What should be the last word on LOST? Cheesy? Lame? Cliched? Cheap? Vapid? Insulting? All good options, but I think there’s really only one word that ends up describing what LOST became in the end.

I’m not trying to be smug, but I predicted it would turn out like this. I knew it. I think we all did. It didn’t happen all at once, but gradually the sloppiness and laziness of this much anticipated season became obvious. There was the wrong date on Aaron’s sonogram, then Kate’s name not being on the cave ceiling even though it supposedly was on the cave ceiling, the pointless Temple subplot, the Stargate Lighthouse, finally the awkward, stiff, so bad it made me cry scene where Michael was trotted out to give the lamest possible explanation for the whispers.

“We’re going to get killed,” said executive producer Damon Lindelof.

They’d been all but screaming from the rooftops that we wouldn’t be getting any goddamn Answers. It was all about the characters, yo. Those stupid questions were all red herrings! Not just the big ones, like Walt and Aaron and the Numbers. All of them!

Lindelof: As much confidence as we have in the story we’re telling, we are also comfortable saying, “But what do we know?”

They seemed genuinely shocked that anyone had been expecting any answers from them.

We actually really just set out to make a show that we thought was kind of cool and entertaining, and we never imagined that people would get wrapped up in the intricacies of it to the degree that they have.

At times they got downright insulting about it:

Not only did Damon inadvertently describe the process by which American kids grow up both stupid and fat, but he made it clear exactly how much respect he had for his audience. Which is to say – he thought we were chumps. He thought we weren’t really interested in answers to the gajillion questions he’d posed. We didn’t want to see the design behind the mysteries and characters revealed in a brilliant fashion that would reward us for our years of devotion. All we really wanted was cheap, generic junk food. So that’s the way he ended his series.

The famously funny.

The infamously awful.

The controversial

And the sublime.

Obviously the boy wonders knew everything LOST had ever been was hanging in the balance on May 23. Carlton Cuse himself described the metric by which he knew they’d be judged.

We don’t know whether the resolution between the two timelines is going to make people say, “Oh, that’s cool” or “Oh, fuck those guys, they belly-flopped at the end.”

So which was it? Cool? Or a belly flop?

I’ve been MIA the last third of this wretched finale season. It turns out it’s not really much fun to hate on something that you once loved. It feels terrible actually.

I’m embarrassed to remember how naively I approached this season, described by Cuse as a precious Christmas present they were going to slowly let us unwrap. I even went back last fall and recapped the glorious Season One in excrutiating detail, believing the hype that we were finally about to revisit that masterpiece and watch all its mysterious potential be fulfilled.

I tried to imagine how cool, how fun, how satisfying, it would be to see the big clock come together under the hands of the master watchmakers.

Instead what we got were gears and springs and meaningless numbers strewn all over the floor like a fish kill of red herrings, while the “watchmakers” mocked the audience for ever mistaking them for people who cared. Yes, if you’re wondering, I do feel kind of stupid. I had faith in these two bozos. What can I say?

As tempting as it may be, it’s probably wrong to blame Darlton. After all, it was our own choice to keep watching. We decided all on our own to imagine that we were playing some kind of puzzle. No one told us to expect that! Why would we think that a story about six magical numbers that were magically connected to cataclysmic events, or a story about an island where diseases are cured but pregnancy kills, or a story that wove intersecting timelines into a vast interdimensional web of coincidences and fate – why would we think any of that was meant to be a puzzle??? We must really be stupid! As stupid as The Fine Brothers!

It was our own free choice to gabble away on message boards these last few seasons talking about wormholes and string theory and exotic matter and Schrodingers goddamn cat. We did it long after it became obvious that these two guys weren’t able to write that kind of story. It was obvious they weren’t quantum physicists. Or even the kind of guys who passed physics in high school.

No one told us we had to prattle like morons about determinism and gnoticism and Manicheism and Buddhism and Catholicism and Egyptology and Philip V. Dick. I mean look at these two guys. Why would we think they had some kind of wisdom to offer?

You know who these two really remind me of now? The two con men who pretended to be tailors in Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes. They convinced the dopey Emperor he was getting a new set of gorgeous threads, but really he just ended up walking down the street with everyone laughing at the pimples on his butt. The Emperor, it turns out, was us.

At least we were in good company. In the days after the finale, I got calls and emails from pretty much every family member, friend, frenemy or casual acquaintance who had ever loved LOST, or knew that I once did. There were sighs, sad shakes of the head, muttered expletives, viral video exchanges and the always hilarious fancraft that LOST fans had raised to an artform.

The consensus was unanimous:

But how did the finale fare out in the land of media, both old and new? Did they stick their landing or did they …

?

I realize there were some in the fast food media who, as expected, were bowled over by the cliche overload of the finale. USA Today not only found it “thrilling”, ” clever” and “profound”, but they mocked those of us who’d bought into that silly mystery crap.

If you were looking for explanations for every twist and turn, you didn’t get them. (Some viewers won’t be satisfied until the producers churn out a multi-volume island manual that answers questions that were never actually posed.)

And as expected, both “I live next door to Damon” Kristin dos Passos and Cheerleader in Chief Jeff Jensen dissolved into predictably soggy heaps of teary satisfaction.

“The End” was an emotionally draining epic that had me crying with almost every single “awakening” and has left me mulling the true significance of the Sideways world, which was revealed to be a Purgatory-like realm created by the souls of the dead castaways themselves. (Purgatory! The irony!) I was so happy The Island was saved. I was so moved by Jack’s heroism and sacrifice and the glorious significance of ending where he began, as well as that Doubting Thomas allusion there at the end. … I loved Ben’s contrition. I loved Locke’s forgiveness. I loved it when Ben told him to stand up and walk again, and Locke did.

But if Darlton let themselves listen to anyone other than their friends in lowbrow places, they probably realized they’re going to have to stay in that bunker a little bit longer than anticipated. The New York Times trashed it on both the Arts page:

But you have to think that the gauzy, vaguely religious, more than a little mawkish ending of ‘Lost’ – “Touched by a Desmond” — will not sit well with a lot of the show’s fans. … The “Sopranos” finale was ambiguous and a bit of a shrug, but not puzzling; to me the “Lost” finale, in the immediate aftermath, felt forced and, well, a bit of a cop-out.

and the Editorial section:

Across six seasons, it’s true, we learned endless facts about the island — about its geography, its inhabitants, and what had happened on it across decades and centuries. But we never learned the whys behind the facts. And with the final season in the books, there’s good reason to think that we never learned them because the show’s creators never had a well-thought-out “why” for their story in the first place. The island wasn’t a real mystery — it was just a MacGuffin.

Max Read at Gawker thought “The Lost Finale was incredibly Dumb”, which pretty much sums up the consensus of my inner circle:

Once upon a time, there was a television show about a bunch of people on an island. For six years it was one of the most fascinating things on TV. And then it ended, in the worst way possible. … Lost ended tonight, and with it the hopes and dreams of millions of people who thought it might finally get good again. SPOILER ALERT: It didn’t. What did we learn? Nothing. We learned nothing from two-and-a-half hours of slow-motion bullshittery backed with a syrupy soundtrack.

Televisionary’s Jace Lacob tried really hard to hide his disappointment in this piece at The Daily Beast, but he couldn’t quite do it.

“The End” didn’t so much answer the long-dangling mysteries—Why do pregnant women die on the island? Why was the character of Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) special? What is this island? What was with all of the Egyptian hieroglyphics? What was the character of Desmond’s ultimate purpose on the island?—as it did ignore them altogether….Considering how much time viewers have spent trying to figure out the relationship between the island timeline and the Sideways one, it is also frustrating that it turned out that there is none—or more precisely, that what happened in the Sideways timeline didn’t affect what happened on the island at all.

Aside from coining the pithiest descripiton of the finale – “a prom of the dead in a chapel of love where everybody is farting rainbows” – Chadwick Martin of Slate nailed one of the finale’s main flaws:

There are second chances in life, but there are no do-overs. At least all the time travel, the donkey wheels, the smoke monsters were vehicles to explore the human condition. They were as fantastical as purgatory, yes, but they were also grounded in the terrestrial realities of life, death, and the pursuit of happiness. The show’s purgatorial clusterfuck is not. It is a venue for wish-fulfillment. Thus, the finale wronged not just me, but the show itself.

As did Laura Miller at Salon :

A series like “Lost” doesn’t need to solve all of its riddles, but it does need to address the right ones…. The comic-book paraphernalia and texture of the island — its secret bunkers with their code names, Jacob’s migrating cabin with its creepy paintings, the ersatz normality of the Others’ compound ringed by those sonic pylons and the fantastically mechanical grinding and dragging sounds that used to accompany the appearance of the smoke monster — were not peripheral to the heart of “Lost.” They were the very essence of its appeal.

And David Zurawik of The Baltimore Sun :

And the message of the Hero Quest in mythology is certainly not the gauzy, happy, angels-at-the-doorway one “Lost” fans had to settle for last night. Once Jack stepped into the church it looked like he was walking into a Hollywood wrap party without food or music — just a bunch of actors grinning idiotically for 10 minutes and hugging one another.

Scott Mendelson’s fine essay, republished at The Huffington Post, decided that the finale was so bad that it managed to nullify the series almost as a whole, although he – like me – hopes it will still be possible to enjoy the first three seasons before this series started its sad, end date driven decline:

By leaving everything unanswered right up to the end, and then pulling a narrative switcheroo instead of finishing the story that was being unveiled, Lost basically mocked those who bothered to watch from the very beginning, as such rabid viewership proved entirely unnecessary. Thus, the finale of Lost rendered the entire series run relatively pointless and effectively killed any and all rewatchability of the prior episodes. So, in the end, Lost ended for me with season three.

With all that and so much more being said, is there really any point in me writing anything else about this sad spectacle ? Is there anything left that really needs to be said? I’m over it. I could live without never giving LOST another thought. I’m literally itching to erase it off my dvr. But I promised I’d do this. Inquiring minds seem to want to know what it all meant to me. So, here we go, one last time, for old time’s sake.

I think others have pretty much covered the shameful way we were taunted with questions that were never intended to be answered, even as recently as the run-up to this season. They were running full speed ahead right up until late April, not only implying that we’d be rewarded for our detective work, but throwing new questions at us! Of course everyone was excited to see what the answer to the puzzles would be. And then we got this:

The superclunker episode Across the Sea. We found out the only thing worse than getting no answers was getting the LAME answers they came up with. Why did they even bother to answer the pointless Adam and Eve “mystery”, for instance? Was that at the top of anyone’s mind? As compared to things like – who bankrolled all Ben’s trips off the Island, who was Penny’s mother, why did Libby give Desmond a sailboat, what was the sickness, why did Rousseau’s crew hear the numbers on the radio, why did Claire leave Aaron … not to mention all those silly little trifles like why was Walt so special and why did pregnant women die and what the hell was up with those numbers? But nope. They didn’t feel the need to address any of those mysteries. They needed to give us a bogus backstory for two skeletons that almost no one remembered. Why?

My guess is because Damon had stupidly bragged about it back in 2007:

When all is said and done, people are going to point to the skeletons and say, ”That is proof that from the very beginning, they always knew that they were going to do this.

Of course, in his hamfisted way, he managed to prove exactly the opposite. It added nothing to that remembered moment to find out that Jacob, the 40,000 year old virgin, buried his bad twin and his another raising mother in the cave after a night of interfamily murder. We just met these people. They meant nothing to us.

Their story was tacked on, like everything else in Season Six. In fact, the whole finale could have been slapped on at any random endpoint. It wasn’t a culmination or an inevitability or a hard earned catharsis. The message that after death we’ll all live happily ever after with our bestest BFFs could have been, as one reviewer noted, a perfectly good finale for Saved by the Bell or Happy Days. Or a kiddie cartoon, for that matter.

What’s more, by bottom loading all the mysteries and saving them for the end, rather than building them organically into the fabric of the story, they belied the pretense that they were master storytellers. A good story needs pacing. I had assumed their need for a fixed end date was in order to allow them to pace their story. But we all know now that had nothing to do with it.

We could tell that Mama Clegg was not the Island’s Eve. She was only another interim hermit guardian, just like Jacob. Someone came before her, maybe the people that carved the cuneiform marks into the big stone plug. Someone before Momsy built the light sealing contraption inside the big shiny hole. Who was that person? Why did they do it? We never really learned why the Island was special, what was the source of its power, what its power really was. We never learned why the Smoke Monster had to be contained on the Island, what would have happened if he’d escaped. We entered the final battle of the story without knowing the stakes.

We just knew it was really important for Jack. Because he used to be a man of science. And now he is a man of faith. Faith in the Island. OK. But why?

The story never created any meaningful metaphor for the Island. It was the “warmest, brightest light you’ve ever seen or felt.” It was a little piece of “something that’s inside of every man.” The enemy was “evil incarnate”. It would all “only end once”, except that – since Hurley became Jacob – it didn’t! It was a myth that was never told, a myth, if we can even call it that, that never coalesced into anything more than mawkish abstractons. It meant nothing. It was just pretty pictures.

