Dec 13 2008
The Mystery of LOST’s terrible fathers
One theme that keeps recurring in LOST is that of the crash survivors’ terrible fathers. There are so many of them!
I see two possibilities. Either this unusual abundance of bad fathers is just a coincidence, something that seeped out of the subconscious of the writers, who perhaps themselves struggled with father issues, without any larger significance — or else it is a key element of the overall plot.
I believe it is a key element of the plot. I think that the shortcomings of the fathers must have something to do with the reason that these particular sons and daughters were all brought to the Island, whatever that reason may turn out to be.
Locke’s father Anthony Cooper, aka the “real” Sawyer:
Probably the most evil of all the bad fathers is Locke’s father, the “real” Tom Sawyer, who conned his son out of a kidney and then tried to kill him by pushing him out of a high-rise window. Here’s a clip of that scene (it’s from The Man From Tallahassee, Season 3, episode 13), in case you want to take a little trip down LOST memory lane:
Locke, of course, miraculously survived the fall, but became paralyzed.
So Locke’s father took away Locke’s ability to walk — and then the Island gave Locke that ability back. Could that be a clue as to what the Island is all about? Does it restore what the bad fathers have taken away?
If so, why? Why would the Island give back what the fathers have taken away? And how?
Let’s look at some of the other bad fathers for clues. There’s Sun’s gangster father, Mr. Paik. Sun seems to have found the courage, on the Island, to stand up to her father in her post-Island life.
There’s Sawyer’s father, who killed his mother and himself. When Sawyer killed Locke’s father on the Island, he seemed to reach some peace with his memory of his own father.
So in this two cases, the pattern does seem to hold — the Island gave back something that the fathers had taken away.
The stories of Jack and Claire’s erratic alcoholic father, Christian Shephard, and of Kate’s father, who abused her mother, are still unfinished, but I expect will be signficant — especially the story of Shephard.
Another interesting aspect of the existence of the bad fathers is the way they provide connections between many of the main characters who would otherwise be unconnected. This is something I will write about in a future post.
