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Nostalgic
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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: May 9, 2007
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Lost, “The Man Behind the Curtain” (Season 3, Episode 20) [Stream on Netflix]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: The upswing in quality from the nadir of the middle of Lost‘s third season to the end of it was swift indeed. There’s a reason why people constantly mythologize the fact that Damon Lindeloff and Carlton Cuse were able to set an end date for their program. Because pretty much as soon as they did, the storytelling on Lost began to … well, “make more sense” wouldn’t be correct. But “move swiftly forward” would. No matter what you think of how Lost shook out in its final three seasons, it’s undeniable that the feeling of running in place that was present in seasons 2/3 was gone. An episode like “The Man Behind the Curtain” is a perfect example of this. In the present-day storylines, Ben Linus is looking for any way to ditch John Locke from his band of others. Locke is impossible to control, for one thing, and more importantly he seems to share a communion with the island that Ben does not, and this frustrates the hell out of Ben. Locke must be dealt with, and by the end of the episode, he sure is.
For a while, it seemed like Lost was setting up a warring-brothers conceit with Jack and Locke. Jack was the Man of Science, while Locke was the Man of Faith, and it would be their two camps in which the rest of the crash survivors would reside. But with the introduction of the endlessly fascinating Ben Linus, Lost went and pivoted. Locke and Jack were still natural adversaries, of course, but that sparring-brothers thing went to Locke and Ben. This is the episode where Ben takes Locke to the shed to “see” Jacob. Locke of course can’t see Jacob; only Ben can do that. But it turns out that Locke can hear Jacob, which meant that Ben was no longer special. And feeling that black-sheep jealousy, Ben lashes out in the petulant/lethal way that makes Ben such a singular character.
It’s a phenomenal episode overall. It answers one of the biggest questions the audience had: what happened to the Dharma Initiative? The answer to that question is darker and yet far less supernatural than we might have been expecting. In the end, it wasn’t the smoke monster or some invisible force that destroyed the Dharma Initiative – it was the vengeance of a neglected and overlooked boy who grew up to be a significantly disturbed man.
Ben Linus may not ever have been a wholly sympathetic character, but until this episode, it was impossible to know whether anything he said was to be believed. This was the first episode where we got any kind of look at Ben that wasn’t filtered through his own words. It was a crucial step towards Ben becoming the kind of quasi-protagonist whose squirrelly perspective would make the final three seasons of Lost so good.
