SUN CONFLICTS

Sun-Hwa Kwon is an enigma, a person or thing that is mysterious, puzzling, or difficult to understand.  

She grew up in a Korean culture dominated by male power. She was expected to be the passive daughter of a wealthy industrialist (with harsh criminal attributes in his business dealings). By all accounts, she grew up as a spoiled, rich kid who had everything the upper class could offer her except excitement.

So she tried to feed her rebellious spirit by trying to undermine her father. Her daddy issues were part cultural, part self-esteem.

Her illicit romance with a poor man, Jin, was an example of her lashing out against her father's wishes. As Jin turned into her father (by being an enforcer for her dad's business partners), Sun began to rebel against her husband by having an affair with her English tutor. We presume that ended badly with her teacher being thrown to his death.

Throughout her back story, we find that Sun had no real close friends. This may be from her isolation as a daughter of a rich and powerful family. She may have been isolated for her own protection against kidnapping, ransom or shaming the family with bad behavior. As such, with Jin she found herself again alone in her home with nothing to do - - - no one to turn to discuss her problems. She thought that she could drastically change her life with the man she loved, but that quickly turned out to be not the case. She turned into the passive, doting spouse. A role that she despised. 

In order to find some self-worth, Sun tried to conceive a child to stabilize her marriage. Jin's infertility put another strain on their relationship to the point Sun was going to leave him at the airport to start a new life alone in America. 

But a pang of regret, remorse or guilt took Sun back to Jin in the airport. It took her onto Flight 815 and her ultimate fate of being trapped on a mysterious island. Since Jin did not know of her English skills, the couple were isolated from the start from the rest of the survivors. This also brought more stress on their relationship since Sun needed to have something more than Jin's paternal iron hand ruling her life. She sought out Kate with her secrets. 

It is ironic that Kate, who could easily make friends with her charm, could never really keep them.

It seemed that Sun could navigate her cursed island life with the meager chance of one true friend to stabilize her marriage, but a jealous Jin and the betrayal that she spoke English, shocked Jin to  shun her.

Here is where the Sun story goes off the rails. 

Despite Jin's infertility, Sun conceived Jin's baby on the Island, which strengthened their marriage but threatened Sun's health. This is the drama that binds the couple together. But logically, many viewers thought that the child was actually her English tutor's. How the "magic" of the island could create a baby in Sun while the couple was cold towards each other could only be thought to be the dream of a weak school girl.

Then the second improbable occurrence: Sun giving birth to her daughter in the jungle with the help of Kate. This was probably more a Kate moment than Sun's, since Kate had avoided her entire life. responsibility for anything or anyone. 

The third improbable occurrence was Sun's near death experience on the freighter. She gets on the helicopter just before the explosion. She is shocked and grief stricken that Jin has been killed. But then she has another near death experience when the island vanishes and the helicopter crashes in the ocean.

Instead of being grateful for having a daughter to care for, Sun's personality changes dramatically.
Back in civilization, Sun became more self-confident and daring, seizing control of her father's company. She also sought revenge for Jin's death. When a man she never trusted, Ben, tells her Jin is still alive, Sun drops everything - - - including the care of her own daughter - - - to return to the island. That makes no sense. Why would a mother with a young infant abandon her to go to a dangerous island in search for her deceased husband? Since she had the power and wealth of a Widmore, she could have sent her own rescue party to the island. We were as naive as she was in trusting Ben.

Back on the island, she is in the wrong time shift. She cannot find Jin. She feels angry and betrayed but somehow never accepts that it is her own fault. And during her island time, she has no remorse or feelings about her daughter.

Once the time lines merge, Sun reunites in a fantasy reunion with Jin. Their reunion was very brief, since the submarine destined to take them home is sabotaged by Flock. In the worst possible story line, Sun is trapped by a locker when the bomb explodes in the submarine. The ship takes on water. Instead of Jin saving himself to take care of their daughter, he decides to stay and die with Sun. Why would a father abandon his daughter that way?