What’s more, the characters themselves experienced no consequences. The very same second that The Great Jacksus laid down his life, he was handed his eternal reward. His sacrifice wasn’t a sacrifice at all, just the last step in him being handed all the presents and goodies and heavenly lollipops that anyone could ever dream of.

It was a pretty sweet deal. Save the world and go straight to heaven. Doesn’t really tug at my heartstrings. Or make me feel anything at all. No stakes. No consequences. No metaphor. No myth.

But all this ground has been covered, and better, by others. Few disagree that in the end the LOST “storytellers” failed in their central mission – to pull together a coherent and satisfying end to the mysteries they themselves had chosen to create. But I was surprised to see how many, at least in the immediate aftermath, seemed to think that the finale succeeded in a different area – that of giving resolution to the characters. It became like the one good thing people could say about LOST – that it was a terrible ending, but at least the characters all got “satisfying resolutions”. I don’t know where they’re seeing that. Maybe people just need to convince themselves that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as it all really, really was.

To be fair, not everyone was fooled. But far too many were. If I have to pick what I consider to be the Number One Inconvenient Truth about the LOST Finale, it would be this:

It was NOT “about the characters.”

The biggest secret that Darlton managed to hide from us was that the characters never really mattered. At all. Yes, LOST had a great cast of mostly wonderful actors, who emoted the shit out of the material they were given to work with, even if it was often insane nonsense. But charismatic acting is not the same thing as good characterization.

I think the primary failure of LOST’s end story was its failure to respect and resolve its characters. Except for Jack, none of the characters got any better resolution than the mysteries did.

Let’s start with a somewhat minor, but nonetheless pivotal, character. Claire and her baby, who she’d been apocalyptically warned must not be raised by another, seemed to be mystically connected to the Island.

But then Claire dropped Aaron in a cabbage patch. He got raised by another anyway. And Claire became a crazed axe murderer.

That was her character arc. We never saw how she went crazy. We never saw what happened when Aaron got his Mad Mama back. We missed every interesting thing that Claire’s story could ever have been about. All we know is that Claire eventually died and re-birthed Aaron in her self created purgatory while she waited for her big brother Jack to arrive, so she could spend eternity with Charlie – the guy whose death she never even mourned.

How was this character arc resolved? What is satisfying about this characterization? How is it even a characterization? It’s a collection of cutesy coincidences – She’s Jack’s sister! She’s crazy like Rousseau! Only worse! – that ultimately went nowhere and meant nothing.

Ok, maybe you say Claire’s a bad example, because she wasn’t an important enough character. Let’s take the great John Locke then. Because no one can say Locke wasn’t an important character. How did this great character get his resolution in the finale?

Well, basically he stayed dead.

Until Jack came to fix him.

John Locke, who so wanted to be special and who came to the Island and had his legs magically restored and who had a child’s faith in the beautiful Island and who tried and failed to convince Jack to stay and who left what he loved and sacrificed his life for the sake of his Island – his “resolution” was that he got to wait in Limbo Land until Jack – freaking Jack – got around to not only dying, but to accepting that he was dead.

Locke’s character “resolution” was to further the glory of Jack, even in death. What once seemed like an epic duel between equally matched protagonists went out with a weak, faint sounding pfffffffft. By the time the big showdown happened, Locke wasn’t even there.

Like so much of the audience, Locke got screwed. Sorry, John, you were just road kill on the Highway to Jack’s Heaven.

But don’t worry. Be happy! It’s not like there’s anything we can do about it now. Except maybe this …

Sun and Jin’s “resolution” came at the end of three long seasons wherein they both did, collectively, nothing.

Finally they reunited. Then they died the next day, with not even a passing acknowledgment of the daughter who had been at the heart of their story. In Purgatory, or Limbo, or whatever the hell that Sideways bullshit was, they had to wait – for Jack, of course – until they could speak English (the language of Jack’s heaven) and follow their dear leader into the light.

We can also add Sayid to the list of screwed over characters.

In post-9/11 America, it was shocking to see an Iraqi soldier in the Revolutionary Guard presented as a sympathetic character. But Sayid worked his way into our hearts, despite being the sickest killer in the bunch, because he was a passionate man. Who loved Nadia.

Nadia was at the nexus of all his moral quandaries – he betrayed his country for her, he betrayed his boyhood friend for her, he struggled off the Island and married her, only to lose her again. And with her death, he lost his soul. His character resolution? Well, first – of course – he had to wait for Jack. Obviously. Then … uh … he hooked up with Shannon and he got to go to Heaven!

Did this make sense to anyone???? Was this supposed to be a joke?

Sadly no. They were serious about this shit. See, Sayid didn’t really love the woman he’d devoted his life to, the woman his entire story had been about. He only wanted what all men want in Geekland – a blonde American babe.

Hurley apparently lived out his roly poly life on the Island, maybe for centuries, with Ben. Although that might have made a great season of LOST all by itself, we never got a glimpse of it.

Instead we learned that the only great thing in Hurley’s extremely long life was Libby, the girl he once almost went on a picnic with the day before she got shot. Nothing else. So once he finally died, he – like everyone else – waited for Jack, and then finally, I guess, he got to have a girlfriend, even if they were both dead.

Sawyer’s story ended in Season Four.

We had watched his evolution, one of the most beautiful in the show,

from guilt ridden, self loathing orphan to passionate lover and hero.

But in Season Four, fanboys everywhere rejoiced as Sawyer’s hotness got sucked away and he was reincarnated as a neutered Deputy Dawg, flashing big buttery grins at his tall blond Dharma-wife.

And that was it for poor Sawyer. He got to scream and cry while Juliet died … over and over again … then he sat on his ass until it was time for Jack to save the world. Then he did absolutely nothing for all the rest of his life until it was time for the most anticlimactic and uninspired cup of coffee in tv history. And then he hugged Jack, and he too got to pass through the pearly gates.

Character? Resolution? I can’t find either one in this story. The complex, charismatic character that stole my heart and first addicted me to LOST disappeared the day he jumped off the helicopter and saved the life of the woman he loved. I watched and I hoped and I put up with Carlton’s insulting insinuations that we were only watching to see him take his shirt off, but the Sawyer that I loved never ever returned to LOST.

Kate didn’t do any better. We don’t know when she died but we know she never met anyone better than Jack. That’s sad enough. You didn’t deserve that, Kate.

This is where the poor character development leads straight into The Second Inconvenient Truth About the Lost Finale:

It had a very depressing message.

In order to believe in whatever the Shiny Happy Afterlife was meant to be, we have to believe that nothing that ever happened to Kate, Sawyer or Claire after they left the Island ever meant a damn thing. They had to wait TO DIE before they could live.

Well, technically, they had to wait for JACK to die before they could live again.

If we accept that the gang in the church had to be there together because they were the only people that truly mattered to one another, we have to realize that all these people lived HORRIBLE lives here on earth. Think of all those who didn’t matter to them:

Charlie Hume didn’t matter to his Mom and Dad, and neither did Ji Yeon, a fetus for all eternity.

Hurley didn’t want to be with Grandpa Tito or Mami Carmen or any of the people who loved and raised him.

Helen was good enough for Locke’s purgatory, but she didn’t rank high enough to make it into his heaven.

Jack’s alcoholic, philandering daddy was the High Holy Priest in his Heaven,

but the old Moms who put up with being married to this creep didn’t rate any heavenly reward.

Sorry, Margo, your son just wasn’t that into you.

Juliet had no place in her heaven for the sister and nephew she longed to see for so long.

Nadia? She was no biggie to Sayid. Just a passing fling.

Boone never had anyone in his life who meant anything to him at all and the greatest moment of Shannon’s life were those few weeks she spent trying to breathe without her inhaler in the Rape Caves before she got shot in the gut.

Kate and Sawyer never missed their mothers either, or Tom, or Clementine, or Kevin, or each other.

The only thing this “heaven” proved is that all of these people lived sad, loveless lives on earth. But so what if life sucked for all the Losties? They got to be in a clean, perfect heaven with all the other pretty people, paired up like the giraffes and zebras on Noah’s ark.

In the LOST credo, it turned out the only thing that ever matters in life is finding a Schmoopie. Parents, children, lovers, friends – none of it means a damn thing. The key to life is The Schmoopie.

Throughout the years, LOST made a big show of flashing various religious symbols at us like stolen watches from under a trenchcoat. The Church of Shiny Happy People felt like self parody, what with all the spiritual tchotchkes stuffed into every available corner.

A dharmachakra, an aum, a menorah, a Ganesh … I guess they couldn’t find space to shove in any voodoo chicken feet or Rasta spliffs or Wiccan wands.

But no one should have been fooled. The religious message of LOST was conventional Judeo-Christian group think of the most joyless kind.

Humans must unquestioningly accept the will of a capricious, often vicious Higher Power, because he’s Jacob and you’re not. Life’s a bitch and then you die, but in the religion of LOST, once you find your Schmoopie … and once the great St. Jacksus arrives of course … even cold blooded killers can all go to Hollywood Heaven together.

Damon Lindelof: This is the critical mystery of the season, which is, “What is the relationship between these two shows? … Where’s Libby? Where’s Ana Lucia? Where’s Eko? These are all the things that you’re supposed to be thinking about.

Got that? The only question Darlton cared about answering in their finale season, the ONLY one, was this: What was the Sideways universe? The Sideways that didn’t even exist until this season. And what was the big revelation about the Sideways? That it was a completely separate, non intersecting, non connecting afterlife that the characters “created for themselves” while they waited to enter Heaven, or the light, or what the fuck ever. After swearing for years their story wasn’t about Purgatory, they made their finale season all about … frigging Purgatory! Haha! Gotcha!

It’s not that making the story about Purgatory would have been such a terrible idea. It could have been a coherent theme to carry over the seasons, showing us each person’s passage to Enlightenment after their death. But this mish mosh didn’t even make any kind of theological sense as Purgatory. What was the point of it, except to bide everyone’s time until Jackie-poo arrived? Sawyer did not create a purgatory where he could repent for the murder of the innocent sweet shrimp seller.

Kate did not atone for the wrongs she’d done. In fact, she made herself a world where she was innocent, wrongfully accused. All that bad stuff? Nevah hoppened.

Charlie was still on the junk needle in his self created purgatory, only richer than Croesus this time around.

Sun and Jin for some reason created a purgatory where they were even more miserable, where Jin killed people and Sun got shot.

And Sayid apparently filled his self created purgatory with even more murders – I guess the ones he didn’t get around to committing in his killing spree of a life.

By creating a trite, pat purgatory, all the stories we’d invested in suddenly felt shallow and pointless. In one fell swoop, they managed to dishonor almost every character and render their stories meaningless. It didn’t reflect the reality of our human experience, where all our acts have real consequences, where we don’t have an escape hatch into paradise, like we found out the Losties had. But this purgatory had other problems as well. Basically it just didn’t make any goddamn sense.

Was the highpoint of Aaron’s life really the day he was born? It’s hard to imagine how horrifying this poor kid’s life was if the first six hours were the highlight. Or was Aaron just a symbol, not an actual human baby with a soul of his own? Even in death, was Aaron just a prop in Jack’s Heaven?

Why was Eloise worried that Desmond would take Daniel away?

If she was “awake” and understood that she was dead, why was she still in purgatory? And why didn’t she understand how it worked? She had been paired with her Schmoopie, so why couldn’t she get on the Ark?

What was Ben waiting for? Did he need Danielle Rousseau to wake up too?

Because of course Danielle would want to spend eternity with the mouse faced creep who made her life a living hell, rather than the dearly beloved father of her child. She just hadn’t woken up yet and realized who her true schmoop was.

Why wasn’t Michael allowed into Jack’s heaven? He blew himself up with a bomb just like Sayid did. Why did he have to be trapped on the Island as a whisper? Was it because he didn’t have a Schmoopie?

And what about poor Walt? Not only wasn’t he special in any way, but none of the other 815-ers wanted him in the heaven they created for themselves. Can you believe it? They wanted Libby there, but they didn’t want Walt! They wanted Penny there and most of them didn’t even know who she was! Boy, they really, really held that puberty thing against him, didn’t they?

Why was Juliet Jack’s wife?

Seriously. Why in the hell would she create that for herself? And why would she have an imaginary son with him? Forget about the realization that her precious sister actually never meant anything to her. I’m more hung up on that numbingly redundant candy machine conversation. When Miles listened to her dead body, remember that he heard her say “it worked”? What was she talking about? The bomb worked? Her hope to never have met Sawyer worked? No! She was talking about the candy machine of course!

When Sawyer unplugged it and plugged it back in, it worked! Wow! How clever was that? I mean, that’s why we all stuck with LOST, wasn’t it? For stupid gimmicky shout outs and conversations written entirely in cutesy catchphrases.

See? Look! It was an Apollo candy bar! And Number 23! Holy moly! My mind, she is blown! Darlton, you iz geniuses!

