While we are pulling the podcast together, I thought I would stop procrastinating and post a well overdue theory article.  It should be a little taste of what Doc and I have in store for you in the next podcast (which should be really really soon).

When we found out that Jacob had an enemy, or maybe a better word choice would be rival, everyone was quick to call him Esau. But how much does the story of Jacob and Esau fit with this rivalry in LOST? When Michael Emerson was asked at the Lost panel at comic con, he gave an extremely cryptic answer, and told us nothing.  Although, good ol’ Ben Linus probably only knows as much as we do at this time.  If the creative staff is dodging these story parallels, why even use the name, Esau, to define unLocke?   Let’s take a look at the story and analyze if unLocke deserves the name Esau.

Two Nations and Stolen Blessings

Isaac (the father of Jacob and Esau) was having some fertility issues of his own.  His wife, Rebekah, was barren. So he went to the temple and summoned the smoke monster… wait nevermind, wrong story. He prayed that she would get pregnant, and what do you know? She did! Shortly after conception, though, her twins fought inside the womb, and this worried her quite a bit.  Anyways, she prayed to God asking for help, and he gave her this interesting quote:

“Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples from within you will be separated;
one people will be stronger than the other,
and the older will serve the younger.”

I’d like to back peddle for a bit, and allude to a game that John and Walt used to play, backgammon.

“Two players. Two sides. One is light… one is dark.”

Of course, in the case of Jacob and Esau neither one was exactly light or dark (unless you count Esau’s red skin). Anyways, Jacob was born after Esau, grasping firmly on his heel.  Actually, that is how he got the name Jacob, which means “he grasps the heel” or more figuratively “he decieves”.

As they became older, Esau became a “skilled hunter, a man of the county” (a John Locke, if you will). Jacob liked to hang out with his mom back at the tents and became quite the little cook. After a long day of hunting, Esau came back to home base completely famished, and Jacob was praticing his Martha Stewert-like cooking skills on a lentil stew. Esau demanded some food from Jacob.  Jacob agreed to give him the food, but in return Jacob wanted Esau’s birthright. Now the birthright is a pretty big deal. The eldest son gets most of the inheritance when the father dies and has the privilege of his family line to produce the Savior. (Could our Jacob and Esau be battling over the inheritance of the island and the power to save the cheerleader, and subsequently, the world?)

Well, Esau thinks he is about to die and decides his birthright is going to do him much good if he kicks the bucket (or he was quite hungry). Esau sells his birthright to Jacob, and Jacob does a little devious dance. (Ok, well that isn’t in the story, but I imagine him doing some kind of jig)

Years later, when they decided to send the legally blind Isaac to a retirement home, Isaac also decided that it was time to bless Esau. He told Esau to go out and catch him some wild boar to make a tasty meal.  Once Esau did that, he would receive Isaac’s blessing.  Rebekah, being the devious old codger that she was, overheard this, and told Jacob that he can get the blessing all for himself if he acts fast. So Jacob grabbed some goats, Rebekah prepared her own tasty eats, and covered Jacob with the goat skins (since Esau was a hairy guy and Jacob was, well, not).

Isaac, surprised at speedy service, and asked Jacob how he did it so fast. Jacob responded with something witty about working at a Jimmy John’s, and proceeded to show him how hairy he was. Now Isaac was pretty confused by all this and thought something was off when he heard Jacob’s voice instead of Esau’s. Isaac asked Jacob if really was Esau.  Jacob lied to him and said he was, and unknowningly Isaac blessed him:

“May nations serve you
and peoples bow down to you.
Be lord over your brothers,
and may the sons of your mother bow down to you.
May those who curse you be cursed
and those who bless you be blessed.”

(This seems to be just like our Jacob, who is “worshiped” by the others) Jacob received the blessing and scurried off shortly before Esau came in with his boar stew. Esau was ready for his blessing, and told Isaac to grab some grub.  When Isaac realized his mistake, he told Esau that Jacob stole Esau’s blessing and there wasn’t anything he could do to change that. Although, he did have a little bit of a blessing for Esau (If you can even call it that)…

“Your dwelling will be
away from the earth’s richness,
away from the dew of heaven above.
You will live by the sword
and you will serve your brother.
But when you grow restless,
you will throw his yoke
from off your neck.”

(If we take this blessing literally enough, its seems like Esau could be the shapeshifter and/or the smoke monster.) Esau is pretty pissed off at this point and decided he wanted to beat the living crap out of Jacob–or to put it lightly–kill him. Jacob, with the help of his ever resourceful mother, escaped with his life and goes to live with his uncle, Laban (who actually deceives Jacob for a change).

This story, does in fact, have a happy ending (while Lost most likely will not). Some time after this event, Jacob finds out that Esau is coming for him.  In a futile plea for his life, Jacob tries to shower Esau with gifts. However, when Esau sees Jacob, instead of a knife, Jacob receives a hug.  In the end, Esau forgave Jacob.

Ok, now that you endured this strange rendition of the Jacob and Esau story, how can we apply it to Lost?  I think it actually doesn’t shed that much light on our own Jacob and Esau–other than being a framework of the timeless story of rivalry.  There may be some parallels we can draw from this story, such as Jacob’s dominance of Esau on the island.  Jacob may have stolen the power of the island from unLocke, and this could be why unLocke tried (and succeeded) in killing Jacob.  But our story doesn’t end there, it only faded to white…

An Interuniversal Backgammon Board

If we think of the island as one giant backgammon board, as Locke presented it in season one, we would only see half the picture.  Jacob and unLocke have been at war with each other for at least before the time of the Black Rock.  The pieces on the board are the manipulated lives of the castaways.  As we saw in the finale, unLocke had finally found a victory over Jacob by manipulating Ben to do his will.  This victory, however, will be short lived.  Jacob had seen his death coming, and set in motion his plan to increase the size of the board by another universe.

Along with AstroJones, I’m pretty convinced that unLocke is the shapeshifter–or illusionist–that we have been seeing since season one. He may have not even been in his true form when we saw him briefly in the finale.  This manipulative power comes with a price, unLocke cannot kill and may have limited access to the physical world.  He had kept the losties under his sway by getting hold over their emotions, and ultimately manipulating Ben to kill Jacob.