Sun and Jin drowned together for no good reason. 

But the last contradiction is a major one. In the flash sideways, the pair were reunited after a family crime matter resolves, putting Sun into labor at the hospital. The birth of her daughter in the side ways world (after life) has the same major plot issues as the Aaron birth by Claire at the side ways concert: why would a live human being be born again in the afterlife? One theory is that the children were never born to their parents in their real life. That the island was all an illusion. That the dreams and hopes of a heavenly life would include a fabricated family to love. Otherwise, Sun's daughter would be alive on the mainland, growing up to live her own life, and then dying to reunite with her parents as an adult.

The Sun story shows many of the critical script flaws in LOST.

IN A GAME OF WAR

Last post we picked "teams" for a battle of island survival.

JACOB'S LIGHT TEAM members:

Jack, Locke, Daniel, Dogen, Iana, Mars, Ana Lucia, Goodwin, Kate, and Danielle.

Field leader(s): Jack, Ana Lucia
Mission specialist(s): Daniel
Survivalists: Danielle
Athletic/Military: Iana, Goodwin, Kate
Intangible: Dogen, Mars

MIB'S DARK TEAM members:

Ben, Sayid, Jin, Sawyer, Mr. Eko, Keamy, Patchy, Ethan, Naomi, Kelvin.

Field leader(s): Ben
Mission specialist(s): Sayid, Ethan
Survivalists: Mr. Eko
Athletic/Military: Jin, Keamy, Patchy, Naomi, Kelvin
Intangible: Sawyer

So, if the series was about a rough and tumble, no rules, winner-take-all survival contest on who would control the island, who would win?

If you were going to write a preview story for an NFL game, a writer would look at the strengths and weaknesses of both teams. How the coaches view strategy. And which teams can exploit another's weakness.

If it was a game of "hide and seek," Team Jacob's Rousseau and Kate would be excellent hiders/seekers. MIB's team has no real stealth operatives except for Naomi. It is interesting that it is female characters who best fit this strategy.

If this was a game of "brutal strength," each team could lock horns in drawn out matches. Jacob's best "fighters" would be Ana Lucia, Goodwin, Iana, Mars and Danielle.  MIB's strongest fighters would be Keamy, Sayid, Patchy, Mr. Eko and Kelvin.

If it was one on one, ranked bouts:

Ana Lucia vs. Keamy.  It would be a brutal prize fight since pound for pound Ana Lucia is a pit bull.

Goodwin vs. Sayid. Also a close contest with Goodwin having the size, but Sayid having extensive combat experience.

Iana vs. Patchy. Again, a closer contest than one would imagine since Iana seems to have the background in hard, unwinnable situations as Jacob's Girl Friday Hunter while Patchy seems to throw himself into danger and miraculously survives.

Mars vs. Mr. Eko. It would seems clear that Mr. Eko's size, strength and meanness in a street fight would take down Agent Mars. If there was some strategy, traps or weapons, Mars could close the gap but Eko still would be the favorite to prevail.

Danielle vs. Kelvin. This match in some ways happened on the island. Both of the them were long term island inhabitants. Danielle kept away from the Others, baited trapped and killed some of them. Kelvin's position in the Others camp is less clear. Was he a hold over from Dharma (unaware of the purge) or a recruited ex-military from Ben's Others? Either way, both combatants have a roundabout tactics to ambush their prey.

That leaves "tactics and strategy," or leadership in game planning. Who has an advantage in that area?

Team Jacob's brain corps consists of Jack, Locke and Daniel. Daniel has the scientific background to potentially exploit the islands' natural energy sources. Locke has the survival-hunting skills to operate the base camp. Jack has the power position to make life and death decisions, but he has no background in war strategy. Locke, having been an avid gamer, is more suited to be a field general.

