“Lighthouse” is the 5th episode of Season 6 of Lost and the 108th produced hour of the series as a whole. It was first broadcast on February 23, 2010. (Lostpedia.com)
In the Sideways world, Doc Shephard spotted his appendix scar in the mirror and struggled to recall the forgotten/suppressed memory of when the ruptured organ was removed. Again, he wondered: How did that get there? Again we wondered: What does it mean? This story ended with Jack looking into the episode’s most unusual and most miraculous of mirrors — the eyes of his son, David. What he saw in them was the very thing his Island self should have recognized in the Lighthouse: an invitation to let go of the past and move into the future.
You don’t have what it takes, Christian told Young Jack during a boozy stupor. That one left a mark. Father Shephard was actually trying to teach his son a lesson — that being a hero isn’t something you choose to be, but rather something that you just are, and that when you try to be a hero, and you fail, then what you become is a failure, at least in your own eyes, and that’s a mighty hard thing to live with, if you can live with it at all. If you’ve watched all of Lost, then you know the great irony of Christian’s harsh wisdom: Jack has pretty much proven his father correct. But did Christian correctly identify Jack’s fundamentally flawed nature — or did he nurture it with his problematic brand of parenting?
Anyway, this is all to say that the Sideways Jack that we got to know in ”Lighthouse” was a lot like the Castaway Jack we’ve come to know over the past five season, but also very different, in ways both obvious and not so obvious. (Has there ever been a less helpful sentence ever written than that last one?) We met him as he was washing a hard day’s work off himself and talking with his mother about the mystery of Christian’s missing coffin. Yep: still missing. Probably in Berlin, according to the airline, but nobody knew for sure. The Widow Shephard was flummoxed. How could someone possibly lose a dead body? The lack of resolution had left her proverbially paralyzed; she needed Jack’s help in settling Christian’s affairs. (In more ways than one.) It would be wrong to say Jack was unfazed by his father’s Lost-in-the-system corpse (he certainly seemed moved by his mother’s need), but at the same time I didn’t get the sense he was haunted by it, either.
But I wonder if the perplexing puzzle of Jack’s appendix scar told the real story of Jack’s seemingly mature serenity. Eyeballing the blemish, Jack suddenly realized he couldn’t recall when the damn thing has been cut out of him. His mother reminded him that it had happened when he was 7 or 8 years old, that he had collapsed at school and his father had wanted to perform the surgery himself but was denied. Now, we all know that the castaway version of Jack had his appendix removed on the Island back in season 4 (more on that episode in a sec), and I think Lost wanted us to once again wonder if these Sideways characters are psychically linked to their Island counterparts or possess their memories somewhere the backs of their fogged-up minds. Consider this: If we assume that Jack is about as old as Sawyer, then that means it’s very likely that Sideways Jack had his school collapse/appendix episode the very same year that a certain group of time traveling castaways were blowing up Jughead on the Island. What if Young Jack’s collapse was caused by Castaway Jack’s mind/soul getting blown into him? What if Young Jack’s appendicitis was reflexive a psychosomatic response to the appendix-free Castaway Jack’s sudden psychic migration into his mind? What if Castaway Jack’s mind/soul has lain dormant within Sideways Jack ever since, but now is starting to stir and take hold? What if Sideways’ Jack’s appendix confusion and other instances of spotty memory manifested in this episode are symptoms of an identity crisis caused by this trippy-tricky of mental operating systems?
For now, I’m going to say that the answer to every single one of those preceding ”What if…?” questions is a big fat NO. Instead, I’m going to say that Sideways Jack is a man who’s dangerously out of touch with his emotions and with others, because he’s a self-absorbed jerk, or because of pain he’s been spending most of his life trying to avoid, or both. As ”Lighthouse” progressed, we learned that Sideways Jack’s relationship with his father was also marked by fear and hurt; and so I wonder if a simple explanation for his fuzzy recall of the appendix drama was that he had suppressed the memory. The only psychic entity lurking within Sideway Jack is his own wounded child, and for his entire life, he’s kept him heavily tranquilized. His story in ”Lighthouse” was about choosing to recall and feel childhood pain, about rousing that sleeping, hurting kid… and then letting him go.
BURNING QUESTION: Who’s David’s Mom? Who’s the female participant in the creation of this inexplicably conceived Sideways child? Who’s this phantom woman that Sideways Jack was once with and now isn’t? Wouldn’t if be totally ironic and fitting if she was the Sideways iteration of Lost‘s resident fertility doc/Jack dumpette, better known to us as Juliet? And you wanna know why she wasn’t home last night? That’s right, kids: Going dutch on coffee with new boyfriend Sawyer. (Your goosebumps? That’s right, I did that.)
Christian Shephard left something for Claire. My thought: Well, that answered that question. Sideways Dad was an intercontinental horndog, too
Jack arrived at the audition. He followed the sign directing ”the candidates” to the auditorium. Inside, Father Jack bore witness to his piano prodigy son exercising his awesome gift. It took his breath away. It was all very end-of-Billy Elliot. Jack swelled with pride, with joy, with selfless happiness for his son — with life. The piece: ”Fantasia Impromptu in C-sharp minor” by Chopin. Last season on Lost, another child prodigy played the same number for us. I am referring to Master Daniel Faraday in ”The Variable.” We remember his fate: how his mother cut him off his from art; how she redirected his brilliance toward physics in a doomed bid to save him from her future bullet; how she drove him and rode him and smothered him. He died, anyway. A failure, anyway. I felt Lost was offering a belated toast to the late Faraday in Sideways Jack’s surprising cross with Sideways Dogen, whose son was also auditioning for Williams. ”They are too young to have this kind of pressure,” Dogen said. ”It’s hard to watch and be unable to help.” Rest In Peace, Daniel. Sorry your Mom sucked. (I look forward to getting Island Dogen’s backstory and seeing how much of it ironically synchs with this small peek into his Sideways world.)
There was more to the statement, but let’s just begin with that phrase, an extraordinary admission of humility from a once-proud man of science who spent years arguing for the strength and supremacy of his own agency. But Jack’s full statement was: ”I came back here because I was broken, and I was stupid enough to think this place could fix me.” Jacob would later suggest to Hurley that Jack couldn’t be more wrong, but the good news was that Jack had grown enough in his journey to summon a magical beacon, one that could to light the way to the his journey’s homestretch. Literally.
Hurley thought — or hoped — that he could summon Jacob by cranking on a chain and turning the dial to its 108 setting. (Though I didn’t see it, the Web consensus seems to be that the name attached to this number was ”Wallace.”) But before the contraption could reach 108, Jack saw something in the mirrors — images of buildings that shouldn’t be there. He then got a scary thought: What would he see if he turned the dial to his number, 23. He pushed Hurley out of the way and changed the ”channel” and there on the ”screen” was a live shot of his childhood home. Jack then came to some conclusions. He concluded that the Lighthouse was a mystical surveillance device. He concluded that Jacob had used it to spy on him all his life. He concluded that Jacob wanted something from him, and he angrily demanded that Hurley summon Jacob ASAP to explain himself. Hurley explained that it didn’t work that way, that Jacob was a ghost — a sometimes there, sometimes not non-entity.
Meanwhile, Hurley and Jacob debriefed. Jacob seemed to suggest that contrary to Hurley’s panic (and armful of inky instructions), everything had gone according to plan. Jack was supposed to look in the magic mirrors. Jack was supposed to see what he saw. And maybe most importantly, Jack was supposed to have the response that he had, even at the expense of his magical mirror, mirrors on the Lighthouse walls. The purpose, I think, was to correct Jack of one misconception: He was not stupid to believe that the Island holds redemptive purpose for him. It does. Jack just needs to keep his eyes open and look for it. He also needs to do one thing more, and I think it’s the thing that Lighthouse mirrors were designed to show him. Hurley and Jack got it wrong. The Lighthouse doesn’t cast light outward. It casts light inward, and reveals the state of your heart. For Jack Shephard, his heart is still locked up in his childhood home, his father’s house, his past, and he won’t be free and realized until he leaves all of it behind. (1-11 from Doc Jensen at EW.com)
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But at least somebody at the Temple is making productive use of time. Hurley and Miles are playing X’s and O’s! There’s no ambiguity in X’s and O’s. Two sides: one is X, one is O. And their game plays out in a similar manner as the one being played between the Man in Black and Jacob – endless ties, one always blocking the other’s “three in a row”. Of course, if you play X’s and O’s enough times, someone wins a game, often out of sheer carelessness on the part of the other player. Is this what’s happened between Jacob and MIB?
Speaking of which, what was Jacob doing? I’ve rewatched it a dozen times, and he appears to be swirling a piece of string or a thin stick in the waters of the Spring. Honestly, it looks like he’s fishing. I’m not sure what to make of that, although if I was pressed to make some comparison, the first thing that comes to my mind mind is Jesus Christ, not just a fisherman but a “fisher of men”, who recruits his followers and gives them tasks that they often don’t understand and end up failing at.
From Justin and Claire we’re given two slightly different accounts of what’s happened to Claire over the last three years. I think it’s fair to say at this point that Claire didn’t do any time-traveling during the season 5 flashes, as the group from Dharma times only arrived in 2007 a day or so ago, which wouldn’t have been enough time for Claire and the Temple Others to establish their current relationship (nor would Claire have had ample time to build a shelter and set traps if she had only recently flashed to 2007). I can only assume that Claire wasn’t subject to the time traveling because of some sort of interference from the Christian Shephard apparition, which I’m 99% sure was actually the Man in Black.
So for the last three years, Claire has lived from 2004 to 2007, running from the Others and was at one point captured by them. She tells Jin that they tortured her, even showing him the scars. Based on this and what Dogen said about Claire being infected, it seems that she underwent a similar test as Sayid. I have no doubt that she failed, too, but I’m less sure that that means either of them are actually infected, as I have yet to see them become corrupted by the Smoke Monster the way that the French Team was (though it’s certainly possible that this did happen to Claire – we now know who she’s been buddy-buddy with lately.
For the record, I don’t think Claire recalls it happening that way. Remember her emotionless, zombie-like appearance with Christian in “Cabin Fever”? Christian must have brainwashed her or altered her memory somehow (which could very well be a side effect of becoming infected – Sayid doesn’t really understand what’s going on, either). If apparitions of Christian are indeed the Man in Black, it makes sense what he was doing. By brainwashing Claire into thinking that the Others had her baby, he turned her against them permanently, thwarting any future attempts on the part of Dogen to gather all the Losties at the Temple for the forces of good. This is why he continued to appear to her as her “friend”, deliberately feeding her lies, recruiting her in his efforts against Jacob and the Temple.
Last but not least in this story thread, Flocke shows up at Claire’s camp and is heralded as a friend of hers. A quick tally: Sawyer is with Flocke, Claire is with Flocke, Kate is heading to her doom, the Temple is probably about to be destroyed and Sayid is infected. Whoever Jacob wants Hurley to guide to the island better be pretty vital for the forces of good.
Anyway, Wallace could turn out to be no one. Last week I made a huge fuss about Kate not being a candidate and this week, there she is – not crossed off, no important number, just kind of there. My point is that there might be less rhyme and reason to these names and numbers than we suspect. Then again, Damon and Carlton know we’d be on the lookout for 108, so I have a hard time believing it says “Wallace” for no reason (12-18 by Robz888 on DarkUFO.com)
I’m starting to think that all the candidates are pieces of a Jacob-constructed Rube Goldberg machine, one where if everyone is placed in the correct spot at the correct time Smokey will be defeated and a new Jacob will take the Island’s helm. The side-effect of all this is that all the candidates’ lives will have been made miserable up to that point because of Jacob’s machinations in getting them there; Jacob essentially sacrificing the good of the few or the one for the sake of the world. That’s why, without Jacob’s influence, everyone’s lives are better in the Alt universe (except for Kate, perhaps).
So let’s say that’s true – that Jacob essentially made everyone’s lives miserable because it was necessary to defeat Smokey. In that case, I can see Jacob being responsible for Jack fixing Sarah, Locke having issues with his Dad, Hurley thinking he’s cursed, etc… all these awful things that Jacob was actually responsible for in order to get them to the Island. Now with Jacob’s influence gone in the Alt, everyone is actually a lot happier, but the Island is destroyed. What the ramifications of that are for the world we just don’t know yet
Another nice nugget of info this provides, though, is that if totally all of the candidates were written on the lighthouse turntable, then there are only 360 total. Lostpedia has an updated list of all the candidate numbers from Jacob (or Smokey’s) Wall. Looking it over, there’s only one number above 360: Daniel Faraday. And even that could be wrong, given how illegible some parts of the wall were. Also note: Kate’s name is in the lighthouse at #51 and is NOT crossed out. Interesting, eh?
I really, really liked Claire this episode and props to Emilie de Raven for playing crazy as well as anyone on the show. The sickness has turned out to be one of the most interesting things about this season. Smokey’s appearance and the fact Infected Claire knew that he wasn’t the real Locke certainly suggests the sickness is something caused by Smokey.But what exactly does it do? In Sayid’s case, he definitely died and came back to life infected. In Claire’s case, we’re really not sure. It certainly seemed she died from wounds inflicted in the attacks on the Barracks, after all, the Claire Locke saw with Smokey in Jacob’s cabin seemed eerily calm – much different from this Claire. And Sayid certainly seems normal so far as well. Whatever is does there’s a definite progression. But are they really dead, zombie-like creatures or merely corrupted souls (something like a Ringwraith perhaps, an evil servant of Smokey)? (19-22 from Mistaking Confidence for Fate)
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The first time I watched this episode I was pretty sure that Claire revealed that Christian and “Locke” are the same people. But when I watched it again she clearly says that first Christian told her that The Others took Aaron and then her friend told her. Her friend was revealed to be “Locke” so if we’re going to believe Claire then they are still separate people. I don’t know what to think. If there was ever a time to reveal that Christian was “Locke” then that was it.
Jacob was watching Jack’s old house. It was a white house so it was a light house. Get it? HA HA HA… anyways. Jack was enraged when he found out Jacob was watching him. But the truth is that he might not have been watching Jack. Doesn’t it seem more likely that he was watching Christian? Jack only lived there as a kid. For Jack’s sake I hope I’m wrong about that. (23-24 from Not Confused Just Lost)
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The Annotated Alice: Jack says he read it to David, and we saw him reading it to Aaron when he was living with Kate.
Claire isn’t just kinda crazy… she’s totally batshit bonkers creepy-skeleton-head-baby-lovin’ super crazy
Jack found the key under the rabbit, just like Miles reached under a rabbit in “Some Like It Hoth” to get into that apartment with the dead man when he was a kid.
Jacob says that Jack is here because he has to do something, and that he needs to look at the ocean for a while… Locke looked at the ocean for a long time before he sensed his destiny on the island. We also saw the Man in Black staring at the ocean when he returned looking like Locke. (25-28 from Nik at Nite)
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There was an amazing number of black and white references this episode, and most of them were in LAX_Jack’s world. All throughout his home we saw black and white, especially amongst the paintings, photos, frames, and wall hangings. Ditto for Jack’s black and white office. And the icing on the cake? All those various shots of piano keys.
Figuring out Jack’s color is tough right now. Like Sawyer, he’s walked both sides of the fence. He’s been a man of science and a man of faith, and he’s also someone who walks “among us but is not one of us”. I suppose all of these references could be pointing out that Jack’s final role has yet to be determined, or that maybe he’s being played by both sides of LOST’s game.
We’re seeing a very distinct pattern in the LAX timeline, and here it is in a nutshell: the circle can be broken. People can change. Mistakes don’t need to be repeated, over and over again. Some examples so far:
* Kate Austin is a fugitive on the run, only looking out for herself. She glances into a garage mirror and… BANG! Kate heads back to bring pregnant Claire her stuff, help her through false labor, and befriend her during a major crisis… all at great risk to her personal safety. Cue Claire’s credit cards and a makeover shopping spree.
* John Locke is the same angry and defiant cripple he’s always been. Still struggling against his paralysis he calls Jack’s number, looks into a mirror and… BANG! Locke suddenly hangs up the phone and embraces his condition. Helen loves and accepts him for who he is, there’s a nice tearful hug, and everything is unicorns and rainbows.
* Jack Shephard is a workaholic surgeon neglecting a son he only sees once a month. He looks in the mirror and… well, you get the picture. With some help from his mother Jack realizes the error of his ways, eases up on young David, and opens his loving arms to his son. Time for ice cream and some hair-rumpling.
This is some exciting news, actually. It may be proof that Jacob is right. People don’t always have to fight, corrupt, and destroy. By stopping to take a good look at what they’ve become, people can actually reverse bad behavior and start making positive changes to their lives. Maybe broken people can be fixed after all.
Here’s a phrase you’ve heard me say before: “placed into being by requirement”. Charlie’s guitar, Locke’s knives, Jack’s sewing kit, Rose’s husband, Yemi’s crashed plane, the black rock’s dynamite, a shitload of heroin, the Swan’s washer/dryer, Christian’s coffin, the food drop, Sun’s pregnancy test, the marshal’s Haliburton case, Anthony Cooper, Jacob’s cabin, IM chats with Walt, batteries, radios, guns, canoes, explosives, medicine, a spinal surgeon, Aaron himself… and now, a giant stone lighthouse.
The end of LOST is near. Answers are bigger, and they’re right in front of our eyes. The reason we never saw the lighthouse until now is because our characters never needed the lighthouse until now. So was it always there? Shoot me, but I say NO.
Listen to Dogen talk to Jack about his son David, and how it’s unfair that he’s under such a tremendous amount of pressure. “It’s hard to watch, and not be able to help”. This simple statement is one of the fundamental principals of LOST. It’s almost as if Jacob is speaking through Dogen here, looking on helplessly but hopefully. Jack and the other candidates are like his children: he can only sit back and watch as they walk their paths in life, unable to do much of anything to help. He can only push or nudge them in the right direction, but he cannot directly interfere.
Dogen’s final statement, “How long has he been playing?”, is much more than an innocent throwaway line of dialogue. It’s a direct reference to just how long LOST’s game has gone on, and how many times Jack himself has been through the loop. Iteration after iteration, Jack has been playing damned near forever. Yet perhaps this time through, maybe he’s come further than ever before. As the dark man told Sawyer last episode, “it would be a shame to turn back now after coming so far”.
