Rewatching LOST: 2.10 “The 23rd Psalm”

When Eko learns of Charlie’s secret Virgin Mary statue, he demands to be taken to the beechcraft the statue came from, leading to shocking revelations about Eko’s past. At the Swan station, Michael begins to formulate a secret plan.

• Claire tries to get to know Eko better, but in the process brings up Charlie and what she believes is his sudden interest in religion, as evidenced by the Virgin Mary statue he’s been carrying around. The topic piques Eko’s interest straightaway, and he asks to see the statue. When Claire explains that Charlie found it somewhere in the jungle, here on the island, Eko becomes confrontational, demanding to know where. Claire is defensive, pointing out that it’s “just a statue,” until Eko breaks it and shows her the heroin concealed inside.
• Locke changes the combination lock to the Swan station’s armory, believing it to be safer now that the tailies have joined the group. Michael arrives and asks Locke for a gun, and Locke offers to help him learn how to become more proficient at its use. When Locke brings it up, Michael denies that his interest is motivated by a desire to go hunting for the Others alone, again.
• Kate cuts Sawyer’s hair. Sawyer is disconcerted to realize, with Kate’s help, that everyone at the camp has come to like and respect him, after all that he’s been through. Michael approaches the two of them and offers to take Kate’s shift at the Swan station. She agrees.
• Eko confronts Charlie and demands that he take him to where he found the Virgin Mary statue right now. On their way out of camp, Charlie stops to tell Claire that he’s leaving to help Eko but she’s irate over his possession of drugs. He lies, trying to convince her that he didn’t know about the drugs inside the statue, but she’s not interested in his lies.
• Charlie brings Eko to a spot in the jungle where he claims to have found the Virgin Mary statue, but Eko realizes that Charlie’s lying, and tells him that he knows the statue could only have been found inside an airplane. After Charlie agrees to take him to the beechcraft, they argue in the jungle over Charlie’s drug addiction until they are interrupted by the nearby movements of the monster, which is revealed to be comprised entirely of black smoke and seems to be observing them. Later they find a parachute in the jungle and a priest’s body on the ground (the same one Locke and Boone found in Season 1′s “Deus Ex Machina”). Eko abruptly tears open the dead man’s shirt, looking for something, but it’s not there. Instead, he finds a golden front tooth on the body’s skull, and Charlie realizes that Eko knows this man. Eko confirms it by telling him, “This man saved my life.” While Eko prays over the body, Charlie suddenly understands: Eko is a priest. Eko neither confirms nor denies this.
• Much later, Charlie becomes lost in the jungle, unable to find the rest of the way to the plane. Eko asks him to climb a tree to get a better perspective, and Charlie reluctantly agrees. When Charlie is high in the tree, the black smoke monster suddenly appears, violently tossing trees out of its path as it makes a beeline for Eko. But Eko ignores Charlie’s panicked cries to run for his life, stubbornly staring down the smoke monster, which examines him, only inches away from his face. As it studies him, scant images from Eko’s past flash deep throughout its billowing form. Eko refuses to back down, and as suddenly as it appeared, the monster inexplicably withdraws back into the jungle. Charlie jumps down from his tree and asks why Eko didn’t run; Eko says he wasn’t afraid of it. But he’s more interested in finding the plane, which Charlie tells him he did manage to see from the tree.
• Michael reports for Kate’s shift at the Swan station and uses the computer again to talk to Walt. Michael affirms that Walt is okay, and then asks where Walt is being held. While he’s reading Walt’s reply, Jack enters and interrupts their conversation. Jack promises to find a way to help Michael get Walt back.
• Eko and Charlie finally reach the beechcraft, and Eko recognizes it as the same plane he tried to smuggle drugs out of Nigeria on, years ago. Inside he finds a crate full of the Virgin Mary statues and the body of his brother Yemi, who died saving Eko’s life. He cradles his brother’s corpse in his hands, weeping and begging for forgiveness. Charlie enters later and asks what’s going on. Eko explains to him that the dead man is his brother, and then gives Charlie a new Virgin Mary statue to replace the one he broke. Eko sets fire to the beechcraft as a funeral pyre for his brother, and as it burns, Charlie asks one last time if Eko is a priest or not. Eko replies that he is, and recites the 23rd Psalm as a final prayer for his brother.
• As an overture of friendship, Jin introduces Ana-Lucia — who’s still isolating herself from everyone else — to Sun, and gives Ana-Lucia a freshly caught and cooked fish to eat.
• Hurley lends Libby a helping hand in constructing her tent at the fuselage survivors’ beach camp.
• Returning to the beach, Charlie finds Claire angrily throwing his stuff out of their shared tent. She tells him she doesn’t want him anywhere near her or the baby. Late that night, Charlie quietly retreats to a covert spot in the jungle where he adds the Virgin Mary statue given to him by Eko to a stash of duplicates that he’s secretly collected from the beechcraft before it was burned.