Team MIB management team consists of Ben, who had been a proven, driven, hard-nose and brutal dictator who also had a keen sense of strategy, manipulation and cruel traps. He is a cold blooded villain. Sawyer is also a person who can "think" a series of actions to get to "a solution," such as conning a woman out of her life savings. Sawyer can iron out the details, and put a plan into motion.

Clearly then, Team MIB has a much stronger leadership team to devise and implement battle strategies in the field.

Then it comes down to the "intangibles," Team Jacob's spiritualist Dogen vs. Team MIB's medical researcher Ethan. Both men have a killer streak in them. When cornered, they will strike like a cobra. Ethan has a much bigger build than Dogen, but he seems to have martial arts in his soul.

So in a game of island war, it would be a very close battle. On most fronts and one-to-one bouts, the teams balance out as a wash. It would be a close contest but Team MIB (Evil) would seem to be the slight favorite to capture the island.

THE POWER OF SUGGESTION

In a recent New Yorker article, the power of suggestion is examined and its results are somewhat startling to the average mind.

The power of suggestion is not new. In 1906, Hugo Münsterberg, the chair of the psychology laboratory at Harvard University and the president of the American Psychological Association, wrote in the Times Magazine about a false confession case.  A woman had been found dead in Chicago, garroted with a copper wire and left in a barnyard, and the simpleminded farmer’s son who had discovered her body stood accused. The young man had an alibi, but after questioning by police he admitted to the murder. He did not simply confess,  Münsterberg wrote; “he was quite willing to repeat his confession again and again. Each time it became richer in detail.” The young man’s account, he continued, was “absurd and contradictory,” a clear instance of “the involuntary elaboration of a suggestion” from his interrogators. Münsterberg cited the Salem witch trials, in which similarly vulnerable people were coerced into self-incrimination. He shared his opinion in a letter to a Chicago nerve specialist, which made the local press. A week later, the farmer’s son was hanged.


It would take decades before the legal and psychological communities began to understand how powerfully suggestion can shape memory and, in turn, the course of justice. In the early nineteen-nineties, American society was recuperating from another panic over occult influence; Satanists had replaced witches. One case, the McMartin Preschool trial, hinged on nine young victims’ memories of molestation and ritual abuse—memories that they had supposedly forgotten and then, after being interviewed, recovered. The case fell apart, in 1990, because the prosecution could produce no persuasive evidence of the victims’ claims. A cognitive psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus, who had consulted on the case, wondered whether the children’s memories might have been fabricated—in Münsterberg’s formulation, involuntarily elaborated—rather than actually recovered.


To test her theory, Loftus gave a group of volunteers the rudimentary outlines of a childhood experience: getting lost in a mall and being rescued by a kindly adult. She told the subjects, falsely, that the scenario was real and had taken place when they were young. (For verisimilitude, Loftus asked their parents for biographical details that she could plant in each story.) Then she debriefed the subjects twice, with the interviews separated by one or two weeks. By the second interview, six of the twenty-four test subjects had internalized the story, weaving in sensory and emotional details of their own. Loftus and other researchers have since used similar techniques to create false memories of near-drownings, animal attacks, and encounters with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland (impossible, since Bugs is a Warner Bros. character).


Earlier this year, two forensic psychologists—Julia Shaw, of the University of Bedfordshire, and Stephen Porter, of the University of British Columbia—upped the ante. Writing in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science, they described  a false memory method,  not of getting lost in childhood but of committing a crime in adolescence. They modeled their work on Loftus’s, sending questionnaires to each of their participant’s parents to gather background information. (Any past run-ins with the law would eliminate a student from the study.) Then they divided the students into two groups and told each a different kind of false story. One group was prompted to remember an emotional event, such as getting attacked by a dog. The other was prompted to remember a crime—an assault, for example—that led to an encounter with the police. At no time during the experiments were the participants allowed to communicate with their parents.