So the whole Sideways/Purgatory/Bullshitland that the characters “created” for themselves after death was not about Redemption (except for Jack.) And it wasn’t about Free Will, one of the other alleged “themes” of LOST. The characters may have created this place, but they didn’t know they were doing it, and they didn’t know why they did it, and most of the connections they unwittingly created for themselves meant absolutely nothing in the final denouement, just like all the connections built into the pre-crash flight and the off Island world meant absolutely nothing.

LOST wasn’t about connections at all, you see.

It was all about how many times you can pull a meaningless WhatTheFUCK plot twist on the audience. It turns out, you can pull an entire show out of your ass based on nothing but constant gotchas and contrivances, and you’ll be able to fool … well, a whole lot of people. For a really long time. Like for six years.

I think so far we’ve established one thing: Thinking about the LOST finale is not a useful exercise. The whole Man of Faith vs. Science debate, as presented on LOST, was designed to undermine the value of thought and contemplation, to degrade intellectualism. Just believe. Just have “faith”. And what we were asked to have Faith in on LOST was … Nonsense. On LOST, the Faith argument was used to hide lazy thinking and cheap storytelling. The only thing we were having Faith in all along was Chuck E. Cheese.

So here’s another Inconvenient Truth that we learned from the finale:

LOST had no intellectual design behind it.

In the past if I’d seen this image of the Monster being thrown off the cliff:

I’d have dug out my favorite Dore print of Lucifer being thrown out of heaven. But at this point that feels like it would only be giving them a respect they don’t deserve. I wasn’t impressed that Jack’s hicky turned out to be a mark from the tip of a knife. I really didn’t care that Jack stumbled to his death from a wound to his right side, like the wound Doubting Thomas pondered in the picture Jack gazed at in 316. I can’t be bothered to dig out images to illustrate these things. I get it. Symmetry. Mirrors.

I always did love the visual imagery of LOST, but you can’t just throw random symbolic elements onscreen and call that a story.

By the end, LOST had lost all its intrigue for me, 100%. Without a story behind them, symbols alone feel superficial, and cloyingly facile.

I had given up on the idea that there was an intelligent design behind LOST’s Famous Thinker Namedropping, but I was still dumbfounded by how incredibly facile and superficial the use of imagery became.

Not only could we tell that a man was good based on whether he was blond and blue eyed (Aryan=Good) and wearing a white tunic, but we could even tell the moral destiny of a baby by the color of his blanket! And see! They were playing a game. Like how the LOST writers were playing a game with us.

I can’t have been the only one who misread Damon Lindelof’s New York Times editorial some years ago. Remember how he had the audacity to lecture J.K.Rowlings on how she should end the Harry Potter books? I think a lot of people thought he was advising her to be brave, to do the unexpected, to do the unpopular. But re-reading that thing, it’s obvious he was saying no such thing. In point of fact, he was laying out exactly the way he planned to end LOST – catering to what he considered to be the stupidity and short attention spans of the American public.

THE BOY WHO DIED…

“We Yanks, however, do not want froufrou endings. We want things definitively tied up. And by “things” I mean lots of people dead.”

“We really like gratuitous explosions.”

“Because if there’s one thing we like more than explosions, it’s surprises.”

I kind of wish, as an American, that people like Damon wouldn’t speak for what “we Yanks” appreciate. I’d just like to let the global audience out there know that not all Yanks tell their kids to shut up and eat cheese and not all Yanks are proud of being stupid and unimaginative.

I am one Yank who became totally enchanted by the “froufrou” of LOST’s endless literary, religious, scientific and philosophical allusions. Yes, I gradually recognized that it was an exercise in futility, but I still hoped against hope that there was some bare bones design behind it all, some order to the chaos. But the truth is out now: There wasn’t any. Ever.

Cuse and Lindelof have dropped plenty of guideposts along the way. Several characters are named for authors or philosophers (Locke, Milton, Rousseau, the Zen master Dogen) whose concepts play into the story, and classic works of literature sneak into key scenes. The writers say they use these references as “a tip of the cap” to their influences, as Lindelof puts it, “as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, we came up with this idea for the first time.”

In other words, they were saying that great minds in history had addressed great issues and told great stories … but Lindelof and Cuse weren’t trying to do that. They were just copycats. Who didn’t have the skills. Sort of like this:

I think Darlton should have taken this full disclosure thing one step further. The writers who influenced them weren’t Lewis Carroll or James Joyce or C.S. Lewis. Come on, guys! Be honest. The literary influences in your writing room were more along these lines, right?

Killer the dog WAS. Now Killer was born to a three-legged bitch mother. And he was always ashamed of this, man. And then right after that, he’s adopted by this man, Tito Liebowitz. He’s a small-time gunrunner and, uh, rottweiler fight promoter. So he puts Killer into training, next thing you know Killer’s GOOD! He is DAMN good! But then, he had the fight of his life. They pit him against his brother Nibbles. And Killer said, “No, man, that’s my brother, I can’t fight Nibbles!” And he made him fight anyway. And then Killer, Killed Nibbles. And Killer said, “That’s it!” And he called off all his fights, and he started doing crack, and he ffffffff-FREAKED OUT. And then in a rage, he collapsed, and his heart… no longer beat. Wow.

Anyone who ever followed Damon Lindelof on Twitter, begging people to vote up LOST on some poll where it was losing out to Ghost Hunters or something, knows that this dude believed in the power of the button pushers. He said as much in another inadvertent admission hidden in that infamous NY Times editorial:

“I read an article recently saying that 80 percent of American poll respondents said they thought Harry wouldn’t survive the final book. As is the case in many polls, there’s probably a degree of wish-fulfillment here. In other words, we want the little bugger to die.”

I don’t see how poll watching could ever be a good practice in any creative enterprise. It seems to me that “conventional wisdom” is in itself the death knell of originality. But we do know the boy wonders liked to follow polls, and given the dumbassery of the LOST fandom, this may possibly explain how LOST managed to fail so utterly. Let’s look for a minute at the kind of fans who truly and deeply loved this LOST finale. First of all there’s people like this lovely young Jate fan:

Fuck you all, dirty whores. Yes I’m talking abotu real people because you suck and fail at life. I loathe you all haters, you deserve all the spit and shit on your faces as you can get for all those years trolling the internet. Our fandom doesn’t have any respect? STFU you son of a bitch you! Keep fooling yourselves that Skate was eyefucking the whole season. You’re only embarrasssing yourselves, even some decent skaters can see. Yes, there are sane skaters out there who appreciate them sanely.

These are your fans, Damon. You own them now. Don’t look now, but they may be all you got left. We’ve learned now that fanmail campaigns and obsessive poll rigging pay off when the writers have neither balls nor any kind of plan. Sure, you managed to destroy your show’s reputation and legacy, and sure, your name will be mud to any LOST fan who ever tried to follow the show on an intelligent level, but you did manage to satisfy geniuses like the poster quoted above. So, uh … Congrats?

It would be wrong for me to blame the batshit Jate/Suliet fans entirely for how inane and angry the LOST online discourse became. By far the bigger culprits were the vicious, often misogynist fanboy types who camped out at the site run by my old friend DarkUFO. Given Darlton’s addiction to pandering to the lowest common denominator in the fandom, there’s no way they weren’t aware of the whims of Fanboy Central. On that loud, big, spoiler whoring board, any sensible disagreement or alternate viewpoint about LOST was systematically shouted down, mocked to shit and banned out of existence by the torch and pitchfork carrying villagers.

It’s sad to think that LOST was once considered cutting edge precisely because of the cyber-conversation that had grown up between fans and writers, a conversation that may have ultimately destroyed the integrity of the story. Laura Miller’s Salon piece makes a great case for another Inconvenient Truth:

LOST was “Ruined By Its Own Fans”

From statements the producers of “Lost” have made over the past five years, they developed a dynamic with die-hard fans (and disillusioned fans and skeptical non-fans) that was infinitely more complex than any of the personal relationships among the series’ characters. Could it be that in resisting the geekiest, nitpickingest, most Aspergerian demands of their audience they swung too far in the opposite direction, dismissing as trivial everything but the cosmic (the tedious and largely unnecessary Jacob-Smokey background) and the sentimental (making sure that every character receives his or her designated soul mate or therapeutic closure of the most banal Dr. Phil variety)? If so, “Lost” may be the quintessential example of a pop masterpiece ruined by its own fans.

Infintely more complex, indeed. DarkUFO was despised, and rightly so, by the LOST inner circle, because of his thoughtless and selfish spoiling of their big Season 3 and 4 finale surprises. So, was it REVENGE that made Darlton write an endgame that fanboys hated even more than Skaters? If so then the irony of Fanboys and Skaters being on the same side is delicious. Nice job, dudes.

Fanboys and Skaters were the natural enemies of the LOST Fan Kingdom. Aside from Andy Page’s smarmy egotism, the defining feature of his site was his petty vindictiveness towards Skaters, most likely because we were the ones who unmasked him for the poll rigging liar and all around skeevebag that he was. How petty was he? I don’t think anyone outside of Fishbiscuitland quite understands. For years he lurked 24/7 on our board under his chosen alias:

mary2009!

Miss Mary mostly just used our site as one of the many from which he’d steal spoilers or pictures or media mentions, all of which he’d post on his own board without credit. But in the run up to the finale, his juvenile pettiness was on full display. One night, when I guess he was getting bored down in that basement bunker, he put on his best squealing imitation of what he thought a dumbass Skater fangirl would sound like:

I juust had my friends sister email me about the finale. She works on the set if LOST She told me that in the finale that Kate tells Jack she loves him Uve now given up on this show after the Juliet kiss scen

And then a few moments later:

They are sending me scans tomorrow. And they will send to dark UFO tomorrow as well I promise I am not lying and this is real I wish it was not: (((((((((

I busted him right away, explaining that even squalid fangirls were smart enough to trace an IP, and he ran straightaway, skirts flying over his head, to erase the evidence that he was, in fact, every bit the petty, juvenile twit we’d always known him to be. Apparently he didn’t want anyone to know that the great and powerful DarkUFO loved to troll among the squalid shippergirls he always claimed to despise. We banned the bastard after that, but Lord knows how many other sock puppets this douchebag had over the years, or how deeply into the pie his poll rigging fingers really were. It’s all water under the bridge now, thankfully – one more reason to be happy that LOST is over.

LOST is over, MaryAndy. Suck it up. You have to go out and get a job now.

MaryAndy may have just been one of the creepy curiosities of the LOST fandom, but his Skate Hate was something that was shared by most of the fanboys who followed LOST, including, it seems the Alpha Nerds who wrote this dreck. It brings me to one of the biggest downers of my LOST experience. Maybe it doesn’t quite count as an Inconvenient Truth, but it’s a Truth nonetheless.

Nerds hate romance.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that most nerds wouldn’t know Romance if it jumped up and kissed them on the mouth. That’s part of what makes them nerds, after all. Sci Fi and Fantasy genres have never been a romance friendly milieu. Romance, when it appears at all, is generally very stilted and unrealistic, and caters to the male sensibility exclusively. Most women in this genre are blond. All women are beautiful, although beauty is completely optional for the male half. It is common, and preferable, in Nerd Romance, that the female abjectly worship her mate. Strangely, though, Nerd Romance rarely features … s.e.x.

I’m sure many are wondering how I feel about Sawyer and Kate being left flat in the finale, about them being the only couple left out of the great cosmic circle jerk. Every obscure, asexual couple in the show’s history, from the non starter of Daniel & Charlotte to the anti-romance of Ben & Danielle got some kind of validation in the story, yet the long romance of Sawyer & Kate, deeply embedded into the fiber of the story, was ignored completely. I was disappointed, but not shocked, and not all that broken up over it. It’s hardly the only thing that didn’t make sense, and it’s not like it made the finale any worse. I don’t think there was any way it could have been any worse, to be honest. It may well have been a blessing in disguise that they didn’t pander to Skaters. If they had, I might have been tempted to watch it again, and this way I’m forever protected from that fate.

The gloopy cheese-bubbles that were meant to signal eternal schmoopiness in the “The End” made the Gray’s Anatomy’s finale look like Shakespeare. I don’t think LOST could possibly have trivialized the idea of romantic love more if they tried.

Basically, the way Romance ended up being depicted on LOST, the uglier a romance was,

the less we saw it happen,

the less sensual it was,

the more weird and shallow and gimmicky it was

– the more likely it was to end up depicted as Twu Wuv in the finale.

Sayid and Nadia’s series long love story, just like Sawyer and Kate’s, ended up meaning nothing. In both cases, the women were swapped out for the leggy blonde at the last second. Meanwhile, Jack and Kate, who spent the last two seasons in a deep funk of apathy towards one another were magically transformed with one last WTF into the most vapid kind of Nerd Lovers imaginable.

These writers had no intuitive sense of how to write romance, and what’s more they seemed to have a strange antipathy towards the concept of passionate sexual love. It’s incredible, but true, in the entire run of the whole series, there was only ONE deeply romantic, loving sex scene in the full six years.