Jacob saw that this was inevitable, and had a plan to keep unLocke from accomplishing his task.  He manipulated the castaways in a different way, taking them back in time to cause a little fade to white that changes everything.  (Ah yes, I know, a lot of people reading this just groaned and are completely against changing time.  Don’t worry, I’ll explain how that will work out in my next physics article, trust me).  By giving unLocke the pleasure of killing him (which will only keep him off for a while) and creating an alternate universe, Jacob wins this round.  How the battle continues from there is anyones guess, but I’m thinking the pieces of the game will learn of their significance and start picking sides…

Speaking of picking sides, who is the good guy here?  Throughout the series, we have only known about Jacob and it seems like he is the best choice for a protagonist.  This could not be more wrong, Jacob is a murderer and is only in this for himself.  He killed Sayid’s wife just to being Sayid back to the island.  Although, you may argue that if we are changing time anyway, her life will be spared.  Messing with alternate timeline stuff will be pretty tricky.  We have no idea what is in store for Sayid and Nadia when this new timeline comes into play.  They may have never met in this new timeline, and thus Sayid becomes an even more terrible torturer in the process.  Although, it could easily go the other way and they live happily.  This is just another reason why Jacob can’t be our good guy, since he is only altering the universe for his own good.

Since Jacob’s out, we turn to unLocke.  Could he be our hero?  Nope.  This guy is also fighting only for his own good, and will happily take down whoever stands in his way.  Remember Eko?  He used the image of Yemi to manipulate Eko and further his plan along, and the smoke monster destroyed Mr Eko.

Both sides are only in it for themselves.  Who should the losties root for?  Their only hope will be to play the players, and cause this immortal struggle to cease with the destruction of Jacob and unLocke.  I say, Locke will save them all.  John came back on flight 316, John 3:16, its only fitting.  That or I am just a really big Locke fan.

Of Dimensions and Rivers

I hope you guys enjoyed my little rendition on Jacob and Esau, and my take on Jacob and unLocke.  I’ll will be back next week to talk about why its inevitable that we change time (while preserving whatever happened, happened), and a little bit of physics of how thats possible.  As well as more promises of an upcoming podcast.

Before I get into any of the evidence,  let’s just look at this logically.  Leaving popular characters’ lives in precarious situations is part and parcel of the LOST finale experience.  In season one it was Jin, Sawyer, Michael, and Walt.  In season two it was Desmond, Mr. Eko, and Locke.  You get the picture.  This season we have a lot of lives at risk: in addition to being parked a few yards away from a nuke, Sayid is bleeding to death.  Juliet was at ground zero for said bomb; heck everybody in that general vicinity is more or less screwed without the deft writing chops of Darlton to rescue them in some fascinating way.

The main reason people should be faithful is that Daniel’s plan will likely work, altering the future for all characters – including Locke.  For it to fail would mean that the story is over for Jack, Hurley, Jin, Juliet, Kate, Sawyer, and Sayid; very unlikely.  Now as for the aim of Daniel’s plan, we all know that had nothing to do with Oceanic 815 landing in Los Angeles.  The changes to history would begin the same day the bomb went off, in 1977, and would fan out from there.  Dharma could potentially continue their research, minus a station, and the butterfly effect would likely disrupt timelines so sginificantly that Oceanic 815 may never even take place as we know it.  As for Daniel’s true purpose in changing history – saving Charlotte – that plan may succeed.

If the finale taught us one thing, though, it is that the particulars of the castaways lives are not important in Jacob’s game.  They were selected to play on his chessboard of an island for a reason and altering their histories won’t change that.  All of them were chosen long before they got on Oceanic 815.  A big temporal reset at this point doesn’t free them from the game, only the circumstances that have shaped their journey up until this point – including death.

One piece of evidence, albeit very tenuous, is Walt’s prophecy – we’ve yet to see this come true.  Could Walt have been seeing events from a separate time-line?  From a story perspective, it could be very interesting to have Locke somehow ressurrected after anti-Locke has done so much damage to his reputation.  As for Terry O’Quinn continuing in the role of Jacob’s nemesis: why?  Now that man number 2 has presumably succeeded in his mission to kill Jacob, does he even have the need to maintain Locke’s visage?

For me, Locke’s death-death is par for the course in LOST-ville, and something we are expected to debate until season six premieres next season, but my gut tells me the bald guru will yet have a role in the island’s final saga.

Remember back in the season one finale: when you knew that the show was about to end but you were waiting for that one final shot?  They would pan down, you would see whatever was in the shaft, and then “LOST” would flash on the screen and you’d have all summer to consider the meaning of whatever it was that you saw.  But that shot never happened (which, in retrospect, is amazing and brilliant.)  The season five finisher was similar.  This time though, as the clock ticked, away we knew that we didn’t have enough time to find out what was going to happen, so we’re left with everything to speculate about.  Heck, we don’t even know for sure that the bomb went off.

There was so much going on in this episode that I’ve decided to break it down by character.  I should start by saying that my thoughts are based on the assumption that, whatever does happen in 1977, 815 crashes on the island – because whatever happened, happened.

Sayid:  The man with the most to gain if the bomb changes history, and the least to lose if it doesn’t, may be a goner.  “Nothing can save me,” he said to Jack, and the look on his face said that he wasn’t just talking about his life.  Sayid has lost everything that he has ever cared about, was tossed aside by the man who sent him on a bloody but purpose-giving killing spree, and in trying to destroy this monster, ended up creating him.  I’d like to see him make it, and I’m not giving up hope – the island is powerful, and I’d like to think that Sayid’s purpose entails more than just shooting a child and rigging a nuclear device to explode on impact.  When the time-travelers take their final flash through time I hope that Sayid isn’t left behind like Charlotte was.  He’s much too kick-ass to be killed by a drunkard workman.

Kate:  Even as a child she was causing trouble…  And I thought that she might have been redeeming herself – she was the one voice of reason against setting off the bomb.  Then a bloody Jack walks out of the jungle and she caves, even though the man is trying to nullify everything that they had together, and in doing so ensure that Kate spends a hefty amount of time behind bars.  There’s one more season for this character to become, at the least, likable.  Something drastic needs to be done.

Radzinsky: “Hey, Stuart?  Remember that time that Dr. Chang asked you to stop drilling into that electromagnetic pocket, and you wouldn’t, and all hell broke loose and Phil got impaled and Dr. Chang lost use of his arm?  Oh, and the gunfire and all those people dying?  And you know how, because of that, someone has to live underground and push a button every 108 minutes or the whole world is screwed?  Well, you’re new assignment just came in…”

Sun / Charlie / Claire / Hurley: When I was rewatching season three and saw that Charlie’s DS ring was left in Aaron’s crib, I knew that it was going to make a reappearance.  Sun found it for a reason, and it’s a safe bet that, with Charlie dead, its use will have something to do with Claire.  After all, Christian may be some form of apparition, but Claire is still Claire.  As far as we know.

Or: Sun has the DS ring and Hurley has a guitar – two objects that a resurrected Charlie Pace would be very happy to see.  It’s probably just wishful thinking, but the ring and guitar are there for a reason.