What Shaw and Porter found astonished them. “We thought we’d have something like a thirty-per-cent success rate, and we ended up having over seventy,” Shaw told me. “We only had a handful of people who didn’t believe us.” After three debriefing sessions, seventy-six per cent of the students claimed to remember the false emotional event; nearly the same amount—seventy per cent—remembered the fictional crime. Shaw and Porter hadn’t put undue stress on the students; in fact, they had treated them in a friendly way. All it took was a suggestion from an authoritative source, and the subjects’ imaginations did the rest. The students seemed almost eager to self-incriminate.


One young woman spun a story about a kind of love triangle. In the first debriefing, she remembered the incident as a fistfight between her and another girl. In the second, she remembered having thrown a small rock at her adversary after the girl uttered a slur. By the third debriefing, the rock had grown to the size of her fist and she had hurled it at the girl’s face. “It was very emotional,” Shaw said. “Each time she’d reënact the event, the rock would fill her hand a little bit more.” Nothing in the woman’s affect suggested that the memory was false. She earnestly believed in the truth of her confession, as most of her fellow-participants did theirs. The memory was vivid, loaded with details about the crime that the interviewer had not furnished. Moreover, Shaw and Porter could find no personality traits that distinguished the false confessors from the few holdouts, and no way of identifying who was most susceptible.


Researchers conclude that these are troubling findings. They mimic, in the gentlest way, what can happen during police questioning: a small lie, told to shake loose the truth, rattles around in a suspect’s imagination and takes root. The psychologist Saul Kassin has studied interrogation and false confession for decades. He told me that Shaw and Porter’s experiment illustrates perfectly how social pressure can make innocent people admit to wrongdoing. “Think about the dilemma the suspect now faces: ‘I don’t have a memory for this, but the person who took care of me does. Therefore it must be true and I have to find a way to remember it.’ ”

After reading this article, this is another plausible premise to the LOST saga. As the plot started, we were on a fairly straight and narrow crash survival tale, but over the course of time, it moved off into very different, strange tangents unrelated to the initial premise. It is like minor suggestions were being conjured and amplified in a person's mind - - - creating a roller coaster of self-importance to criminal behavior memories. A theory is that LOST was the creation within some character's mind.

BATTLES

When we think of "battle," we think of the ancient art of warfare in all its glory and blood shed.

You can imagine warriors on armored horseback, with a shield, a long sword, arrows or a war club. They would charge directly into the enemy's lines without fear or hesitation. Soldiers are trained to do only one thing: kill or be killed.

In LOST, when we were told of an impending "battle," we got a wet noodle fire work at best.

After Jacob was slain by Ben, the remainder of the followers were in panic. The statement that gave them great pause, "they are coming!"

Now, in the imaginative circles of the LOST community, this was supposed to be a brilliant "whoa" right story angle of monumental proportions.  At the time I wrote that I thought it would be cool that above the Tawaret statue would rise the silhouettes of men carrying spears. Then there would be a huge loud cracking scream from above, and the men above would suddenly sprout black wings. These would be Hell's soldiers returning to the island to reek havoc, since a central theme of the series was good vs. evil.

But alas, nothing as out-there or big as Hell's warriors coming to the island. There would be no pitched battles, hand to hand combat, or a reason why the island was under attack.

Who was coming - - - was another vague threat to raise dramatic tension.

Widmore? His men had already been on the island.
Jacob's reserves? The followers left in the Temple were wiped out by Flocke/Smoke Monster.
Jack and the Candidates? They were not organized to do anything, let alone fight against an unknown foe.

For if the one key battle was that of Jacob against MIB, then MIB won when Ben betrayed his master. But somehow, that did not stop Flocke's continued quest to kill off all the candidates, who still did not know their true purpose on the island.

For if the battles were more symbolic, mind games, then the resolution of daddy-issues, accountability, fear of loneliness or mental illness was anti-climatic.

I think somehow we are still owed a "battle" by TPTB.

