The Substitute

Really solid episode this week. So solid, in fact, I watched it twice on Tuesday night. As I discovered after several hours of writing and over 2,000 words, I have a lot to say about this one. So let's get started.

We start off in the LAX world with Locke arriving home from the airport. He pulls into his driveway, but the wheelchair lift he needs to get out of he van stalls a foot from the ground. Angry, but determined as always, Locke decides to make the leap. He doesn’t stick the landing. Instead he flops face-first onto his front lawn, the sprinklers turn on, metaphorically pissing on him, and the Box Man lies there helpless and ashamed with his chair folded next to him. But Helen opens the front door and helps him up. Indeed, a fitting metaphor for the episode as a whole. It turns out John and Helen have a wedding planned for October, so one would assume that they've been together for a while. How nice for Locke!

That said, how could these two possibly still be together? Didn’t Locke mess up his relationship with her? And, from the picture of Anthony Cooper and Helen's suggestion that she and John elope with Cooper as one of the exclusively invited guests, it seems that everything between Locke and his daddy is a-okay. But…what?! Is Cooper somehow not an enormous ass in this timeline? And if it's not from his father pushing him out of a window (which I assume would nix any chances of a wedding invitation), then how does Locke become paralyzed? And how did he meet Helen if his father never stole his kidney and he never went to that anger management class? Is it the result of the universe "course-correcting"? Seems likely. If the universe says that Locke is supposed to be paralyzed, then either he never should have gone to the Island, or someone on the Island (Jacob? MIB?) defied the will of the universe. It’s one more tasty way we get to ponder who’s good and who’s bad. More on that later.

Helen or no Helen, Locke still works at the box company, and that douche Randy Nations is still his boss. Randy knows that Locke didn't attend the company seminar in Australia, and when Locke refuses to tell him how he spent the company dime while he was there, Randy fires him, with a sarcastic salute to Colonel Locke on his way out the door. Locke leaves without a fight. He makes his way back to his van, but because he refused to park in the handicapped spot, he finds a big, yellow Hummer parked right up next to him, leaving no room for his chair lift to operate. He decides to lower the lift anyway. But the it stalls just before scratching the crap out of the Hummer.

It turns out the Hummer belongs to Hurley (I can't believe I didn't catch that the first time through. It's the same car we saw him drive in "Numbers". I’m embarrassed), who tells Locke that he'll hook him up with a job. So Locke goes to Hurley's temp agency, where Rose proceeds to tell him that there are, in fact, things that he can't do. Obviously, this doesn't sit well with the Box Man, but Rose gives him a little lesson about being realistic, about how he needs to learn to accept the things he cannot change. Sounds like a lesson similar to the one Jack seems to be learning on the Island this season.

Locke has been told many times by many people about the things he can't do. And each time, he's ignored them. But this time, it was Rose who gave him the straight talk. And he listened. Now, that's not the first time in the LAX timeline that we've seen one 815er help another cope with post-815 life. It's becoming a trend. I'm not ready to say what I think that means, but I will say this much - do not mistake coincidence for fate.

To me, this was a huge turning point for Locke. This week, Doc Jensen explained how he saw LAX Locke as a very different person from the one we’ve seen in flashbacks, someone who wasn't angry, and who could laugh off the little slights that used to send him into a fury. I disagree. I will concur with him to the point that LAX Locke doesn't seem quite as angry as the Locke we came to know from flashbacks, but then again, it's bound to be the case that a man whose kidney was stolen from him would be angrier than the same man who didn't have that happen to him. But this Locke still has the same need to prove himself to the world that he can do anything he wants, whether it's the walkabout, a construction job, or just getting out of his van, and he does these things with the same grudge toward the world at large about his wheelchair-bound fate. I don’t see a fundamental difference in attitude there.

Locke heads home and confesses to Helen that he lost his job, that he will never be able to walk again, and that if she can’t accept that he wouldn’t blame her if she left. But Helen doesn’t leave. She accepts Locke for who he is, job or no job, legs or no legs. When she says to him, “the only thing I was ever waiting for was you,” he finally takes that to heart. He doesn’t have to change who he is for her, and that allows him to begin accepting the things he cannot do. She has set him free. And we all know, whether he’s on the Island or not, Locke longs to be free. After this scene, I started to get the feeling that LAX Locke's story will have a happy ending. Locke has always needed for unconditional love and support more than anything, and he’s getting it from Helen. He doesn’t need to serve the Island or Jacob or Cooper to feel a sense of self-worth anymore. With Island Locke meeting such a depressing end, maybe this Locke - really the only one we have left - will find happiness as sort of a consolation prize. I can only hope.

But really, that's what the LAX timeline feels like right now - a consolation prize. I don't know what the stakes are for anything that's happening with it. This week especially, it just felt like a fantasy world. A really cool fantasy world, but still just that. I said before that the point of this timeline would be to explore the effect the Island has always had on each of our characters’ lives. I still stand true to that but I've also started to fall into the mindset of almost everyone around me who speculate that there's going to be some huge twist that ties both timelines together. It's been preventing me from enjoying the LAX timeline how I did in the beginning – as simply a cool storytelling device. Maybe, for once, we're not going to have our minds blown with a Lostgasm tying up a major mystery. And that would be just fine with me.

