Something Nice Back Home

As I was going on the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish to God he'd go away. - Anonymous

It's hard to tell what invisible man Jack was more afraid of in this episode. The shadow of "Han" Sawyer, the father who won't let go, even from beyond the grave, or the little voice inside his head that won't stop reminding him what a fraud he is.



At least this season we're getting steak and potatoes when all we had before was fish-biscuits and water. The voices calling Jack back to consciousness in the opening scene definitely seemed to belong to both Juliet and Kate. This type of duality saturated the whole episode, as did the circular feelings of everything having been done before. Operating on the beach. Going to the medical hatch. Aaron is taken, again, and someone even gets busted for secretly knowing a language. Kate mentions she's going to be Jack's nurse, to which he points out "it wouldn't be the first time". This type of circulature has got to be intentional and yes, I just made up the word circulature.

You'd think LOST was trying to tell us something the way it keeps pointing toward Lewis Carroll on its bookshelf. In ''Something Nice Back Home,'' flash-forward Jack enjoying domestic bliss with flash-forward Kate read a passage from the children’s classic as he put flash-forward Aaron to bed.

''Alice took up the fan...and, as the hall was very hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking: 'Dear, dear, how queer everything is today. And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think: Was I the same when I got up this morning?...If I'm not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I?”



''The Pool of Tears'' is a transitional chapter in Alice's adventure. She's just fallen out of her world but finds herself stuck in a stuffy corridor on the other side of a door leading into Wonderland proper. As she ponders the riddle of herself and the problem of opening the door (a problem because the door is rather tiny and she has grown very large thanks to a piece of magic cake) she cools herself with a fan left behind by the White Rabbit, oblivious of the fact that the very act of fanning is magically making her smaller. The dilemma is making her weep: Poor Alice can't figure out how she fits literally in her new world. Similarly, ''Something Nice Back Home'' was a transitional passage in the LOST saga, a busywork episode designed to put all the characters in position for the year's big finale.




And so it went that ''Something Nice Back Home'' began with Jack's iconic eyeball fluttering awake, an ironic wink at the first scene of LOST's very first episode, in which the good doctor, having just fallen from the sky, pops awake and springs into life-saving "Hero of the Beach" mode. He staggered out of his tent and into a squabble between his castaway friends and Faraday and Charlotte; then he fell flat on his face. We learned that shortly after Kate's trial, Jack got over his aversion to Aaron (though it wasn't explained how or why he was so anti-Aaron to begin with) and shacked up with the former fugitive. Rumpled sheets and red panties, a sexy post-shower smooch, and even a marriage proposal. But the omens of relationship collapse caused by Jack's backslide into old, self-destructive patterns (jealousy, paranoia, insecurity) were planted early. There was Jack stepping on a toy Millennium Falcon and grumbling ''son of a bitch!'' (Not a fatherly thing to say, and certainly not a nice way to talk about your half sister, but also, that's usually a “Sawyerism“) There was also the sports news of the day: Jack's beloved Red Sox had just been swept by those damn Yankees. So much for reversing the curse and so much for Jack reversing the destructive influence of his accursed father issues. Initially, he appeared to have made peace with his past. He actually spoke nice of Christian, warmly recalling to Kate that he had been a great storyteller. But he was also nagged by doubts that he could ever be a decent dad himself, much in the same way that he was nagged by doubts that he could be a good husband to Sarah. Alas, he was given reason to indulge these anxieties after being summoned to the Santa Rosa Mental Health Facility for an emergency meeting with Hurley. Finally, we were shown Jack's post-island turning point this episode. The catalyst to his downfall had nothing to do with Kate, or Jack's misguided assumptions that he was once again being two-timed. Instead, it was Hurley.



Everything is perfect for Jack until Hurley pees in his soup. Kate's been acquitted, work is going well, and Aaron hasn't been kidnapped in years. He's clean shaven. Adorable panties litter his bedroom floor. Things are looking up until Hurley's tales of speaking with dead Charlie sharply remind Jack as to who he is and where he's come from. Mentally and perhaps even physically, the island looms over everything and will not go away. One by one it shatters the illusion of heaven that Hurley refers to. It happened to him, it happened to Sayid, and it happens to Jack now too, as we know the only future that exists for him is a downward spiral of jealousy, drugs, and alcohol.

Talk about Alice in Wonderland links: We learned Hurley had become as mad as the Hatter — a character, intriguingly enough, who believed he had literally murdered time. More to the point of the episode's cited passage, Hurley had become like Alice: despairing over how he fits into the post-Island world, puzzling over the man he was or wasn't.

“We’re dead. All of us. All of the Oceanic Six – we’re dead. We never got off that island. […] Living with Kate, taking care of Aaron, it all seems so perfect. Just like heaven. […] I was happy too, Jack. For a while anyway. Then I saw Charlie.”



Interestingly, Hurley’s current perspective now reverses his delusions from the Season Two episode Dave. Before, Hurley believed that the island was a fantasy and that Santa Rosa was reality, but now he has come to believe the exact opposite. Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud argued that our dreams are largely the manifestations of the unconscious. Unconscious fears and desires can manifest themselves in many other ways in life, and not only while a person is asleep. In Hugo’s case, an overwhelming case of survivor guilt causes him to lose his tenuous grip on reality. Previously, his guilt over his involvement in the catastrophic deck collapse triggered his first mental breakdown. It might be easy to chalk up Hurley’s interactions with his two imaginary friends (Dave and Charlie) only to the power of the island, but there are deeper psychological forces in effect here. The island does not need Hurley as much as Hurley needs the island: in order to repair his self-image, he needs to return to the friends that he abandoned.

