Shall we receive Good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive Evil? – Job 2:10

When Sayid woke up after being drowned to death in the dirtywater pool, he didn’t seem any different than we’ve known and loved him to be all these years. He was the same coldblooded killer with the same impeccable manners and the same big soulful eyes. But this episode set us straight about what happened to him. He didn’t come back as the same old Iraqi torturer with the ambiguously noble heart. He came back more like the way that Buffy came back. He came back wrong.

When someone has killed as many people, as gracefully and fluently as Sayid has, it’s hard to pinpoint what made this week’s killing spree somehow different. We’ve seen Sayid kill a lot of people, a lot of places. He’s done a country club assassination.

A post coital bullet to the belly.

He shot a hole into the heart of an innocent kid.

Killing is Sayid’s gift.

But he mostly felt really bad about it. His big brown eyes got all sad. Sometimes he even cried.

This Sayid was different. When Ben discovered him by the side of the bubbling sulfur pit where he killed Dogen and his hippie friend, he looked like a wild animal that has just ripped someone’s intestines out with his bare teeth. He looked like he’d been interrupted in his feasting on a still steaming corpse. This Sayid isn’t conflicted about the killing he just did. He enjoyed it.

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.

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.

We know it as the song that Claire’s absentee father used to sing to her on his visits to her as a baby, as the song Aaron’s airplane mobile chirped out in the cradle that had been prepared for him, the song Claire wanted his future mommy to sing to him, the song Kate did sing to him. It’s Aaron’s song and Claire’s song. But hearing it echoed in such a mournful style called to mind something else.

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.

It parallels the way Sawyer’s ladder broke loose and thrust him down into the Smoke Monster’s cave.

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.

“And oftentimes to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths; win us with honest trifles, to betray’s in deepest consequence.” – Shakespeare, Macbeth

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”?

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?

What did Kate see in the Smoke that howled above her when she was in the pit?

Did she look into the eye of the Island the way Locke did in Season One? Did she also find it “beautiful”? Has she been turned as well or is she just in shock?

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”?

The cards are being reshuffled, the players are moving again around the board. All we can do is come back next week and see what game they feel like playing with us then.

“I, your glass,
Will modestly discover to yourself
That of yourself which you yet know not of.”
- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

The mirror does not lie. It may play a few tricks here and there, but it cannot hide the truth. The mirror forces us to look at ourselves, all our warts and zits and wrinkles and scars.

It was very odd that OtherJack didn’t seem to recognize his own appendectomy scar, the one his Mom told him he’d gotten when he was 7 or 8. Not remembering a 30 year old scar seems downright inexplicable. I suppose it’s possible that he only just noticed it after a fresh chest wax.

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!

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.

The son who is a candidate in a different, but no less heroic, challenge than his father.

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.

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.

Whenever one travels through the looking glass, the first thing that one notices are all the reversals. Jack reminds David about Alice’s kittens, black Kitty and white Snowdrop, who the story turns into the wild and crazy Red and White Queens.

As we would expect in a mirror story like this one, we find other interesting reversals. Kate’s number has been found! They decided not to keep us in suspense after all. She is Number 51.

She doesn’t get to have one of the magic lottery numbers, but at least she’s not crossed out. And, it’s also curious that, of all the numbers in all the sundials in all the interdimensional parallelling universes, she gets assigned to the mirror image of Ford’s Number: 15.

I like it! I’m sure many will say this is a mere meaningless accident, because hey, it could be. I mean there are only 358 other numbers the writers could have chosen for Kate and Sawyer. I’m sure it means absolutely nothing that they are palindrome reflections of each other. Nothing at all.

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.

You can see why Jin is feeling so nervous around her.

I don’t know if Stephen King’s Misery ever played in Korea, but if it did, you know Jin was thinking of this.

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.

First he guides Hugo through an ego boosting encounter with Dogen.

“Why don’t you go back to the Courtyard?”

Following Jacob’s cues, Hurley manages to pwn the Zen master at his own game. Jacob is so skilled a puppeteer that his dolls never even feel him pulling their strings.

Next Jacob feeds Hurley the line that Jack needs to hear. Unlike his mean old Earth Daddy who told Jack he didn’t have what it takes, Jack’s Heavenly Father has the opposite opinion of him. Being told he does have what it takes works like magic on Jack, and he and his Sancho Panza set out to find some windmills. Or to do whatever Jacob’s invisible puppet strings are pulling on them to do.

Whoever’s controlling him, Jack’s Hero’s Journey seems to be right on track. He’s pretty much wrapped up the whole Kate thing, or to be more specific about it, he’s resisted the Lure of the Temptress.

“The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond the woman, surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond.” - Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

I guess it’s easier to resist the Temptress when she’s lost all interest in tempting you. A few stray fans seem not to have noticed this, but Kate isn’t Jack’s adoring little girlfriend anymore. In any case, it’s all obvious to Jack.

Kate has a story of her own. Finally. About damn time.

Having moved beyond the Temptress, the hero’s journey next proceeds to the inescapable task of Atonement with the Father. And really, when you come right down to it, what else has Jack’s story ever been about?

We learned a lot about Jack in this episode. For one thing, we learned why he came back to the Island. It’s been a topic of debate on message boards throughout the run of LOST. What motivates Jack? What makes him act like such a .. Jack?

About midpoint in this episode, he told us. Jack does what he does because no matter what, he is always thinking about Jack. He can’t get himself out of his head. The kind of reflection that most interests Jack is self reflection. I don’t mean this as a criticism. It’s a diagnosis. Jack didn’t come back to the Island to save anyone, to help anyone, to get anyone home. He didn’t come back to find his sister and reunite her with her long lost son. He didn’t come to save the Island. He came to get fixed. He was broken and he wanted the Island to make him well. In one sense, it’s a breathtakingly selfish motivation. But it makes perfect sense when you look at how he behaved in the Lighthouse cabin.

Hurley had instructions on his arm … which, no, you can’t read even if you hold a mirror up to it. (Not that I tried or anything.)

Somewhere in there you can see that Jacob has instructed Hurley to turn the compass dial to 1o8 degrees. The ancient smoked mirrors begin to swing past Jack. The temple where the Kwons were married floats by him.

Then the church where James Ford buried his mom and dad.

But it’s not until his own family home lurches by that Jack suddenly finds this whole exercise intriguing. He looks down and sees his name on the dial at Number 23.

He doesn’t stop to look for the names of his friends. He doesn’t wonder what images the mirrors might project for each of them. And it’s not like he cares that WE all wanted to see what those pictures might be! Thanks a lot, Jack! It’s not like you broke a totally unexplored visual metaphor before we even got a chance to appreciate just how cool it might have been.

Seriously, I’ve been trying to be a little less hard on old Jack these days, but that was old school Jackassery. Right up until that moment, he was doing so well. He’s been so mellow this season, I can hardly recognize him sometimes.

But when he got up in the Lighthouse and saw his magic number roll by, when he realized that whoever created this machine had been controlling his Fate since he lived at home with Christian and Margo, something snapped. Nice Jack disappeared. And like a storm blowing towards a quiet beach from across the open water, out came his rageface. Ah, it’s been so long since we had a Jackface party!

“If you wish to avoid seeing a fool you must first break your looking glass” - Francois Rabelais

When Jack smashes the lighthouse mirrors, it is the rebellious act of a defiant son. He may be a recovering control freak, but he still can’t tolerate being controlled by someone else.

Afterwards, his heavenly Father watches over Jack as he hikes up to a cliffside to meditate on this new travail he’s being made to endure.

Or maybe he’s just posing to be the next great Island monument.

While Jack sits and contemplates the great burden of being Someone Very Important in the Battle of the Island Gods, Hurley and Jacob do a postgame wrapup. Hurley at one point in the episode refers to Jacob as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and it fits him well.

“Strike me down and I shall become more powerful than you can imagine…”

Jacob may be “dead”, but it has only caused him to step up his game. What that game is remains a mystery, and whether or not Jacob is the Good Guy in this game is more in doubt than ever. He’s a manipulative, scheming bastard, that much is clear. But at least his recruits aren’t putting axes into people’s guts. At least not yet.

So I guess for the time being at least, he seems a little bit less of a villain than his extra monstrous Bad Twin.

The episode leaves Jack perched on the mountaintop, searching the horizon for his Destiny Ship. Maybe he’s wondering why he broke the Lighthouse that could have signalled his position. Maybe he just doesn’t want to come down because he feels stupid for smashing the thing that might have fixed him. Because, uh, seriously, why did he do that?

Jacob doesn’t seem disturbed that Jack broke his cool machine. He’s still babbling about this big important Someone who is Coming, which is a phrase that Jacob may have used one time too many. I’m trying hard to be intrigued about who is coming, and why Jack breaking the beacon is going to help the Island to be found … but my curiosity is weakening. Koans tire me. Jacob is like a zazen who never tries to teach his pupil anything, only gives him the chance to work it all out for himself.

Jacob is employing the time honored techniques of Buddhism, to seek the Mirrorlike Wisdom of pure Enlightenment by never actively seeking it. Whatever his destiny is, Jack is going to have to figure it out on his own. Especially now that he broke the mirrors.

“If you really want to know who I am,
you will have to be absolutely empty as I am.
Then two mirrors will be facing each other,

and only emptiness will be mirrored.” – Osho

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”
- Einstein

I’ve often wondered whether LOST is a game we are playing, or whether it’s a game that’s being played on us. Channeling the spirit of OtherJohn’s job placement counselor in this episode, maybe the question we should be asking is this: If LOST were a game, just what kind of game would it be?

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.”

But mostly LOST feels to me like a board game, where the luck of the draw pushes the players around the board from space to space.

It’s Chutes and Ladders.

But there’s history and cultures and cults. Maybe it’s more like Settlers from Catan.

LOST can be a rush, but to really appreciate it, you do have to think, quite a lot actually. Maybe the game is Twenty Questions. Or Twenty Thousand Questions.

There’s strategy involved, and bluffing. It’s Truth or Dare.

Maybe it’s a game about a game, a meta-game like LoseTheGame, where the only way to win is to never think about The Game. Or, in this case, quite literally, the polar bear.

Do you see him?

But most of all, and always, LOST is a Puzzle.

The Riddle of the Numbers notched another kink in this episode. It was very cool. The numbers had been scratched all around the inside of a cliffside seacave. Lots of numbers. With each number was a name, and nearly every name had been crossed out.

A lot of blogs have put together charts, to try and sort through this new information dump. I like the one at TVOvermind. It’s very complete. Just for reference, though, for anyone who wants a quick cheat sheet, here’s mine:

Six of the numbers have not been crossed out. It’s a stupid question to ask which six numbers of course. What other numbers are there? But which six lucky duckies got paired up with the famous LOSTian digits? That’s the fun part. Which six Losties can now also be known as Listies?

The first Listie was Locke, who of course is no longer a living Listie. His number was 4 – to the Japanese, the unluckiest number, the Death Number.

The above diagram of very specific spheres represents The Answer. The game is to try and figure out The Question. It’s Doug Adams’s 42 Puzzle. It’s like a backwards version of LOST!

But, seriously, why is a Kwon at Number 42? Is it still possible that either one of them, or the two of them together, are more important than we think?

LOST fans have uncovered many fascinating theories and mathematical relationships between our beloved Numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42. It’s an impressive body of collective fan intellect and imagination. I guess we all have our favorite fascinating factoid about the Numbers. Mine is this one: All of them are numbers retired by the NY Yankees and all of them sit in Monument Park in the Bronx. Including even Jackie Robinson from Brooklyn, who was so great even his enemy honors him.

The game of baseball is like one of LOST’s secret hidden treasures. It’s my favorite kind of Easter Egg. It explains a lot about LOST when you consider that it originated in the mind of a Yankee fan who was also a hardcore Trekkie. It almost makes sense when you think about it.

According to NotJohnLocke, the numbers and the names in the cave represented Jacob’s List of all the people he’d brought to the Island. We can wait til later to discuss whether NotJohn has a whisker of credibility about anything he says, but whoever is responsible for those numbers and names, it’s clear that someone has been playing craps with the lives of these Listies. And that, I think, is where The Game really begins.

A game must have rules. We’re starting, finally, to learn the rules of this one. The Island is the playing board. There are two sides to the board. Nothing fancy, just your basic White and Black.

It seems that only one side – White – has the power to bring players in from the outside. But once brought onto the board, Black has the power to recruit them. Players may have different powers as they move through the levels of the game. And at the top level, for those who survive the game that far – they can become Candidates. It’s like the way the world chess federation used to select its final contestants by holding a Candidates Tournament.

NotJohn tells Sawyer that the Listies are Candidates – brought there by Jacob to replace him as guardian of the Island. In other words, they are all Candidates to become The Substitute. Ergo the name of this episode. If NotJohn wasn’t lying, then it would seem that selecting a Candidate is the Object of The Game. But I’m pretty sure that NotJohn was not telling the truth, so … basically, we are playing a Game where the Objective is unclear, and the Rules are being parceled out erratically, by rulemakers who all seem to be lying. Maybe the Objective of this Game is to figure out the Objective!

We’re not completely in the dark. Some things we do know (provided we adopt a very flexible definition for the word “know”): The temple seems to be a kind of safe haven for the players. Home base.

A circle of ash protects White from being destroyed by Black.

A player may be conquered, but under certain circumstances he may be brought back onto the board. Is this what the Temple bathtub is for? Is this what is known as being “claimed”? Or is claiming an unpredictable side effect that only happens to some players who are brought back? Was Ben claimed and is that what gave him the power to kill Jacob? Or did something different happen to Ben, maybe because the water wasn’t dirty? In any case, what special powers will Sayid have, now that he is claimed?

Along with bringing players to the board, it also seems like White is the only side that is allowed to travel to areas outside of the game board. But White is always White, wherever he goes in the world.

Black, on the other hand, is a changeling. He can transmogrify into the form of any of the bodies – Alex, Christian, Yemi, John – who were left to rot on Craphole Island.

He also has the option to morph into his black smoky essence at any time, in which form he can Evil Dead his way across the Island, chains clanking and gears growling like the Cyclone rattling down the wooden tracks at Coney Island. (That’s what it sounds like to me.)

He is capable of mass destruction. He has consciousness and can look into people’s minds, and into their windows.

Somewhere in this game there is a No Kill rule. The mechanics of this rule are still mysterious, but it’s one of the first rules we learned. Way back in The Shape of Things to Come, Ben Linus and Charles Widmore had a showdown in a London penthouse.

Ben had come to avenge his daughter’s death, a death that he believed Widmore was responsible for. In a classic scene filmed with a sharp dark/light split, the two men used much of the same dialogue that White Jacob and his Black Twin had used in their scene on the beach. Because Widmore had broken the rules, Ben wanted to kill him, but he could not … because of the rules. Direct murder mano a mano was prohibited between the two adversaries, but everyone near and dear to either of them was fair game. So the rules are old, they don’t apply only to Jacob and his Twin, and Ben, it would seem, understands them. At least one of them.

Strangely, it seems like Ilana does not know this rule. She knows about other things, about candidates and recruiting, but she doesn’t know that the Smoke Monster could not have killed Jacob. She accepts Ben’s lie about it. Clearly, Ilana’s education in Island protocol has been neglected. Unless of course she’s bluffing as well. But it didn’t look to me like she was.

At this point in the game, Black has killed White. He found his loophole, his Substitute, and the White God died at the hands of a mere mortal. But The Game continues. Jacob can’t be like the King in a chess game, because the King is dead but The Game goes on.

However, Jacob’s death has brought a new Rule into play. White has lost his power to bring new players onto the board, and probably as a result, Black has lost his power to change form. Black still gets to play, but he is now locked into one fixed position. From now on Black is locked into being Locke.

I’m still not sure what to call this creature, Mr. He Who Has No Name. I’ve seen some great nicknames out there. Esau, the twin to Jacob. Smoke + Locke = Smocke. Mock Locke = Mocke. Man in Black + Locke = BLocke. I’ve seen him called UnLocke, Dead Locke, DreadLocke. I like Doc Jensen’s nickname of the Locke-ness Monster. Get it? Locke’s like-ness? Good one … There’s no shortage of clever names for this dude, but I still wonder, why is he nameless?

Not knowing the Objective of the Game, all interpretations are up for grabs. Do we believe NotJohn when he says he wants to go home? Where is home? He says he is trapped. Are we wrong to assume that it is the Island that entraps him? Has he been Jacob’s prisoner all these years? And if so, WHY?

Being a prisoner in another man’s body is an experience all versions of Locke can understand. In this week’s installment of OtherLOST, we revisited the life and times of the very human version of John Locke, the way we first met him – a man trapped in a body he can’t use, and struggling to survive within the seventh circle of American lower mid-management.

OtherJohn’s existence is much the same as it was when we first met him in Walkabout. He keeps secrets, and he lies, escaping the shackles of his wheelchair by building a fantasy life of adventure in his head. His ordinary everyday life isn’t adventure enough for him.

Off the Island, Locke risks humiliation with every mundane task – even just getting out of and into his car. He feels fear and anger and shame. He refuses to use a handicapped parking space. Just like the original John Locke, he is raging against the reality of his fate. He does not accept the world as it is.

On the surface OtherLocke is as we remember him, but looking just a little bit closer, we can see that he’s really so, so much different. For one thing, this Locke manages to laugh at his adversity.

And this Locke has an actual Helen. She isn’t just a substitute he pays for from a sexline. She’s real, and she loves him.

She accepts him as he is – and she’s not the only one. Everyone he meets in OtherLOST is good to him. Except for Randy, of course, who’s a douche in any reality.

OtherLOST is a kinder, gentler place. Locke is rude to the company CEO Hugo Reyes, as he’s leaving the premises after being fired, but the jolly Hurley Claus stops and gives him a present anyway.

It’s not a big deal for Hurley to be so magnanimous. Life is good for him. When John tries to ram his wheelchair ramp into his car, the ramp refuses to so much as nick Hurley’s car. It stops a millimeter short. OtherHurley wasn’t kidding when he called himself the luckiest man alive.

We meet OtherRose as well, and she pulls a little tough love on John, but she’s only being cruel to be kind.

She helps open his eyes to reality. Rose still has cancer, but she reminds John that there is still life to be lived. It’s time to give up on miracles.

And live for the now.

OtherJohn and IslandJohn end up sharing the same fate. Both of them end up as Substitutes. We watch OtherJohn learn to embrace his destiny without bitterness. This version of John can’t walk, but he can enjoy the irony of a day spent surrounded by strong young legs.

He ends up making the same friends in OtherLOST. It’s much easier to warm up to his fated friend, when the little nerd doesn’t have any worries stronger than a wet coffee filter.

OtherJohn is blessed. He doesn’t need to look any further than his lover’s bosom to find the meaning of his life – literally.

Peace and Karma. Joy and Transcendent Love. OtherLOST is not just a variation on LOST as we knew it. It’s an entirely different world. A kind of window into normalcy. What would the lives of our characters be like if they were well adjusted and emotionally healthy? If they learned to cope with life’s adversities instead of being warped by them?

It’s the little changes in OtherLOST that make it so much more livable. For one thing, OtherJohn doesn’t seem to have the Bio-Dad from Hell, the way the original John Locke did. Helen mentions that they should invite John’s dad to their wedding, and we see a happy picture of the two in his cubicle cell. So, in OtherLOST, I guess we can assume that Anthony Cooper is not an outrageous dick, and we really have to assume, considering OtherJohn’s lack of animosity, however he came to be paralyzed, it wasn’t because his OtherDad pushed him out of a highrise window.

The circumstances in OtherLOST are similar, but they are definitely not the same. OtherJohn has been treated far more gently by the winds of chance.

He’s not as bitter because he has less to be bitter about … and yet, he’s still a paraplegic. I see a pattern developing. The OtherLosties get where they are going by different chains of cause and effect, and so far it seems that they are milder versions of the Losties we knew, but when it comes to the big bullet points – Rose’s cancer, Kate’s handcuffs, Locke’s wheelchair – nothing has changed. How they got there is different, how they cope with it is different, but where they are is the same.

The Locke we met in Walkabout was angry and prideful. Everyone remembers his motto: “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” Back on the Island, the Monster within, inhabiting the clone he made of Locke’s body, uses that same phrase to shout down the ghost-boy he chases through the jungle.

That was odd. Does NotJohn retain a kind of inner Locke that now governs his emotions in this human shell? Does Locke live on in this beast who knew his dying thought?

He also shares Locke’s love of a good sharp edge. Has more than just John’s physical shell been stolen? Is Locke’s old embittered spirit trapped inside his borrowed form as well?

The NotJohn Monster remains an enigma. But one thing’s for sure – Richard is scared to death of him. He looks like a mouse that just spent an hour getting mauled by an alley cat.

Richard knows the history of this creature, and it’s obvious that his powers are fearsome. But who is the Monster? Is he meant to be the personification of Evil? Are we being asked, finally, to make that judgment? After all this time, is the story going to start to shrink into a simple, bold presentation of Good defeating Evil? Is Jacob Good and is this Monster Evil? Whatever happened to all the shades of gray?

But I’ve always felt it was going to be synthesized in the end into something approaching the Eastern belief in the co-dependence of opposing forces, rather than in the Western idea that good and evil exist in constant competition.

Now I’m not so sure. It all goes back to the origin of the argument between our two sides. What is the beef between Black and White? The first boy that Locke sees in the jungle is young, and his arms are covered in blood, a gruesome apparition.

When he reappears moments later, he is years older and his hands are clean.

Is it the same boy at different ages? Or is it two different boys? Is this a story of two children, brothers maybe, who – judging by their dress – first lived on this Island in the distant past? Did some tragic event disturb their childhood idyll in paradise? Did some blood feud between them create this endless loop of conflict and gamesmanship in which both are now trapped?

And if so, is the Monster locked inside Locke the Bad Twin we’ve been looking for all these years?

When NotJohn takes the white stone and throws it into the ocean, it’s as if Satan feels he has finally conquered God and earned his dominion.

Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile pomp.- John Milton, Paradise Lost

John Milton’s Paradise Lost is the poetic template for Western views of a segregated celestial hierarchy – where God and the Devil may contest one another, but the outcome is never seriously in doubt. God always wins. It’s interesting though that even an old style Puritan like Milton couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for the Devil.

Satan isn’t just a purely evil being. In the beginning, he’s God’s most perfect angel, but it ate him up that Heaven was so lacking in democracy. He was an early advocate for Majority Rules. He was also quite the outrageous egotist, who came to think so highly of his wonderful self that he could no longer bear the tyranny of “Heav’ns awful Monarch”.

He challenged God by taking it upon himself to undo the paradise that had been created for Adam and Eve. And the way he did it echoes loudly into this story that we’ve all been watching. God makes it plain that “necessity and chance /Approach me not and what I will is Fate.” In other words, there is no Free Will that can supersede the Will of God, of Fate. Yet, “free will”, or some mirage of it, is what God has given to Adam and Eve. And wouldn’t you know it? They use that free will to make the choice that loses everything for them. They are tempted by Satan to eat of the tree of knowledge, to know good and evil, and because they are as God made them, they choose freely and are expelled from paradise forever. Free Will, as given by God to man, and by Jacob to his Listies, is a total gyp.