David is Jack’s direct reflection. To say what’s real or unreal is getting irrelevant at this late stage in the game. Suffice it to say that the Jack of this timeline – much like Kate and Locke – is finally learning. My guess is he’s gaining the important knowledge needed to go back to the island, where he’ll eventually win the war against Flocke and his recruits.
It was interesting to note Kate’s name on the wheel, at number 51. Even more interesting, her name was not crossed out. This reinforces my opinion from last recap: that although she’s not assigned one of the big six numbers, Kate is still a candidate. In fact, she’s a secret candidate, because the dark man knows only about Locke, Reyes, Jarrah, Shephard, Ford, and Kwon.
So who’s coming to the island? Who’s number 108? The name on the wheel reads Wallace. Before I’d even seen the name, my money was on Desmond. Even afterward, I still like the idea that Desmond is on his way. He’ll arrive by boat, just as he did the last time he came to the island, just as the Oceanic six had to return by way of an airplane. (29-34 by Vozzek69 at DarkUFO.com)
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In 6×05, The Lighthouse, we got to see… a lighthouse. The numbers corresponding in degrees to the heading of the lighthouse were affiliated with names… many familiar, some not. This seems to be a match with the numbers seen in the cave in the last episode. Of course, we also see that a person’s number can be dialed into and be observed from the lighthouse. Does it make any sense at all? Hmmmm…. no. Click here to see close up pictures of the dial at Sledgeweb’s Lost Stuff
“The Substitute” is the 4th episode of Season 6 of Lost and the 107th produced hour of the series as a whole. It was originally broadcast on Feb 16, 2010. Locke goes in search of help to further his cause. (lostpedia.com)
Officially, there was John Locke the Island adventurer, now a ripe, sun-bleached corpse buried six feet under on Boone Hill after Captain Frank Lapidus declared the impromptu graveside service ”the weirdest damn funeral” he’d ever been to. There was ”John Locke,” aka the Locke-ness Monster, the fearsome Island entity now wearing the Ben-murdered castaway’s visage, who oozed sincerity as he/it/whatever downloaded oodles of noodle-expanding mythology… although can we really trust him/it/whatever? And there was Sideways John Locke, a tough and tender man, so superior to his dead Island doppelganger in many ways, save possibly one. We met him as he fell flat on his face, yet another humiliation for a soul who seems to be destined to suffer a daily diet of humiliations no matter which ”island universe” he happens to reside upon. But this John Locke can laugh when the fates make fun of him. This John Locke has the self-awareness and strength to grow and change. And this John Locke is loved, and better, he knows it, and we were reminded last night how much we need that kind of love, both to flourish and survive.
Sideways John Locke had self-confidence, self-awareness, and a genuine self. He also enjoyed the security of knowing he was loved by his soulmate, Helen. But I wonder if that’s part of the important point of these parallel world stories. Lost is creating the means for us to see these too-familiar people with fresh eyes. By presenting them as something profoundly different, as profoundly ”Other,” the castaways are revealed anew, or perhaps even for the first time, by the comparison.
We were told nothing about how this Locke and Helen met. But we were told they have an October wedding date, and given that it’s late September in the Sideways world, I’m predicting that their Big Day will serve as a key moment for the entire Sideways arc — perhaps the time and place when all the disparate story lines will converge. Does Sideways Locke have a better relationship with his father than Island Locke had? It’s possible. When Helen suggested they elope after a frustrating phone call with a caterer, she pitched him on the idea of bringing Papa Locke along for the ride. John didn’t respond to the mere mention of his existence by involuntarily punching her in the face, so I’m guessing Sideways Anthony Cooper had nothing to do with crippling his son. ARE YOU THINKING WHAT I’M THINKING? We know from season 1 that Boone Carlyle’s mother, Sabrina Carlyle, owned a massively successful wedding business, and that Boone served as the company’s chief operating officer. Methinks the Carlyle family biz will play a role in solving Helen’s catering crisis…
But this was a clearly a Locke who didn’t believe in higher power-directed fate like his dead Island world counterpart. I thought it was interesting the way he described the walkabout later in the episode. He called it ”an adventure” about ”man versus nature.” By contrast, when Island Locke described the Walkabout in the classic season 1 episode of the same name, he called it ”a journey of spiritual renewal, where one derives strength from the earth and becomes inseparable from it.” Island Locke wanted to be feel connected to the world, to something bigger than himself; Sideways Locke wanted to feel his own strength, to feel whole again — to feel like a man.
How to account for the discrepancies between the two Lockes? There were a couple moments when I wondered if Sideways Locke had learned a thing or two from the experiences of his Island doppelganger via… quantum entanglement? Psychic connection? Past-life memories? (”When we’re puzzled we have all the stories that have been handed down from people who had the same problems.” — A Serious Man) Still, this matter of cross-universe connection was hard to say this week. For the third straight episode, the episode’s lead character was given a conspicuous moment in the bathroom, looking long and hard in the mirror. Where Jack saw an explicable (continuity) flaw on his skin and Kate watched herself flutter through the déjà vu blinky-blinkies, Locke struck a more conventional, contemplative pose, absent of any hint that he might be aware of his Island self. Which makes sense, given that Island Locke is, like, dead.
he curious thing about both photos: Locke appeared to be standing. When and how did Locke become dependent on a wheelchair for pedestrian perambulation? TBD. Island Locke didn’t get thrown out of that eighth-floor window by Bad Dad leaving him below-the-belt paralyzed until after Helen dumped his father-fixated ass. So it appears that Locke’s loss of lower legs was a trauma that he and his soul mate experienced together.
Was it just me, or did you get a Jacobesque vibe from Hurley, all empathetic benevolence as he responded to his ex-employee’s prickly anger with patience and grace and supreme knowingness and the hooked him up with a new job via his temp agency, another division of Hurley’s financial empire? Watching this scene, I couldn’t help but think about Helen’s earlier line about destiny. And I found myself flashing back to this scene later in the episode, when Helen challenged Locke’s incredulity about miracles. Was the Locke-Hurley crossing total coincidence, quantum synchronicity, or divinely orchestrated appointment? An elemental faith/reason debate worthy of old school Lost.
Yep, he lied to Boone on the plane. Like his Island counterpart, Sideways Locke was denied his outback adventure. And like his Island counterpart, Sideways Locke raged in response: ”Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” But this John Locke is capable of reflecting upon moments and realizing: My god, I must have sounded like… a big douche! Interesting that in an episode that saw the Locke-ness Monster spout Locke’s famous catchphrase, Sideways Locke came to the same conclusion about his situation that Smokey articulated in the premiere. They were right to deny me the walkabout, because it’s true — there are things I simply can’t do. He told Helen he was sick of daydreaming about life outside his chair, tired of imagining himself walking her down the aisle on their wedding day. He wanted to move into the liberating grace of brutal truth about himself and move on with his life. He asked Helen to do the same: ”I don’t want you to spend your life waiting for miracles, Helen, because there is no such thing.”
For now, though, John Locke is a man of science. Literally. You caught that, right? He accepted a job as substitute teacher. Subject: Biology. First lesson: the human reproductive system. It also looked like he was either teaching physical education or coaching basketball. There were some deeply embedded ironies here. FLASHBACK WHOOSH TO… the season 4 episode ”Cabin Fever,” in which Teenage Locke was encouraged by a teacher to cultivate his natural talent for science by attending a summer camp run by Mittelos Biosciences, the Others’ company that recruited miracle-grow fertility doc Juliet Burke to The Island. But Locke didn’t want to hear that. He wanted to drive fast cars and play sports. When he was told his dreams were unrealistic, Young Locke bellowed, ”Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” What a difference a (Jughead-spawned?) parallel reality makes. Here in the Sideways world, Locke is teaching science, teaching sports, and looking very much like a man who just found his niche. Of course, there’s still ample time for his born again life to go horribly wrong. After all, he’s now working with Benjamin Linus….
I thought this was an interesting newsflash from Ilana: Smokey is losing his shapeshifting mojo. By choosing Locke has his avatar, he’s becoming stuck with it, and you really got the sense that this god-like entity was settling into his new skin, his new home. But I also wondered what else Smokey might lose as he becomes more human. Will he lose the ability to turn to smoke and snake and coil through the jungle? Too bad, because that effect was pretty damn neat. But did you wonder as I did if perhaps some vestige of John Locke that got absorbed by Smokey along the way might be ”infecting” him to ironically appropriate some Island parlance? I got that latter vibe from the moment when we heard Un-Locke bellow, ”Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”
Sawyer became a dark knight of faith, a sinister ”substitute” for the deceased Locke. Or so I think the show made it seem….
UnLocke is old
He told Sawyer that he was a reader — but that Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, published in 1937, was after his time.
UnLocke used to be a man
”What I am is trapped,” Fake Locke told Sawyer at one point when James grew frustrated and pulled a gun on the Monster. (I was like, SHOOT HIM! Just see what happens!) ”I’ve been trapped for so long I don’t even remember what it feels like to be free. Maybe you understand that. But before I was trapped I was a man just like you. I know what its like to feel joy to feel pain, anger, fear, to experience betrayal. I know what it’s like to lose someone you love….” My gut is that hardcore Lost theorists will be pulling these lines apart, looking for clues they can research in hopes of ascertaining the Monster’s true identity. My guess is that we won’t find it in a book… but if we could, I’m betting that Un-Locke is either… Cain or Abel. I’ll explain why next week in my Doc Jensen column.
UnLocke and Richard have a special relationship
The Monster stated again that he wants to leave the Island and go home. He told Richard that he wanted him to come along. Richard adamantly refused. More than that, Richard was pretty damn confused by almost everything FLocke was telling him, most importantly the whole concept of ”candidates,” Jacob’s picks for replacing him as Island protector (again, provided we can trust Un-Locke).
UnLocke is haunted by a ghost
Smokey saw and was deeply ruffled by a vision of a sandy-haired boy with bloody hands wearing Others garb. He was also deeply bothered by the fact that Sawyer could see him, too. (If the boy is dead and appearing in spectral form, does that man that Sawyer has developed Hurley-like see dead people powers?) The boy later ventured close to Un-Locke, this time with no blood in his hands, and warned him that he could not kill him. THEORY: The boy functions as a referee in the Jacob-Man In Black skirmish. He got that honor because the boy represents the first person the Man In Black ever killed
The White and Black Rocks
What Smokey Said: Upon arriving in Jacob’s cave, Un-Locke spotted two large stones, one white and one black, sitting on a scale. He grabbed the white rock and threw it out into the sea. Sawyer asked: Huh? Un-Locke replied, ”Inside joke.” Percentage Chance I Believe Smokey: 100% Or maybe 0%, because I got the sense from Smokey’s angry toss that this so-called ”inside joke” wasn’t all that funny for him. My guess is — obviously — that the white rock represented Jacob, and that tossing that rock was symbolic of Fake Locke’s (apparent) victory, and, perhaps, his rejection of the white/black categorization of his morality and his relationship with Jacob. My guess is also that whenever and whatever was decided between Jacob and his nemesis — the nature of their conflict/game; the roles they would play; the rules they would play by — it was all hashed out and settled in the cave, and the deal was sealed with some ceremonial putting-rocks-on-a-scale thing.
The Numbers
What Smokey Said:Lost fans, prepare to rethink your Valenzetti Equations. With a dramatic reveal of the cave’s ceiling, we learned that Jacob assigned each of his potential replacements a number. He wrote their digits next to their last names on the ceiling of his cave with chalk. Locke: 4; [Hurley] Reyes: 8; [James ''Sawyer''] Ford: 15; [Sayid] Jarrah: 16; [Jack] Shephard: 23; [Jin or Sun?] Kwon: 42. Why? Un-Locke shrugged. ”Jacob had a thing for numbers,” he said. PCIBS: 49% It’s not that I think Jacob doesn’t have a thing for numbers — I just think that Jacob has good reason for assigning numbers to his candidates, and more, that Un-Locke knows what that reason is and isn’t telling Sawyer. DEBATE! Where’s Kate? (1-17 from Doc Jensen at ew.com)
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I haven’t had a chance to totally go over The Wall frame-by-frame (but Dark UFO has screencaps if you’re interested), but it seems nearly everyone on Flight 815 (or at least everyone who survived) was a candidate to replace Jacob (which seems very Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to me – who’s going to give up theirEverlasting Gobstopper, eh)? The Numbers represent six of our favorites:4 – Locke
8 – Hurley
15 – Sawyer
16 – Sayid
23 – Jack
42 – Sun or Jin
Locke’s name is now crossed out and I imagine Sayid’s name will be too now that he’s infected. And if Sawyer goes along with Smokey and doesn’t double cross him (which is a distinct possibility, don’t forget), Sawyer will also be out. This leaves Hurley, Jack and Sun or Jin. As for the latter two, I’m thinking it’s Jin since Sun wasn’t transported back in time on Flight 316. Of course, neither was Frank and he’s a candidate according to Ilana, but perhaps she hasn’t seen an updated list yet. Another possibility: Jacob did touch both Sun and Jin – maybe they can only be a candidate together.
And moreover, why is Smokey stuck as Locke now? I guess he won’t be impersonating Christian again anytime soon. So what do we know about the rules so far:1) Smokey isn’t allowed to kill Jacob unless he finds a loophole
2) Smokey isn’t allowed to leave the Island
3) Smokey isn’t allowed to kill the candidates (at least certain ones)
We can probably also add that Smokey has to protect the Island when summoned (as Ben did in the Barracks) and he needs help in order to leave the Island (which seems why he’s trying to “recruit” Sawyer and Richard).
So is the Island simply a giant prison for Smokey with Jacob as the warden?Seems like it right now. And this also explains Smokey’s snarky comment to Richard in LA X where he comments that it’s good to see him “out of those chains,” with the chains being his servitude to Jacob.
are the Numbers just related to the candidates or are they really part of the Valenzetti Equation as well?You can click the link above for the full lowdown on Valenzetti, but the short of it is:
According to the 1975 orientation film in the Sri Lanka Video, the Valenzetti Equation “predicts the exact number of years and months until humanity extinguishes itself.” During the video, Alvar Hanso also states that the radio transmitter on the Island, will “broadcast the core numerical values of the Valenzetti Equation.” The numbers,4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42, are explained in the Sri Lanka Video, as the numerical values to the core environmental and human factors of the Valenzetti Equation. Alvar Hanso also states in the video that the purpose of the DHARMA Initiative is to change the numerical values of any one of the core factors in the equation in order to give humanity a chance to survive by, effectively, changing doomsday.
Now these explanations are not mutually exclusive. I could easily see Jacob’s six candidates as being the variables that could prevent Doomsday (Smokey) from destroying the world. The interesting thing to me is that you need to change one of the variables to prevent destruction. Is this what Jacob is trying to do, get the candidates to change, possibly through redemption on the Island? I think that’s a really, really neat concept, don’t you? (18-21 from Mistaking Confidence With Fate)
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“You know the rules…”
Rules! They were first mentioned by Ben when Alex was killed and he muttered that Widmore had changed the rules. There’s always been a link between the Widmore/Ben war and the Jacob/MiB one, and in “The Shape of Things to Come,” Ben tells Widmore that he knows Ben can’t kill Widmore, and in “The Incident,” the MiB can’t kill Jacob. Here the mini-Jacob tells Not-Locke that he knows he can’t kill him. Does this mean that Jacob is only merely dead, and is NOT most sincerely dead?
Someone pointed this out in the comments: have you noticed, by the way, that the flashbacks are following the same sequence as S1? First ep a two-parter that covered off many of the survivors, ep 3 a Kate-centric one, ep 4 a Locke-centric one… does this mean next week is Jack-centric and the following week will focus on Sun? Presumably ep 7 won’t be about Chah-lie…
The loopy career counsellor who asks Locke what animal he would describe himself as was the fake fortune-teller that Papa Reyes hired to try to trick Hurley in “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead.”
I’m thinking Locke didn’t end up in the wheelchair because his father threw him out a window this time. Perhaps Cooper was still behind it somehow, but why else would Helen say they should invite his dad and her parents to a shotgun wedding? (Unless of course she meant that the shotgun was aimed at Cooper.) (22-25 from Nik at Nite)
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"What Kate Does" is the 3rd episode of Season 6 of Lost and the 106th produced hour of the series as a whole. It was first broadcast on Feb 9, 2010.
I give the episode an admiring B, and if you ask me again in a few hours, I might add a + to it, because the more I think through this deeper-than-it-appears affair, the more I’m stimulated by it. Granted, it’s my job to think about Lost, like, a lot, but put the episode’s good stuff on a scale and I’ll wager it’ll outweigh the lame stuff.
Josh Holloway’s wrenching acting as he revealed the heartbreaking disclosure that he intended to propose to Juliet. The intrigue of “infected” and “claimed” Sayid. The hilarious irony of Dr. Ethan Goodspeed. Crazy-scary mother-gone-wild Claire. The notable camaraderie of the Temple castaways, determined to survive their latest ordeal with “live together, die alone” idealism and great, knowing humor. And don’t look now, kids, but is Jack Shephard actually getting likable again? I loved his sincere concern for Kate and Sayid, his willingness to accept Sawyer’s seething heartbreak, and his humbled self-awareness. I loved his smiles, his knowing laughter, his warmth. “You take care of Sawyer, I’ll take care of Sayid,” Jack told Kate, the castaway dad huddling with the castaway mom on how to handle their troubled castaway kids. When he told Dogen, “I don’t even trust myself,” Jack may have uttered the most heroic statement of his wannabe hero life, because it was so painfully honest. Superman of Science? No. Superman of Faith? No. Just Jack. And in the end, one wonders if that’s exactly what he needs to be to save the day for himself and his friends.