Rose and Bernard: Good for them!  My only problem is that I was hoping that Bernard, as the last surviving member of the tail section group that joined the other 815ers, would have a greater purpose in the overall scheme of things.

Are they Adam and Eve?  Probably not.  For one, they don’t live in the caves.  Plus, Jack estimated that the corpses had been there for forty or fifty years – Rose and Bernard are living only twenty-seven years before the bodies were discovered, and they looked like they had plenty of time left.  Also, Jack found a small bag with two stones, one black and one white.  If the bodies were Rose and Bernard, then the mystery of these stones would come to nothing.

Jack: He wants to detonate a nuclear bomb on an inhabited island because he and Kate couldn’t cut it in a relationship?  Remember Jack the hero?  Remember the man who brought Charlie back from certain death?  Remember the live together, die alone speech?  What the hell happened to this man?  I have no doubt that they would only sink Jack this low so that he can rise back to his former glory in the final season.  Many people believe that it’s Jack, and not Locke, who is the chosen one (I hope it’s Locke,) and no true hero can have his glorious victory without first descending to a point of misery.  Odysseus was imprisoned on an island and thrashed for days by the sea after watching all of his comrades perish, a one-handed Luke Skywalker was reduced to tears in front of his terrible father before coming into his own as a Jedi, and Captain Malcolm Reynolds saw everything he knew on the brink of extinction before finally releasing the Alliance’s horrible secret to the ‘Verse.  Jack will rise again.  Will he be the new leader of the Others?  Will he be the new Jacob?  He has faith in Locke, and that may be the first handhold on his climb back to greatness.  Whatever happens, I hope it’s worth the wait.

James: Not Sawer.  Sawer was a product of James Ford’s unresolved issues with the man who ruined his family.  Then he strangled this man to death with a chain.  Sawer doesn’t need to exist anymore, even if the woman he loves (not Kate) is dead.  All he wanted was to be left alone so that he could be happy.  Then came Kate, the woman who he had fallen in love with, and who loved him back whenever Jack wasn’t around.  It’s easy to forget that, prior to her leaving the island, he only knew Kate for about four months.  He was with Juliet for three years.  We’ve seen him as a loner con-man, then as a responsible and committed leader (and lover.)  If Juliet is dead we’ll see another side of James.  He’ll be angry, and not least of all at the woman who came between him and Juliet.  But the positive changes that his years in the Dharma Initiative allowed to happen won’t completely abandon him.  When it’s time to choose sides, he’ll pick the right one, and he’ll be determined and ready to inflict punishment on the bad guys.  He won’t be quite so nice as he has been, and he’ll be one of the most dangerous forces on the island.

Juliet: That scene tore my heart out.  You know the one I mean.  James wanted to hold on to her, both physically and emotionally, but the forces acting on them were just too great.  I don’t want her to be dead, but if she is, then at least she died in a moment when she was taking charge.  She was lured to the island where she existed subject to Ben’s whims, then carried to a time where a reunion with her sister, the one person who she longed to see again, was impossible.  But in her final moments she was finally in control of her destiny, and she chose to take action.  If a touch from Jacob means protection or survival, then Juliet is truly gone.  That sucks.

Richard: So we know that Jacob is the source of Ricardos’s lack of aging, but we still have no idea how long Richard has been on the island.  I was half expecting to see him, at least briefly, on the Black Rock.  Without that shot, however, it’s quite possible that he had been on the island long before the ship arrived, possibly along with a group of Others.  And how did 1977 Richard know where to smash in the wall in order to enter the house in the barracks?  This would suggest an intimate knowledge of the layout of the Dharma village as well as a deep familiarity with the temple.  And if the temple is so near the island’s surface, how is it that construction of the barracks didn’t accidentally unearth the tunnels?  Unless someone who designed the barracks was also associated with the Others – that would also explain the convenient proximity of the tunnel and basement.  Could the Others have infiltrated Dharma?  Possibly even before the Initiative began working on the island?  Jacob brought the Black Rock, and possibly Oceanic 815, maybe he also brought the Dharma Initiative.  Maybe the “very clever fellow” who built the pendulum in the Lamppost is the same man that leads the Others.

Ben: He never saw Jacob and doesn’t know why.  It can be assumed that his intention once gaining leadership of the Others wasn’t to deceive them, but it became a necessity once Jacob refused to show himself.  But perhaps he was chosen by Jacob, and his purpose all along was to deliver the fatal blow when they finally did meet.  He was a perfect choice – such a brilliant liar and manipulator would be so confident in his abilities that he would never suspect that someone was manipulating him.  He always had a plan, was always in control, and therefore made the perfect pawn.  But, in the end, he performed his duty well, and may be rewarded for his years of loyalty to the great leader who refused to acknowledge him.

The real Locke: When Lapidus asked what was in the box, I jokingly said “Three spare John Lockes.”  I had no idea how close I would be to the horrible truth.  It was wonderful to see John confident and in charge, and then we find out that it wasn’t really him.  The possibility that John Locke is gone for good is unthinkable, and it would royally piss off a whole lot of people – including me.  But I don’t believe that he’s gone for good.  The island healed his spine, and it looks like Jacob brought him back from the dead during their encounter after Locke’s fall – and that gives me hope.  Jacob – who also isn’t dead – will need a general, and who better than John Locke?  He will return to regain his identity, and though he probably won’t be leading the Others, he’ll have an important role to play in the events to come.

Ilana and friends: When Jacob visited Ilana in the hospital it was made clear that they were already acquainted with one another.  If an “Other” is defined as a follower of Jacob, then there could be several branches.  We know that there are Others off-island, and Jacob clearly isn’t confined to the island’s borders.  Jacob knew that some stuff was about to go down and put Ilana on Ajira 316 because he knew that she, as well as Bram and the others with them, would be useful in the events to come.  This also explains why she brought Sayid: Jacob knew that he needed to be back on the island and wouldn’t return by choice.  After finding the “note” in the cabin, both Ilana and Bram recognized the statue, and at least one of them knew exactly where it was.  Could Ilana be the off-island version of Richard?  Not really a leader but someone knowledgeable about what’s going on and there to guide those who are in charge?

Frank: He may be a candidate.  For what?  Maybe for leadership of the Others.  Ben was ousted and Locke is dead, so there is no leader.  Jacob might have tasked Ilana with being on the lookout for a new leader.  Next season we could be seeing Jacob the Great and Powerful instructing Leader Lapidus and General Locke.  That definitely works for me.

Jacob and the Adversary: “They come.  They fight.  They destroy.  They corrupt.  It always ends the same.”

“It only ends once.  Anything that happens before that is just progress.”

