Television Review: The 23rd Psalm (Lost, S2X10, 2006)

The 23rd Psalm (S0210)

Airdate: 11 January 2006

Written by: Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof
Directed by: Matt Earl Beesley

Running Time: 43 minutes

By the midpoint of its second season, Lost had firmly entrenched its narrative modus operandi: a cyclical return to core characters, themes, and even physical spaces. This structural habit, whilst providing a comforting rhythm, risked tipping into formulaic repetition. However, on those occasions where this revisitation was infused with genuine creativity and thematic expansion, the familiar became a powerful foundation for the new. A prime exemplar of this successful alchemy is The 23rd Psalm, an episode that functions not merely as a counterpart, but as a profound spiritual and narrative sequel to the first season’s Locke-centric Deus Ex Machina. Where the former dissected one man’s desperate faith in the Island’s purpose, the latter explores a brutal journey from damnation towards a fraught, hard-won redemption.

The episode cleverly pivots from the established spiritual figure of John Locke to his Tail-section analogue, Mr. Eko. Eko is a masterpiece of visual contradiction: a hulking, silent presence whose survivalist menace is offset by the Biblical verses he meticulously carves into his formidable staff. It is this very duality that piques Claire’s curiosity and sets the plot in motion. In a casual exchange, she mentions Charlie’s religiosity and his possession of a statuette of the Virgin Mary. Displaying the characteristic Lost trait of characters knowing far more than they initially let on, Eko immediately intuits the hidden truth. He smashes the icon, discovers Charlie’s heroin stash, and coerce the former rock star into guiding him to its source. This demand initiates a pilgrimage to the Beechcraft crash site in the Island’s interior, a journey that mirrors Locke’s own doomed trek to the Nigerian drug plane in Deus Ex Machina, but with a radically different destination in mind.

The revelatory flashback transports us to Nigeria, establishing the poignant and tragic connection between Eko and the doomed aircraft. We witness a young Eko (Olekan Obiley) protect his younger brother, Yemi, from being conscripted as a child soldier by committing murder himself. Years later, Eko has ascended to become a ruthless warlord embroiled in the heroin trade. His plan to smuggle drugs inside Virgin Mary statues necessitates the coerced involvement of Yemi (Adetokumboh M'Cormack), now a Catholic priest. The sequence is a taut, morally complex tragedy. Yemi’s last-minute betrayal, intended to save his brother’s soul, results in his own mortal wounding and desperate flight on the Beechcraft, whilst Eko remains behind, mistakenly identified by soldiers as the priest he sought to corrupt. The symmetry is brutal and elegant: the holy man dies amongst the drugs, and the drug runner survives to be mistaken for a man of God.

Eko and Charlie’s Island journey is fraught with tension and revelation. Charlie’s attempts to end it, reinforcing Eko’s implacable control. The trek’s most significant moment, however, belongs to Eko alone: his first encounter with the Island’s mysterious smoke entity. In a scene long-anticipated by the audience, the Smoke Monster roars around him, its tendrils probing and scanning. Eko stands firm, unflinching, and is seemingly deemed unworthy of consumption—or perhaps, given his history, it finds nothing to judge. This passive confrontation stands in stark contrast to Locke’s more reverential, seeking relationship with the Island’s mysteries. Upon reaching the fuselage, Eko discovers Yemi’s remains, retrieves his brother’s cross, and performs a symbolic funeral by fire. The subsequent recitation of the 23rd Psalm with Charlie is a moment of profound, shared grace, a ceasefire in their personal war and Eko’s first tentative step into his brother’s abandoned sacerdotal role. Charlie, in turn, secures another statuette, a cynical hedge against his own fragile sobriety.

Written by Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, the episode is a model of efficient, dovetailed storytelling. Eko’s past actively drives his present actions on the Island, transforming a physical quest for heroin into a pilgrimage for atonement. The episode also seizes the opportunity to deepen the show’s spiritual dialectic. Both Locke and Eko are the most overtly spiritually attuned characters, yet their faiths are antithetical. Locke’s is a personal, almost pagan faith born of the Island’s healing touch—a cult of one. Eko’s is a journey back towards a conventional, institutional Christianity he had violently rejected, now embraced through guilt and legacy. Director Matt Earl Beasley renders this duality with visual clarity, using stark red filters to distinguish the flashback’s Nigerian heat from the Island’s verdant menace, all achieved economically on Hawaiian locations.

If the episode has flaws, they are minor and largely technical. The long-awaited, proper reveal of the Smoke Monster, whilst narratively pivotal, is slightly let down by CGI that has not aged gracefully in the intervening two decades, its video-game quality momentarily puncturing the scene’s gravity. More narratively, some viewers might question the considerable leap of logic required for a small, short-range Beechcraft to crash-land on a Pacific island, seemingly a world away from its intended Nigerian smuggling route. Yet, by this stage, Lost had begun to wear such enigmatic improbabilities as a badge of honour, treating them not as plot holes but as deliberate mysteries to be unravelled. Indeed, just as Deus Ex Machina provided the foundational stones for The 23rd Psalm, this episode itself would become a crucial building block. The episode is a testament to the series’ unique strength: its ability to remix its own components into stories that feel both comfortingly familiar and thrillingly new.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

==

Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com
Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/
InLeo blog https://inleo.io/@drax.leo

LeoDex: https://leodex.io/?ref=drax
InLeo: https://inleo.io/signup?referral=drax.leo
Hiveonboard: https://hiveonboard.com?ref=drax
Rising Star game: https://www.risingstargame.com?referrer=drax
1Inch: https://1inch.exchange/#/r/0x83823d8CCB74F828148258BB4457642124b1328e

BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG
ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7
BCH donations: qpvxw0jax79lhmvlgcldkzpqanf03r9cjv8y6gtmk9

Posted Using INLEO