The Sideways world story line very clearly mirrored the Island world story line. Kate chases after Sawyer; Kate chases after Claire. Is there a physical, cosmic connection between the two realities? Still TBD, though we were again given a few moments that seemed to suggest the Sideways characters were either intuitively recalling their Island experience or perhaps even channeling it. We’ve been told not to view the Sideways stuff as an inconsequential ”What if…?” fairy tale about an uncrashed Oceanic 815. Yet most of ”What Kate Does” felt exactly like that… until the final act, when we got the great comic irony of Tom Cruise’s Evil Cousin serving as Claire’s perfectly decent OB. By the end of the episode, I accepted Lost‘s first regular episode Sideways tale as a simplified pitch of the entire conceit. Nonetheless, I wished we had gotten more. Specifically: a clarifying peek into Sideways Kate past. Did this Kate also have a childhood pal with a fondness for toy airplanes? Did this Kate also murder her father? Did this Kate also marry a cop that looks like the guy Castle? The episode decided not to dote on the past.
Now, all of this is neat. But is Lost doing this just to be all fancy-pants literary, or could it be that Lost is trying to tell us something? Could it be that the creative design of Lost‘s sixth season, embedded and suffused with past episode resonance, is a clue to resolving the mystery of its seemingly split reality? I am wondering — and perhaps you are, too — if these corresponding events across parallel realities are meaningful synchronicities. It’s almost as if no matter the world, these people are destined to intersect and to play out variations of the same essential drama. THEORY! It’s all about reincarnation. The Sideways world is basically the afterlife for the Island castaways. Their Sideways selves contain the experiences of their Island World identities within their genetic make-up/spiritual essence. Think I’m crazy? Then I refer you to last year’s anagram clue, the Canton-Rainier (aka ”reincarnation”) Carpet Cleaning Company. See? Totally settled!
Now here’s the crazy thought I had — an alternative to past-life/reincarnation theory. I submit that when Kate saw Jack at the airport, she established a psycho-spiritual circuit with her doppelganger self on he Island, and specifically the moment between Jack and Kate in Temple. This circuit facilitated a transference of psychic energy that flowed from Island Kate to Sideways Kate — or rather, from Redeemed Kate to one of her Fallen Kate selves in another world. That energy? Strength. Selflessness. A sense of sacrifice. A sense of ”You All Everybody” idealism. All qualities that Kate embodied in her Island story — and all qualities that Kate gained during her Sideways story.To put it more simply: Island Kate inspired Sideways Kate. Bottom line: The Sideways-Island relationship is a metaphor for our relationship to fiction. It’s about how fantasy redeems reality
Then she saw the plush killer whale. Stopped her really, really cold. Kate looked in the mirror. The ”déjà vu-or-guilt?” expression wrinkled across her face. It would totally make sense to me if that killer whale poked at her Island-past life memory, because after all, in the Island world… it was Kate who gave Aaron that killer whale, not Claire. FLASHBACK-WHOOSH TO… the season 4 episode ”Something Nice Back Home,” the episode in which Aaron’s killer whale made its most prominent (and I think its only) appearance. This was the story in which Claire disappeared into the jungle with Ghost Christian, setting in motion the events that would send Aaron off the Island with Kate. This was also the episode in which Sawyer began to step up as a selfless castaway leader, setting in motion the events that would lead him to his own kind of ”something nice back home,” domestic bliss with Juliet in the Dharma ‘70s. This was also the episode that Jack proposed marriage to Kate — and then drove her away with his suspicion that her heart still belonged to Sawyer. This was also the episode where a bleeping smoke detector led Jack out in the waiting area of his hospital suite, where he found Ghost Christian sitting there, waiting for him. This was also the episode in which Jin made arrangements with Charlotte to make sure Sun got a spot on the helicopter that would get her off the Island, setting in motion the chain of events that would separate them. In various ways, all of these plot points from ”Something Nice Back Home” were implicitly referenced in the Island-set portion of ”What Kate Does.” I’ll identify them as we go — just look for handy-dandy SHAMU ALERT!
Killer whales belong to a long line of fish references in Lost. In season 3, we learned that the Hydra Station experimented on dolphins and sharks in their aquarium. In the season 4 premiere, Hurley’s sanitarium was swimming in big fish imagery, from a drawing in the day room to the graphic on Ghost Charlie’s short. At the end of season 5, we saw Jacob eating fish for breakfast. And of course, now we have… the Locke-ness Monster. You laugh — but then, you forget Claire’s disturbing nightmare from her season 1 episode ”Raised By Another,” which was suffused with her Aaron anxiety and future foreboding, and in which she encountered a creepy looking John Locke, one eye black, one eye white. Killer whale colors. Interesting. Especially interesting given our cultural affection for killer whales. See: Shamu, Free Willy, and one of favorite movies from my youth, Orca, the Killer Whale!, in which this boy killer whale goes crazy psycho on evil whalers for killing his pregnant girlfriend killer-whale mate. So very damn sad. IMPLICATION: FLocke, the Locke-ness Monster, may look fearsome and scary, but really, he’s our protector and friend. Just like Willy. Just like Prometheus.
Many people suspect Sayid became imbued with Jacob’s spirit, like he became a vessel for some or all of Jacob’s soul — a living Harry Potter horcrux. Maybe Dogen was trying to jar Jacob loose, bring him to the surface of Sayid’s consciousness. Honestly, watching Sayid suffer last night, my first thought was that Sayid should have… well, died. It looked like Dogen was inflicting way too much punishment, and Sayid’s tolerance struck me as almost superhuman — and superhuman ain’t natural. And here’s this observation from my colleague and fellow Lost friend Adam B. Vary. He noted that for a guy who went into death convinced he was going to hell, Sayid sure didn’t act like he was being punished, be it fairly or unfairly. His only frame of reference for his experience was one he knew full well: torture. He told Dogen that he had no information to share, nothing that he was hiding. Was that the ”tell” Dogen was looking for? We must recall last season, when Richard indicated that one of the side effects of the holy hot tub process was forgetfulness. Maybe Sayid remembers too much; maybe if the spring had worked, he wouldn’t have processed his experience through the lens of his old, damned life. Regardless: Sayid said and did all the wrong things for Dogen. FAIL! Time will tell if his grading is correct.
Aldo got up in Kate’s grill and reminded her that he was the all-grown-up-now Stephen Hawking-reading Other-boy that she and Sawyer assaulted outside Room 23 back in season 3. In doing so, Lost was cleverly reminding us of a significant gap in the Island’s story. The Oceanic 6 left the Island on the same day that the LeftBehinders started time traveling. That was around January of 2005. The dating of the current Island drama: December 2007/January 2008. That’s about 36 months of Island history that we have not seen. During that time, Aldo grew up. What else changed during that window? Well, for starters, someone disturbed the circle of ash around Jacob’s cabin and ransacked the joint. Also: Richard’s tribe of Others set up camp on the beach. Perhaps season 6 will help fill in the blanks.
The last time we saw Claire in the Island narrative, she was hanging with her father, Christian Shephard, in Jacob’s shack. We suspected that like Christian, she, too, was dead, killed during Keamy’s mercenary raid on New Otherton. In light of the revelation that Fake Locke is Smokey, and knowing that Smokey can animate or take the form of the dead, we should be wondering if back then, Ghost Christian and Ghost Claire were Smokey manifestations, too. Then again, this frizzy-haired crazy Claire that we saw last night came off as human. We were told by Dogen that Claire had been ”claimed” by the same ”darkness” currently spreading within Sayid. So many pieces of info, desperately needing clarifying context. I’m still crunching it. In the meantime, I’m going to theorize that Scary-Pale Claire is the Solomon Grundy of the Island… or a golem. And I’m not going to tell you what the hell I mean by that either! (1-10 from Doc Jensen)
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For me the most important line is the one above, spoken by Dogen. “Claimed” suggests that Sayid’s body has been taken over by someone (or something) else. We all assumed last week it was Jacob, and maybe the Temple dwellers assume it’s the Man in Black, and that he’s the bad dude. Watching Sayid hooked up to the electrocution device and seeing him getting stabbed with a hot poker made me think, “Wow… karma’s a bitch.” But they were using these torture instruments diagnostically. How? Could they have been seeing if the thing that Sayid’s body is hosting would jump out? Did they think he’d start talking in tongues? Or was it something more physical and less supernatural than that?
So… is this a production error or a suggestion that in the new timeline, Flight 815 actually left a month later? Claire’s ultrasound readout clearly says the date is 10/22/2004, which puts the flight in October, NOT September. (It also says it’s 9:29 in the morning, and considering it’s probably been a few hours of Kate and Claire running around and it’s been broad daylight the entire time… this is probably yet ANOTHER prop error.) So… prop error or hint that even the date is different?
The killer whale doll! Do you remember that? It’s from “Something Nice Back Home.” As Jack’s going completely ballistic on Kate because of some phone call that he thought might have something to do with Sawyer and he’s about to leave them, just as he says, “You’re not even RELATED to him!” Aaron comes walking out into the kitchen and he’s standing there holding the whale doll. Kate would have bought that for him, and in this reality Claire’s the one who got it for him. (It’s a clear reminder of the black and white theme on the show.)
Dogen says to Jack that he needs to remain separate from his people, because it makes it easier when he makes decisions they don’t like. As much as I loathe having to remind anyone of the events of “Stranger in a Strange Land,” this reminded me of the Jack tattoo that “Woman From the Others Who We Never Saw Again and Seemed to Have Been A Mistake At the Time Before the Writers Had Truly Worked Things Out” said meant, “He walks among us, but he is not one of us.”
Dogen’s name comes from D?gen Zenji, who was a Zen Buddhist master of one of the three sects of Japanese Buddhism. He lived in the thirteenth century.
Kate’s used the name “Joan Hart” before. I think it was in the flashback where she dyes her blonde hair back to the original brown and then asks the guy at the hotel front desk for any letters to Joan Hart.
In the original timeline that we saw before, many of us speculated that there was no adopting family on the other side, and Richard Malkin simply knew that flight was going to crash and he put Claire on it, forcing her to have to raise Aaron on her own. Does the adopting mom on the other side suggest that Malkin really was telling the truth, or did this change as a result of the different timeline? (11-17 from Nik at Nite)
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As Kate, Claire and the taxi driver make their break for it, Kate looks out her window and sees Jack. They share a lengthy glance that, in my humble opinion, tells us something important: she clearly remembers him. Now you might be thinking, “Of course she remembers him, she collided with him outside the 815 bathroom.” Yes, that’s true, but her expression is one of complete bewilderment, and that’s because she remembers him from somewhere else. Think about it – she’s desperately trying to make her escape, Arzt is blocking the taxi, all hell is breaking loose… in this situation, it would take something really out of the ordinary to make her forget all that for even a few seconds. When she sees Jack, she knows that she knows him from somewhere else.
Claire goes into labor and Kate, pulling a 180 from the desperate-to-escape convict we saw earlier, drives her to the hospital and even stays by her side. The doctor is none other than our good friend Ethan, which I thought was one of the episode’s more favorable developments. “I don’t want to stick you with needles if I don’t have to,” he says. I guess papa Horace got him on the sub in “The Incident” or else he wouldn’t actually be alive in this timeline.
Kate, Jin and two Others head out to recover Sawyer. And guess what – one of the Others is Aldo, vigilant guard of Room 23 (and I thought he was blown up at the beach raid in “Through the Looking Glass”!). I kind of liked Aldo showing up, mainly because he adds a degree of continuity to the Others, which is something the Others sorely lack most of the time. Apparently he’s been holding a grudge against Kate for knocking him unconscious three years ago, motivating him to spend the entire episode as an incompetent jerk. But he’s an Other, so I guess we shouldn’t expect anything other than constant, needless violence and threats from him. (Ok, I just have to mention how weird it was to see Mac from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia pop up as a character on Lost!! The two shows could not possibly be more opposite. Lost is intelligent and insightful and full of mystery. It’s Always Sunny is the most irreverent and funny show I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen It’s Always Sunny, give it a try. Just make sure there are absolutely no kids around!)
Kate finds Sawyer at the Barracks continuing to mourn Juliet. He even digs an engagement ring out the floorboards of his old house and, like Desmond in “Flashes Before Your Eyes”, he chucks it into the ocean. He won’t go back to the Temple with Kate, though it’s not entirely clear that she’s headed back there, anyway. If the Others’ goal is really to unite the “Touched”, they’re sure doing a lousy job.
Check out that ashy smoke that Dogen sprays on Sayid. Related to the circle of ash that keeps away the Smoke Monster? Quite possibly.
Since Dogen used the same words as Rousseau – i.e., “infected” and “sick” – I’m going to venture that this sickness afflicting Sayid is the same one that claimed the lives of Rousseau’s team. But this creates some inconsistencies. We pretty much know how Rousseau’s team got sick: the Smoke Monster did something to them. It would then make sense that ash is used in both the sickness “test” and to protect oneself from Smokey. But how did Sayid catch the sickness? We’ve known his whereabouts almost the entire time he’s been back on the island, and he never encountered the Smoke Monster. I guess going into the Spring could have something to do with it (on account of the water being murky), but Dogen and a couple Others went in there, too, and I’m assuming they’re not sick.
But instead of telling Jack anything concrete or meaningful about the sickness, Dogen sidesteps questions by revealing that it “claimed” his sister – Claire. Does this mean Claire is going crazy and leaving traps because she’s infected? That’s a little strange, as Claire is acting like Rousseau, who is the one verifiable person that didn’t get infected. Personally, I have trouble taking the Others at their word. But if he’s telling the truth, we’ll need to be shown some sort of flashback involving Claire and Dogen. But shooting Aldo doesn’t make Claire an “infected” person in my book, yet.
Deciphering the Others’ hierarchy has been a goal of Lost fans ever since Benry Gale claimed that bearded Tom was not the leader. That was four seasons ago. One would think we’d stop running into people claiming to be in charge of the Others by now.Tom, Klugh and Isabel were possibilities a long, long time ago. Stronger contenders included Charles Widmore, Eloise Hawking, Benjamin Linus and John Locke, who have all claimed to be the leader. And when finally it’s looking like the guy with the real authority has been Richard Alpert (on Jacob’s behalf) all along, Dogen appears. Is Dogen above Richard? I hope not, as that would really mess with my conception of the Others. I’d like to believe Dogen is lower on the chain than the “official” leader bracket, but I can’t really picture him taking orders from the likes of Ben. (18-25 by Robz888)
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Aaron has identity even before his birth. This is a disturbing and wonderful and deeply mysterious truth, made more profound by the chilling then comforting presence of Ethan Goodspeed at Claire’s bedside. Apparently, whether Claire gives birth on-Island or off, Ethan must lead the prenatal preparations. This revelation was one of several instances of relational inevitability dramatised over the last three hours. The recurring theme of inevitability seems fresh with each occurrence, seems a necessary aspect of the narrative.
His name must be Aaron. “I don’t know why I said it,” Claire says to Kate. “It was like I knew it or something.” He is Aaron because his own flesh-and-blood mother must raise him. And somehow, we know, even before Claire knocks on the door of the adopting family’s house, there is no way they can adopt the baby. Of course the woman’s husband left her–the world is course-correcting in such a way that Claire, whether she likes it or not, will have to raise the baby herself. That is her destiny, but more importantly, this is Aaron’s destiny.
The most terrible and exciting aspect of this entire sequence of scenes is the fact that every facet of the strange inevitability around Aaron revolves around the truth that he must return to the Island. Yet we know, in the spacetime inhabited by fugitive Kate and pregnant Claire and the pleasant Dr. Goodspeed, the Island is submerged under a thousand metres of water. There is no Island to which Aaron can return, and in this spacetime, he was never even on the Island. Yet the connection to the Island is undeniable. Aaron is tethered to the Island by an umbilical stronger and more real than the one connecting him to his mother.
Sayid and Jack place greater value on their trust of each other than on their own lives.
This is not a show about good versus evil. It is not about free will versus determinism. It is not about time travel or electromagnetic anomalies or spacetime displacement. It is about our very humanity. It is about who we are at the very centre of our conscious selves.
The interaction between the two women is as rich in its own way as the higher-stakes scenes between Jack and Sayid. Claire ought to be frightened by the reckless fugitive who thinks nothing of pointing loaded guns at anyone crossing her path. Yet Claire feels endeared to the woman and her genuine desire to help. When Claire asks Kate to accompany her to the door of the adoptive parents’ home, we know the connection is firm. And when they dash to the hospital, Claire protects her new friend.
Two sides: One Jacob, one the Man in Black. One says human beings are essentially good, that we seek perfection. One says human beings are corrupt, that we can only be judged for our sins.
In the world of LOST–on the Island–they’re both wrong. Human beings are good and bad. But our humanity is only good. It is our humanity–the fertile soil of our existence as complete human beings–that is worthy above all of our most reverent attention–even to the point of sacrificing health and life to secure for the common good (26-31 from Pearson Moore)
============(I don’t know why my numbered list reset to 1. Can’t fix it!! aargh!)
The Others started freaking out about Sayid after he had mysteriously come back to life (yeah, I’d freak out too). But does the Sickness only infect dead bodies? And, more specifically, do they have to be unburied to infect them? Claire likely died somewhere in the jungle after the explosion at the Barracks. And remember that Christian’s body was unburied when the coffin crashed on the Island too. Boone, Shannon, Charlie, Eko, Ana-Lucia, Libby and Nikki & Paolo were all buried and we haven’t seen them walking around the Island ala Christian.But if Smokey is the one claiming them, can Smokey only assume the forms of unburied bodies? He’s appeared as Christian and Yemi to be sure (both unburied, Yemi’s body was burned and later disappeared). He’s also appeared as Alex, whose body I believe was left at the Barracks in the aftermath of the attack (Ben said goodbye, but I don’t think he buried her).I wonder if this has anything to do with the theory that Smokey really is one of the Egyptian Gods of the underworld. Of course, since we now know that the Nemesis = Smokey, Smokey’s got to be a more important god to rival Jacob. If Jacob is Horus, Osiris, orRa then Smokey is Anubis, Set, or Apep. Regardless, I think this is definitely worth keeping in mind. (from Mistaking Confidence With Kate)
And here’s a promo for next weeks episode. Is Sawyer going to team up with the Locke-ness Monster?
What can you say? After an almost year long hiatus, Lost is back, kickin’ butt and takin’ names!!! I thoroughly enjoyed these first two episodes and loved the big reveals, and of course, was frustrated at all the new questions this episode created!