This has been going on for a long time.  From the sound of it, whatever the survivors of Oceanic 815 are in the middle of has been going on long before the Black Rock made its way to the island.  Jack, Locke, and friends came, did a lot of fighting, and their fare share of destroying.  As for corruption, I guess that’s part of the bigger picture.  The big question is: is this the ending, or just more progress?  Considering that this is the only occurrence that a television series has been made about, I’d think it’s a safe bet that we’ll see the ending of whatever it is that these two mysterious characters are talking about.  Someone is finally going to resolve things – probably Jack, but I hope it’s Locke.  Or maybe they’ll throw us a curve ball and it will be James, or Frank… or Bernard.

Jacob brought the Black Rock to the island, and based on his appearance in the lives of our friends, he brought Oceanic 815 and Ajira 316, as well.

I can’t begin  to guess just who these two men really are.  They are probably very ancient, and more than likely not human.  Gods, perhaps?  Left over remnants of the Egyptian pantheon?  Or ancient people who were given gifts and assigned the tasks of protecting/destroying something that the fading ancient gods could no longer influence.

The white and black clothing was intentionally obvious, saving us from debate over who is really good and who is evil – evidence that is supported by the rest of the episode.  Not-Locke doesn’t seem very trustworthy, and they did all they could to make Jacob feel benevolent.  His touching of the passengers of 815 was significant, possibly marking them with a type of protection.  With the exception of Rose and Bernard, who escaped to find peace, and Claire, who has temporarily vanished, those that Jacob touched are the only ones from 815 alive and on the island.  Or possibly he was marking them for a safe return, ensuring that Ajira 316 would go where it was supposed to.

I don’t believe that Jacob is dead.  There was no surprise when the Adversary showed up in his home, and, knowing that Ben was capable of killing him, Jacob seemed to goad Ben into taking action.  My thought is that Jacob’s treatment of Ben – his refusal to speak with him and the sacrifices that Ben made – were all done to ensure that Jacob was killed.  What lies in the shadow of the statue?  The answer translates to “He who will save us all.”  That has a very prophetic feeling about it.

I think that maybe both Jacob and his Adversary are monsters.  We’ve seen the black smoke monster many times, but in season two Locke described the monster that he saw (during season one) as a “beautiful white light.”  Jacob wore white, and maybe the monster that Locke saw was actually Jacob, showing himself to Locke to help cement Locke’s faith in the island.  The smoke monster we’re used to is the black-clad adversary, who took on several forms in order to accomplish his goal of killing Jacob: he was Yemi, and killed Eko so that Locke would receive the sign from Eko’s stick; he was Walt, to talk John out of the Dharma grave and into killing Naomi; he was Christian, accomplishing, among other things, making sure that Locke turned the frozen wheel; and he was Alex, ensuring that Ben would follow not-Locke and do whatever he said.

Ilana said that Jacob hadn’t been in the cabin for a long time – it could have been the Adversary that called “help me” to Locke – we don’t know when the ash line was broken, or what it’s true purpose was.  Was it to keep someone in, or to keep danger out?

I just rewatched the scenes with Jacob and his “friend,” and got the idea that they could be working together.  His friend says that he wants to kill Jacob, but maybe that’s what has to happen for the “progress” to turn into an ending.

There’s a loophole, though: Jacob can only be killed by someone who truly believes in him, and who follows his word, and this person has to do it of his or her own free will.  Enter Benjamin Linus.

Jacob’s friend says that one day he’ll find a loophole.  Jacob replies, “Well, when you do I’ll be right here.”  And he found his loophole, which was the alienation and torment of Ben Linus.  A chosen leader who was kept away from Jacob, and who had to sacrifice his daughter, and the island itself, for a man who would not even meet him.  And Jacob was waiting patiently to die.

Jacob’s friend used the appearances of Alex and Locke to push Ben over the edge, making him want to kill the man who Ben told, “I never questioned anything.  I did as I was told.”

Jacob made sure that it was Ben’s decision; “Whatever he’s told you, I want you to understand one thing: you have a choice.”  When he said “What about you?” to Ben, it wasn’t said with malice, but almost with pity.  He knew that Ben had been used – he wasn’t proud of it, but it was necessary.

Listen to the words and tone of the conversations between Jacob and his friend.  They can easily be interpreted as sinister, but that’s what we expect when one person wants to kill another.  There’s nothing overtly malicious.  They could be two people working together to ensure that one of them dies.  “They’re coming,” could have been a warning to his friend, who clearly understood who he meant, and, after he kicked Jacob into the fire (which was necessary to cleanse the body for whatever step comes next,) that look on false-John’s face could have been because of what was to come – whoever is coming means trouble.

I’ll end here, as this is getting a little long.  My hope is to follow the viewing schedule set up by the good people at DocArzt.com and give my thoughts on any unanswered questions (as well as general complaints about Kate.)  Thanks for reading.

Technorati Tags: the incident, Wild Speculation

My theory is that Ilana is a character intended to represent the Egpytian goddess Sekhmet.

Ilana is clearly in charge on the island, a strong female leader among her people, and Sekhmet was a warrior, protector and hunter. Sekhmet was commonly referred to as a lioness, and from a purely physical perspective, Ilana’s beautiful hair can certainly be described as a mane.

But Sekhmet is also known as both the Lady of the Flame and Devouring Flame, which is quite significant given that when we last saw Jacob, he had been kicked into the fire by Not-Locke/Mystery Man.

One of Sekhmet’s other designations was the Lady of Life, because she was able to cure illnesses and heal the wounded. Enter Jacob. He approached her at the hospital and asked for help, and we can assume that this took place before the events of 2007 on the island during the finale. If Jacob knew ahead of time that Mystery Man was going to take advantage of the loophole as Not-Locke and finally attempt to kill him, perhaps this favor he asked of Ilana involved protection from the future inferno, followed by her restorative powers. Further, I believe that Jacob was wearing gloves in the hospital because they had to avoid physical contact prior to the moment of salvation.

Before being tossed in the flames, Jacob told Not-Locke that “they’re coming,” and he very well may have been alluding to Ilana and her people. They were just outside of the statue, and I have a feeling that (at the beginning of Season 6) we will see Ilana rescue and/or save Jacob.

We are not privy to how, when and where Ilana sustained her injuries. But if Ilana is indeed an embodiment of Sekhmet, some of you might be wondering why she herself was susceptible to bodily harm. I would venture to guess that her gift may be activated or enhanced upon arrival on the island, which we know has unique healing properties itself.

Relevant side note: when you combine the names Ilana and Sekhmet, one of the applicable anagrams is heal mistaken.