The Monster explains to Sawyer that Jacob has manipulated all of them, Losties and Listies alike, to become stranded in this paradise. He has pretended that their own choices have brought them there, but is there any way that can be true? All of them are on the Island because of the Will of Jacob. He only lets them think they’re choosing. The Monster has a point. How can Jacob be Good if he has so abused the free will of all the people he has brought to the Island? In Milton’s moral universe, that wouldn’t be a sticking point. God’s Will is an absolute. Whether we approve of it or not is immaterial. So is Jacob the God of the Island? And if so, is God now dead?

Has Jacob trapped the Monster on this enchanted Island in order to keep his Evil force contained away from the world at large? Is Jacob a kind of Dr. Frankenstein who created a monster that turned around and made him his slave? Did Jacob have to then concoct a plan to bring a Saviour to the Island to somehow destroy the creature that he could not?

That’s not the only thing that can’t be understood yet. Why is it that Sawyer is able to see the ghost boy? And why can’t Richard see him? I guess the logical answer is that Sawyer can see magical things, the way he saw Kate’s black horse, because he’s a Candidate and Richard is not. The thing is, that doesn’t really explain much, given that we haven’t got the foggiest clue yet as to what makes Sawyer a Candidate. Why is there a Rule that Candidates can not be killed, at least not directly, by Black or White? Was Shannon a Candidate back when babbling Walt appeared to her in Abandoned?

One thing’s for certain. The Island is a palace of illusions, a hall of mirrors. For the third straight week, there is a prominent moment in OtherLOST where the featured character is caught in the reflection of a mirror.

Mirrors have always been an important motif on LOST. Season Six so far is mirroring Season One in the sequence and structure of the character centrics, with Kate coming first after the two hour premiere, and Locke’s episode following next. The Locke who saw the Monster in Walkabout has become the Locke who is the Monster in The Substitute.

But the reflection in a mirror is an illusion. It doesn’t show us the truth, it shows us a phantom reversal of what we believe to be true. In this episode, as always, Sawyer is the one who cuts through the illusion most effortlessly and gets right to the heart of the matter.

When we last saw Sawyer, he was headed into hibernation in the house that he had shared with Juliet. It’s hard to tell how much time has passed until the next time we see him. Time seems very much scrambled in the ghost of Dharma Town. Presumably the house was last inhabited in 2004, well into the CD era, yet The Stooges are blasting from a dusty turntable that looks like it’s been sitting there untouched since 1977.

In any case, Sawyer seems to have been there for quite some time, sucking up the Dharma booze and pretty much wallowing in his own filth.

I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb
I am the world’s forgotten boy – The Stooges, Search and Destroy

Sawyer sees instantly through the facade of the Monster and knows immediately this creature isn’t who he looks like. But he agrees to go along with him anyway, because he’s promised the one thing no one ever gets on this Island: Answers.

The trip that Sawyer takes with NotJohnLocke is full of memories and echoes.

He follows him through the jungle the same way Sawyer followed Locke in Season Three’s The Brig., as he was being manipulated into one of the Island’s most dramatic patricides.

They stand on the cliff above the sea the same way Ben and Sawyer did in Every Man for Himself.

And Sawyer even brings up his own Official Book, Of Mice and Men, which Ben used to teach him something about himself back in Season Three. Sawyer may be hurting right now, big time, but he’s wrong to think he’s meant to be alone. In fact, the Monster is offering him a chance to be part of a team. Among the things this Monster can’t do for himself, is leave the Island. He needs another Substitute, and he’s offering Sawyer the job.

There is a moment, right after Locke returns from chasing the apparition of the boy, when it becomes clear that Sawyer has grokked onto the true nature of the beast he’s following. He lies to NotJohn that he was talking to no one, and NotJohn lies right back about the ghost boy they’ve both just seen. The long con is on, and both sides appear to be playing with admirable game face. It’s still hard to see how Sawyer can succeed in conning an ancient, evil, trapped Island Monster, but I’m pulling for him. Every game has to have a winner eventually.

In the Cave of Numbers, the story becomes unusually literal in its metaphor. Black and White are laid out cleanly on a scale of justice, like big honking symbols telling us what to think. It’s a beautiful scene between LOST’s two most powerful actors.

It’s a moment of clarity, where we get a glimpse for just a second of how high the stakes are in this game. it reminds me of that moment in The Seventh Seal where the knight, named Block (ha!), plays the White pieces against Death in a metaphysical chess match where the stakes are Life itself.

“Is it so cruelly inconceivable to grasp God with the senses? Why should he hide himself in a mist of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles?” – Antonious Block, The Seventh Seal

Whatever meaning we are intended to take from the stark duality, there is something ritualistic about the presentation of the objects in the cave. On the altar, there is a carpenter’s compass, a lyre, a mallet and a scale.

The scale could be a reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead where, at the moment of death, “The Good Spirit, who was born simultaneously with you, will come now and count out your good deeds with the white pebbles, and the Evil Spirit, who was born simultaneously with you, will come and count out your evil deeds with the black pebbles.” But this isn’t Western style judgment. The soul after death begins a journey that returns it to the endless cycle of birth and death, to the infinite incarnations of illusion that make up human existence.

“Then the Lord of Death will say “I will consult the Mirror of Karma.” He will look in the Mirror, wherein every good and evil act is vividly reflected. Lying will be of no avail.” – Bardo Thodol Tibetan Book of the Dead

Lying continued to be the standard operating procedure for most of the characters in this episode. Sawyer lies to NotJohn about talking to Richard. NotJohn lies to Sawyer about seeing the boy. Ben lies to Ilana. OtherJohn lies to Randy. And at first he lies to Helen. But there was a moment of epiphany for OtherJohn when he breaks down and admits to Helen the truth. He had lied about going to Australia on business, because he had been lying to himself about being able to go on a walkabout adventure.

At the moment when John admits the truth, the doorbell rings, like an angel getting his wings. And at that moment, his “lost” property is returned to him. Together he and Helen tear up the spinal doctor’s card and resolve to accept life as it is. When John accepts the truth, it is his moment of enlightenment. He’s no longer lost; he’s been found.

“Seeing, hearing and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.” -Walt Whitman

Some have noted that the Cave of the Numbers might be an allusion to Plato’s Metaphor of The Cave. I can see that. It’s like it was screaming “metaphor” at us. Plato’s cave hypothesized a world where human beings were jailed in a prison of illusion, never seeing anything real, but only being shown the images or reflections of a truth that had been manufactured for them by a higher power. It’s a very deep topic, and I won’t offend anyone by mangling it, but suffice to say that with this metaphor, Plato had somehow predicted the modern American multiplex.

He had also, perhaps, imagined the situation as it exists on LOST Island. The reality the Island’s captives experience is the illusion that has been manufactured for them by Jacob. One by one, he’s brought prisoners to his home. Some thought they came of their own free will. Some, like Sawyer, realize they’ve always been the pawns of fate. But either way, they are powerless over their own lives at this point. They are all being forced to play their parts in Jacob’s game, but they can only experience its reality indirectly, because they are all still trapped, all still lost.

Like them, we still don’t understand most of what’s going on. We don’t know who to trust. Both Jacob and the Monster appear to be master manipulators, liars, bluffers and cheats. We don’t know for sure whose cave the Numbers have been written on or who exactly is ticking them off.

Do the Jacob’s Ladders lead to Jacob’s Cave, like the Monster says? Are the names those of the people Jacob wanted to bring to the Island? Or are they just the Monster’s list of each of Jacob’s players that he’s managed somehow to capture? I think it must be the Monster’s cave, because Juliet’s name is crossed out, and Jacob was quite dead before she finally kicked it. Or maybe it was until just recently a shared space, a free zone where both had equal rights.

Either way, one thing is obvious. One of the Candidates is no longer a Candidate. Locke is really and truly dead. For real this time.

And there’s one last question, one that I’m sure was on the mind of even the most virulent Kate hater: Where the hell was her name? Of all the major players in our story, only hers was missing. I am thinking back to Par Avion when Mikhail told Kate that she was not on The List because she was “flawed”. But he told Locke and Sayid they were not on The List at that same time, and we see now that this has since changed. Could it be that Kate was not on The List … yet? Maybe she wasn’t ready to be a Candidate then but now she is. Maybe just as Locke became less “angry” and Sayid less “weak and afraid”, Kate has become less flawed. Maybe she finally qualifies. Because it’s hard to miss that there’s a vacancy on The List at the moment.

Is it possible that Kate is The Substitute? If so, then the six Listies would be Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Sawyer, Jack and Jin (I’m guessing). These are the same six we just saw transported via A-Bomb from 1977. It’s probably not going to be a popular theory in a fandom where Kate always seems to be persona non grata, but I like it. I’m going to keep it for awhile, or at least until someone can prove it wrong.

After all, it’s not like any of us know much about the nature of The Game yet. It’s not easy to play a game when you only know some of the Rules. And you still can’t be sure what the Goal is. Or who’s playing. Or which side they’re on. But it’s not like any of us are going to quit now, right? And besides, how much more fun can this get? We can do this. We just have to think it through. I think the best tip on how to play this Game is this one:

“95% of this game is half mental” – Yogi Berra

Thanks to our friends over at TheSanatorium for this awesome battle Lost style!

Even with all the satisfying answers we got, we still have what makes the show great, awesome questions, many answers are new questions themselves, the tally clocks in at

Answers: 19 Total with 6 Juicy ones…….

Questions: 20 Total with 12 Juicy ones….

THE WINNER IS QUESTIONS —— Look below at the judges table JUICY ONES IN RED

http://www.TheSanatorium.com

Check back every week for the Q. v. A. challenge

Answers:

• Smocke is definitely the smoke monster
• Randy is still an A-Hole!
• Helen didn’t leave Locke before his attempted walkabout (in the ALT time line)
• Helen and Locke are getting married
• Richard says he (Smocke) wants everyone dead and he wants to…
• Rose also works for Hugo in the Temp Agency in the ALT time line
• Rose Still has cancer in the ALT timeline
• Smocke is from before 1937 which is when John Steinbeck wrote Of Mice And Men
• Smocke is trapped (on the island, by Jacob presumably)
• Smocke was a man before he was trapped by Jacob
• Smocke is “stuck” this way (looking like LOCKE) He can no longer change form according to Ilana
• Locke lied to Boone on the plane about going on the walkabout.
• Not attending the walkabout was the final straw in Lockes loss of faith, without reviving his walking ability on the island all of Locke’s faith has been diminished.
• So the oceanic six are seemingly the last 6 names unscratched on the inside of the cave walls. There seem to be numbers next to other names that are numbered past 100, However 4- John Locke and 15- James Ford, were not members of O6- And Kate wasn’t on the wall.
  
• Jacob wrote all the names on the Cave
• Ben work’s at a grade school and teaches European history (he seems to have never became the EVIL Ben we know)
• Jacob had a thing for numbers
• Jacob’s encounters with our Losties were to steer them toward the Island because they were all candidates
• (According to Smocke, The Candidates were to take over as protector of the island) but would the candidates be a replacement for Jacob? For now this will be categorized as answered unless we find out Smocke is lying.

Questions:

• Helen didn’t leave Locke before his attempted walkabout, what has changed in their back-story from what we have seen? (It seems they changed a whole series of events stemming from 1977 not ONLY the events after the crash did/didn’t happen.
• Helen mention’s Lockes DAD attending the wedding. but he is in a wheelchair, did his dad not throw him out of a window in this line? (How far back does this go? did this stop Locke’s dad from ever being a conman in the first place and thusly never conning sawyers parents?
• Richard: “What do you want?” Smocke: “What ive always wanted, for you to come with me”
• Why did Jacob never tell Richard about what was really going on?
• is Smocke telling the truth to Richard?
• Richard: “I’m not going anywhere with you” WHO IS YOU EXACTLY
• Who is this little boy in the visions that Smocke sees?
• Illana say’s Smocke is recruiting, is he recruiting for a replacement for himself as Jacob was?
• Why can Sawyer see the child apparition
• Child apparition: “You know the rules, you cant kill him” what rules, who cant he kill?
• VERY INTERESTING, why would Smocke say “Don’t tell me what i can’ do”?
• When Sawyer ask’s about the “kid” in the apparitions Smocke acts like he doesn’t remember the kid, this is right after we heard Smocke act an awful lot like the real John Locke
• Why are there numbered names etched on the inside of the cave some scratched out
• Was Ben Ever on the island?
• Is teacher Ben the Good guy he was meant to become by never being resurrected in the temple?
• Why did Jacob write all the names on the cave wall? (was he looking for a replacement for himself? or is Smocke lying)(perhaps a replacement is the way out?)
• Kwon is 42- which Qwon is it? Sun, or Jin?
• Does the Island really need to be protected for some reason?
• why would Smocke need Sawyer to get off the island if not only to secure his name as erased from the candidates?…
• How Does Richard fit into all this?
• Kate’s name was not etched on the wall, why? And neither Locke or Ford were part of the o6

The Cave wall names…… Not the o6 because James and Locke were not apart of them, nor is Kate’s name etched on the wall corresponding with a number.

4- John Locke
8- Hugo reyes
15-Ford
16- Jarrah
23-Jack Shepherd
42- Kwon

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Flash-Sideways:

• Locke seems to be living a much happier life (i.e. he is marrying Helen!)
• Helen and Locke are thinking about inviting John’s father to the wedding
• Rose still has cancer, same upbeat attitude about it
• Businessman Hurley is pretty generous to the guy who was about to gouge his hummer.
• Ben and Locke teaching at the same school, I would have pegged Ben to be a politician

On Island:

• Sawyer follows Flocke, while Richard stays behind, and Sawyer falls off a cliff.
• Who is the kid that appeared to Flocke and Sawyer? Little Jacob or an older Aaron?
• Ben reveals that he murdered Locke, but still lies to Ilana about murdering Jacob
• Why can’t Flocke change into anyone else but Locke?
• An interesting numbers appearance, could it lead into an explanation of the numbers?
• 4-Locke 8-Reyes 15-Ford 16-Jarrah 23-Shepard 42-Kwon
• Where is Austin? Which Kwon does 42 represent? Jin, Sun, or Both?
• Is Flocke telling the truth about “the candidate?” Or is he just manipulating Sawyer

I probably left some things out, sound off in the comments!

Alone I can never be.
Others before me going and away from me flowing
Were weaving, weaving at the I that is me.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

As we begin this long season’s journey into the end of LOST, each milestone we pass is like a sad old friend we’re saying goodbye to. It occurred to me watching What Kate Does that we may have been watching the last Kate-centric episode of LOST ever.

Kate-centrics have their own peculiar flavor out in the LOST-o-sphere. LOST fans have a decidedly love-hate relationship with their freckled femme fatale. Actually, a lot of the time, it seems like they mostly have a hate relationship with her. Message boards the day after a Kate-centric episode will inevitably erupt in a collective fanboy bitchfest. They haaaate Kaaaate!!!! They wish she would die already. Because she’s useless. And they want her to Shut. Up. Kate.

I don’t get it myself. But I can definitely tell that they don’t like her.

Maybe the writers have to take some responsibility for not doing their best by Kate over the years. It’s true they have written her into a bunch of shitty little corners – like making her a father killer who doesn’t really much care that she did that, or by having her raise Claire’s baby and lie about it, or by having her – incredibly – not be able to decide between Jack or Sawyer all these years. That last one has definitely ruffled the most feathers.

But perhaps we should get into that later.

Early in the episode, OtherKate notices OtherJack yakking on his cellphone, and she looks to be momentarily stunned by a flash of recognition.

It might seem like she’s only remembering the guy whose pocket she just picked on the plane. Or maybe she’s doing a double take and asking herself,

“Hey, isn’t that the guy from that show LOST?”

But it happens again when she pulls out the stuffed Shamu from the luggage she has stolen from Claire.

And again when she first hears Claire’s baby’s name is Aaron.

It is becoming clear, in a very not clear kind of way, that OtherLOST shares a very porous boundary with the world of LOST as we have known it. There is leakage across the border – a nebulous, maybe subconscious, kind of cognition by the OtherLosties of the road never taken. It’s exactly the kind of thing that makes the puzzlement of OtherLOST such an inviting game.

It was interesting to see in this episode that Kate and OtherKate seemed, on the surface at least, to be almost exactly the same person. We saw last week that many OtherLosties are different, but this does not seem to be the case with Kate. Like our old beloved Kate, OtherKate is a murderer on the run, and like original flavored Kate, she is a damn fine escape artist. She’s almost a girl version of Jason Bourne.

Like Kate, OtherKate has a fractious relationship with motor vehicles.

She is well acquainted with the best methods of extricating oneself from handcuffs.

OtherKate also uses the same aliases as Kate. In this episode, as in Born to Run, she called herself “Joan Hart”. I don’t know what that means … except maybe that OtherKate was a fan of OtherSabrina, the Teenage Witch?

It does make sense that Kate would like that show. After all, Melissa Joan Hart’s Aunt Zelda on the show (top left) is Kate’s mother!

OtherKate was similar to Kate in many ways. We have always known that Kate is a helpful person.

She hauled the farmer to safety in Tabula Rasa (after she’d crashed his truck),

and she put the airmask on the Marshall during the crash in The Pilot (after she’d stolen the keys to the cuffs),

and she saved the bank manager from getting shot in Whatever the Case May Be (after she’d robbed his bank).

This is the pattern to Kate.Whenever she does a person wrong, she turns around and pours her heart into helping them recover from whatever it is she just did.

Kate may be a world class screwup, but when she remembers where it is, her heart is always in the right place. The thing is, a lot of the time she forgets. And when she does – watch out!

In Season Three’s Left Behind, Kate met Cassidy in a gas station, then went off on a Girls in Cars adventure before convincing her pregnant friend to do the right thing by her baby – who turned out to be Sawyer’s daughter.

In What Kate Does, Kate went through Claire’s bag in a gas station – after a Girls in Cars adventure – and then convinced her pregnant friend to do right by her baby – who turned out to be Kate’s sorta kinda “son”.

The symmetry of the seasons is beginning to synch up. Old references are bubbling up, reminding us of questions we never realized we forgot to ask. The same baffling patterns that we remember from seasons past are re-weaving themselves into our new altered reality.

In Do No Harm, Kate delivered Aaron on the jungle floor. In OtherLOST, she made sure that Claire made it to the hospital to have him.

In Maternity Leave, Ethan Rom was very pleasant to Claire, as he prepared to rip her baby from her in the Others’ medical dungeon.

In OtherLOST, Ethan has kept his maiden name Goodspeed, but otherwise seems unchanged.

He still has a serial killer face, he’s still a doctor, and he offers up the same kind of unctuous encouragement to the frightened child-mother as he did back then. But does OtherEthan have an evil agenda? Hard to tell, although the name of the hospital might be a clue – Angel of Mercy, the creepy venue well known to any fan of Dexter.

Maybe they’re trying to tell us that even though Ethan is super extra creepy, his motives for doing evil are always good.

Claire goes to the home of the infamous “nice couple in L.A.” but finds only a weepy woman too distraught about her lousy husband to give a young girl the courtesy of a phone call before she flew across the Pacific eight months pregnant to a city where she knew no one.

The woman’s name, we can learn from credits, was Lindsey Baskum – our first anagram from OtherLOST!

It works out to “Used by Malkins”, as in the famed psychic Malkins of Seasons 1 and 2, who conspired with the extrasensory universe to finagle Claire and Aaron onto Flight 815. It seems that all of LOST’s intricate details are being copied over onto OtherLOST.

Someone made a chart years ago, showing the ganglia-like net of connections between the characters prior to them coming to the Island.

(click to enlarge)

It’s out of date now that we’ve been back and forth to the future so many times, but it’s still interesting to see how thickly this tangled web has been woven, right from the start. Over time it has only gotten denser, but for Kate, as the chart above shows, one connection has been constant. As has almost always been the case, in a Kate-centric episode, Sawyer’s story takes a dramatic turn.

In this episode, we see Sawyer more lost than we have ever seen him. He has cut all emotional ties. He makes it clear to the templefolk that they can kill anyone they want – they aren’t his friends. He orders Kate not to follow him. He runs.

In the past, Kate would have let him do just that, but this time she follows.

And there’s a funny thing about that. Now I know many readers aren’t familiar with the dark underbelly of the online LOST spoiler-sphere, but suffice to say there is at least one individual out there who has made quite a career out of stealing Darlton’s secrets and broadcasting them to the worldwide web. For some reason, this episode seemed to bring out a new degree of interactivity from the spoiler snitches. Not content to merely spoil the facts of the episode, for this one they decided to actually pre-spoil our interpretation of the episode. We were informed, in no uncertain terms some weeks ago, that in this very episode, Kate and Sawyer’s story together would come to an unequivocal end. Forevah.

Naturally, having gotten wind of this prediction, I was curious to see how it would all work out. It seems an odd point in the series for such an endpoint to arrive, but stranger things have certainly happened on LOST. The title of this episode, What Kate Does, was an obvious cross reference to the Season Two episode where we first found out What Kate Did. You may or may not have realized it, depending on how closely you follow this sort of thing, but that particular episode was a pivotal one for the love triangle.

In Season Two, Jack pulled a desperately confused Kate towards him for a kiss, a kiss she ran from, with a rather horrified expression, straight to the side of Sawyer.

In Season Six, Jack pulls Kate to him again, but this time she barely stops for a quick goodbye. She’s running to Sawyer again, and this time when Jack goes in for the kiss, all he gets is a mouthful of hair. It is a striking change in tone.

Hey, now, wait a minute! Is it possible the spoiler snitches got the whole thing backwards and the angle of the triangle that’s shutting down is actually … Jack and Kate?

Forevah?

In What Kate Did, Kate and Sawyer had a famous scene where she opened up to him about her secret. She thought he was asleep when she confessed to him that she killed her father, and that she saw her father somehow in Sawyer, and that she couldn’t let herself feel anything for him because of that.

In What Kate Does, Kate and Sawyer again have a beautiful scene, alone, this time on the very dock where Sawyer once convinced Juliet to stay and keep him company. And again, secrets are revealed. Kate tells Sawyer, finally, about her mission to return Aaron to his true mother. Sawyer tells Kate something that he had never even told Juliet – that he was planning to give her a ring.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain to Kate why exactly he never did ask Juliet to marry him back when the poor soul was fretting herself into a lather about Kate’s return. And he doesn’t explain why he buried the damn thing so deep into the foundation of his house that he needed a wrecking bar and a sledgehammer to retrieve it. Who was he hiding it from exactly – Juliet or himself?

But he does tell her why he feels so guilty, and perhaps what he is telling her, much like she did back in What Kate Did, is that from now on, whenever he looks at Kate, he will always remember why Juliet died.

It was on that very dock that he convinced Juliet to stay with him in 1974. Josh Holloway’s performance is heartbreaking in this scene, as Sawyer turns to Kate and reminds her just why he tried to cling to Juliet in the first place … because he didn’t want to be alone.

Much is left unspoken, but it really isn’t hard to read between the tears. Sawyer’s feelings for Kate didn’t kill Juliet in The Incident. They started to kill her all the way back in LaFleur, when he first tried to plug the hole Kate had left, by keeping Juliet on the Island that would become her grave. And to drive the point home even deeper, he reminds Kate – and the audience – that Kate had done exactly the same thing, and for exactly the same reason.