Also, I just want to be clear, that the following ideas and theories are collated from about 10-15 different other blogs and podcasts I follow on a daily basis. I figure that I’ll summarize all the great ideas out there for those of you who choose to just follow one blog, that being mine. (click here to see a list of all the Lost people I read or click here to see a list of Lost fanatics I follow on Twitter) This post is rather long, but well worth the read. Lots of great theories ahead!
I’m going to start off this blog post by highlighting a very telling interview Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (Lost’s main producers) gave to Entertainment Weekly. (click here for full link) I encourage to read it fully, as there are lots of tidbits spread throughout the article.
EW: The whole idea of flash-sideways and the plan to use season 6 to show us a world where Oceanic 815 never crashed — how long has that been in the works? Why did you want to do it? DAMON LINDELOF: It’s been in play for at least a couple of years. We knew that the ending of the time travel season was going to be an attempt to reboot. And as a result, we [knew] the audience was going to come out of the “do-over moment” thinking we were either going start over or just say it didn’t work and continue on. [We thought] wouldn’t it be great if we did both? That was the origin of the story. CARLTON CUSE: We thought just doing one [of those options] would inherently not be satisfying. Since the very beginning of the show, characters started crossing through each other’s stories. Part of our desire [in season 6] is to show that there’s still this kind of weave, that these characters still would have impacted each other’s lives even without the event of crashing on the Island. Obviously, the big question of the season is going to be: How do these [two timelines] reconcile? However, for the fans who have not watched the show closely, that’s an intact narrative. You can just watch the flash sideways — they stand alone all by themselves. For the fans who are more deeply embedded in the show, you can watch those flash sideways, compare them to what transpired in the flashbacks and go, “Oh, that’s an interesting difference.” LINDELOF: Right out of the gate, in the first five minutes of the premiere, you get hit over the head with two things that you’re not expecting. The first is that Desmond is on the plane. The second thing that we do is we drop out of the plane and we go below the water and we see that the Island is submerged. What we’re trying to do there is basically say to you, “God bless the survivors of Oceanic 815, because they’re so self-centered, they thought the only effect [of detonating the bomb] was going to be that their plane never crashes.” But they don’t stop to think, “If we do this in 1977, what else is going to affected by this?” So that their entire lives can be changed radically. In fact, it would appear that they’ve sunken the Island. That’s our way of saying, “Keep your eyes peeled for the differences that you’re not expecting.” Some of these characters were still in Australia, but some weren’t. Shannon’s not there. Boone actually says that he tried to get her back. There are all sorts of other people that we don’t see. Where’s Libby? Where’s Ana Lucia? Where’s Eko? These are all the things that you’re supposed to be thinking about. When our characters posited the “What if?” scenario, they neglected to think about what the other effects of potentially changing time might be and we’re embracing those things.
That said, are you saying definitively that detonating Jughead was the event that created this new timeline? Or is that a mystery which the season 6 story will reveal? LINDELOF: It’s a mystery. A big one. CUSE: We did have some concern that it might be confusing kind of going into the season. To clear that up a little bit: The archetypes of the characters are the same and that’s the most significant thing. Kate is still a fugitive. If you were to look at the Comic-Con video, for instance, that now comes into play. There was a different scenario in that story. She basically blew up an apprentice plumber as opposed to killing her biological father/stepfather. Those kind of differences exist, but who the characters fundamentally are is the same. If it becomes too confusing for you, you can just follow the flash sideways for what they are. It’s not as though there’s narrative that hangs on the fact that you need to know that this event was different in that world, in the flashback world versus the sideways world. That’s not critical for being able to process the narrative this season.
Is there a relationship between Island reality and sideways reality? Will they run parallel for the remainder of the season? Will they fuse together? Might one fade away? LINDELOF: For us, the big risk that we’re taking in the final season of the show is basically this very question. [Lindelof then explains the show has replaced the trademark “whoosh!” sound effect marking the segue between Island present story and flashbacks or flash-forwards, thus calling conspicuous attention to the relationship between the Island world and the Sideways world.] This is the critical mystery of the season, which is, “What is the relationship between these two shows?” And we don’t use the phrase “alternate reality,” because to call one of them an “alternate reality” is to infer that one of them isn’t real, or one of them is real and the other is the alternate to being real. CUSE: But the questions you’re asking are exactly the right questions. What are we to make of the fact that they’re showing us two different timelines? Are they going to resolve? Are they going to connect? Are they going to co-exist in parallel fashion? Are they going to cross? Do they intersect? Does one prove to be viable and the other one not? I think those are all the kind of speculations that are the right speculations to be having at this point in the season. LINDELOF: But it is going to require patience. We’ve taught the audience how to be patient thus far, so while they’re getting a lot of mythological answers on the island early in the season, this idea of what is the relationship between the two [worlds] is a little bit more of a slow burn.
Did Jughead really sink the Island? And is it possible that the Sideways characters are now caught in a time loop in which they might have to go back in time and fulfill the obligation to continuity by detonating the bomb? LINDELOF: These questions will be dealt with on the show. Should you infer that the detonation of Jughead is what sunk the island? Who knows? But there’s the Foot. What do you get when you see that shot? It looks like New Otherton got built. These little clues [might help you] extrapolate when the Island may have sunk. Start to think about it. A couple of episodes down the road, some of the characters might even discuss it. We will say this: season 6 is not about time travel. It’s about the implications, the aftermath, and the causality of trying to change the past. But the idea of continuing to do paradoxical storytelling is not what we’re interested in this year.
Now, off to see what the blogosphere is saying about last night’s brand new Lost episodes.
Did Jacob want Ben to kill him? I keep being reminded of Ob-Wan, “If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine”. Of course we all know how that ended, Obi-Wan turned into a useless ghost. But there do seem to be parallels. Obi-wan/Jacob is killed way too easily by a lackey, Darth Vader/Ben, while the real Master, The Emporer/”Locke” sits on the sidelines. Will Jacob be more useful?
Is it possible that Ben is feeling suicidal? He’s back on the Island like he wanted, but Locke is there too, ready to snatch The Others away from him. His own daughter accused him of her murder and now he’s killed his former boss. I imagine that might be a little discouraging.
”See you in another life” has new meaning now doesn’t it? (Desmond had told Jack that in Season 2 as they exercised at a local track)
Jacob says, “I was killed by an old friend who grew tired of my company”. I’m definitely thinking a lot about the cave drawing of Smokey and Anubis. Beside that there is some slight significance to that line. Apparently the Man in Black was annoyed with Jacob because they had to spend so much time together, presumably stuck on the Island.
Sayid was very concerned about what would happen to him after he died. I think that raises the possibility of something interesting happening to everyone off the Island after these characters die. Dying on the Island, in that timeline, might allow a character to pass into the other timeline. I doubt the writers wanted to bring up heaven and hell at this point.
Charlie says “I was supposed to die”. Really? In the same way he was supposed to die at the end of Season 4? Is Charlie aware of the past? That would make him more interesting. (1-6 Not Confused Just Lost)
Free Will vs. Destiny
Again the show’s overarching theme was there in a big way. Charlie says he was supposed to die, and in the original timeline, that’s exactly what happened. When they find Montand’s body, he had on him one of Kierkegaard’s books. Kierkegaard believed in choice and free will and believed in experience over theory. Perhaps Smokey attacked Rousseau’s crew for those beliefs? (Interestingly, he also studied the personal and psychological reactions people had when faced with certain circumstances, as if he were the real father of the Dharma Initiative, who ran many psychological experiments that covered similar material.) There’s an idea in the episode that no matter which path you choose, the outcome will be the same. Jack will always be the guy rushing to someone’s side, and will be hated for it. Locke will continue to believe in his greatness, even if no one else does. Boone says he’d be by Locke’s side, just as he was on the island. When Kate knocks the marshall out, he incurs the exact same wound on the same side of his forehead that he got when the case whacked him in the head. When Kate runs into Jack as she’s stepping out of the airplane bathroom, she looks at Jack like she’s immediately taken by him, just like she did on the island. When Sawyer sees Kate’s handcuffs in the elevator, he’s immediately attracted by her bad-girl nature and helps her out.
So blowing up a Hydrogen bomb in the Swan caused the entire Island to sink. Hmm, curious. That kind of implies that they killed everyone on the Island. I guess they considered that before they did it, but still, to see it makes a big difference. All those people died to give Jack a second chance with Kate? Of course this is all mostly just hypothetical, in reality those people only died in 50% of the show. They lived in half of these episodes (well until the Purge)
Hurley’s also wearing a red shirt. Which has me REALLY REALLY worried. Please change shirts, Hurley. Soon! (3-5 Nik at Nite)
The questions you are asking are questions you should be asking. (2) You will get answers to these questions — but patience will be required. (3) The temptation will be to dismiss the sideways story as ”What if…?” trivia, but we should trust that we’re being shown this story for a reason, and so we should take the leap of investing in its reality. Interesting: Last night’s first of two conspicuous literary references was Salman Rushdie’s fantasy Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Its famous line? ”What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” The premiere’s second conspicuous reference? Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which challenges true believers to embrace the absurdity of faith. Combined, both books send this message to us: This absurd sideways thing has a purpose. It is ”useful.” Promise. Have faith. Just go with it..
o my eyes, the premiere, entitled ”LA X,” was filled with metaphors for afterlife possibilities, beginning with that bravura f/x shot taking us to the sunken Island — a figurative descent into the underworld, to a veritable city of the dead. The Sideways story line represented old, pagan ideas of reincarnation. The Island story line, with its deus ex machina plucked characters: the Christian rapture.
the episode continued to mirror the established Lostnarrative. Jack’s nicked neck RX was analog to pilot’s ”physician, heal thyself” moment when Jack excused himself to the jungle of Craphole Island to patch up the ugly gash on his side. One wonders if the entire season 6 side ways story line will model the general thematic thrust of the castaway story, but with different incidents and events — a gritty, more down-to-earth version of the mythic, larger-than-life Island epic, like how Dorothy’s adventure in Oz was a fantastical extrapolation of her life in Kansas.
But where did Desmond go? Later, when Jack returned to his seat from saving Charlie from a bag of heroin, Desmond had vanished. There’s probably a reasonable explanation for this, too. (That Jack was creepy. I’m going back to my other chair next to the snoring guy.) Still, I did have the thought that Desmond could be flickering in and out of this world, like Pariah in Crisis on Infinite Earths. And if that reference lost you, just pretend it didn’t. Maybe there’s something not quite ”set” about the Sideways reality, that it’s still in flux, and Desmond is an element moving in and out of the mix, like a supplementary story line to an epic film that may or may not make the final cut depending on the director’s vision.
14.Question: What sunk the Island?
Possible Answer: Jughead. Does That Make Sense? I’m not sure. If the bomb was powerful enough to sink the Island, wouldn’t it also have obliterated the Dharma Barracks, which we saw were still intact?
Question: So if not Jughead… what sunk the Island? Possible Answer: The Island’s electromagnetic energy. Huh? In all my theorizing about Jughead since last May, I have pretty much neglected this pretty huge plot point. The Dharma Initiative was dealing with another crisis that had nothing to do with the time travelers or Jughead. Radzinsky’s ”Black Swan” team has been drilling into the Island’s pocket of electromagnetic energy. Doing so risked cataclysmic consequences, according to Dr. Chang. What if in the Sideways world, Radzinsky continued drilling, hit the EM pocket, and triggered a cataclysm that sunk the Island. Where do the castaways fit into this theory? They don’t. Or won’t. I mean they don’t have to, because this scenario doesn’t need them. The sideways world could have branched off from Island world many years earlier. It may not even be a branch at all.
15. The question remains: What did Juliet mean by ”It worked”? Clearly, Lost wanted us to think that Juliet was acknowledging the Sideways World. Here’s just one possibility. Perhaps the Sideways World is the afterlife for these characters. Perhaps when they die, their consciousness or essence zips into their sideways doppelgänger. Perhaps what Juliet really saw as she was slipping away from the Island World was the dawning of a new life with Sawyer in the Sideways World. The show has given us precedent. I refer to season 3, ”The High Cost Of Living” — the episode where Mr. Eko was killed by Smokey. As Eko lay dying, we were shown a sweet little bit of younger Eko walking into the sunset with his brother, Yemi. Was Eko merely flashing on a happy memory — or were we being shown Eko’s afterlife destiny, i.e. his soul transmigrating back to a pivotal point in his past? In light of what we saw in the premiere, I would amend ”point in the past” to ”the sideways world.”
16. So just in case you stragglers weren’t sure of this before, the Whispers = the Others. But perhaps a certain classification of Others, i.e. the hard-core Island mystics that hang in the spiritual heart of the Island, anchored by a ziggurat, a step pyramid more Mesopotamian than Egyptian, even though there were Egyptian hieroglyphics everywhere. I am beginning to feel Island archaeology is tangential to what the Island really is. The Island: the original and purest expression of the God idea, of God power. These ruins? The remains of those zealots who’ve attempted to claim, name, and tame this place over the centuries — those people the Man In Black spoke of last year: ”They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”
17. it seemed to me what needed to happen was that Sayid needed to not only be revived but stay alive for the entire course of the treatment in order for the full scope of its magic/effect to take. What is that magic/effect? And what were the ”risks” Dogen spoke of? We may look to Benjamin Linus for some illumination. Last year, after Sayid shot Young Ben, Richard Alpert brought the boy into the Temple for healing. We may now surmise that what happened to Sayid was what happened to Ben, albeit more successfully. But what did Alpert say? ”He’ll forget this ever happened, and his innocence will be gone.” The bottom line is that the spring’s affect on people may be more than physical — it could be spiritual, too.
18. ”Hello, Richard. Nice to see you out of those chains.’‘ FLocke’s line to Richard after leaving the Four Toed Statue and Richard had finally figured out FLocke’s identity was a theory spawner. ”You?” Richard said. ”Me,” Flocked said, and then took him down hard. The popular theory is that FLocke was alluding to the Black Rock with his chains reference, as if Richard had come to the Island as a slave. What might be the reason for their bad blood? My hunch is that FLocke is bitter toward Alpert for conspiring successfully to keep FLocke locked up all these years. FLocke hoisted the unconscious Alpert on his shoulder and walked into the jungle, yelling before that: ”I AM VERY DISAPPOINTED IN ALL OF YOU. As he left, he passed the body of the real John Locke lying dead on the and. I yearned for this betrayed man of faith to take to his feet and walk again. That didn’t happen. (10-18 Doc Jensen)
19. This is also a good time to point out a strange line of dialogue from season one, during All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues. After Ethan drags Charlie off and Jack is chasing after him, he tells Kate “I’m not letting him do this. Not again.” Is Jack referring to Ethan taking Claire earlier in the season? Maybe. At the same time though, it also seems as if Jack knows what’s happened before, and this time around he’s looking to change the outcome. If you ask me, Charlie was supposed to die at that tree. Jack brought him back through sheer force of will… call it faith, belief, or whatever. From that moment on, death always surrounded Charlie. As Desmond proved over and over in season three, there was just no saving him. Even now, in this alternate timeline, Jack is still trying to prevent his friend from dying. It might not be long before destiny course corrects by killing Charlie in some other way.
Examine Charlie’s many deaths a little more closely, and they all have one thing in common: not breathing. Desmond saw him drown (once in a dream, once in reality), Ethan hangs him to asphyxiation, and we see a vision in which he gets shot in the throat with an arrow. Now, in this episode, Charlie’s choking on a big bag of heroin. Whatever happened to kill Charlie must apparently happen again and again, in the same basic way, no matter where, when or what universe he happens to be in.
20. Traditionally, mirrors have played a huge part all throughout LOST. In almost every case, they’ve reflected back the raw truth. Maybe they’ve even given us a glimpse into the elusive ‘other side’. Whatever happened to cause the wound on Jack’s neck, perhaps it only happened in the one “true” universe. It’s possible the mirror is reflecting back something that happens to Jack later on, or maybe even at the end of the show. It’s important to realize that we never see this wound directly, but only in the mirror.
21. It was extremely significant that Locke gave Bram’s team a choice before killing them. He explained that Jacob was dead, and presented their situation in a straightforward, logical way. They were basically free to go, at least up until Bram fired his gun. Once that happened, judgment could be passed. This is also why Richard is so adamant that no one on the beach shoot Locke, screaming for them to hold their fire when he finally emerges from the statue.
Going a bit further, this also explains why the smoke monster doesn’t just kill anyone and everyone it comes across. We already know that the dark man disapproves of Jacob bringing people to the island. In keeping with the rules however, he seems unable to touch anyone unless he’s judged them first, or unless they’ve wronged him in some way. Not sure how or why it killed Seth Norris or Nadine… but both of those characters had just arrived on the island so maybe there was a exception clause. Or maybe the smoke monster hadn’t eaten in a while, and he was just plain hungry.
Bram’s circle of ash is something the monster apparently can’t cross. Perhaps this solves the mystery of Jacob’s cabin: it wasn’t Jacob’s at all. If the cabin served as a type of prison, then the circle of ash there was used to keep the entity or monster in and not out. This may by why Illana’s team burned the cabin to the ground upon reaching the island – possibly on Jacob’s orders. In any case, Bram’s plan A sucked, and his plan B was non-existant.
22. Jacob’s lists have always been critical to LOST’s story. He’s not very big on communication, so these lists are all his followers really have to go on. I’ve long theorized that the people listed by Jacob are the ones integral to the end game – without every single one of them, Jacob’s final ending cannot be realized. This could be why the hippy with the wire-rimmed glasses tells us that Sayid had better pull through, or there’s going to be BIG trouble. As they called out their names, I also realized that we were cycling through every single one of the characters that Jacob had already touched during The Incident. Sawyer shows up later on, and he’s been touched too. But Miles? Uh oh
23. So what happens now? Is Sayid still Sayid, or is he now a ‘candidate’ for Jacob? As much as I hate to say it, we’ve probably seen the end of the asskicking Iraqi we all know and love. Hopefully I’m wrong, but it would make more sense for Jacob to somehow inhabit Sayid’s body here, especially since he was the one who sent that body to the temple. Go back and look at Jacob’s face while he’s talking to Hurley and examining Sayid’s wounds. Even he knows the guy is too far gone. It’s unfortunate, and he looks a little sorry to even do it, but I’m pretty sure Jacob’s going to somehow live through this new version of Sayid
24. While I’m not sure Jacob and his nemesis are a pair of fallen angels, there’s certainly a higher power above them. Maybe they’ve been placed on the island for a specific purpose: to serve a penance all their own. Perhaps their game isn’t a game at all, but a lesson that needs to be learned before they can move on. If this is the case, the island becomes their own personal Purgatory…. and yes, I said Purgatory
25. After the crash, Jack has no way of knowing that his dad’s coffin wasn’t on the plane. As far as he’s concerned, it was. So when he starts chasing ghost-Christian through the jungle and “finds” the coffin, is Jack only seeing what he expects to see? Did he bring his father’s coffin – and even his Christian himself – to the island via the magic box, much like Sawyer unknowingly brought The Man From Tallahassee? Kooky idea, but we’re in season six. Ghosts, time travel, alternate timelines… the whole magic box thing goes down a lot easier these days.