In addition, there are some who believe that Sekhmet was the daughter of the Sun God RA, so it isn’t out of the question that Ilana could be Richard Alpert’s daughter. According to Alpert, he is ageless because “Jacob made me this way.” So if Jacob had the power to bestow eternal life upon a man, who’s to say that he did not also bequeath that man’s daughter with a predisposition for rejuvenation. That Ilana appeared to recognize Jacob in the hospital seems to indicate that they were already acquainted with one another, and it is logical to assume that she has been to the island before because she is more than familiar and comfortable with the layout of it.

There is great debate about exactly which Egyptian god or goddess is represented by the statue on the island, and Sekhmet may be a candidate; she has an Ankh in her right hand and a solar disc on her head. That being said, I am convinced that the infamous statue on Lost is an aggregate of several Egyptian idols rather than one in particular.

So there you have it.  To be honest, at first I was trying to figure out if Ilana was injured after a turn of the Frozen Donkey Wheel and poor landing or reception in Tunisia, or if she herself was somehow the one who was kicked into the fire. But neither of these theories seemed feasible after analyzing the logistics of both situations.

I was hesitant to follow this path, to compare yet another character to a historical Egyptian figure. Because despite the obvious mythology that exists on the island, I am still optimistic that this lore does not explain the entire series. To be frank, I will be disappointed if that is the case.

Thank you for reading, and feel free to discuss and dissect this theory in the Comments, but please be constructive!

[For other theories and episode analysis, please visit Jo's LOST blog]

Technorati Tags: Egyptian mythology, Ilana, Jacob, Richard Alpert

For the Season 5 finale, the LOST cast rallied and decided to act out the Bible in roughly 84 minutes. Technically, they did it in about 72 minutes, when accounting for the artificially added, twelve-minute gunfight, which I totally don’t remember being in the standard-issue Catholic go-to, King James edition.
Still, it was all very impressive.
My only gripe was not getting to see Ben and John’s rendition of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which I understand had to be cut for time.
And while that duet would’ve been killer, I’d be grossly remiss if I didn’t state, right here and now, that I am effing thrilled with “The Incident.” I think it was brilliantly executed.
Also, I am totally 100 percent crushing on Jacob.
Wait…was that a blasphemous statement?
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned…

Dear Micro-Me…

Dear Micro-Lyndsey (circa 1987),
I know you hate it. I know you cannot comprehend why your mother inflicts this gnarly-ass extra hour of ‘school’ upon you every Sunday, especially AFTER you’ve been made to sit through that interminable Roman Catholic mass.
Still, I heartily encourage you to pay attention to those seemingly ‘meaningless’ parables that bore you so…
While I am trying to keep your life as ‘spoiler-free’ as possible, I will tell you that one day you’ll have a favorite show in the whole wide world (no, not “Who’s the Boss?”,) and all of this preachy nonsense will suddenly thread itself together and become the genesis of a most awe-inspiringly intricate web of characters and events, which you will come to know as, “LOST…”
This is precisely why you will not regret devoting some time to the tale of Esau and his kid brother Jacob.
Their pals Thomas, Moses and Judas are wicked fun too…
I swear to God (even though we aren’t supposed to,) that it’ll be worth your time.
Trust me on this one; I’m from the future.
Love,
Macro-Lyndsey (circa 2009)

“One of these days, sooner or later, I’m going to find a loophole, my friend.”

Jacob weaves his divine threads of creation, and then catches a super-symbolic salmon to satiate the Original Hunger.
Jacob is joined by Esau a conspicuously unnamed, diametrically-opposed-older-brother-type, on the beach. They converse as The Black Rock approaches from the sea, and it quickly becomes obvious that Jacob and The Other Boleyn Girl the guy who really wants to kill him, seem to have majorly disparate opinions on the whole ‘You-can’t-change-the-future’/‘Oh-yes-I-can!’ debate.

“If I could chhaaaannngggeee the world…” Eric Clapton

Radzinsky thinks consequences are for pussies.
And in spite of his Eric Clapton-inspired eyewear, Stuey is not a pussy.
Far from it, actually.
He’s really a lot like the O.G. badass, Thomas Edison.
And thank Jacob God!
Because, just think of where we would be sans electricity and you know, The Swan Station…

“Yes, I lied. That’s what I do.” Ben Linus

The jig is up.
Ben admits that he’s a total phony and that he’s never seen Jacob. He feels blue.
I’m sure it doesn’t help that just 20 paces to the left, Richard and John swap ‘Super-Special-Island-Guy’ beauty secrets.
Ben feels way left out, as he is neither age-less nor un-dead.
He suddenly wishes he hadn’t been so cavalier with Ethan’s life, because hey, at least Ethan was loyal. Sigh.
But now Ben is loyal.
To his leader… John Locke.
And John Locke decrees that Ben must kill Jacob.
Because he said so. And actually, he’s doing Ben a favor.
Just as Ben did for Locke when he delivered Anthony Cooper to John for retribution…
Though, thinking back, that didn’t really go so well, did it?

Even God Changed His Mind on Occasion…

Richard attempts to enroll Jack in some ‘John-Locke-Ain’t-All-That’ trash talk, for which Jack is traditionally totally game.
However, recently, Jack’s had a change of heart re: Crazy-Leg-John.
He’s developed a soft spot for the guy and his ‘Destiny’ mumbo-jumbo.
He encourages Richard not to ‘count John out’ just yet.
Because John is his disciple or apostle or whatever.
Awesome.
*The preceding ‘awesome’ was a retrospective, sarcastic ‘awesome,’ brought to you from the future. This ‘awesome’ is a Variable and was derived from the end of the episode. If things had gone differently, I’d not have added that bit of sarcasm, as it would not exist. Or would it? *
Juliet also changes her mind.
And hey, even though Juliet is not God or even Jack, it’s still her prerogative and she’ll do what she wants to do.
So she stages a flashy ‘Coup d’Sub’ and heads back to the Island to live together , die alone save the Others.
And also to escape Sawyer’s moony-eyed ‘Kate-looks.’
Which was sad, because I for one totally got sucked into all the “Blondie” and “I love you, back,” Suliet stuff. Which I’d resisted. For a long while.
As the French say, “Que Sera, Sera…”

“I’m sorry that this happened to you…” Jacob

Jacob bops around spreading his divinity and touching his ‘chosen ones.’
Please note that Juliet was not ‘touched.’
Except for by Sawyer, who is pretty effing divine himself, so I would’ve called it a wash, except for the fact that Sawyer is not actually God, Jesus, Jacob or any other savior. Turns out that sheer physical beauty and hella quick wit, do not a deity make.
Also, the presence of Jules’ red t-shirt (never a good color choice in a finale sitch) just didn’t bode well…

“We hide in plain sight” Sayid

So Ellie is ‘in charge’…
Even though Richard claimed (in “Whatever Happened, Happened”) that he does not answer to Ellie or Charles. Still, upon performing the now-famous “LOST-gun-to-the-back-of-the-head-knockout,” he declares that he did it to protect his leader, Ellie. He sends Jack and Sayid into the wild (a.k.a.- alarms blazing, almost-Incident-ridden Camp o’ The Others.)
Sayid, feeling fortified by his discovery of Horace’s ‘mathematician’ jumpsuit, does some quick calculations and remembers that the quickest way to get from point A to point B is via straight line, and suggests that he and Jack make their way directly through the fracas. Sadly, Uncle Rico is still all angsty toward ‘the Hostile who shot his kid,’ and he promptly shoots Sayid in the stomach.
Hey, an ‘eye for an eye’ or a ‘stomach for a stomach,’ you know?
Once again, Hurls and his mystery ship Dharma van, arrive just in time to scoop Jack and Co. up, and expediently transport them far away from “The Battle at Dharma-ville.”

