Rewatching LOST: 2.21 “?”

While Jack tends to a gravely wounded survivor, Eko and Locke share surreal dreams that lead them to the site of the large question mark from the blast door map.

• Ana-Lucia visits Eko in a dream and tells him that he “needs to help John.” In the same dream, he sees his brother Yemi inside the Swan station, who says that the work being done in that place is “more important than anything,” and that Eko needs to make Locke take him to the question mark. Before he wakes up, Yemi tells him to bring an axe. Eko awakens and sets out to find Locke at once.
• Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and Locke return to the Swan station after realizing that Ana-Lucia has a gun that she means to use on the Other known as “Henry Gale.” But before they enter, Michael comes stumbling out with a gunshot wound to the shoulder, claiming that Henry shot him and escaped. As Eko arrives and offers his help, Kate and Sawyer run inside to find Ana-Lucia dead and Libby severely injured. Later, Eko performs Last Rites over Ana-Lucia’s body while Jack and Kate work to treat Libby’s wounds. She tries desperately to tell them that it was Michael who shot her, but her injuries prevent her from being able to speak. Jack angrily tells the others that he wants to go after Henry and hunt him down, but Eko volunteers to go instead, and asks for Locke’s help with tracking.
• Inside the Swan station, Michael nervously asks if Libby has said anything to Jack, but Jack says she’s unconscious. She’s dying, and he can’t save her; all he can do is make her comfortable. He asks Sawyer for the heroin stash, and assigns Kate to accompany him. Sawyer realizes that Jack’s only sending her along so that she can see where Sawyer’s hidden the heroin — and the guns. But Jack doesn’t back down, and Sawyer sees he has no choice, so Kate agrees.
• Morning arrives at the beach as Sawyer leads a suspicious Kate to his tent. Kate is stunned to learn that Sawyer hid the guns in a hole in the ground beneath his tent, and they’ve been right there the whole time. As they’re about to return to the Swan station, Hurley approaches and asks if they’ve seen Libby, and Kate’s forced to tell him the bad news.
• Kate, Sawyer, and Hurley return to the Swan station, where Libby lays dying. Distraught, Hurley quietly tells Michael that he and Libby were about to have their first date, and then says he’s glad Michael is okay.
• Once they are alone in the jungle, Eko reveals that he lied to Jack and has an alternate plan: he wants Locke to take him to the question mark. It takes some convincing, and Locke never believes in Eko’s quest, as he’s going through his own crisis of belief, but he finally reveals the location of the question mark as he saw it on the blast door map. While following the map, they unexpectedly come upon the crashed beechcraft that held Yemi’s body, which was burned to cinders by Eko after he recently discovered it. The next morning, Locke wakes up screaming after having a nightmare in which Eko was invited by Yemi to climb up the side of the cliff — the same one that the beechcraft fell from — only to fall. When he reveals to Eko that he had a dream involving a priest, Eko realizes that climbing the cliff is the next step they’re meant to take. He leaves Locke on the ground and climbs to the top, where he gets a new and different vantage point on their whereabouts: visible in the ground near the downed plane is a large question mark. Back on the ground, Eko finds that the ground around the top, circular portion of the question mark has been salted, to keep anything from growing on it. Eko theorizes to Locke that he believes whatever is here was marked as a target so that planes flying overhead could see it. At the question mark’s bottom point, Eko locates another hatch and the two of them anxiously dig it up. Eko uses his axe to pry open the handles, and the two of them look down into a long, eight-sided shaft that’s very similar to the one that led the survivors to the Swan station, except that this one has a ladder on the side that’s intact. They climb down and find that the small station consists of a bank of video monitors. Locke fiddles with them until one of them turns on and shows a live feed from the Swan station. There are dozens of blank notebooks in an adjacent closet, and a suction tube for sending messages to some unknown destination. Eko finds a video tape labeled “Orientation,” and he and Locke sit down to watch it together. The video explains that this Dharma station, “The Pearl,” is dedicated to surveillance and observation, and that the Initiative workers assigned there were to observe all of the activities of another station via hidden cameras, where workers believed they were carrying out very important work — only they weren’t. It was all just a psychological experiment. Locke is disillusioned by this, believing that the Swan station is the psychological experiment referred to in the video. Which would mean that everything he thought about the island and the Swan station was a lie. Eko, on the other hand, is encouraged by what he’s seen, believing they’re being tested. He says that the reason for pushing the button was never because they were told to in a video, but because they believe they were meant to. Locke explodes in outrage, his faith shattered and his life now rendered meaningless. But Eko explains that every road he’s traveled in life has led him to this place, citing the remarkable “coincidence” that Yemi’s plane crashed on the same island that he did, right above the Pearl station, concealing it until now. He volunteers to take over the “button pushing” duties from Locke.
• At the Swan, Jack gives Libby a shot of heroin to ease her suffering. Hurley asks to talk to her, and he apologizes for forgetting the blankets — the reason that she came to the Swan station right before getting shot. She wakes up just then, and whispers Michael’s name, trying to tell them who shot her, but Jack misinterprets it as concern for Michael’s wellbeing, and assures her that Michael survived being shot. She stops breathing just then, and Jack gently closes her eyes. Hurley cries by her side, while Kate ends up in tears out in the living area, where Sawyer shows up to cradle her with comfort. The countdown computer begins to beep loudly, as Michael stands over Ana-Lucia’s dead form, looking ominous.

