LOST DISCOVERIES
LOST:
…In Translation
Created by: J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof
Story by: Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Leonard Dick
Air date: Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Day of Reckoning
By Rachael F.
A Soulful Spike Society Review
It's sad that our misunderstanding
Has turned into a war
I don't know you
anymore, anymore
And our love got lost
in the translation
And when I see you out
You're a stranger to
me now
You're a stranger to
me now
- Our
Misunderstanding, Fastball
Okay. We’re not stupid, or unobservant, so by now
we know that in Lost, episode titles matter.
So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that an episode entitled: “Lost...in Translation” would be about
misunderstandings. Everywhere we look,
the signal-to-noise ratio is so low that the message is getting lost in
translation.
Jin and Sun’s
collapsing marriage, and potential reconciliation take center stage in this
episode. So, again unsurprisingly, most
examples of misunderstanding and failed communication involve them. We revisit the fact that, in order to marry
Sun, Jin took a job working for her father, and that until very recently, Sun
had no idea what that job entailed. In
addition, we learn that Jin has allowed Sun to believe his father to be dead,
when the reality is that Jin’s father lives in a fishing village, and Jin was
too ashamed of his humble beginnings to be up front with his future bride. Further, it seems very likely that Sun
believes Jin to be a murderer, and he’s done nothing to disabuse her of this
notion. Finally, we learn that,
unbeknownst to Sun, Jin was planning to take his father’s advice to run away
from his job and start over somewhere new.
On the flip side, Jin
learns what we’ve all known for some time - his wife speaks English quite well,
and has been keeping that knowledge (as well as her incipient friendship with
Michael) a secret from him. And we, the
viewers, know that she speaks English because she was planning to leave Jin in
Australia.
*whew* Still with me? All in all, it seems that Jin and Sun’s entire marriage is built
on a foundation of misunderstandings and failed communication. They don't know one another anymore. While
the scene with Jin’s father was very touching, for me, it underscores the
fundamental flaws in Jin and Sun’s relationship: after all, she still doesn’t know that his father is alive
and giving him advice, and frankly, running away to start over without actually
telling your wife what’s going on, seems to me a shaky position from
which to begin again. They don't know one another anymore; and it's unclear
they ever knew each other, at all, and the day of reckoning for their
marriage has finally arrived.
But the pattern of
missed communication doesn’t stop with Jin and Sun. Throughout the episode, misunderstandings between characters are
given center stage: Sun slaps Michael
in order to prevent a fight between him and Jin (a clear mirroring of Jin’s use
of a beating to prevent a politician’s murder); When Michael’s boat burns in
the night, everyone assumes Jin set the fire, and he is unable to correct this
assumption, because he speaks no English.
Shannon and Sayid have a temporary setback, which is due to a
misunderstanding about what she wants and needs from a man.
But perhaps the most
effective part of “...in Translation” is how it shows us that we, as viewers,
have also fallen victim to misunderstandings due to our own assumptions. How many of us assumed, when we saw the
scene in “House of the Rising Sun”, with Jin washing himself free of blood,
that he’d killed someone that night?
The reality of it turns out that Jin saved a man’s life by
beating him within an inch of it.
But there’s more. While I never believed that Jin set the fire
(because the sooner Michael left the island, the happier Jin would be), many
viewers likely jumped to the same conclusion that the castaways did: Jin did
it, out of spite. And then, once we
knew Jin hadn’t done it, our minds jumped immediately to Locke, whose earlier
behavior led us to believe he’s more than willing to take away others’ rights
to choose for themselves if he thinks it’s for their own good. (Remember his sending Boone on an
involuntary vision quest?) Not to
mention that we’ve long suspected that the island has him in its thrall, and he
has good reason not to want to leave - who’d want to go back to being a
paraplegic?
My point? We’ve been making assumptions, too; and some
of them are coming back to bite us.
A last word about
losing the message in translation: when
we look more closely at this episode, we can see that most of what I’ve
described above aren’t simple misunderstandings...at best, they’re born of
incorrect assumptions and snap judgments (witness our assumption that Jin was a
murderer and Locke burned the boat), and at worst, they’re allowed to persist
through lack of communication, or created, deliberately, by someone with an
unknown agenda. Twice, Jin fails to
correct the mistaken assumption that he’s done something horrible - we would
have known he isn’t a murderer a lot sooner if he hadn’t been in the habit of
not telling his wife, well, anything.
For her part, Sun kept
the fact that she speaks English from almost everyone, and I see this as a huge
betrayal of Jin...because Jin doesn’t speak English (in my opinion, the scene
on the beach where we hear the other castaways speaking in nothing but
gibberish was meant to establish this fact - your mileage may vary), and no one
else speaks Korean - meaning he is truly an island unto himself, isolated from
the others. Sun had the capability to
be a bridge, and instead chose to leave the man she loved truly alone. At last, when she finally chooses to tell
him that she was planning on leaving him, she does so in English. A language she knows he can’t
understand. For whatever reason, she
chooses to keep him in the dark. Again.
Finally, deliberate
misdirection - the most striking example of this is Locke’s coverup regarding
the boat burning. He knows, somehow,
that Walt set the fire. He doesn’t tell
anyone. So now they think that the “others”
burned the boat. Nicely manipulated,
Locke, really.
Stuff that worked:
·
Daniel Dae Kim’s acting. The man is amazing - his character speaks no
English, and yet we know what he’s saying without the subtitles...and sometimes
without any words at all.
·
Locke setting Shannon straight on being an adult
and taking charge of her own life.
·
Shanyid.
I’m liking the whole Shannon/Sayid dynamic.
·
Sun’s moment of freedom at the end of the
episode, spreading her wings to the sea breeze.
Stuff that didn't work:
·
The boat.
I may be completely wrong here, but I suspect that the likely end for
anyone venturing off the island in that thing is a slow, lingering death by
exposure. Or a quick death by
drowning. Most likely - the island will
just bring them right back in.
·
Sawyer going all “Lord of the Flies” on
Jin. I guess...I had felt that his
character had moved beyond behavior like that, and it felt like the writers
were being heavy-handed in their attempt to remind us that Sawyer is a “bad
man”.
·
On a similar note: Michael beating the crap out
of Jin while the others watched. I
thought someone (Sayid or Jack) should have stopped that fight. They must know better than to let such an
anarchic system of justice take hold, and yet they both stand and watch. I vote we put Kate in charge. Seriously.
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