In Part I of our look at “Lost’s” Season 3 finale, we dug into some of the key issues facing the show heading into the offseason. Today, we examine the other major characters who will have a significant voice in determining the course of Season 4 – and beyond.
LOCKE
“This is not how it’s supposed to happen.” These are the words that John Locke uses as Jack is prepared to use the satellite phone to call for rescue. Locke looks pleadingly at Jack, hoping that he can appeal to Jack’s sense that something doesn’t feel quite right, that this is way too easy after way too long. Locke appeared to lend some credence to the importance of hearing him out after sticking a knife in Naomi’s kidney from half a football field away, but Jack has had enough of Locke’s erratic, mountain-man-like behavior and makes the call anyway. It is a very foreboding seen, with the jubilation of the survivors after rescue is promised juxtaposed with the crestfallen looks on the faces of both Locke and Ben.
We see Locke shake his head and disappear behind the radio tower as the other Losties celebrate, but what will happen from here is the source of frantic discussion and speculation. Will he lead an uprising against the rescuers, who appear to be potential usurpers of the island? Will he be forcibly sent back to the real world by the rescuers? Will his paralysis return and have him face a life back in his hated wheelchair? Or is he even the one in the mysterious coffin, who died off the island?
Locke didn’t even appear in the finale until nearly an hour in, as we see him lying in the mass grave after being shot by Ben. Thinking he’s paralyzed again, Locke loses it and clutches a gun, ready to commit suicide. The ghost of Walt – played by soon-to-be first overall NBA draft pick Greg Oden – suddenly appears, chastising Locke for his weakness and seriously announcing, “You have work to do.” If this “work” was to stop Jack from contacting the outside world, did he fail and will he retreat into being a recluse like Rousseau? It’s hard to fathom that we have heard the last of John Locke … especially since many theorize that the entire show revolves around the story of Locke.
SAWYER
Mostly a bit player in the two-hour finale, Sawyer’s drama revolved mostly around his shunning of Kate and his cold-blooded killing of Tom. He is unmistakably part of an odd love quadrangle taking place between himself, Kate, Jack and Juliet, but part of Sawyer appears to throw in the towel and give up the brief period of hope and optimism that seemed to permeate him when he and Kate were together. When Sawyer leaves to try to check on or save Sayid, Jin and Bernard, he is literally and figuratively trying to remove Kate from his life. The brutal, crass Sawyer returns when he verbally assaults Hurley, who wants to help in the return to camp to check on the above-mentioned trio, who had stayed behind to attack the Others. Sawyer sees that Kate loves Jack and vice-versa, and he reacts with the only weapon he has and has always turned to: escape.
Does the concealed anger beneath that perceived rejection lead him to murder Tom? After Hurley saves the day by ramming the van into the Others, Sawyer is casually having a beer when he confronts Tom. Even though Tom surrenders, Sawyer shoots him anyway, saying, “That was for taking the boy on the raft,” referring to the abduction of Walt and the subsequent shooting of Sawyer. When a mortified Hurley intones that Tom had surrendered, Sawyer says only, “I didn’t believe him.”
Some “Lost” fanatics believe that it is actually Sawyer who committed suicide and resides in the mysterious coffin, while others feel that he is the “he” mentioned by Kate in the final scene with Jack at the airport. Did he and Kate discover a relationship off the island? Did Sawyer go back to a real world that offers him no options, whether voluntarily or involuntarily? Or is he the much-discussed corpse that draws nobody to his funeral and leads to Jack’s nearly attempted suicide?
Sawyer’s marginal inclusion in wrapping up the show’s third year was mildly disappointing after he experienced a roller-coaster season – from playing swallow the Swan (hatch joke) with Kate to killing the man that destroyed his family – but his likely return as a major factor in Season 4 is cause for anticipation.
BEN
Do you get the feeling that Ben is in a long, downward slide that he can’t seem to get out of? As his leadership becomes questioned more often by Richard and others and his decisions appear to go awry more often than not, the pervasive assumption is that Ben’s reign as king of the island is dwindling to a close and that his future is uncertain at best.