“It’s always something with you people” Rose

Post-‘Great Sub Escape,’ Sawyer, Kate and Juliet paddle furiously toward the Island.
Kate and Sawyer share a moment. Juliet cries on the inside.
Once they arrive on the beach, Juliet and Kate share a moment and have a laugh about all those times they bitch-slapped one another.
That was their internal dialogue anyway…
Suddenly, Demon Dog Vincent makes an appearance, which prompts the much-anticipated re-appearance of Earth Mother Rose and Scraggly Beard Bernard.
Bernard has clearly spent the last 3 years enjoying the herbal offerings of the mysterious Jungle and dancing naked in the moonlight with his beloved.
Island ‘retirement’ has been good for the Phil Collins (a.k.a.- Genesis) fans, and they care not at all to shoot people and save lives and stress out over shit like, saving the universe, man…
They point ‘Team Stop-Jack’ toward the barracks and bid them adeiu.
But not before Bernie asks Jules to stay for the weekend, and invites her to enjoy a spot of the delicious magic mushroom tea he’s concocted.
She seems momentarily tempted, but instead opts to forge on with her love and his love.

“In my experience, the people who go out of their way to tell you they are the good guys are the bad guys.” Frank J. Lapidus

Massively good call, Frank.
Call me a cynic, but I’ve gotta agree that the truly good, authentic people in life, tend not to harp on said ‘goodness.’.
Still, Frank (the ‘Candidate’) joins Team Ilana (against his will) and immediately wishes that he hadn’t been given access to ‘Locke-in-a-box.’
Especially after his new ‘friends’ start burning and looting…
Frank may be a helluva pilot, but has no experience with extinguishing forest fires.
He’s also not down with the whole ***“And the enemies set fire to the house of God, and broke down the wall of Jerusalem, burnt all the towers, and whatsoever was precious they destroyed,” nonsense. ***(2 Chronicles 36:19)

“I don’t speak Destiny” Sawyer

Team Destiny runs into an issue, in the form of Team Free-Will.
It’s all so ‘Hatfield’s vs. McCoy’s’…
Just as Jack and John had once done, Sawyer and Jack settle in for  ‘5-Minutes-Tops’ leader talk.
Sawyer channels Churchill and requests that Jack pull up a tree stump, so they might speak like gentlemen. Jack refuses. Sawyer insists. Jack obliges.
This is already going better than ‘Locke-Talk ‘05’

Sawyer spills his tragic tale to Jack and concludes that even though he knew that he’d have been able to prevent his tragedy, he’d decided not to. Because what’s done is done (read: ‘Whatever Happened, Happened’.)
He asks Jack what he wants…because “a man always does what he does because he wants something for himself.”
Jack admits that he’d wanted Kate. And he’d had what he’d wanted.
But now it was too late to get her back, so he’d rather change the course of the entire Universe, in hopes that he might ‘Eternal Sunshine-ize’ his mind and heart.
This is clearly the logical thing to do, as Jack is obviously not a fan of the ol’ “get over it and move on,” school of thought.
Sawyer sees that Jack is pretty solid in his decision to nuke the Island, so he takes the opportunity to kick Jack’s ass. And groin. Which I can imagine was no picnic for Jack.
Juliet saunters in, just in time to save Jack from Sawyer’s years of pent-up aggression.
Jack slips away during Jules announcement that she’s defecting from Team Stop-Jack.
Though Sawyer was the heavy favorite in his scuffle with Jack, Juliet turns the tables and easily decimates Sawyer when she spits the reason behind her sudden ‘change of mind.’
It seems she and Jack are now on a common mission… to avoid losing the ones they loved and skip the heartbreak altogether, by never encountering them in the first place.

Same Line…Different Time

*Radzinsky learns that the ‘Hostiles’ will soon descend upon the site of the future Swan Station. He commands Phil to fortify the perimeter so that “when they get here, we’ll be ready for them,” which is exactly what Jack said when Karl informed the 815-ers that the Others were coming “NOW!” back in S3’s “Greatest Hits.”

* Kate wipes the blood from Jack’s head wound and they discuss how it ‘feels like a million years ago’ that she first stitched Jack up in the Jungle.

A similar line was uttered in S3’s “There’s No Place Like Home,” as the two waited for the ‘rescue’ helicopter. That time it was Jack who commented, “It feels like a hundred years ago that we first came out here.”

Shortly thereafter Jack repeats his favorite convince-Kate line, “Are you with me?”

And just like that, Kate is magically re-enrolled on Team Destiny.

Back at the van, Sayid gets weaker and Jack promises him that ‘this will work’ and Sayid will be saved. Sayid disagrees, claiming, “Nothing can save me.”
Jack stomps off to prove him wrong, and throws some metaphorical salt in Sawyer’s gaping wound as they pass in the Jungle, by promising to “See him in Los Angeles.”

“So maybe the best thing to do is nothing? I’m glad you all thought this through.” Miles

Miles suggests that maybe “The Incident” was always Jack setting off the nuke, and that perhaps everyone needs to just, like, let everything run its course. Clearly Miles has NEVER MET EVEN ONE OF THESE PEOPLE.
Jules vetoes the ‘sitting still’ plan and Team Help-Jack, head for The Swan.

