Lost: "The Other Woman"

Not nearly enough poems composed in archaic repetitive rhyme schemes have been written about the cruel beauty that radiates from Elizabeth Mitchell's sad, curious face. Not to say that the actress is herself cruel, or sad. In fact, she is the prototypical "Lost" actor, rescued from a career of TV guest appearances and co-starring roles in big-screen dross (she was the Missus in "Santa Clause" 2 and 3) that established her credentials as a journeyman pro but that only hinted at her depth as an actress. You can imagine that she has had to fight to make a career: bit parts in 90s TV shows with names like "LA Firefighters" and "Significant Others," Dennis Quaid's wife in "Frequency," Linda McCartney in a TV movie that was actually called "The Linda McCartney Story." She was Angelina Jolie's lesbian lover in "Gia," one of the very rare TV movies that people actually talked about. But Angelina became Angelina, and Elizabeth Mitchell had a four-episode stint on Jennifer Love Hewitt's "Party of Five" spin-off.

I don't mean to make fun of her. Far from it. This woman is tough. She never had her debutante moment, was never the next It Girl, like her old co-stars Jolie and Hewitt (and now Evangeline Lilly). She has just worked, and kept on working, past the age when Hollywood stops paying attention, maybe waiting for her big breakthrough, maybe satisfied enough to be a working actress, which is usually an oxymoron.

That is why her beauty is so particularly cruel - because it bespeaks a certain wizened experience, an understanding of despair and human frailty, and a cold, black humor about this cold, dark world. It is that humor - that deadpan, fatal sarcasm - that made Juliet such an instantly perfect addition to the show. For those first six episodes of season 3, when Sawyer and Kate were in cages and nothing seemed to make the least amount of sense, mysterious Juliet was the reason to keep watching, beckoning us forward.

Lost's first round of female characters were desperately sincere - spunky Kate, preggers Claire, just-wants-to-be-loved Sun. They tried to do something different with Ana Lucia, but she was a bit too much of an extreme in the other direction - unnecessarily angry at everything, as if Michelle Rodriguez had her boxer's grimace from "Girlfight" botox-carved permanently on her magnificently self-loathing face. I liked Ana Lucia, but her best moment was unquestionably her death. It was the shot of thrill juice the show needed, coming after long weeks of number-typing.

Juliet was different. For one thing, she was funny. Hilarious, even. There are a few characters on "Lost" who can save a listless episode with just a couple of lines - Ben, obviously; Sawyer, with his endlessly hyper-referential nicknames; Hurley, with infinite inventive inflections on the word "dude"; and Juliet, who had one of the best lines of last week's "The Constant." Faraday was about to explain the whole time-jumping helicopter mindfuck, when Charlotte (who, I'm guessing, is the one member of the Fantastic Freighter Four who is genuinely evil - as opposed to Miles, who is just petty, money-mongering evil) said:

CHARLOTTE: Dan, let's not confuse anyone.

JULIET: (with impeccable timing and an expressively inexpressive face to challenge Buster Keaton) Well, Daniel, maybe if you talk real slow, we'll be able to follow.

Lines like that don't just make you giggle. Whenever the show reaches astronomical heights of time-skipping cross-reality geekery, moments like that give the show its bite. Much of "Lost" has been done before, but it's never been done with such a nimble sense of humor. People never cracked jokes in "Forbidden Planet." People didn't even know what sarcasm was in "Forbidden Planet."

"The Other Woman" was a Juliet showcase, and its story was so straightforward, both in the island present and the island past, that it's mesmerizing to consider just how delicately the writers wrapped this flashback together with her welcome-to-the-island showstopper, last season's "One of Us." Both episodes covered pretty much the same time frame - "One of Us" showed us Juliet's arrival, and "The Other Woman" begins soon afterwards; the earlier episode ended just after Flight 815 crashed, while last night's took us forward just about a month later.

But man, did "The Other Woman" change pretty much everything we understood about "One of Us." Hell, last night changed just about everything we knew about everything. Because as much as "The Other Woman" told us more about Juliet, it told us even more about Ben. We learned that, in his own strange, megalomaniacal, socially maladjusted little-boy-lost Big-Bad way, Ben is in love with Juliet.

Juliet's therapist mentioned that Juliet "looked just like her," leaving everyone to ponder on that "her." (Someday, someone will write an extended thesis about the use of pronouns in "Lost" - Tom, spotted sans beard by a drugged out Claire, explaining to Ethan that "he" is getting impatient; Kate, practically shining with make-up off the island, telling a brokedown Jack that she has to leave, because "he" will be waiting for her; Hurley, on the asylum basketball court, yelling at Jack that "it" wants us to come back).

That "her" may be a reference to Ben's old childhood friend Annie, whose fate we'll probably learn about in Ben's next flashback. But then again:

 

The woman on the top is Elizabeth Mitchell, radiant as always. The woman on the bottom is Carrie Preston, who played Ben's mother in "The Man Behind a Curtain." Am I crazy for seeing a resemblance and sensing some deeper, Freudian romance on Ben's side? Doesn't it make a perverse amount of sense, then, that Carrie Preston is married to Michael Emerson, who plays Ben? Would that not be the most extreme, twisted-romance casting decision ever?

I may be wrong. No matter who Juliet reminds Ben of, his devotion to her formed the emotional punchline of "The Other Woman." It was an unrequited affection - unlike the episode's other entanglements, which were decidedly requited, rife with cuckoldry and betrayal and fulfillment. This was an episode about romance - two love triangles, both with Juliet as the woman in question, stealing one woman's husband and another woman's One True Love - why else would Kate find her way to just that precise spot of the island, except to lose Jack again just as she was returning to him, for good?

You can argue that last night's "Lost" was a soap opera, and it certainly was, in the sense that much traitorous love was made by all. But I think it's more fair, and descriptive, to call it soap operatic - a whirlwind, a rising tide of backstabbing fuckery and dime-store romance, all set against the background of unimaginable evil and unthinkable disaster.

And god, was it hilarious. A therapist accuses her patient of sleeping with her husband, and wants her to stop not because she wants her man back (he's been sleeping on the couch) but because she doesn't want him killed. By the other man. Jesus, Michael Emerson! The scene where he had Juliet over for dinner - "Come in!" he squeaks, with all the nervous desperation of a lonely romantic from a late-period blink-182 song. And then, his declaration of love, so passionate, so petty - "You're mine!"

Watching this episode was like learning that your wife of twenty years had sex with your college roommate before you ever met her - it doesn't change anything, and yet it changes everything. More than anything, "The Other Woman" proves the artfulness of Lost's flashback conceit. This episode was like a good Christmas present - it gave us something we didn't know we wanted so badly. Rather than answering an obvious question - who is the monster, who is Jacob, blah-de-da - it explored a far more devious mystery - just who, exactly, is Ben?

He's a grinning face of evil, charming enough to yell, offhandedly, "See you guys at dinner!" And he is desperately in love - if such an unimaginable possessiveness can be called love - with Juliet Burke.

Who can blame him?

(As an aside: does anyone else notice how good the set designers have gotten about building such three-dimensional scenes? What I mean is, how many times does a new scene start on this show that makes you giggle or marvel at the lunatic detail - Locke barbecuing some rabbits, Sawyer and Hurley playing horseshoes, Juliet and Goodwin sharing some wine from the submarine, Ben's table set for two, Ben's hidden safe. Far more than the kinetic camera and the special effects, it's these little touches that make "Lost" truly cinematic - the minute attention to detail, the way the very environment seems to tell a complete story.)