He still has a penchant for shortcuts, however, as somehow, he and his daughter, Alex, take a leisurely hike up a mountain and beat Jack and the rest of the survivors – who had an enormous head start – to the radio tower. Perhaps the most meaningful scene that Ben has is when Alex pleads with him and asks him why he doesn’t just let the survivors leave, and he turns to her and seriously intones, “I can’t.”
The question of why he can’t allow that to happen will follow him into Season 4, especially after he asks Tom to kill Sayid, Jin and Bernard; is caught in a lie by Mikhail; is beaten to within an inch of his life by Jack; takes a rabbit punch from Rousseau while tied to a tree; has his power taken from him; and tries unsuccessfully to warn Jack not to use the satellite phone and screams that Naomi is not who they think she is.
Does Ben know his cancer will return if he is removed from the island? Does he know that if the rescuers represent the return of the Dharma Initiative that he so coldly destroyed, they’ll kill him slowly? Is he the mysterious dead body in the coffin? Does he somehow escape and go into hiding on the island? Does he call on some type of island powers that we don’t know about to save him? The image of a bloody, battered, scorned and whiny Ben tied to a tree doesn’t inspire much faith that he’ll be a key character in Season 4 … but he is still Ben and he must be reckoned with.
DESMOND AND PENNY
OK, if the rescue boat doesn’t belong to Penelope, then where is she? Everyone seems to be focused on the identity of the rescuers, but few people are asking where Penny is and how she has been able to make contact with the island. Chah-lie’s final message – “Not Penny’s Boat” – seemed to get through to Desmond, who we have to assume escaped the flooding hatch safely. What will he make of that message and how will he go about trying to find a way to re-establish the lines of communication and transmission with his lost love, Penny?
One theory is that Charles Widmore, Penny’s father, sent Naomi to “finish” Desmond because he had found out that Des was still alive by tracking his daughter’s search efforts. Does her father think so little of Desmond that he wants to beat her to finding him and end his life? Desmond returns to briefly save Chah-lie even after the hobbit delivers him a needless shot to the head with an oar, but does he also possess the resolve to track Penny to wherever she is transmitting from and perhaps even mount a counter-insurgency to whoever is on the rescue boat?
There is little doubt that Penelope and her patient search party will emerge as a very big part of the storyline next season. With Chah-lie out of the picture and the island in turmoil, the story of Des and Penny is sure to be an enormous aspect of the early part of Season 4.
ROUSSEAU AND ALEX
After 16 years, Danielle Rousseau is finally reunited with her daughter, Alex, again in the season finale. Somehow disturbingly, there is a poignant mother-daughter bonding-through-binding scene when they tie up Alex’s “father,” Ben. The duo of Danielle and Alex remain bit players in the series, but a key question will be whether they are among those “rescued.” During their walk to the radio tower, Rousseau is adamant in telling Jack that she won’t leave no matter what, saying, “This is my home now.” Will finally meeting Alex change that stance?
Rousseau has always been in the background, lurking in the jungle until a Lostie needs rescue or dynamite or a bad French accent. Will she be able to convince Alex and her boyfriend, Karl, to remain on the island or will she wish a better life for them? I don’t expect this duo to suddenly emerge as vital characters in Season 4 and beyond, but their story is one that will be essential to what actually happened when the rescue boat was ultimately contacted.
JACOB
Obviously, next to nothing is known about Jacob, so it is fun to throw far-fetched theories at this person or entity, hoping something sticks. Did Jacob send the flash-forward to Jack as a dream geared toward convincing Jack to not let them get rescued? Is Jacob simply a figment of Ben and Locke’s imagination? Is Jacob the embodiment of all the sins and sicknesses of the island and its inhabitants? Is Richard actually Jacob? Is Christian Shepard actually Jacob? Is Locke actually Jacob? Is Sanjaya actually Jacob?
