Juliet

Like her namesake before her, Juliet's pathetic life story is one of inevitable loss, and a terrible sense of frustrated longing and dashed hope. Unlike the famous tragic heroine, it seems the seeds of her losses are rarely of her own making, further heightening the pathos of her story.

It's somewhat surprising Juliet has retained her ability to act, yet she has grown up to be a functioning, strong, and intelligent person. But there is little surprise in that she tends to allow herself moments of happiness in secret or illicit endeavors that avoid the light of day. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Juliet's first head-on collision with fatalism occurs quite early in life, when her parents tell her that despite loving each other (??), they just can't be together. Psychologists could have a field day with this line, not least of which is that love is an active verb and not just a passive noun. Nevertheless, her most significant, jarring childhood lesson was that despite all necessary ingredients, life can still dash your most intimate dreams and deny you happiness. What an effective way to teach someone never to plan or fall in love! Her parents would have served their daughters better by telling them they didn't love each other anymore.

But unlike her Capulet sister, Juliet's lesson is repeated many times. Her marriage goes the way of her parents but in an even crueler twist of fate, retains the power to deny her career fulfillment. Even when it unexpectedly happens, her career advancement is tinged with a sense of manipulation and personal guilt. What a life. At every important turn she has been taught that everything she wants will be snatched from her not long after she gets it.

It's not surprising we next find her sneaking illicit moments with a married man, emotionally and figuratively denying herself any apparent hope at long term happiness. But even that attempt fails to avoid an angry fate's scrutiny, again in the form of her boss, and ends in failure and death. Wow. One wonders at how firmly Juliet still grasps a sense of rationality.

If LOST's stories of personal redemption are inter-twined with the successful resolution of the larger plots of the island landscape, and we have every reason to believe that is exactly the case, then Juliet's life story represents perhaps the largest mountain to climb and overcome. It would seem only a miracle could convince her of a universe where she can still actively realize her dreams and plans.

Her life story also to some extent rationalizes her reluctant participation in Ben's under handed, manipulative and illegal behaviors. We can't blame Juliet if she now believes that's how you get what you want. It is also unsurprising that she finds herself identifying with a hamstrung and manipulated Jack who has been out-maneuvered far more than even he is aware. Like some viewers, we would not fault Juliet if she mistakes empathy for love, even for at least a little time. But Juliet is smarter than that.

Unfortunately her life lessons are not complete. She loses Jack, although by now it must have seemed more correct that she never had him, and her plans to escape the island are thwarted twice. Her three happy years with Sawyer must seem to her as a dream.

Amidst the looming backdrop of her life, it makes all the sense in the world that in the Season 5 Finale she acknowledges the destruction of their island escape so readily, just as she then succumbs to the fatalism of a single stare from her lover. Far from vacillating as some viewers lament, her decisions during the Finale remained inordinately consistent with the lessons she has won so painfully throughout her life.

The Finale ends with perhaps the most pathetic and heart rending scene in modern story telling. In the space of a few short hours our tragic heroine, by now a complicit actor in her own demise, finds herself transported from an impending life time with her lover, and now lies broken and alone in the dark at the bottom of a deep hole next to a bomb of unimaginable horror. We expect her sanity to spin wildly out of control, fleeing her body atop the shrill wails of her dying gasps for breath.

Incredibly, this is not Juliet's reaction. With a determination only Sisyphus could muster, Juliet embraces her fate, and strikes the very bomb that embodies not only her failure, but the final fitting chapter of the story of her life. The image is so terrible, so poignant, so tragic, that it over-shadows the major plot of the story; a vicious, developing climax of centuries of hate, all mankind in the balance.

The viewer's heart is rent by Juliet's story. We were left only a very small and subtle foreshadow, when Bernard asks so gently, "Are you sure you won't have some tea?" And with a wistful look she declined, armed only with her gun and a heavy sense of loss.

But as we ponder and flail at Juliet's fate, viewers can not but remember that this is LOST, where not everything we see is what happened, and not every law of nature is followed. In our desperation we look for an alternative to a story almost too tragic to face. Yet there are rational reasons to gird our emotions. We do have reason to believe Juliet still lives.