Lost 6.14, "The Candidate"
Lost 6.14, "The Candidate"
May 06
I’m having a hard time with it.
SPOILERS AHEAD.
Watching Jin and Sun drown together was pretty gut-wrenching TV. I’ve been saying to my wife for weeks that I’d be seriously upset if they killed Sun and/or Jin, after everything they’ve been through. It seems pretty shitty for a show to build up two character arcs around searching for a lost love, then conclude those character arcs with two death scenes barely two episodes after the tearful reunion.
I felt like Hurley, though I didn’t cry. I got pretty emotional, but no howling tears.
It’s hard for me to see past the death and look at the rest of the episode, but I’ll say that it packed a big punch all around. Plot-wise, action-wise, character-wise, just juicy and intense and occasionally kick-ass stuff. Flocke has ascended to total evil badassery at this point; I loved watching him wade into a hail of gunfire without flinching, the bullets not even appearing anywhere near him. The show’s wrapping up, the plot threads are being gathered and tugged (relatively speaking; this show will leave frayed plot edges to be debated for years to come), it all feels right.
But what about those deaths?
A show like Lost, with so many characters and so many individual plot events happening on a weekly basis, I think they have to thin the herd occasionally. You need to move pieces off the board otherwise the game becomes a convoluted mess. There’s maybe no better time to simplify than as the show reaches its conclusion.
Jin and Sun had a good story. It was not a happy ending, but it was a good story. Other than the daughter who will grow up with no parents, which as a daddy myself is a pretty agonizing loose end that will hang out there forever, Jin and Sun had their time. They started at one spot, they made many twists and turns, they became the focus of this big quest across time and space to reunite, and then they reunited. Then they died. The end.
So from a mechanics perspective, I understand the appeal. From a viewer investment perspective, I guess I expected to see the strings too heavily, and feel ripped off by their deaths.
After seeing it play out, though, I don’t know if I feel ripped off. Would I preferred them shunted off somehow to a safe part of the world where they could raise their kid and live happily ever after? Absolutely. But how do you pull that off on a show like Lost? Do they somehow escape the island even though everyone else is left behind? Do they hang out for three episodes not contributing much, just taking up air time and screen space? (That’s how I’ve felt about another apparent casualty of “The Candidate,” Frank Lapidus–love Jeff Fahey, love the smart-aleck one-liners, but if he wasn’t the only living pilot left on the island, he should have died long ago. Killing him now was almost too late, although it did have the effect of taking that pilot off the table with only a few episodes to go.)
Sayid died too, and in some ways, that felt cheaper than Sun and Jin. Sayid didn’t have a tidy close to his arc; he didn’t find redemption, or at least not much, and he didn’t complete his turn to the dark side. He just sorta…blew up. But again, the piece is off the board.
Someone had to go; characters we care about had to vanish. It’s killer that it had to be Sun and Jin. But look at that beach at the end of “The Candidate.” Look at who remains–Hurley, Kate, Sawyer, Jack. In many ways, the emotional heart of the show from its start. They’ll seemingly face off against the Man in Black and his minion Claire in one final showdown for the fate of their lives and the island. Ultimately, that’s as it should be, even if it makes an orphan. (Or two, if Lapidus had kids.)
