LOST Discoveries

LOST:

The Whole Truth

Created by: Jeffery Lieber, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof

 

Air date: March 22, 2006

 

THE WHOLE TRUTH: And Nothing But

by Sara Wilcox

 

A Soulful Spike Society Review

www.soulfulspike.com

 

 

The Whole Truth: And Nothing But

  

Truth takes time. ~Irina Derevko

 

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. ~Oscar Wilde

 

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. John 8:32

 

 

 

Lemme get this straight: this episode featured both Jin and Jack appearing half-naked before the first commercial break, half-naked Sawyer a little while later, and a soaking wet Sayid... and you expect me to have paid attention to the plot?

 

Okay, fine.

 

Kahil Gibran once wrote: “Say not ‘I have found the truth,’ but rather, ‘I have found a truth.’” It’s an important distinction Gibran makes; when we use the phrase “the truth,” there’s an implicit sense that we feel what we know is comprehensive and complete—that there’s nothing that needs or can be added to the picture. But saying we know “a truth” indicates our awareness there are more truths yet to be learned, and that knowing this one thing doesn’t mean we know the whole story. So while all of the main storylines in this episode centered around searching for, and sometimes struggling with, a truth, we also see the castaways making Gibran’s distinction between “the truth” and “a truth” time and again over the course of the hour.

 

Our main storyline this week featured Sun’s struggle with two truths: the question of whether she was pregnant and what she would say to Jin regarding her pregnancy. There’s little doubt that Jin would be ecstatic to learn his wife was with child, even though one of the reasons Jin cited for having a baby—to induce Sun’s father into giving Jin a different job—was no longer relevant. And until the scene in her garden their marriage seemed to be back on pretty solid footing, enough that the thought of having a child to help “make it better” wasn’t even on the radar.

 

However, even before Sun began to suspect she was in a family way, we saw that some of the issues that derailed their relationship in the first place hadn’t simply been Photoshopped out of the picture completely: Jin’s tendency to cast them in the roles of the man of the house and the little missus is still alive and kicking, despite the steps he’s made toward treating their marriage as an equal partnership, and it would appear he still has some anger management issues to resolve. Since these flaws were among the reasons Sun was leaving Jin in the first place—and thus most likely why she was “glad” to be told she couldn’t conceive—I think it was unsurprising for most viewers to see Sun’s mixed emotions upon learning this particular truth.

 

But, as is so often the case on Lost, the other shoe hadn’t yet dropped. And when it did, it was a size 13 EEE. In quick succession, we learned not only was Sun tempted to cheat on her husband, but that it was Jin who was unable to produce children—a truth she’d kept from her husband for quite some time. Suddenly, her reluctance to shout the news from the treetops takes on an entirely different dimension; because of the diagnosis the doctor initially gave, telling Jin she was pregnant all-but required she be honest with him regarding which of them the doctor found to be infertile—a revelation which in and of itself strongly implies Jin is not the father of the child she’s carrying. Considering what Jin was like when he thought there was something going on between Michael and Sun, and his cold behavior towards Sun when they were told she couldn’t have kids, it’s not unreasonable for Sun to have harbored a few trepidations about taking Jack’s advice to tell her husband “everything—the whole truth.”

 

And as it turns out, she didn’t. Not quite, anyway. Given what she had to lose, the extent of Sun’s honesty—most notably her conversation with their fertility doctor—was incredibly admirable. And her avowal to Jin that she had never been with another man seemed, to this viewer anyway, heartfelt and sincere. So there’s no question that Sun told Jin a pair of truths. Yet by not revealing the identity of her English tutor or Jae’s implicit confession of interest in her, Sun did not in fact share “the” truth; Jin does not have as complete a grasp of the available information as he could.

 

The fact remains, though, that the truths she did share gave Jin more than ample reason to question his wife’s fidelity. From what we’ve seen of his behavior, not to mention his knowledge of her plans to leave him before they boarded Oceanic Flight 815, we had every reason to believe right along with Sun that Jin would turn on his wife with anger, hurt, and suspicion. But then Jin did something that, I suspect, surprised all of us: he believed her. He trusted in her essential goodness, in her honesty, despite knowing she’d kept things from him in the past—including what she’d told him mere moments before—the idea of Sun betraying her marriage vows was simply impossible for Jin to imagine. And as Sherlock Holmes once noted, when you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Since a miracle was the only possibility left in his mind that could explain her pregnancy, a miracle it must be.

 

As for us cynics who know of the moment of temptation Sun faced, saw Sun’s ambiguous expression as Jin embraced her, and generally speaking consider infidelity far more probable an occurrence than the miraculous... well, it would probably behoove us to remember, particularly the next time we see Locke stand up or Charlie do anything at all, that the island has already produced a miracle or two for our beleaguered survivors.