Kate breaks down into sobs. But why exactly? Is she feeling the enormity of Sawyer’s loss, of her own, of what they have lost together?

Sawyer, nearly a zombie, leaves Kate and walks mournfully back into the ghost of the house he had lived in with Juliet. He plans to stay alone in his abandoned DharmaTown, making a home with his memories.

I know the poor man needs his space, but he’s going to have to snap out of it pretty quick. We’ve only got three months left! I don’t want to see him dressing up in her clothes and building a shrine to her in his attic or anything like that.

I’ve noticed a creeping necrophilia in the romantic tastes of the online LOST fandom, but I really hope they don’t have Sawyer go all Norman on us. I’ve seen those avis the Sawyer/Juliet fans have been circulating, and I know you all are grieving. But when you find yourself kvelling over something like this:

… It’s time to let it go, girls. Trust me.

That is the fundamental question of the Buddha Dharma.

Is it a joyous thing to live long?
Life is not that way.

Is it sorrowful to die after a short life?

Life is not that way.

The question is how we shall live.
- Dogen

Early in the episode, Sawyer is bitter as he and Kate watch Sayid return from the dead. The good woman Juliet is dead. The Iraqi torturer who shoots kids has been given a second life. Or has he? Just as Kate’s theme is running, Sayid’s theme is torture. He continues to reap his karmic penalty, even in his reincarnation.

The mystery of what happened to Sayid only deepens in this episode. Again there was a reprise from Season One. In Solitary, Rousseau tortured the torturer in her primitive chamber of horrors.

Our new Samurai Other, Dogen, also favors electroshock therapy on his subject. And like Rousseau, he is not looking for answers from Sayid. He is “diagnosing” him.

It is not clear afterwards whether or not Sayid has passed this test. Some say yes, some say no.

John and Yoko don’t really seem like straight shooters to me. Their agenda is impossible to discern. What are they testing for, how do they obtain their answers, what do they put in the pill they prescribe for their patient?

Pill popper Jack comes along and sacrificially throws himself on the poison grenade, but that doesn’t tell us anything either, because Dogen karate chops him into upchucking it. We can see that Dogen doesn’t want Jack to swallow the pill, but does that mean we can assume it would have killed Sayid?

What happened to Sayid when they drowned him in the dirty water? We are told that he was “claimed”, although that definition is only approximated from the Japanese word misuru, which translates more as “bewitched” or “charmed”. He has been diagnosed with an Infection, one that will spread to his heart like a darkness until he is no more. So is it the Infection that has “claimed” him?

The Infection is another dropped story thread from earlier seasons that is now being picked up and woven back into the tapestry. In Season One we heard Rousseau tell how The Sickness claimed the lives of her crew.

The exact details have always been sketchy, but the best guess generally was that the crew had been altered by their visit to the temple in such a way that Rousseau was forced to kill them. Of course there has always been the alternate explanation that perhaps Rousseau lost her mind and just murdered her crew for no reason. Which could mean, it would seem, that Rousseau may have been the one who actuallly caught The Infection. After all, her new doppelganger in the story is Claire and we are told outright that Claire has in fact become one of the Infected.

“The plague had swallowed up everything and everyone. No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.” - Albert Camus, The Plague

What is The Infection? Images of disease have been ever present on the Island throughout the story.

Injections and vaccines are a big part of LOST imagery.

Ethan injected Claire. Kelvin instructed Desmond to take daily injections down in the Swan Hatch. Charlie found injections and Claire gave them to Aaron. Juliet buried vaccines beneath a tree to create an elaborate ruse, back in her Other days. There is the “cabin fever” sickness that afflicts the Kahana.

The Dharma initiative innoculated all their new recruits.

There has been an ongoing theme of illness on the Island, and of people taking measures to ward it off. It hasn’t been a focus of the plot recently, but it seems to be making a comeback. Does it have any substance to it, or is it another one of the Island’s many illusions?

It certainly makes sense to look at The Infection as a metaphor – although what it might be a metaphor of is not clear. Infection is an evil thing. If The Infection is creeping towards Sayid’s heart, perhaps we can expect to see him becoming ever darker and more evil as the story continues. But that metaphor doesn’t seem to fit. We’ve been watching Sayid’s heart darken since the story began, and especially the last few years. There’s nothing new in that. It seems to me the important place to look for clues is – as always – in the connections.

Sayid’s story has become bound inextricably to Ben’s. Ben is the man who made Sayid a professional killer, a job that turned his heart into an icy black rock. Sayid is the man who mortally wounded Ben as a boy, forcing Ben to be brought to the temple – and presumably drowned in the same waters as Sayid has just been. Was Ben “claimed” as a boy?

And what about Claire, who we are told has the same illness as Sayid? Did Claire in fact die the day her yellow house exploded around her … and was her long walk off into the jungle really a trip to the temple, to the same mikveh where Ben and Sayid were also claimed?

If Ben is one of the claimants, that might explain a lot. It might explain what turned the sweet bespectacled boy into the heartless killer and conniver we all love to hate. But it would also seem, if Ben is infected, that The Infection doesn’t kill people and it doesn’t make them unable to love or to feel. It may be that what the Infection does is imbue its host body with some power that others lack. Was Ben able to kill Jacob precisely because he was “claimed”? Was The Infection the agent that turned Ben into The Loophole?

The choice of the word “claiming” is also interesting. It sounds like a game move. It reminds me of Backgammon, the Official Board Game of LOST, where if a playing piece is left unprotected, it may be hit by an opposing piece and taken off the board. A player cannot continue to bear off his other pieces until he reclaims the lost piece and returns it to play. Is that what’s happening here?

It’s another indication that the choices we saw Jacob making in last season’s finale were the equivalent of Jacob assembling his team. When Sawyer tries to escape from the temple, Dogen’s reaction is to protect him. He orders his soldiers to hold their fire. He tells Sawyer, almost plaintively, that he “has to stay.”

Later in the jungle, when his men want to get rid of Jin, they are stopped from harming him because he “might be one of them.” The suspicion continues to grow that the reason this group of survivors has been brought – and brought back – to this Island is because they are the essential necessary playing pieces in a gigantic cosmic game they don’t even realize they are playing.

We are back among the language of games, which is one of the favorite dialects of LOST. I’m sure everyone sat up and took notice when the scene came up on Dogen sitting behind his desk contemplating a baseball.

Baseballs are always important totems on LOST. In one of Kate’s great flashbacks, Born to Run, a baseball (cryptically autographed by a name that looks like “John Locke”) is among the items she and Tom retrieve from their time capsule. Is this baseball there only to remind us of that one?

Maybe it means that Dogen, like Jack, is a Red Sox fan. Maybe we’ll see OtherDogen sitting next row down from Other Jack at Fenway Park in some sideways flash a few episodes from now.

Or maybe it’s a clue to Dogen’s past. Maybe in his pre-Island life, he came to the Island only after he got let go by the Hanshin Tigers. It could be a shoutout to Deep Space Nine’s Benjamin Sisko and the many deep existential truths he found hidden within that little 108 stitched wonder.

“I’ve tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan … I believe in the Church of Baseball.”- Annie Savoy, Bull Durham

It could be a reminder that baseball is the most Eastern of Western games.

This year’s Other is named after Dogen – a 13th century Japanese monk who was a great proponent of the practice of zazen, or sitting meditation. By training the body to be still, the mind becomes like a mirror, reflecting in itself a transcendant enlightenment that cannot be described in words. Dogen said, “you hear the sound of the dharma…. with the body first and the mind last.”

Zen monks have developed arts to help them attain this most indescribable of states – archery, for instance, and brush painting. For Americans, perhaps the closest approximation of this kind of active meditation might be baseball. As Yogi Berra explained it, “You can’t think and hit at the same time.” You need to shut off the mind to let the perfect self shine through and do its thing.

This is what, I think, Jack Shephard is currently trying to do. He isn’t thinking any longer. He’s just acting on instinct, without any more need to try and control the outcomes of his actions. It’s a big change, as we saw last week, to the point that Jack almost seems like more of a different person than any of the people in OtherLOST do. He’s like a 12 Stepper who has finally gone all in and accepted that all he needs to do is “let go and let God.”

“I am in no way interested in immortality, but only in the taste of tea.”
- Lu t’ung

After Dogen heimlichs the pill out of him, he offers Jack tea. And even though he knows this guy just conjured up a poison pill for his friend, Jack accepts. You almost get the sense that if Dogen wanted to handcuff Jack to a polar bear, this new Jack would go along with it, just to see what kind of head trip it might turn out to be.

Whatever it is that Dogen is selling, and for whatever reason, Jack is buying it. Dogen explains to Jack that he doesn’t speak English in front of his people because it’s important that he keep himself isolated from them. Leaders do not get to mingle with the minions. It’s something Jack has known for some time.

Until now, he never really had to face up to the implications of that body art he wanted so badly: “He walks among us but is not of us.” In other words, Jack Shephard, this is your life.

Jack didn’t choose this life. It was thrust upon him, against and in spite of his own free will. And what’s making it even worse is that he doesn’t even understand yet what it is he doesn’t get to have any choice about. The never ending dilemma of fate vs. volition continues to generate new ripples within the story.

Jack and Locke, Kate and Sawyer, Hurley and Sayid, Sun and Jin – all were brought to the Island by Fate. Dogen says that he was also “brought” to the Island. It’s an Island of immigrants, where everyone is imported from somewhere else. There are no indigenous people. Who brings them there and for what purpose? That is the question we are now circling in an ever decreasing orbit, but it doesn’t seem to me that Free Will has much of anything to do with it.

We saw in OtherLOST that Kate is fated always to be a part of Aaron’s story. OtherClaire names her son the same way Claire did back in Exodus. The name just blurts out of her: “Is my baby ok? Is Aaron ok?” We have heard her say almost exactly the same lines on the Island. Both times, she says that she has no idea how the name came to be. It just happened. Claire never chose Aaron’s name. It was destined that he be named Aaron. It’s a punctuation point that’s been made twice now, so I am guessing there is a reason it is important.

OtherLOST also provides a window into just how much things stay the same, even in decoherent coexisting parallel realities. Horace and Amy’s baby boy must have been evacuated off of the Island just prior to The Incident, but even though he never became Ethan Rom, the Other Man, he still became the world’s creepiest OBGYN. And he still ended up poking around and taking an interest in Claire’s unborn son.

At some point after The Incident, Christian Shephard apparently still played around on his wife with a mistress in Australia, still fathered and abandoned a daughter. Claire still went on to become a teenage mother, who handed over her credit card to the woman who just carjacked her while she was running from a U. S. Marshall.

… proving once again exactly why children having children is such a very bad idea, whatever reality they find themselves in.

Claire still wanted to find adoptive parents in America, and she still ended up deciding to keep her baby. Kate, as we know, still became a criminal and a fugitive with a heart of gold.

The question that interests me is this: In a world where all the choices were different, why did Ethan, and Kate, and Claire, and Christian, all end up making the same decisions? And those are just the ones we know about. I admit that I am excited to see what has become of all the OtherLosties as well. I think what we learn about their OtherLives is going to be the key to unlocking just what role Fate and Free Will are playing in this mind game.

However tenuous its existence, Free Will is a concept near and dear to all our hearts. Most of the time we don’t even care if it’s true or not. We just choose to believe that we have the power to choose.

The pill that Dogen wants Sayid to take must be taken willingly, or apparently it will not do its intended work. But Sayid has acquiesced his free will to Jack and is asking to be told what to do. Since being claimed, Sayid doesn’t want to think for himself any longer. So while he may take the pill willingly, if Jack tells him to, it can’t really be said that it’s Sayid’s free will that is choosing. Jack, on the other hand, does demonstrate free will when he tries to take the pill himself. But Dogen’s quick reaction immediately prevents his will from working its way.

Although Fate seems to be the power player thus far in this story, it’s impossible for us to rule out the dark horse potential of Free Will. In Season Two’s What Kate Did, one of LOST’s most enigmatic moments happened when Kate and Sawyer witnessed the dark horse in the forest. That magical image has never been explained, or even referenced, in all the episodes since.

In What Kate Does, we see these same two characters attempting to exercise their free will. Sawyer chooses to leave the temple grounds, despite Dogen’s command that he can not. Kate chooses to run after him, and she chooses to lie to Jack about her true intentions.

It’s interesting that she makes another choice in this episode – one that seems to have flown under the radar of much of the fandom. Perhaps no one expected to find it buried in the middle of an episode this way, or delivered in such an understated way, and that explains the lack of fanfare it has received. As they are about to go their separate ways in the jungle, Jin asks, “Who do you care about, Kate?”

Kate’s answer is that she is going with Sawyer, that she has lied about bringing him back, and that she intends for him and her to figure things out “together” from here on out. Jin is now the only other person who knows that, in the interminable question of “Jack or Sawyer”, Kate has finally made her choice.

The only problem, of course, is that Sawyer has also made his. While Kate has finally made up her mind about where her heart lies, Sawyer has just shut down his heart and thrown it into the bottom of the sea. Sawyer doesn’t want to be together with anything but his memories right now. The trauma of Juliet’s death has convinced him that he is meant to be alone. Just as we saw him do in Confidence Man, he has shut Kate out and marooned himself on the island of his own despair.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path. - Buddha

It is impossible for me to believe that any character will be left entirely alone at the end of this tale. An episode about Kate reminds us of her connections to Sawyer and to Aaron, and through Aaron to Claire, and through Claire to Ethan and Rousseau, and through Rousseau to Sayid, and through Sayid to Ben, and through Ben to Jacob. The characters write one anothers stories. The past stories we have seen on LOST echo back into the story as we continue going forward. The unknown new reality bleeds into the reality we thought we knew all along. Everything is fluid. All the elements are still in flux. They haven’t started yet to cohere into one consistent truth.

We’re still being peppered with questions.

What took place on the Island during the dead zone of 2004 – 2007, when none of the Losties were there? We know the timeline up until 2004 is still in place, since Aldo makes an appearance to remind us of his encounter with Kate in Season Three’s Not in Portland.

Why does he keep telling his buddy to shut up? What is the big secret?

And speaking of dates,why was the date on Aaron’s sonogram exactly one month later than the fateful Flight 815’s original date? Is everything in OtherLOST off by a factor of +1?

We don’t have time to stop and linger over the questions that never stop multiplying. The playing pieces are moving around the board now. The game is in motion. Claire has been brought back onto the board, remodeled into someone intriguingly different.

Sawyer has called a time out.

Kate has finally focussed all her better angels and has begun her final quest.

Jack is still downloading input from Destiny Central, but it seems only a matter of time until he makes a bold gambit.

We know they are all cross Island from the psychodrama still unfolding in and around Jacob’s bloody foot. What will happen when their worlds collide with that of NotJohnLocke?

At the same time, the co-reality of OtherLOST seems poised to begin spiraling around and into the reality of our Island as we’ve known it. I haven’t got the faintest frakking clue what’s going on around here, but damn! This thing is fascinating.

“… all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story …” - Haroun and the Sea of Stories

It’s a running joke that LOST is the TV show that keeps its fans perpetually starved and begging for answers. Well, it’s not really a joke … because it’s true. But this is the final season – time for the answers to start creeping out from under their hiding places, time for the story to start rumbling in for a landing.

So, now that we’ve seen the big gala premiere episode, how does it feel? Does it feel like it’s all starting to come together?

Hell, no! The two hour episode wound through multiple realities and story twists, only to end on a resurrected Sayid’s question: “What happened?” Good question! One we’re not getting the answer to anytime soon. Because, seriously, just to show how eternally screwed we all are: We waited eight months to find out what happened when Juliet hit the bomb and we still don’t know for sure whether or not it went off!

We saw that Kate had landed softly in the top of a tree.

And we found out that Juliet was miraculously still alive and squeaking after hugging herself around an H-Bomb while it (maybe) exploded in her face.

But the Island under everyone’s feet was fundamentally undisturbed. Juliet, last seen perpetually falling down into the abyss, was now only a few feet under ground. And she wasn’t buried in Radzinsky’s construction site. She was crushed under the rubble of the Swan Hatch as it had been when Desmond imploded it in 2004.

The Bomb Squad had time jumped, quite conveniently, to 2007, where all their friends were waiting on the beach to synch up storylines with them. But they hadn’t managed to unmake time so that whatever happened didn’t happen. So Jack’s plan didn’t work, right?

Right. Except for the part where it totally did!

And you know what that means, right? It means they went there.

“For every story, there is an anti-story” – Haroun and the Sea of Stories

In addition to still being on Craphole Island circa 2007, Jack and Locke and all their frenemies were also getting a do over on Flight 815, heading into LAX from Sydney Airport on a beautiful sunny September 22, 2004. Having exhausted the paradoxical quandaries of time travel stories, the intrepid writers of LOST have decided to boldly go to pretty much the only place they haven’t been before: Alternate/Parallel/Coexisting Realities. Which means that for all the devotedly bewildered watchers of LOST, the questions that need to be answered … just doubled.

If you’re in this thing for the Answers, you might as well set your DVR and come back in June. But if you’re up for another epic entanglement with a many headed Question Monster, then gird your loins and get ready to do battle. The questions in this story are like Whack a Mole. Hit one down and a new one pops up. Questions like:

How did the Island sink underwater? And when? In 1977, when the bomb did/didn’t go off? Then how did everyone not drown? Are they going to have to go back and find a way to resurrect Atlantis? Or is Season Six going to be the story of how they sunk it?

Is the Dharma Shark happy that he has the whole town to himself now?

Why was Desmond on the plane? And then not on the plane? Was Jack the only one who could see Desmond, the way only Hurley could see Jacob? Since he left someone who was snoring, and since Rose was sleeping the whole time he was there, is he some kind of Dream-Desmond?

What does it mean that Sayid was resurrected from a pool of water that had turned dirty?

Is he still Sayid? Or is he some kind of cousin to the creature who now possesses John Locke’s body?

And what does that tell us about Ben’s visit to the Temple in 1977? What really happened to young Ben inside the Temple?

And if we find out later that Sayid isn’t really Sayid any more, will that mean that Ben hasn’t ever actually been Ben?

What’s up with this Cindy chick? Is she like a permanent Other, or just an opportunistic beeyotch who always finds a way to hook up with the kool kidz?

Was there any particular reason that so much of the story in the alt-world took place inside small public toilets?

Should we be upset that Hurley is wearing the biggest Red Shirt ever made?

What does it mean that he was carrying a big old symbol of eternal life in his guitar case,

… and the first thing the Shogun dude did was break it?

Doesn’t that seem like a bad sign?

Why is the Man in Locke so mad at Richard? And what is he disappointed about?

And what chains did Richard used to be in?

How did Jacob die from a stab wound, when his God-Twin is impervious to bullets?

And speaking of Jacob, how can it be that Jack never heard about him before this? Doesn’t everybody know Jacob by now?

Did the Jack who was on the plane remember the Jack who was on the Island?

And did he have a personality transplant? All of a sudden he’s the most mellow fellow on the Island. He even stood by and let them drown Sayid!

This new Zen Jack seems to share a personality in common with the pleasant, friendly Jack we saw on the plane landing at LAX. Is Jack going to be the conduit between these two worlds? And the most shocking question of all: am I going to have to start liking Jack?

Whoa! We are clearly not in Kansas anymore. But, hey, at least we’re out of DharmaTown!

I think the place to start is with some nomenclature. This is not going to be easy. Damon Lindelof has cautioned against regarding this new off island storyline as an “alternate” universe, saying that ” We don’t use the phrase “alternate reality,” because to call one of them an “alternate reality” is to infer that one of them isn’t real, or one of them is real and the other is the alternate to being real.” So in the interest of keeping this whole thing true to his creative vision, I’ve decided to call this off island world OtherLOST. I think that kind of sums it up, without in any way implying that it’s inauthentic or less real.

I’ve also read that Darlton consider this season, in contrast to last season’s “graduate course in physics”, to be instead a “graduate course in the humanities”. I really like that idea. I want to go back to the Season One glory days when discussing this story inevitably revolved around issues that were philosophical and ethical and theological, when no crazy question or wild ass story arc took precedence over learning more about these wonderful characters. And I take them at their word that’s where this is all going. But for now, trying to figure out this first Season Six episode, I find myself going back inevitably, however reluctantly, to good old fashioned Quantum Physics. My (not at all) favorite subject.

In 1935, an Austrian physicist named Erwin Schrodinger felt the need to develop a thought experiment, or gedanken, because he had a quibble with some of his buddies about their theories of quantum mechanics. He wished to question the argument that a physical system only resolved all of its possible states once a measurement, or an observation, of its actual state was made. To do this, he invented a hypothetical “diabolical mechanism”, where a hypothetical cat was in a hypothetical box. The box was rigged with a silent but deadly hypothetical device that had exactly a 50/50 chance of going off and killing the cat.

There would be no way for anyone outside the box to know if the cat had been killed or not. Therefore, until the cat was observed to be either alive or dead … he was both! Basically, until we observe a specific reality, all possible realities are equally true. And unless I’m mistaken (which is definitely one possible reality) I think that’s where we are headed this season on OtherLOST.

Jack’s plan didn’t work.

And Jack’s plan worked.

At the same time.

Juliet is dead.

And Juliet is alive, looking for someone to split the tab with her at Starbucks.

Desmond was on the plane.

And Desmond wasn’t on the plane.

Jack argued with an Oceanic lackey and his father’s body got put on the plane.

Jack argued with an Oceanic lackey and his father’s body has become lost in time and space.

We should probably all try to be like Gedanken Desmond. As he said to Jack “Nice to meet ya. Or to see you again.”

It seems to me the first place to start understanding OtherLOST is to think of it as a system, one with common elements – our characters. All the possible states they could ever have been in are equally real … until some yet-to-be-made observation causes this fantastic world of infinite possibilities to collapse into one consistent reality. For right now, we’re flickering between two LOSTs. There’s LOST and there’s OtherLOST. It might just be a passing fling, but at the moment, I’m finding OtherLOST a whole lot more seductive. It’s a puzzle, after all, and I’ve never quite figured out how you can be a LOST fan if you don’t appreciate a good puzzle.

OtherLOST intrigues me. It’s the same, but it’s not. It’s not opposite world exactly, even though Charlie switched haircuts with Jack.

Some of the differences are pretty stark. Hurley went from being cursed to being the self described luckiest man alive.

Jack has gone from being a tightwound control freak to being, like, normal. OtherLOST looks good on Jack. He’s boozing less.

It’s him that has fear of flying this time, instead of Rose.

And he has no problem graciously accepting her advice that he should “let go now.” He’s actually … dare I say it … kind of … nice.

Hey there, OtherJack. Pleased to meet ya.

Rose and Bernard aren’t much different, but they are safe and happy together on the plane. Which is different.

With all due respect to the emotional tone deafness of LOST’s fanboy recappers, the Sawyer we see on the plane is subtly, but unmistakably, a different man. He’s not glowering at anyone. He’s polite, friendly, helpful … especially to Kate.

I think he’s being entirely sincere when he advises Hurley to shut his trap about his lottery loot when he’s in public. So do you think OtherSawyer killed that shrimp guy in Australia? I’m going to guess that answer is an obvious No.

OtherBoone is sans Shannon, and he also isn’t suffering from post-incestuous stress syndrome.

Locke appears unchanged.

