Season 5, Episode 5: "This Place is Death"

Wow. So just as we were able to start wrapping our heads around the whole time travel scenario and other mysterious nuggets that Season 5 has brought forth, the Lost writers decided to bring us right back to square one with the most exciting and puzzling episodes yet. Smokey! The Temple! The sickness! Death! Dismemberment! Christian! Donkey Wheel! Old Lady Hawking! Hurley on the radio in 1988!...wait what? We'll get to that. Be forewarned...this one's a bit long, but I think we need it after seeing what went down in "This Place is Death."

On the Island we pick up with more of Jin and Rousseau's meeting in 1988. A few things pop up in the first few minutes of the scene, and none are more important than the voice on that is broadcasting the numbers through Montand's (Blonde asshole dude's) radio. Sure, it's the numbers...no biggie there, right? And yeah, it's likely coming from the radio tower...but who recorded the broadcast? Take a closer listen and see if anything rings a bell.

As I teased in the intro, the voice on the transmission sounds an awful lot like Hurley's. I'm not 100% convinced, but there is a clear chance that it's him, and if so that means that Hurley somehow made it to the radio tower some time before 1988 and decided to broadcast the numbers out to the world. This means a couple things: first that even if/when the O6 get back to the Island, it is still in record skipping mode, allowing Hurley to get to the tower before November of 1988. The second point is that if it is Hurley's voice, he is actually responsible for his OWN initial arrival on the Island via flight 815.


Remember, the only reason that Hurley was in Australia in the first place was to find out the origin of the numbers seeing that they had caused him considerable misfortune since winning the lottery with them. He had learned that Leonard (his crazy mental hospital Connect 4 competitor who repeated the numbers over and over) was partnered with Sam Toomey and were stationed in the Pacific Ocean monitoring long wave radio transmissions for the Navy (we are not sure when...but likely before 1988). They received the numbers transmission (the same transmission that we heard over Montand's radio), and later Sam used the numbers at a fair in Australia to win a "guess how many beans are in the jar" contest that got him a cool 50K cash prize. However, on the way home from the fair he and his wife got into a crash that led to the amputation of his wife's leg. Fearing that the numbers were cursed, Sam later killed himself to escape its grasp. This story was recounted to Hurley by Sam's wife, in Australia. After the meeting with Sam's wife, Hurley then boarded flight 815 to return to the States, and we all know what happened from there.

Does anything about Hurley's possible self fulfilling destiny sound familiar? If you remember, in the "Jughead" recap we posed that Locke essentially carved out his own destiny by telling Richard Alpert to witness his own birth two years after their meeting in 1954, which inevitably led to Alpert shaping Locke's life to lead him back to the Island. So with these two events coming to light, will we begin to see other examples of our Losties facilitating their own destiny? For so long in this show we have been beaten over the head with mantras of unquestioned fate and destiny - that events in life are predestined and "meant to be" - but what if the "destiny" everyone is referring to in Lost is actually is a construction of their own actions in the past? Can't change the past, my ass!


Ok, let's move on to what might have been the coolest scene of the season thus far. Smokey is back, and he's taking no prisoners. After announcing his arrival by spitting out poor Nadine, he turns his attention to Montand - who with his dick-ish attitude was a likely candidate to incur Smokey's wrath. One arm rippage later, the rest of the crew heads down into the guts of the Temple to try and save their companion (yes - this is "the Temple" that Ben tells the Others to go to since it may be the "last safe place on the Island." I don't necessarily think Smokey "lives" there...I see him more as patrolling the "underworld" of Island through a number of tunnels that vent out at certain locations on the Island...he is Cerberus after all, right?).


Somewhere in this series of events Smokey transmits the "sickness" to them. While it's still unclear as to what exactly happened down there, I'm leaning towards the theory that Smokey simply killed them all, and then took their form when trying to convince Rousseau that all was well. Another theory is that it brainwashed them to work for him and kill Rousseau...but I'm not sure why that would be necessary since Smokey can pretty much do whatever he wants whenever he wants. Many wonder if he's in cahoots with the Others, but I don't think so cause then he wouldn't want to push for the death of Rousseau and her unborn child (since the Others love baby mommas so much). There are still plenty of questions here...but the one point we can be sure of is that Rousseau and her crew were NOT welcome on the Island, and the security system did its job in protecting it for the time being.

[One thing I can't seem to get out of my head though are the similarities between Rousseau's group and the Losties that would crash on the Island 16 years later. Both groups had a musician (Lacombe and Charlie), a leader (Robert and Jack), an asshole (Sawyer and Montand), and a pregnant woman (Claire and Rousseau). I'm sure it's nothing, but I would guess that the similarities are not a mistake...nothing is on this show. Could it be that the Island has been searching for a group to right its wrongs, and that this one just didn't fit the bill yet?]

After watching Rousseau murder her boyfriend, Jin is able to avoid getting shot himself thanks to a conveniently timed flash that brings him to a happy reunion with Sawyer and the rest of the gang. It is here that Jin finally gets an understanding of what the hell is going on (well, kind of...telling someone your "traveling through time" is never really going to be understood fully) and they continue to make their way to the Orchid station. But before they get too far, Charlotte nears head explosion levels of temporal displacement and we witness her excruciating, yet informative death scene.

