The Cork in the Bottle: Eternal Prisoners on "Lost"

I have very mixed feelings about this week's episode of Lost, which is a rarity for me, as I'm usually on board with whatever Team Darlton and Co. throw at us from week to week.

But in an opinion that's likely to make me not very popular, I didn't love last night's Richard Alpert-centric episode ("Ab Aeterno"), written by Melinda Hsu Taylor and Gregg Nations and directed by Tucker Gates, which attempted to fill in backstory for one of the most enigmatic characters on the series, the seemingly immortal Richard Alpert (Nestor Carbonell).

My dislike for the episode comes with a few caveats up front. For one, I thought Carbonell did a fantastic job, delivering a knockout performance that carried the entire episode and portraying some very different incarnations of Richard Alpert over a stretch of roughly 150 years. I also give the producers credit for doing something risky in allowing the action to unfold mostly in Spanish, with English subtitles, and attempting to recreate period action off the island.

That said, I wanted more from the episode and from Richard's backstory, which struck me as being a little cliched and predictable. While we got a few answers this week, both about Richard and the island itself, it lacked the revelatory punch that I had anticipated. While I'm glad that we got to see Richard's past, I wanted something staggering rather than serviceable.

So what did I think of the episode? Unlock your chains, grab that half-empty bottle of wine, bury that cross, and let's discuss "Ab Aeterno."

Richard Alpert has been at the forefront of many viewer discussions. The spiritual adviser to the leader of the Others, he had been blessed--or cursed--with eternal life and the episode's title draws attention both to his condition as well as that of the island's battling entities, Jacob and his Nemesis, the Man in Black. Just who is Richard? What was he before he came to the island? How did he receive his gift from Jacob? And how much does he really know?

I wondered for a moment if the producers had pulled a bit of a bait-and-switch with the audience and would focus not just on Richard but also Ilana in this week's episode, given the way that the installment opened with the heavily bandaged Ilana being visited in a Russian hospital by Jacob. But this sequence seemed almost out of place, given the fact that we learned precious little more about Ilana and it didn't connect very much with the Richard plot. (The sequence involving the castaways at the campfire acted more as as a narrative framing device, with Hurley and Richard's scene at the end wrapping the Richard plot up as it were.)

But Ilana's story will have to wait for the time being as this episode was devoted almost entirely to exploring Richard's backstory and shedding light on the complicated rivalry between Jacob and the Man in Black, the latter of which I enjoyed thoroughly and far more than Richard's noble savage plot in Tenerife. With a nice bit of visual theatricality, Jacob explained the true nature of the island, the Man in Black, and his role in this eternal battle. (I'm hoping that this speech more than anything will finally silence those who believe that the Man in Black could possibly be good.)

Using the half-empty bottle of wine as a metaphor, Jacob explained that the wine itself is symbolic of a terrible darkness, which if it could flow from the bottle, would overtake everything, a viral infection of evil that could spread throughout the world if unchecked. The island itself is the cork in the bottle, a means of keeping it trapped and contained. I thought it interesting that Jacob didn't view himself as the cork, but gave that role over to the island itself, an eternal prison for the darkness that would consume everything in its path. Jacob, therefore, is the caretaker for the island, a tapestry-weaving prison warden whose mission is to protect the island and therefore keep the darkness at bay.

The Man in Black's attempts to escape, to find a loophole to kill his jailor and flee, would result in the scales tipping towards black for the entire world. If the island has sunk to the bottom of the ocean as it has in the Lost-X timeline, then it could mean that the wine has flowed out of the bottle. Despite people getting their heart's desire (or close to it) in that world, it might just point towards the Man in Black having escaped from his prison and roaming freely. Which would be very bad indeed. In detonating the hydrogen bomb and altering the timeline, did Jack and the castaways smash the bottle? Have they freed the djinn and unleashed unspeakable horror on the world? Or is the Nemesis still there, at the bottom of the sea, biding his time and plotting his escape once more? Hmmm...

To use the cork and bottle analogy further, the Man in Black's efforts to find a loophole to escape take on greater significance. He and Jacob are opposing forces whose respective strengths have resulted in an even scale and stasis. The cork in place, the wine can't get out of the bottle. But there's more than one way to get out of the bottle, one that doesn't involve removing the cork: simply smash the bottle. Which is exactly what the Man in Black does here after Jacob makes a gift of his lesson to Richard by giving his Nemesis the bottle as "something to pass the time."