Still crippled, still sad. But he seems melancholy more than miserable. And he’s somehow more peacefully philosophical, more secure in himself, less bitter.

He still likes to examine diagrams and charts.

And he claims to have gone on an actual Walkabout this time. That seems unlikely, even in OtherLOST, but when he describes what he did in the outback – “We slept under the stars and made our own fires, hunted our own food.” – it kind of does sound like what they just spent the last five years doing on the Island.

Hmmm.

Most of the differences are subtle, and probably still hidden. I really enjoyed the OtherLOST scenes because they began to feel like a subtle dance, with little bubbles of mystery popping up in unexpected places. I am officially intrigued.

Sayid is still gazing at Nadia’s photo, but he has an Iranian passport now. So what does that mean? Did he defect from the Revolutionary Guard? Is he a traitor now? Is he looking at the woman he lost or the woman who’s going to pick him up at the airport?

Kate is still a murderer, and she’s on the run, which feels the same … except that in OtherLOST, she’s no longer interested in the Halliburton case.

What happened? Did she and OtherTom never bury the plane? Or did they just never dig it up?

The numbers were still lurking around, but like everything else, they were just a little bit off. Jack’s seat on Flight815 is enshrined in LOST history as Seat No. 23. But on OtherLOST, by my counting, the row he was sitting in was No. 24. Maybe that’s the Other23.

Charlie is still a junkie in OtherLOST.

This time he tried to swallow his drugs for safekeeping, rather than pour them down the toilet. Jack came to his rescue, but for some reason he bypassed the more obvious Heimlich maneuver and went for the surgical method of heroin baggie removal. Maybe there are no first aid posters in OtherLOST.

OtherCharlie was saved, but as he resentfully reminded OtherJack: “I was supposed to die.”

It seems that some things don’t change, whatever reality we find ourselves in.

Jack didn’t seem to remember how he got that sore on his neck. And we were wondering along with him, because we don’t know either. Although it did look a bit like the wound that Faraday got when he was nicked by a bullet in The Variable. Did it mean anything that Jack only saw the sore in the mirror? Maybe, it’s both there and not there. It’s a Schrodinger’s sore.

Maybe the mirror itself was the clue. Maybe this time they’ve all passed through a different kind of looking glass. But OtherLOST isn’t a place of symmetric reversals. Many things were changed, but many weren’t.

Jin is still an uptight prick, still carrying Mr. Paik’s watch and a large sum of cash to LA, where presumably he still intends to bail on his father-in-law and disappear into some California Koreatown.

Unless she’s also still a liar, OtherSun can’t speak English. So, no Jae in her past. And no dreams of her own either. Poor OtherSun. Whipped, in any dimension.

OtherFlight 815 still went off course and flew over the latitude and longitude of the now sunken Island. That didn’t change.

Christian Shephard had obviously still gone to Australia and died there. And Jack was not feeling too kindly towards him, seeing as he wanted to cannonball his body from the plane straight into an open grave within two hours of landing. So the much beloved Shephard family dynamic appears to be intact.

The causal chains that brought each of the OtherLosties onto Flight815 were all different, some a lot different, some only a little. But somehow they all ended up again in Sydney, Australia looking to get on a flight to LA. Cause and effect had conspired to get them all into exactly the same place. Well, not all of them. Most of them. I’m not sure Claire was there. Or Michael or Walt or some others. But then again, maybe they were. Since we didn’t observe them, their superpositions haven’t yet collapsed into any concrete reality. See? That’s how this is going to work. Maybe.

What changed to make the characters so different? And what stayed the same? Was it a kind of butterfly effect, where one change set off an unpredictable new chain of cause and effect? Or are we also dealing with a Many Worlds fantasy now? Is this kind of like how the location of a rainbow changes depending on the location of the person who is observing the rainbow?

Or maybe we can go back to Schrodinger’s poor kitty for a minute. Instead of the cat being both alive and dead until observed, let’s imagine that at some point the cat dies … and at that same point, it also lives! Whenever a choice is made, the world branches out into two things – the thing that happened, and the thing that could have happened, but didn’t. Only now it does. Whatever happened, happened. And whatever didn’t happen … also happened!

And this goes on and on into infinity, so that the universe is made up of infinitely decohering realities. It’s mind blowing, and it has absolutely no practical application to life as we live it, but it’s a great way to take your imagination out for a ride.

When Desmond sits down next to Jack on the plane, he is carrying a book. I hope every LOST fan knows by now that you have to rewind the DVR whenever a book shows up, because trust me, you’re expected to know these things. The book is Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

Haroun lost his temper and shouted: ‘What’s the point of it? What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?

The story begins in a city “so ruinously sad it had forgotten its name”, a city that finds its name and is saved by a wonderful thing – the power of imagination, and of stories. Salman Rushdie lists as his inspirations two literary influences that we are very familiar with on LOST – Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. But he also lists a third, The Arabian Nights, which is a book we’ve never really seen referenced on LOST before. Until now.

That is – if you want to compare this years bunch of random mooks to Arabians. Whatever we call them, we have met the Season Six Tailies/Others/FreighterFolk/Dharma-ites. It’s like the props department wanted to use up all their spare parts, so they dumped everything into the multicultural mixmaster, and came up with something that had a kind of Apocalypse Now meets the Planet of the Apes feel to it.

I don’t know how to describe these people. It was kind of like John Lennon was translating for Shang Tsung at Indiana Jones’s Temple of Doom while the Mad Max children from Tomorrowland served cookies for everyone.

WTF are these people doing there and why have we never seen them before? … Ah, it wouldn’t be a new season of LOST if we didn’t get to ask that question at least once, would it?

I’ve got to admit, I was underwhelmed by this season’s choice of Others. But they obviously went to a lot of trouble to build that wicked looking temple thingie, and there’s got to be something about all this that will mean something to us at some point. So I’ll give it a shot. This heretofore unseen gigantic palace in the middle of the Island had obviously been built above the place where we had seen the Smoke Monster drag Rousseau’s crew underground. In the bowels of the temple, Kate and Hurley find a copy of Kierkegaards “Fear and Trembling”, and you know what that means. Book Alert!

This is a book about Faith, which uses the Biblical story of Abraham obeying God by murdering his son to illustrate the many difficulties that arise when a man resolves to have Faith in that which is Absurd. Certainly as LOST fans we can identify with that. And in the great LOST tradition of bastardizing all the faiths of the world and using them as chum for the story, this Angkor Wat knockoff had within it what looked like a Jewish mikveh – a ritual bath of purification. Now where else other than LOST can you find two things like that in the same place?

Sayid figured his soul wasn’t headed to a good place, and it turns out he was right. He was taken in for his baptism and they didn’t take him out until the bubbles stopped coming up. Apparently they had to kill him in order to save him.

But why? Weren’t these guys Friends of Jacob and hadn’t Jacob ordered them to save Sayid? When they heard that Jacob was dead, they all ran out like the volunteer fire department to lay a ring of ash around their fortress, and to fire off a rocket to …

Richard?

It seems like this quasi-ancient society coexists in time with 2007 where Richard is on the beach, waiting for NotJohnLocke to come out of The Big Foot.

And even though Jacob had been living inside the Foot, the guys in the temple seemed like they were his amigos. NotJohnLocke, as we know, had just found the loophole he needed to kill his God-Twin, Jacob. After which we found out, by watching his ruthless slaughter of Ilana’s men, that the being who inhabits NotJohnLocke is also the force that we have come to know and love all these years as The Smoke Monster.

“I’m sorry you had to see me that way”

I know this was meant to be a huge revelation, but somehow I felt like we already knew that the Smoke Monster was the being who was inhabiting Locke. What we didn’t know was that the Monster doesn’t consider himself a monster at all. He may look like a coldhearted, deadeyed bastard, but all he’s trying to do is the same thing we watched Jack Shephard try to do for the first three seasons. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, he just wants to go home.

Where is his home? Is it off the Island? Is it inside the Temple where he used to drag his prey, but where he’s now kept out by a ring of ash? A ring of ash that apparently wasn’t needed until Jacob died and the Temple lost his protection? And didn’t we just see him in that Temple very recently, when he appeared to Ben as Alex and told him to obey NotJohnLocke, i.e. himself? Oy, the labyrinth of questions never ends.

Whoever he is, whatever he is, he’s the nemesis of Jacob. The black to his white. The Lucifer to his Michael. The Twin. The Other. And whatever else we know about this Battle of the Titans that’s going on just beyond the wall of our understanding, I think we can all see that these two are the Gods of the Island. If there was ever any doubt, consider this: They know everything. Jacob knew that a time traveling Jin had been with Rousseau’s crew as they were being dragged by the Smoke Monster into his lair. Where did Jacob come by that knowledge?

And his Bad Twin went him one better: He had been inside John Locke’s very mind the night he was murdered and had felt his fear and heard his dying thought.

These guys have omnipotence. They exist outside of time and space. But what is their endgame? What are they trying to accomplish? It feels like a war, but it also feels like a game.

And games, as we know, are sometimes won … and sometimes LOST.

A game has rules: In this one, you can’t hit a player when he’s inside a circle. Although, as in any good video game, there are plenty of backdoors and tricks.

And there are players. In last year’s finale, we saw how Jacob went about the process of choosing his playing pieces. He chose Ilana, Jack and Locke, Sawyer and Kate, Sun and Jin, Sayid and Hurley.

Is that why Sayid couldn’t die? Was he “killed” because he couldn’t be saved, because both his body and soul had been ruined? But then, because he’s one of the playing pieces Jacob has chosen, was it necessary to bring him back? Even if he is, technically, maybe, no longer Sayid at all? Was that why Sayid lived again after death, but Juliet – who was never chosen – had to stay dead?

I don’t know if you missed it in this episode but Juliet died. For quite some time. The Interminable Dying of St. Juliet, lasted – if you include the hiatus and all the excruciating commercials – about eight freaking months. And in the course of it, magically, her motivation shifted 180 degrees. Instead of hitting the bomb so she could never have to meet and lose her precious James, she now claimed to have only wanted to let him go home … which, I hate to tell you, could have been accomplished a whole lot more efficiently, if she’d just stayed on the damn submarine! Argh, I hate when LOST slips and insults us like that.

So, what was the point of it all? You know I really hate to bring this up – really, I do – but there’s an ugly comic book trope some of you may be familiar with – something called ” Women in Refrigerators.” The name comes from this iconic comic moment when the Green Lantern’s girlfriend is killed and stuffed in a refrigerator, thereby driving forward the adventures of the bereft heroic boyfriend. Because the hero’s story matters. And, just like Juliet’s, the refrigerator woman’s story does not.

The medical genius who went toe to toe with Ben Linus was reduced to the adoring helpmate of James LaFleur and then sent for a little spin through a meat grinder. The fact that so many online fans keep having multiple orgasms over this sexist storyline makes me sad.

The flipside trope to this comic book staple is known as “Dead Men Defrosting”, wherein when a male character is killed off, he frequently returns, altered in ways that make him even more intriguing and intrinsic to the tale. Exhibit A: Sayid Jarrah. Gender: male.

But hey, I’m not going to let a little misogyny get between me and my favorite storytellers. I just really felt it needed to be said. And besides, all is not yet lost. There are still a few women left alive around here.

Season Six Kate is showing some definite signs of returning to her longlost badassery. It will probably take awhile to wring all the Kate Hate out of this fandom, but I like that it looks like she’s finally getting her mojo back.

It was so great to see Kate back to Season One form. She was wild and brave and tough – at least OtherKate was. And on the Island, Kate seemed to be back on the side of Sawyer, which just always feels more natural.

The scene where she tenderly helped a wounded Sawyer reminded me instantly of the way she had nursed him in Collision when he was near death.

Sawyer decided he wouldn’t kill Jack after all, only let him live so he could suffer.

And once again, at least part of Jack’s suffering comes from having to sit off to the side, watching, as Kate’s affections turn to Sawyer.

That wasn’t the only scene that conjured up memories of how LOST used to be. The entire sprawling episode was glittering with inside references and callbacks and déjà vu of seasons past, especially Season One.

The sequence of the passengers disembarking in LA mirrored the famous plane boarding scene from Exodus and the same musical theme played to poignantly accent the reflection.

Familiar relationships from Season One reassembled effortlessly in OtherLOST. Boone and Locke will be friends in any universe of possibility.

Sayid and his feet of fury will always be of invaluable assistance to Jack.

Jack met the other characters in much the same order as he did in the Pilot. First Rose, then Charlie, then Kate. Only instead of stitching him up this time, Kate ripped him off.

LOL. I really like this OtherKate.

Sawyer had Kate’s back in the elevator, instinctively helping her to get free. But why did Sawyer help her? I don’t know, but I have a feeling this might be one of the more effervescent mystery bubbles in OtherLOST. Was it just me or was that look he gave her on the plane something other than flirtation? Was it maybe … recognition?

Jack’s attempt to revive Sayid mirrored his desperate Season One attempt to revive Charlie … except that this time he failed.

The Marshall got his noggin conked, which seems to be his interdimensional destiny.

Both times Jack landed at LAX, he didn’t have his father’s body to bury.

And Claire was back! I can’t wait to see what happens next between Aaron’s Two Mommies.

And of course, we got to see the true “ultimate relationship” of LOST begin to unfold before our eyes in OtherLOST.

John Locke, in his white shirt, and Jack Shephard, in his black suit, together form the kernel at the heart of this story. I don’t think that can possibly be denied at this point. The scene of them exchanging awkward looks as they left OtherFlight815 perfectly mirrored the moment in Exodus when they caught one another’s eyes upon boarding.

At the end of the episode, they met up unexpectedly in a place that made perfect sense – Lost Luggage Claims. Nothing in the entire episode was more striking than this encounter. The Island adversaries bonded in a scene that twinkled with many facets of irony.

Jack offered his services as a spinal surgeon to try and fix John’s disability. OtherLocke is still “irreparably broken.”

OtherJack is still The Fixer, but the framing felt more profound. It didn’t feel like the same old controlling obsession we remember from Jack.

It felt like … Redemption. “Nothing is irreversible”, he said, and somehow that sounded like a motto we’re going to need to remember as we continue on. But what will end up being reversed? Which reality needs to be fixed?

John was gentle and helpful to the distressed Jack, and reminded him of something that’s very important in this story. Jack hadn’t lost his father, only his father’s body.

It’s something we need to keep in mind as we continue this beguiling journey. It’s not the surface that matters, not the things we can see.

Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.- The Little Prince

The soul is not bound to the carcass it inhabits. As John Locke’s story has shown us, the body itself is only a vessel. OtherJohn had lost his knives, the body that carried the soul of his manhood. But in our Island tale, a knife was the instrument of NotJohnLocke’s vengeful spirit. Which will it be in the end of our story, when it finally winds down to the ending that must come?

I don’t jump to the conclusion, like many have, that NotJohnLocke is evil and Jacob is good. I don’t know if the Island is even meant to be seen as a place that is either evil or good. Despite the constant references to black and white contrasts, I’m not settled on the idea that Western style bi-polar morality is where this story is eventually headed.

One of the logical deductions of the Many Worlds Interpretation is that morality is irrelevant. Whether good or evil is done, whatever the consequences may be, whatever happens … it’s just another branching point, a different set of consequences, a new chain of cause and effect. No reality has dominance over another. No outcome is superior or more desirable. Everything just is what it is.

It’s a good Zen concept to take into the season I think. It’s time to drop our expectations and predictions and just start bobbing along for the ride. The story has gotten more complex, more inscrutable, more impossible. And that has to be by design. I’m reminded of last season’s Book Club Selection: Everything That Rises Must Converge. A title that hearkens to the theory of the Omega Point, where a universe of ever increasing diversity ultimately converges into a state of transcendent unity of consciousness.

Yeah, I know LOST isn’t going to ever be able to hit a philosophical point that sophisticated, but I do think they’re headed in that general direction. Since we started with physics, but we’ve been promised a season moored in the humanities, it might be good to remember the words of a great genius who well represented that rare combination.

Obviously, I’ve got high hopes for this season. I’m willing to look past some of the glitches and kitschy misteps, at least for now, as long as I still get the sense that the story is reaching for the stars. I’m not sure John Locke’s dying thought was all that sad: “I don’t understand.” Well, who does? Certainly noone who is currently watching LOST. But that’s ok. If we understood it all right now, what fun would that be?

I’m strapped in for the season. Looks like it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

As season 6 fades in from white we see a familiar scene. Jack, plagued by deja-vu, has been transported to moments before the Oceanic crash… There are many subtle differences here from the first time we saw this, a side by side comparison is here: Side-By-Side Comparison

Ive been a long time speculator that the opening of Jacks eye in the season 1 pilot gave the same sense of deja-vu and always thought this wasnt the first time weve done this… In fact if you play the pilot opening scene the way they showed the ALT timeline scene on the plane it has much of the same effect…
So whats different? well for starters Jack didn’t seem as keenly aware the first time around. We see a major role reversal here as Jack is the one panicked to Rose’s comforting. Cindy, our stewardess, hands Jack a single bottle of Vodka rather than two, and this time it will be their little secret rather than breaking some FAA regulations… When Rose said “you can let go now” I got a strong sense of how this will be an essential theme to the rest of this season…

When Jack returns from the bathroom Desmond has sat in the seat next to Jack and in the brief few lines Henry Ian Cusick delivers he steals the screen. Not only has Desmond never made it to the Island to forget to push the button which will crash Oceanic 815, but the Island itself, it reveals, has been submerged under the water under some yet unknown circumstance.

So the internet chatter was right on, an alternate time-line has been created, the only logical new narrative device, however our Losties who detonated the bomb have been catapulted back to their respective time and must now suffer the consequences of the detonation.

Sawyer steals the show in these early scenes. His character development has been extraordinary throughout five season’s which really makes us feel for Sawyer in a genuine way. Another thing I would like to note is that Josh Holloway has had his own evolution in his acting, In season one Holloway seemed like a soap opera actor to me however he has truly come into his own and delivers some of the most powerful scenes in this episode. It was difficult though to watch Juliet die again and again, between re-watching season 5’s finale and the recap ep and then the previously on Lost i feel like I watched Juliet die a hundred times. Josh Holloway is awesome when he gets the chance to really act like this…

The scenes on the plane are great for nostalgia, getting to see many of our favorite losties who have fallen on the way is great. We find that this ALT reality is alot like a mirrored image of what took place the first time around. Shannon has not come with Boone, Locke got to go on his walkabout, Hurley is lucky… etc….

After Richard and Ben scuffle over Lockes dead body we find FLOCKE sitting inside the statue in Jacobs place… This is the first time I have really seen FLOCKE as perhaps the good guy in the story. We are told this episode that FLOCKE is really the smoke monster, which many had guessed. Some have refused to accept that he is in fact smokie however Darleton did confirm this last night on Kimmel to a crowd of people who gasped when they said it as the show was pre-recorded and none of the audience had seen it yet….

Anyway, what do we know about smokie? Smokie seems to be protecting the island, ridding it from the unworthy inhabitants while allowing those who have achieved redemption to thrive… It obviously serves its own agenda as Locke was able to walk, we can assume this was a move that was thought of several moves ahead and was essential if MIB was to succeed in convincing Locke to take his own life in order for smokie to take his shape, and all this was done so that Ben could fall from grace and suffer the humility that would ultimately lead to him CHOOSING to kill Jacob. In that respect EVERYTHING down to Bens Cancer was all moves in the game…

And what do we know about Jacob? Well he seems like the good guy, wearing white and all, however what are his motives? He keeps bringing people to the island, while MIB thinks this is futile. It seems however that even dying was a move made by Jacob played off of the moves played by MIB/SMOKIE/FLOCKE…. Jacob’s death was part of a series of moves that he had accepted and countered. (more on this later)

When FLOCKE tells Bram that Jacob is dead he tells him, you can go now, your free…. (sounds like “you can let go now” doesn’t it) He says, I have GOOD news, there is nothing for you to protect….

It was at this point I again started giggling with excitement over how awesome this show is… haha – Then Flocke goes off camera, a bullet hits him and falls to the ground and smokie kicks some bodyguard butt…

Emerson who’s character has fallen a few tiers plays the confused, bewildered Ben to perfection, quite the opposite of the Ben we grew to love to hate.

And with Locke being escorted off the plane in a wheelchair part 1 comes to a close… Check back soon for Part 2!

www.TheSanatorium.com

This is it, folks. We’ve finally come to the end of the beginning of LOST. It’s taken me longer than expected to finish this Reset Rewatch, but I’m sure you all can understand. What with the job and the kids, the holidays, the houseguests, the online outbreaks of hiatus induced hysteria … nothing is ever as easy as you think it’ll be.

The original purpose of my Reset Rewatch was to go back across old terrain with an eye towards the future, to try and glean some clues perhaps hidden in the Season One pirate’s map that might point towards the buried treasure chest of LOST secrets that’s finally about to be uncovered.

No one can ever say it hasn’t been an entertaining voyage. Rewatching Exodus, even all these years later, is like watching a most excellent two hour film. As the culmination to one of the finest seasons of television ever, it’s hard to imagine one way it could have been better. The great iconic moments all still inspire the same awe.

The majestic launch of the raft.

Walt’s capture by the fiendish Others.

The jawdropping awe of seeing the Black Rock for the first time .

Aaron’s first post-birth kidnapping.

The assumption of Arzt into heaven.

Smokey’s first attempt to bodysnatch John Locke.

And of course, the blowing open of the Swan Hatch -

- the big hole that would be our entrance into the labyrinth which would end up at that same big hole at the end of Season Five, this time being blown up from the inside out.

We didn’t know it yet, but the great spiral of interlocking storytelling loops was beginning right then and there in the moment the Hatch was blown. It was an even bigger moment than we could ever have imagined. Like every episode in Season One, however, this one was more than just the sum of its mindblowing parts. I think of Season One as LOST B. F. – LOST Before Fanboys. Yeah, I know they existed back then, but in good old 2005, LOST was very much a mass viewing experience, a shared pop cultural phenomenon that all kinds of people could enjoy. We buzzed it about across cubicle walls and dinner tables and in queues and on barstools. It’s hard to remember that now when it seems like most hardcore LOST fans have become internet exiles, each of us isolated in our laptop cells, tapping out our esoteric theories to one another on the keyboard shaped walls of our echo chambers.

We used to actually talk about LOST to other people. And it’s easy to see why. Season One had mysteries and secrets and supernatural phenomena … but far more than that, it had Heart.

It had Soul.

Above all, it had people that we could really care about. Namely these fourteen unique and irreplaceable people who had all fallen out of the sky together.

There really has never been another character on LOST that I’ve cared about as much as I cared about that little group. And that’s probably because in Season One so much painstaking effort was taken to make them real to us, to make us care.

We watched Walt and Michael grow from angry strangers to a father and son bound by more than mere DNA. In trying to decode the mystery of his very special boy, Michael had begun to unlock the secrets to himself.

Walt gave Michael’s life a meaning it had never had before. It ennobled him and made him want to do great deeds. We know now it ended disastrously, with Michael being driven first crazy, then dead, and we know that in spite of all the love that grew between them, Michael’s pre-flight plea to his mother to take this awful kid off his hands

is exactly how it all turned out anyway.

All during Season One this had been one daddy issue that seemed to be headed for a happy ending. Alas, like so many hoped for happy endings on LOST, it was never meant to be.