Similarly, Locke’s case of knives was found amongst the beach wreckage early in season one. I’ve long speculated that those knives were there simply because Locke wanted them to be there, but now we find out that he really did pack them. Yet if they never made the plane and they somehow still showed up on the beach… magic box? Could be. Early on we saw a lot of things brought into being by requirement, usually whenever a character needed them most.
26. After beating Richard like a prison inmate trying to make a statement, the monster stands up to address everyone surrounding him. “I’m very disappointed in all of you!”, he shouts. Not sure what he means by this, but it struck me that maybe he’s going topretend to be Jacob. It was probably that half-smirk he made at the end. The only conscious person who’d know that he’s lying would be Ben… and the last time we saw Ben he was looking for a second pair of shorts. Whatever the dark man’s next move is, you can be sure it involves an asskicking. (19-26 by Vozzek69)
Just wanted to say that I’m glad to be back blogging, but I sure have been enjoying my time away from the computer. My wife are on vacation and just got back from a 5 day cruise! That was a lot of fun! Tonight we watched the new Star Trek movie (directed by JJ Abrams, so it is Lost related!) and it was phenomenal. We also watched this week’s Lost a day late, thus the late blog entry! Just want to say thanks you to Nic for letting me use his laptop to write up this blogpost! And this post is a long one, but keep reading. There are some juicy tidbits in this episode!!
Soooo, here we go! My initial reaction to this episode is that I need to watch it again.
“Follow the Leader” is the fifteenth episode of Season 5 of Lost and the 101st produced hour of the series as a whole. After the death of Daniel in 1977, Jack and Kate wok with Eloise and Richard to follow through with Daniel’s plan to detonate the hydrogen bomb. In present time, Locke finally takes his place as leader of the Others and begins his new mission, with Richard’s help. It was originally broadcast on May 6, 2009. (Lostpedia.com recap)
Richard’s building of what could be the Black Rock might be a clue that he was once tied to the slave ship… but I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure he’ll turn out to be way older than that. This episode, we finally learn more about Richard’s role in the story: he’s an ancient advisor. So we’ve got deputies of fate like Abaddon and Hawking, and we’ve got Richard in the role of camp counselor. With his book of laws and a rusty old compass, he gets to sit around building model ships until it’s time to help identify the next leader of the Others eternal campout. Oh yeah, and he gets to stay young forever too. Not that bad a gig, really.
There are a few important elements to this scene. The first are Richard’s words to Sun, after she shows him the recruitment photo. The fact that he “saw them all die” doesn’t mean much here, because he could easily be talking about the Dharma initiative in general and referring to the purge. But if he’s not, it’s gonna make the finale a hell of a lot more interesting.
Locke’s words to Sun were also interesting: “I don’t think we went through all this for nothing, Sun.” This seems to indicate a definite sense of purpose; not just for him but for all of our main characters. Where old Locke was a follower, flowing along with the island’s stream of never-ending (and repeating) events, new John Locke is suddenly anti-destiny, striding purposefully through the island’s jungles and across its beaches in an attempt to make a difference. He’s instilled with both knowledge AND an objective. And his objective is the exact opposite of Ben and Richard’s, which I think I’ve finally figured out:
Since last week, I’ve had the impression that the Others have all been guardians of LOST’s time loop, living only to keep it alive. Somewhere down the line, a horrific event takes place that needs to be avoided. I think most of us can agree by now that the release of the island’s inner energy causes time to fold back on itself, looping over and over again. This loop of time must begin somewhere and end somewhere (the incident? the 815 crash?), but everything in between is the only thing that matters to the Others. This is where they reside, and this is what they protect.
So these people survive on and on, living from generation to generation, making sure that everything happens up to and including the important point where time folds back upon itself. They have knowledge passed on from forever ago, and their agents (Hawking, Abaddon, etc…) use this knowledge to ensure that the everything happens in proper order. Richard is the Other’s constant. Since he never dies, he’s the keeper of all the advanced knowledge – he passes this on to each successive chosen leader. He knows what must be done and guides everyone accordingly. And if I were him, I’d probably be bored out of my skull right about now, too.
I’m thinking the Swan hatch MUST get built in order to allow the time loop to occur. Everyone knows this. This is why the Others are allowing a full-blown construction team to dig in their territory. This also explains why they’d leave Desmond alone for all those years, so he could keep on pushing the button.
When you consider that only the leaders really know what’s going on, the rest of the Others’ tribe members are resigned to lame tasks like fishing, hunting, sewing up those cool cloth tents, and getting shot every couple of episodes. They’re generations removed from knowing anything about what’s going on. Every once in a while a leader gives them an important task that will shape the future, such as clearing off the runway on the Hydra island, but they’re too much in the dark to even know why they’re doing such things. They’ve been followers for so long, they no longer even know who or what they’re following. Just look at how they all stumbled, zombie-like, into a line of well-behaved sheep when Locke announced he was taking everyone to the movies.
So now, where does Jacob fit into all this? And why are they following him? The answer is that they’re not. Even worse, they never really were. More on that at the end.
Kate looks horrified at Jack’s suggestion that he erase their future past. From the face she makes when Jack mentions flight 815 landing in Los Angeles, some of it has to stem from Kate knowing she’ll be back in handcuffs. But from the rest of it, I guess we’re supposed to gather that Kate truly does love Jack. I never really doubted this, but I think she somehow loved Sawyer more. Can she love both? Not sure. But Kate seems to do the most soul-searching when she’s in captivity, and her love always seems conditional on her current situation. This is exactly the type of flip-flopping that dooms her character to ridicule.
We also learn a little more here about Widmore and Hawking: both of them seem to be on equal footing when it comes to ruling the Others. I was surprised at how little resistance he gave her after she explained what she planned to to. Watching him place his hand on her stomach, we can also assume she’s already pregnant with Daniel.
So why are the big bosses at Ann Arbor so obsessed with getting the Swan done? From what we know so far, its only purpose is to study a magnetic anomaly. This can’t be the case anymore – someone definitely knows something (or maybe even has advanced knowledge of that something). Hopefully Radzinsky will reveal this later on. For now though, we get to watch him beat up Sawyer – and see Phil slap girls. Not cool Phil. If I were him, I wouldn’t be doing that with the finale coming up and all.
And don’t reduce Sawyer’s loyalty solely to Kate. Just because they did a freeze-frame on her tiny little butt doesn’t mean Sawyer wasn’t trying to protect all his other friends too. This was apparent when Juliet was about to say something and he told her not to get anyone else hurt. Sawyer won’t betray any of his friends. So when Radzinsky gives Sawyer pencil and paper, I’m pretty sure he’s going to get a diagram of Disneyland. This should lead Radzinsky’s team into a storm of trouble during the finale… and it might put the blast door map a little off, too.
The Variable is Hurley.
Since the very beginning of LOST, this has been true. We’ve never seen it so clearly until now, because we’ve never really had reason to scrutinize it. But let’s examine the evidence for a minute, and then you guys can make your own assumptions. Here’s what I’m saying:
* Hurley almost didn’t make Flight 815. In fact, the woman at the counter tells him: “I don’t think you’re supposed to be on this flight, dear”.
* When Ben sees Hurley on Ajira 316, he looks him in the eye and tells him: “Hugo, who told you to come?”
* In Left Behind, episode S3.15, Hurley stands on the beach with Sawyer sitting behind him. He then looks out into the ocean, and says “I’m not supposed to be here”.
* In Locke’s vision where Boone’s wheeling him through the airport, Hurley’s the only person not getting on the plane. Everyone else is boarding the flight, but Hurley is not a passenger: instead he’s stamping tickets at the gate.
* In S1, Hurley knew he wouldn’t die on the bridge. He just had a ‘feeling’ he’d be alright – and he was. At the end of S3 Hurley knew he could get that 30+ year old van to start… and he got it started. He drives the van into Pryce through a hail of gunfire, without ever taking a single bullet.
* Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and Hurley all get captured by the Others. But Hurley was the one person they let go.
Hugo has always been lucky: rolling the dice, winning at horseshoes, never missing at basketball, winning the lottery. He eternally makes his own luck… and if this is the case, it stands to reason that he can make his own future. Hugo makes his own kind of music – he’s been doing this both on and off the island. He’s untouchable, unreachable, and the island can’t affect him for a very simple reason: he’s not supposed to be here.
Think about Hurley’s distractions, too. The island tried to bribe him with a storeroom of food, but Hugo blew it up. It tried to offer him romance, but then his potential girlfriend gets shot. It even tries to get him to kill himself… by using Dave to almost convince Hurley to jump off a cliff. Didn’t work.
Outside of the island? Hurley’s in a mental institution, where someone is watching over him (because they can’t touch him) to make sure he stays put. He gets out anyway. Then he’s captured and imprisoned by the police. Somehow he gets out of that, too. No matter what happens, Hurley can’t be contained. Hurley can somehow even see Jacob’s cabin, because he’s not affected by whatever illusions or smokescreens the island puts up.
Even now, it’s no coincidence that Hurley’s the one voice arguing in favor that things can be changed. He argues with Miles in Whatever Happened Happened, and he’s trying to rewrite history with his Empire Strikes Back script. Hurley’s seen more ghosts than anyone else. Charlie comes to Hurley as a ghost, telling him “They need you”. Who needs him? Everyone else in the story. The Hurley bird is even shrieking his name over and over in the finale. The answer is obvious to me: Hurley’s the one person who’ll end up changing things.
What’s funny is that we’ve always thought the game changer would come from one of the bigger players: Desmond, Ben, Jack, Locke – but if you think about LOST in general, it makes sense that such changes would come from someone you’d least expect. Hurley is perfect because no one’s expecting him to matter. He’s done nothing but cook, divide up food, play ping pong, and make everyone else laugh – including us.
Hurley is the island’s very big problem because he’s the one person who’s “not here for a reason”. And that’s the very reason why he’ll end up being so important: WHH can’t apply to Hurley, because he was never a part of the plan (timeline?) in the first place. In short, I’m saying Hurley is the variable. Just tossing that out there, so let’s hear everyone’s thoughts on it!
Here’s one to hate on: I think Ben’s not half as stupid as he acts this episode. Michael Emerson is an amazing actor, which is why you can tell when he’s intentionally over-acting. Ben’s comments throughout this episode ranged from false bitterness (“Why John, afraid I’ll stage a coup?”) to artificial astonishment (“What just happened? Where did you go?”) to over-the-top sarcasm (“Your timing was impeccable, John!”). If you doubt it, just listen to him when Locke mentions the Beechcraft: “What plane?!?!?!”. Yeah, right. Clearly he’s acting here, and not doing a very good job of it (Linus, not Emerson).
The reason for this is pretty simple: Ben’s slow-playing the island. He intentionally wants the island (acting through Locke) to think he’s stupid, that way it doesn’t perceive him as a threat. Thinking pointedly back to Alex tossing him around that Egyptian chamber and calling him out on his murderous thoughts, Ben is attempting to keep the island out of his head. Acting dumb is the best way he can think of to accomplish this right now.
But one thing I don’t think Ben’s lying on… when Locke calls him on never having seen Jacob? That’s the truth. I don’t think Ben ever has seen Jacob. Ben was never meant to be a chosen leader of the island anyway.
the Egyptians built one hell of an underground tunnel system. I’m not sure how or why the bomb got down there, but if it’s directly beneath Dharmaville this whole time maybe it explains why Miles’ mother seemed to be suffering from some sort of radiation sickness in her later years. She’s one of the only Dharma residents who reaches old age anyway, so it’s kind of hard to make a comparison.
Sawyer’s idea to buy Microsoft and bet on the Dallas Cowboys is probably one of the soundest plans on the whole show. With Radzinsky being led safely away to wherever Sawyer’s map sent him, everything’s looking good from all angles. He and Juliet get to leave the island for a sweet bell-bottomed lifestyle, and his friends can do whatever the hell they want… being in shackles absolves Sawyer of any responsibility toward them at this point. It’s totally win-win for him.
But then, just like before, Kate arrives to screw everything up. Suddenly Sawyer is now one crazy landlord and a pair of short shorts away from starring in his own twisted version of Three’s Company. So much for his plans of eating popcorn and watching the 78′ Superbowl.
With the finale only a week away, it’s obvious that the sub never gets to leave the island. I’m not sure how it happens, but if I had to guess? Kate convinces them to go back – which is a nice twist on Jack trying to convince her to go back two seasons ago
There definitely has to be a Jacob. Not only have we seen his cabin, but we’ve heard him speak. We’ve also seen him actually re-wind time: at the end of Locke’s first encounter with him, we saw that broken lantern (and the fire it started) instantly fix itself. We saw a ring of ash around Jacob’s cabin, which originally seemed like it might’ve been there to protect it from being discovered or seen. Later on though, it became more and more obvious that the ring of ash was probably there for the opposite reason: to keep Jacob IN. We also saw a very worried look on Ben’s face when he saw that the circle had been broken, almost as if he were worried that something had escaped. Incidentally, this is also when we started seeing quasi-evil Christian and Claire.
Now we find out Locke wants to kill Jacob. Perhaps he only wants to kill the illusion of Jacob – once he does that, he puts himself firmly in command. Or maybe he wants to free Jacob from whatever temporal prison he seems stuck in, and the only way to do that is through the same method he himself was resurrected: death. The only thing we can be sure of is that whatever spirit wants this done (the island? the smoke monster?) is now acting through Locke, and is probably trying to get rid of a long-standing island problem that both Richard and Ben were trying to hide or keep from it.
To sum it up, maybe Jacob did exist at one point. If so, I’m guessing he was a realllllllly bad dude. Maybe he caused assloads of problems and was finally contained, similar to a demon or something along those lines. It probably took a lot of time and a lot of effort to finally put Jacob down, and now Locke’s talking about revisiting a very bad scenario. I think both Ben and Richard are genuinely afraid of Jacob – they don’t seem to be pretending when it comes to that. (1-12 from Vozzek69 at DarkUFO)
…the episode was steeped in veiled references to yet another fabled fantasy about young heroes stumbling into an enchanted otherworld — presuming, of course, that ”Follow The Leader” is indeed a direct nod to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. The game of the same name is central to the story line of the author’s play and book; a song of the same name is part of Walt Disney’s beloved 1953 animated musical adaptation. These various versions intersect with Lost in any number of ways: magical islands inhabited by peculiar tribes of people working at cross-purposes, death and resurrection, ticking bombs, lost boys, never-aging enchanted beings, and more. Peter Pan gives us ”The Peter Pan Complex,” describing maturity-challenged adults who can’t deal with reality and so try to change it (see: Jack), not to mention ”The Tinker Bell Effect,” which according to Wikipedia ”describes those things that exist only because people believe in them” — things like ”a rule of law” (see: Horace Goodspeed, ”We have a rule of law!”) and ”deities” (See: Jacob)
Confronted with the revelation that she had just killed her own son, Eloise agreed to help Jack destroy the timeline in hopes of rectifying her mistake. Interesting: She told Jack and Kate she was 17 years old when she escorted time-traveling Faraday at gunpoint to the Jughead drop zone back in 1954. That would make her 40 years old in 1977. So I’m going to say that Boy Daniel Faraday was alive back in the year of Adult Daniel Faraday’s death on the Island. Moreover, remember the 9-year-old Faraday playing the piano in last week’s episode? I’m going to say that that moment happened right after the Dharma-times events depicted in the last few episodes. In my recap of ”The Variable,” I wondered why Ellie entered the room in tears. Perhaps that scene represented the first time she had seen young Faraday since killing older Faraday; and perhaps her tears were an indication that her attempt at eradicating her mistake by helping Jack blow up Jughead had failed. We shall see next week.
ageless enigma that is Richard Alpert. For starters, we saw him building a ”ship in a bottle,” a type of mechanical puzzle known as ”an impossible bottle.” The moment will surely feed the well-heeled theory that Alpert is either a descendant of the Black Rock castaways, if not a miraculously death-challenged survivor of the slave ship’s crew. (Or one of the imprisoned human cargo.) Or perhaps it’s merely a metaphor for himself: something ancient, trapped inside the timeless bottle that is the Island. FUN FACT! ”Ship In A Bottle” is a famous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode from its sixth season in which an unreal Holodeck character — Professor Moriarty, enemy to Sherlock Holmes — takes over the Enterprise and conspires to find a way to exist in the real world. ALSO SEE: Doc Jensen’s first Lost theory, The Evil Aaron Hypothesis, which put forth that a powerful, disembodied supernatural agency had taken control of the Island and has been conspiring to bring about his or her physical incarnation.
Locke took the former Others power couple out to the drug plane so they could bear witness to a miracle: The sight of time-traveling Locke stumbling out of the jungle, wounded from Ethan’s gunshot. New (But Improved?) Resurrected Locke instructed Alpert to tend to Old Wounded Time-Traveling Locke and pass along his compass and some crucial instructions, like the whole thing about needing to die to save his castaway friends, and in this way one of the trippy mystery moments from the season’s fragmented first episode was rounded out and given context. Ironic: ”Follow The Leader” gave us one arc in which Jack in the past schemes to produce paradox, and also gives us another arc in which John hustles to prevent paradox from occurring. (Specifically, Locke was trying to avoid what is known as a ”bootstrap paradox,” involving the acquisition and replacement of objects and the receiving and imparting of information from future to past to future again. You can investigate at your leisure over at Wikipedia.)