• Some time after he took up the role of a priest following his brother’s death, Eko moved to Australia, where he worked at a local parish under the pseudonym Father Tunde. It’s unknown how long he lasted there, but he made arrangements at one point to change his identity again and flee to Los Angeles. Before he could carry out this plan, the church’s monsignor asked him to investigate an apparent miracle: a girl named Charlotte Malkin who had died but returned to life the next day. The undertaker assigned to the case gave Eko a tape recording of his autopsy — during which the girl seemingly came back to life, screaming. The next day, Eko visited the family of Charlotte Malkin, where he meets her father, Richard — the same Richard Malkin who was a psychic and tricked Claire into boarding Oceanic 815 — who said that it’s all a big mistake. Malkin told Eko that his daughter was never really dead, just in hypothermia, and that the undertaker didn’t catch it. He claimed that his wife was a religious zealot who appealed to the church to get involved because she wanted to spite him, revealing to Eko that he wasn’t psychic at all, but a con artist. Eko left the Malkin family in peace and resumed his planned trip to L.A., but Charlotte found him at the Sydney Airport and gave him a haunting message from Yemi: “You were a good priest.” She claimed to have seen Yemi when she was “between places,” where he told her that Eko would come to visit her and that even though he was pretending, he was a good man. “He wants you to know that he will see you soon,” she said. “He said that even though you don’t have faith in yourself, he has faith in you.” Eko couldn’t accept her words as the truth, and became angry. He was almost shouting as Libby passed by and asked if everything was okay. “He has faith in you,” Charlotte said. “One day you’ll believe me.”
• The full transcript of the Pearl Orientation film:

  The film’s title screen reads “The Dharma Initiative, 5 of 6, Orientation.” A second screen shows the octagonal Dharma logo, and reads “Orientation – Station 5 – The Pearl.” The man from the Swan Orientation video, who claimed to be Dr. Marvin Candle then, appears and says: “Hello. I’m Dr. Mark Wickmund, and this is the Orientation film for Station 5 of the Dharma Initiative. Station 5, or the Pearl, is a monitoring station, where the activities of participants in Dharma Initiative projects can be observed and recorded, not only for posterity, but for the ongoing refinement of the initiative as a whole. As Karen DeGroot herself has written, ‘Careful observation is the only key to true and complete awareness.’ Your tour of duty in the Pearl will last three weeks, and during this time you and your partner will observe a psychological experiment in progress. Your duty is to observe team members at another station on the island. These team members are not aware that they are under surveillance, or that they are the subjects of an experiment. Working in eight-hour shifts, you and your partner will record everything you observe in the notebooks we’ve provided. What is the nature of the experiment, you might ask? What do these subjects believe they are accomplishing, as they struggle to fulfill their tasks? You, as the observer, don’t need to know. All you need to know is that the subjects believe their job is of the utmost importance. Remember, everything that occurs — no matter how minute, or seemingly unimportant — must be recorded. Each time a notebook is filled with the fruits of your diligent observation, roll it up and insert it into one of the containers provided. Then, simply place the container in the pneumatic tube and presto — it will be transported directly to us. At the end of your eight-hour shift, proceed to the Pala Ferry, which will take you back to the Barracks. [garbled video] On behalf of the DeGroots, Alvar Hanso, and all of us here at the Dharma Initiative, thank you, namaste, and good luck.” The film ends with a copyright screen that reads “The Hanso Foundation, 1980. All Rights Reserved.” It’s worth noting that Marvin Candle’s arm — which seemed to be lame or missing altogether in the Swan Orientation film — is perfectly intact in this one, leading one to believe that it was recorded earlier than the Swan film.

• The question mark was the location of the Pearl station, a station where the behavior of Dharma members was monitored and recorded for a supposed psychological experiment.
  Question: What is represented by the very conspicuous question mark at the center of the map? 2.17

• Who or what guided Eko and Locke through their dreams to the Pearl station, aka “the question mark”? And why?
• Was Eko right about the salted circle on the ground above the Pearl station being made a visible target for planes to see? If so, why? Could the circle be the intended target of the Dharma food drops?
• Where does the message tube from the Pearl station carry messages to?
• Why does the man in the Dharma orientation videos go by different names in each one?
• Locke believed the Pearl Orientation video’s claim that the Swan was nothing but a psychological experiment, and all the button-pushing was pointless. Eko believed that the Pearl video was a lie, a test of their faith, implying that it was the observational tasks at the Pearl that were pointless. Which one of them is correct?
• Richard Malkin claimed to be a fraud, yet his terrified reading of Claire when she was pregnant seemed genuine. Was he perpetuating his fraudulent business with Claire, or was she somehow the one real psychic reading he ever had?
• Did Charlotte Malkin truly come back to life? Or was her father’s scientific explanation for everything the more accurate one?

• “?” is the second Eko-centric episode of the series.
• With the death of Libby Smith, there are now 46 survivors remaining alive.
• I remember hearing that film director Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain, The Wrestler) was courted by the show’s staff to direct this episode, and though he initially signed on, he had to cancel when his wife gave birth to their child.
• The Pearl is the fourth Dharma station to be visited by the survivors, after the Swan, the Arrow, and the Staff.
• This episode is notable for the first mentions of both the Pala Ferry and the Barracks. The Barracks wouldn’t be seen until Season 3, but the Ferry was the location Jack, Kate, and Sawyer were taken as captives in just a few episodes’ time.

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Image credits: “Rewatching Lost” logo by Robin Parrish. Season 2 cast promotional image and Dharma Initiative logo: American Broadcasting Company.