So why bring people to the island? Jacob is not only looking for candidates to replace him but also to allow the eternal game between him and the trickster to continue, a moral Skinner box in which those who find themselves on this island can choose to become repentant for their past sins or choose to become corrupted, to select between the light and the dark. Prior to Richard's arrival, everyone who has come to the island has been killed but Jacob isn't there to force them to act one way or the other--that is the Nemesis' style, given his gift for manipulation--but rather he wants people to figure out right and wrong on their own. Jacob's whole modus operandi is to foster free will, then.

Richard's arrival on the island is a fortuitous one as it seems as though we're seeing the birth of the Others before our eyes, a race of people who have chosen to protect the island, to fortify the prison, and keep the cork firmly in the bottle. So why might they have sought to purge the Dharma Initiative? My theory: the Dharma Initiative's experiments into the electromagnetic energy properties of the island were creating a situation from which the Nemesis would be be to make his escape. They were effectively weakening the cork and allowing the darkness to seep out into the rest of the world. They saw the island as something that needed to be dissected, examined, probed, and categorized rather than what it was: a prison with them as the jailers. (The same held true of the U.S. Army, which is why the Others slew them in order to prevent others coming there and giving the Nemesis further opportunities to escape or to allow the scale to tip the other way.)

Richard's need for contrition places him on the path to righteousness. His crimes were accidental but crimes nonetheless. While he sought to help his wife, he murdered and stole but he turned towards redemption rather than destruction. Did it matter whether Jacob had spoken to him before he plunged the knife? Or was Richard's fate decided the moment he turned towards the light, towards divine forgiveness for his past misdeeds? It's not Jacob's ability to offer absolution. If we can move past our issues, our damages, and transgressions, we can be forgiven it seems. At the very least by ourselves.

Richard Alpert's Backstory. We saw this week just where Richard--or Ricardus, as Jacob calls him--came from: namely, 19th century Tenerife. (Incidentally, itself the site of one of the world's most deadly aviation accidents, as mentioned earlier this week on Breaking Bad.) Richard is a Spanish Catholic whose wife Isabella is dying. Traveling through a terrible storm to try and find help, he's refused by a greedy, mercenary doctor who finds that Richard does not have enough to pay him for his services and throws Isabella's beloved cross on the floor. A struggle ensues and Richard pushes the man, accidentally killing him. (I called that one straightaway.) Then he pockets the medicine and rushes back to Isabella's side, only to find that she's died. (Ditto.)

He's then seized by soldiers and imprisoned, where he learns English by reading the Bible. A priest denies him absolution for his crime (only a life of penance can remove his cardinal sin) but before Richard can be executed, he's purchased by Jonas Whitfield, a man working for Magnus Hanso (!!!), who explains that he is now a slave and the property of Hanso. And, sure enough, he ends up shackled aboard the Black Rock and, in the midst of a terrible storm, winds up in the middle of the island.

Whitfield ends up slaying most of the slaves because they have limited supplies and they will try to kill him... but the remaining officers are instead massacred by the smoke monster, who flits through the Black Rock in a fantastically cool visual before killing Whitfield and sparing Richard's life. Richard's dead wife Isabella appears and she tells Richard that they are both dead and in hell. But she runs off and is seemingly menaced by the smoke monster. (It seemed fairly certain to me that this was a manifestation of the smoke monster, appearing in the form of the dead Isabella. The monster had previously taken the form of someone else who died off-island: Ben's mother.)

Later coming to Richard in the guise of the Man in Black, he offers him freedom from his shackles (offering a nice callback to his line earlier this season about it being good to see Richard out of his shackles), and manipulates him into helping, preying on his fears of eternal damnation and his need to find his wife, setting up Jacob as the devil to who took her. His mission for Richard: to slay Jacob with a ceremonial knife (just like Dogen gave to Sayid) and to not allow Jacob to say a word before he plunges the knife into his chest (just like Dogen told Sayid).