What have I overlooked? A lot. I didn’t talk about Pierre Chang and Miles. I didn’t talk about the evacuation of the Island. I didn’t talk about the LOL funny history quiz administered to Hurley. I didn’t talk about why Dharma wants to drill into the electromagnetic anomaly at the Swan site. I didn’t discuss further the oddly quiet year for Sun and what it might have to do with the time travel novel entitled The Year of The Quiet Sun. And I didn’t discuss Alpert’s claim that he watched all the time traveling castaways die right before his eyes back in 1977 — a claim that I suspect is either totally bogus or doesn’t really tell the whole truth. But please, feel free to discuss these things for me in the boards below — and come back next Wednesday for very special year-end editions of Doc Jensen and ”Totally Lost.” (13-17 from Doc Jensen)
In fact, if you really want to follow me down the Whackadoo Well, consider the possibility that Jacob is fictional just like Dr. Moriarty. The precedents of zombies like Christian and Yemi suggest that Jacob is someone deceased. But what if the Island’s ghostly patriarch is really the product of so many people believing in his existence? Maybe the Jacob avatar popped out of the Island’s magic box like Hurley’s imaginary friend Dave did
Many, myself included, have been struck by the seemingly circular origins of Jacob’s influence on the Others. When Locke first invokes Jacob’s name back in 1954, it’s not entirely clear that anyone, including Richard, gets the reference. It’s possible that Locke unwittingly planted the seeds of Jacob’s legend himself. Like Richard’s compass, therefore, Jacob may originally be one big ontological paradox birthed by the time loop we’ve witnessed.
I think the foregoing possibility has occurred to Locke, as well. John doubts that Ben has ever spoken with Jacob because he suspects Jacob is a hoax perpetrated by Ben to control the Others. That’s why Locke is so adamant about taking the Others to see their leader. When John says he plans to kill Jacob, I think he expects to reveal the latter as a lie. What Locke forgets is that the Island is a place where even fiction can sometimes become reality.
Before closing, let me follow up briefly on my suggestion from last week that our Losties will cause the Incident by trying to prevent it. I’m increasingly convinced that the Island is itself the threat of human extinction predicted by the Valenzetti Equation. The DHARMA scientists are supposed to cause some cataclysmic — perhaps even extinction level — event by drilling into the Island’s pocket of exotic energy at the Swan site.
Our Losties will change what’s supposed to happen by substituting the less cataclysmic Incident in lieu of our total annhilation. But they will succeed mainly in delaying the inevitable, resulting in the button protocol, which will again threaten to destroy the world. Desmond will avert this threat by activating the Fail-Safe, but as I mentioned last week, I think Bram and Ilana’s presence on the Island has already restarted the countdown to Armageddon.
All of this is building to the realization that the Island was never supposed to be on Earth. It crashed here long ago, whether from the future or the stars, disrupting the course of human destiny. No matter how many times someone saves the world, the change will only be temporary. As long as the Island remains on Earth, people will keep exploiting its miraculous properties, pushing us back on track for extinction. (18-22 from Eye M Sick)
“Dead Is Dead” is the twelfth episode of Season 5 of Lost and the ninety-eighth produced hour of the series as a whole. Ben, Locke, and Sun travel to the Temple so that Ben may be judged by the monster. In flashbacks, the origins of Ben and Widmore‘s troubled relationship is revealed. It was originally broadcast on April 8, 2009.
1.How many half-truths, obfuscations, and outright lies did Linus lay on us this episode? Part of the brilliance of Michael Emerson’s performance is that it’s hard to really know, and it forces you take a stand and make an interpretation that just might be totally incorrect. Here is mine: ”Dead is Dead” was the story of how one of Ben’s most ambitious fibs backfired big-time on him. His downfall began the moment he awoke in the Hydra Station and found Locke sitting by his cot sporting yet another one of his classic Season 5 grins. Hiya. Remember me? The guy you strangled to death? Yeah, that didn’t really work… Ben told Locke that he knew his Island magic would bring him back. The surprise etched all over his face certainly suggested otherwise, but silver-tongued Ben explained it away by evoking his Doubting Thomas Sunday school lesson from ”316:” ”Because it’s one thing to believe it,” he said, ”but it’s another thing to see it.” Then Ben told Locke that he had broken the rules by returning to The Island and claimed that he had a desire to be judged by Smokey. (”We don’t even have a word for it,” Ben clarified, ”but I believe you call it ‘The Monster.”’)
2.At the risk of impugning Ben’s honesty… oh, wait, that’s impossible. Anyway, my theory is that Ben really was totally shocked to see Locke alive again (Alex’s line ”I know you’re already planning to kill him again” would seem to confirm that Ben wanted Locke dead dead, not temp dead), and I think he was trying to buy himself some time with Locke by dropping an idea that he knew would capture Locke’s imagination: The prospect of The Island giving Ben cosmic comeuppance.
3.Charles Widmore, circa 1977: A cool fantasy hero stud saddled with atrocious hair. I asked my wife what he looked like to her. Response: ”A mushroom.” Widmore was pissed that Richard had brought Young Ben to The Temple. Richard neutralized him with four words: ”Jacob wanted it done.” This is pretty significant: We now know this unseen entity has held sway over The Others since at least 1977. Why did the mention of ”Jacob” shut Widmore up? Probably because he felt threatened. It’s been suggested that Jacob likes to play favorites, so Widmore probably realized right away that Ben represented a rival. You know what they say: Keep your friends close — and your future replacements closer.
4.One of the episode’s blockbuster revelations was that Charles Widmore had ordered Ben to kill Rousseau shortly after her arrival on The Island. Perhaps it was a leadership evaluation, akin to how Locke had been challenged by Ben and Alpert to murder his father back in Season 3. (Was Ben being assessed to fill Eloise ”Ellie” Hawking’s shoes? After all, she was mysteriously MIA from all the flashbacks.) Anyway, arriving at Rousseau’s tent, Ben discovered that the frazzled Frenchie had given birth to a child. Suddenly, all of his snakey heartlessness slithered away. Behold Ben’s Achilles’ Heel: Moms. Which makes sense. His own Bad Daddy had pumped him full of guilt for his mother’s death during childbirth. Mamas are the line that this Locke-killing, Dharma-purging fiend just can’t cross.
5.Yes, Widmore played the jerk in this drama. Yet we must ask ourselves: Was he correct? It all depends on if you think everything that has happened during the Ben era of The Island was supposed to happen. And for now, I am taken with the notion that it wasn’t. Benjamin Linus was a stop-gap for John Locke who outlived his usefulness, a mistake that won’t go away, and his ongoing struggle to remain essential to The Island’s story (if not simply survive) has created history that deviates from destiny. We know, of course, that Fate can correct an altered course, but either its repair job is following a long-term, slow-developing plan, or Survivor Ben, cockroach resilient, has been outwitting, outplaying, and outlasting Fate at every turn.
6.We also found out why Ben boarded Ajira 316 all battered and bloody. He had gone to the marina to fulfill his promise to kill Widmore’s daughter in retaliation for Alex’s death. Classy as always, Ben gave Chuck a jingle to let him know that his runaway child and mother of his never-seen grandson was about to get pumped full of lead. He dropped the name of Desmond’s boat, ”Our Mutual Friend,” named after the Charles Dickens’ novel that housed the love letter that kept the Hatch-trapped Scot going during his darkest days. The book, which I have not read, chronicles the consequences of an inheritance that is ceded to other people after the intended heir goes mysteriously MIA and fails to pick it up — which sounds an awful lot like the theory that Ben somehow usurped the Island destiny originally slated for Locke, a mistake that The Island has been madly trying to correct
7.We saw Ben pop a cap into Desmond. Right? We agree that we did see that? Okay, so a bag of groceries got in the way, but unless Desmond had some bulletproof cans of haggis in that bag, bruthuh should have been dead, or at least severely wounded.What was most interesting about this scene, though, was what we didn’t see — namely, what happened afterward. How did Desmond survive that near-point blank shooting? Did The Island intervene from afar as it did with Jack and Michael’s suicide attempts? How did Ben get fished out of the water? Who fished Ben out of the water? How did his damaged arm get put in that sling? Because Ben was sporting that sling in the episode ”316” when we saw him calling Jack from a pay phone at the marina. Perhaps Desmond pulled him out the drink in order to ask him some ”Why did you do that, bruthuh?” kind of questions — but that would blow a hole in the prevalent fan theory that Desmond is now en route to The Island to finish off Ben in order to protect his family from future attacks. If that’s what Desmond wanted, why didn’t he just make sure Ben was dead at the docks?
8.Ilana — the bounty hunter who was bringing Sayid back to Fiji when he got zapped back to The Island — teamed up with some other toughs on the plane and cracked open a giant steel case full of weapons and staged their takeover of the Ajira Airlines castaways. Looks like somebody came to The Island prepared for a hostile takeover, if not a war — perhaps the very same war Charles Widmore spoke to Locke about. Ilana gave Lapidus a sphinx-like riddle test that made her sound as if she was intimately acquainted with The Island’s ancient mythology. (He flunked, and got hit over the head for his trouble.) No doubt the statue refers to old Four Toe, aka the Egyptian god Anubis. What lies in its shadow? For now, my money is on Jughead. Regardless, I’m hoping upcoming episodes will reveal more about these radicals who have infiltrated The Island via Ajira 316 and what kind of perspective they have on The Island. (Doc Jensen)
9.Locke kept Christian’s shoes. They showed him taking them in and out of his bag. They might still have some significance.
10.Locke insists that he’s that same person he was before. But something has changed. He “knows” a lot more about the island, and his new perspective is interesting. “Now you know what it was like to be me.”
11.Richard speaks for Jacob, interesting. As usual, I wonder why he isn’t in charge. It seems like Charles doesn’t speak for Jacob though, or else he could have countered Richard’s decision to save Ben.
12.Rewatch that scene with Ilana and Ben in the beginning of this episode. She’s crazy-and-a-half, and confident. Dangerous.
13.I think we can guess who the people with the Ajira water bottles, shooting our time-travelers are. They’re going to be trouble for a while now. Also It’s safe to assume that this group is going to be the threat to Locke that we heard about from Walt.
14.This could be the answer to the big question. We saw a very clear carving of Anubis supplicating Smokey. It seems likely that the Statue is Anubis. It hasn’t been confirmed, obviously, but showing the god in te show is a pretty obvious tip-off.
The similarities between that carving and Locke’s childhood drawing is obvious. What that means, I’ll leave for another day.
15.Smokey really seems to have a purpose now. He is a judge. Not a novel idea true, but it’s quite provable now. We’ve seen two of it’s judgements now. One when the subject repented and the other when he didn’t. Eko was asked by his brother to repent, and he wouldn’t. Ben was given the same chance and he clearly did feel badly for his actions and he was spared. But his ghost, Alex, didn’t leave it at that. I wonder what Eko’s ghost, Yemi, would have commanded. If only we could know. (Not Confused Just Lost)
16.So in season 2, the countdown clock rolled over when it got to 0 and we saw Egyptian hieroglyphs, throwing fans into a tizzy. It took less than 24 hours before one of them figured it out by finding the particular grouping in a textbook of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Then Ben went to summon Old Smokey in “The Shape of Things to Come” and he pushed open a door covered in them. Just before turning the wheel, there were more. In this episode, he steps back from the door and I could just hear the fans who have been translating the hieroglyphs either squealing with delight or moaning at all the work they had ahead of them. And then he dropped through the floor and landed in a room covered in them.
But the biggest moment was when he stood in front of the Egyptian drawing of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian God of the Dead, summoning Smokey. I had suggested in an earlier post that perhaps that big statue is Anubis (but its ears are a little short to really be him) but here he is now. In one episode in season 3 (I think it’s “Left Behind”) Juliet rushes through the sonic fence and then Smokey hits it, and as he comes at it he looks like Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hell in Greek mythology. Now we see he’s connected to Anubis. Anubis was the god of mummification, and rather than being some harbinger of death, which he is not, he was the one who protected the dead. We were discussing last week on the boards the idea that the Others are very caught up in keeping their dead bodies (they ask for Paul’s body… Christian’s body disappears and then he’s walking around… they ask Locke to bring his father’s body to them… Locke is now back from the dead… Amy makes a comment that they need to bury the bodies deeply in the ground). Perhaps they’re bringing them here for Anubis to protect them… or bring them back from the dead. Anubis is often portrayed holding an ankh, which Paul is wearing and Amy takes (and Horace freaks out that she’s kept this token of his).
17.Maybe I’m off-base on this one, but I screamed when Ben and Widmore had their showdown on the dock (not least because I thought those two were electric on screen in “The Shape of Things to Come,” and I’ve been dying for another scene with Emerson and Dale). Ben appears to be in charge now (it’s post-Purge, seeing as Alex is about 8 and the Others are living in New Otherton) and while Charles is hissing that if the island wants Alex dead, she’ll be dead, Ben is countering that he simply broke the rules. Therefore, he believes Widmore is wrong, the island never wanted Alex dead, and rules are rules. You do not go off the island and start a family, you stay on the island.
Now fast-forward to “The Shape of Things to Come,” and Alex is dead. Ben’s first words are, “He changed the rules.” On the dock, he insisted that Widmore broke the rules. We’ve been trying to figure out ever since what Ben meant in that death scene. Could it have been a reference to this one? Maybe it’s showing us that in that scene, Ben is thinking, “How could this happen to me? It was WIDMORE who broke the rules, NOT me, so why is my daughter dead? How could the island really have wanted her dead, when I’ve followed the rules and he broke them?” But why say he CHANGED the rules, not broke the rules? I’m thinking he is really saying that the island didn’t want Alex dead, so Widmore simply sent a vigilante to the island to make it happen. He changed the rules in forcing a death and not letting the island decide who lives and who dies. Rather than Smokey bringing the judgement forth, Widmore did it, thereby changing the rules. (Nik at Nite)
18.Ever since Sun and Frank went back to Othersville a couple of weeks ago, and we got to see the condition the barracks were in, plus the fact that there were apparantly still Dharma photos hanging up, people started to cry alternate timeline. I mean, how else could the barracks look SO different than when we last saw them. The theory was that something must have been changed in the past to cause the difference. But tonight when Ben entered his old house he looked at a Risk board laying on a table, a subtle clue that nothing has changed.
Last season, just before Keamy shot Alex, Hurley, Sawyer, and a few other people were holed up in Ben’s house. While in there, Hurley and Sawyer played a game of risk while having a little snack. As you can see from the images below, the Risk board is still there, just the way they left it more than 3 years before. (Sledgeweb’s Lost…Stuff)
“Whatever Happened, Happened” is the eleventh episode of Season 5 of Lost and the 97th episode of the series as a whole. It was originally broadcast on April 1, 2009. Kate struggles to save a young Benjamin Linus from a gunshot wound at all costs.(Lostpedia.com)
Kate’s big season 5 flashback episode aspired to reveal why Kate was so emotionally invested in Aaron and managing the lie that he represented. Certainly time played a role. Funny now to think that Kate had been Aaron’s mother longer (three years) than Claire had ever had been (a couple months). Yet ”Whatever Happened, Happened” revealed that Kate needed to be Aaron’s mother. To fill her Sawyer void. To assuage her guilt over abandoning the Left Behinders.
The marina sequence — a nexus point of destiny for the Oceanic 6, originally depicted in ”The Little Prince” and ”This Place Is Death — was revisited yet again in last night’s episode, as it was last week for Sayid’s flashback episode. And once again, we saw that boat with the word ”Illusion” emblazoned on the side. For the Oceanic 6, the marina = ”this place is death.” It is the place where the mirage of their after-Island happy endings — poof! — faded away
Sawyer’s all Mr. Respectable now, the kind of ”Live together, die alone” leader Jack used to be. Meanwhile, Jack is back on the Island searching for destiny and his fulfillment, and while I don’t make that bad (not yet, at least), last night he came off looking a little…well, a little like Old Sawyer to me.In the same way Jack used to go barging over to Sawyer’s tent on the beach demanding help from the con man (Band-Aids, pills, etc.) and instead only getting bad attitude and ”What’s in it for me?” selfishness, now it’s Sawyer barging into Jack’s home, demanding that he apply his surgical skills to Young Ben, and getting a big self-centered ”No” in return. Yeah, yeah, there was a little more to Jack’s response to that — there always is, with anyone — but let us note this conspicuous role reversal. Jack is the new Sawyer. He even went shirtless last night! Wonder where that may lead? Sweaty cage sex? A Dharma library card? Crazy nicknames?
Last night, there was that bit of business about knowing that Sawyer and Kate were coming to him. But how? Psychic powers? Hyper-attuned jungle senses? A Desmond-esque flash from the future? And why not let them come to him? Is that just not the Others way — or did you get the sense, as I did, that Richard didn’t want them to know anything about the Temple, aka The House of Smokey? So far, we only know of one castaway who is aware of the Temple’s existence: Jin. (See: The Affair of Montand’s Severed Arm.) I’m going to hazard a guess and say that his knowledge of this mysterious Island landmark is going to play a crucial role in the season’s endgame. And while we’re on the subject of the Temple: Do you think Richard and Smokey are roommates?
Again, we are prodded to ask: What exactly is Richard’s relationship to the Others and his role in the leadership structure? My current take on Richard is this: He is like an angel to be wrestled with and overcome, like a sphinx to be solved and beaten, and should you be successful, you get the keys to the kingdom, the Island, and as part of the deal, he serves you faithfully until someone else comes along and knocks you off the mountain.
the castaways are being made to understand that their participation in past events is shaping the future that they have already experienced. They have themselves to blame for the thing that is Benjamin Linus. We are the causes of our own suffering. Think about your life. At the same time, I didn’t quite know how to interpret this idea that Ben would be getting a memory wipe as part of his healing treatment. Did Richard mean that Ben would only be made to forget how Sawyer and Kate helped save his life? I hope so, because if Ben’s whole childhood is about to get erased, it really makes me look stupid for insisting to the whole world that Adult Ben remembers growing up with the castaways in Dharmaville. (Doc Jensen)
Miles describes time as being relative to oneself. For them, the years go 197? (whenever they were born) to 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977… For Ben they go forward, and the “past” they’re in right now is Ben’s present. Miles is convinced that whatever happened, happened, and you can’t change it. Hurley, the lover of comics and reader/watcher of several stories of going back in time to change the past, isn’t so convinced. Is Miles right, and if so, where did he get his information from? Is it possible that THIS is his real usefulness?
