Review: Lost 5.17: The Incident (Part Two)

Jack Shepard, selfish jerk, prepares to not change anything
at all due to his own stupidity!

Our final hour plays out very much like a retread of all the stupid decisions that have been made over these past four episodes. What's perhaps the enraging thing is that all of the tension, all of the character work that supposedly drove this more mature and complex season is revealed to boil down to the fucking Quadrangle. This plot device was the bane of my existance in Season Four, but it never directly influenced the plot, because we had sensible characters like Ben and Locke doing things of actual interest. Now we're left with the quadrangle, and we suffer because of it. Sorry if I get a bit ranty.
     Saywer has a chat with Jack about why he wants to erase the past four years of everyone else's lives. Jack eventually explains that he's butt-hurt about losing Kate. Newsflash, Jack - that's your fault. This isn't a justification for ruining the lives of everyone around you, it's self-pity. And that still doesn't explain why nobody can see that his plan will not in any way work. Sawyer starts to beat up Jack (which I'm enjoying more than I should) but Juliet stops him, having changed her mind for the eighth time in a row and now supporting Jack's cause. The reason for this? She thinks that she and Sawyer aren't "meant to be".
      Destiny is fine. Really. It's completely BS and it can cause some really horrible storytelling decisions, but it's fine. But these four episodes really take the biscuit in that destiny guides the paths of the main characters even when it doesn't. We're supposed to sympathise with Jack in this fight. And yet what is he, after this season? After five seasons? A whiny, self-pitying, selfish jerk who destroys everything he touches and then is prepared to destroy everyone else's lives on a pipe-dream that he might save his own. How this even qualifies as a protagonist is beyond me; he seems like the villain of the piece.

Jacob tells Hurley what to do.

      Juliet's constant indecision feels less like realistic storytelling and so much more like the writers having to shift her into situations that just don't fit. Her excuse here, that they weren't meant to be, doesn't ring true now and it won't later in Season Six, where, guess what, they're soulmates. But even on a basic level, Juliet, like Jack, is a scientist. And yet she sprouts this destiny-driven meant-to-be crap like a teenage love poem. How can anyone empathise with characters stupid enough to believe that their lives are driven by destiny, which, in fact, is the exact opposite of what Faraday said?!
      Anyway, there's a firefight at the Swan and Jack drops the bomb down the borehole. Initially nothing happens, until metal starts getting pulled into the pocket of electromagnetism. Everyone tries to escape, but Juliet is pulled back by some chains and dragged into the borehole, letting go of Sawyer's hand and falling to her doom. At the bottom of the borehole, she strikes the core eight times with a rock, and the screen fades to white.
     In the past, Jacob touches both Jack and Locke. On the Island in the present, Richard, Flocke and Ben finally arrive at the Statue, where Jacob lives. As they enter, Ilana approaches with the crate, and reveals to Richard using Locke's body that Flocke is the Man In Black. Inside, Jacob tells the MiB that he found his loophole. Ben questions him on why he was ignored for all of his 35 years on the Island, and yet Locke got to visit him straight away. The answer is of course that he isn't a Candidate, but because the writers don't want us to know this, Jacob is unnecessarily mystical and deep. So Ben stabs him to death, and the MiB triumphantly burns his corpse.

Ben kills Jacob.

     A lot of The Incident (Part Two) is just excuses for the idiocy of what I dub the Faraday Fallacy storyline. I'd have loved it if these excuses had made real sense, but they really didn't and instead appealed to both the Quadrangle and Destiny themes that really have no right to be here. I loved the Jacob/MiB side of the storyline, but it was painfully short. Despite that, I prefer the one or two minutes of Michael Emerson's outstanding acting to this two hour horror story created by our supposed protagonists.

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This wraps up my Lost Reviews, pretty much forever. I had at one point considered going through Season Six, but as you can tell from my ranty posts for these past few weeks, I don't think that would be a good idea. Nevertheless, it's mostly been a very fun thing to do and I've enjoyed not only watching Lost but examining it like this. I hope you've enjoyed reading and if you haven't, then you're right and I'm wrong, as usual.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Not Lost. Oh well. Ashes to Ashes. Funk to Funky.