TV Verdict

Sins of the father, a secret mission, and axe bloody spray. Spoilers follow.

Hurley described “The Lighthouse” perfectly when he called it “old school.” Tonight’s episode was classic Lost, balancing character drama and mythology with an entertaining Lostie pairing, strong flash-sideways story, mysteries and answers, and one bat-guano crazy jungle lady.

We begin with this week’s Jack-centric LA X timeline story. It’s at least a few days after his return from Sydney, and the good doc is back to work, though still dealing with the fallout from the disappearance of his dad’s coffin. His mother is bugging him to help find his father’s will, and Jack is struggling to find time to be a father to the teenage son he apparently has in this timeline. His name is David, and he may or may not be a Jonas Brother. The product of a divorce (I assume, though they carefully hide the identity of his mother), David doesn’t see Jack more than once a month, and doesn’t much care about his dad’s forced attempts to relate to him. Not because he’s a surly teen, but because he’s the latest in a line of Shepard boys afraid of disappointing their fathers. In David’s case, he doesn’t want Jack to know that he has an audition for entry into a music conservatory. Jack finds out anyway when David goes missing and he tracks him down at the theater. Proud, and more than a little guilty, Jack tells David how amazing he was, and asks why he kept the audition from him. David tells his father that he didn’t tell him about his audition (or even the fact that he still played piano) because he didn’t want Jack to see him fail. In his son, Jack sees the same fear that was instilled in him by his own father. As a boy, Christian Shepard gave cruelly assessed his son as not having “what it takes.” Back on the island, however, another father figure is eager to give Jack a different message.

Back at the Temple, Hurley and Miles are killing time playing tic-tac-toe—a game the cynical ghost hunter rightly criticizes for “always ending in a tie” (a reference, perhaps, to the struggle between Jacob and the Man in Black). Having worked up an appetite, Hurley goes looking for a snack and runs into Jacob in the Temple pool hall. The still-very-much-dead Jacob gives Hurley a secret mission, to help a mysterious “someone” find the island by trekking through the jungle to a ruined lighthouse where… but we’ll get to that in a minute. The important thing, he tells Hurley, is that Jack must accompany him. Knowing that the broken doctor will need to be convinced to leave the safety of the Temple, Jacob tells Hurley to give Jack a message: “You have what it takes.” The words he always wanted to hear from his father.

The words have the desired effect on Jack—who seems more interested in confronting Jacob than carrying out his wishes—and they escape the Temple through a secret passageway. As the pair make their way across the island, Hurley passes the time by bringing up stuff Lost fans have been throwing around on the messageboards lately: how Jacob is kinda like Obi Wan, how the castaways conveniently forgot about the Adam and Eve skeletons in the caves from season one, and how long it’s been since a couple of old school characters have gone on a ol’ fashioned jungle adventure. He also tells Jack about the Jacobian visit that convinced him to return to the island, and asks the doc why he wanted to come back. Jack tells him that, off-island, he was a broken man. He’d hoped that the island would “fix him” if he returned. But it hasn’t. At least, not yet.

Much like the dark duo of Locke and Sawyer last week, Hurley and Jack’s journey takes them to an island cliff. But instead of climbing down into a dark cave, they ascend upwards to the top of an ancient lighthouse. Kudos to Jack for preemptively asking the question that was bound to flood forums this week: how come they never noticed it before? I’m not sure Hurley’s answer that they just weren’t looking for it will appease fans, but I’m pretty sure any bad feelings were swept away by what they found when they reached the top. An open room, overlooking the ocean, with a circular stone table. On that table, a large rotating dial with mirrors mounted on one side. Hurley tells Jack they need to aim the mirrors, per Jacob’s instructions. As Jack helps Hurley rotate the mirrors to the Jacob-prescribed 108˚mark, he notices that next to every degree marking there is a name, including their names. Jack also sees strange reflections in the mirrors, ghostly reflections of places from all over the world. He sees what looks like the temple where Jin and Sun were married, and a church steeple that might be from Sawyer’s parents’ funeral. When he aligns the mirrors with his own number, 23, he sees a vision of his childhood home and realizes that Jacob has been watching them all. He confronts Hurley, demanding to talk to Jacob and find out why he has been spying on them. Hurley tells him he doesn’t know, and that Jacob is not there to ask, sending Jack into a rage. He grabs a nearby telescope, smashes the mirrors, and storms off. After he leaves, Jacob appears to a shaken Hurley, seeming decidedly nonplussed about his magic lighthouse having just been destroyed. As they talk, Hurley realizes that Jacob wanted Jack to see the mirrors (maybe even to smash them). Jacob says it was the only way to prepare Jack for the job he was brought to this island to do. A task he must discover, and choose to undertake, on his own. Jacob then tells Hurley that their trip had the side-benefit of getting them away from the Temple, which is just about to be attacked by “someone bad.”

