'Lost': Locke gets in touch with his feelings --Todd VanDerWerff | Show Tracker | Los Angeles Times

"The Substitute" is almost entirely a showcase for O'Quinn, a chance given to him to once again knock it out of the park (perhaps for the final time). He plays two wildly different characters who converge in some interesting ways. He is allowed to play the full range of emotions for both Locke himself and the fake Locke who is actually the smoke monster. He's also allowed to share most of his scenes on the Island with Holloway, who's always been a strong companion for the actor. For some reason, Sawyer's devil-may-care attitude has always blended well with Locke's headstrong faith, so their journey to the cave with all of the countless names crossed out was the perfect blend of psychological test, religious ritual, and Boy's Life adventure story cover.

"The Substitute" does so many of the things I love about "Lost" that I have to break hard with the folks on my Twitter feed who said immediately after the episode that it was yet another filler, an episode designed to space out the time between now and the end when we presumably will get the "answers" we're owed or something.
And even if the answers are the only things you want to see, look more at just what we've begun to see filled in this evening. Fake Locke turning Sawyer was the sort of thing that was almost inevitable, I suppose (though I assume Sawyer will get a final turn toward good in the end), but I, for one, did not see the reveal that the famed Numbers -- which I had long ago given up on ever seeing explained -- would all refer to one of the survivors on the wall of that cave where Jacob had been hastily scratching in what appeared to be hundreds of names (just how long has this island been here?). And then the final reveal: With Jacob dead, the Man in Black, in the form of Locke, is able to leave the Island, presumably to walk among us, and he wants to take Sawyer with him. That is, if Sawyer doesn't want to take Jacob's place as guardian of the Island, the one to both protect it from the outside world and, presumably, protect the outside world from the Monster. It's a huge amount of information to download, and the elegant way "Lost" just dropped all of it on us was truly impressive.

The flash-sideways, which occupied a similar amount of time when compared to Kate's flash-sideways last week, also offered up some great moments. This one was primarily about Locke learning to accept that he didn't have a great destiny, that his destiny was just to marry a wonderful woman and have a nice house in the Los Angeles suburbs. (On a box company middle management salary? Psh.) There's a real heart to these scenes, to the notion of a man who could have been great giving up on miracles and on anything other than a nice, quiet life with a woman he loves. And there's a terrific sense that the show understands that, in some ways, this was better than his quest for greatness. In one universe, he ends up in a hole in the ground, his murderer delivering his eulogy while a force of ultimate evil borrows his skin to go walk about. In ours, he gets fired and becomes a substitute teacher (where he ends up working with, surprise surprise, Ben Linus), but that's not such a bad destiny after all, even as he looks impossibly small behind that desk.
American fiction doesn't talk often about giving up. 'I've settled down. History, my dear friend. .. and I won't get up again.' It's all about having big goals and either realizing those goals or being completely crushed by the realization that you won't become what you always dreamed of becoming. Yet, out here in the real world, most of us are living out that old John Lennon axiom that life is what happens when you're making other plans. For those of us who dream big, the world is a long series of sideways flashes into lives that we couldn't have comprehended living when we were younger but that we come to love all the same. If there is such a thing as destiny, it also needs substitute teachers, and this episode of "Lost" is about the fact that sometimes that's a viable path after all.

But none of this would land with the resonance it does if it weren't for the sad, soulful gaze of O'Quinn, the man who just longed to be given a greater purpose and saw that longing twisted and perverted by others with lesser ends. There's a marvelous bit of editing here where fake Locke shows Sawyer all of the names of the people Jacob chose as candidates for his job, interspersed with shots of Jacob touching each of them in last season's finale. It's a nice way to clear up a tiny point that most of us were wondering about last season, but it's also a wonderful way to outline one of the underlying themes of "Lost": What does it mean to choose someone? We all make choices every day, but we also all choose which people we're going to support, which people we're going to surround ourselves with. In a world as starkly drawn between good and evil as the world of "Lost," that means choosing between representatives of God and the devil. But it can also mean choosing to mourn the woman you loved or choosing to stand by the man you're to marry, whether he's in a wheelchair or not. Life is all about substitution, really, about replacing some of the things you wanted with the things you now want. "The Substitute," then, is a reminder that the one thing you don't want to substitute too heavily on is the people you have in your life.