Let's get to the Island stuff now. One thing I noticed is that while everyone at the Temple is scrambling around like the apocalypse is coming, the MIB/Locke/Smokey is acting calmly. A little too calmly. He’s the source of whatever wickedness the Others are preparing to combat. That's why I don't buy into the MIB's claim that Jacob was the bad guy, the Island isn't special, and that he's just trying to go home. He's trying to position himself as the good guy, but if he needs to slaughter all the Others at the Temple in order to accomplish his goals (which their Bruce Weber-like commitment to defense suggests), then I don't care if Jacob was manipulating our Losties to the Island this whole time. That's better than killing hundreds of people. Plus, he killed Eko. Case closed.

So the MIB’s going about his business of “recruiting”, and he starts with Richard. Richard refuses to join him, but it becomes clear that these two have a lot of history. When Richard asks what he wants, the MIB answers “What I’ve always wanted. For you to come with me.” Have Jacob and the MIB been fighting over Richard for all these years? That has to make Richard pretty specially I would think. But at the same time, Richard appeared clueless when the MIB talked about how Locke was a “candidate”. Do the Others know anything at all? Maybe they’ve haven’t been feigning ignorance this whole time after all. Maybe they really don’t know the answers to the questions our Losties have been asking them. After all, Ben had never seen Jacob, and if Richard didn’t know what Jacob was up to in that cave with all the names – a task that appears to be of the utmost importance – then maybe the Others just follow Jacob not as if he was their leader, but as if he was their god. They see the miraculous things he can do, like heal irreversible injuries, and they devote themselves to protecting him and his Island. Sure, they have learned a lot about the Island, like how to move the Island and summon the Monster (which seems even odder now), because they’ve been there for so long, but they’re kept in the dark about the real purpose of it all. That makes some of the terrible things that Ben and Widmore have done look even more awful. They weren’t following the will of Jacob; they were acting selfishly.

The MIB gathers himself after Richard’s rejection and moves on to Sawyer. Now, Sawyer’s in a pretty vulnerable place at the moment. But the whole time he was walking through the jungle with the MIB, I couldn’t help but think that there was no one else I’d rather have in this position, with the character that seems to represent the “bad guys” of the show, then Sawyer. I don’t expect him to do anything rash because even when he acts out of emotion, he does it in a calculated way. Take our first flashback with him, when he killed Duckett. Like the pain he’s feeling now about Juliet, he wasn’t acting in the heat of the moment. Killing the “real” Sawyer was an extremely emotional subject with him (and that’s an understatement), just like Juliet’s death is now. But even then, when he looked down the barrel of that gun, he had second thoughts about becoming a murderer. I have a hard time believing he will be thrown into a rage and threaten the lives of his friends as a result of anything the MIB can do now that he’s had some time to process Juliet’s death. I trust Sawyer. Maybe he’ll even pull off one of his classic cons.

Having said that, we’re dealing with a Sawyer who doesn’t feel he has a reason to live. Like he said, “I think some of us are meant to be alone.” If it means sacrificing himself to save his friends (if he still considers them his friends), I think he’ll do it. I guess I have always thought that this would be Sawyers fate anyway. I just thought he fulfilled it when he jumped from the helicopter. So I could swallow this one. On the other hand, I could see him going dutifully serving the MIB if it gets him something he wants, like some peace of mind. I’ll admit, I don’t know my Bible very well, but I’m sure there’s something in there about the Devil tempting a broken man to join him in some sort of evil plot. And this reminded me of that. So my enthusiasm for this new Sawyer/MIB team is muted at best. Nevertheless, for the second (or third?) consecutive week, Sawyer remains the most interesting and unpredictable character on the show. I’ll be rooting hard for him the rest of the way.

I should probably say something about the cave. We know there were six candidates remaining the last time Jacob was in that cave (I’m not going to entertain the possibility that it was actually the MIB’s cave with the MIB’s numbers. That’s too much to digest) - Locke, Hurley, Sayid, Sawyer, Jack and one of the Kwons (my guess is Sun). And each had one of The Numbers assigned to them. So now we know why those numbers are important; they each correspond to one of the candidates to take Jacob’s place. If this is the only answer we get to The Numbers, that’s just fine with me. I don’t know how much “meaning” a series of numbers can have, but I think we can conclude that the numbers follow our characters around because the numbers actually are our characters. If you told me and Ceddy that while we were watching season 2 sophomore year, you would have been scraping our brains off the ceiling because our heads would have exploded.

One last thing, and it’s a minor beef. I don't know how I feel about the structure of this episode. Traditionally, the Island events and the flashes both revolved around the same character, and it was used to illustrate a larger point about that character. But in "The Substitute", we followed Locke off the Island, but on the Island, we were really following the MIB. Just because he's in Locke's body doesn't make him Locke. I found this strange. Sure, it's a good excuse to give us a lot of LAX Locke, and if that's the reason, that's okay I guess. But I like the traditional format. Just looking at Terry O'Quinn in both timelines wasn't quite enough for me. And this didn't bother me at all while I was watching on Tuesday, but it has started to eat at me the last few days.

Then again, maybe we are following Locke in both timelines. When the MIB yelled, "Don't tell me what I can't do!" at that bloody blonde-haired kid while running through the jungle, I took that - once again - as more than coincidence. Maybe there's a little John Locke in there after all? (No Helen jokes please.) Remember how he knew Locke's dying thoughts? Maybe that was because Locke's spirit told him, Miles-style, but I think it's more likely that somehow Locke's spirit lives on inside the MIB. Perhaps within the macro-level fight between good and evil (Jacob vs. MIB), there's an inner battle for good and evil (Locke vs. MIB) within the MIB.

See? I did have a lot to say about this one. Until next week.