Jin and Sun’s brittle marriage had shattered before our eyes into a million tiny papercuts of missed communication.

But Sun knit it back together with the book of translation she made for Jin as he was leaving on the raft.

There were tearful apologies and a final kiss before the Kwon marriage of misfortune began another hopeless separation.

Shannon first encountered Sayid as a generically suspicious Arab leaving his baggage near her chair,

and she did her patriotic post 9/11 duty by reporting him to the authorities.

But a few weeks later, her safe, snotty world had evaporated around her. Now it was Sayid she was depending on to help her cope with her mounds of baggage – both the literal and the metaphorical kind.

Charlie started his journey as the kind of soulless junkie who would beat up a woman for a one inch ball of smack.

But we’d watched him evolve, watched him kick his habit, watched him become a real blood and guts hero-man,

watched him evolve into the kind of grown up who would risk his own life to protect a young madonna and her helpless babe.

Of course Claire wasn’t the only Madonna that Charlie was in love with,

and as the season ended we knew that this very human love triangle still had a lot more story left to give.

Jack’s progress towards becoming the Supreme Leader of the survivors was the most predictable story arc, but it was coherent and also real. People had sought psychological shelter under the umbrella of the AMA approved Captain America, and he had truly grown into the role.

He was even able to deal diplomatically with a schnook like Dr. Leslie Arzt, professor emeritus of Kabloom College.

And like the unflappable hero he’d become, Jack took it right in stride when the good Doctor Artz ended up as nothing more than a glob of schmutz on his T shirt.

Sawyer’s story arc, on the other hand, was the opposite of predictable.

He had subtly but miraculously morphed over the course of the season from a self centered asshole and destroyer of families

to the kind of shining knight who would take a bullet for another man’s child. He claimed that “I ain’t no hero” but only the flattest interpretation would agree with that.

He proved his worth to his shipmates by cutting the mast for them swiftly in their hour of need. Once on board the raft, he dove overboard without a second thought to salvage the rudder.

And all that was even before he got shot trying to save Walt or swam through shark infested waters to help Michael. It’s always strange to me when I read descriptions of Wimpy Jim the Flower from Season Five as if that was somehow the “heroic” version of Sawyer, as if he’d just suddenly stopped being an asshole when he put on a stay-prest Dharma jumpsuit and ironed his hair flat.

The complex and colorful part of Sawyer’s hero’s journey had begun years and years before, in the earliest episodes of LOST, and it has spanned all the seasons. It’s mind boggling to me that so many managed to miss it for so long.

Jack and Sawyer, the yin yang man candy of LOST, had their very own iconic moment in this episode.

Sawyer told the story of the night he’d met a masochistic Boston Red Sox fan in a Sydney bar (leaving out the whole mistake murder part that came after) and how Christian had cried in his rotgut, wishing he’d told his wonderful doctor son how much he loved him.

Jack pinched back tears and finally melted down into all out man-jears bawling over the lost chance he’d never have to forgive his dear old drunken Dad. It was without a doubt LOST’s gayest scene ever.

First Season Sawyer was so unspeakably HOT that I think even Jack was checking him out.

See what I mean?

But for truly iconic moments, nothing can compare to the Man of Science and the Man of Faith facing down for LOST’s most profoundly seminal conversation.

Jack and John, the same named pair at the core of the story, together form the two halves of LOST’s true OTP – One True Protagonist.

Neither carries the story alone and neither makes much sense without the other. Their discussion just before opening the hatch may well turn out to contain the whole story of LOST in its nutshell.

LOCKE: Do you think we crashed on this place by coincidence — especially, this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason, all of us. Each one of us was brought here for a reason.
JACK: Brought here? And who brought us here, John?
LOCKE: The island. The island brought us here.

LOCKE: Boone was a sacrifice that the island demanded. What happened to him at that plane was a part of a chain of events that led us here — that led us down a path — that led you and me to this day, to right now.
JACK: And where does that path end, John?
LOCKE: The path ends at the hatch. The hatch, Jack — all of it — all of it happened so that we could open the hatch.

JACK: I don’t believe in destiny.
LOCKE: Yes, you do. You just don’t know it yet.

This conversation felt, at that given point in time, like the distillation of what LOST was going to be about – faith, fate and the eternal question of whether or not there exists such a thing as free will. Years later, and many meandering plot lines under the bridge, it all feels much less clear to me than it did back then. Jack, circa Season One, did not believe in Destiny. Jack, circa Season Five, had so much blind faith in Destiny that he was willing to drop a hydrogen bomblet into a hole beneath his feet just because the Destiny Fairy told him to. I have to admit I don’t get it.

What happened to create this sea change? Sure, Jack became convinced along the way that the Island he’d crash landed on was magical and mystical and not beholden to the laws of the physical universe. But how was that a difficult conclusion? I mean, I think we all realized that around the time Christian Shephard first appeared under the banyan tree in Walkabout. Or maybe even earlier, when the Pilot ended up on the ceiling of the jungle, ripped to bloody shreds. So Jack finally came around to accepting what should have been obvious to a slightly intelligent five year old. Good for him. But where’s the philosophical analysis and deconstruction of the meaning of Destiny in all that? How is any of it about Jack’s Destiny, since the same otherworldly mind frak is happening to everyone else at the same time? Perhaps that is the question they’ve been waiting to dig into in Season Five. And if the whole thing is about Destiny, then what exactly does the concept of Destiny mean? What does it mean within the context of LOST?

The concept of Destiny dictates that the future is fixed and immutable. Free Will is irrelevant, since it is always the predestined future that determines what must happen in the past. Since only one outcome is possible, all the illusions of choice and free will that bring us to that outcome are fated and predetermined. We only feel like autonomous beings in a world where Destiny rules. In point of fact, we are never anything more than Destiny’s puppets.

But such an idea is unacceptable to our psyches. We refuse to even consider the possibility that all of the decision making and contemplating and opinionating we fill our lives with is fundamentally irrelevant.

In ancient times, mankind didn’t dwell too much on the complications of this question. They made it simple. Instead of Destiny, they put their faith in the unalterable Will of God. People had free will – they could either choose to obey the Will of God, and be rewarded forever in the land of milk and honey, or they could choose to transgress against the Will of God, and enjoy a nice long vacation in the fiery pits of hell. I’m really not sure if “free” applies to this kind of choice, but that’s as far as the old timers cared to think it through. For them all the free choice belonged to God, and it was up to him to pick which people he’d designate as The Chosen Ones.

This final episode of Season One was named Exodus, after the second book of the biblical Old Testament. This ponderous book begins with the Israelites, the descendants of Jacob, exiled – much like our Losties – in a land where they do not belong and are not wanted. When it comes to iconic moments, the biblical Exodus is a book filled with some of literature’s greatest – the plagues visited upon the Egyptians, the parting of the Red Sea for the Chosen People, God’s delivery to Moses of the famous Ten Commandments and the endless journey of the Israelites through the desert to the Promised Land, the place that Moses is allowed to see … but never enter.

This episode is filled with winks and nods to the great Book. First of all, and most obviously, this was the episode where Aaron receives his name. Claire first blurts it out almost as if someone else is speaking through her. She tells Sun she doesn’t know what it means, and the implication is that she doesn’t know why she has chosen it. It’s almost like her baby was destined to be named Aaron, which would be all the more ironic given that Claire states plainly that Destiny is something that she, like her brother from another mother, doesn’t believe in. But in the Old Testament, whatever else the name may mean, Aaron is the faithful and ever helpful brother of Moses, the great hero of the Book of Exodus.

In Exodus 2:22, Moses calls himself “a stranger in a strange land” and I’m not sure if you remember, or if you want to remember, but that just happens to be exactly the title of the episode where we learned the meaning of Jack’s sexy and beautiful tattoos.

We’ve also heard Jack referred to directly as Moses – by Naomi, in Through the Looking Glass. Is it possible that is a connection we’ll see revisited? Or was that whole cultural reference played out the first time Jack (didn’t) lead his people off the Island?

God appointed Moses to lead the Israelites by speaking to him through the Burning Bush, a flaming bush that never burned up. Rousseau explains away her scratches (scratches we now know she’d gotten trying to rescue a drugged up kidnapped Claire from Ethan) as scars from a Bush.

Once the Israelites were given the ok to head out across the Red Sea, the Lord took on the form of “pillar of smoke” to lead them along the way.

It wasn’t just that the Israelites were being led by a smoke signal. God himself was the Pillar of Smoke. When Moses had a question or something, The Smoke would come over and talk things over with him.

And all the people saw the smoky pillar stand at the tabernacle door: and all the people rose up and worshipped, every man at his tent door. And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend. – Exodus 33: 10-11

The column of smoke looked ominous on the horizon and it convinced Jack in a heartbeat that all the people on the beach had to be hidden away somehow. It turned out in the end that Rousseau had probably manufactured the smoke herself, to fake the scenario that allowed her to snatch Baby Aaron. But putting it here, a “pillar of smoke” in an episode named Exodus, was an early reference to the fact that Smoke is the form that bodiless deities like to assume on LOST, at least when they’re trying to cover a lot of ground quickly.

Or when they’re in a mood to show off their full power and glory.

Smoke is all over this episode – in the way Arzt disappears in a puff of it, in the way the Hatch is blown, in the way the Raft is obliterated.

Smoke is a destroyer, but on LOST, as in the Bible, Smoke is also the chosen incarnation of The Lord.

Rousseau identified the Smoke Monster as the Island’s “security system”. Locke had a different experience. First the Monster stared straight down into his soul through his goggle eyes, as it had in Walkabout.

Then it tried desperately to drag him into its lair and devour him. But the really strange thing is – Locke wanted to go!

He kept telling Jack to let him go, that he’d “be alright.” It was like he already knew he belonged down there with that thing, that his Destiny was to join with the Smoke.

In the years since, we’ve come to see that Rousseau’s crew had had the same experience, with a vastly different outcome.

It might be a good place here to go into all the ways Rousseau’s story was later illustrated for us, all the way from Montand’s stray arm to the murder of her crew, but sadly there just isn’t time to cram in everything that might be said about this episode. Suffice to say the writers could have made Rousseau’s story consistent with the past version, but they chose for whatever reason to make it slightly different. But the tragic essence remains: one way or another The Smoke ate Rousseau’s crew.

“I had no choice. They were already lost. What would have happened if we were rescued? I couldn’t let that happen. I won’t.”

Jack was more successful than Rousseau in freeing his man. He had the bright idea to drop a stick of dynamite down the hole … which miraculously caused the Smoke Monster to race through its tunnels and flee back out into the jungle sky.

This plan worked so well for them that I wonder why they never followed through on the implications. If the Smoke Monster could be chased away by common explosives, didn’t that indicate a certain vulnerability to natural forces? Or maybe I’m not giving Jack enough credit. Maybe he did remember it. Maybe deep in the back of his mind, he had retained the idea that dropping massive explosives blindly into open holes can somehow make things all right.

The next time we saw Jack near a hole with explosive in hand, it was Juliet who was getting sucked in.

But it wasn’t Smokey who was pulling at her and she didn’t want to be let go to meet her Destiny and I’m pretty sure, though we don’t know for sure, that whatever blew up in that hole didn’t set her free. A familiar theme was reprised in Juliet’s death scene but the stakes had risen. Both the holes and the firepower have changed in scale over the past five years.

Smoke is not the only common element between the Book of Exodus and this episode called Exodus. Rousseau stole Aaron allegedly because she wanted to protect him from the Others who, she warned, were coming “to take the boy”.

To keep him from being kidnapped, she kidnapped him herself. But there was never any threat to Aaron. It was a different boy the Others wanted to take. It was Walt.

Walt’s heartrending cries for “Dad!” to rescue him, as his Dad could do nothing but stand by impotently, stuck with me longer than the mystery of the hatch. Nothing horrifies more than the sight of a child ripped from a parent’s arms to a dreadful fate. And in the first third of the Book of Exodus, that’s what it all came down to – the taking of the boys.

“That same night I will pass through Egypt and kill the first-born son in every family and the first-born male of all animals. I am the Lord, and I will punish the gods of Egypt.” – Exodus 12:12

The Old Testament is a tale dripping with blood and gore. When Pharaoh refused to let the Israelites go, the Lord connived with Aaron to mess with his head. The Egyptians were afflicted with boils and lice and blood pouring out of the sky like rain, but it wasn’t until the Lord commanded the angel of death to slaughter the firstborn males of each Egyptian family that Pharoah’s heart was finally turned. Of all the loathsome plagues that the Egyptians were willing to endure, it was only the loss of all the little boys that was too much to bear.

The Old Testament God was a fearsome, heartless God of draconian lawgiving and smiting and punishments and damnation. And yet the story of the Israelites is that, through the suffering they endured in their long exile, they came to worship and exalt him. They built him a tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant, to carry His laws that they’d sworn to uphold.

Over time, they built temples and created rituals of worship and servitude to the Will of the Lord. We’ve seen that this happened on Craphole Island as well. The mystery of the Temple is still half baked, but it’s one I’m sure they’ll return to. In whose name did they erect such spectacular idols?

And even though we haven’t been able yet to determine which god the Islanders are meant to serve, it seems pretty clear that they’re being forced one by one to submit to the Will of a higher power. We can call it Destiny if we like, but it’s really just semantics. The only “destiny” that Jack is learning to follow is the Destiny that the Island’s higher power wants him to follow.

The Israelites exalted God after the Red Sea had parted for them. They celebrated the death of their enemies in the famous Song of the Sea. Another guy who sang a song about the Exodus was the great Bob Marley.

Working happily on the raft, Sawyer sang a few lines from a different Marley song, “Redemption Song”.

The theme of Redemption seemed so important in Season One, especially for a character like Sawyer, who had murdered but was becoming a better man before our very eyes. I think they lost track of this theme over the later seasons, because all moral distinctions in this story have become hopelessly muddled. I can’t think of a single character on this show that I’d classify as either “Good” or “Bad”. Sort-of-good guys have received the ultimate punishment.

Sort-of-bad ones have gotten off mostly scot free.

I can’t even think what redemption would mean anymore for most of them. Perhaps it will come back around somehow. Or maybe they’re going for something entirely different. In “Redemption Song”, the singer is seeking the redemptive power of freedom – not freedom from his own sins, but from the sins of his oppressor.

Old pirates, yes, they rob I;
Sold I to the merchant ships,
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit. – Redemption Song

We have yet to learn the story of the Black Rock, of the slaves that were on it, how they were brought there, whether some of them lived, and maybe thrived, and maybe became the ancestors of those we know now as The Others. But we did see people trying to break free.

These songs of freedom
Are all I ever heard. – Redemption Song

Before boarding the plane, Jin has a very unpleasant encounter with a creepy dude in the men’s room.

No, not that kind of unpleasant encounter. The creep was a paid hack of Mr. Paik’s, who spoke Korean to warn Jin not to try and exercise any free choice about the mission he’d been given to perform. He told him in no uncertain terms: “You will never be free.”

But on the raft, Jin, the man of the sea, was free – free from the Island, free from his marriage, free from duty and honor … and free, finally, from time itself.

He went to Michael and handed him the notorious watch, the watch they had fought so bitterly over. It was intended no doubt as a gift, and Michael was suitably touched by his gesture, but as we’ve seen, that watch was far more curse than blessing. It’s an odd moment to watch in retrospect. You don’t know quite how to take it.

The ultimate fearsome, merciless Lord, always demanding his Will be done, is Father Time.

Time is one of the major, major themes of LOST – though in what way, and to what end, none of us understand. Hurley seems to be a kind of TimeMaster, the keeper of the Numbers with which we count the seconds, minutes, hours of our lives.

On the morning he boarded Flight 815, time betrayed him – his alarm clock didn’t go off and it made him frantically, hilariously late.

His race against the clock gave us one of LOST’s cleverest sequences ever, as we saw his lucky Numbers appear on everything from the odometer of his rented car to (my absolute favorite) the uniforms of a girls’ soccer team.

Hurley left his hotel room 2342, stampeded through the airport like an elephant, and finally bought himself a scooter from a lucky guy wearing a Crazy 8’s hat, for the bargain price of $1,600.

And wouldn’t you just know it? Hurley’s winning streak didn’t run out and he made it just in time to be the last lucky person to pass through Gate 23 to board Flight 815.

There was more to Hurley’s mad dash than just LOLs and WTFs. We saw him coping with the limitations of not only Time, but Space as well, as he was forced to buy two seats to accommodate his double wideness.

And when he explained why it was so important that he got home that very day, he let slip one of the most telling lines of the episode, though of course we all missed it then: “My mom’s birthday is tomorrow. Or, today — I don’t know. I don’t really get the whole time change thing, but I’ve got to make that flight.”

As the years have gone by on LOST, Time has loomed larger and larger as a driving force in the narrative. Obviously, we aren’t operating in a linear universe, where “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time”. Time doesn’t start in the past and cross over the present into the future. I don’t know exactly how time operates in the LOSTverse, but I’m sure it doesn’t work like that. Just try to tell the story of LOST to someone else (preferably someone with a LOT of time on their hands who’s a really good listener) and see how impossible it is to keep track of what came first or what caused what to happen. While we weren’t looking, the scrambled storytelling of LOST has become a complete confuzzle where we can’t possibly be sure – to take just one small example – if Ben became evil because Sayid shot him or if Sayid shot him because he was evil.

There are dozens of theories out there as to what these time travel spirals are all going to mean in the end. To make sense, to have been worth our while, it needs to tie in somehow to the other themes of the show – to the concept of Destiny and Fate and Free Will and Redemption and all that other good stuff. So, how could that possibly work?

One theory that appeals to me is the Block Universe theory of time, where all points in time are relative to one another. A moment is in the past only with respect to some other moment, which we can arbitrarily call the present, but relative to some other moment in the past that same moment could just as easily be in the future. Similarly, that which we call the future can only be experienced as it exists in some moment that will exist in the present, and will be the past to some other moment we designate as future to it. I know it sounds really complicated, which is why I always like to let Billy Pilgrim explain it.

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. – Slaughterhouse Five

It feeds very neatly into the discussion of fate and free will that LOST has dwelled on. If all points in time are fixed, and we only traverse across them willy nilly, then there isn’t much point to making choices. Is there?

I’ve often thought that this, in some form or other, is where LOST is headed, but they’ve left themselves so many open doors, I’m no longer sure of it. There’s also the idea of alternate realities, of parallel universes coexisting simultaneously, but I admit that makes even less sense to me. Which makes it all the more likely that the writers will be springing exactly that brand of mind frak on us next season. I guess we have to keep an open mind going into the finale season. What it always comes down to on LOST is learning to think outside of the box.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.
Have no fear of atomic energy,
Cause none of them can stop the time.- Redemption Song

Speaking of boxes, and of atomic energy, and of time, it all brings us back around to the place this story has so often returned to: The Swan Hatch. When that hatch was opened at the end of the episode, and LOST’s gigantic Season One audience realized they were going to be kept on edge for months before they’d learn what was inside, there was a collective howl of frustration that you probably could have heard out on the street if you’d listened for it. It’s different for us now. We know that this guy was down there.

And he lived in this really cool geodesic dome thingy that he wasn’t allowed ever to leave.

And we know that after they found out what was in the Hatch … well, then a whole lot of other stuff happened. You might want to go get a cup of coffee right about now, because this is gonna take a few minutes:

It’s interesting to read J. J. Abrams confession now that they never did know what they were going to make the hatch be all about.

“…But truthfully, when we started it, we didn’t know exactly what was in the hatch. We had ideas, but we didn’t know to what extent it would be. The notion of The Others was there, but we didn’t know exactly what that would mean. Damon hadn’t come up with the idea of flash forwards yet. To see where we are and what they’ve created is insanely gratifying and it’s something that no one could have predicted, at the beginning of it. The evolution of it is really part of their glorious experiment of taking a show that we were all, at the beginning, saying, “How do you make this a series?”

Do you realize what that statement means? They really were making it up as they went along! They could have done anything with that Hatch!

Luckily for us, they chose wisely. And considering the epic work of imagination they managed to spin out of the raw materials of Season One, it doesn’t really matter that they didn’t know where they were going. But it does make you wonder, as you try to read into the many motifs and themes and apparent symbols within the story: What did they know and when did they know it?

Hurley guessed that the Hatch might be filled with clean socks and hot showers and food, and whaddayaknow? He was totally right.

Except for the Twinkies. I don’t think the DI ever made Twinkies.

Locke believed the Hatch was filled with Hope. I’m not sure if that was just a careless remark or if it was a meaningful reference to Pandora’s Box – the box that unleashed all forms of evil and pestilence upon mankind, due to the careless act of a stupid, curious girl, but which was slapped shut just in time to trap one thing inside it – Hope. It’s one of mankind’s many misogynist creation myths, and it kind of fits with the anti-woman vibe LOST has often adopted, but was it an intentional reference or a one off? After all, the Hope inside Pandora’s Box isn’t a particularly useful kind of Hope, since – you know, you’re not allowed to ever open the box.

What about some of the other mysteries we’ve seen? In this episode we see Locke, with characteristic LOST style irony, waiting to board the plane because the airline could not find it’s “special” wheelchair. Simply put, Locke pre-815 was defined as “not special”. It was the Island that had made him “special”. That was his whole story, right?

But why even in the earliest episodes, was it hinted that there was something vaguely sinister about the usually cheerful survivalist?

What had happened to him during his face to face encounters with the Smoke Monster? Why was he so sure he would be alright if Jack let him be sucked into the underground chamber? Was Locke always someone other than Locke? Have we been tricked by an illusion all along?

I mean we all know Locke isn’t Locke anymore, but seriously – was he ever?

Another big question: For all the parsing and philosophizing that’s been done about the meaning of black and white on LOST -

- given that this is the least morally absolute storyverse I’ve ever visited … is it possible we’ve overlooked the most literal interpretation of black and white? The simplest one that they laid out for is in Season Five’s finale.

A color code. Twinship. Yin and Yang. The opposites that exist only in relation to, in tension with, one another. The two forces, brothers even, neither one morally quantifiable, that vie for control of their common magical Island home. I had posed this in a recap once, purely as a joke, but is it possible we really are headed for something like this?

Here’s another question that bugs me:

Was Aaron ever meant to be important, as he seemed to be in Season One? In the Book of Exodus, the boy child is taken from his mother and raised by another, only to return in his manhood to set his people free. Yet it seems right now that Aaron’s story has been parked over in dullsville for the duration. Will we see him again? In some other form maybe? Will his story have a meaningful conclusion or was he just a useful symbol that no longer serves a purpose?

I mean, it’s not as if LOST has any problem discarding symbols once they’ve passed their expiration date. Take Kate’s plane for instance.

It was so freaking important in Season One. Don’t you ever wonder where it is now? Does Kate carry it around in her pocket, like Jack’s Adam and Eve stones? Will it turn up someday for a big Oh, Snap! moment? Or did they just decide it was too stupid to mention again?

Speaking of Kate, why do the writers hate her so much? When she drew the short straw, that meant she’d be one of the two carrying the dynamite from the Black Rock to the hatch.

Her orders were simple. If anything bad happened, she should take off the backpack and RUN.

OK, so something terrible ended up happening. Naturally. And what did she do? Kate – who we’d once been led to believe was a savvy, tough survivor – ran like a bat out of hell with the damn TNT-pack still on her back.