Yes, it was one of the greatest tv love scenes ever and yes, it will be remembered long after this dreadful finale is forgotten, but still … Only one! In six years! That’s shocking. It almost makes you wonder what other issues these guys were repressing. Women were never important to these writers as anything other than babymakers and schmoopies. Sex for the most part was invisible, except when it was making women pregnant so they could die. But when it came time for the Darlton to imagine what the secret in the bowels of the Island would look like, they created a big rod. And a shiny wet hole.

I know. Ew. But don’t blame me. I didn’t write this shit. The ultimate denouement of this phallic fantasy was that the big hero man had to stick his rod back into the hole. Then the world was saved. And Jack was bathed in an orgasm of light.

Sheesh. These two guys should have just taken their Jack Action Figure and gotten themselves a room.

The LOST writers, of course, chose to make a love triangle central to their story from the very beginning, and to keep it there and promote it until the bitter end.

For years, we heard – from the mouths of the Darlton themselves – that Sawyer was their Han Solo. Even a Star Wars neophyte understands that Han is the romantic hero of the story. He’s charismatic and sexy and adorable in all the ways that Luke is not and can never be. It’s a type, an archetype, and an especially entertaining one, in my opinion.

But LOST, since it couldn’t be original in any other way, decided that this well loved archetype would be the one, the only one, that would stand on its head. They de-sexed their Han Solo and made sure that he ended up getting gotz in the end of the story. There could be no romantic victory for Sawyer, just like there could be no heroic victory, because nothing could be allowed to deflect any light from the greater glory of the magnificent Jackass. Sawyer’s fate, and the fate of Sawyer and Kate as a love story, was one more casualty of LOST’s Revenge of the Alpha Nerds.

And here’s the last saddest, most Inconvenient Truth :

LOST was never anything more than The Jack Show.

All of it was just passing time until it was time for Damon’s surrogate, Jack Shephard, to win all the marbles. The only character that got any true resolution in this story was Jack. Jack became Jacob! Then he gave up being Jacob! Then he killed the bad guy! Then he saved the world! Then he died a great hero, knowing he’d saved the world! Then he won the Kate trophy! Forever! In heaven! If you ever doubted that this was The Jack Show, check it out: No one could go into Heaven until Jack got there. He was even the most important person in Heaven!

It’s a very inconvenient, but unavoidable, truth that these two rich, mainstream Hollywood white guys could only envision a story that revolved around a privileged mainstream white guy like themselves. It’s laughable to think back at how LOST was once considered a groundbreaking show because of its multicultural cast. As the years went by, the black people disappeared, the Asians learned to speak proper English, the Middle Eastern man became an evil beast and the females all became interchangeable schmoopies. Even the lesser white men had to take a backseat to the Great Jacksus. Locke ended up inert,

Desmond ended up not being very special after all,

and Sawyer was kept around as nothing but eye candy.

The decks had to be cleared to make sure no one, at any time, outshone the Great White Hero. Face it, even Purgatory was Jack’s Wet Dream. Who besides Jack got a damn thing out of this Sideways world we’re told they all allegedly created for themselves?

Claire was still the unwanted bastard stepsister who was pregnant with a baby she didn’t really want. Kate was still a fugitive. Sayid still a killer. Charlie still a junky. Locke still crippled. In Jack’s wet dream, Sawyer couldn’t even get a woman! If nothing else, that proved that we were living in Jack’s fantasy world.

But look at what Purgatory was like for King Jacksus. He was the generous kindly brother to Claire that he had never been in real life. He got both of Sawyer’s women before he did, and even impregnated one! He magically cured Locke’s spine. Who needs a miraculous mystical Island when you’ve got St. Jack? Miracles were just all in a day’s work for him.

Purgatory was so custom made to make sure Jack would be comfy in his new afterlife that he even got a whole fake person tailor made for him – David.

Now, David, of course never really existed. Poor kid, I’m sure it would ruin his day to find that out. Once Jack had been convinced that he would have been the bestest daddy in all the world, David, I guess, just poofed away. Jack was done with him, he returned to the void to which all things go that Jack no longer has any need of. His only function was to help Jack work out the all important Jackiness of being Jack.

I really can’t think of any way they could have undermined their quasi-spiritual “message” any more completely than by focusing the entire endgame on the glorification of only one character. I know LOST prided itself on making pseudo-religious pudding out of all the world’s great faiths and philosophies, but I’d really like clarification on which mutant religion they drew their inspiration from for this final act. In what faith is the individual ego considered a viable path to salvation or nirvana or enlightenment? Make no mistake: this final episode was about about one person and one person only. It was about Jack fulfilling all of Jack’s dreams,

about Jack becoming the hero that Jack always wanted to be,

about Jack not being a drunk or a stalker psycho ex husband,

about Jack having the perfect son who loved him perfectly,

about Jack getting the respect from Dad that Jack always wanted,

about Jack fixing everything for everyone just like Jack always obsessed over,

and about everyone loving and wanting and waiting for Jack before any of them could start their eternal afterlives. The message wasn’t “Live together or die alone”. It was “die alone and wait for Jacksus to lead us into paradise.”

With this predictable, but disastrous, narrative choice to focus on only one character above all the others, Lost managed to destroy the last hope that LOST could ever have been a great story with a message that was universal or transcendant. The strength of LOST had once been in the variety of its characters, in the way, that each one of them represented a slice of humanity, a slice of heroism, a slice of each of us. If there had been a truly humanist vision behind the LOST story, each of us could have seen ourselves in some incarnation within the story. We could have come away with some unifying vision of what it means to be human and to be connected to other humans. I think this is what many of us had hoped for. I know I wasn’t the only one who imagined that’s what we were witnessing. This TIME Magazine article gives a great interpretation of what LOST could have been, what so many of us thought it would be, but what it sadly decided it didn’t want to be:

But Lost has not a single protagonist but a huge ensemble of heroes and antiheroes with checkered pasts. The loser, the con artist, the arrogant doctor, the fugitive, the junkie: each has his or her part in the quest, which has less to do with good beating evil than determining how to be good, less to do with getting the happy ending than finding out what it means to have a happy ending. Collectively, they are — to borrow the title of Joseph Campbell’s classic study of myth — the Hero with a Thousand Faces, or at least a dozen or so. It’s a concept of heroism for our complicated, connected world, where problems are too complex for a single savior.

LOST’s problems weren’t too complex for Jack. He solved them all, all by himself. Locke tried to save everyone but only ended up giving the Monster a body to use. Desmond thought he could do it, but he couldn’t. Sawyer, Kate, Sayid, Sun, Jin, Charlie, Claire, Hurley, Ben – they may have moved the problems along, but none of them helped to solve or fix a damn thing. It was Jack, all Jack, only Jack.

The Geniuses in Chief liked to say that the show was telling them what it wanted to be about. We couldn’t hear it, being mere peons of the audience, but I guess what the show was telling them was that it wanted to pretend for a really long time to be about cool, intriguing characters and ideas and mysteries … but then at the last minute it wanted to be about Jack getting his ass kissed, his balls washed and a big fat halo super glued on to his head.

So, LOST is over. Finally. And good riddance to it. Sometimes I still find questions popping into my head. Like:

Why did Kate wear a dress into the church but then showed up inside wearing pants?

Or, if Michael said the whispers were souls trapped on the island, why was Duckett who died in Australia trapped there telling Sawyer “it would come back around”?

And like why did Hurley and Ben have to stay behind on the Island if the Smoke Monster was finally DEAD?

But then I slap myself and realize – I don’t have to think about this shit anymore! Ever! And that’s good, because finally it’s safe to admit what many of us suspected, but never wanted to say: It was all bullshit.

Is there anything good to say about LOST in the wake of this debacle? Well, the music of Michael Giacchino was always stirring and emotional. The visuals of this show were magnificent. All kudos to the Art and Cinematography departments of LOST. The acting was often stellar and I hope to follow many of the actors into bigger and better careers. And of course, I’ve made some great friends, some of the smartest and wittiest people on the internet, and we made a home at Fishbiscuitland, which is staying open for business. But that’s about it. This was the kind of finale that nullifies a series, that ruins it forever, that renders any rewatch moot. And that’s not an easy thing to do. That kind of failure comes around only once every few decades. So I guess Darlton can claim that distinction. However, I really don’t think they should ever show their faces at another Comic Con.

It occurs to me we still haven’t settled on an actual, literal last word. I think we know what Darlton’s last word to the fans was:

But as for myself? I always enjoyed sprinkling quotes on my LOST recaps. How about this? LOST was …

… a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Oh, well.

Make truth your island.
Make truth your refuge.
There is no other refuge.

Oh, and over there! The garden where Sun used to grow healing herbs, until she got conked over the head by Charlie so Sawyer could steal the guns.

Yay! Bpo Bpo lives!

And OMG! Whaddayaknow! There’s that super kewl brainwashing room from all those years ago! Room 23!

The purpose of which was …

… uh

… ?

Now that’s not to say we didn’t get our share of Answers this week. In fact, I’m guessing that the Answer junkies out there in the audience were probably giddy that they could tick off so many boxes on their Answer checklist.

It landed in the middle of the jungle on the top of a giant wave during a terrible storm. Check!

The ship and the wave smashed into the Tawaret statue and left nothing standing but a four toed foot. Check!

Richard doesn’t age because Jacob magically granted him immortality. Check!

And the mysterious, bewitching, inscrutable Island of infinite possibility, it turns out, is a … cork.

Hmmm. Check?

You know what I found out this week? I found out that for me Answers don’t much matter anymore. They’re always going to be only the icing on the great LOST cake. I know we need to start accepting them one by one, but each Answer rubs off just a little bit of the wonder and makes me just a little bit sad. Like, I always imagined the Black Rock taking flight somehow, before landing on its belly on the forest floor. Knowing that it rode in on a tsunami, and that it took out Tawaret’s noggin along the way, was useful information … but it felt just a little unsatisfying. Like finding out Santa Claus is really just Dad drunk on eggnog. It’s part of growing up, part of letting go of LOST, but my relationship to the Answers has changed. I’ll take them as they come, but I’m done with using a checklist. Answers, I’m convinced, are never going to be what LOST is all about.

This episode was called Ab Aeterno, which translates as “since the beginning of time.” The title reminded us not just that Richard is very old, but that the elements to any really great story are immeasurably older. It’s the Big Picture we need to be looking at now. Not each intricate, individual Answer Tree, but the eternal, universal Sea of Stories.

Which sent him into the clutches of a fat, greedy priest.

He navigated each harrowing turn in his bleak little life with the unselfconscious aplomb of a cork bobbing about loose in a bottle of wine until finally he washed up on the shore of the Fate he’s been enduring for 140 years: as a plaything of the gods.

Richard came from a time before antibiotics, indoor plumbing or iphones, a time when life, especially for the poor, was nasty, brutish and short.

Except for his trip on the Black Rock, Richard had lived his whole long life on an island. He came from Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands – a fittingly tragic place for a LOST luminary to hail from.

In 1977, Tenerife was the site of history’s deadliest air disaster, with 583 souls lost in a horrifying runway crash between two airliners. In this melancholy place, Richard lived a life of hardship and misery, looking not to this crummy world but to the glorious afterlife for his reward.

All Richard could see ahead of him was the gaping maw of eternal damnation in a fiery Hell. And for someone of Richard’s time and station in life, there was nothing hypothetical or metaphorical about Hell. It was so real to him he could smell the sulphur.

The local padre was a slob who used his Godly connections to run a very lucrative con with destitute beggars like Richard. He doled out absolution like it was his own private possession and enriched himself selling criminals to slavetraders. Richard was the perfect mark for this conman.

He was above all else, a Man of Faith. Denied absolution, he wanted only the chance to accrue enough penance to save his soul from eternal damnation.

And it was that same gullible faithfulness that made him an even more convenient mark for the two ultimate Con Men he ran into on LOST Island.

Mr. Whiteshirt and Mr. Blackshirt. Or, as they could just as easily be called, Mr. Whitepants and Mr. Blackpants. I wonder why no one thought to call them that. Because I really don’t think it makes any difference. The whole black and white thing has only always been a ruse. I’m convinced of that now. The relationship of these two dudes is fascinating.

They’re like Sheepdog Sam and Ralph Wolf, who clock in every morning to battle one another to the death, and then clock out every night to share a cocktail.

It seems that the Flim Flam Twins are running contiguous cons. Jacob offers tabula rasa, a clean slate, a new life unstained by past sins.

His brother offers freedom – freedom from Hell, from being Jacob’s prisoner. He offers free will.

Jacob has magical powers, but they’re a little bit half assed. He can make a person live forever, but for those who have already died, he can’t do a thing to bring them back.

But it’s conceivable that The Monster has always been more flexible than that. How many of the other curious things we’ve seen were ploys from his bag of tricks?

The Monster says Jacob is the devil. Jacob says The Monster is lying. The Monster says Jacob is lying when he says The Monster is lying. Last week, the NotLocke Monster told us that his mother had been insane. The more we learn about her kids, the more that starts to make sense.

