Episode Report Card Daniel: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Lord is my Shephard
By Daniel | Season 2 | Episode 10 | Aired on 01.10.2006
Back on Craphole Island, Eko climbs into the plane. He looks around, sees smashed-open crates with Virgin Mary statues scattered about. He looks at the doorframe, sees dried brown streaks of his brother's blood.
Towards the cockpit, he finds a body. This time, when he opens the shirt, he finds his old cross. He sits, and he stares. For a long time. And slowly, effectively, he starts to cry. He's even drooling. He hugs his brother's corpse and whispers, "Forgive me."
Back on the tarmac, a stunned Eko is still sitting on the ground, watching the sky. A soldier walks up, and says, "Father? Are you okay, Father?" Eko tries to swallows his anger and sorrow as best he can, and smiles.
After the commercial break, Eko removes the cross from his brother's body. And great, here comes Charlie to spoil the mood, just as Eko is wrapping his brother's arms around a Virgin Mary statue. Charlie asks who that is, and Eko says it's his brother. "I'm sorry," says Charlie quietly. Sorry that Eko's wasting a perfectly good statue on a corpse, you mean. Eko reaches above his head and rips a fuel line from the roof (well, the floor, since the plane is actually upside down). The fuel looks like it came out of the pump just yesterday, for crying out loud, as Eko pours it over his brother's body.
Outside the plane, Eko hands Charlie another Virgin Mary statue. "For the one I broke," he explains. Interesting, that, given that Eko knows exactly what's inside. So the plane's on fire now, which seems a little premature, given that not all that long ago there was a working radio inside that, as far as I know, hasn't been checked since Boone did a half-gainer down the cliff. Charlie chooses this time to ask a follow-up question: "So, are you a priest or aren't you?" All the questions that you think someone would have about a crashed plane with dead priests and smuggled heroin in it, and Charlie wants to see this guy's priest license. Eko slowly puts the cross back around his own neck, and says, "Yes, I am." Then he starts reciting the 23rd Psalm. I'm not going to get into whether the writer of the episode made the biggest mistake in the world by having Eko say "the shadow of the valley of death" instead of "the valley of the shadow of death" right after finding the body of his long-dead brother, killed thanks to Eko, because, come on. And yes, Charlie joins in, but he only starts moving his lips around the time Eko gets to that part, and I only actually hear his voice a line or two later. It is entirely possible that, Catholics or not, a drug-runner-turned-priest-imitator and a musician-turned-heroin-aficionado maybe aren't the ones we should be relying on for authentic Scripture. Google "shadow of the valley of death" for yourself and you'll see that thousands of others make the same mistake, even when you filter out the Marilyn Manson. This show has many nits to pick; this one's too small to bother with.