It didn’t really matter, because St. Jack had chivalrously tricked her, apparently assessing correctly that she had the intellect of a sea urchin, and had shouldered the dynamite himself.

So, my question is, did the writers intend to portray Kate, their lead female character, as a total bleeding idiot? Or was that just another happy accident?

And speaking of accidents, how about this one?

Ah, the stillborn “romance” of Jack and Ana-Lucia. Their meeting at the airport bar took on some interesting echos in Season Two when we learned that this was actually the second time Ana had shared a drink with a Dr. Shephard at Sydney Airport.

But their chemistry was so awkward, so downright weird, that one has to wonder what exactly the producers were thinking.

And clearly they had plans for this couple. Look at this ad campaign that they filmed between Seasons One and Two.

What were they going for? It made it look like Season Two was going to be about Jack having a threesome with two greasy lesbians.

But enough with the quibbles. This was a magnificent episode and a superb capstone to an historic television season. The Book of Exodus opens with an episodic section where plague upon plague is visited upon the Egyptians, in an escalating iteration, until finally the Pharaoh gives up and allows the Chosen People to go free. This episode of Exodus borrows some of this episodic feeling by threading the various stories of the survivors through the story, showing us what each of them did in the hours and minutes before they boarded the plane.

The Book of Exodus is about, more than anything else, a journey.

The Israelites travel across the desert for the entire Book of Exodus, and by the end of that Book, they have not arrived. There is no destination reached, only a long, long journey undertaken. In this episode of LOST, there is much journeying being done.

The beach crowd is traveling to the caves, to be safe from the smoke bearing Others. The gang of four on the raft is trying to escape – hopelessly it turns out – the snowglobe of the Island’s immutable Will.

Jack’s crew journeys into the jungle to find the dynamite and they discover the wreck of the Black Rock.

This was one of the most magical moments of the episode for me, the sight of a great schooner marooned and wrecked so far inland. How could that have happened? It can only be explained through some kind of sorcery. It reminds me of Chris Van Allsburg’s wonderful book The Wreck of the Zephyr, where a young man’s sailboat takes flight before crashing miles inland on a hillside.

It’s the kind of image that reminds us we’re being told a fairy tale and that looking for any kind of logical explanation is pointless. But our minds don’t rest when all we have is irrationality to work with. We’re always trying to make order out of chaos. The glimpse down the hatch was the beginning of a very long journey, one that has often taken us into holes and tunnels and dark places that feel like the underworld. All of our characters are on some kind of journey, through various dark nights of the soul, towards a Promised Land that we have yet to glimpse. As this great episode ended we watched them boarding the vessel of their metamorphosis – the airship that would take them to the mystical, mythical port of call where their transformation would begin.

First they boarded the pregnant women, then the handicapped.

Then the outlaws being banished, one in shackles

… and one whose chains were still invisible.

An un-blissfully wedded couple.

A gen-u-wine I-raqi.

Two spoiled rich kids.

The jester.

The prophet.

The Dad.

The final look that is exchanged between passengers before the plane rises into the air is fraught with future meaning.

Locke looks up at Jack quizzically, maybe a bit suspiciously.

Jack smiles down at him. It’s a perfectly ordinary, friendly kind of look. These two could never have guessed what kind of journey they had ahead of them, what kind of bond they’d forge, however unwillingly, in the months and years ahead. Neither could we of course. And we still can’t know. As the season finally approaches – we’re counting down now in mere DAYS – we’re still all completely in the dark. We may know now what was at the bottom of the Hatch but where has it gotten us? Only back at that same Hatch, watching it get blown to smithereens yet again, and knowing just as much now as we did then. Which is to say – We don’t know nothing. Sure some themes are firmly in place. It’s a story about Time, about Destiny, about Heroes and Magic and Mystery and Adventure. Most of all, it’s a Mind Game. We’ve gone around and around through miles of circles and we’ve come right back around to where it all started. A plane going up into the sky.

A hole being blown in the earth.

And all of us, with our mouths hanging open, scratching our heads, wondering how the hell we ever got mixed up in this crazy show.

But no worries. The end is nigh. And no matter how we feel about, whether we love it or hate it or never ever understand what the hell it all was about, one thing we can count on. It’s ending. And for better or worse, we’ve been promised: It only ends once.

“Remember always that you are just a visitor here, a traveler passing through. Your stay is but short and the moment of your departure unknown.”
- Dhammavadaka

The turning of the Dharmic wheel, as the souls of Aaron and Boone passed by one another, was a profound moment in the history of LOST. We had been anticipating the birth of Claire’s baby – that was expected – but the death of Boone was a heartstopping moment first time around. It’s not that we hadn’t seen death before, but we had started to get numb to it. The deaths had gone from the grotesque

… to the merely gruesome …

… all the way down to “who the hell was she?”

Boone’s death was different. It was more like a real death because we had come to know Boone, to like him. It seemed like he had just started on his own hero’s journey, the classic boys-to-men hero’s arc, when suddenly – WAP! He was gone. In the blink of an eye. It was a reminder that death could happen at any time to any one of us, no matter how healthy and young and pretty and rich.

Boone’s death happened when death still mattered on LOST, when everything stopped for the funeral, complete with burial and eulogies.

Even though not every death has earned the same tribute as Boone’s did, death has always been an important character on LOST. The circle of life spins constantly, as it does for all of us. We are all born to strangers known as our fathers and mothers.

Who twist us into tangled mirror images of themselves.

In the beginning, it’s all fun and games. We go out into the world.

We make friends for life.

We fall in love. Some of us even get married.

All of that’s the good part. But the wheel doesn’t stop turning there. We end up chasing the ghosts of our unfulfilled dreams.

Our parents get sick and wish they’d never had such rotten kids.

We lose touch with our friends.

We just keep going until everything we love is destroyed.

Then, we all march forward to our own predestinated meeting with grim death.

Only to have the whole big wheel start turning again.

It’s not a pretty picture. Basically life’s a bitch and then you die. And then life’s a bitch all over again.

The fragility of life is what makes us cling to it. We cling even though it so often brings suffering, even though we know we are all destined in the end to lose it. Hindus and Buddhists have a name for this vicious cycle we’re all trapped in - Samsara, the eternal round of birth and death. And as colorfully as it is portrayed in this picture, it’s meant to be seen as more of a revolving door prison than a happy merry go round.

As LOST fans we are extremely familar with the idea of vicious cycles. And of circles within circles, wheels within a wheel.

This is a story where the last three season finales have all had cliffhangers hinged upon the same inanimate object.

It’s astonishing sometimes to realize that since the gamechanging Season Three finale, as the characters have hopscotched all over time and space and imagination, our story has only budged forward a couple of days, something less than a week. It has been everywhere and gone nowhere. Like a loop.

It’s a valid ongoing theory that the entire story may end up as nothing more than an endlessly swirling time loop, infinitely repeating itself. There have been hints of such. There’s the sound of Hurley’s voice on the radio transmission that drew Rousseau’s crew to their Island deaths, where Hurley would one day hunt down Rousseau wondering where on earth she’d come up with the numbers she’d written all over her maps.

There’s the compass that Richard gave to Locke that Richard only had because Locke had given it to him, in the past, before Locke was born.

There’s the Incident that (maybe) created the phenomenon that ended up crashing the plane that would bring the 815 survivors to the Island so that they could create The Incident that would create the phenomenon that would end up crashing their plane.

It’s not so much a time loop that endlessly repeats itself as it’s a recursive, self referential “strange loop”, an idea that was defined by Douglas Hofstadter this way:

“not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.”

Got that? It sounds complicated but it’s as easy to understand as this statement: “I am lying”.

If the statement is taken as true, then it immediately becomes false. You can not trust either of your logical conclusions. For instance, how to explain the night in The Little Prince when Sawyer is made witness, so many months after the fact, to the sight of Kate delivering the baby Aaron?

Now Aaron, like each of us, was only born once. That seems irrefutable.

Except that there was the one time when Sawyer was watching it, close enough to reach out and touch them,

and there was the one time when Sawyer was back on the beach with no idea in the world what was about to happen.

How is what we saw logically compatible with the reality that Aaron was only born once?

And what about how Sawyer and Locke, unsprung from time when the Island went pooft, watched from afar as the hatchbound Desmond’s not-deus leapt out of the machine during their revisit to that same hallowed night?

Where were original Locke and original Sawyer during these moments in time when they coexisted in the same vicinity as their time traveling incarnations? Can we perhaps begin to understand these permutations of events reoccurring with different participants as “successive upward shifts” in a “paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop”? What’s done may be done, but is it possible that it might be done differently the next time it’s done?

Such loops are not entirely theoretical. In fact, one of the examples of such a loop in music is known as the Shepard Tone, which is the audio illusion of a tone that seems to rise and fall in pitch without ever actually changing its pitch from the base tone.

You may recognize this abstract concept more colloquially as Mario’s Infinite Staircase.

Not to get overly wonky, and certainly not to get anyone’s panties in a bunch that I’m developing some comprehensive theory of LOST here, but given the name Shepard, with allowance made for the trivial misspelling, is it possible – remotely – that the Shephard family name is NOT a clue to the Jesus-nature of Jacksus, as we’ve mostly assumed, but to the musical/mathematical recursive feedback loop that bears his surname? It’s just a thought, and probably as offbase as most LOST theories are, but it’s a tasty one to mull over next time you’re relaxing with a nice cup of hot chocolate.

Having gone that far afield, I’ll quietly tiptoe back to the episodes at hand, which all happened in a simpler time – back when we all thought LOST was about Jack being a fixer and a saver, a/k/a Good Guy, and Kate being a runner and a criminal, a/k/a Bad Girl. Boy, were we naive!

LOST was never that simple. It’s a story told in circles, tumbling past, present and future, so that with each recursion through the loop, our perspective and understanding of the big picture changes.

In Born to Run we saw Kate and her childhood sweetheart Tom Brennan dig up an old New Kids on the Block lunchbox, during Tom’s last few hours on earth, to retrieve the trinkets they’d buried as children in a time capsule.

We’d already seen the crime where Kate robbed the bank to retrieve the toy airplane, so that much made sense.

But we wouldn’t know for years that the lunchbox itself had been the bounty of Kate’s first crime spree, and that Jacob himself had been her friendly first accomplice.

Knowing that adds an entirely different color to this scene on rewatch. The time capsule feels so much more meaningful, knowing the great and powerful Jacob was the one who made sure Kate got to keep it. In fact the whole setting seems dreamlike.

There are odd portents scattered throughout these episodes, such as the mysterious Tree of Life under which Kate and Tom dig up their buried past. And those longhorned bulls, reminiscent of the Brahmin bulls so sacred to Hindus … what are they doing there? There may be nothing symbolic in any of these things, but the framing is so delicate and lovely and odd. It is the little quiet pictures I find scattered around LOST that intrigue me.

For instance, I happen to think that T-Shirt Decoding is a very important skill in The Art of Reading LOST. It could be that the Yin Yang symbol on Jack’s T-shirt was meant as a pointer to The Way out of all of these vicious, inexplicable cycles we find ourselves wandering into on LOST.

In Eastern thought, concepts like good and bad, right and wrong, birth and death, are abstractions without any essential definition. Opposites are inextricably bound to one another, each state existing only so long as the other exists in equal part. In Do No Harm, birth and death were knit together as neatly as two threads in a tapestry, like two arcs of the same circle.

“For certain is death for the born,
And certain is birth for the dead,
Therefore over the lost
Thou shouldst not grieve.”
- Bhagavad Gita

Or as Yoda would put it:

“Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is.”

Unfortunately, Jack did not have a Jedi sage sitting on his shoulder. The closest thing he had to a life coach was Drunk Christian and his misanthropic system of self defeating cybernetics.

Shephard the Elder offered his son not advice on his wedding day, but a diagnosis: “Commitment is what makes you tick, Jack. The problem is you’re just not good at letting go.” According to his guru, Jack was so committed to being committed that he was doomed to constant failure.

Jack had been committed to his old buddy Mark Silverman for over twenty years. Mark Silverman, you may recall, was last seen not being saved by young Jack Shephard in Jack’s first schoolyard bout with heroic malfunction.

A quarter century later, Jack had still not given up on his quest to FIX! and to SAVE! whatever broken, doomed thing crossed his path.

If anything, he was more determined than ever. He went above and beyond in every way trying to save Boone – from inflating his collapsed lung Pulp Fiction style, to wrenching his shattered leg into place without anesthesia, to transfusing him with his own blood through sea urchin spines (!)

to jury rigging a crude guillotine out of airplane parts so he could amputate the dying man’s leg during his final seconds of life. He was committed all right.

Finally Boone had to rouse himself from his own death throes to put a stop to his own gruesome mutilation, to beg Jack to please just make it stop.

Jack had to surrender and to submit. He may have been the finest spinal surgeon ever seen at St. Sebastian Hospital but even the great Jack Shephard could not stop the turning of the inexorable wheel of death and life. Even heroes don’t get to be God.

As you may recall, he got rather upset about the whole thing.

But come on, let’s give the guy a break. Wasn’t he just being a good doctor? Just fulfilling his Hippocratic Oath, as per the title of the episode? I don’t know – maybe, maybe not. We’d seen with Sawyer’s torture that the Hippocratic Oath wasn’t necessarily Jack’s top priority, and we’d see it again in the future when the life of Ben Linus was on the line … back in the past.

One of the things I personally respect about LOST is the way it constantly challenges our preconceptions. Boone’s death was juxtaposed not only with birth in Do No Harm, but with sex,

and, most dramatically, with Jack and Sarah’s wedding day.

Having sworn to save Boone’s life, as Jack was wracked with grief and despair and the crushing realization that he had failed, as Boone gasped out his last ragged breaths,

the scene cut, jarringly, to Jack giving his heartfelt and sincere oath to Sarah. To love her. Forever.

Another solemn oath, vow and sworn promise that ended up meaning exactly nothing. The marriage lasted about two, three years tops, before Jack was kissing another woman, Sarah was in love with a man whose main virtue was not being Jack, Jack was mugging his dad at an AA meeting accusing him of banging his wife, and Sarah was bailing Jack out of the local jail before telling him to please, please, please just get lost. Marriage, American style.

Both of Jack’s failed promises stemmed from the same inspiration.

We didn’t know what Sarah meant when she thanked her hero Jack for “saving” her. For all we knew it was just a metaphor between lovers. But we knew Jack liked hearing her say it. In fact, hearing it again and again, proclaimed over a public microphone, made him feel all verklempt and moisty eyed and more in love with Sarah than ever.

Sarah’s hero worship may well have been the only thing Jack did love about her. And maybe there’s the rub. How can being a hero, even wanting to be a hero, ever be a bad thing? To the Western way of thinking, where good and bad occupy mutually exclusive compartments on the opposite ends of a clean and tidy moral universe, heroism falls squarely into the good box. A Buddhist might say that such thinking arises from a false premise. We have convinced ourselves that there are good things and bad things and that all happiness depends on avoiding the one and embracing the other. We are lost in the delusion of duality, of the illusion that black and white are mutually exclusive adversaries, rather than mutually dependent equals.

I know in the beginning, it really did seem like we were being sucked into a simplistic black and white metaphor. Like any good magic show, before the magician can deceive us with illusion, he must first divert our attention with a surefire distraction.

Because, let’s face it, when all is said and done, there hasn’t been a single morally clear moment in all the series. Every good thing that any character has ever done was been conjoined inextricably with something bad. Locke found the hatch, but he got Boone killed.

Sun wanted Jin to stay with her because she just remembered she loves him with all her heart, so she tried to poison him…and gutted Michael instead.

Jack tried valiantly to save Boone, but he went so psychotically overboard, we ended up wondering if perhaps he was not sane.

Jack wasn’t the only one chasing the Hero’s brass ring. Sayid successfully lured Essam to join the Muslim martyrs as a way to become a Hero for Islam.

Tom Brennan sat straight up and let himself be driven headfirst into a bullet, trying to be a Hero for Katie.

Locke tried to comfort an inconsolable Shannon by assuring her Boone had become a Hero in death.

Shannon, unconvinced, tried to become a Hero herself by taking Locke out,

and Sayid broke his promise to Shannon, playing Hero to preserve Locke’s life – and his wisdom – for the greater good (he hoped) of all the survivors.

The concept of The Greater Good, the title of Sayid’s second flashback, is fundamental to the philosophy of Utilitarianism. And indeed, the founder of Utilitarianism, one Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher whose mummified corpse lives on as the famed Oxford University “autoicon”,

was John Locke’s nom de plume when he returned to Planet Earth for his predestined execution …

… so that he could die as part of the master plan, for the greater good of his beloved Island.

“It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong.” – Jeremy Bentham

But defining “the greater good” isn’t always an easy task, as Sayid discovered. Was Nadia’s freedom a greater good than Essam’s life?

Was helping the US government a greater good than living up to his Muslim ideals? Most importantly, was learning the truth about the hatch a greater good than getting lucky with Shannon?

From the start, Sayid’s was the most clouded ethical lens. It was obvious early on that he was eminently corruptible. He was willing to deceive and manipulate his dear friend, who he knew to be a peaceful man grieving inconsolably over his wife’s murder.

Sayid’s treatment of Essam informed us early on that Sayid had the moral flexibility of a snake. It was unforgivable. Yet he nobly chose to stay behind to arrange for proper funeral honors for Essam, and in doing so, he unknowingly marched right onto the fateful Flight 815.

“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” – Schopenauer

LOST’s ubiquitous conflict – Fate vs. Free Will – was muted throughout these episodes, but it wasn’t absent. Sayid’s smoking, drinking, Half-Life video geek Muslim pals commented that perhaps Fate had brought Sayid to them.

Of course we knew it wasn’t Fate, but the Central Intelligence Agency that had brought them together. Sayid was not one to blame things on Fate. When asked, he told Kate that “there is always a choice”. He emphasized that “time will make no difference”. He begged Shannon not to kill Locke because once it was done, it could never be taken back. Sayid is a rational being, one who trusts in the Laws of Cause and Effect, who embraces the karma of Consequence.

There was however one character on LOST for whom Consequence seemed not to exist. Kate had chosen not to ponder on the great philosophical questions of the ages. She had created a fail safe solution to all of life’s problems.

She took off. We didn’t yet know at this point what the hell Kate had done, but we were starting to see that, whatever it was, it wouldn’t be Kate who would end up bearing the consequences.

At least not yet.

Kate’s opening sequence in Born to Run, where the blonde arrives at a no-tell motel and brazenly showers in a stolen room, was a deliberate melange, some say, of scenes from Hitchcock’s Psycho.

But what’s most noteworthy about it to me is the ease with which Kate swings between her many false identities, like a monkey switching from branch to branch as it loops across the jungle sky.

Because she is no one, nothing can really ever be “her” fault.

Kate had no particular Self that she had attached herself to. But Karma, both negative and positive, ripples out into the universe and isn’t limited to an individual. It can seem unjust. Tom was a good man killed by the karma of Kate’s bad deeds. And Kate’s bad karma kept rippling outward to injure more innocents, as Tom’s death, we were reminded, created yet another fatherless son.

Nadia was the one who suffered the karmic curse of Essam’s dying wish, not Sayid.

Essam was a distraught husband caught in the crossfire of Sayid’s karma, convinced by Sayid’s argument that “there need to be consequences” for the death of his wife. If there were no consequence, Sayid explains, it would be as if her death meant nothing, as if it were just passively accepted.

But passive acceptance of Fate seems to be the only option, no matter how actively you work against it. Sayid believed the lack of an outside handle proved the hatch was “not meant to be opened.” And yet opened it would be.

Walt, in his Chucky voice, warned Mr. Locke not to “open that thing”. But Locke decided to ignore the little psychic, just this once. Walt may have known the future, but he couldn’t stop whatever would happen from happening.

Now that we do know the future, we can see Fate’s fingerprints all over these episodes. Which is not the same thing as knowing what it is we have seen.

Michael worked heroically to build the raft so that they could escape from the Island and send back help. Watching him work, Walt worried that the raft would sink, that there would be sharks and that they might die.

And one by one, for Michael at least, all those things came true.

Charlie couldn’t give up his dream of fame and fortune, imagining that this Island adventure would only enhance his celebrity. Maybe he could try and top the success of You All Everybody with his new instant classic, The Monster Ate the Pilot.

And he did get part of what he wanted. The helicopters did come.

Some of them did become wicked famous.

Unfortunately, as we know, Charlie wasn’t one of them.

Kate delivering the baby she would one day raise was Fate at its most heavy handed.

She called him “all of ours”,

but never did we imagine that Kate was the one he’d grow up calling “Mommy”.

Why was Sawyer’s voice the only one that could soothe the frazzled newborn?

Was that somehow connected to the reason that Sawyer would in future return to the past to witness Aaron’s birth? Or was it just another excuse to show us how cute he looked in glasses?

Sarah wearing pyjamas with the number 44, in the episode where the number of the survivors dwindled to 44, was perhaps an inside joke.

But what about Charlie misspeaking the lyrics to the Eentsy Weentsy Spider so that the spider

… drowned?

Is it my imagination or does Jack’s “among us but not of us” tattoo

look a bit like this part of Jacob’s tapestry?

Arzt made the series’ first reference to Antarctica in his weather lecture on the beach. There have since been numerous other references to the southernmost continent. Meaningful, or just an ice cold red herring?

Why was the baseball from Kate and Tom’s time capsule signed by “John Locke”?

And speaking of baseball, how clever was it of the writers to come up with the name Aaron for the baby born on the night that Boone died?

It might not be common knowledge but in the fall of 2003, about a year before the LOST Pilot, while the Curse of the Bambino was still holding the hapless Boston Red Sox in its endless loop of failure, there was a big bad NY Yankee named Aaron Boone, who hit an 11th inning home run to rob the Sox of the American League championship. I’m not sure why we keep getting all these baseball hints. Maybe it’s because baseballs have 108 stitches. Maybe it’s because Carlton Cuse spent a lot of time at Fenway when he was at Harvard. But the twist I like on this particular Easter Egg is that Aaron Boone wasn’t another spin around the loop of failure for Boston. He was the last big heartbreak. He was, in a way, the loophole.

Trying to decipher and decode the clues of LOST is, for me, the biggest fun of being a fan, even if it is completely futile. Five full seasons in and less than two months from the premiere of Season Six, I feel almost as clueless as ever. When Locke tells Sayid that the rest of the survivors “were all so focused on getting off the island that you weren’t seeing things clearly”, it sounds like a description of the same well set trap that we’ve all fallen into. We’ve all been looking and looking so hard we didn’t notice we weren’t seeing anything.

In Eastern philosophies, the reason that mankind suffers is simple – it is Ignorance that blinds us. On LOST, we are kept ignorant through misleads and bluffs and sleight of hand, as we watch our characters stumble about in the ignorance created by their ever expanding web of secrets and lies. Jack knew that Sun had poisoned Michael because she’d really wanted to poison Jin, but he didn’t know that Kate was the poison expert who had taught the herbalist Sun how to go about it – even though Kate had just poisoned him the day before.

Hurley knew that Kate was the criminal the Marshall had been escorting on the plane, and he let it spill in front of Locke, who didn’t know that Jack had known all along, and none of us knew yet what it was that she had done. It was easy to understand Hurley’s frustration when he said, “How am I supposed to keep straight who knows what around here?”