Divine providence didn’t shine on these boys equally. Jacob gets to have a human body. He gets to have a name. His brother gets neither – although he does seem to like to be called “Friend”. What’s more, he’s Jacob’s captive. Like Richard, he can not be killed, but like Richard, he’s trapped within a place that’s more purgatory than paradise.

Jacob compares his no-named brother to the darkness inside the wine bottle. Jake has the job of keeping the evil genie inside the bottle.

Is No-Name the Master?

It’s worth noting that the Hellmouth did not spring forth fully formed from Joss Whedon’s imagination. People in the Middle Ages believed in a howling chasm below the Earth squirming with fiends, gargoyles and demons.

The concept of a Hellmouth corresponds to the pocket of supernatural energy that seems to be trapped within LOST Island. And there is still a lot of credence for that idea.

I’m in the camp that believes, not that it matters, that the ship we’d seen approaching the beach in The Incident was indeed the Black Rock.

As it approached the Island, it became trapped in a violent electrical rainstorm, much like the one Frank had to steer Desmond through in The Constant. Passage to or from the Island seems to involve navigating some kind of turbulent EMF-infused moat.

For those still looking for science fiction in this fairy tale, there is plenty of evidence left over for a theory that the Island represents a pocket of super forces, created by an electromagnetic anomaly of ginormous proportions. But that wasn’t what this episode was about.

As a 19th century Spanish Catholic, the Hell that Richard feared was a place of merciless, incessant torment, a place that made perfect sense within a universe where insignificant humans accepted their plight as toys to a capricious God. A God who could punish men for failing to avoid the Evil that he himself had forced into their path.

The black and white morality of the Catholic Church made perfect sense to Richard, made him an easy subject for the Flim Flam Twins to manipulate. The question for us to consider is whether the writers are also expecting us to buy into this binary moral universe – where black is bad and white is right – or if they’re counting on us to have just a wee bit more intellectual sophistication.

When Richard finally decides to align himself with Jacob, he brings a message back to The Monster.

I have no problem describing The Monster as Evil. He’s done enough coldblooded killing to qualify hundreds of time over. But there’s no way I’m ever going to be able to see a way clear to identifying Jacob as Good.

Does that mean he brought everyone who came to the Island? Even the Dharma Initiative?

Since this is LOST, even an Answerpalooza episode like this one raised more Questions than it answered. For instance, if Jacob is the only thing keeping The Monster trapped, why isn’t he free now that Jacob is dead? And what kept him caged in on all the occasions when Jacob went off Island, shopping for Candidates to give his magic touch to?

Jacob asked Ilana to help protect the six remaining Candidates. So this group represents the end of the line. What then? What happens when the last Candidate dies? Or leaves? Does that mean The Monster wins? Is that what makes the stakes so high?

Why would anyone be willing to replace Jacob anyway? Does this look like a fun job? Alone for all eternity, keeping watch on a Monster who tries every day to kill you, all while constantly interviewing candidates for the inevitable day when he succeeds … Who would ever want a job like that?

Why did Jacob fight off Richard’s attack but not Ben’s? Why can’t Jacob just destroy The Monster? And why can’t The Monster kill Jacob himself?

It came with the same instructions – to use it before the victim had a chance to speak – and in both cases it failed to hit its mark, although for different reasons.

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.” – Coleridge, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

The Smoke Monster evaluates Richard, much as we’ve seen him do before – to Locke, to Juliet, to Eko

- and for the time being at least, he spares his life.

Is the boar that comes in to eat the rotted flesh also The Monster? Is it another atrocity designed to pulverize Richard’s defenses?

We know from Outlaws in Season One that The Monster sometimes enjoys being a boar.

The Monster lets water pour into the cell, but none of it is within reach of Richard’s mouth. The whole time he is dying, we keep watching him try to live.

But when the boar runs by him and knocks the nail out of his hand, Richard’s despair is complete.

That’s when The Monster decides to pull the trigger on his scam.

“And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that Woman’s mate?”- Coleridge, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

The Monster brings Richard one last false hope before he reels him in.

Ghost Isabella warns Richard that they are both dead and in Hell – the very words we hear Richard say at the beginning of the episode, the words Anthony Cooper said to Sawyer before he was killed in the belly of that same ship.

The Monster grants the lovers one scant joyous moment of reunion

… before he kills “Isabella” one more time, rips her to pieces and lets Richard hear her agonized screams. Richard tries desperately to save her one last time, but it’s futile.

Totally bereft, totally helpless, totally hopeless, Richard is softened up well and good by the time Randall “The Monster” Flagg finally climbs down the ladder to claim his prey.

The Monster asks one thing of Richard in return for saving his life – the same thing he asked when Ben summoned him in the Temple basement. Like the resentful child I think he is deep down, the only thing the monster wants is “anything I ask” – which in this case means “kill the devil”. Richard agrees. In return, The Monster promises Richard, just like he promised Sayid in Sundown, that he’ll grant him his heart’s desire. Isabella.

Richard, not stopping to consider the limitless possibilities for unintended consequences in this situation, sets out to slay the dragon. Little does he know, as he races along on his rickety bowlegs, that he’s only running from one con game to another.

“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” – Shakespeare, King Lear

Richard is weak and easily bested by Jacob, who rudely baptizes him and then makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Still pretending he’s the High Priest of Free Will, Jacob decides he could use a translator, an intermediary to help him influence all that free will he says he’s not going to influence.

Like when he sends Richard to Portland, Oregon to recruit Juliet for the imaginary firm of Mittelos Bioscience.

Or when Richard is sent to test the specialness of the six year old future Candidate, John Locke.

Jacob freed the trembling peasant who feared God’s eternal damnation as a murderer. But a funny thing happened on the way to redemption.

Somewhere along the way, the good God fearing Man of Faith became the co-author of a gruesome Island genocide, along with one of Jacob’s other murdering acolytes, Ben Linus.

Somewhere along the way, something went horribly wrong.

I think we’re probably going to have to face the fact that this is a story without a Good Guy. Just like it’s not about the Answers, it’s not about Good Guys and Bad Guys either. So what is it about then?

It’s not about Prophets. It’s not about following the leader. It may be reminiscent of Biblical chapters where God and Satan played dice with the lives of human beings, like they did with Job or with Adam and Eve, but it’s not really about that either. Jacob can’t absolve sin. He can’t reverse death. He isn’t God. He just plays one on the Island.

“The absurd is sin without God.” – Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

The Monster has a bit more charisma than Jacob, I think, and there’s something oddly sympathetic about him. As NotLocke last week, he told Sawyer his philosophy was “Kill or be killed.” We hear Whitfield use the same phrase as he systematically butchers the captives so he won’t have to compete with them for resources.

What happened to The Monster that he settled on this ethos to guide his life? He doesn’t have a body himself. What does he mean when he says he was betrayed and his humanity stolen? Was he once killed, at least in the physical sense? Was he the victim in some ancient melodrama we have yet to witness? Did the Island keep his spirit alive after death and has it now distilled into a supernatural force of rage and retribution? Did Jacob create The Smoke Monster?

Whatever happened, Richard is now caught between two masters. Having faithfully served Jacob for a century and a half, his disillusion drives him back to The Monster, to take him up on his ancient offer.

He calls out to the omnipresent Monster that “I changed my mind”, but though he hears, The Monster doesn’t answer.

And it’s just as well really. Running from one false prophet to another is an exercise in futility. In absurdity. It’s the same madness the button pushers were driven to by the 108 minute clock in the Swan Hatch.

Richard may not be trapped in Hell, but he is trapped in a world where God is dead. Without God, without death, without love, without freedom, what can save Richard from his vast despair? Isabella is dead, on the other side of that great unknown where Richard can never go.

That’s where Hurley comes in. We see him early in the episode, looking surprisingly sane as he babbles in Spanish to the night air.

Later, after he has translated Isabella’s ghost-speak for Richard, Hurley talks briefly to the air again, after Isabella has gone. Who is he talking to when he says “Got it”? He tells Richard that Isabella told him he has to stay and stop the Man in Black from leaving the Island and sending them all to Hell. In other words, he has to stay to save the cheerleader and save the world.

Personally, I think Hurley lied to Richard when he said Isabella told him that. That sounds to me like Jacob talking. By the end of the episode, I think we see just how completely Hurley has fallen under Jacob’s sway.

Hurley was the last Candidate that Jacob chose, and he was chosen for a very special talent that he alone possesses. Miles may be able to speak with the dead, but only Hurley can actually see them and talk to them person to person.

It’s a beautiful scene when Whoopi Reyes brings Hurleybella to Richard for one last sad goodbye. The camera swirls slowly around the ghostly trio, delicately revealing Isabella as she comes to Richard and speaks lovingly to him and then just as delicately, as she goes away again.

“Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.” - Tennessee Williams

It is as sad and sweet a moment between lovers as we’ve ever seen on LOST. It’s also profound. Richard can never be with Isabella, but that doesn’t mean he has to bury his heart underground like he did her necklace.

When he puts the necklace back around his neck at the end of the episode, Richard is making a choice.

He chooses to be human. He chooses to live. Trapped in the absurdity of a life without death, Richard’s only choice is between life and despair. And as he showed throughout this episode, as all the Losties have shown time and again throughout the story, what Richard wants most of all is To Live.

“…because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Like I said, I don’t think the Answers really matter all that much anymore. I used to think it was all going to come together like a clock, but now I’m pretty sure that if it did, it wouldn’t be the kind of clock that would ever be able to tell time. Maybe something more like this:

Having seen the statue crumble, I’m not sure we really need to know how it got built.

I don’t know if we’ll learn why the Others spoke Latin. I don’t really care what the Black Rock was doing between leaving Portsmouth, England in 1845 and taking on its human cargo in the Canary Islands in 1867. The puzzle has shifted now from this kind of arcane fact checking to trying to unravel the bigger questions of good and evil and loving and hating and living and dying.

This episode wasn’t about Richard after all. It was about the Big Brothers who are grappling over this scrap of Island real estate. Why are they there? Why do they keep dragging civilians into the middle of their battle? And why in the world should any of our Losties be cooperating with them? If the Island gods want to kill each other, what business is it of anyone else? Sawyer had the right idea last week: Let them fight it out and let everyone else get the hell out of Dodge. Not that that’s going to be easy.

If the Island is a metaphor for Pandora’s Box, a place where unspeakable Evil is kept trapped so the world can be safe from it, then there was an interesting image about halfway through the hour. As Richard lay on the wooden planks of the beached ship, surrounded by the stench of death and feeling his own end creeping nearer, he looked up and saw a buttefly fluttering around in the wisps of sunlight.

Maybe I’m just being a cockeyed optimist but I think that was an important moment. Because when Pandora stupidly opened the box and freed Evil into the world, she managed to slam it shut and keep one thing still trapped inside it: Hope. Maybe that’s the only Answer that’s going to mean anything in the end.

“Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.” - Cervantes, Don Quioxete

This was a great Skatey episode. It had tackles, just like the old days.

Hell, it even had bars!

It may have been Sawyer’s episode, but every other scene, rotating in a kind of back and forth flip show, was about Kate. Just as Kate’s latest centric featured the critical moment when Sawyer let go of his Dharma dream,

Sawyer’s centric focused on the moment that Kate and Claire had their long awaited confrontation.

And I’m going to have to say this flat out, to all those besotted fanboys who haven’t yet accepted that Juliet is …pssst … dead, the reason for that is this: Sawyer’s story and Kate’s story are indelibly linked. They always always have been. And not to rub it in, but it’s starting to look like they always will be.

I’m not sure how this glaring, boldly presented plot point has been missed by anyone. Last season, we watched Juliet turn from complex scheming genius to a clinging, whining female who killed herself – much like Sawyer’s father – because she got so jealous she lost her mind. Some fans apparently dug this sad deconstruction so much that they have been steadfastly refusing to let it go ever since, to the point a kind of derangement syndrome seems to have set in. This episode should have hit them like a big red flying toolbox to the noggin.

But if not, maybe I can help.

You see, LOST is a tv show that has been weaving the tapestry of its story for more than five long years. And all across those years there have been certain common threads. In the case of Sawyer, the common thread from the beginning has been …

… Kate.

Let’s start with the books on Sawyer’s dresser. All of them are books we’ve associated with LOST’s most famous reader, but I’m not going to get all esoterically literary here. It’s not half as complicated as all that. In fact, it may just be the utter simplicity of it that makes it so invisible to the nerd herd out there.

First there’s Watership Down, the book “about bunnies” that was left lying on top of Sawyer’s clothes when he was skinny dipping, only to be discovered by …

… Kate.

Then there’s A Wrinkle in Time, the book Sawyer was painfully reading right before he was dragged off for an eye exam by …

… Kate.

And then there’s Walker Percy’s Lancelot, the book Sawyer was reading the day he gave one of his guns for a recon mission to …

… Kate.

I’m befuddled about this memory lapse by reviewers who seem to have otherwise photographic memories of LOST’s arcane plot twists and mysteries. Is it part of the same Kate Hate that causes fanboys to repeat the same lame PleaseKillKate “joke” on every message board they can find? Do they secretly long for a leggy blond to become fixated on them to the point she’ll kill herself if she can’t have her man exclusively to herself? Or do they just have a thing for really big, ugly flowers?