Jacob was introduced almost solely to introduce a Pandora’s Box of questions for “Lost” viewers, to distract Locke for a Ben attack and to serve as a “man behind the curtain,” a technique used similarly in “Wizard of Oz” (obviously) and “Carnivale.” Will he or it eventually earn a more integral and important role than that? We are likely to find out sooner rather than later when Season 4 arrives.
MIKHAIL
The forbidden love child of Jack Bauer and Jason Vorhees, Mikhail has survived a massive electroshock from an enormous power fence, a spear gun to the chest and possibly a grenade exploding in his hand, so we must surmise that he could still be around to haunt the Losties in Season 4. However, even though he obeyed Ben’s order to kill the underwater hotties, his faith in Ben appears to be shaken at best and destroyed at worst.
After seeing Desmond in the boat, he follows Des down to the hatch and discovers Chah-lie, Greta and Bonnie, but when it is time to kill all three, he conveniently forgot why he was down there in the first place: Desmond. He survives Desmond’s speargun attack long enough to remove the spear, swim around with a grenade, taunt Chah-lie and (possibly) sacrifice himself in an effort to destroy the Looking Glass – and ultimately, make Desmond’s vision of Chah-lie’s death a reality.
Though whether Mikhail is still alive isn’t readily clear at the end of the season finale, he began to emerge as a more and more important element of the show as Season 3 progressed. Will he return again in Season 4 to repeatedly laugh at and bitch-slap the Grim Reaper? We shall see.
SAYID, JIN, HURLEY, JULIET, SUN, MICHAEL, WALT, BERNARD, ROSE, ETC.
The stalwarts like Sayid, Jin, Hurley and Sun deserve better than to be lumped into the end here, but they did not progress as characters this season and have basically regressed into one-dimensionality. What we know is that Jin dropped the ball in his part of the dynamite-shooting assault; he, Sayid and Bernard were ordered to be killed by Ben; they weren’t; and they were saved by Hurley. Everything else is up for grabs.
Sayid, Jin and Bernard killed seven Others, Hurley ran over another and Sawyer murdered Tom … but what will the repercussions be, both in terms of spiritually and in the context of the island? Bernard sings like a canary in giving up the location of the rest of the survivors, but he is let off the hook. The return of he and Rose and their humorous back-and-forth was welcomed after a season of silence, but what lies in store for them in Season 4? Will Rose’s cancer return if and when she returns to the real world?
Hurley was severely dismissed by Sawyer when he wants to join the expedition back to camp, with both characters returning to the familiar roles of bully and wimp. However, Hurley saves the day as we were left hanging, wondering whether Sayid, Jin and Bernard were truly killed or not.
What of Juliet? Her shocked face after Sawyer killed Tom made one wonder, if even for a moment, whether she wasn’t still working a countermove with the Others after all. Did she eventually get off the island? What became of her relationship with Jack? Did she remain on the island, and that’s one of the reasons why Jack is so intent to return in the flash-forward?
Ultimately, we have to assume that at least some of the Losties were “rescued” and taken off the island, in exchange for remaining quiet – at the very least, we see that Jack and Kate have returned to America. Now, we are led to believe that they have realized they left something undone, turned the island over to the wrong hands or sacrificed something in the rescue that wasn’t worth it in the long run. So what are they going to do about it? The answer to that query will remain one of the many developments we’ll have to wait for in the interminable time between now and the onset of Season 4. Stay tuned …
Lost Links
June 4, 2007: "Lost": Saying Goodbye To Season Three, Part I
May 10, 2007: "Lost": Harry Potter and the Zany, Mysterious Adventures of Moonlight Graham
April 24, 2007: "Lost": An Island Of Paradoxes
March 29, 2007: The Resurgence of "Lost"?
February 8, 2007: "Lost" V 3.5: Let The Games Begin
November 9, 2006: Mini-Season Makes For Long, Lost Winter Months
November 2, 2006: Vaya Con Dios, Mr. Eko
October 4, 2006: "Lost" In A Sea Of Questions
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