Don’t tell me what I can’t do!

If you recognize John Locke’s signature line from Lost, welcome! If you haven’t seen the series, I leave it up to you to decide whether you want to read an article about its resident disabled character. If you’re planning on watching it… well, do I really need to warn you that this article will contain spoilers?

And if you don’t know what Lost is, what rock have you been living under?

I recently decided to rewatch Lost, which I hadn’t done since it first aired. When I first saw it, I wasn’t disabled, so the Locke character, his personal story and his wheelchair didn’t mean anything special to me; they were just another story to be told in flashbacks and flash-sideways. This year, though, I am disabled, and as a consequence I paid much more attention to that character’s particular path on the show.

Walkabout

My condition is not an issue. I’ve lived with it for four years. Never kept me from doing anything.

In the fourth episode of season one, we learn that John Locke, who we thought of as abled until then, was actually in a wheelchair before the crash. We don’t know why yet, but we do know he’s not particularly happy about it. He goes down to Australia to participate in a walkabout in the Outback, saying he’s been preparing for it for years, and is furious when the tour guide refuses to let him on the bus, stating insurance reasons preventing him from participating.

Back when I saw the episode for the first time, I thought, well of course they can’t let him participate in a walkabout, he can’t walk! This time, though, while I understand their reason for not being able to bring him on the tour, I also understand Locke’s frustration. This was something he had been preparing for and looking forward to for years, and he learns just at the last minute that it was yet another thing that he could no longer do because of his disability. Because I’m willing to bet the website he booked on didn’t say anywhere that the excursion was inaccessible; places are quick to announce when they’re wheelchair- or otherwise accessible, but when they’re not, there is not a word about it. I’ve quickly learned to assume the whole world is inaccessible to us unless proven otherwise. John Locke apparently hadn’t learned that yet, or didn’t want to accept it.

In the above quote, which he yells at the Australian tour guide, he states he’s had his “condition” for four years. It would take over two seasons—until episode thirteen of season three, “The Man From Tallahassee,” to be exact—for us to learn what that condition is, exactly. His father (a con man who stole his kidney) pushed him out of an eighth-floor window; he plummeted to the ground and landed on his back, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. If you ask me, this explains a bit about why he’s so unhappy about being in a wheelchair.

When he crashes on the island and discovered he can walk again, he is ecstatic. He repeatedly refuses the wheelchair (which came out of the plane unscathed—at least Oceanic Airlines didn’t forget it in Sydney) when he’s injured, and has nightmares about becoming paralyzed again. I absolutely relate to that feeling. Ataxia is degenerative, and in my case it only started becoming a real impediment in my late teens, so I have clear memories of walking without assistance, even of running and jumping. I sometimes feel like it’s a bit frowned upon, in the disability community, to “want out” of your disability, which is absolutely what Locke wanted, and I have to say if I ever met a genie who granted me three wishes, my first one would be to not have ataxia. However, contrary to Locke, I’m not planning on crashing on a magical island that will cure me (and then try to kill me repeatedly), so I accept my disability. I don’t love it and I probably never will, but I live with it and make the most of life with it.

The Candidate

If you’ll give me a shot, Mr. Locke, I think that I could fix you.

In season 6, the final season of the show, we are introduced to what became known as “flash-sideways.” In the timeline of the show, three years have gone by from seasons 1 to 6, but because of events that happened in the previous season finale that I will not bore you with here, the characters are also launched into a parallel universe in which, in 2004, Oceanic flight 815 did not crash and landed safely in LAX. Some things have changed, with the characters from the parallel universe more resembling their island counterparts, and others have not.

John Locke is still in a wheelchair, and has been for four years also. Eventually we learn that in this universe, rather than his father pushing him out a window, Locke was the one piloting the small plane and crashing it, leaving him paraplegic and his father in a vegetative state.

We get the impression that he is more at peace with his disability in this timeline. He has a job as a substitute teacher, a house and a fiancée. We see him driving, and use a special lift to get out of his van. His house has noticeable adaptations—grab bars in the washroom, wider doors. He seems to be doing much better with his life than he was in the regular flashbacks of the previous seasons, even though we later learn that he is only so accepting of his disability because he sees it as a “punishment” for having crashed the plane that left his father brain-dead.

And then he meets Jack Shephard, a neurosurgeon who became the leader of sorts on the island. One of the first things Jack asks Locke is, “what happened to you?” and I wanted to punch him in the mouth (though to be fair I spent most of the six seasons wanting to punch Jack in the mouth). He asked because he was a neurosurgeon, he says. As if that’s an excuse! He’d known John for all of five minutes, why on earth did he presume Locke’s situation could be fixed by a neurosurgeon, or that he even wanted to be fixed at all in the first place? Jack overstepped here, and I don’t know if it was done knowingly by the writers or not, but it bothered me.

And then it got worse.

After we saw Locke decide not to contact Jack and rip up the business card he gave him, they again meet by chance, this time because Locke got hit by a car and ended up in Jack’s hospital. During the surgery, Jack “got a look” at Locke’s original injury and believes he can “fix him.” He could get feeling back in his legs, maybe even walk again, how wonderful!

And Locke refuses, repeatedly, and Jack is so perplexed at the fact that a disabled person doesn’t want to be “fixed” that he goes to see Locke’s father! As disabled people, I’m pretty sure we all have experiences of doctors, or even just regular abled people, trying to “help” us by being way too pushy and assuming they know better than we do what we want or need. Now, I love Lost, it is and always will be one of my favourite shows, but these scenes made me regret that they clearly didn’t have anybody disabled on hand to tell them that this storyline, or at least some of the dialogues, were not okay.

Terry O’Quinn as John Locke

Some people might see the actor and the show as cripping up—an abled actor playing a disabled character. Personally, though, I don’t think it is cripping up, exactly. Yes, Terry O’Quinn is perfectly able to walk, yet there are entire scenes and storylines in which he is playing someone paraplegic and in a wheelchair. However, since in most of the show—all that is not a flashback or a flash-sideways—John Locke has to be 100% abled, I consider it an exception to the rule of “not casting abled actors as disabled characters.”

In conclusion, even though Locke’s disability wasn’t a central part of the plot, I think it was great to see a disabled character on such a high-profile show. Apart from a few hiccups—mainly because Jack Shephard is obnoxious—showing that they probably didn’t have any disabled writers, his storyline and evolution, both in the flashbacks when he hates being disabled and the flash-sideways when he accepts it, were well thought out, in my opinion.

I watch a lot of television, and I love re-watching my favourite shows. In the case of Lost, I feel like watching it as a disabled person myself for the first time completely changed my perspective on that very important character and his arc, and I’m glad it did.