. "Follow The Leader", as the title suggests, also features a lot of characters in leadership roles, for a variety of different reasons. The question is: who would you put your trust in?Well, there's Jack (Matthew Fox): the de facto leader of the losties from season 1, until he relinquished that role upon returning to the island earlier this season. Now he's come to believe that Faraday's plan (to detonate a hydrogen bomb, negating a DHARMA electro-magnetic "incident" ultimately responsible for Flight 815's crash) is the best way to alter history for the better -- including Faraday himself, who was shot dead by his young mother Eloise (Alice Evans).
Kate (Evangeline Lilly) is a long shot possibility to assume leadership, I guess. She doesn't believe in Jack's plan to find the Jughead bomb and detonate it (as that will erase all the good times they've shared, effectively snuffing out their existence as friends), so she parts company with Jack. This enables Jack to finally snap out of the doldrums, armed with a purpose, to persuade Eloise and Alpert (Nestor Carbonell) to take him and Sayid (Naveen Andrews) to the 23-year-old bomb -- stored in an ancient chamber accessible via a Tomb Raider-style watery tunnel.Sawyer (Josh Holloway) has been the ascended leader of the losties for much of season 5, having successfully infiltrated the DHARMA Initiative posing as James LaFleur and given them all new identities. He's presided over three years of peaceful island dwelling for his group, but the return of the Oceanic Six has slowly resulted in him losing grip. In "Follow My Leader", Sawyer's lies are slowly being exposed, as he's beaten for answers by Radzinsky (Eric Lange) in front of girlfriend Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) at the Pearl station, before agreeing to tell them everything in return for a place on the island submarine bound for Ann Arbor -- to avoid the imminent disaster at the Orchid Station.
The most notable leader, and most likely the one referred to in the title, is Locke (Terry O'Quinn), who has returned to the island newly-resurrected with fresh ideas and a clear understanding of his purpose here in 2007. And it's not to find his missing friends stuck in 1977, although that's what he has Sun (Yunjin Kim) believe. First, he leads Alpert and Ben (Michael Emerson) to the crashed drugs plane – seconds before a past version of himself appears, shortly after Ben turned the donkey wheel and sent the losties jumping around in time. Present-day Locke sends Alpert to tend to his past-self's leg injury and to give him his compass -- thus tying a temporal knot.
Ben has now become the usurped former-leader of the Others, apparently having fallen out of favour with Jacob. He's something of a broken man now, forced into subservience and no longer able to concern Locke with his enigmatic riddles. However, Ben's not quite ready to throw in the towel and follow his new leader blindly. Once Locke starts making preparations for all of the Others to visit Jacob (something unheard of), Ben is there to fan the flames of Alpert's concerns that Locke may not be the exalted leader he's been preparing for since 1954... but a troublemaker, in over his head. Not only that, but in a final scene Locke lets Ben in on his intentions when they find Jacob: he's going to kill him.
Now, this begs the question: who is Locke acting on the behalf of? If the island resurrected him, is that a separate "force" than Jacob? I know some people consider the two "entities" the same thing. Or, by killing Jacob, is Locke actually doing Jacob a favour? After all, Jacob whispered "help me" when Locke first entered his cabin back in season 3. Maybe he's a spirit who desperately needs to cross over to the other side, but is trapped in this island limbo for some reason, and Locke is the only one willing to send Jacob to the afterlife? Maybe his "guardian" Richard Alpert (who must surely have arrived aboard the Black Rock in the 19th-century, as inferred by that scene of him putting an old sailing ship in a bottle), has been exploiting Jacob in some way all these years, for his own end? Immortality, somehow?Overall, "Follow The Leader" was a maneuvering episode for the most part, but the sense of direction was pleasing and I'm glad to see things inching towards a thrilling finale. We still have Ilana and her mysterious crate heading to the main island, too, remember? And special mention goes to Hurley (Jorge Garcia), whose interrogation from Dr Chang (Francois Chau) about the fact he's a time-traveller was possibly Lost's funniest moment ever – I just loved how he fumbled the arithmetic to get his age wrong, thought the Korean War question was a trick, before giving up entirely when Chang asked who the current president is. Priceless.
Questions!
- Present-day Alpert claims he saw the 1977 losties die? Was he mistaken? Did they actually just vanish into the future again?
- Why does Locke intend to kill Jacob? Does he have good intentions behind it?
- Why is Alpert wary about taking Locke to see Jacob, if he agrees that Locke is the Others' new leader? Did he have similar concerns when Ben wanted to see Jacob?
- Do we just have to swallow the idea that the Others got the hydrogen bomb down into that subterranean chamber without setting it off?
- Okay, seriously, where the heck did Bernard, Rose and Vincent the dog go? They must be really confused right now!
10 May 2009
Sky1, 9pm
Writers: Elizabeth Sarnoff & Paul Zbyszewski
Director: Stephen Williams
Cast: Terry O'Quinn (Locke), Michael Emerson (Ben), Matthew Fox (Jack), Evangeline Lilly (Kate), Ken Leung (Miles), Josh Holloway (Miles), Jeremy Davies (Faraday), Alice Evans (Eloise), Nestor Carbonell (Alpert), Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet), Yunjin Kim (Sun), Jorge Garcia (Hugo), Naveen Andrews (Sayid), Francois Chau (Dr. Chang), Doug Hutchison (Horace), Eric Lange (Radzinsky), Patrick Fischler (Phil), Leslie Ishii (Lara), Victoria Goring (Mother), Maya Henssens (Young Girl), William Makozak (Capt Bird), Sebastian Siegel (Erik), Kevin Chapman (Mitch), Elisabeth Blake (Vanessa) & David S. Lee (Younger Widmore)