It’s a question we LOST fans ask ourselves all the time.

But what made these particular episodes striking, I think, was the amount of actual truth that managed to be uncovered. Sun told Jack about poisoning Jin. Walt told Michael about burning the raft. Locke admitted to Sayid that he’d been the one who beaned him back when he was trying to triangulate the signal. But most importantly, the truth finally came out about the Hatch.

Jack took a break from banging John’s head into the rocks on the beach and tried instead the novel approach of actually speaking with him. The high holy Jacksus was angry that the big bald liar had not told him about the hatch. Who the hell did Locke think he was?

Locke deftly reminded Jack that he had done the very same thing when he’d taken it upon himself to wrap the key to the guns around his own neck and not let anyone know where he’d hidden them. Touché, Mr. Clean. Well played.

Knowledge is power, after all, and Jack and John’s confrontation over who got to control the Island information highway was a great scene, a kind of heavyweight bout between the Island’s Alpha twins.

Locke and Sayid’s rumble in the jungle had a different feel to it.

It was more like a ju jitsu match. Locke was cagey, and smart, and tried to play his hand as best he could,

but in the end Sayid was the more agile fighter.

He zeroed in on Locke’s secrets, separating the truth from the chaff, and skillfully unearthed just the treasure he was after.

Kate managed to wander accidentally into a little truth telling session for herself as well.

Her clumsy attempt to steal Sawyer’s spot on Michael’s raft set off a different kind of cat and mouse game. The sexy kind.

I rewatch scenes like this one and I have to wonder: were there ever actually LOST fans who didn’t think these two were fated to hook up?

Sawyer saw right through Kate and it seemed like a very big deal at the time when he revealed to the group that she was a criminal, that she hadn’t told any of them the truth, that she’d been trying to lie her way onto the raft to avoid recapture.

It seemed like after that, no one would like her anymore.

But never fear, it was all forgotten by the next episode. No harm, no foul. Turns out it wasn’t such a big deal at all. And besides, it’s not as if Kate held it against Sawyer.

There was a tacit forgiveness on both sides in the beautiful fireside scene, the last that Kate and Sawyer would share together in Season One. Sawyer pulled his best Pacey Witter and tried to get Joey Potter to ask him to stay.

But, alas, she did not.

WE have come to the point in the Reset Rewatch where it’s time to start wrapping things up. I’ll try and sum it up a bit more after Christmas with the final Rewatch of Exodus, but in this group of episodes I see some patterns that I do believe will be with us in the end.

LOST has toyed with the idea of Resurrection, but they’ve never actually gone there. Resurrection is an idea that inspires hope in us, I think. Deep down we all love the idea that even if we do have to die some day, we might get a chance to come back … as our same selves. And when it comes to serial dying, no character on LOST has had more shots at Resurrection than John Locke. In The Greater Good, Locke “dies” for the first, but not the last, time.

The path to Resurrection lies in Redemption. We see Locke at the waterfall, trying to wash the blood of the innocent off his sparkling white T-shirt.

Like Locke’s impossible task of ever getting that shirt white again, Redemption on LOST has mostly been a spotty business. The minute someone does something shiney and good, they turn around and do something shitty. And given what has become of John Locke, perhaps it’s not Resurrection we should be expecting, but …

… Reincarnation. Instead of the individual Self being eternal, it is the soul’s karma that is eternal, taking ever different forms, higher or lower, in its multiple incarnations through the endless cycle of birth and death. It is confusing to Westerners. We think only how birth is joyful,

and how death causes such pain.

Birth, good thing. Death, bad thing. But the harsh fact is that the sole cause of death … is birth. Since nothing can exist without its opposite, the source of all that is good, in essence, is evil. What’s a Hero supposed to do in a moral universe where morality itself is absurd?

It’s interesting that the words “do no harm” don’t actually appear in the Hippocratic Oath, as is commonly thought. But Do No Harm is the phrase that Buddhists consider their Golden Rule. It’s quite different from the Christian Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Buddhism does not counsel any particular course of action. It counsels Non-action.

Sitting quietly, doing nothing
Spring comes
And the grass grows by itself. – Basho

Buddhists seek release from the endless loop of Samsara through the process of Enlightenment, of seeing naked truth directly with fully opened eyes.

Through Enlightenment one may attain Nirvana, which in direct translation from the Chinese, means “non-doing”.

Or in other words: Let go. In all the obsession with Fate and Free Will, I think a lot of LOST’s audience expects some kind of TKO decision in the end, where either Fate or Free Will is the Last Concept Standing, arm held high as the victor. But it’s gone too far for something so simplistic as that. It would be fake to have some contrived act of Free Will overcome the mountains of Fate that we’ve seen throughout the story. Yet no one wants to think that Free Will is useless, that our characters are nothing but puppets in a play controlled by some tapestry weaving puppet master. Since I’m deep into the Eastern theme this week, I’m seeing the Third Way, the way out … dare I say it? The Loophole.

It’s as if the only Free Choice that actually exists is the choice to be committed or the choice to Let Go. To detach. From fate. From choice. From karma. From samsara. From the whole bloody vicious cycle. To get out. To find the loophole.

Or as the great Yoda would say:

“Train yourself to let go of the things you fear to lose.”

Good advice for LOST fans as we enter this final season. The first thing each of us will have to let go of is our personal pet theory of What LOST Means. I’ve seen theories of LOST that compare the Island to being a brain, or God, or a video game, or a Dr. Moreau style laboratory, or a Dantesque circular netherworld or – my personal favorite – a kind of sexed up version of Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer… you know the claymation version where the Heros have to leave the Island of Misfit Toys, and then come back, after they save Santa Jacob.

I hate to say it, but it kind of does fit. Plus, I like the holiday theme! Merry Christmas everybody!

We also are now dealing with the fact that when the long awaited Season Six premiere date was finally announced:

… it turned out to be none other than freakin’ Groundhog Day! I’m not sure what Groundhog Day really stood for before the great Bill Murray classic was made,

but the only thing “Groundhog Day” means now is a day where everything keeps happening the same way over and over, except for little incremental changes we make each time around. In other words, an endlessly recursive, self referential loop … with a loophole. Maybe like Phil in Punxatawny, PA, our characters need to keep going around this same circle until they finally get it right. Maybe what Redemption means, in the context of LOST, is finding the Loophole that will let them escape. Until then, everyone just keeps going around in the loop, making a little more Progress each time.

Lost may be set on an Island isolated from time, space and the laws of common physics, but there is no single piece within this puzzle-story that exists in isolation. Everything, everyone, is connected to something, someone, else. By now we’re familiar with these connections. We’re old hands now at the Where’s Waldo game of looking for them in episodes, but back in Season One we were just starting to deke them out. Sometimes it’s a name, or a book title, or an object in the background that cues our attention. It’s anyone’s guess whether or not these hidden trinkets, these Easter Eggs, are anything more than bonus prizes for the super obsessed, but either way, we wouldn’t be half as LOST without them.

This was also the first time we put an ‘Easter egg’ into the show – Hurley on the tv in Korea – and we thought maybe two or three people would catch it. But our audience is so dialed into detail, it didn’t get past them. – Damon Lindelof, TV Guide, May 29, 2005

If Damon ever doubted the OCD level of apophenia in this fandom, he shouldn’t have.

We didn’t just notice the connection between Hurley’s lottery win and the Korean Secretary for Environmental Safety’s living room, where Jin had come to deliver a beat-o-gram courtesy of Mr. Paik.

Some of us even noticed that Locke’s long lost mom had once been a patient in Hurley’s institutional home sweet home.

Some of us may have caught the throwaway connection made when Hurley’s financial advisor informed him that he had just bought a box factory in Tustin, CA, the same town where the box factory regional manager Locke had been sentenced to his cubicle gulag.

But there was no way for us to connect the body that flew by during their conversation in the California high rise …

… with the Californian named John Locke, whose paralyzing eight-story fall we wouldn’t even learn about until two years later.

Now that we have the luxury of hindsight, the connections run as deep as a viewer has the energy to pursue them. We might have expected that we’d someday see the corpse of the drug smuggling Nigerian priests made flesh,

and we did

but we could never have imagined the half of it.

We had no way of knowing back then that when Boone made joyous radio contact with another human voice,

the man on the other end of the line, identifying himself as a “survivor of Oceanic Flight 815″, was none other than Bernard Nadler, DDS.

Why was Locke temporarily lame during Boone’s climb up the terrifying tree-root cliff?

We may have thought it was because he’d been wounded by the metal shard from the trebuchet, but now we have to wonder if he wasn’t sort of existentially lamed by Ethan’s gunshot during his future journey to the past, in order to prevent him from being the one to climb the tree roots and die.

He wasn’t the sacrifice the Island was demanding just yet. It’s like Ethan was there to make sure Locke didn’t jump ahead in line and steal Boone’s ticket to the death lottery.

We’ve gotten so hyper-connected within this convolvulating story that the connections no longer help us find our way. They only leave us more lost than ever, on shakier and shakier ground.

They were already leaving us clues back then, even if we hadn’t yet learned to read them. Like this one telling us that Time would soon start Wrinkling on us.

We can’t have been expected to notice that Sawyer was a Madeleine L’Engle fan. We were all still Easter Egg neophytes at this point. Season One was before anyone thought of things like that, before we ever conceived of time travel and course corrections , before the Dharma Initiative and the Others and Widmore Corporation and Benjamin Linus, before we ever imagined there was a godlike Egyptologist weaving a magical tapestry inside a hollow four toed foot who was destined to be killed through a loophole deviously engineered by his ancient metaphorical nemesis who had long conned John Locke into donating him his body.

In Season One we were still making Connections 101. The connections were mostly simple, even primitive. We learned how all the characters ended up in Australia and why they were all collected inside the fragile hull of the doomed Oceanic Flight 815 on that fateful day. We were learning their backstories. One basic connection fast became obvious:

All of them were hopelessly, helplessly LOST.

Jin had lost his marriage and his moral compass.

Hurley was losing his mind under the incessant attack of the cursed Numbers.

Locke had lost his kidney, his dignity and his last shred of self respect.

Sawyer, conned into committing his first horrifying murder, had lost his soul.

in Season One LOST was a show that was accessible to everyone. It was still keeping its sci fi colors under deep cover. We all knew there was something askew with this story-verse, but we were hypnotized by the carousel of humanity spinning around us. The connections that we noticed in Season One, the connections that most fascinated us, were the ones being made between the characters.

The survivors were becoming a community. When Sawyer needed glasses to heal his splitting headache, it took a village to make him well. The whole gang pitched in.

You can almost hear the Smurf tune in the background, can’t ya?

Or was that just the redshirts starting up their own Blue Man troupe?

Jin wanted to connect to the community, even after they treated him like a terrorist and beat the living crap out of him. He even learned the word for the thing he wanted to do: Boat.

Walt felt so connected to the Island that he burned the raft that was going to disconnect him from it.

Jack, a/k/a The Keymaster, was starting to feel mighty connected to his new job as Boss of Everyone.

After all, nobody got a gun unless Jack let them have a gun. Suck on that, keyless losers.

Sayid decided to cut the Nadia connection that meant so much to him mere days before,

and connect up with the hot, hot blonde who was ready, willing and right there.

Carpe diem, Sayid.

As we approached the back end of Season One, the quality of the storytelling was picking up. Two of the episodes in this group were cited as the favorites of the original creators – J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof – in the May 2005 TV Guide wrap up.

(click to enlarge)

I concur with their choices. It’s an all stellar lineup: The Pilot (J.J.), Exodus (Damon), White Rabbit (Damon), Do No Harm (J.J.). Both Sawyer-centrics made the list: Damon chose Confidence Man, J.J. picked Outlaws. Unsurprisingly, both loved the transcendent episode Walkabout. Surprisingly, they both also chose …In Translation.

One episode that I’m guessing just missed the list was the well titled Deus Ex Machina. Episode titles in Season One were so beautifully chosen, I find myself drawn to interpreting each one. In literature, “deus ex machina” – the god out of the machine – refers to a literary device that is not generally much respected. It derives from the custom in Greek theater to have a god literally lowered down onto the stage. By a machine.

It was the ancient Greek equivalent of a WTF! ending. Aristotle considered it to be a cheat, because nothing the audience had already seen prepared them for it.

“It is obvious that the solutions of plots too should come about as a result of the plot itself, and not from a contrivance.” – Aristotle, Poetics

But despite its bad rep, WTF! is not an unusual method of turning around a story that has gotten itself lost. It’s not always a bad thing. I mean, without gods coming out of machines, where exactly would LOST be?

And we all ended up liking that twist, didn’t we? Even Aristotle had to admit it was often unavoidable.

“it is probable that improbable things will happen. – Aristotle, Poetics

The sepulchral light that lit up the hatch window felt like a sign to the bereft and desperate Locke. But that wasn’t a god down there. It was only Desmond Hume, buried under the earth with his button to push, shining up a light to see what was causing all that racket.

Locke was connected to Desmond before any of us even knew that Desmond existed. At times it almost seemed like Locke had become the hub in the connective wheel.

In just the few short weeks since the crash, Locke had turned Guru. We’d watched Walt seeking him out, admiring him. In these episodes, Locke deepened his connection with the young grasshopper.

To Walt’s amazement, Locke knew that he’d burned his father’s raft, and to Walt’s relief, the secret was safe between soulmates.

Locke knew it was Claire’s birthday. He even gave her a present! A cradle for the baby who would soon be born, another kindred spirit to Locke – the son of a child mother who hadn’t wanted to keep him.

Locke was so tapped into the Island grapevine by this point, he was even giving advice to Shannon on her love life.

But the person Locke had become most closely connected to was his devoted acolyte, Boone, whose faith in Locke was about to become a waking nightmare.

They were a kind of Master and Apprentice … except that it wasn’t clear what exactly Locke might be a master of.

Every day Boone went out into the jungle with Locke and dug holes and pounded fruitlessly on the sealed up hatch. He helped him build a trebuchet.

Boone gave a lot more than just blood, sweat and tears to Locke. He put up with a constant stream of crazy shit.

But more than anything, Boone listened to the old coot. And Locke had a lot to say. He filled their working days with long dissertations on The Meaning of Lost Island.

The Island had made him whole. They were supposed to be on The Island. The Island would tell them what it wanted them to do. The Island had given everyone a new life. The Island would test their commitment but if only they kept faith, the Island would show them how to open the hatch. Everything breaks if you apply enough force.

Boone knew Locke was pretty much batshit insane. Still he couldn’t help but absorb some of his rabid intensity. It was all SO clear to Locke. Maybe it was that certainty alone that convinced Boone to follow his leader.

Straight over a cliff.

Before that tragedy, Locke and Boone, for their brief wrinkle in time together, had become a kind of father and son.

And father and son, as we have seen time and again on LOST, is a connection that matters. A lot. Daddy issues were equal opportunity in this story. As Locke told Walt, everybody’s got a dad. It’s a universal connection. Everybody’s got a mom too, of course, but on LOST mothers don’t seem to be quite as important. Unless they’re filled with heroin.

Or have a funny accent.

Mostly on LOST, it’s the Y chromosome that counts.

Locke had been so hungry to have a real, live dad all these years that he was a sitting duck for the slimy conman who claimed to have donated a sperm on his behalf 40 years before. All it took was some drinkin’ and some shootin’ and Locke was ready to hand over his internal organs. Anything for dear old Dad.

Jin had a sweet, wise father, loving and forgiving – a true anomaly on LOST.

But to make up for it, he had the father in law from hell, a mean sturgeon faced psychopath who had Jin by the balls and didn’t plan on ever letting go.

Sawyer’s father was a pair of pointy toed, high heeled cowboy boots.

That’s all we ever saw of him, making it all the more sadly ironic to hear Sawyer referred to so often as a cowboy, or to hear him tell someone to “cowboy up”. The cowboy who killed himself on his little boy’s bed was an animal.

And Sawyer had been chasing the wrong man rather than deal with the fact that the enemy he should have been hating on all these years was his own daddy.

Since this is a story of connections, it stands to reason that the connection between Locke and Sawyer would be made through a Dad.

The same coldblooded con man who had snatched Locke’s kidney was the same ruthless creep who had conned this little boy’s family into oblivion.

We knew nothing about any of that then. But all the seeds had been planted for the story that was yet to unfold.

Perhaps the most memorable connection made in these episodes was the one forged between Sawyer and Kate in one of Lost’s signature scenes from Season One – the great “I Never” fireside chat from Outlaws, about which J. J. Abrams had this to say:

“I loved the dynamic between Sawyer and Kate. It proved to me that two people talking in the jungle could be as compelling as running from a monster.” – J. J. Abrams

“I Never” is a drinking game that lets you tell the things you’ve done by only admitting to what you have not. It started light and teasing. The tomboy had never worn pink. The redneck had never kissed a man.

It was just a game, a way to catch a much needed buzz after weeks of staggering hardship.

Quickly, the revelations turned personal. Kate had never had a one night stand. Sawyer had never been in love. Kate had been married, for at least a New York minute.

What made them slip into such sudden, unexpected intimacy? Why were they telling each other these things? They began to needle one another.

She teased him about chasing a boar. He challenged her for wanting to take off into the night and be alone with him.

She lashed out about his letter. She was teasing, but it cut deeper than she’d thought.

He asked her flat out if she had ever killed a man. She looked him in the eye and told him yes.

Darkly, brokenly, he confessed that he had too.

There was silence, maybe shock, that they’d exposed themselves so utterly to one another. In the morning they were back to snarking and bitching at each other,

but the encounter had left its mark. For reasons we have yet to discover, the writers had decided to give this love story the slow burn.

Kate was there to witness the moment when Sawyer let escape the boar he’d gone into the jungle to hunt. She didn’t know exactly what she was seeing when it happened, had no idea yet of the thing that was haunting Sawyer, but she could not look away. She was connecting to him. And we would see this connection continue to build, in ways big and small, past and present, on Island and off it.

In the Season Five finale, we saw another connection. Of all those he touched, Jacob chose only two children. He helped one child to see that, for her, crime might just pay.

And he encouraged the other child to hold tight to his anger and pain.

Why did Jacob choose only two children and why did he make a point of teaching them exactly the wrong life lessons? It was almost like he wanted to be sure they both ended up getting lost in the lives that were ahead of them, like he wanted to make sure they grew up to be a couple of Outlaws.

The “I Never” scene was notable, not only for Season One but for LOST in general, because it contained something very rare for this show – actual communication.

Connection after all takes language. And asking questions, giving answers – that’s something that doesn’t happen too often on LOST.

Jin let himself be beat almost into brain damage rather than signal to Michael that he had not burned the raft. Miscommunication leads to assumptions.

Watching Sun and Jin wrestle over her bathing suit on the beach, everyone assumed that Jin was a brutal abuser. No one suspected that he was instead the gentlest and most trustworthy of men.

Sun could have helped connect him to the larger group if she’d only revealed she spoke English, but Sun, for reasons known only to her, was hoarding the power of language to herself.

Sun and Jin parted bitterly in this episode, a reminder of just how fragile our connections to one another really are.

At the end of this episode, Hurley also loses his connection to the word. When the batteries on his CD player run down, he takes off the headphones with calm resignation. It was a poignant moment, not least because it had been inevitable for some time. It was a powerful reminder of just how alone and disconnected the survivors really were.

… In Translation, another great title, might be taken to mean “(LOST) … In Translation”. Or perhaps it’s a reference to “In Translation” by James Merrill, a poem about (I think) a child putting together a jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t seem to know what picture it wants to be.

There is a scene in … In Translation where for a minute we are inside Jin’s head, listening to the quarrels of the people around him, not a word of which he can understand. We get a chance to experience briefly what it has been like to be Jin. The voices are actually the soundtrack being played backward in that scene. It’s very short, and it’s the only time Jin’s language problems ever gets that much consideration, but it brings home the point. Without language, Jin is disconnected, as any of us would be.

The Island has its own language, and not just the one Locke is trying to hear. When Sawyer chases the boar into the jungle, he is suddenly engulfed in a swirl of hissing, whispering voices.

Like Sayid in Solitary, Sawyer can’t hear most of what the whispers are saying. However if only he had the the proper decoding audio software, he could have heard them saying a lot of creepy things, like “I knew he was American” or “He’s been in a plane crash” or “Hide against the bushes” or “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry”. The voices seem to be talking about Sawyer as he stumbles around mesmerized and confused:

Sawyer’s whispers differed from Sayid’s in that there was one clear phrase repeated in the middle of the otherwise indecipherable murmurs. There were the dying words of the innocent man Sawyer wrongfully murdered in cold blood, to his own immeasurable horror.

Karma. The ring of birth and death that never ends, that none escape.

The incessant, inexorable wheel of causation and consequence.

After watching Sawyer’s tragic tale in Outlaws it felt like Sawyer’s soul was doomed to damnation. But no moral quandary on LOST is ever that clear, especially not when Sawyer is involved.

On his first pass, we saw that Sawyer hadn’t been able to bring himself to shoot the shambly old Yank, the nice enough dude who only wanted to cook him up some hot shrimp, half price. He ran. His soul would have been saved, he could have gone home with his conscience clean.

Except that he had the misfortune to run into a certain sozzled Boston doctor, in a bar bathed in an almost beatific light, who convinced him to get on with his business, and put that bullet into the man he thought deserved it, and finally get to read the letter that Jacob had helped him write. What was it with Jacob and his emissaries giving Sawyer very, very bad advice just when he was at his most vulnerable?

Sawyer’s story, in Outlaws as in Confidence Man, is a black diamond of exquisite moral contradictions.

No child in the Lost-verse has ever been more grievously harmed than Sawyer. But the murder he committed was the act of a grown man.

He had been conned into committing the murder, a karmic justice right there. We saw the horror and regret break instantly across his face when he realized what he’d done. But he couldn’t have ever been conned if he hadn’t been nursing evil in his heart.

He remains haunted, by the evil he has done and the evil done unto him.

In the years since, we have come to see that there is a world of good inside Sawyer, so what does his story mean? How are we to take it?

After freeing the boar Sawyer seemed to feel lighter, happy again, back to needling Lord Jack. Did that mean his guilt had been exorcised? Is it ever possible to be free of that kind of guilt?

Or is Sawyer trapped forever in a perpetual loop, both victimizer and victim, a creature inspiring equal parts of pity and fear? For Sawyer, will it always and inexorably come back around?

Karma is not an easy concept to understand, and it’s no easier when we’re all speaking the same language. Sometimes it’s a relief to just dispense with language entirely.

That brings us to the subject that is near and dear to the hearts of all original flavor LOST fans. When you really want to get lost on LOST, the thing to concentrate on is the Numbers. Mathematics is a unversal language, and Numbers are the indispensible building blocks of mathematical connection.

Hurley’s first great centric was a classic. Actually I think this one could have gone on Damon and J.J.’s list as well. The famous Numbers first showed up on Hurley’s lottery ticket. After that, they’d be popping up all over the place. At the end of the episode, we got an eerie glimpse of them stamped into the lid of the unopened hatch.

But that was just the beginning. In later months and years, we’d see them on the medicine vials.

On a girls soccer team.

On the odometer of Hurley’s Camaro.

On Eko’s magic stick.

