Lighthouse (S6X05)
Airdate: 23 February 2010
Written by: Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse
Directed by: Jack Bender
Running Time: 43 minutes
The final season of Lost arrived burdened with an almost impossible task: to tie together the myriad mythological threads and character arcs spun over five preceding years within a mere seveteen episodes. Creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, having painted themselves into a narrative corner of staggering complexity, were left with precious little time to resolve the labyrinthine plot. This necessity for accelerated, definitive answers resulted in a marked shift in storytelling cadence. Where earlier seasons thrived on slow-burn mystery and implication, Season Six often traded subtlety for expediency. Plot points that might once have been teased across multiple episodes were now frequently introduced and explained within the space of a single instalment, with the nuance of a sledgehammer. The fifth episode, Lighthouse, written by Lindelof and Cuse themselves, stands as a prime example of this truncated approach—a instalment where fascinating concepts are undermined by hurried execution and a frustrating reliance on contrivance.
True to Lost’s tradition, Lighthouse remains ostensibly character-centric, though its focus takes time to crystallise. The episode’s primary 2007 narrative initially centres on Hugo ‘Hurley’ Reyes, holed up in the Temple. His peaceful sulk is interrupted by the spectral form of Jacob, who delivers a new mission: retrieve Jack Shephard and lead him to a specific destination. The instruction that Hurley is a “candidate” proves a potent passcode, disarming the Temple’s leader, Dogen, and allowing the duo to depart. Their journey through the jungle is a brief, nostalgic trek, intersecting with a fleeing Kate Austen—who refuses sanctuary—and culminating at the original survivor caves. It is here that Jack, in a moment of uncharacteristic vulnerability, confesses to his own supernatural experience: following the ghost of his father, Christian Shephard, which led him to this very spot. This thread establishes the episode’s core: a guided tour for Jack, orchestrated from beyond the grave, though one whose purpose remains frustratingly opaque to both him and the viewer.
The tour’s endpoint is the episode’s titular marvel: a towering lighthouse, perched on a cliff edge, which somehow evaded detection for over a hundred days of island survival. Hurley’s blasé explanation—“We weren’t looking for it”—feels less like folksy wisdom and more like a writerly shrug, a hand-wave for a massive geographical retcon. Inside, a large dial, numbered like a celestial compass, is covered with the names of Jacob’s candidates. Following Jacob’s instructions, they turn it to 108, whereupon Jack—upon accidentally touching the lens aligned with his own name, 23—sees fleeting, mirror-image glimpses of his childhood home. This revelation, that the lighthouse functions as a mystical periscope into the candidates’ past lives, is conceptually intriguing. Yet, Jack’s reaction is pure, unadulterated fury. Denied a clear explanation by his absentee puppet-master, he responds by smashing the central mirror to pieces. It is a moment of high drama that rings hollow. Hurley’s subsequent chat with Jacob, who calmly explains that Jack “needed” to destroy it to reach his own conclusions, feels less like profound mysticism and more like narrative justification for a petulant tantrum. This Jack, supposedly the wiser, self-sacrificing leader of later seasons, regresses to the frustrated, controlling surgeon of Season One, his destructive outburst serving primarily to artificially prolong the mystery.
While Jack and Hurley engage in cryptic tourism, a far more compelling and visceral drama unfolds elsewhere. The episode’s secondary 2007 plot follows Jin-Soo Kwon, who awakens caught in a bear trap, rescued—or captured—by a wild-eyed Claire Littleton. Taken to her ramshackle hut, Jin quickly realises Claire is profoundly unwell, her mind shattered by three years of isolation and, as is later revealed, torture at the hands of the Temple’s Others. The horror escalates when she drags in a prisoner: Justin, an Other who feigned death during her ambush. In a chilling scene, Justin confirms Claire’s paranoid accusations, coldly stating the Others experimented on her and discussing the merits of snapping her neck. Claire’s response is to murder him in cold blood. Emilie de Ravin delivers a powerhouse performance, masterfully portraying a descent from fractured vulnerability to feral menace. When Jin, desperate to survive, lies that Kate “stole” her son Aaron, Claire vows to kill her. The segment reaches its sinister peak with the arrival of the Man in Black. Claire’s calm introduction—“This is my friend”—is terrifying, confirming her total alignment with the island’s primordial evil. This storyline works because it pays off the “infection” hinted at previously with brutal, emotional logic, transforming a beloved character into a tragic monster and creating genuine, character-driven tension.
In contrast, the episode’s “flash-sideways”—the alternate 2004 timeline where Oceanic 815 never crashed—continues to be the season’s most structurally problematic element. Here, Jack grapples with the bureaucratic disappearance of his father’s coffin and a missing will. In the process, he is revealed to have an ex-wife and a teenage son, David (Dylan Minette), with whom he has a strained, distant relationship. The introduction of David Shephard, despite being a plausible ripple in an altered timeline, feels jarringly like a soap-opera retcon, a late-in-the-game addition designed to inject paternal drama into Jack’s arc. The contrivance compounds when Jack attends David’s piano recital and encounters none other than Dogen—the Temple leader—in the audience, there to see his own son perform. This cameo, while a neat piece of fan service, inadvertently shrinks the expansive world of Lost to a laughably small universe, suggesting alternate Los Angeles operates like a provincial village where every significant character is inexplicably linked. It underscores the flash-sideways’ core weakness: it often feels like a detached, sentimental vignette rather than an integral part of the season’s endgame.
Of the three narrative strands woven through “Lighthouse,” only the Claire and Jin storyline truly resonates with the show’s former strengths. It is a tense, character-driven horror piece that expands the mythology in a personal, devastating way. The Jack and Hurley expedition, while solid in premise, suffers from feeling like filler—a mechanistic fetch-quest designed to deliver exposition (the candidate list) in a visually interesting but ultimately shallow way. Jack’s mirror-smashing rage is a character beat that feels manufactured for episodic conflict rather than organic growth. The flash-sideways, meanwhile, remains an awkward, undercooked appendage, its emotional beats undermined by a sense of artificial construction. *Lighthouse? thus encapsulates Season Six’s central dilemma: in its frantic race to the finish line, Lost too often sacrificed the delicate character psychology and earned mystery that defined its glory years for plot mechanics that clunked as loudly as the gears in Jacob’s mysterious tower.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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