Lost Review:
"316" (Episode 5.06)

It's highly personal, but this has always made me slightly uncomfortable. Perhaps it's our rigorous separation of church and state that disallowed me from saying the Pledge of Allegiance in middle school, or the music industry's black-and-white genres, marketing Switchfoot to a completely different audience than Iron and Wine. With a divider like the island's electric-fence security system, I want my religion over here and my entertaining sci-fi over there, never the twain to meet.

But in a world where polar bears roam the tropics, this doesn't seem a realistic option. And it probably shouldn't be. Last night's Lost pulled religious (primarily Catholic) themes into the mix again, and I started to settle into it, realizing that this show is all about that twilight zone between the real and imaginary, the sacred and the secular, the bizarre and highly mundane. It pushes us into those uncomfortable places, and perhaps therein lies its brilliance.

"316" brought Jack, Kate and the crew back into Mrs. Hawking's world. The crew walked down the isle, past the icons and candles and into an underground lab, complete with a pendulum and a chalk board full of calculation scribbles. Mrs. Hawking tells them she's not exactly searching for where the island is, but where it is in time. She tells the group that if they leave on a plane now, they might just make it back. 

Jack's doubts as to whether this is possible lead Ben to construct an elaborate analogy between their situation and Thomas the Apostle. He tells Jack the story of how Thomas doubted Jesus' resurrection until he touched his actual wounds. However, he also tells Jack that the group doesn't have this option. When it comes to the island, they need to take a "leap of faith." For Jack, a surgeon used to dissecting the world around him, this is a difficult order. 

Told that he must find something of his father's to give to Locke's corpse, Jack finds his dad's old shoes. He remembers that he simply put tennis shoes on his own father's feet for burial, because of his extreme antipathy toward him. In a moment of tenderness, Jack lifts the lid of John's casket and places his father's shoes on him. Maybe its a stretch, but in light of all the religion sprinkled throughout this episode, the story of Jesus washing his disciples feet seemed like an obvious reference point. It was a move of supreme humility for Jack, who's always loathed John.

I'm settling in to the physics/metaphysics blend, especially when you see how a character's faith, or lack thereof, is affecting their interaction with others. Church above, lab below, Lost seems to be pushing us to see that maybe those two places aren't so antithetical after all.