The Numbers are the subject of endless fascination and speculation. LOST attracts a special breed of intellectually gifted interpreters, as any online fan knows. The things they have discovered about the numbers is truly awe inspiring. You might be interested to know that the numbers hold a valid Diophantine relation, that they appear in a mathematical relationship to the Flavius-Josephus sieve … and, what’s more, if you hold the ALT key in notepad/wordpad (font type must be “System”) and type the numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42, and then release ALT, you will get the Greek symbol µ (Mu) which is the name of the lost continent Lemuria, which is similar to Atlantis! Don’t try and tell me that’s an accident!

But what do they mean to we of little brain? Anything? In a May 2008 interview with Kristin of E!, Damon Lindelof seemed to hint that the infamous Numbers didn’t actually mean a dang thing.

“There are some questions that are very engaging and interesting, and then there are other questions that we have no interest whatsoever in answering. We call it the midi-chlorian debate, because at a certain point, explaining something mystical demystifies it. To try and have a character come and say, “Here is what the numbers mean,” actually makes every usage of the numbers up to that point less interesting….You can actually watch Star Wars now, and when Obi-Wan talks about the Force to Luke for the first time, it loses its luster because the Force has been explained as, sort of, little biological agents that are in your blood stream. So you go, “Oh, I liked Obi-Wan’s version a lot better.” Which in the case of our show is, “The numbers are bad luck, they keep popping up in Hurley’s life, they appear on the island.” … But if you’re watching the show for a detailed explanation of what the numbers mean—and I’m not saying you won’t see more of them—then you will be disappointed by the end of season six.”

You know I just don’t think that explanation could ever be acceptable to the kind of obsessives who managed to connect the Numbers to the lost island of Atlantis via their keyboards. So in 2009, again with E!, Damon took another crack at it and this time he did better:

“Here’s the story with the numbers. The Hanso Foundation that started the Dharma Initiative hired this guy Valenzetti to basically work on this equation to determine what was the probability of the world ending in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Valenzetti basically deduced that it was 100 percent within the next 27 years, so the Hanso Foundation started the Dharma Initiative in an effort to try to change the variables in the equation so that mankind wouldn’t wipe it itself out.”

Muuuuuuch better. It’s important to give the literal minded among us something to connect with. Personally, I’m fine with swimming around in a sea of vague multicultural free associations. I enjoy it. When Michael started rhapsodizing about the architectural genius of the Flatiron Building in Manhattan, it didn’t just strike me that the Flatiron was a triangle – LOST’s favorite shape – but I also recognized right away the location: 23rd Street!

It doesn’t mean anything, but gee, it’s kinda cool. Once you know the Numbers you can dig out Easter Eggs all over the place.

The numbers add up to 108 – the number of Penelope’s suitors when Odysseus was away, the number of names for each Hindu god, the number of beads in a Buddhist prayer mala, the number of times the bell is rung for Japanese New Year and in China, the most fortunate of lucky numbers.

Hurley wore a medallion on his neck with the Chinese symbol known as LU, which means Luck, specifically the luckiness of Prosperity.

There was cruel irony in that choice of symbol of course because Hurley never had a lucky day after the Numbers had made him prosperous. He became obsessed with discovering the source behind the curse. He was connected to the numbers via his pal Leonard from Santa Rosa,

who was connected to the numbers via his old Navy buddy, Sam Toomey.

Sam Toomey had built himself a house in the middle of nowhere, so as to be in a place where his numerical curse couldn’t hurt anyone but himself. Except for his wife, Martha, who had already lost her leg – in a car crash, the night after Sam had guessed there were exactly 4,815,162,342 beans in the jar at the Kalgoorlie fair.

Despite her loss and despite Sam being driven to madness and suicide by the Numbers, Martha refused to submit to the concept of a curse. She was emphatic in declaring to Hurley that bad things happen all the time, and everyone is still responsible for making their own luck. It was a classic Fate vs. Free Will dichotomy.

It was also in stark contrast to the philosophy expressed by Christian Shephard in the bar with Sawyer.

Christian’s core belief was fatalistic. Where Martha represented Free Will, Chris was a true believer in Fate. And in Curses. His slogan was “That’s why the Sox will never win the Series”, a reference to the once hapless Boston Red Sox who, as of September 2004, hadn’t won a world series since they’d sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920 and brought down the Curse of the Bambino on themselves.

It’s an interesting reference, and maybe a clue as to where the writers true affiliation lies in this perpetual debate between Fate and Free Will. The episode was set in September, 2004, about a month before the Bambino’s Curse was finally broken. On October 28, 2004, with a lunar eclipse adding a final surreal touch, the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years.

After defeating the hated Yankees in the ALCS championship no less! After being down 3-0 and winning the last 4 straight. How’s that for Fate?

What to make of it? By the time Outlaws aired on Feb. 16, 2005, we all knew that Christian’s life philosophy had become permanently irrelevant. Was that a clue that fatalism was the false path? That Fate can sometimes bring good things? Or does it mean Free Will controls the outcome? Even if it takes 86 years to come back around.

Hurley’s quest to solve the secret of the Numbers had been in vain, until he finally met up with the crazy French chick.

He was driven to find her after he’d found her scribblings of the Numbers on one of her maps. Like Sam Toomey, Rousseau had heard the Numbers beaming through the atmosphere, repeated on an endless loop over a radio transmission. Her crew had followed the Numbers to the Island, as if they were magnetized by them, and been ruined there. Meeting Rousseau was a great relief for Hurley. Finally someone who understood what the Numbers had meant for him, how it felt to have your whole life stolen from you by a string of inanimate digits.

Rousseau listened to Hurley and then she agreed. They had both been cursed by the Numbers, the mysterious integers whose power had drawn them both to this same cursed place. That was all he needed, someone to understand him. They connected with a kingsize hug.

Rousseau’s belief that the Numbers were responsible for them landing on the Island sounds like an argument for Fate again. It’s a question that keeps spinning around and around. We all know by now we’re not getting the answer to that question until the bitter end, if then. In this game, we just have to accept we don’t know when or where they’re finally going to spring the trap.

In the Bible, the Book of Numbers tells the story of the Jews as they wandered in the desert, after they had left Egypt but before they entered the Promised Land. It’s also known as the Book of Aaron, because Moses’s big brother gets to play quite a prominent role in this part of the Exodus. As always, we are never far from Biblical allusions on LOST.

“When a prophet of the LORD is among you, I reveal myself to him in visions, I speak to him in dreams. “ – Numbers 12:6

Locke, the visionary, the dreamer, ended his episode in a state of despair, reduced from mystical wise man to a traumatized, unhinged child.

But the behavior we’d seen from him didn’t lend itself to literal understanding. None of it made sense. How did he know why Sawyer had been out in the jungle?

How did he know it was Claire’s birthday?

What spirit told him about Boone’s childhood nanny, Theresa, who had fallen up and down the stairs and broke her neck doing the bidding of a tyrannical six year old Boone?

How did he know that Walt had burned the raft?

Why did he try to convince the rest of the group that unseen Others had burned the raft when he knew all along it was his little backgammon playing buddy?

What was Locke’s agenda, right from the beginning? Rewatching Season One, I often feel like I’m missing something, some connection between the Locke we saw then and the Locke we saw at the end of Season Five.

There is more to Season One Locke than just a quirky old nut who likes the scenery on Craphole Island. But what?

There is a moment while Locke is building Aaron’s crib. Hearing that he has made his own glue out of rendered animal fat, Claire is fascinated, as are we all, by Locke’s incredible array of exotic abilities. Without tools or measuring sticks or levels or squares he has put together quite a quaint little manger for the Island’s chosen one.

He explains to Claire that he is good at “putting bits and pieces together”. Connecting things. Now that is the same thing all of us are trying to do whenever we watch an episode of LOST. That’s the whole technique of the whole big puzzle-game. But for some reason that comment reminded me of this recent Easter Egg, one of the more in-your-face book titles we’ve been given during the history of LOST.

Everything that rises must converge. As we approach final landing, I don’t get the feeling that all this confusion is yet coalescing into anything. Is all this dizzying complexity going to connect in the end to form one unified, transcendent reality? We are still waiting to find out. But it won’t be long now.

It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.

We dance around in a ring and suppose.

But the secret sits in the middle and knows.
- Robert Frost

As we moved on in to the midsection of Lost’s great Season One, the secrets were beginning to pile up. There were the secrets the survivors had brought to the Island.

The secrets they found there.

Secrets kept.

Secrets stolen.

And secrets finally shared.

There were the secrets that others had left behind

And the secrets the Island wasn’t planning to give up.

Recently Damon Lindelof revealed his own secret in an interview with USA Today. It seems all episodes on Lost are not created equal, and this batch contains the episode Damon considers “my least favorite episode of the show ever …” Homecoming, I think, was flawed on almost every single level that an episode of Lost could be.” It’s true the quality flagged here and there in the first season. But maybe that’s an occupational hazard of trying to put together a puzzle when it has to be kept a secret where all the pieces are being kept. It’s easy to get a little lost.

I think Damon’s being too hard on himself about Homecoming. Even a subpar Season One episode was pretty damn fun. Things jump out at you that you never noticed the first time, things there was no reason to notice. Like this scene from Hearts and Minds. Jack approaches Locke, who is sitting on the beach, looking out to sea.

There’s more to it, a conversation where Locke bullshits Jack about there being no boar, because he’s keeping his secret about the hatch from Jack. It’s only a little scene. It’s probably just a happy accident that now, five years later, it seems almost like a bookend to this scene:

Now, it’s not exactly the same. Jack and Locke don’t achieve the same level of metaphorical color coded fashion in Hearts and Minds. Instead of black and white we get a beige and checkered theme … which means – like, nothing. But later, when the two alphas are out in the jungle digging up guns, they do put on their bicolored duds, just for the occasion. I’d like to draw your attention to whose wearing which color shirt. Not that I have any theory on it. Just sayin’.

I do realize this is most likely just a fortunate glitch, but when a story is clicking, those connections have a way of making themselves. I’m still giving even money that the final scene of Lost resembles something along these lines:

And of course I’m completely prepared to be completely wrong. How could I watch this show if I wasn’t?

There were other foreshadowy moments, though none quite as glamorous. There was a tiny moment when Sun and Jin were discussing Claire’s baby, just after Claire had returned from the jungle, and they gave each other a look that told us – even though we didn’t see it then – that this was a couple where babies were a big issue.

We had NO idea watching that scene that we were being given our first signal that infertility and infidelity would one day define the story of Jin and Sun. But it was there, and it was fun to spot it. That’s a big part of the fun of rewatching Season One as a visitor from the future. You get to see all the stuff that was always right there that you never saw before.

Another pleasure of a rewatch is just getting to watch – again – things you really enjoy rewatching. Like Kate and Sawyer jumping into the waterfall and frolicking and larking around like two kids. It is one of the most purely joyous moments of Season One.

It’s sexy, but it’s innocent.

It feels so natural. It looks so fun.

Until they bump up against those everpresent dead people that turn up everywhere on Craphole Island.

The discovery of The Case begins the quest for the shiniest secret of the batch.

What was in Kate’s Case? And by extension what was the deal with Kate? She had been traveling under heavy guard with a U.S. Marshall. Aside from that, we knew that she climbed trees better than Tarzan.

She could track. She seemed to feel pretty comfy living in the wild. And that’s about all we knew about her. Then as now, she’s a very hard character to get a bead on. Finding out that she had this case, and that it meant so much to her, became a not so subtle metaphor for how much Jack and Sawyer both wanted to find a way to get inside her … head.

This episode, coming on the heels of the epic sex-ay kiss in Confidence Man, was the next chapter in the LOST Love Triangle series of stories. It starts out light and bubbly with the waterfall romp.

Then it shifts into a hotter, more sexual vibe as Kate and Sawyer wrestle for The Case

and bargain for it and come to an impasse.

Kate enjoys the cat and mouse with Sawyer and almost gets the upper hand.

But then inexplicably, prematurely, she just gives up and goes begging to Jack.

That’s when it all starts disintegrating into a long, miserable slog towards Jack finally letting Kate have her lost Cracker Jack prize. And in the end, it’s still a total secret what it all means to her.

As a matter of fact, according to this 2006 interview with ABC, Damon Lindelof regarded Kate’s toy airplane as “probably the single biggest regret that we have as storytellers. ”

Our intention was always that there be a second flashback story that revealed that that plane was part of a time capsule that she shared with a childhood sweetheart. She was responsible for the childhood sweetheart’s death when she was on the run and, therefore, the plane had great emotional investment. And we would hear “What’s up with the plane? What’s going on with the plane? When are you going to pay off on the plane?” Then we paid it off and people still are asking us. So in the finale that year the marshal gives this big sort of monologue about, “You want to know about this f–ing plane? I’ll tell you, God damn it!”

It goes to show you how much forethought those guys were putting into Kate’s storyline. Like … none. The plane meant nothing. It just showed that Kate was clinging beyond all rational measure to a childhood trinket. But let’s let bygones be bygones, shall we? This episode, the cleverly named Whatever the Case May Be was a fun one, at least for the first half. It could almost be considered a kind of litmus test for shippers. For example, if you like your romance flirty and hot and where the girl gets to be on top sometimes,

then you just might be a Skater.

If, on the other hand, you’re more of a navel gazing no fun mopey type,

then don’t look now but you just might be a Jater.

Seriously, it’s wrong to generalize. There’s more nuance than that to both these stories. The differences between them, however, are striking. Sawyer bargains with Kate over The Case, and only wants her to tell him what’s inside. He’s not even asking to see it. He’s curious, not about what’s actually in The Case, but only why it means so much to Kate to have it.

Jack on the other hand not only has to see what’s in the case, he’s going to oversee any and all openings of said case, and then whatever they find, he’s going to take it.

Except that stupid plane, of course.

When Sawyer and Kate have their close encounter with corpses, they’re as weightless and playful and graceful as a pair of dolphins.

When Jack and Kate go grave robbing, they’re gagging and tearing up and trying not to retch all over each other.

Was this stuff deliberate or did the writers not see what they were doing? Even when it came to month old dead people, Sawyer and Kate managed to make it look sexy. Jack and Kate had peaked too early with all that hot and heavy verbal copulation. By this episode they had already moved on to the numbingly miserable bad marriage phase of the relationship.

Maybe it all boiled down to respect. When Kate couldn’t go along on the jungle trek to trap Ethan, Sawyer simply handed her his extra gun. No problem, baby.

Jack didn’t think a grubby little alley cat like Kate deserved his trust.

After he dragged THE TRUTH out of her and wrenched the key out of her hand, after he’d humbled her and made her watch while he opened her damn case and confiscated the key and put it around his own fucking neck!,

he left her to have a good girly cry. When it comes to these two ships the biggest secret for me still remains: Why did anybody like watching Jack and Kate? And more than that, what were these writers thinking when they dreamed up this shite? One possible answer? It’s an aspect of season one that makes fanboys a little uncomfortable, I’ve noticed, but I’ll say it anyway. The explanation for Season One Jack & Kate, as far as I’m concerned, was the not so pretty thread of misogyny that ran deeply through much of the early characterizations.

Jack, despite being as highstrung as a tripwire, was portrayed as the reasonable man, the decent guy, the great doctor who had every right to control and discipline the white trash brat, Kate. Kate was the liar and the criminal who deserved to be treated with suspicion and resentment. We had seen her use her feminine wiles to rook the bank manager,

and we knew she’d been pulling plenty of tricks on the fool she got to help her rob the bank.

Kate used sex, heavily watered down with tears when necessary, to get whatever she wanted from life. I’m not sure if we were supposed to be distracted by the way she handled a gun into thinking she was kickass,

because in the story we saw on the Island, Kate was playing the naughty child begging for the good graces of her mad daddy Jack, as traditional and demeaning a female role as there is. If Kate were a singular case, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it so much. But Sun was also a liar. In fact, she was such a liar that she asked Kate, right after she stopped lying about not speaking English, “Have you never lied to a man you’ve loved”? As if to say that lying and loving went automatically hand in hand for women.

And on Season One LOST, unfortunately, they did.

Shannon lied to Boone to take his money, and then she duped him into quasi-incest sex, and then she dumped him with about as much warmth as an ice shower.

And to top off the array of women behaving badly, Walt’s mom Susan lied to Michael so that she could steal Walt away for herself and then she lied to Walt his whole life by never letting him know his dad had sent him letters.

In the twisted world of fanboy-written romance, the undeniable undercurrent is that girls, basically, suck. You can’t trust them. They lie and they’ll screw you over first chance they get. It’s a throwback to the mother of all misogynist archetypes – Eve, the devious manipulator who tricked poor Adam into losing innocence, immortality and the most prime piece of real estate in mythological history.

As in the Bible, there are exceptions made, but basically only for women that weren’t considered sexually desirable. Or available. The innocent madonna Claire was sacrosanct. Never more so than when she was playing damsel in distress, which is a female role fanboys can all get behind.

And no one could ever say a bad word about Holy Mother Rose, comforting her boy Charlie in this jungle Pieta.

So while it was being well established that hot girls are all sneaky ass bitches, what story were we being told about the boys?

Most of their stories revolved around a secret as well, the kind of secret LOST really likes to get its teeth into – the secret of what it takes to turn a boy into a real live man. Manhood, baby.

The first thing it takes is the one thing most of these poor schmucks on LOST ain’t got: a real live Dad.

What they had instead was John Locke, their resident fatherless mystic crackpot – boar expert, dreamweaver and most likely a hardcore devotee of the Iron John School of Mythopoeic Manhood. Iron John is an interesting fairy tale to read if you have a minute, with echoes of LOST that are quite striking and lyrical.

“I am Iron John, and was by enchantment a wild man, but thou hast set me free; all the treasures which I possess, shall be thy property.”

Walt met with Locke secretly, every chance he could get, trying to glean the secrets of manhood that Michael seemed so uniquely inept at teaching.

Locke had been mentor to Charlie as well, imparting to him the wisdom of bees and boars and the fine art of kicking a monkey off of one’s back. But the young man Locke was most invested in was his partner in hatch finding, that dreamy boy Boone.

Since time was of the essence, and Boone was a pretty limp subject to start with, Locke was forced to resort to his homemade Instant Manhood Recipe. He bashed him over the head and then slathered his open head wound with hillbilly LSD that he mixed up himself, right on the spot.

You won’t find this method in any of the parenting handbooks, but as always Locke knew how to think outside the box. Locke told Boone he had given him “an experience that is vital to your survival on this Island”, and despite the fact that Boone ended up not surviving on this Island, it seemed to be a very useful experience.

Manhood means freeing yourself from the effeminazation of modern civilization and grabbing hold of that big ass knife.



It means rescuing damsels in distress.

And then it means, when you lose the thing you love the most, you must suck it up and “let it go”.

There’s no crying in manhood. Because really, what girl is worth getting so messed up over, dude?

Especially your not-sister who is a self absorbed airhead who’ll flirt shamelessly with any old charming Iraqi torturer that wanders into her life.

Shannon’s first death scene, even though it was just hallucinogenic wish fulfillment, was pretty gruesome, and I’m sure it felt shocking the first time around. I don’t remember how I felt the first time I watched it, if I even realized it was a dream at first. But what I noticed this time around was that Boone’s dream accuratetly depicted the way that the Smoke Monster kills.

Shannon was lifted up in the air exactly as Eko was and thrashed around until she looked like chewed up hamburger.

Boone may not have lived very long in this tale, but he was very talented in the dreamosphere. We would see him again in Locke’s dreams, a bond between father and son that would not be broken by death.

Charlie, like Boone, struggled to find his way as a man.

He had his own flashback secrets. Instead of incestual longings, Charlie’s secret was his addiction to heroin. His sad attempt at fitting in as a normal workaday man type ended with him ralphing straight into the state of the art C815 photocopier he was trying to sell.

It was one of the most pathetic flashback stories ever told on LOST, small and weak, but it revealed a central secret. For Charlie, manhood was going to be about “taking care of someone”.

It didn’t work out with the daughter of the guy who bought the paper company in Slough (shoutout to the British The Office ), especially after he was caught stealing Winston Churchill’s cigarette case,

but he was determined to make it work out with sweet little Claire. He mourned her loss and tortured himself over his failure to save her.

Then he read her diary and got real happy because he found out she liked him,

which felt like a wildly inappropriate reaction considering at the time she was still missing and in the clutches of the dreaded Ethan Rom. (Come to think of it, maybe I can see why this is Damon Lindelof’s least favorite episode.)

He gently coaxed her back to reality after she survived her trauma.

And then he did the most manliest thing of all and picked up a gun and shot another man dead.

Killing Ethan left many secrets hidden, at least for another year or so. We wouldn’t know how Ethan got all those scratches on his face.

We wouldn’t know what happened to Claire or why Ethan took her or who he took her to. All that would have to wait because Charlie had decided to be judge and jury, to give Ethan what he “deserved”. Charlie’s story, as always, circled back to Catholicism and judgment, and to the biggest secret of all – the secret of Faith and why it means so much to some people and seems so totally irrelevant to others.

Let’s take a break here and collect some of the other secrets that were raining down in these episodes. Like, who knew, when we watched Sayid’s long passionate tale about his devotion to his beloved Nadia, that he secretly just had a thing for leggy blondes.

Turns out Sayid was down with that “love the one you’re with” mentality all the way.

Yes, that was a direct contradicton of what they had been telling us about Sayid just a few weeks before, but what the hell. Romance on LOST is the soul of inconsistency.

That’s one thing I think we all can agree on.

Here’s a secret I’ve always wondered about: Why are bathroom jokes always considered funnier when they’re about a fat guy ?

Hurley had to put up with Jack snickering because he had the shits, and then they had him grabbing at Jin’s crotch to beg him to pee on his foot! It was double the hilarity. Number one and number two in the same episode!

And why is it even funny when Hurley just looks at a dead fish? Like I don’t see any joke here, but this picture still makes me smile.

Another secret: How do assless men keep their pants on?

And speaking of Sawyer, how did he rebuild his shelter up beach when all he carried with him on the great migration was a backpack?

It was still a secret, a cool one, why 815 passengers kept showing up in each others flashbacks, like Sawyer during Boone’s visit to the Sydney police station. Come to think of it, it’s still a total secret what those pre-crash connections are going to mean in the end.

And we are able to wonder now, with all our wonderful hindsight, whether it was coincidence or fate that Kate was robbing a lockbox 815

in a bank in the same city where Sawyer later told the warden to deposit Clementine’s inheritance.

When Michael was hit by the car just before he was set to go and get his baby Walt back

was that the Island reaching out to shape his fate the same way the gun he bought refused to kill him?

Was the cartoon about the Penguin with a Sunburn a secret nod to the mystery of a Polar Bear on a South Pacific Island? Is there some meaningful secret behind the cognitive dissonance of Antarctic creatures existing in tropical climates?

Why was the unluckiest boy in town the one wearing the shirt with the four aces?

Here’s a secret I don’t expect any answer for, but what was up with those slimy greenish greyish guava seeds that Jack gave to Kate?

Was it some kind of squicky method of asexual seed transfer, sort of like second base for verbal copulators?

Why were there so many antibiotics on the plane? Jack was able to blackmail Sawyer into giving up the case by playing peekaboo with his Hippocratic Oath and threateni