Cabin Fever Part 1

"You may be right. I may be crazy. But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for."- Billy Joel



Take lots of Ben and Locke, the welcome return of Richard, the ever-awesome Christian, spooky Claire, the reappearance of Jacob’s cabin, and then pepper it with threats, beatings, shootings, throat-slitting, and the best candy-bar eating scene in all of television history. Comic-book references. Biblical allusions. Mythological connections. Double meanings to scores of lines. Hurley's ''theory'' that he, Ben, and Locke were chosen for this vision quest because they were the craziest ones on the Island was one of my favorite parts of the episode. Now jam it all into one episode. This is what the writer’s strike did to us, and we should be thankful for it.

John Locke always knew he was special. It's just that it didn't seem like being special was such a good thing to be. He was "specially" misunderstood. "Specially" unpopular. And "specially" unwanted. He was even "specially" rejected. Our culture can be hard on boys. There's not a lot of slack for those who fall short in the manly rituals of initiation. So it was easy to sympathize with young John's stubborn refusal to embrace his preordained status as a nerd. John resisted the destiny he was born to fulfill . But maybe that was because the advertising was so uninspired. Someone should have sat him down and told him a story to get him fired up. They should have told him the oldest story in the mythos of mankind...The Birth of the Hero.



In Western mythology, it always comes back to the same thing. The hero. First he must be born. Preferably to a young, sweet maiden. In many myths, the hero has no earthly father. Jesus was one and not to be sacrilegious in our cultural associations, but Anakin Skywalker was another. That prick Anthony Cooper was a genetic match for purposes of organ donation, but are we absolutely certain that he was the older man who fathered Emily Locke's child?

For sure, some sort of divine intervention played a hand. From the start, the very special baby thrived despite impossible odds. The man who found resurrection by crashing in an airplane started life as the youngest preemie his 1950s hospital had ever seen survive. Which is not to say he lived any kind of charmed life. Like so many heroes, the earthly father Locke eventually came to know was a dirty rotten bastard. Who tried to kill him. And who John arranged, with mythic deviousness, to have murdered by another fatherless son. Ever since Zeus stopped his father Chronus from cannibalizing his own children the age old competition of father and son has shaped the story of men.

Like Moses or Oedipus or Luke Skywalker, the mythic baby is often sent away immediately after birth to protect him from the wrath of the evil father figure. Even if the father himself is not a villain, the hero may still need to be sent away in order to survive. Like Kal El being sent off into space in his intergalactic incubator, little John Locke was set adrift at birth to fend for himself and find his destiny. Once set orphaned, the hero child is raised by surrogates. It seems to be a critical ingredient for heroic stature that one not be raised by one's own ma and pa. You can run down the list from Oedipus to Moses to Clark Kent all the way through Peter Parker and Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter, and the one thing many of the great superheroes have in common is that, like little Johnny Locke ...they were all raised by another.



Who looks outside, dreams
Who looks inside, awakens. - Carl Jung

Locke, as we know, is prone to interesting dreams. Jung thought that, in dreams, each person creates their own personal mythology. Using the archetypes of our own unconscious dreams tell us the stories of ourselves. But where do the characters come from? How does Locke, for instance, dream of Horace Goodspeed - a man he had never met? Horace returned through time to guide Locke to his destination or more to the point; to Jacob, who has been waiting such a long time for the Chosen One to arrive. In the logic of dreams, Horace seemed trapped in a broken loop of time. He cut down a tree, only to find the tree still standing. His nose bleed reminded us of the way he and Ben's other victims died in his genocidal coup but also reminds us of the sickness that infests the freighter and of the way Desmond's nose reacted to his recent tangle with the wrinkle in time. The nosebleed in the dream was an example of the way our own unique dream motifs are larger than our own unique consciousness. The archetypes of dreams share a commonality that spills across our individual experience and break through the limits of our individual knowledge. They are evidence of the collective unconscious we share with all humanity, where the shadow world beyond this waking dream has messages to tell us, if only we can be made to listen.





Horace the Ghost came to push Locke with "goodspeed" on his way to Jacob. In the collective unconscious, as described by Jung, dreams have been known to predict future events. How can that be possible? How can the sleeping mind know of things that haven't happened yet? How did little Locke know about the smoke monster on the Island he wouldn't visit for another forty years? This is the kind of myth where "Time" is a magical power. With the logic of a dream, a man can be killed long after he has already washed up dead on shore.

