s2e17: Lockdown

Just when you think Locke leads the show in bad-ass-ness (though mostly since we haven't had much Eko for a while), we get an episode like this, which features the typically emasculating Locke backstory, plus restores to Jack much of the bad-ass-ness he lost over the first whiny half of this season and gives Sayid a pretty awesome moment at the end of the show.

Can it really be considered a surprise that "Henry" is an Other? Probably not. The writers teased us on this one as much as any plot point all year, but he was always a little too dramatic, too good with names, too manipulative of his captors to just be some guy who crashed in a balloon. I had thought even after last week's teaser that it was possible that "Henry" had simply seen the balloon and built a story off of that; recall how convinced Sayid was that "Henry" would remember the depth had he truly buried his wife with his bare hands. He also had that number sequence a bit too down pat too quickly, didn't he?

But the real question now is this: just who are the Others? Are they a true part of the Dharma Initiative? I honestly can't say for certain just how much we learned about Dharma in this episode, although the apparent parachute of food and the lockdown of the hatch (not to mention Henry's evident ability to reset said lockdown) suggest that there is plenty of Dharma oversight on the castaways.

If the whole thing is just a bizarre social experiment, the lockdown certainly could have been intentionally triggered to give Locke a clue - that strange map, which appeared to me to be a drawing of various bunkers all over the island and a suggestion that they all had connections to a central point of some sort. The Others seem to have taken pains in the past to keep the castaways from getting too curious about certain things, though, so why they'd intentionally provide such a big clue now... I don't know. But then, there are a lot of things I don't know.

One important clue came from the teaser, where "Henry" cries that "He'll kill me" if he tells anything about his people. This is presumably the same "him" who is referenced in "Maternity Leave" when Zeke and that other guy are talking outside the room where Claire is being kept. Zeke himself appears to be the chief Other when they make outside appearances, so presumably this overseer is the big man in charge of either Dharma or whatever else might be going on.

I continue to feel that Dharma is not a sufficient explanation for all that happens on the island, though, and the film's concern with "incidents" would appear to be proof of that. Perhaps Dharma itself is part of a larger, more mystical connection - which might explain the various appearances of the numbers. Dharma may be working with the castaways they were given, but it still seems unlikely that they could have been responsible for bringing them all there in the first place. The various crossovers in flashback - Hurley owning Locke's company after winning the lottery, Sayid meeting Kate's not-quite-dad in Iraq, Shannon's father ending up in Jack's OR, Sawyer meeting Jack's dad in Australia (the only of these coincidences to date that the castaways are aware of, and done really, really well in a first-season episode) - cannot possibly have been driven by Dharma unless Alvar Hanso is also God, and it seems equally beyond their scope to have picked a few people and then tracked down a bunch of others to whom they were peripherally connected (at best) and then somehow made sure they were all in Australia at the same time.

We should only have five or six new episodes left this season (especially if the finale is two hours again, which seems quite possible); I'm hoping for a ton of fun new revelations. "Locke sees the map" is probably this season's "Locke finds the hatch" in terms of being used for a large section of the mystery plot in the final few episodes, but that's just a guess; the unmasking of "Henry" will surely contribute as well, unless Sayid actually just blows him away in the first five minutes next week.