 

Meanwhile, paralleling Sun’s inner journey towards honesty was Ana Lucia and Sayid’s literal journey towards, as they see it, figuring out whether Henry has been telling them the truth. On the surface, it seems pretty obvious—Henry’s story hinges on a fairly large piece of physical evidence. Find the evidence, and, as Ana Lucia pointed out, “everyone will believe [him].” No balloon, and Sayid can start oiling up his pliers or sharpening bamboo shoots without even a twinge of guilt.

 

Yet it seems to me that everyone involved is forgetting something fairly important: verifying a truth doesn’t make his story the truth. And in this case, finding a balloon where Henry says it is doesn’t guarantee it got there how he says it did, any more than the balloon’s absence would mean his entire tale was a lie. If the balloon is there, one has to consider that if he is an Other Henry could have simply stumbled upon the balloon while out gathering food and is now using that knowledge to lend credence to his story; by the same token, if the balloon is missing it’s more than possible that an Other did find the balloon and appropriated it for their own use, making a liar out of an honest man.

 

I suspect Sayid is beyond lacking interest in any such niceties of logic: he wants to prove Henry is lying so he can make someone pay for Shannon (which, interestingly, makes Henry’s assertion that the castaways are just looking for someone to blame and punish for what’s transpired true, regardless of whether he’s an Other or not). Meanwhile, here’s Ana Lucia trying to do the right thing and accept responsibility for Shannon’s death, and yet while Sayid grudgingly recognizes that there is a truth in what she says—she is the one who pulled the trigger—he continues to see the truth as something quite different: that the Others are the ones who “really” killed Shannon. It’s understandable, I suppose; no one wants to think the death of a loved one was meaningless, an accident born of fear, fatigue, and rain. Much better—and perhaps easier—to believe there were dark forces at work rather than acknowledge we can lose everything we hold dear in an instant for no other reason than that a butterfly flapped its wings in China.

 

Ana Lucia, on the other hand, has against all expectations emerged as the first voice of reason in the entire Henry saga. And has indeed apparently learned from her mistakes—or perhaps her mistakes simply reminded her of who she once was. Instead of immediately assuming guilt, as she did with Nathan, Ana approached Henry as a cop would (or should), determined to be guided by the facts as much as by her instincts. Whether Ana believes finding the balloon immediately clears Henry of suspicion is questionable; she may be just as interested in gauging how he reacts when she tells him what they discovered. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the irony at play here: Ana Lucia, the person who perhaps has the strongest reasons to distrust Henry, is now the person who appears the most willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

 

While these two main truth/trust storylines dominated the hour, even the briefest interactions also reflected the themes of the hour. Locke presented a truth to Jack—that he’d been thinking about bringing Ana Lucia in—only to reveal it was but one aspect of a larger truth, namely that she was talking to Henry at that very moment. We saw Ana tell Jack and Locke a truth about her conversation with Henry, but not the entire truth regarding what their meeting produced. When Sun claimed she was simply lightheaded when speaking with Rose and Bernard, she was sharing a truth about her health while omitting her suspicions as to why she felt as she did. Jack obliquely told Sun a truth about his understanding of her situation, as urging her to tell the whole truth indicated he realized she had something to hide, but then literally turned around and gave Kate as vague a truth as possible in response to her question about the hatch. And Sawyer went and told Jin he was going to be a father, sharing a truth Sawyer was well aware would be meaningless to the person it mattered to the most.

 

Oh, and lest I forget, we capped the episode with Henry sharing a few truths with Jack and Locke, the final one intended solely to twist the mental knife as deeply as possible. And the beauty of it is that this particular truth remains true regardless of whether Henry is an Other or not. If he is, he gets the pleasure of rubbing his deception in their faces when it’s far too late for either of them to do anything about it. If he’s truly just another castaway, sharing his honest opinion still serves the purpose of screwing with their minds and paying them back for some of the misery they’ve caused him over the past few days. Either way, Henry definitely won that round.

 

In other news:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All in all, I still found this to be an intriguing episode despite the lack of answers about, well, anything. I enjoy the character studies just as much as I do those episodes that delve more deeply into the island’s mysteries, and the more we see of Jin and Sun’s background the more complex and multi-layered a portrait of marriage their union becomes. Besides, on a show that constantly has us wondering why these folks are on this island and what the hell is actually happening to them, the question of what is “a” truth and what is “the” truth is certainly not an idle one; indeed, it’s one we’d do well to keep in mind as the creators continue their dance of both obscuring and revealing the larger picture.

 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some episode screencaps to drool over examine...

 

 

 


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