I’m not going to belabor this point any further. I’m just saying that it’s time to move on. Juliet is as dead as Claire’s squirrel baby. This is a show with a history that didn’t start last year. Sawyer’s moving on and so can we all. It’s time.

Besides, it’s not as if you won’t see Juliet again. I love these avis that were made by geekfreak over on Oh No You Didn’t. They picked up on the hat thing over there too, and you know what they say about what it means when the hat fits:

There is one important book that isn’t sitting on James’ dresser.

Sawyer already mentioned Of Mice and Men in The Substitute, when he asked The Monster if he’d read it, and The Monster said no. Maybe OtherJames hasn’t read it yet either. Maybe that’s because he’s still living it.

“A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. … I tell you a guy gets too lonely and he gets sick.” – John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

There was a very poignant quality to James’ life in the OtherLOST. He seemed somehow softer, more breakable.

Especially when compared to the hardbitten badass he’s become on the Island.

Nothing much can hurt Sawyer now. He’s been through so much, he’s bulletproof. It’s not that he wants to die exactly. He’s still trying his best to survive. I think it’s more than he’s willing to die now. But he’s also willing to live. He’s not giving up. It’s just that he’s lost all fear.

Sawyer has been engaged in some very high level diplomatic discussions with both the Island’s Deity

and its Royalty.

He’s taking a very interesting tack. The Monster tells Sawyer that he trusts in his ability to bring back good reconnaissance – because he says Sawyer is the best liar he’s ever met. Considering The Monster is probably about two thousand years old, that’s a pretty bold statement. But is it accurate?

“Truth alone wounds.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

Sawyer never seemed like a good liar to me. He’s a good faker. He can pretend to be somebody else with complete ease. He’s James Ford who became Sawyer who became LaFleur who became …

the man with no name. Sawyer’s looking more Clint Eastwood than Steve McQueen on the Island. He’s not a dashing action hero. He’s more the noble loner. And he’s got his own Fistful of Dollars game going on between the two warring clans. Maybe Sawyer’s higher purpose has been revealed.

On Detective Ford’s desk in L.A., there’s a small statue in the corner, a Franciscan monk, holding a child, perhaps the Christ child, in his arms. It could be St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things.

It adds another grace note to the mystery of Sawyer’s purpose on the Island.

Who is Sawyer protecting and how will he be able to do it? Will it be him that has to end up protecting the Lost Souls by staying behind – or dying – to protect the Lost Island?

The Monster has sent him to the other island, Hydra Island, to gather information on the situation there.

The Monster pretends he is sending Sawyer to discover the fate of the Ajira passengers, but of course he already knows their fate. Since obviously he killed them himself! That’s not really why he’s sending Sawyer over there.He needs to find out what’s happening with the man who has been coming to the Island all season, the one – I’m guessing – that Jacob has been expecting.

It’s a familiar face, but one that represents one of LOST’s least understood mysteries. What is Charles Widmore’s agenda after all? Does anyone really know? We know he came to the Island as a very young man. Or perhaps he was even born there.

We know he grew into middle age on the Island, that he comforted Ben after his trip to the Temple and that he fathered a crazed genius son with Eloise Hawking.

We know that he was eventually banished from the Garden of Eden by Ben Linus, after he’d created a mutant Human-Island child with some as yet unknown Earthling.

Ever since then, Widmore has apparently been tootling about the world in his submarine, trying to come back to the Island. But why? What does he want with it? And what is his connection to The Beast who has been trapped there for all these centuries?

It’s a tessellated mystery that feels like getting lost in a maze. For instance, let’s assume that it was The Monster, in the form of Christian Shephard, that sent John Locke back to the mainland to look up Eloise Hawking, an appointment that Locke unfortunately had to adjourn due to some unavoidable unpleasantness.

The upshot of Locke’s journey was that The Monster took over his likeness and the five potential Candidates (or Recruits?) got returned to the Island. So who did this benefit?

Clearly The Monster. That’s all well and good, but there’s one hitch in all of it. The Monster sent Locke to Eloise Hawking – who is a person very intimately connected to Charles Widmore.

Does that mean The Monster and Charles Widmore are in cahoots? Is this The Monster’s ride to the freedom he craves?

Why then is Jacob looking forward to his arrival? Is Sawyer being walked into a trap? Is the con man getting conned again?

That’s hardly the only possibility, of course. Widmore is setting up pylons to keep The Monster penned away from him. So, it’s also very likely, just as likely, that when The Monster gave Hawking’s name to John, it was Eloise – and by extension, Widmore – who was being conned. The Monster knew exactly how Mrs. Hawking would react, knew she’d tell the Candidate-Recruits how to get back to the Island. He couldn’t have known Ben would also go and murder Locke, I don’t think, so that part might have been a bonus. The Monster’s con of Widmore was even more successful than planned. But now Widmore is back to even the score, and Jacob has been counting the days until he gets there. So what’s in the closet?

Sawyer is now in the middle of this grudge match. And he’s handling it in an interesting way. He’s not telling any lies at all. Not to anybody. He’s just letting himself be used as a conduit. He tells Widmore the truth about NotLocke. Then he tells NotLocke the truth about Widmore. He’s hoping to let the two of them duke it out while he rides out of town in a puff of smoke. With Kate. Naturally.

Sawyer’s con may or may not be successful, and he may yet get caught in his own trap. Widmore knows they don’t trust each other and Widmore doesn’t look like an idiot to me. He’s not taking Sawyer’s word at face value. I’m guessing Sawyer realizes that. The Monster, on the other hand, strikes me as rather gullible. Almost the way a child might be.

This is just my impression. I admit I’m bewitched by the beauty of Terry O’Quinn’s portrayal of this fascinating creature. I find myself imagining the details of the fairy tale that underlies his existence. He reminds me at times of a big misunderstood monster who is trapped on an enchanted Island by a spell he is struggling to break. He lives in a cave, like Grendel from Beowulf and he is, like Grendel, a bit of a twisted mama’s boy.

In this episode, The Monster confessed his secrets, separately, to Sawyer and to Kate. He told Sawyer that he wanted only to leave the Island. He whined petulantly, like a peeved adolescent, that everyone thinks they need to protect the Island from him, but all he wants is to get the hell off of it. He just wants to leave home, dammit. Can’t the bloody authority figures stop trying to keep him caged up and let him do whatever he wants?

Maybe The Monster chose to kill John Locke, because Locke was so hell bent on protecting the damn Island. But the only reason he was trying to protect it was because he’d looked into the Monster’s eye and found it beautiful. In other words, the Monster forced Locke to protect the Island he didn’t want protected. See? The Monster, among other things, is insane.

The Monster also confesses to Sawyer that he does not want to be killed. In other words, he still considers himself to be alive.

The being inside Locke’s body, the force within the Black Smoke Monster’s tornado – that spirit is the essence of a soul that has never died. At least according to him.

This is one of the deepest mysteries of life. And it’s one of the deepest mysteries on LOST.

“Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over… Death is not anything… It’s the absence of presence, nothing more… the endless time of never coming back… a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not a sound…” - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

As children, we wishfully refuse to believe in the finality of death. It is easy to get children to believe in a heavenly place where those we love will wait for us, just as we remember them, until we get there ourselves to see them again. It doesn’t seem to dawn on children that they’ll have to be dead themselves before they get there.

That’s part of what Papa Ingalls is telling Laura in the Little House on the Prairie scene that Sawyer watches in his sad little apartment.

The episode is called “Remember Me”, and in it Pa tries to comfort Laura as a neighbor’s death approaches, reminding her that as Christians they believe in an eternal heaven where her soul will travel after death. He tells her that “people aren’t really gone when they die.” And as ironically presented proof of this, in typically subversive LOST fashion, we have our unkillable Smoke Monster. Who is all kinds of dead. But definitely not gone.

How did he get trapped on this Island? Why is he being trapped there? Who is he to begin with?

Ever since the bloody handed boy appeared to NotLocke in The Substitute, I’ve been imagining that The Monster has been on this Island since he was … that boy. Something horrific happened to him, or was done by him, when he was just a child on the magical Island. After this week, that explanation feels a little more certain.

The other person The Monster confided in was Sawyer’s mirror character in this plot – Kate. On the surface, The Monster seems to be playing Kate, offering her something she really wants, just like he did Sayid. He saves Kate from Claire’s killing rage, and then goes to comfort her, to assure her that she will not be harmed because of him. He takes her aside and tells her a long story, about how he was badly damaged as a child by a mother who was insane, and now he wants to be sure that little Aaron doesn’t end up with a pyscho mommy like he had.

He conveniently leaves out the part where he is the reason Claire went crazy in the first place. He plays into Kate’s heart’s desire – her love for Aaron, her wish to be his mom. But it didn’t seem to me like Kate was taking the bait.

She gave The Monster a sympathetic ear, but she kept her wits about her. Now that Kate has been wedged out from under Jack’s left butt cheek, she’s starting to seem like an intelligent human being again. And it sure looked like the Monster appreciated her. What was he looking for from Kate? Why so courtly and polite?

There were a few moments during their talk on the beach when The Monster looked for all the world like a troubled little boy, trying to get someone to understand how hard he’s had it. He knows he’s messed up. He’s trying to be honest with himself, and face up to his personal issues. But you know who’s really to blame, don’t you? It’s always the mother’s fault!

The Monster is the true Man with No Name in this story. We still don’t know what to call him. When we first learned that Jacob had a companion on the Island, many began to refer to him as Esau – Jacob’s twin from the Book of Genesis.

Now we have a new piece of information. We know that The Monster considered his mother to be a crazy woman, and whether or not that’s true, it adds a new dimension to the story. Esau, after all, was the son the mother shunned.

“Now Isaac loved Esau, because he had a taste for game, but Rebekah loved Jacob. “ – Genesis 25:28

She actively colluded with her preferred son Jacob to have him receive the family birthright, the blessing of the firstborn, bestowed upon him by his dying father. She may not have been crazy, but I don’t think Esau ever quite forgave her. So, is The Monster really the son of a crazy mother, or is this just a case of “Mom liked you best? ”

Was the older boy – the stern one who scolded NotLocke in the jungle – was he the son that Mom liked better? Was he Jacob?

Is The Monster the bestial Esau, the brute who sold his birthright for a big pot of greasy stew?

I am imagining a story where this younger boy did something very bad. Perhaps it was the mother that he killed instead of the father, a little twist on the standard man myth. Perhaps he could not be killed because he was yet a child, so instead he was put under an enchantment to keep the world safe from his original sin. Maybe he was a baby psychotic and this was the best way for him to be punished fairly, to keep the world safe from him while still showing mercy for his youth. In his dealings with the children from the Temple, and his behavior around Claire, The Monster seemed like a kid playing Daddy.

He’s like the Boy King of the Island. Sometimes he’s Locke, sometimes he’s The Smoke Thing. But inside, he’s still just a child.

He’s Peter Pan trying to keep order amongst his Lost Boys. And what does he see in Kate? Does he see what Peter saw in Wendy? Is he looking for someone to tuck him in at night and tell him stories?

This was the big episode where Kate and Claire’s drama came to a head.

Claire was acting super creepy throughout, most creepily so when she took Kate’s hand and odd little smileys kept twitching around her mouth.

She showed her pretty dolly to Kate.

She explained resentfully that she had to make do with the little Jar Jar Baby because that was “all I had”.

Kate didn’t quite get the hint, but she figured it out a few minutes later when Claire tried to butcher her up like a rabbit for dinner.

Zombie Sayid looked on without flickering an eyelash.

I think after this episode, we can lay to rest the question of what happened to Sayid.

Sorry, kidz. Sayid iz ded.

Adieu, you wily Iraqi. We’ll miss you.

The Monster in his wisdom had initially told Claire that her baby had been taken into the Temple. This was a pragmatic move on his part. He wanted Claire to have something to hate, so that hate could give her a reason to live. That same kind of Hate is what Sawyer’s story has always been about. In LOST and in OtherLOST, hatred and revenge are the fuel that keep James Ford moving forward. In OtherLOST the hatred feels more muted. He seems like a pretty nice guy when he hooks up with Charlotte.

Rebecca Mader made her encore appearance in this episode, joining the cavalcade of reappearances in Season Six of People Who Died in seasons past. I guess Darlton still owed her some payback after that whole kerfuffle about her age … because they gave her more face time with Josh Holloway than she probably had dared wish for. I wonder if they even had to pay her.

Charlotte looked like she could definitely have had a return engagement on James’ hot sheets if she’d played her cards right. But she totally blew it. Offered a T-shirt from his top drawer, she began shoveling through his stuff like she was on an archaeological dig site. I mean, how rude can you be, Miss No Manners Nosy Pants?

I didn’t blame James for tossing her out after she yanked open his private possessions and started poking around in them. But I know the message we were meant to take from it: OtherJames is still keeping too many secrets.

“Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.” – Paul Tournier

He’s not just hiding his private family tragedy from his one night hookups. He’s still unwilling to open up and tell the truth to his best friend. Miles and James had a funny little bromance going on. James flirts with him, but Miles is too serious to be distracted. When James won’t admit to his lies, Miles breaks up with him. But OtherJames isn’t as hardcore as original Sawyer. He feels bad when Miles wants a divorce. He wants to kiss and make up.

They have a real heart to heart, and James’ defenses finally start to come down. He tells Miles the truth about his vendetta against “Sawyer”, knowing that Miles will never let him carry through a plan like that. He gives up on vengeance. Ruefully, he starts to hand over the folder he’s been hoarding, and at just that redemptive moment …

Boom! Who should come crashing into his life, in perfect Bullitt fashion but …

… Kate!

Sonuvvabitch! Of course! Who else could it have been? Because like I told you in the beginning, Sawyer’s story has never been about just Sawyer. It’s always been about Sawyer …

… and Kate.

The woman who met his child’s mother before she ever met him. The woman who was the first to learn his terrible secret and to slowly begin to draw him back into the land of the living. The woman that Juliet was so sure she couldn’t compete with that she chose death over trying. The first woman he ever fell in love with, after thirty some years of hard, angry solitude.

When Sawyer came upon the cages where he and Kate had been kept captive together, he found her discarded floral dress still laying on the block where she’d taken it off. It might have seemed a contrivance, but it was one the story needed. To those of us who follow the story closely, the dress doesn’t represent just the passion that Sawyer felt for Kate during those few hard days.

The first day he saw her in that dress was the day she was brought to the cages dressed in it, the day that Sawyer’s heart broke for her fear and vulnerability.

He reached out to her, comforted her, made her laugh.

He gave her food.

Uh….Fishbiscuits, anyone?

When Sawyer held the dress in his hands, he was remembering something that will keep him going a lot better than Hate will. He was remembering Love.

In Tricia Tanaka Is Dead, Sawyer first told about his fondness for Little House, and naturally the person he told was Kate.

In this episode, Sawyer was remembering the really important part of Pa Ingalls advice. Not the pie in the sky part, the magical thinking that we’ll get to see our dead loved ones again someday. That part’s not really sure, even for those who desperately wish it to be true. But the part we can count on, the part we can live by, is this part:

At the end of his little recon adventure, Sawyer hasn’t really cleared anything up. He is forming a plan, but its outcome is still very uncertain. One thing, though, has been decided. Sawyer didn’t jump into that hole after Juliet. He didn’t jump into that grave. He’s alive, at least for a little while longer. And if life’s about livin’, like Pa Ingalls says it is, then maybe that’s what he best start doin’.

As the episode ends, he returns to Kate, who is recovering from her no good very bad day at the campfire.

He does what he’s always done – he makes her smile.

Then he tells her the whole truth. There’s no more lying or faking left in this con man. He’s letting the Truth do all his fighting for him. Widmore and The Monster can duke it out however they like. Sawyer will set the table and then he and Kate and whoever else wants to come will slip out the back door.

In the course of the episode Sawyer has moved decisively past being “not with anyone” to being part of “you and me”. In What Kate Does, Kate told Jin she wanted to “figure things out together” with Sawyer. Now Sawyer wants the same thing. The two Outlaws are on the same page – a place that, for all their long and winding road together, they’ve never actually been before just now.

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.”
- Thomas Merton

” A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” - Joseph Conrad

Now, I’ve got to preface this recap by stating outright that I haven’t got the faintest idea what is going on with LOST this season.

I’ve always found it remarkable how LOST, at least until now, has avoided the trap of moral absolutism. LOST has been a show where we can watch a man like Sayid terrorize, betray and butcher his fellow human beings … but we can still love him and want to see him happy.

LOST’s Season One finale was a beautiful episode called Exodus. I watched it and reviewed it just recently, as a matter of fact. In that episode the Island child was given the name of Aaron, the brother to Moses – the great Hero who led the Chosen People to the Promised Land, with the help of a column of Holy Smoke.

It was an episode that plunged us into the dark, scary hellfire and brimstone of the Biblical Old Testament – literature’s first great horror story. In the Bible, the Lord God established his dominion over mankind by smacking the shit out of them at every opportunity, or by having his Candidates do it. He helped murder little boys for making fun of Elisha’s bald head, he helped David rip off 200 Philistine foreskins so he could buy himself a wife, he helped Samson slay thousands with just the jawbone of a donkey. The Old Testament Lord was a badass, mean-ass monster and he seemed to thoroughly condone mass murder, so long as it was being done in his name. It was, like LOST, a story where Good and Evil kept getting called out as if they were opposites, but one where most of the time, the difference between them is entirely unclear.

In Sundown, Evil and Good have retreated to their mutually exclusive corners. The office machine Dogen kept in his inner sanctum was a custom model Evil-o-Meter, designed to probe a person and pass judgment on their pH balance of moral righteousness. As guessed, this medieval contraption had previously diagnosed Sayid as a bona fide Evil Being, causing Dogen to want to do the right thing and make him dead.

On his righteous right hand, Dogen wears a gleaming silver bracelet. On his sinstre, or wicked, hand, he wears a fingerless black glove.

It’s a little disconcerting how simple this has suddenly all become. What are they telling us? Black is bad and white is right? Seriously?

Sayid defends himself against the verdict of the Evil-o-Meter by saying that neither man nor machine can tell what “kind of man” he is. So what kind of man is he? Using our new parallel story world to compare and contrast, we get to ask another question as well: what kind of a man is OtherSayid?

In any reality, Sayid is the kind of man who loves Nadia.

According to Omer, he’s the kind of little brother who he still counts on to choke his chickens for him.

And although he claims otherwise, although Nadia does what she can to persuade him away from violence, OtherSayid is still the kind of man who kills with ease.

Of course, when it’s Keamy’s insipid mug that’s getting waxed, it’s hard to pass judgment on Sayid. It’s not as if killing Keamy can ever be a bad thing. There’s just something satisfying about watching that gigantic Gary Busey/Chris Walken love child bite the big one.

OtherSayid’s story is different from the OtherStories that we’ve watched in recent weeks. He didn’t contemplate his reflection in a clear mirror, as his friends had done. Instead, there was only a passing glance of his distorted image captured unexpectedly in Nadia’s front door glass.

OtherSayid was an interrogator for the Revolutionary Guard, just like Original Sayid. He was still fearsome and violent. Still a passionate lover separated from the one he loves. There were no radical departures from his story as we knew it, except of course that he’d apparently manipulated Nadia into becoming the wife of his brother, and it’s unclear if the two had ever bonded in a torture cell, the way we’d seen them do. Unlike the previous Other-flashes, Sayid’s story seems much the same. He is still an assassin. He doesn’t rise above. He doesn’t conquer his demons. He doesn’t solve his problems. We can tell that OtherLOST isn’t going to be merely a mirror story of redemption, because there isn’t any redemption there for Sayid.

The mirror parallels weren’t as strong this week. The pattern of symmetrical character centrics was broken. This episode was called Sundown, which mirrors the name of its Season One counterpart – House of the Rising Sun – but it was Sayid’s episode, not Sun’s. However, symmetry was not completely abandoned.

Just as Ben Linus had helped create a massacre in Dharmatown, his life partner in contract murder, Sayid, helped create one in this episode.

And when Ben came to find Sayid by the bubbling pool, it was a revelation to him just how completely Evil had claimed his once and future assassin.

Evil was the theme of the week. Dogen tells Sayid that the Man in the Monster is “evil incarnate”. Then he sends Sayid out to kill the Evil Thing. Many seem to believe that Dogen was lying to Sayid, that he really intended for the Thing to kill Sayid. Maybe he was hedging his bets, and hoping that whatever happened, at least one of his problems would go away.

He also does not kill Sayid. He’s not even that angry about being attacked. Instead, he benevolently offers to give Sayid whatever his poor tortured heart may desire. If you stay on his good side, it seems like the Monster can be quite a kindly friend.

Sayid is convinced in a flash to jump over and join up with Old Smokey and he kicks off the kill party with some coldblooded retribution killing in the same pool he was himself murdered in.

“And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” – Deuteronomy 19:21

Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer,
Conspir’d against our God with Lucifer,
And are for ever damn’d with Lucifer. – Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

The song, Catch a Falling Star, is not idly chosen.

In Isaiah 14:12, there is this passage: 
”How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! “ Lucifer, the word for “morning star”, was the first damned angel that fell from Heaven. Biblical scholars will argue whether Lucifer is Satan, or the Devil, or just the most prideful angel thrust out of Heaven by the Lord, but the core concept here is that Lucifer is a baddie. That’s not in dispute. And the version of Catch a Falling Star that played at the end of this episode sounded a whole lot like a hymn of praise to the Lord of the LOST Underworld, Mr. NotJohnLocke, the Smoke Monster.

The question we’re being forced to deal with on LOST now is this: If the Monster is indeed an evil, vile thing, if he’s really “evil incarnate”, then what does that make Jacob? We can’t really call the Monster Evil if there isn’t some counterpart moral entity that represents Good, can we? Evil isn’t Evil unless it’s defined in terms of its Other. So, is Jacob all that is Good?

Let’s review. Jacob has been using a lighthouse to seek out Candidates, in order that he may manipulate them, each one individually, to emigrate to his hellhole of an Island home. He does this in order that he may use them in some fashion, to do some thing that we still don’t understand, and that none of them understand either. He does this knowing that his bloody brother will in all likelihood recruit them, and that their odds of survival are approximately 1 in 360, and that they are far more likely to end up as a smoking corpse than they are to ever see their loved ones again. So, the first question is: How can someone like him be a Good Guy?

Kate is thrown down into the pit by the arrival of the Smoke Monster.

She has no freaking clue that the girl she has heroically devoted herself to saving is now a murderous lunatic. In her blissful ignorance, Kate seals her fate with Claire, by confirming that she did in fact “take” Aaron. It’s possible a more judicious word choice might have helped matters, but then again, given Claire’s state of mind, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference.

He killed anyone who hadn’t taken him up on his generous offer to join him or die. Kate, by hiding in the pit with Claire, was spared. Or maybe she was spared because she was a Candidate. Only I can’t tell if she’s still a Candidate since her name wasn’t shown on the wall and her Jacob touch wasn’t revisited when Smokey explained the cave to Sawyer. Is she a Candidate but not a Recruit? Is she as confused as the rest of us?

I don’t know, but I was happy to see that she remembered to snag a rifle before she joined the pod people. I have a feeling she’s gonna need that.

What plans does the Monster have for Kate?

He looked her up and down and seemed to be sizing her up very carefully when she came out of the temple, looking dazed and confused.

This group is headed back to wherever Jin and, most intriguingly, Sawyer, are being kept on ice. How the Monster makes use of having Sawyer and Kate together in his camp is a plotline I’m down with. Bring it on, and while you’re at it … please don’t keep Sawyer offscreen for two episodes in a row ever again, mkay? Thx.

Like everyone else, I’m trying to understand the symbiosis between Jacob and his Monsterly twin. It reminds me of how, in the Old Testament, Yahweh and Satan often passed their time by rolling dice with the lives of human beings.

Job passed the test. Even though all his oxen and his asses and his sheep and his servants and his sons and even his camels were brutally taken from him, even though he got covered in sore boils and had to sit in his filth scraping off the scabs with a broken potshard, Job remained faithful to the Lord and praised him nonetheless. Job was clearly not a Man of Science. He was the ultimate Man of Faith. And in the Bible, in the Old Testament, that is all that God wanted from his human toys. He was the Puppet Master. Theirs was not to question why, theirs was just to do and die … and not to bitch about it.

It’s a kind of “morality” that makes no sense to our ultra civilized psyches, but it’s the kind of morality I think we may be seeing on LOST in this grand finale season. Like Yahweh and Satan, Jacob and the Monster are running a battery of tests on their candidate-recruits. And the test appears to start with a Choice. Or at least the pretense of a choice. When Sayid re-enters the Temple after meeting with the Monster, he offers the inhabitants there a Morton’s Fork of a choice. They can either stay in the Temple and be slaughtered, or they can leave and join up with the Monster who would gladly slaughter them. Most choose to leave, some stay and die.

Now, Sayid himself is acting on the basis of the choice the Monster has offered to him. The Monster is forthright with Sayid. He offers him the simplest and most desirable thing of all. He offers him “whatever your heart desires”. Really, you can’t beat an offer like that. What Sayid’s heart desires is that Nadia should live.

It raises an interesting point. We have seen that in OtherLOST, in fact, Nadia is alive. Sayid can see her, he can talk to her, he can care for her children.

Making deals with the devil is another time honored tale. The most famous such deal was made by Dr. Faustus, when he was tempted by Mephistopheles to sacrifice his immortal soul if only his dearest wish might be granted.

But on LOST, it’s not only the devil who is making deals. Jacob is double dealing as well. He has offered Dogen his own kind of Faustian bargain.

We’ve seen the same kind of bargain given to Juliet in Season Three, although as always with Juliet, it’s hard to see what she did to deserve such cruelty.