“This Don’t Look like LAX” Sawyer

Phil spies Jack and another madcap shoot-out begins. The ‘Van that Dharma Built’ once again squeals into town, in just the knick of time. Sawyer saves Jack by taking Phil hostage… which  seemed like a way ill-conceived plan, right from the start.
I mean, seriously?
PHIL?
I’m a loyalist and all, but were I as hell bent on ‘changing the world’ as Radzinsky seemed, the sacrifice of that woman-beater Phil, would be the least of my concerns…

Still, Sawyer’s gun-to-head-of-Unibrow tactic seems to have worked, and after his trademark “5 second pause for fear,” Jack drops the bomb.
And we wait. And wait. And wait…
And then we collectively realize that perhaps in his weakened condition, Sayid’s
‘re-jiggering’ of the bomb, so that it detonates on impact, may have gone awry.
But before any brilliant new plans can be hatched, that crazy magnetic force that Alvarez got caught up in, unleashes itself times a bazillion, causing major issues. And while it was gratifying to see un-Radzinsky and his entire Jeep of cronies get sucked into the vortex, as well as watch Phil become the victim of “flaming-arrows-2.0” better known as “metal rods through the chest,” what happened next broke my wretched heart.
And I cried.
And so did you.
Deny it if you must, but Sawyer fighting for Juliet’s doomed life was phenomenal.
And gut-wrenchingly poetic. And, in my mind, maybe the saddest goodbye on LOST…ever (don’t maul me Charlie-lovers…it’s an opinion.)

“I’m the same man I’ve always been” John Locke

I am totally not a gloater, but I would now like to gently point out how totally ‘un-Locke’ S5 John Locke really is. Was. Whatever.
John and Co. arrive at the statue and he promptly gets snippy with Richard regarding why they’ve stopped. Rich-y totally faces John when he tells him that they’ve stopped because they’ve arrived.
John proceeds to get all lippy with Richard and accuse him of “making up rules,” after he suggests that Jacob would prefer to speak ONLY to the leader…
And that only one leader is allowed on the Island at a time.
This causes John to play his “But-I’m-the-leader-and-what-I-say-goes” card for the 90th time in the past three episodes.
Ben and John proceed into Jacob’s lair…

“I’m a Pisces” Ben Linus

Benjamin Linus is a Pisces. Jacob Jesus was also said to be a Pisces.
The symbol of Pisces? Why, a fish of course.
Just like the symbol of Jesus, which somehow reminds me of the fish Jacob filleted on that rock, all those years ago. Fun.
Other notable Pisces?

Bobby Fischer- Chess Genius. Ben also likes chess…
Maurice Ravel- Composer and Famed Concert Pianist. Ben enjoys the piano…
Albert Einstein- Scientist- concocted some theory about time being relative. Tres’ Ben…

And last but totally un-least:
Linus Pauling- Scientist and peace activist
Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon. Just like Ben…

According to Wikipedia:

*During the Second World War, Pauling worked on military research and development. However, when the war ended he became particularly concerned about the further development and possible use of atomic weapons and with the destruction inflicted on the world by war in general.”
* In 1946, he joined the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, chaired by Albert Einstein.
*In 1962, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaign against above ground nuclear testing. His beliefs were not without controversy at the time and he was criticized by some for his actions.
* Linus Pauling died of cancer.
* Benjamin Linus had cancer as well, but our Linus also had Jack…

I wouldn’t dare to attempt to connect all of the above with the Benjamin Linus we saw last night, but I like the connections that might be drawn in terms of Ben actually being a ‘good guy’. I’ve clung to this hope that Ben really has a genuine love for something other than Ben, and that he was simply protecting that thing, by any means necessary.
The Ben we saw last night was the pretty much the anti-Ben.
We saw a complete character 180 and it was wholly powerful.
Pre-finale-Ben totally hinged on the idea that he was special.
That he was chosen.
That he was a leader.
And now he thinks that he was merely a pawn…

And he is spinning.

“NO EFFING WAY!” Collective viewer outcry post ‘Locke-in-the-box’ reveal

Ilana and crew arrive at the statue for a quick show-and-tell with Richard starring the corpse of ‘John Locke 1.0.’
Sun was already craving a stiff drink and this revelation only serves to stoke that desire.

“What about me?” Benjamin Linus

Jacob and Not-Exactly-John exchange not-so-pleasantries.
Jacob acknowledges that Non-John has found his ‘loophole,’ and then he addresses Ben.
Ben is fired up, vengeful, and ready to scrap.
He makes a stirring speech about ‘always doing what he was told and continually being ignored.’
He is a man spurned and he is done with doing as he’s been instructed…
He asks what was wrong with him.
“What about me?” he yells
Jacob calmly sneers, “What about you?”
Ben replies by stabbing Jacob…exactly as he’d been instructed to.
Ahhh Bartleby. Ahhh Humanity.

With his last, dying breath, Jacob warns Non-John that “they are coming.”
Non-John tosses Jacob into the hell-fire and watches him burn.

But here’s the kicker…Jacob totally goads Ben into killing him.

He was dealing with an emotional madman and instead of giving him the ‘choice,’ as he’d always done (even if it was a manipulative, faux-choice) he made sure that Ben would snap. He needed Ben to kill him.
Exactly as he always had. Exactly as he was meant to. So that everything would be ‘Constant.’
But then Juliet got her hands on the bomb…

The Last and Final Sacrifice

Juliet finds herself up close and personal with that dang faulty bomb.
She makes her final sacrifice. Her final choice. And she chooses ‘faith.’
She detonates the bomb. And she changes everything.
White screen… blank slate…Tabula Rasa.
The ‘black’ had been written. The ‘black’ had been the Constant.
The white is still un-written…it’s the Variable in the truest sense.
Juliet was the Variable.
She was never ‘touched’ by Jacob.
No one knows anything from here forth.
And though, according to Jacob, there is but ‘one ending,’ we are left to wonder if this particular brand of ‘progress’ is big enough to change all of that?

A New Thought for a New Day

We are all familiar with the story of Jesus and his Judas.
The widely accepted version of the tale dictates that Judas betrayed Jesus by delivering him to the Romans.
But what if that weren’t exactly the case?
According to the ‘Gospel of Judas’, Judas and Jesus struck a deal whereby Judas would deliver Jesus to the Romans so that Jesus could carry out his duty to God.
This ancient scroll was written in the 2nd century AD,  and described the story of Jesus’ death from the viewpoint of Judas.
“Where was this thing discovered?” you ask…
Beni Masah, Egypt.
During the 1970’s.
In a leather-bound Coptic papyrus (probably just like the journal that Daniel carried…)

I am not necessarily saying that Ben IS Judas.
In fact, in addition to his Judas-y characteristics, Ben is a fun Moses, Thomas, Andrew hybrid.
Along with a slew of others, I’m sure.
In the end, I think that drawing direct parallels to the Bible is a bit of a cop-out, but I do think there is merit in some of the conclusions that might be drawn through consideration of these possibilities.

I’m also liking the idea that Jacob may actually be Aaron.
Yes, I know that I have previously shunned this notion, but what if he were?
And what if (as Miles pointed out) the future has already happened and essentially becomes the past, thus the actual ‘timeline’ (1954, 1977, 2007,) would matter not at all?
Because its all ‘past’…
What if the ‘Esau’ figure isn’t actually a brother at all?
Might he be anOther?
Might he be a version of Ben or Jack or Christian or someone else entirely?
Food for thought…

Just Asking/ Saying…

* Simon was the father of Judas. ‘Simon’s Butcher Shop’ served as Benny’s ‘dead-Locke storage,’ as he attempted to gather the O6.
* Ben could not kill Widmore, just as ‘Esau’ could not kill Jacob.
Do the players change, but the rules remain constant?