Off his meds, Hurley had come to believe that he was dead, that his after-Island life was actually the afterlife, that his doctor wasn't real, and that Ghost Charlie was visiting him and imparting important Intel intended for Jack. The messages: (1) that Jack ''wasn't meant to raise him'' (presumably, '' him'' means Aaron) and (2) that Jack himself was about to get haunted. Jack, not courageous enough to engage in Hurley's kind of self-reflection (and all the worse for it), tersely told his friend to get back on his meds and left, trying hard not be spooked. But he was. And so was I.



There was more to Jack's appendectomy than meets the eye. Much, much more. Because if you thought it was all simple episode filler, you missed Rose's words to Bernard completely. Rose doesn't get much dialogue, but when she does speak it's usually pretty important. This episode she questions why the island would make Jack sick, especially now, when in the past it's made people better. Keep in mind that Rose has always been attuned to the island in a Locke/Walt sort of way; certain in her assumption that Bernard was alive, and somehow knowing her cancer was gone. Often unconsciousness seems to play a role in visions, flashbacks, and even appearances of the smoke monster. To speak with the island, Locked ingested his home-brewed trip paste, and even gave it to Boone in season one to invoke visions. Eko's Yemi-sightings came while sleeping at night, and Charlie's visions came during dreams. It seems to me that the more withdrawn from consciousness the mind gets, the more it can communicate with (or be influenced by?) the island. Now take Jack, who for some reason is adamant about staying awake during the procedure even though Juliet's performed dozens of appendectomies. The last thing he screams before Bernard chloroforms him: "I don't want to be unconscious!" Jack goes out, and then… white light (Hurley's heaven?) Suddenly, Jack's in his flash-forward and at a very crucial point in his flash-forward too, because this is exactly when his father not only appears but actually calls to him.



The episode carefully lays the groundwork for a meaningful exchange between Jack and Christian, but the conversation never materializes. Instead, Christian interacts with his daughter Claire rather than his son. Jack’s life does not fall apart simply because Christian appears to him. Instead, his dream life deteriorates because he desperately wants to talk to Christian, but he cannot. If Jack had the ability to sit down on a bench and chat with Christian, the experience would not only be ‘kinda cool’ as Hurley says, but it would be a life-changing event for him. The white-shod manifestations of Christian Shephard have always served as Jack’s own personal white rabbit, but he still has not caught up to him even after four seasons. In order to achieve any lasting happiness, Jack still needs to complete his initial task: to bury his father and bring closure to those unresolved issues at the heart of his suffering. Unfortunately for him, the island might be the only place where he could achieve this result.



And so it went that during a late night at the hospital, Jack was lured by the bleating of a malfunctioning fire alarm to the lobby, where his father was waiting. ''Jack,'' he said sharply, causing his son to almost jump out of his tattooed skin. Actually, it played more like the instinctive flinch of a battered dog, reacting to his master's raised hand. Christian quickly vanished after that, but it was enough to make an impact on Jack. He asked a colleague for some anti-anxiety meds, then went home and washed the pills down with a beer. Jack's transformation into a pill-popping, booze-guzzling, airplane-crash-yearning, bridge-jumping-wannabe grizzly bear had begun. Sealing the deal was his mounting paranoia that Kate was pulling a Sarah and stepping out on him. And as it turned out, Kate did have another man on her mind: Apparently, she had been secretly fulfilling a promise she made to Sawyer before leaving the Island. (My guess: The shaggy con man asked her to look in on Clementine, the daughter he had with con gal Cassidy.) Furious over learning he was still competing with Sawyer for Kate's mind, heart, and time, Jack raged: ''I'm the one who saved you!'' Does he actually love this woman, or does he view her as some reward for being a good boy? Connecting that back to Jack's statements to his fellow castaways earlier in this episode (''I've gotten us this far. I said I was gonna get us off the Island, all of us. I promised that I would '') and even further to the hurtful, defining comments of his father in ''White Rabbit'' (''Don't play the hero, Jack. You don't have what it takes''), and what you have is one really complicated guy whose savior complex not only is an expression of his damage but gets in the way of his own redemption. Jack might be a good man, but he's a control freak (see: insisting on observing and guiding his own surgery) who hates himself and will sabotage any chance at happiness that he gets (see: driving Kate away). For Jack, there will never be ''something nice back home'' both literally and spiritually until he gets over himself.

So the big question becomes why would the island want to put Jack under? And the only answer to that (I think) is because it needed to communicate with him in a way it normally couldn't. Sleep wouldn't do it, the island needed Jack under under… perhaps to get to him on a future level. It's no coincidence that the smoke detector goes off right before Jack sees his father. The island IS influencing the flash-forwards, just as I've always suspected it's been influencing the flash-backs. Bernard described the experience would be pleasant, just like “dreaming of something nice back home”. This phrase, from which this episode takes its title, transforms into a cruelly ironic reversal. It's as if Jack knows exactly what the future has in store for him and doesn't need it to be revealed to him while he is unconscious. By this point in the story, Jack’s idyllic dream world has transformed into a nightmare. Jack's clothing even offers a visual cue for the impending doom: a white shirt, a light blue shirt, and a dark gray shirt. In the later flash-forward scenes, all of his deepest fears become reality. Christian flees before Jack can communicate with him, Kate begins to lie to him about a secret life just as Sarah did, and Jack himself becomes the same type of out-of-control, substance-abusing parent that he once hated.