You Won't See Me

It’s time for a post that’s late, haphazard, and uninformed by any online discussion thanks to computer problems, but nonetheless my first impressions of…



While I didn’t get to jot down as many memorable lines as usual, an early one made
a lasting impression: “How do you lose a body?”

Jack’s mother said this in the Alternate Universe as they discussed Oceanic’s misplacement of Christian Shephard, but I thought immediately of Locke. He suffered unimaginable indignity in death — he was despondent to the point of suicide, only to have Benjamin Linus “save” and then murder him, after which his body was brought back to the Island but he was not; instead, Smokey manifested using Locke’s appearance. (Now that’s identity theft.)

The episode’s flashsideways centered on Jack as he connected to the son we didn’t
know about, partly because until now he didn’t necessarily exist. Am I the only one to whom he looked eerily like the love child of Matthew Fox and the Jonas Brothers?

I found the climactic piano recital touching even if we’ve seen it before — credit to Fox displaying his range once again, from angst to pride to fierce anger over two realities — and it reminded us that, for all the potential Island enlightenment the AU versions of our castaways may have “lost” by never having become castaways, their lives as untouched by the Island’s influence seem whole.

David’s existence and that appendectomy scar of Jack’s are further evidence that
when the Island sank in AU 1977 the butterfly effect of the event extended not just to those in the immediate vicinity, like the presumably evacuated Ben or Ethan Goodspeed, but future persons of interest to Jacob who now have led lives as different in some ways as they are similar in others to their OU versions. Hurley feels lucky and happy; John is with Helen; what AU Kate did is apparently different from what OU Kate did, although I think that’s still technically extracurricular info not yet covered in the show. Some of this might be due to lack of human interference from the likes of Charles Widmore, but much of it could stem from either the absence of Jacob or a different approach necessitated by the H-bomb explosion. Yet destiny brought many of the OU castaways together on Oceanic 815 in AU September 2004, and located Ben, Ethan, and Temple leader Dogen in the same Los Angeles environs as the Oceanic travelers. (Dogen’s appearance bolsters my hope that we’ll see Alex Rousseau talking back to Ben in one of his history classes. “Shove it, Mr. Linus! You’re not my father!”)

The subplot of what happened to Christian’s missing coffin and, more importantly, what may or may not be inside is likely going to be significant, but in this episode it served mostly two purposes: Inject the name Claire Littleton into Jack’s AU existence, by extension linking those scenes to Claire’s present-day OU Island adventures as well as Jack’s, and cause me to all but shout at the television, “Let’s see if Dad’s will is filed neatly on the mantlepiece bookshelf behind his desk after we dig through all these boxes!”

Despite the fact that we last saw her sitting serenely in Jacob’s cabin with Christian, Claire’s evidently been living like half-mad Frenchwoman Danielle for some time.
Even as her piercing blue eyes shine out through her paranoia, grime, and crazy jungle pseudo-mullet — bird’s nest in the front, electroshock therapy in the back — whether it’s due to Smokey’s influence, some kind of undead state, or just the trauma of three years without any human companionship, Claire isn’t quite right.

Her crib and its contents were sure a strange sight, partly because Claire does understand that Aaron’s not with her and partly because the animal skull on her makeshift totemic baby came a snout that made it resemble the Island’s statue of Taweret. Speculation on not only where Claire was but what she was has been simmering for a couple of seasons now. She doesn’t look to have passed beyond the physical realm, although given that place and these storytellers we can’t assume.

The house where Claire resided when the castaways succeeded the Others as
occupiers of the old Dharma Initiative lodgings was blown up good by Widmore’s freighter mercenaries, but at the time she seemed unharmed. Miles saw her walk off into the jungle with Christian in the middle of the night, however, leaving Aaron behind near Miles and Sawyer. Her only appearance since then in the Original Universe was in the cabin, placid and unconcerned for her son. Folks have pondered whether she actually died when her house was attacked, but if she did she got up and kept moving right away without benefit of the Temple’s healing pool. Quite puzzling is her change of heart or mind over Aaron’s whereabouts, as is her exact interaction with Christian or whomever he may be and the figure Claire knows not to be Locke and simply calls “my friend”.

Dogen told Jack that his sister had been claimed as Sayid was, and that might count
as a body lost. “If there’s one thing that’ll kill you ’round here, it’s an infection,” she told Jin in a comment as pregnant with meaning as she was with Aaron when the series began. Of course, Aaron is lost from Claire’s perspective, believed to have been taken by the Others when in fact Kate has traveled back to the Island to bring Claire back to her son in LA. Jacob has also lost his body, or at least the only body of his we’ve seen, but that hasn’t kept him from appearing to direct Hurley and Jack to the magic multifaceted mirror in that lighthouse. You could even stretch the association to include Alternate Universe Jack’s feeling of losing touch with his own body, first staring into the mirror in the airplane lavatory in the season premiere and now having to ask his mother about his appendectomy scar. Will he ever learn that there’s a second Jack Shephard who lives through the looking-glass, still chasing his own white rabbit?


Previously: Magical Mystery Tour / Next: Nowhere Man