The episode begins with John Locke working at a toy store, and introducing the game Mousetrap. A woman comes up and asks for help, who we later learn is John’s mother. She tells him that he is special, that he is part of a design, and that he has no father, but was immaculately conceived. Locke learns that Emily Locke, his mother, is schizophrenic and had been institutionalized multiple times. In turn he finds his way to Anthony Cooper, his father. When Cooper learns what John had been told about an immaculate conception, he laughs and says, “Well, I guess that makes me God.” (Note the common incorrect use of “immaculate conception” – which refers to the idea that Mary was conceived without original sin – when what is meant is a “virginal conception.”)
On the island, John tells Boone he needs to have faith, as they try to use a trebuchet to break the window on the hatch. He gets a piece of shrapnel in his leg, and discovers that it didn’t hurt, so he later tries burning the sole of his foot to see whether his legs can feel pain. As they work to try another way to open the hatch, Locke tells Boone the island will tell them what to do. In a dream, he says that their faith is being tested – the island will send them a sign. He then sees (among other things) a plane crashing and Boone bleeding and saying “Theresa falls up the stairs, Theresa falls down the stairs.” When Boone is skeptical about signs and dreams, Locke tells him about Theresa, and it means something to Boone, and persuades him to continue helping John. Eventually Boone explains that Theresa was his nanny, who fell down the stairs and broke her neck. They find the plane perched on a cliff ledge, and since John can’t walk, he tells Boone that he needs to climb up and find out what is in the plane. Boone finds statues of the Virgin Mary with heroine inside of them. Boone finds the radio works. He says we are survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, and the voice on the other end says the same. Then the plane falls, Boone is injured, and John manages to carry him back to camp to Jack.
They find a rosary, then a corpse of a Nigerian priest – although finding a gun on him, John says he is not so sure that he was a priest.
John’s legs start failing him, and John wonders why the island is taking back what it gave to him. He talks again about what they are supposed to do. In flashbacks, we see John donating a kidney to his father, telling him that this was meant to be. But in another flashback, we learn that his father manipulated him to get his kidney.
On the island, John cries and asks why this happened, pounding on the hatch, and then the hatch window lights up.
As I watched the series the first time, I remember wondering whether Locke was right or wrong at various times throughout, and then feeling sorry for Locke when we learned he had been manipulated as a pawn in the game that Jacob and his brother were playing. But all that was hinted at here in this episode in the first season. Locke was listening to the island, and in parallel we see him talking about it being “meant to be” when he found his father and was able to give him his kidney. But his father had in fact manipulated him. And so this episode has very strong continuity with the direction the show continued to take through to the end. The episode’s title, “Deus ex Machina,” refers to the way a deity often appeared suddenly at the end of a Greek play to resolve the story. The question of who or what God may be, and whether that is who is arranging things that seem “meant to be” in your life, is one that LOST raises poignantly. And the image of the game mousetrap nicely foreshadows the complicated game of cat and mouse that Jacob and his brother play, and the rules that constrained it.
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