'Lost' recap: Mirror Image

In the season premiere of Lost three weeks ago, Jack Shephard looked at himself in the mirror and saw a small cut on his neck that left him baffled. He wondered: How did that get there? We wondered: What does it mean? In last night's episode, ''Lighthouse,'' Jack's man-in-the-mirror season continued with a series of peculiar looking glass encounters. On the Island, Jack's story began with a shot of the flawed and fallen castaway leader scrutinizing his reflection on the surface of Temple Lake like a seer trying to discern his fate in a scrying pool. It ended with Jack smashing the enchanted glass inside the Lighthouse after peering into it and seeing the haunted manse of his unhappy childhood home. He was left to ponder the implications while gazing out on the ocean; here's hoping his deliberations will include the epiphany that his paranoid conclusions about what he saw inside the Island's derelict divination tower were all wrong. (That's my theory, at least. More on that in a little bit.)

In the Sideways world, Doc Shephard spotted his appendix scar in the mirror and struggled to recall the forgotten/suppressed memory of when the ruptured organ was removed. Again, he wondered: How did that get there? Again we wondered: What does it mean? This story ended with Jack looking into the episode's most unusual and most miraculous of mirrors — the eyes of his son, David. What he saw in them was the very thing his Island self should have recognized in the Lighthouse: an invitation to let go of the past and move into the future.

The Sideways World
The Dead Father Lives!

Dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead.
The Dead Father, Donald Barthelme

''Lighthouse,'' the fifth episode of Lost's sixth season, was the mirror twin to ''White Rabbit,'' the fifth episode of the show's first season. ''White Rabbit'' — which was referenced numerous times in various ways during the hour — was the one where Castaway Jack chased after the now-you-see-him/now-you-don't ghost of his dead father. The subsequent jungle journey led Jack to Christian Shephard's empty coffin, denying him the opportunity he was truly pursuing. And what was that opportunity? Follow the rabbit trail of pain. You don't have what it takes, Christian told Young Jack during a boozy stupor. That one left a mark. Father Shephard was actually trying to teach his son a lesson — that being a hero isn't something you choose to be, but rather something that you just are, and that when you try to be a hero, and you fail, then what you become is a failure, at least in your own eyes, and that's a mighty hard thing to live with, if you can live with it at all. If you've watched all of Lost, then you know the great irony of Christian's harsh wisdom: Jack has pretty much proven his father correct. But did Christian correctly identify Jack's fundamentally flawed nature — or did he nurture it with his problematic brand of parenting? And the debate rages. Yet we must also remember that Jack had wounded his father, too. ''White Rabbit'' flicked at that when Mama Shephard ordered her adult son to go save Christian from his bender down under by telling him that he had no choice in the matter, ''not after what you did.'' We learned exactly what Jack did two seasons later in ''A Tale of Two Cities'': Gripped by the paranoid conviction that Christian was sleeping with his ex-wife Sarah, Jack wound up subverting his alcoholic father's bid to go sober and atone for his past sins. Put another way, Jack returned the slight his father had given him as a child; Jack's faithlessness left Christian convinced that he, too, lacked the right stuff for heroic endeavors. Jack brought all that pain and all that guilt with him to the Island, and so when he thought he saw his dead father beckoning him into the jungle, he gave chase, thinking divine forces that he had never before believed in had given him the opportunity he yearned for, be it consciously or subconsciously: a chance at redemption; a chance at reconciliation; a chance at restoration. But the coffin was empty. His father? Not there. And so Jack's sick soul has festered like an infected appendix on the precipice of bursting and poisoning him with icky toxic pus, and my brain just quit on this paragraph, but I think you get the idea. It's basically what Claire's said: ''If there's one thing that'll kill you around here it's infection.''

Anyway, this is all to say that the Sideways Jack that we got to know in ''Lighthouse'' was a lot like the Castaway Jack we've come to know over the past five season, but also very different, in ways both obvious and not so obvious. (Has there ever been a less helpful sentence ever written than that last one?) We met him as he was washing a hard day's work off himself and talking with his mother about the mystery of Christian's missing coffin. Yep: still missing. Probably in Berlin, according to the airline, but nobody knew for sure. The Widow Shephard was flummoxed. How could someone possibly lose a dead body? The lack of resolution had left her proverbially paralyzed; she needed Jack's help in settling Christian's affairs. (In more ways than one.) It would be wrong to say Jack was unfazed by his father's Lost-in-the-system corpse (he certainly seemed moved by his mother's need), but at the same time I didn't get the sense he was haunted by it, either. Perhaps the wise words of Sideways Locke at the airport back in the premiere had given him some peace. ''They didn't lose your father,'' Locke said. ''They just lost his body.''

NEXT: Michael and Walt live! Sort of...