• Eko grew up with his younger brother Yemi in Nigeria. Guerilla members came to his village one day to kidnap/recruit children to their cause, and they almost took Yemi, but Eko took his place by killing an innocent man to save his brother’s life. Over time, Eko adapted to his new life and grew up to become a drug running warlord — a cold man with a reputation for “not having a soul.”
• One day, Eko and his organization were contacted by a pair of Moroccan drug dealers, who offered him a large stash of heroin. He slit their throats and took the drugs from them, formulating a plan to transport the heroin out of Nigeria by using a Catholic missionary plane. Eko visited his brother Yemi, who had grown up to become a Catholic priest, and Eko made an offer: if Yemi would help him smuggle the drugs out of Nigeria, Eko would give Yemi enough money for a needed polio vaccine for his entire village. When Yemi refused, Eko returned later with an amended offer: all Yemi had to do was sign ordination papers, effectively making Eko and his men Catholic priests, and they would fly the drugs out of the country themselves. In exchange, Eko would give his brother all the money he needed for the polio vaccines. Still Yemi refused, until Eko threatened to have his men burn Yemi’s church to the ground. Yemi angrily relented, and Eko bought three hundred Virgin Mary statues from his brother, which the church was using to try and pay for its polio vaccines. The day that Eko and his men were preparing to fly the drugs out of the country, Yemi came to the airstrip and begged him not to get on the plane, desperate for him to stay. The reason for his anxiety was quickly revealed when the Nigerian military showed up to stop them; Yemi had reported the drug smuggling to them, but not mentioned names of anyone involved. His plan was for Eko to use his priestly disguise in front of the military to allow him to escape to safety with Yemi. But a gun fight broke out and Yemi was shot. Eko’s subordinate Goldie put Yemi on the plane and forced Eko off of it. Eko was able to fulfill his brother’s wish and assume a new life as a priest while the plane escaped into the air. It was the last time he would ever see his brother alive.

• The beechcraft was a Catholic missionary plane being used by Eko’s criminal organization to smuggle heroin out of Nigeria. The exact circumstances of the beechcraft’s crash on the island are unknown, but presumably it stumbled across the island the same way other crafts — like Oceanic 815 and the Black Rock — did.
  Question: How did a drug-smuggling beechcraft from Nigeria wind up on the island? 1.19
• Boone was correct that the dead priest they found in the jungle was in fact a drug smuggler in disguise — an old operative of Eko’s named Goldie. Goldie’s partner on the plane, however, was a real priest — he was Eko’s brother Yemi, who took his place on the plane.
  Question: Who were the two dead bodies from the beechcraft? Was the “priest” really a priest, or was he just a drug smuggler in disguise, as Boone believed? 1.19

• How exactly was the smoke monster able to call up images from Eko’s past? Was it reading his mind? Or is it technological in nature, accessing electronic records of some kind?
• Why did the smoke monster call up images of Eko’s past while it stared him down? It seemed to quickly scan through highlights from most of his life. Was it attempting to pass some kind of judgment on him?
• What was Walt’s concealed response on the computer when Michael asked where he was being held?

• “The 23rd Psalm” is the first Eko-centric episode of the series.
• Prior to this episode, Lost‘s flashbacks had already shown us individuals who made dramatic changes to their lives after crashing on the island, but few were as radically about-faced as the changes undertaken by Mr. Eko. Here we learned that he was once a ruthless, near-evil criminal in Nigeria who eventually became the genteel priest we had already come to know.
• Eko was a remarkable character with a tremendous sense of self and a powerful screen presence from the first moment we met him. This opportunity to get under his skin and learn about his background didn’t disappoint, and I remember really loving the symmetry of Eko saving his little brother’s life as a boy by taking his place, and then Yemi returning the favor as an adult by taking Eko’s place on the plane that would ultimately crash on the island and kill him. Even as a warlord, Eko carried himself with such nobility that it was impossible not to like him, and the nature of his personal story was downright poetic. Definitely one of Lost‘s most interesting and compelling characters.
• My favorite moment from the episode has to be that look shared between Eko and Charlie right after the monster left. Absolutely priceless.
• Eko is the second person to hold his ground against the smoke monster, after Locke’s similar move in Season 1′s “Walkabout.” Speculation following the Season 5 finale is that Locke’s fate of becoming Jacob’s nemesis was possibly tied to his belief that the smoke monster was a force for good on the island, despite all evidence to the contrary. This is based on the assumption that the smoke monster is either a minion working for Jacob’s nemesis, or is itself another form that Jacob’s nemesis can assume (because we know that the smoke monster can also assume human form). Assuming all of this turns out to be correct, I can’t help wondering if the smoke monster first sized Locke up back in “Walkabout,” deciding then and there that Locke was a perfect candidate to become the loophole Jacob’s nemesis needed to destroy him. If that’s true, then perhaps it was similarly sizing up Eko in this episode, and may have let him live as something of a backup plan, should anything go wrong with Locke. The show’s producers have said many times that they had some really spectacular long-term plans for Eko before the actor decided to leave the show, and I’d be willing to bet that those plans had something to do with the monster, and Locke’s fate.

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