Last Night on Lost (#305--"The Cost of Living"): The Smoke Being reappears, and it becomes clearer that it is the spirit of the Island that is the object of Locke's faith. The Smoke Being is what Locke refers to when he says things like "The Island brought us here." It also seems pretty clear that the Smoke Being took the shape of Eko's brother, Yemi, in last night's episode. And if that's true, it eplains the other "hallucinations" that appear to the castaways from time to time--Jack's Father, the dripping-wet Walt as Shannon saw him once, Boone as Locke saw him a couple of episodes ago, the horse that Kate saw, and probably the boar that harassed Sawyer, not to mention the polar bear and the whispering. We're not talking about a being that appears in ordinary daylight consciousness, but a shapeshifter that exists in the dreamtime of shamanic consciousness. The castaways may or may not be dead in the "Sixth Sense" way, but they are not living in ordinary day-time consciousness.
In my recollection Locke and Eko were the only two who had come face to face with the Smoke Being and survived. I described this encounter in previous posts as a moment of judgment, and that was precisely the nature of Eko's encounter last night. In Locke's and Eko's first encounter they stood face to face with it, and the Smoke Being withdrew. So there was a reason that both Locke and Eko were spared the violent fate that the others suffered. In Eko's case I took this as an indication that the Smoke Being looked into his soul and saw the goodness there that derived from the way his life intertwined with his brother Yemi's life. And that this connection with Yemi had redemptive value that outweighed the grisly violent evil done by Eko as a Nigerian drug lord.
Locke's encounter with the Smoke Being both terrified and fascinated him. He ran from it, but he was willing to let it take him into that hole it was dragging him into toward the end of the first season. Remember how angry he was at Jack for "saving" him? That's the normal reaction when you have an encounter with the "sacred"--both fear and fascination. And last night Locke told Eko when he had encountered it before he saw in it light and beauty, suggesting that this being was not the evil monster, at least for him, that everyone thought it to be. Maybe a better way to think about the Smoke Being is similar to the wrathful Old Testament God who is merciful to those who know and love him but who is at the same time quite capable of inflicting the worst horrors on those who defy him, as for instance his wiping out half of the Pharaoh's Egypt in Moses' day.
I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here. The Moses' theme was earlier connected to Eko when he learned that Claire had named her baby Aaron. Eko told Claire that it was the name of Moses' brother. Not that that proves anything, but the brother and sister theme is important for the writers: you've got Charlie/Liam, Shannon/Boone, Eko/Yemi, and even a hint that Jack/Claire are sibs unbenownst to one another.
But I digress: In Eko's encounter with Smoke Being last night, he he comes face to face with the spirit of the island, and the spirit of the island has the face of his brother, and he is the spirit of judgment. Testing and judgment, if my theory about the show is correct, is the whole point about one's existence on the island. If Locke is right and the Island did bring all the castaways to the island for a reason, the reason is judgment. And so the Purgatorio idea still has legs.
The Smoke Being's relationship to the Others is not clear. I used to think that it was a tighter relationship than the story as it has developed now supports--that they too were agents of judgment, but they seem to have their own intramural dramas, which might be in their own way for them tests or dramas of judgment. But who knows? It might all just be elaborate theater, a con to put the castaways in test situations to see how they will react, The Others, like the Smoke Being, are shape shifters. What you are allowed to know about them has little to do with who they really are. The prickly Henry/Ben is likely to turn out to be the island's benevolent Prospero or Sarastro, and the vulnerable, sincere, sympathetic Juliet, the steely, evil, vindictive Queen of the Night.
But last night was Eko's story, and I was disappointed to see that the writers killed him off. It seemed rushed and premature to me, and inconsistent with the way they had been developing his character. I liked the way the writers were depicting Locke, the white middle-class, middle manager of a box company, as the group's shaman. And then contrasting this with the Eko, who images the powerful African tribal chieftan, as the representataive of biblical religion. It fit in so nicely with what I have been writing about retrieval and fusion: that as traditional cultures modernize, modern cultures premodernize. Maybe Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, the actor who plays the part, had other commitments and would no longer be available, so they had to write him off the island. There are too many questions left unanswered about him to just let him go like that. It looked like he was being set up to play a key role in the story as it evolves.
In any event, whatever Eko saw in his first encounter with the Smoke Being, it was clear he was not seeing light and beauty in this last encounter with it. He was meeting the "wrathful" Smoke Being that judged him unrepentant and worthy of death. So the moment of judgment for Eko was a negative one, and that's the part that doesn't make that much sense to me. Was the reason for his condemnation his refusal to acknowledge and confess his sinful past? That's what the writers seem to be suggesting, but it seems like such a flatfooted and simplistic reason that goes against the sophistication and complexity of Eko's story as it had been developed, especially in the second-season episode called "Psalm 23".
"Psalm 23" was the episode that really got me hooked on Lost because it was a remarkably well-crafted story about the interpenetration of good and evil and of the redemption of evil by Goodness and Love which has the last word. Last night's episode suggests that Eko's redemption hadn't taken, that he was still the captive of his violent past, and that his brother's love was powerless in the end. Condemnation rather than redemption had the last word.
Eko's refusal to repent on one level seems feisty and noble, but isn't it really no more than the Darwinian, lizard-brain justification of all thugs and fascists--"I did what I had to do to survive." No he did far worse than what was needed to survive. His situation is morally complex only because his original sin was commited out a love for his brother. The brutality of his later life was set in motion by what happened to him in that critical choice he made as a child, but cannot be solely attributed to it.
The Eko that I thought the writers had created would have understood that. He was far more morally complex and interesting than the self-justifying thug he was portrayed to be in last night's episode. This end for him seems too contrived. Either the writers were forcing something for reasons that are hidden from us, or I just don't understand what they're trying to do, which is probably the more likely explanation. But it just left me with a bad taste and a little worried that the writers are floundering.
Previous posts on "Lost" can be found by scrolling through the Pop Culture Archive page, which you can find here.