First we learn that she was in fact born on the Island and lived there for some time as a girl before being shipped off to Britain with her mother. Was she the daughter of Annie, Ben's childhood girlfriend? Or, was she another product of the much theorized but yet unproved relationship between Eloise Hawking and Charles Widmore? Charlotte did mention that her parents worked for Dharma, but maybe Eloise and Charles were working undercover to spy on Dharma operations? We'll have to wait and see I suppose. But right before kicking the bucket she dropped the bomb of the night. She said that a "crazy" man had insisted that she never return to the Island after leaving...and that the crazy man in her memories was Daniel Faraday.

So what do we make of this? Well we know a couple things at this point: first is that Daniel's cameo in the first scene of the season proves that he was around during Dharma times. Second, while we assume that Locke's turning of the wheel MAY stop the time skipping, the turning itself could cause one last jump to another time. What if that time is 70's era Dharma Initiative? If so, then we know that a heart broken Daniel's first course of action would be to immediately seek out a child-version Charlotte and advise her to never return to the Island so that he could prevent her eventual death. Sure, this might mean that they never meet in the future, but at least it would save her from an early grave. But Daniel says you can't change the past, right? Well, a broken heart can often be the cause of irrational behavior. Clearly Daniel is hoping that this particular past event can be changed, and that Charlotte Staples Lewis won't spend her adult life looking for her very own Narnia.


The last Island event to review may just be the most difficult to analyze. After a mid rope climb time jump, Locke drops like an anchor to the bottom of the well, once again injuring those mysterious legs of his. He encounters Christian, Jacob's "spokesman," and learns that he F'd up once again..."Ben wasn't supposed to turn that wheel, you were John! God, you're such and idiot!" Regardless, his task remains the same; go back into the world, gather up the O6, and die in the process. That's cold, undead Christian Shephard. I honestly don't know what to make of this scene just yet, but I would ask you to remember three things: Christian's inability to physically help John, the Lantern that seems to always accompany his scenes (and will soon represent a yet unseen Dharma seal), and the fact that John is asked to say hello to Christian's son before tele-porting the hell out of there. What might come of these elements is unclear, but just keep them in mind. In one last thought, I do think it's interesting that Christian arrived on the Island in a coffin and soon took up the role as Island spokesperson, and that Locke will soon arrive in a similar manner. Is he gearing up to be the next creepy Island ghost?



Let us not forget that things happen off the Island as well. Not too much went down this week, but what did occur was interesting. First off, the group quickly loses Kate, Aaron, and Sayid after a tense showdown at the docks. Ben - promising to show Sun proof of Jin's survival - takes her and Jack to Hawking's bat-cave in the Reincarnation van. What happens on the way is part hilarious, part Lost brilliance.

While Sun and Jack are debating who gets to shoot Ben first if he ends up screwing them over again, Ben completely loses it and screams "what I'm doing is HELPING you. If you had any idea what I've had to do to keep you safe, you'd never stop thanking me!" Short of "turning this van around and going home" Ben's tirade sheds some light on an interesting dichotomy working on and off the Island. If you recall, right before Locke heads down into the well to turn the wheel, Juliette genuinely thanks John for his help and leadership through their time skipping adventures. And you feel that the whole group shares in that feeling too. Even though they've been through hell, John's singular mission has been to try and fix the problem. Even Sawyer, who in the past has been the quickest to defect in such situations has been surprisingly supportive of Locke's ambition.

Conversely in LA, the O6 are in shambles. Everyone basically hates each other. Four out of the six survivors are out of the picture and time is running out. More than anything, their hate for Ben prevails and he just can't take it anymore. We again see the honest Ben in his outburst...he IS just trying to help, but his credibility is gone. It's almost as if his participation may be the reason that things are falling apart. After all, he was never supposed to turn the wheel. As Christian put it to John in the cave, "since when did listening to him[Ben] get you anything worth a damn?" Ben is getting no thanks because his time for redemption has come and past. If this is a show about redemption, salvation, and destiny, the writers may be trying to tell us that not all can be saved. Ben has lead a life of deception, manipulation, and selfishness…it just might be that his efforts are now too little too late. Remember, he’s not even supposed to be allowed to go back to the Island after turning the wheel, so it could be possible that his involvement in their return is detrimental to all? So who then – you might ask – will lead the O6 back to the Island? Well that’s obvious, right? The game changer himself, Desmond Hume. After all, no one was more surprised (troubled?) to see him outside the church than Ben.


(note to self: I can’t wait to see how wrong I am on all of this, but it sure is fun to guess, isn't it?)

Regardless of who makes it back to the Island, we’ll have a much better idea of HOW they get back in next week’s episode, which is titled “316.” If you want to know what the number is referring to, I’d spend some time with last week’s post, or better yet, head over to Ajira Airlines and take a gander at some available flights……

There is plenty to discuss from this week's craziness, so chime in below with your thoughts. See you next week!