There are a couple of lines from season 4 that I can’t stop thinking about. One of them was when the psychiatrist tells Juliet that Ben is obsessed with her because “you look just like her.” His mother? A girlfriend? Now I’m starting to be convinced that the person she looks just like… is herself. Roger stands in the room where Ben is struggling to breathe, and tells Kate that what a boy really needs is his mother. Cut to Juliet standing over him, looking concerned and leaning down to help him. According to Alpert, he’s going to forget everything that happened up to the point where the Others took him, but maybe Juliet mothers him in some way after this moment, and he’ll remember that and become obsessed with her years later.
The other line is one Charles Widmore delivers to Ben when Ben comes to visit him in the night and tells him that he’s going to kill Penny (Shape of Things to Come). I’ve always been unnerved by Widmore saying he knows WHAT he is, and he also says that they both know Widmore can’t kill Ben. In this episode, Alpert takes Ben to his camp and says Ben will never be the same. Then the one hostile says to Richard that Ellie and Charles will freak out if they find out, they being Eloise (presumably) and Charles Widmore, whom we saw as young soldiers in 1954. Is whatever Richard’s about to do going to render Ben immortal in some way?
Did You Notice?:• There didn’t appear to be a noticeable exit wound on Ben’s back. Maybe it went through his side and that’s why there’s no blood?• Kate’s got her Patsy playing again. An interesting choice, since Kate’s got Sawyer’s picture in her mind, but Juliet’s got him. (not that Kate knows that yet…)• Kate sings “Catch a Falling Star” to Aaron, which is the song that Christian always sang to Claire when she was a baby.
• After Sawyer and Miles took off with the janitor’s keys, leaving Horace and Phil behind in the cell room, Phil had a look on his face like something wasn’t right. I think he’ll be the one to eventually unravel Sawyer’s happy little fairy tale.
• For all his snark, Miles seems to fall into the role of being Sawyer’s underling pretty easily, and takes orders from him without ever talking back.
When Kate goes up to the guy to ask where the juice boxes are, he looks directly at her, and never do his eyes go down to look at Aaron. Then when she goes back to him to ask if he saw her son, he looks at her like she’s kinda crazy and says, “Your… son?” and as she runs away, he looks behind him as if to say to someone that she was nuts. Did anyone else think for a moment that Aaron was invisible in that scene or something? That grocery stock guy was very strange.• Kate and Aaron are wearing the same clothes when they go to Cassidy’s, as if they hadn’t slept at all the night before.• In the awesome smackdown scene between Juliet and Jack (did anyone else detect that maybe IF Sawyer has been pining for Kate, Juliet has been equally pining for Jack?) Jack says that he came back because he was supposed to, but doesn’t know any details. He sounds EXACTLY like Locke in this scene.
• I don’t mean to be unfair to Sun, but Kate looked far more broken up over leaving Aaron than Sun looked about leaving Ji Yeon. (Nik at Nite)
It’s interesting how the “Lost” crew is using the time travel component — and the paradox/no-paradox question — as a lens for character development. Sayid is blindly driven to change the future by killing young Ben in the present; newly-mellow Jack seems to subscribe to Faraday’s theory that events will transpire as they’re supposed to transpire, so his involvement is irrelevant (and convenient, because you know he doesn’t want to crack Ben open again); and Kate, Juliet and Sawyer believe it’s inherently wrong to let a young boy die, regardless of his future actions. In past seasons, Jack would have acted/reacted, Kate would have avoided making a decision, Sayid may have considered the long-range implications (he wasn’t always cold-blooded), and Sawyer would have shot the kid himself.
Charles Widmore and Eloise Hawking are both on the island in 1977 (I’m making the wild assumption that “Charles” and “Ellie” refer to these two). Richard claims he doesn’t take orders from either of them. So what gives? Was Widmore a recognized Other leader, or did he adopt that title? And I’m assuming that if Young Ben is assimilated into the Others, he’ll come to know Eloise Hawking … but what sort of relationship will he forge with her, where will her allegiances lie (With Widmore? With Ben? With Alpert?) and how will the Ben-Hawking connection lead to old Mrs. Hawking helping Ben and the Oceanic Six return to the island in “316″? And who is Daniel Faraday’s father? (The Lost Blog)
Hurley and Miles started a new, special kind of friendship tonight that I hope we see more of in the future. Of course, it does make me worry for Miles a little. After all, people who come in contact with Hurley don’t always fare so well. But in Whatever Happened, Happened there was some fantastic dialog between the two on the specifics of time travel. Hurley definitely represents many of the feelings the fans have had this season. (Sledgeweb’s Lost Stuff. Click here to see video of the above conversations!)
Do You See What I See? Probably Not.
Not me, mind you… but the characters on LOST. Know what they see? Only what they need to see. Or more specifically, only what they need to be shown. Which is why when Jin turns little Ben over, the bullet hole in his zip-down hoodie is now on the exact opposite side of his chest – on the other side of the zipper. It’s not even close, it’s a complete mirror image of the spot where Sayid drilled him precisely through the heart.
Continuity error? Maybe on 24. But this is LOST, and we’re seeing exactly what the island wants us to see, through Jin’s eyes. But through the eyes of Sayid? For him the bullet went right through the kid’s heart – no need for a coup de grace. And this, my friends, is how the island isn’t so much manipulating the events or happenings we see from week to week. What’s being manipulated are the perceptions and experiences of the characters on LOST, and yes, even the flashbacks. I’ll go further nuts on this at the end of my review, but for anyone still dangling from that last thin thread of the continuity argument? It just snapped.
Jack put it all very well: he’s been here before. He’s already operated on Benjamin Linus to save his life. He’s already taken that shower that he’s about to take, he’s already stepped out in that towel and been reflected in that mirror… we’ve heard this song already. The only difference is that this time, Jack’s on the Locke side of the coin. “Maybe the island just wants to fix things itself” – this is something S1-4 Jack Shephard would never have said. Months, years of trying to deny the impossibilities of what’s been happening to everyone has finally give Jack a front row in the first pew of the church of faith – not science. This, plus his talk with Sawyer seems to have sunk in: Jack’s taken the time to examine all the actions he’s taken since flight 815 crashed, and he’s determined that nothing he did really accomplished anything. Whatever was going to happen would be unfazed by Jack’s intervention… and when Jack did intervene, it was simply because he was meant to. Totally maddening. Imagine realizing such a total loss of control – that nothing you ever did, or would do, really mattered at all. THIS IS WHAT JACK’S MEANT TO THINK. This is what the island has been trying very, very hard to show him. When Jack mentions he’d been “getting in the way” it’s because he HAD been getting in the way.
And although Kate came back because the island summoned her, one cool thing to note is that Kate came back with a purpose: Claire. This seems pretty important considering that, other than Sun, no one else came back to the island with any sense of purpose whatsoever. Sayid came back unwillingly, and Jack and Hurley’s most popular answer: “We just gotta go back”.Also important, it seemed Kate couldn’t go back to the island until she’d resolved something: her lie. This was part of the whole redemption-before-getting-on-the-plane process. Jack, the inventor of the lie, had to finally (and besottedly) admit to himself that they weren’t supposed to leave. Hurley spilled the entire can of island beans to his mom at the kitchen table, absolving himself of his own lie. Sayid’s big lie was apparently trying to be a carpenter instead of a killer. And at the end of this episode, Kate finally tells Cassidy and Carole everything: all about the plane crash, Claire being alive, and how she assumed custody of Aaron. Her lie is now over, and that’s when she gets on the plane. Maybe Sun ended up in 2007 because she never resolved her lie? Dunno.
Regardless, Richard makes a point to tell Sawyer and Kate that Ben will ‘always be one of them’. Unlike Juliet who could be easily excommunicated, Benjamin Linus would be forever initiated into the Others secret club. I get the impression that Ben is about to go through a subterranean, more personal version of island baptism than the rest of the Others have gone through (with Richard maybe being the exception). In exchange for his life, poor unconscious Ben is about to sacrifice his future ability to choose any kind of destiny all his own. Later on in life, I think Ben learns this might even be worse than dying.This is the reason why, above all else, I’ve always believed Ben not to be evil. He’s never been his own person, and has spent his life doing the island’s work. Just as the old John Locke has always been a puppet whose strings are constantly being pulled and manipulated by others, Ben’s own destiny has been unwantingly placed before him at an age where he could nothing about it. It sucks, and it’s always sucked. He knows this, and I think it’s why Ben shouts down the island with his whole “I hope you’re happy” speech and leaves via the donkey wheel. He wants to change things. Ben is thoroughly finished doing the bidding of this fickle bitch – he finally wants to have his own life. But in order to accomplish this, I think Ben knew he had to sneak back onto the island via some very shady means. Ben’s helping the O6 these past two seasons may have seemed to be according to the island’s plan, but I think Ben just had to make it look that way.
Humor me for a minute, and watch Kate and Aaron in the supermarket. She asks where the juice boxes are, gets distracted by Jack’s call, and then loses Aaron. Watch the look the stockboy gives her when she tells him she lost her son: as he says “excuse me” his facial expressions register confusion, not concern for someone who just walked by with a little blonde boy in tow. Rewind to when Kate first asks the question, and the stockboy never even looks at Aaron. In fact, no one looks at Aaron in the supermarket at all, except for Kate. As she frantically runs through the aisles the next scene is shown, not surprisingly, in the store’s giant mirror.
Suddenly Kate sees Aaron again, this time seemingly being led away by Claire. We know Claire is supposed to raise Aaron, and the island is showing Kate this. It’s slapping her in the face with the fact that she’s living a lie. It leads Kate back to Cassidy’s house, where Clementine answers the door. “Hi Auntie Kate!”, she says. She doesn’t say hi to Aaron. She doesn’t even look at Aaron. Strange too, because Aaron apparently rang the bell.
Later on, Kate gives Carole a picture of Aaron on a tire swing. Immediately she asks “Where is he?” Kate answers her question with “two doors down”, but Carole continues to stare at the photo. Where is he indeed.
Okay, let me back up a minute. Am I saying that I believe Aaron’s nothing more than a figment of Kate’s imagination, and that he never existed at all? Nope. Aaron is as real as reality gets – on LOST, anyway. There are lots of people who see and interact with Aaron – Cassidy for one. But I am saying this: Cassidy’s words this episode were all about how Kate needed Aaron, instead of the other way around. The minute Kate began wondering if Aaron wouldn’t be better off without her, he suddenly and instantaneously disappeared. (DarkUFO)
“He’s Our You” is the tenth episode of Season 5 of Lost and the 96th episode of the series as a whole. It was originally broadcast on March 25, 2009. The DHARMA Initiative struggles to discover the identity of Sayid Jarrah, while Sawyer tries to make sure that his secret remains safe. (Lostpedia.com)
But we must strongly consider the possibility that Sayid’s discovery of heroic will was actually nothing of the sort. According to the ”whatever happened, happened” theory of time travel, history is fixed. It can’t be changed. This means Ben grew up with the castaways living around the corner from him in Dharmaville, and more, that his list of Greatest Hits (Not!) includes ”The time that captured Hostile in the purple shirt who promised to take me to live with Richard in the enchanted forest betrayed me and shot me.” Seen from this perspective, the Ben-Sayid relationship takes on a provocative new spin, because it means that while Ben was ruthlessly cultivating Sayid into a seething ball of I HATE BENJAMIN LINUS! during those off-Island years, he did so keenly aware that one day, Sayid was going to fall down a wormhole into his childhood and try to kill him. Which, in my book, makes Ben complicit in the assassination attempt on his own life, and maybe even the plot’s chief architect. He wanted this to happen. And suddenly, I am reminded of one of the maxims in the Dharma brainwashing film that Kate and Sawyer stumbled upon in Season 3: ”We are the causes of our own suffering.”
”He’s Our You” was certainly fixated on the theme of free will and the lack thereof. We saw the idea expressed through the abundance of handcuffs, restraints, and prison bars; through psychotropic drugs that eliminate choice and compel obedience; through the Dharma leadership sweating the interference and control of ”Ann Arbor,” as in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, homebase for Dharma founders; through Ben’s bitter, angry father, blasting his son for bringing Sayid a sandwich and yelling, ”I’ll tell you what to think!”
The challenge of personal transformation and the competition between material security and spiritual evolution is at the heart of the conspicuous literary reference that Lost gave us last night. ”A Separate Reality” should probably not be interpreted by us as a clue nodding toward an alternate reality theory, because that misses the point of the book. Of course, its author, Carlos Castaneda, is a controversial guy, and the serious Lostologist would be wise to apply his work to the show with extreme caution. (Doc Jensen)
So Ben never sent Sayid after Widmore. I expected him to. I thought that would be Sayid’s turning point. I thought that Sayid would fail and Widmore would convince him to turn against Ben. (Ben also didn’t send Sayid after Abaddon, but I don’t think that means anything.)
I don’t think Ben’s dead. I don’t think I actually have to say this, but if I don’t then it might come back to bite me in the ass. I believe Ms. Hawkins and Daniel, you can’t change the past and all that you will cause is “course corrections”. So somehow Ben didn’t die. Maybe he had a bible in his shirt pocket. Maybe he had his heart removed and the bullet passed through his body (it would explain a lot, but it might cause a few problems). Perhaps it was all staged, maybe it was a blank in the gun and Ben had a squib on him. I really have no idea how Ben didn’t die, but I’m sure he didn’t. (from Not Confused Just Lost)
In fact, the whole episode is geared toward showing us exactly how Sayid is forged and tempered into a heartless killing machine… the writers have 40+ minutes to really, really convince us of this if they want to pull off the cold-blooded shooting of an innocent kid.
But in reality, it’s not the viewers who really need the convincing: it’s Sayid. And as this episode unfolds, it quickly becomes obvious that Sayid’s hunting down and killing of Widmore’s golfing buddies never really meant Jack or Squat in the grand scheme of things. Not only were these killings unnecessary, they might not even have been related to anything other than planting the seeds of murder deep within Sayid’s brain.
We’ve seen many, many record players throughout LOST, but none as antique as Oldham’s Victrola. This means something, and I think it’s a not-so-subtle clue as to how this creepy new character is in keeping with the island’s ancient ways. He’s living very oldskool, deeper in the jungle, dwelling in a tepee with no electricity far from the civilized Dharma compound. He’s using old methods and listening to old music on an old recording device, and he even has ‘old’ in his name. Go figure.
I think the closer you get to the island’s spiritual roots, the more attuned you are to it’s true nature. Even more important, the deeper into subconscious a character’s mind can journey, the closer they get to achieving the island’s true enlightenment. All throughout LOST, the island has spoken most directly and pointedly to those who have been unconscious, semi-conscious, or drugged out of their minds. Boone tripping out on Locke’s magic paste… Eko’s dreams of Yemi while half-conscious… Locke using his sweat-tent to commune with the island. Last season I pointed out how Jack even took a nice trip to see dad after being knocked out during his appendectomy. These things are highly important.
So what do we have? We have Ben sending Sayid all over the world to kill people for three straight years. Did these people really matter? Did their deaths really keep Sayid’s friends safe? Shit no. I’m even sketchy on them being related to Widmore at all, but if so I’m sure Ben was just playing fun games inside Charles Widmore’s head. The deaths of these men meant nothing in the grand scheme of things other to reinforce one thing that I’ve always said: Sayid Jarrah is an absolute death-magnet.
Then we have Ben reminding Sayid that he’s a killer… telling him that he’s a killer… over and over, beating it into his skull. We also have Sayid driven to an intense hatred for Ben and a complete mistrust in him by the time he gets on the Ajira airways flight. Add all of this together and what do you get?
Alright, I’ve built it up enough: Ben wanted Sayid to go back to the past and shoot him. He fine-tuned Sayid into enough of a killing machine and instilled enough hatred in his heart for him so that Ben knew he would shoot even a young child version of himself. Yeah, I know it’s crazy. I know it’s out there. But if you examine this episode and really delve into why Ben spent so much off-island time honing Sayid into the killing tool he’s now become… it makes a lot of sense.
Notice I said ‘shoot him’ and not ‘kill him’. I’m pretty sure young Benjamin Linus will live. But I think Sayid shooting Ben is going to have serious repercussions on the 1977 timeline that might result in big changes to the way things originally would’ve played out. Maybe Ben getting shot in 1977 will somehow delay or prevent him from joining the hostiles? Maybe the purge will be avoided? I won’t pretend to know those answers, but somehow 2007 Ben understands that getting shot in the past will cause ripples through time that will change things in a direction favorable to his master plan. (DarkUFO)
“Namaste” is the ninth episode of Season 5 of Lost and the 92nd episode overall. It was originally broadcast on March 18, 2009. The return of his old friends to the Island forces Sawyer to struggle to keep his lie concealed. (Lostpedia.com)
Although Ajira Airways Flight 316 travels through a time flash (going from night to day) just before landing, the plane and its remaining passengers are implied to still be in 2008 because a title card in the episode states that the 1977 scenes take place “Thirty Years Earlier”.
As the plane’s co-pilot issues a Mayday call, he picks up a transmission of a voice reading The Numbers. The origin of this transmission is a mystery, as DHARMA’s original radio message was replaced by Rousseau‘s distress signal in 1988, and that broadcast was subsequently terminated in 2004 during the events of “Through the Looking Glass“. (1-2 from Lostpedia.com)
This episode’s ’70s segment formally introduces / reintroduces a number of secondary characters:
Radzinsky — A balding, cranky Dharma scientist who spends his downtime constructing scale models of the Swan station’s computer room. Radzinksy’s involvement in the Swan’s development has a whiff of irony since we know he eventually uses a shotgun and his own brain matter to redecorate the Swan’s ceiling decor.
Ethan — Last week, we saw Juliet rejoice at delivering Amy’s baby boy. This week, she throws up in her mouth a little when Amy reveals that her new son’s name is Ethan … as in Ethan Rom … future Oceanic faker, Claire kidnapper, and Charlie hanger. The most intriguing part of this revelation is this: How does Ethan go from being Dharma born-and-bred to a homicidal Other?
