Why Did the Smoke Monster Kill Eko?
November 3rd 2006 19:10
Yes, why did the smoke monster kill Eko? Of all the murderous, torturing, child-abducting, unrepentant, and generally unlikeable people on that island, why Eko? (And just to clarify here, the characters on the show make for fascinating storytelling, but they are absolutely not people I want to live near, work with, or be related to by blood or marriage, however distantly.)
One of the themes of "Cost of Living" was Eko's resistance to confession or admitting his sins in any way. He stole food as a child, admittedly for a decent reason, but still refused to confess its wrongness. His dream sequence from the second season episode, "23rd Psalm", included him saying he wanted to make confession, but clearly wanting to discuss drug running. In the jungle, he sees a vision of Emeka and his two goons. He has an opportunity to change the outcome of the fight, but again, when Emeka is on his knees pleading for his life, Eko shows no mercy and raises the machete. He is stopped only by the vision of Daniel, the altar boy who asked him if he was a bad man. The end of the episode saw him refuse to ask forgiveness once again.
At every point, he justified his actions to himself and to his island vision of Yemi as something that he had to do to survive. Some of Eko's killings, we can understand and even sympathize with, such as the killings of Emeka and his goons. These men were presented to us on-screen as entirely unredeemable characters, stealing needed medicines for their own profit and shooting villagers to make the point that they are bad bad men. Others are not so easy to sympathize with, yet we can see the motivation, like Eko's first murder, when he killed the innocent man to save Yemi's life. The young Eko surely knew that man and the village looked to be small, so he had probably eaten dinner with him or played with his children. How could he not regret killing that man?
I think there is where the smoke monster draws the line in proclaiming its judgment. It's believable that Eko could look back over his life and think he would make the same decisions—he saved many lives with a few of those murders, he would have died had he not committed others—but to not regret the murders of these people, to not wish there had been some other way of accomplishing the same thing, shows a basic lack of connection to his fellow humans that Eko should have felt.
One of the themes of "Cost of Living" was Eko's resistance to confession or admitting his sins in any way. He stole food as a child, admittedly for a decent reason, but still refused to confess its wrongness. His dream sequence from the second season episode, "23rd Psalm", included him saying he wanted to make confession, but clearly wanting to discuss drug running. In the jungle, he sees a vision of Emeka and his two goons. He has an opportunity to change the outcome of the fight, but again, when Emeka is on his knees pleading for his life, Eko shows no mercy and raises the machete. He is stopped only by the vision of Daniel, the altar boy who asked him if he was a bad man. The end of the episode saw him refuse to ask forgiveness once again.
At every point, he justified his actions to himself and to his island vision of Yemi as something that he had to do to survive. Some of Eko's killings, we can understand and even sympathize with, such as the killings of Emeka and his goons. These men were presented to us on-screen as entirely unredeemable characters, stealing needed medicines for their own profit and shooting villagers to make the point that they are bad bad men. Others are not so easy to sympathize with, yet we can see the motivation, like Eko's first murder, when he killed the innocent man to save Yemi's life. The young Eko surely knew that man and the village looked to be small, so he had probably eaten dinner with him or played with his children. How could he not regret killing that man?
I think there is where the smoke monster draws the line in proclaiming its judgment. It's believable that Eko could look back over his life and think he would make the same decisions—he saved many lives with a few of those murders, he would have died had he not committed others—but to not regret the murders of these people, to not wish there had been some other way of accomplishing the same thing, shows a basic lack of connection to his fellow humans that Eko should have felt.
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