We know that Jacob is a manipulative bastard, but how far will he go? Was Jacob the architect of the infamous Wishing Box that brought Anthony Cooper to the Island to be killed? Did he give Juliet’s sister cancer just so he could manipulate her to come to the Island? Did he plan for Dogen’s son to be nearly killed, just so he could manipulate his father by saving him? When did he start manipulating his candidates? Is he the reason Hurley won the lottery, the reason Christian Shephard came to Sydney to drink himself to death, the reason Sawyer killed the Shrimp Guy? Just how deep does Jacob have his claws into these people anyway? And why didn’t he help Dogen, who had faithfully carried out his will? Not to keep beating the same drum, but how can such a creature ever be called “Good”?

What’s more, if Jacob isn’t Good, then how can the Monster be Bad? The Monster talks of freedom. Jacob’s manipulations have stolen the Free Will of his candidates, and the Monster seems to think he’s restoring that. Of course, his choices aren’t any less manipulative, and to make matters worse, he’s a bloodthirsty animal who seems to exult in mayhem and chaos.

When Sayid goes into the jungle to confront the Monster, the first thing he says is that he wants – you guessed it- Answers! Not that he gets any, and he’s easily persuaded to want something else, but that’s what he asks for at first. When the Monster tempted Sawyer he did not offer to bring Juliet back, as he offered Nadia to Sayid. Apparently that is not Sawyer’s deepest desire. Apparently the one thing that Sawyer really wants is … Knowledge.

And the reason Jack goes ballistic on Jacob’s mirrors is because he’s so enraged that Jacob won’t tell him what the hell is going on.

Who actually claimed Sayid? The Temple folk were genuinely surprised at his resurrection. How did Jacob’s Temple create a new disciple for the Monster?

Who are all these redshirts that have been living in the Temple? And this Cindy chick with the children. It’s been years now. Is there ever going to be a reason for them to be here?

Why did we see Jack Shephard at the hospital where Sayid’s brother was taken? Was that just to inform us that Omer lives in the same L.A. neighborhood as St. Sebastian Hospital, or was that a way for Matthew Fox to get his quarter mil per episode payday?

And speaking of paydays, how sad is it to see the wonderful Yunjin Kim still being reduced to just one sad “Jin?” per appearance? Didn’t this character used to have a storyline?

And how about Jin showing up in Keamy’s restaurant? Random!

Where did Ilana and the rest of her Scooby Gang escape to when they pushed through the Stargate magic portal? I hope it’s someplace cool!

Why did Kate go back to the Temple? Didn’t she just say she wasn’t going to do that?

When NotLocke and Claire, exchange little smiles and nods at the end of the episode, is that Monster code-speak for “yes, you can kill her now”?

Or maybe he didn’t remember that scar because he didn’t used to have it. Maybe when he looked at himself in the mirror, his parallel mind tilted just a little and was reflecting back that time on the Island when Dr. Juliet yanked his appendix out by flashlight on Craphole Beach. You may remember that scene, how he tried to micromanage his own surgery by watching it in … a mirror! It was the apex of Jack’s lifetime achievement as crazy ass control freak.

So did the scar in the mirror trip Jack’s consciousness upside down? Was he having one of those bleedthrough incidents, like he seemed to have on the plane with Desmond?

Lighthouses are used as navigational aids, to help sailors find the harbor, or to warn them away from deadly hazards. But the mirrors in this Lighthouse, as befits a magical Island, did more than just reflect firelight. Just as OtherJack felt an Island memory when he saw his scar, the Lighthouse mirrors gave him a reflected vision of his childhood home.

The same home we saw him visiting in OtherLOST.

The mirrors in the parallel universes almost seem to be sending semaphore across the great interdimensional divide.

This 108th episode of LOST, happening in the fifth hour of the grand finale season, was a Jackback, just like the fifth hour of the pilot season of LOST. But it wasn’t just one Jackback. It was like a kaleidoscope of Jackbackery. Mirrors were more than props. The symmetry of mirrors kept creating little jagged edges of memory, with parallel storylines reflecting onto past storylines in ever more unpredictable patterns.

In Season One’s White Rabbit, Jack chased his father through the jungle.

In a cave filled with death he found the water of life. He also found his father’s casket – empty.

In White Rabbit, Mama Shephard confronted Jack in that same study.

Once upon a time, Christian Shephard was an evil figure in the lore of LOST. When first we met him, he was screwing with his kid’s head in a most unforgivable way. I have never quite been able to decipher the looking glass advice that Christian gave to little Jack back in White Rabbit.

This is the same study where Dr. Shephard issued his famously cruel diagnosis of his son. Jack would never forget that, according to Dad, he didn’t, and never would, “have what it takes”.

In any case, it seems less of an issue in OtherLOST. Christian’s bones are still missing, but his spirit lives on – rather happily, it seems. He’s not a skeery ghost in OtherLOST. He’s just a friendly face shining out from pictures on shelves in the home of his beloved son.

As has been the pattern, everything in OtherLOST is just a little bit nicer, a little bit easier, a little bit less mentally ill. OtherJack doesn’t seem to have hated his dad at all. His mom is kind and helpful, not shrewish and accusing. She compliments him on not following her down the road to alcoholism.

Aside from the fresh coat of paint, though, it’s not all that different in OtherJack’s world.

His ride of choice is still a tan Bronco. He’s still obviously a very successful spinal surgeon, with super deluxe accommodations overlooking Hollywood’s hills.

It’s a faithful mirror image of the life Jack had before, just a little bit prettier and cleaner. There is, however, one big difference. Instead of a surly disapproving father, in OtherLOST, Jack’s the proud owner of a surly disapproving son!

And instead of chasing the ghost of his runaway father through a tropical jungle, OtherJack is running around looking for the son who doesn’t want to be found.

The mirror of OtherLOST has created a symmetry that’s so perfectly fitting it’s a wonder none of us ever predicted it. OtherJack isn’t just a child of a parent. He’s at the focal point of the mirror now. He’s a parent to a child as well. He gets to experience the fun and games from both sides of the great mirror of human reproduction.

LOST is a story of many themes, but no theme is more central than the great Curse of the Daddy Issue. Father begets Son, who fights – and, on LOST, often kills – the Father, in order to become the man he’s meant to be. Jack has always been on the innocent side of that parallel, but in OtherLOST he gets to jump through the glass and try it on the flipside. The Son who resented the Father becomes the Father whose Son thinks he’s a pain in the ass.

It’s a tale as old as time, and it’s the indispensable lynchpin of every manly monomyth that’s ever been told. Not every Hero gets to be father as well as son, but in a mirror story like LOST, it wouldn’t make sense for Jack to be one and not the other. See? This OtherLOST does have a point to it! In this mirror world, the line of gifted-yet-crabby Shephard men does not stop with Jack. There is an heir to the House of Shephard.

A brand new Shephard coming on the scene has to have an interesting name, something we can riff on a little. And sure enough, he does. He’s David. Namesake to the singer of the Song of David, which is the Psalm that just happens to fall at the Official Number of the Shephard Family: Number 23.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. – Psalm 23

In the Bible, David was the poor young shepherd that everyone remembers as the barefoot boy who slew the great Goliath with just a bag of rocks and a slingshot. Before he ever got around to that great deed, David was already famous in the royal court because he was a musical prodigy who alone had the talent to calm King Saul’s tempers by playing his harp.

Naturally then this new Shephard – David – is also a musician.

But he’s not just your average high school Gleek. He’s Juilliard bound. And OtherJack, it turns out, has become so disconnected from the life of his only kid that he never even knew it!

What has OtherJack been doing all these years that he knows so little about the life of his son?

We can tell that OtherJack is still a control freak. His very neat apartment looks like a place I’d be afraid to eat pizza in. He keeps David’s room as cleanly sterile as a monk’s cell. He only sees him once a month.

But in his real home, at Number 233 House, David’s real self is spread out all over.

He’s not a Boston Red Sox fan, like Jack seems to think. He’s from L.A., so he follows the Dodgers … which you think his Dad would realize.

In his real life, David is messy. He’s an artist, not a scientist.

The story of David and Jack follows the pattern we’ve come to expect already from this brave new world called OtherLOST. David confesses that, just like old school Jack, he was afraid to let his father see him fail. Apparently Jack used to obsess over David’s musical gifts and it made the kid self conscious.

Whatever happened in OtherLOST happened so differently that the OtherLosties have all become the kind of people who can solve their own problems. It probably helps that their Other-problems are not nearly as tough. Jack doesn’t have to deal with a teenager that’s taking drugs or flunking school. Even though Jack has just said no to parenting, the kid seems to be doing fantastic. He does his homework, he plays piano, he wears a tie, he even closes up the cookie bag after he takes his one (!) cookie.

He’s almost too good to be true. His mother must have been doing an awesome job with him all those years that Jack couldn’t be bothered. It wouldn’t be LOST if an episode didn’t leave us with a tingly little mystery like this one: Who is David’s mom? What wise blue eyed woman has raised such an extraordinary blue eyed boy?

It’s the guessing game du jour. I have to confess there really is only one possibility that interests me, and I do think they may have given us a fairly pithy clue. When Jack is poking around Number 233 House, he passes by a mirror flanked by big sunhats.

Now check out the picture below of the Othertown weekly book club discussing Juliet’s favorite book Carrie. Note the mirror on the wall. Note the hats.

You thinking what I’m thinking? Granted the parameters of possibility in OtherLOST are still unknown, but I think it would be wicked cool if David’s blue eyes were a reflection of Juliet’s.

Reflection, after all, is the phenomenon that concerns us most these days. While LOST is a story that draws from many of the world’s great books, the mother of all great LOST books is still this one, written by one of literature’s greatest mirror aficionados.

We know Jack loves this book. It was the one his Dad read to him, the one he read to Aaron back in Something Nice Back Home.

With a quick eye, you could find reflections everywhere in this episode.

David’s audition piece, Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu in C-sharp minor, is the same piece little Daniel Faraday was playing in The Variable before his tender loving mother shot his piano career dead in its tracks.

I hope they don’t plan to carry the reflections out too faithfully, because that would certainly not bode well for David Shephard’s prospects in life.

Jack’s philosophical talk with Dogen at the Temple is reflected later in their Other-meeting at the concert auditions.

Dogen is the better, wiser father. He is further along the path to enlightenment than Jack is.

Meanwhile, back in Christian Shephard’s study, a cleverly placed bottle of McCutcheon’s whiskey reminds us that we’re still playing puzzles.

Both of them have some serious anger control issues.

Neither one should be trusted with sharp objects.

Scary Claire is keeping her fetish baby in the little blue bassinet where Amy first kept Ethan.

Everything gets recycled on LOST Island.

In the three years since Claire left her by-bee lying around like lost luggage, we find out that she has gone stark raving bonkers.

And she really, really doesn’t take any shit from anyone. To say she’s hardcore is putting it mildly.

Claire has been taken to the temple and given the torture test treatment. We still don’t know what happened to her. Was she hemorrhaging and soon to die the day that Sawyer saved her from the burning house?

And one who remembers the little boy she wanted to read stories to and sing lullabies to about falling stars and wishes.

She is a blond wigged out reflection of the frizzy haired French brunette who used to wander around LOST Island doing creepy things because someone had stolen her baby.

But it’s not exactly the same. Rousseau was a true hermit. She seemed to speak to no one. Claire, on the other hand, has A Friend.

The Monster, who probably first appeared to Claire in Christian’s form, has become her father figure now. These two, who we saw long ago as a kind of father and daughter – when John made a cradle for Claire’s soon to be born baby

– have reconfigured into an unlikely family unit here in the bizarro world of endgame LOST.

Meanwhile, her big brother is in some other hidden quadrant of LOST Island being guided by the invisible hand of his unearthly father. While the Man in Locke is tending to his daughter Claire, it looks like Jacob is getting his claws pretty deep into his new favorite son Jack.

Both of the Island’s twin gods are manipulative monsters. Just like his brother, Jacob is skilled in the art of using proxies to do his work for him.

Hurley, as we’d expect, has adjusted seamlessly to having suddenly become the uninvited guest of the Freak People.

He is doing what a dude does in such a situation. Play games in the courtyard and make the best of Temple Camp.

But when he goes to find some bug juice in the chow hall, who should be waiting there but Jacob, pondering his pale reflection in the dirtywater pool.

Jacob feigns that he’s been disturbed unexpectedly in his prayers.

But we all know Jacob was expecting Hurley. He’s been plotting ten moves ahead, like any other chessmaster would do. It turns out that in the moldy catacombs of Jacob’s temple home there is a secret hidden door.

Marked with the symbol of the Stargate!

Very clever! One thing LOST was definitely missing was a Stargate. And it explains a lot.

Considering that this same job counselor has been seen before – as the psychic Hurley’s dad hired in Tricia Tanaka Is Dead – sometimes it seems like the game we’re playing on LOST is I Spy.

When I’m playing I Spy on LOST, sometimes I run into background clues that look like a kind of Pictionary. Like this one:

Which I believe works out to the phrase “Men tend to think with their … vas deferens.”