Pierre Chang — Jack is formally processed by Dharma’s instructional video host.
4.Little Ben — We first met innocent Benjamin Linus during the flashback sequences of “The Man Behind the Curtain,” but Little Ben is bumped into the direct narrative with a foreboding scene at the conclusion of this episode. A simple sandwich exchange between Little Ben and Dharma’s latest prisoner, Sayid, suggests that Sayid will soon put Daniel Faraday’s “you can’t change the timeline” theory to the test.(3-4 from from The Lost Blog)
I know how the time jumping baffles some of you. So let’s establish temporal context. It seems those Ajira 316 castaways and the Oceanic 6/Left Behinders are separated by 30 years of time. While there’s always been some debate as to when exactly the Oceanic 6 left The Island, I’m going to take the conservative estimate and say it was late December 2004. They spent three years away from The Island before boarding Ajira 316 to head back. Hence: The Ajira/Hydra castaways are in 2007. The time travelers are in 1977.
In the opening sequence, we saw that after the Island beamed Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Sayid off of Ajira 316, Captain Frank Lapidus spied a makeshift runway on Hydra Island and successfully executed a landing.
I f I am recalling the Lost lore accurately, the Others were working on the landing strip during the time that Kate and Sawyer were stuck in the polar bear cages. In fact, I think Project: Runway was the hard labor the fugitive lovers were assigned during their imprisonment. Sure, the Others may have been making the strip for their own use. But I’m liking the idea that they were making it because they knew — or more precisely because Ben knew — that it needed to be there in the future for Ajira 316. It certainly fits my long-held contention that Ben’s machinations have been informed by knowledge of future events.
7.Sun and Lapidus took one of the Hydra Station outriggers and paddled their way to the Island. As they approached, we heard Smokey’s distinctive rattle — and then the monster retreated. Arrrgh! Who dares waddle onto my beaches?! Oh. You guys. Yeah, you’re all right. Welcome back. Help yourself to the Dharma beer in the barracks. A supernatural entity will be along in a minute to download some crucial intel. And sorry about the mess. Mercenaries, you know?
8.Said spectre was Jack’s poltergeisty pop. Although Ghost Shephard seemed to be slightly more tangible than your typical Casper, didn’t he? And interesting how he turned on the lights in that cabin and then led the way with the flashlight into the old Dharma orientation center. Does Christian actually need that light, or was he just being hospitable for his more conventionally humanoid guests — part of his duty as an otherworldly psychopomp, lighting the way for afterlife travelers? (PYSCHOPOMP! PSYCHOPOMP! PSYCHOPOMP!)
9.One other thought: Was Lost trying to suggest a connection between Christian and Smokey by having the two in the same vicinity at roughly the same time? Could Jack’s father be the monster in human form? (5-9 from Doc Jensen)
10. Okay, so we hate to make it seem like anytime there’s a small amount of smoke in an episode of Lost that it means that Smokey was there, but rewatching the scene where Christian opens the door in Othersville, there is obviously quite a bit of what looks like smoke behind him. Then, as they enter the house, the door opens to a strange squeaking sound and the smoke swirls through the rooom. So is this Smokey, and proof that somehow Smokey is involved in the Christian sightings? Or is this mearly a smoky room and the wind is blowing through the door, making it swirl? I, for one, think that its Smokey. (from Sledgeweb’s….Lost Stuff)
11. If you rewatch the scene where Christian takes Sun into the house, at the end of the scene, if you watch very closely, you’ll notice that there is another woman in the room. At the very end, just after Christian says “You have a long road ahead of you,” and it goes to a tight push in shot on Sun. Over Sun’s shoulder you can clearly see a figure, that appears to be a blond female, move her head. So are we to believe that Claire was in the room with Christian?
12. All of this reminded me of my wild theory, proposed two weeks ago, that season 5 of Lost is running parallel to season 2. Because this bit of business totally evoked for me the Henry Gale storyl ine of the show’s second season, when the castaways nabbed themselves a man they suspected to be an Other. And they were right. Which leads me to my big theory of the column: I think that the Others/Hostiles got their hands on Sayid prior to his capture by Jin. I think they’re blackmailing him into doing something for them that will prove detrimental to the Dharma Initiative and put Sawyer’s standing at risk. And remember how Sayid was allegedly feuding with Ben? How he made that big show to Hurley about how he was never going to trust Ben ever again? Well, I’m entertaining the notion that that was all a ruse, too — all part of Ben’s scheme to manipulate and herd the Oceanic 6 back to the Island. Crazy? Totally reaching? My guess is we won’t have to wait too long to find out….(11-12 from Doc Jensen)
“LaFleur” is the eighth episode of Season 5 of Lost and the 91st episode overall. It was originally broadcast on March 4, 2009. The fate of those left on the island after Locke turned the wheel is revealed, as Sawyer, Juliet, and company meet the DHARMA Initiative. (from Lostpedia.com’s recap)
At some point — we don’t know when — Dharma and the Others declared a truce. Sawyer and the crew land just as the truce falls apart. In the hazy moments following Locke’s departure, the group wanders back to the beach with a rough plan to rebuild the camp (or find the camp … whichever comes first). But they stumble upon a picnic gone horribly awry.
You’ll recall that Daniel Faraday’s Rules for Time Travel dictate that the future cannot be changed by tweaking past events. Or, as Faraday himself puts it: “Whatever happened, happened.” If Faraday is correct, Amy was always saved. Something or someone intervened. But here’s where my brain starts to pulse: Does that “someone” have to be Sawyer and Juliet, or is the outcome more important than the details? And if outcomes carry more weight, who/what determines which outcomes will be most important in a person’s (or island’s) existence?
Sometime during the group’s three-year stay, Amy marries Dharma leader Horace Goodspeed (the moron who invites little Benjamin Linus to the island). Amy gets pregnant and Juliet is called out of retirement to deliver the child. The birth of Amy’s baby boy (and Amy’s survival) marks the first time Juliet has ever successfully delivered a child on the island. The baby is still an anomaly, however. All Dharma babies are born off-island; Amy popped her’s out because she went into labor earlier than expected. So the question is: who will that baby grow up to be? (1-3 from The Lost Blog)
The statue is clearly Egyptian, and it’s holding the rounded loop of an Ankh in the right hand. The elf-like ears jive well with many of Egypt’s gods, who were often represented as crosses between a man and another animal. I had mentioned Anubis in my review two weeks ago, but the Jackyl-God’s ears would be taller. Another good guess would be Horus, Egyptian god of the sun (and of war?). There are some good arguments for him being the best candidate, the first being that this episode had a whole lot of ‘Horace’ in it to begin with. The popular eye of Horus symbol could also be a reference to the glass eye found in the arrow station back in S2. Horus was even half falcon, and falcons have four talons on each claw. But there’s also a big argument against Horus: falcons have no ears
On the subject of falcons, another bird made two solid appearances in last night’s episode: the owl. First we see a wooden owl in Amy’s house, during the scene where she’s going into labor. Later on we see another wooden owl hanging from the wall in Heather’s home. After 90 seconds of research, I’ve uncovered nothing important about the owl in Egyptian mythology, other than that it represents the letter ‘M’. So if anyone else can come up with something, me and the 4-toed statue are all ears.
Faraday’s assertion that he’s “not gonna do it” obviously refers to his future/past warning to young Charlotte. Yet going by his own rule of ‘whatever happens has already happened’, he knows inwardly that he’s going to warn her anyway. Mourning aside, this is the real reason he’s going crazy right now. Daniel’s fighting the urge to grab that little red-headed girl and shake the island out of her… but at the same time his ever-logical mind knows he can’t stop it from happening
Sawyer has always been in the front-running for the most transformed character on the show, but after this episode there can be no doubt. We’ve watched his name go from Sawyer to James, and now even his last name is adjusted to LaFleur. He’s gone from a loner with no accountability to the head of Dharma security, and he’s taken on an extremely Jack-like leadership role. Traditionally, Sawyer’s trudged around the jungle following everyone else, grumbling complaints, and dropping sarcastic/hilarious remarks. Yet LaFleur leads others, makes quick decisions, and takes decisive action – and with all the funny comments to boot.
The hooking up of Sawyer and Juliet was surprisingly awesome, made even more great by all the tough stuff they’ve been through together. While the O6 were off boring me to death in the real world, these two have been time-jumping and dry humping. Juliet turns out to be the type of girl who can drill someone through the heart from 50 yards away, deliver a baby with a #5 scalpel, and then go out and rebuild your transmission. Let me tell you guys something… when you find that type of girl you STICK with her.
Reaction-wise, Kate’s return is certainly going to throw Juliet for a loop. And although the Sawyer/Juliet hookup will surprise Jack, no one’s going to be more pissy than when Ben finds out. In fact, it got me thinking: Maybe Ben already found out. Is this why Ben mated Kate and Sawyer at the Dharma beating zoo in the first place, like a pair of wild animals? Because he was hoping to get Sawyer so involved with Kate that he wouldn’t want Juliet later on? This would imply Ben knew in advance that the two of them would play Dharma house together. But then again, I think by now Ben knows he’s going to end up alone… a bitter, single old man popping pringles and watching
Twilight Zone episodes while sneering at their predictability
Compared to a motor-driven ship, a submarine would be pretty damned slow and it’s carrying capacity downright sucks. So what’s the deal?My guess: the ‘window’ to the island lies underwater. At least currently, while the island is in its present time and position. We’ve seen reference to certain compass bearings in order to get on and off the island, but those have always been two-dimensional representations of a 360-degree circle. What if the island’s radius of accessibility is a three-dimensional sphere, and the window that allows entry (which Dharma has determined is open only once every two weeks) happens to lie on a plane of reference that is beneath the surface of the water? That’s my new sub theory and I’m sticking to it
So then who is the son of Horace? We won’t find that out for a while. But consider this: was he supposed to be born at all? If Juliet hadn’t been there, would he have died otherwise? The other doctor looked like a total goofball. Was having Juliet travel back to Dharma time necessary for the birth of this kid? And if so, did Ben Linus knowingly recruit her to the island in the 1990′s for this sole purpose… the whole ‘solving the fertility problem’ thing being something he knew she couldn’t fix anyway? If so, I think we just saw something really important.The brilliant part of the show is that none of us know what the hell is really going on. Half of us could make arguments for predetermination: nothing anyone does really matters because it’s already done, determined, and finished. The other half could argue that, in fact, everything has changed. (4-11 from DarkUFO.com)
The screen shot of the statue from tonight’s episode along with the ankh necklace that Paul wore in the episode has turned up a strong connection to the Egyptian God Anubis. In fact, SWLS is saying that the four-toed statue IS in fact Anubis. (from Sledgeweb’s…Lost Stuff)
It could be Anubis, but the long jackal ears aren’t there. Instead, as I pointed out in my post, Set was the mortal enemy of Horus, and was the god of chaos and destruction. He was eventually banished to the desert. Horace seems to be the enemy of the Others (who presumably worshipped the statue in their earlier days) and when you go off the island, you are banished to the desert.But one of my readers, Chris Temple, emailed me making a case for another Egyptian god. This is Taweret:
She is the Egyptian goddess of sagging breasts pregnancy and childbirth. She has small ears, like the island statue, and that flat hat on her head. And… she has four toes. But more importantly, her importance is a goddess of fertility, and when we know what happened on the island, could the Others have always had fertility problems and they once called upon gods and goddesses to help them? (from Nik at Nite)
Egyptian themes continue with Paul’s Ankh necklace, seen in “LaFleur”. We’ve already seen hieroglyphs, an egyptian-esque statue, Guyliner Alpert, and a character named Horace… what’s will all the Egyptian nods? According to my good friend, Wiki, the symbol means “eternal life”. That didn’t seem to work out for Paul, but perhaps Guyliner took his body in order to resurrect him and then kill him a second time to make up for the death of two Others.(from Sledgeweb’s…Lost Stuff)
When Horace heard that Richard might be able to find the bodies of the dead Hostiles he tells one of the Dharma guys, “Call the Arrow, tell them we’re at condition one, take the heavy ordinance, and make sure the fence is at maximum.” That’s a lot of vague info.
In the premiere Pierre told us that The Arrow was used to create defensive strategies against The Hostiles. You could say that they were creating a security system. Heavy Ordinance could mean any number of things, but putting the sonic fence at maximum seems to imply one thing, Smokey. Could the Heavy Ordinance be the activation of Smokey? If Dharma had the ability to control or at least trigger Smokey that would explain how Ben summoned it in season 4.
A big “thank you!” to reader DS, who messaged me with this idea about Ageless Richard and made me laugh out loud… until I realized he could be onto something: “With all the Egyptian mythology themes in the show I couldn’t help but wonder if Richard Alpert (R.A.), with his Egyptian eyeliner eyes, is really RA the Sun God.” Now, I don’t want to go as far as to say that I agree Ageless Richard might actually BE an ancient deity in human form, but having Sawyer call out his eyeliner might have been meant to serve two purposes: 1) an in-joke for fans, and 2) a hint — another connection to the Ancient Egyptian culture where both men and women were known to pretty up their peepers. (from Long Live Locke)
I’ve been thinking about Radzinsky for a while now. He was the guy who killed himself while in The Swan. I’m worried that it’s going to be one of the people who go into the past. The most likely, an most tragic, choice would be Daniel. I could see him going crazy down there and shooting himself. SO I’m really hoping that we meet someone named Radzinsky real soon. (14-15 from Not Confused Just Lost)
This episode is unique in its handling of time in two different ways. Firstly, while title cards have been used in the past to indicate times or places, this is the first episode which has used them for this purpose for both the present-day and flash segments. Moreover, while “Ji Yeon” utilized both a flashback and a flashforward separately, this episode was the first to have a story segment which was both a flashback and a flashforward. The 1977 scenes were a flashforward because the depicted events three years after the preceding episodes’ on-Island storyline (continuing from the end of “This Place Is Death“); they were also a flashback because they immediately preceded the events at the end of “316“. In a way, they were also present-day scenes because the final parts took place immediately after Jin finds Jack, Kate and Hurley in “316“. (16-18 from Lostpedia.com)
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Anyway, this is all to say that the Sideways Jack that we got to know in ”Lighthouse” was a lot like the Castaway Jack we’ve come to know over the past five season, but also very different, in ways both obvious and not so obvious. (Has there ever been a less helpful sentence ever written than that last one?) We met him as he was washing a hard day’s work off himself and talking with his mother about the mystery of Christian’s missing coffin. Yep: still missing. Probably in Berlin, according to the airline, but nobody knew for sure. The Widow Shephard was flummoxed. How could someone possibly lose a dead body? The lack of resolution had left her proverbially paralyzed; she needed Jack’s help in settling Christian’s affairs. (In more ways than one.) It would be wrong to say Jack was unfazed by his father’s Lost-in-the-system corpse (he certainly seemed moved by his mother’s need), but at the same time I didn’t get the sense he was haunted by it, either.
consensus seems to be that the name attached to this number was ”Wallace.”) But before the contraption could reach 108, Jack saw something in the mirrors — images of buildings that shouldn’t be there. He then got a scary thought: What would he see if he turned the dial to his number, 23. He pushed Hurley out of the way and changed the ”channel” and there on the ”screen” was a live shot of his childhood home. Jack then came to some conclusions. He concluded that the Lighthouse was a mystical surveillance device. He concluded that Jacob had used it to spy on him all his life. He concluded that Jacob wanted something from him, and he angrily demanded that Hurley summon Jacob ASAP to explain himself. Hurley explained that it didn’t work that way, that Jacob was a ghost — a sometimes there, sometimes not non-entity.
Speaking of which, what was Jacob doing? I’ve rewatched it a dozen times, and he appears to be swirling a piece of string or a thin stick in the waters of the Spring. Honestly, it looks like he’s fishing. I’m not sure what to make of that, although if I was pressed to make some comparison, the first thing that comes to my mind mind is Jesus Christ, not just a fisherman but a “fisher of men”, who recruits his followers and gives them tasks that they often don’t understand and end up failing at.
tells Jin that they tortured her, even showing him the scars. Based on this and what Dogen said about Claire being infected, it seems that she underwent a similar test as Sayid. I have no doubt that she failed, too, but I’m less sure that that means either of them are actually infected, as I have yet to see them become corrupted by the Smoke Monster the way that the French Team was (though it’s certainly possible that this did happen to Claire – we now know who she’s been buddy-buddy with lately.
Anyway, Wallace could turn out to be no one. Last week I made a huge fuss about Kate not being a candidate and this week, there she is – not crossed off, no important number, just kind of there. My point is that there might be less rhyme and reason to these names and numbers than we suspect. Then again, Damon and Carlton know we’d be on the lookout for 108, so I have a hard time believing it says “Wallace” for no reason (12-18 by Robz888 on DarkUFO.com)
360 total. Lostpedia has an updated list of all the candidate numbers from Jacob (or Smokey’s) Wall. Looking it over, there’s only one number above 360: Daniel Faraday. And even that could be wrong, given how illegible some parts of the wall were. Also note: Kate’s name is in the lighthouse at #51 and is NOT crossed out. Interesting, eh?
Jacob was watching Jack’s old house. It was a white house so it was a light house. Get it? HA HA HA… anyways. Jack was enraged when he found out Jacob was watching him. But the truth is that he might not have been watching Jack. Doesn’t it seem more likely that he was watching Christian? Jack only lived there as a kid. For Jack’s sake I hope I’m wrong about that. (23-24 from Not Confused Just Lost)
• Kate and Aaron are wearing the same clothes when they go to Cassidy’s, as if they hadn’t slept at all the night before.• In the awesome smackdown scene between Juliet and Jack (did anyone else detect that maybe IF Sawyer has been pining for Kate, Juliet has been equally pining for Jack?) Jack says that he came back because he was supposed to, but doesn’t know any details. He sounds EXACTLY like Locke in this scene.
11. If you rewatch the scene where Christian takes Sun into the house, at the end of the scene, if you watch very closely, you’ll notice that there is another woman in the room. At the very end, just after Christian says “You have a long road ahead of you,” and it goes to a tight push in shot on Sun. Over Sun’s shoulder you can clearly see a figure, that appears to be a blond female, move her head. So are we to believe that Claire was in the room with Christian?
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