''Can history then be said to have an architecture? The notion is most glorious and most horrible.'' — From Hell

Should John Locke be lucky enough to see the year 2008, he would be 50. That would make him as old as the central figure in the aforementioned text, one Sir William Gull, a 19Th-century English physician. There are some interesting overlaps between these characters. In From Hell, Gull is a middle-aged man uncertain of his purpose, but he is convinced he is special and senses that the architecture of his life is building to a point. Or, in the sweet phrasing of Buddy Holly that was quoted by LOST, ''Every day its a getting closer/Rolling faster than a roller coaster/A love like yours will surely come my way.'' At 50, though, Gull suddenly finds his calling in the form of a mystical mission to defend his country — an island, don't you know — from an insidious conspiracy. You know, just like Locke. Gull is also, probably, totally crackers; he's Alan Moore's speculative pick for being Jack the Ripper in the story. My comparisons of Locke and Gull will end there.



''Cabin Fever'' began by showing us a foundation of life: Locke's birth. We've previously been given reason to believe Locke was born in May of 1956. But in the opening scene, we saw his mother, a rebellious 16-year-old Emily, secretly six months pregnant with John, dancing to that Buddy Holly song and primping for a date with an older man — presumably, John's con-man biological pop, Anthony Cooper. ''Everyday'' was released on vinyl in July 1957. This sounds picky, but timing is crucial in light of future events. Or at least it should be so I don't think it was a goof up by the produces. Emily, John Locke's mother, is struck down by...well, we never saw who was behind the wheel, did we? Maybe that's important, maybe not, or maybe not yet, but anyway, Emily was rushed to the hospital, and with that, John Locke entered the world three months ahead of time. Pedestrians have it pretty hard in LOST. We watched Juliet’s ex-husband eat a bus, and then Hurley rolls right over Pryce. This episode it’s Emily who chews on a fender and although she doesn’t die, it leaves us wondering who the mystery driver is. Is it Cooper? Is this Richard’s second road kill? Doesn’t really matter. What matters is that fate, or the island’s will acting as a executor of fate, bends the path of these people’s lives in the direction it needs them to go.

As preemie John was wheeled away in a toasty incubator, Emily cried out her wish that the boy be named John. We’ve seen this show already, and we know that it ends with a bitter, motherless existence and a sprinkling of patricide. Ben and Locke are brothers, if not fraternally at least metaphorically, as they both walk the same paths through a very tough life. In Cain and Able fashion, one even kills the other, or at least tries to, until mom (in this case the Island) intervenes.

Flashback one year ago in which LOST gave us another cheery Mother's Day edition, "The Man Behind the Curtain". That episode told the origin story of Benjamin Linus, who, if you recall, was also born prematurely, and also born to a woman named Emily who cried out his name, although she did so as she died. Some points of difference: Ben was raised by his biological father, while Locke was given up for adoption and raised in foster care. Ben was born about five years after Locke; call it 1963. Locke's fifth year was a key marker in his fate-whipped trajectory, for it brought Richard Alpert into his life.

We had seen the forever young Other earlier in the episode, checking in on preemie Locke and beaming like some admiring Magus from the east. Or west. Or wherever in Christendom the Island is/was/will be positioned in the space-time continuum. Richard showing up at Locke’s foster parent’s home was an amazing scene, and Nestor Carbonell did an incredible job of creeping us right the hell out. It’s raining again, and Locke is playing backgammon when he arrives, only this time with red and white pieces – no black. He’s drawn pictures of the smoke monster on the wall, indicating exactly what Richard is hoping: that young John Locke is an incarnation (reincarnation?) of a future leader of the island. As such, Locke will inherently know the right decisions to make, the artifacts he’s entitled to, and ultimately will lead them down the correct paths when someday he arrives on the island. Returning five years later, Alpert claimed to be with a school that catered to ''extremely special'' children. He said that Locke could be a candidate for his institution and wanted to assess his aptitude. And then Alpert gave Locke a test, and with that, Lost gave us a scene so dense with (potential) subtext it just might take all of the forthcoming eight-month hiatus to unravel it.