Yes, there was a lot of red shirts in the struggles between the survivors and the Others, but those incidents really had little basis in true conflict. The Others claimed the island as their own, but did nothing to remove the survivors from it. The truce was created because the survivors lacked a killer streak, and Ben found it more useful to mentally manipulate the new castaways then to kill them all off.

No a real battle has to resolve real issues, like territory, property or even for a cause. None of those things were present in the characters final motivations. The heart of the island was unknown to them except for Desmond, Hurley and Jack at the end. Kate, Sawyer, Claire, and the rest were not fighting to protect mankind or the heart of the island from evil; they had no idea that it existed or what MIB was trying to accomplish by controlling it.

The build up of a battle without an actual battle was quite disappointing, and most fans do not dwell on it because the story rushed to an even more uneven ending arc.

ALTERNATIVE: OTHERS

If one thing could have been improved or changed in the series, it could have been the representation and meaning of the Others.

The show's "native" people were not actually island natives. It seems that everyone on the island was brought to it by Jacob or his de facto followers. In Ben's reign, the Others were merely rebel Dharma-folk cloaked in the Others tribal costume.

A better alternative would have been to have the Others really be island natives who would naturally fight any intruder to their space.

The make-up of a lost civilization on an unchartered island would have led to more interesting conflict between the plane crash survivors and the Others.

A true small Pacific island would have limited natural resources. If suddenly 48 survivors begin to live on the island competing for food, water and shelter, the two groups would clash over resources. It is only human nature. Even a self-sufficient non-technological tribe has the will to survive against modern, technologically advanced people.

The alternative Others story would eliminate the need for scientific side arcs like the chemical weapons purge, the island's mysterious EM life force, the Hatch, the Numbers and the political diversions of the tussle between Ben and Widmore over the control of the island, and the Jacob-MIB story arc. It would be pared back to a bare knuckle survival story.

The alternative Other's leader, a king and cult figure to his people, could be as ruthless and cruel as Ben and Widmore combined. That could be represented by him wearing a child's skull as a necklace (even though it would be hard to get that past ABC's prime time censors).  You could add horror elements such as cannibalism, devil worship, tropical fever-madness and revenge warfare as concurrent themes of the natives as they push back against the invasion of Westerners.

Jack's group would be cast as a serious underdog in such a fight. Jack and the beach camp don't know the island and its resources. They are backed up against the beach without normal defenses (except one gun and six bullets). Can one man's military training and one man's delusional outback hero fantasy be enough to keep a violent native tribe at bay?

It would have been a pretty good story.

You could even capture a few of the early dropped elements of the Other's story. If there was an infection, could Jack save the natives and thereby saving his own group from genocide? If there was an issue of tribal women dying in child birth, could Jack save the babies and thereby saving the island population from fading away? Or if the island women were barren by the infection, would the Others kidnap the women and children in order to keep their genetic lines in tact (again, human nature is to reproduce another generation in order to survive)? These real tribal problems could give rise to the plots that the survivors are the solution to the island's issues - - -  from medical knowledge to breeding stock.

There would always be some faction in the beach camp that would want to attack and counterattack the Others in order to forge a place on the island. Another faction would want to seek a peaceful alternative. It is this flashpoint of opinion that could lead to drama, in-fighting and betrayal within the survivors' camp. There also could be a certain madness that would seep into those characters since they have been entitled, pampered, technology dependent individuals who have had their worlds turned inside out. Faced with a real threat by the natives, there would have been an urgency to get off the island and get rescued.

As for the filler arcs, a strong native population could have a back story of actually taking down earlier island visitors such as the U.S. Army (and worship the Jughead bomb as a iconic god) to a bizarre twist that one of the mother elders of the tribe who speaks English is none other than Amelia Earhart.

As a group, the Others were underwhelming in the original series. It was organized more like a street thug crew than as a cohesive group. It could have been used as a more dangerous adversary than as Ben's criminal followers.