LOST Discoveries
LOST:
Abandoned
Created by: Jeffery Lieber, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof
Air
date: Wednesday, November 12th, 2005
“Abandoned”:
A gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do.
by Matthew Amason
A Soulful Spike Society Review
I would like to thank my fellow S’cubies for the stirring discussion that contributed to my thoughts on this episode.
We shoulda seen this coming.
It’s a cliché when someone commits a “crime against nature” they wind up dead. And seducing your brother (even if he’s really just your stepbrother) certainly qualifies. Shannon has had sex twice in this series, and immediately afterwards, a member of her family has died (Makes one wonder if she’d snuck in a quickie with someone before teaching the ballet class we first see her in.).
So let’s spend a few minutes looking at the departed Shannon Rutherford: Bitch, Princess, Seducer, Manipulator, and now, as we see in this episode, also a Dreamer and a proud person.
It turns out she wasn’t always a selfish, helpless excuse for a human being: A few years ago, when she was but eighteen, she was a ballet dancer, and instructor(and a decent one, praising her charges where praise was due), and a hopeful aspirant to a one-in-three-thousand chance position with the Martha Graham dance studio.
This episode serves as Shannon’s full return to the world of the human beings that surround and interact with her, rather than just remaining an uncaring, bitter parasite. And as such, since she’s “complete” now, the writers figure they’ve done all they can do with her. But they gave us one unexpected benefit: supreme tension looks to be in the offing between Sayid and Ana-Lucia, Shannon’s accidental killer.
As it often is, communication (and the willful lack of it) is the biggest theme in this episode.
Shannon can’t communicate to Sayid effectively what she has seen, or Sayid is unwilling to believe her: perhaps too afraid to look back on his own weird experiences with the island. He succeeds in communicating to Shannon all too late that he does believe in her, he does love her, and he will not leave her. Which meant that one of them would die in the next three minutes. I’d picked Sayid, myself, thinking they’d drag Shannon along by the hair for a while longer, but I guessed wrong.
Sawyer uses his skills at tormenting people to try to get them to sacrifice him. His pride burning him, making him unwilling to be dependent on others(as he’d have them believe) or to drag them down with him when he is too weak to travel. Witness the way he torments Michael with his “not caring,” which Michael does not believe for a moment. There’s a bond between them, resulting from their shared time on the raft, and the fact that Sawyer took a bullet for Walt, and that Michael used most of the bullets in the gun shooting a tattooed-assed shark that was gunning for Sawyer. (Thanks, Sara!)
Misterko and Ana-Lucia speak in what are riddles to our old Lostaways, speaking of “Goodwin” and the trouble he wrought. Ana-Lucia comments on how she “liked [Mistereko] better” when he was not speaking. She finally relents under Michael’s questioning and demands for an explanation, and comes out with the fact that our Lostaways have had it super-cushy, comparatively.
Charlie and Locke speak in symbolic ways over a game of Backgammon: Locke accuses Charlie of using heroin again (a fact that Claire unintentionally communicates to Locke, speaking of Charlie being a possible “religious nut” due to the heroin-filled statue of the Virgin Mary he carries), His final “it’s your turn” after Charlie angrily describes himself as a “recovering addict” means that not only is it Charlie’s roll of the dice, but that Charlie decides how he deals with the world.
Personally, I don’t think that Charlie’s using, as he’d be a hell of a lot less grumpy if he were. I think he carries the statue with him as a test: a way to convince himself that he’s defying temptation daily, because it’s just a broken statue away. He’s obviously stressed by the responsibilities he’s assumed, but he’s taking it out in jealousy on Claire and Locke. He wants to be needed: I think that it is what is keeping him OFF the junk.
In a flashback, Boone suggests that Shannon “talk to her” referring to his mother: her stepmother. Sabrina, the aforementioned Wicked Stepmother (I mean, who quibbles about a thing like “step-“ being added to “daughter” when their husband is dead in the next room?), cuts Shannon off without warning, and uses the lack of written wishes on the part of her father as an excuse to get rid of her.
Shannon tries, but fails to get Sabrina to understand that the difference between being fascinated by interior decorating and getting accepted to your DREAM job is not a small, insignificant difference. Sabrina has made up her mind already, and isn’t listening.
Boone fails to communicate to Shannon a confidence or belief in her: perhaps because he sees her still as the child with the Marky Mark poster on her wall. She then sets off on the road that she follows for years more: using Sabrina for financial support, by means of keeping Boone in the “Knight in Shining Armor” position.
Upon first viewing, it appears that her pride made her spurn the money that Boone offered her: she would have done better to have taken it, taken the internship, and proven to them all that she had what it took: but she was wounded by the lack of belief: and that just led to more lack of belief in herself, as she set out to become the parasite that her stepmother viewed her as. If we think about it a little longer, though, it looks as if Shannon lacked the confidence in herself to succeed: that it was easier to follow the path of “I’ll show YOU!” with spite and anger aimed at her family, rather than to actually try for the internship.
Think about it, for a moment: she comes from a rich family. It strains credibility to believe that her name would not gain her loans for her dream internship, or access to scholarship resources. When you are accepted at such a prestigious internship, the “getting the funding” part of things is really the easier part: especially with the connections coming from a wealthy family allow for.
Now, with her Knight gone, just like her father was lost before him, she feels as if she will never be able to hold onto the people that she needs to protect her while she learns what she can do: so she sets off on a mission to prove to herself (as well as Sayid and everyone in the camp) that she is not the “joke” she’s always truly believed herself to be. She succeeds, and gets the validation and belief she needs, and proves to someone else that she is not that joke, just before her storyline is closed.
The biggest lack of communication in the episode? Shannon not getting that when a drowned-rat-looking apparition of your dog’s original owner appears before you, and whispers “Shhhh!” with a finger to his mouth, you don’t go off running and screaming in his general direction.
Which leads to a mistaken identification of her as an “Other” by Ana-Lucia, and her untimely death, setting us up for good conflict to come in future episodes.
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