Elsewhere on the island, Jin is being helped out of a bear trap by Claire, who we last saw shoot Jin’s guards. She takes him back to the… camp? hovel? where she’s been living for the past three years. The isolation has not been kind to the formerly sane Aussie, who is obsessed with finding her son, Aaron (not unlike another crazy jungle lady from seasons past). I guess creepy animal skeletons in bassinets don’t scratch her motherly itch. She leaves Jin alone long enough to capture one of the guards she ambushed, who had just been playing possum. Jin watches as she ties him up. She tells him that the Others captured her and took her to the Temple, where they tortured and branded her (ala Sayid). She escaped, and now she wants revenge—not only for her own abduction, but because she believes they have Aaron, and she wants him back. How does she know the Others have Aaron? Because her father (the ghostly Christian Shepard) and a mysterious “friend” told her. The guard begs Jin to set him free, warning him that Claire will kill them both. Like Sawyer’s response to Richard’s pleas last week, Jin ignores the captured Other. Big mistake. Claire returns with a freshly sharpened axe and, after stitching up Jin’s wounded leg, she brandishes the weapon at the guard, demanding that he tell her where Aaron is. Knowing that the Others don’t have Claire’s son, Jin tries to save the man’s life by telling Claire that Kate has been raising Aaron. She backs off for a second, considering the possibility, then rears back and buries the axe deep in the guard’s chest. Jin, as afraid as he should have been all along, tells Claire what she wants to hear: that the Others do have Aaron, and that he’ll help her get him back. That’s good, she says, because if Kate really did have Aaron, she’d have to kill her. Before Jin can respond, Claire’s “friend” arrives. To no one’s surprise, it’s the Smoke Monster formerly known as Locke, looking pleased as poisoned punch.

“The Lighthouse” mirrors last week’s episode, “The Substitute.” Hurley and Jack’s mission from Jacob is the light counterpart to Sawyer and Locke’s dark journey to the caves. In both cases, they ended with a peek at Jacob’s list, and the revelation that The Numbers are directly related to the castaways. This week’s revelation puts the numbers in some kind of context. Instead of some random cave list, we see that the names correspond with degree markings at the top of the Lighthouse. We know from last season’s finale that Jacob’s hobby is bringing people to the island. It looks like the Lighthouse is a big part of that—both in choosing candidates as well as actually calling them to the island. It’s almost enough to draw attention away from the biggest question of the episode: Who was Hurley supposed to help find the island? Too bad we didn’t get a good shot of the name at 108˚. It’s safe to assume this is the person or people Jacob warned the Man in Black about at the end of last season. Is it a character we’ve already met? Whoever they are, Jacob doesn’t seem worried about them finding their way.

If Locke’s status as a fan favorite was on full display last week, Hurley got his shot at the title this week. He has always been a counterbalance to the darker aspects of the show, and whenever things get particularly heavy (like they did in “The Substitute”) you can count on Hurley to lighten the mood. Whether it’s arguing time travel confusion with Miles in Dharmaville, or chiding Jacob for not being straight with him, he speaks for the fans. And considering that he did the same (but opposite) tour guide job as Locke did last week, I have to say he’s looking more Jacobesque with each passing episode. I know a lot of people are looking to Jack as THE candidate (and after this week, it sure seems like he’s going to end up squaring off against Sawyer and the Man in Black), but I have my fingers crossed that Hurley ultimately swoops in to save the day—preferably by running over the Man in Black with a Dharma van. Perfect final line to the entire series? “Dude!”

All this island stuff makes it easy to ignore the flash-sideways storylines, but that would be a mistake. They are here for a reason, even if their purpose is not yet clear. What gets clearer with each week, though, is that while the the bomb probably has something to do with the sideways timeline, its affect wasn’t as simple as Faraday thought. If it were, Ben wouldn’t be an European history teacher, and Dogen wouldn’t be a stage father hanging out in LA. His appearance in this episode (which was totally spoiled for me in the latest issue of TV Guide, which we got in the mail this afternoon) points to this timeline as being something… well, “other.” Perhaps the bomb didn’t so much reset time from 1977 onward as it did weaken the barrier between two parallel universes. In every flash-sideways story (except, perhaps, Locke’s), the main character seems to recall something from the other timeline: Jack recognizing Desmond on the plane, Kate flinching at hearing Aaron’s name, even Jack not being able to remember his appendix coming out. Will the barrier between these realities continue to degrade? Will someone forcibly break through? Maybe the person whose name is at 108˚ on the Lighthouse dial isn’t coming from across the ocean, but from another reality.

Before I close this out, I wanted to share a pointless (but kind of cool) observation: Jacob shares a name with another famous ghost, by the name of Marley. That also happens to be the last name of the noted Jamaican singer who wrote “Redemption Song,” the tune Sawyer and Michael sing on the raft at the end of the first season finale, and whose lyrics are just as relevant to Lost now as they were then. Look them up, you’ll see what I mean. Speaking of song lyrics, I’m writing this while listening to Johnny Cash’s brand new (posthumous) album, “Ain’t No Grave.” Its haunting title track just about has me scouring Jacob’s list for a crossed out “Cash.” It begins with the lines “There ain’t no grave / Can hold my body down.” Sound like anyone we know?

Your turn. What did you think of “The Lighthouse”? Did you find it illuminating? Were you happy to see Kate, or happier that Hurley put the kibosh on her coming along? Which was freakier: Claire going all Lizzie Borden on that poor Other, or the skeleton thing in her cradle? I didn’t think it was possible to out-crazy Rousseau, but I guess I was wrong. At least Claire’s right about one thing: on this island, infections will kill you.