But, when faced with the possibility of regaining his wife (his heart's desire) or performing a life of penance for his sin, Richard chooses the latter, placing himself into Jacob's employ and receiving a gift: eternal life. Unlike the Man in Black, who claims to be able to return his wife to him, Jacob asks for sacrifice, for penance, for an act of contrition that will set the scale within Richard to the side of the just. He's baptized by Jacob, who plunges him into the ocean waters and then is given a choice: he can take the position of representation or intermediary, a sort of moral guide to help others where Jacob cannot. Richard accepts and Jacob gives him eternal life.... and then Jacob gives his Nemesis a white stone. Score one for Team Jacob. Richard, meanwhile, buries Isabella's cross.

Black Rock and The Statue. We learned that the Statue of Taweret was destroyed by the Black Rock in the tsunami that deposited the ship in the middle of the island. (Looks like Arzt was right after all.) I was a little confused by the storm, given that it seemed from "The Incident" that the Black Rock had arrived in the middle of a sunny, tranquil morning rather than during a hurricane gale (just like Oz, in fact), but perhaps that boat we saw Jacob and his Nemesis arguing over last season wasn't the Black Rock but one of the other ships that had previously arrived on the island and whose occupants had been killed. (I was also confused as to the 1867 date for the Black Rock, given that we had previously been told it set out from Portsmouth in 1845; the entire timeframe of events here seemed a little later than they should have been, really.)

Did the breaking of the statue result in any negative effects on the island? That remains to be seen. But it clearly isn't the cause of the pregnancy-related deaths plaguing the Others as it happened years before there even was a tribe of Others on the island. Just what caused their reproductive failure remains a mystery. It was serious enough that Ben had Juliet brought to the island but it would appear to be something that occurred fairly recently rather than in the distant past. Hmmm...

Ilana. We still don't know much about Ilana other than the fact that she is loyal to Jacob, knew him, and accepted her own commission from him: to protect the final six candidates from coming to harm. At the campfire, Sun believes that she is one of those six but I don't think we have a definitive answer there as Ilana just last week indicated that she was sent to protect "Kwon" and didn't know if that referred to Sun or Jin. Nothing has changed since then to indicate that she's been swayed one way or the other.

Ilana is waiting to receive her next instructions from Ricardus but he has no idea what they're meant to do next: Richard, still suffering his crisis of faith from the previous few episodes, believes that everything Jacob has said is a lie and that they are all dead, echoing a fan-favorite theory from Season One that had the island as purgatory or hell. (Not so, of course.)

Jacob brought Ilana to the island but didn't tell her everything she had to do; he's leaving things still to free will and to her being guided by Richard in a way that he cannot. Jacob seems to set things into motion--pushing people into the game--but doesn't intervene when it comes to their choices, even going so far as to allow himself (I believe) to be killed by Ben in "The Incident."

Richard. So just what are they meant to do next? Richard has no idea and he's had it with his bargain with Jacob. He wants to switch sides, to change his decision and his alliance. He returns to the spot of his past decision, the place where he had buried Isabella's cross, and digs it up as he screams out to the Nemesis that he has changed his mind, echoing the offer made by the Man in Black to come over to his side whenever he wanted. But before that can happen, Hurley turns up with a message from Isabella, acting as a bridge between Richard and his dead wife and passing along two important messages: one, that they are already together, always, and two, that they must stop the Man in Black or they will "all go to Hell."

All in all, I thought this was a serviceable episode that didn't totally fulfill the promise of Richard Alpert's backstory. Things did pick up once Richard arrived on the island and was forced to enter the game between Jacob and his Nemesis but I found the Isabella elements to be really contrived and forced and didn't have the emotional impact that it really should have. (I especially felt that the scene at the end between ghost Isabella, Richard, and Hurley wasn't really earned, given that I didn't care about Isabella and she remained little more than a pious cipher at the end of the episode.) I did, however, really enjoy the flashback elements that dealt with the Man in Black and Jacob as we got to see much more of their relationship and those scenes crackled with energy and tension.

What did you think of this week's episode? Am I being too harsh? Were you let down or excited by this installment? Did you fall for Richard and Isabella or moan when they were on screen together? Just what was the deal with that blue butterfly at the Black Rock? Head to the comments section to discuss.

Next week on Lost ("The Package"), Sun and Jin desperately continue their search for one another while Locke confronts his enemy.