* Both John and Ben have Mother’s named Emily. Neither John nor Ben appears to be as ‘special’ as they’d hoped. Might John and Ben represent ‘twins?’ Warring brothers? Duality? Cain and Abel?
* The still-intact statue holds an ankh.
* Jacob physically touches each 815 survivor that he ‘chooses.’
* What’s Frank’s story? Why him?
* Nadia is killed in the same over-the-top, way-fake looking manner that Juliet’s ex-husband was.
* John Locke ‘never should have survived’ his eight-story window tumble.
Seems as though he may not have. Good thing Jacob was hanging around…
* Jin wrote out his wedding vows (as did Jack’s ex, Sarah). Sun wings it (a la Jack)
* Christian always believed in Jack. But, it seems Jack may not have always believed in Jack.
* Hurley is discharged from jail. Against his will.
* Ever the easy mark, Hurls believes it was really his ‘choice’ to get on Flight 316.
* The knife Ben uses to kill Jacob is the knife that John ‘chose’ as the thing that was ‘already his,’ when Richard visited him as a child.
* The music playing behind Ben’s maniacal stabbing of Jacob is a total ode to “Psycho”
* Jacob ‘makes the thread’ (of life) by hand. He spins his own silk.
This totally brings me back to S1’s “The Moth.”
In that episode, Locke attempts to save Charlie from relapse by explaining the mysterious nature of struggle.

Locke: Come here. Let me show you something. What do you suppose is in that cocoon, Charlie?
Charlie: I don’t know. A butterfly, I guess.
Locke: No, it’s much more beautiful than that. That’s a moth cocoon. It’s ironic. Butterflies get all the attention. But moths, they spin silk. They’re stronger, faster…
Charlie: That’s wonderful, but…
Locke: You see this little hole? This moth’s just about to emerge. It’s in there right now, struggling. It’s digging its way through the thick hide of the cocoon. Now, I could help it. Take my knife, gently widen the opening, and the moth would be free. But it would be too weak to survive. The struggle is nature’s way of strengthening it.

Could John be the real ‘Judas’?
Could he be supporting the ‘true’ leader’s strength by forcing his (or her) struggle?

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” Albert Einstein

Technorati Tags: LOST With Lyndsey

First things first: I’ll be referencing the preview for next weeks episode, so if you consider that kind of thing a spoiler, you may want to stop.  Not that there were any major surprises or reveals in the preview… but there it is.

Okay, this isn’t easy to say, but I’ve got to say it: I agree with Kate.  That’s something that hasn’t happened in a very long time.  In traveling to the past the 06ers have entered a world of reckless insanity and fruitless trying-to-change-the-future madness.  And so far every attempt has done nothing but ensure that very future that we have all come to know: Sayid’s attempt to kill Ben turns Ben into the sinister madman that Sayid was trying to get rid of; Daniel’s attempt to make a difference and keep adult Charlotte from returning to the island leads to her memories of the scary man who told her to stay away, and fueled her archeological career (and even though we didn’t see him tell her to stay away, I think it’s pretty implicit that that’s what happened.)  And it was Mile’s reluctant admission to being Dr. Chang’s son, and his support of Daniel’s warning, that led to Dr. Chang forcing his wife and son off of the island – the very event that created Mile’s ill opinion of his father in the first place.

And now Jack is going to attempt to use Jughead to stop the incident, and I think we all know how that’s going to turn out.

And all because of Daniel.  I’m still bitter about his death.  The one person who could explain why the light scatters differently on the island and reveal the meaning and mechanics behind the time difference between the island and freighter…  And his grief over Charlotte’s death led him to a kind of madness, where he recognized free will as the variable able to change the course of events, but failed to realize that, being in 1977, those variables had already been set in place.  He was a fantastic character who should have been around for next season, and was given an inglorious death at the nadir of his logical and scientific reasoning.

His ideas inspired Jack to take action, and Jack used the grief of Eloise’s recent filicide to lure her into cooperation.  Otherwise I think he would have had a difficult time in getting help.  Why Richard tagged along is anyone’s guess, unless he knows that it’s a futile task and is working to ensure the inevitable future.

I have no reason for thinking this, but I’ve got a feeling that Sayid might not actually be in Jack’s corner.  This runs contrary to all evidence (his attempt to kill Ben, the fact that the plane landing means that he could be with Nadia,) but there was something in his look after he emerged from the water that made me think that Jack better keep an eye on him.

That Phil’s a jerk, huh?  Even Radzinsky looked shocked by his attack on Juliet.  You can’t blame Phil for being bitter, though, considering that his good natured attempt to hear Jim’s side of the events documented on the tape was rewarded with a fierce punch and some time locked in a closet.  Still, I’m a Juliet fan and it wasn’t very nice.

I was hoping that Jim had a plan.  His deal to get Juliet and himself on the sub was a perfect way to buy some time, and the moment before he climbed into the sub hatch had what was undoubtedly the intended effect of making me think “NOW he’s going to do something bad-ass!”  But his “Good riddance,” tossed all that out the window.  But it seems that he’s not finished with the island yet.  There’s nothing to indicate how or why Jim, Kate, and Juliet get off the sub, but it seems unlikely that the Dharma members would turn around to let them out of their own free will.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the island intervenes and flashes them back to dry land.  Either that or Kate’s going to spoil Jim and Juliet’s would-be happy (but boring) ending by doing something rash and forcing the sub back to the dock long enough for them to make an escape.  Something extreme enough might make the Dharma folks force Jim and Juliet from the sub, whether they want off or not.

Hurley is still lugging around the guitar case, which means either that there’s something more important than a guitar inside or ghost Charlie (who I believe told Hurley to be on the plane) told him to hang on to the guitar because it would be needed in some way.  I suppose that a reunion with a resurrected Charlie isn’t likely, though it’d be welcome by me.

If not ghost Charlie, then maybe Bram of the Children of Dharma got in touch with Hurley and somehow convinced him to be on Ajira 316.  According to Eloise’s reasoning, this would improve the likelihood of the plane crashing on the island, plus put Ilana, Bram, and company closer to whatever their goal is.  This doesn’t explain the guitar case, though.

Now we jump thirty years into the future!

Something’s up with Richard.  I think he knows more about what’s going on than he lets on.  He told Sun that he saw everyone she pointed out in the photo die, but this seems very unlikely.  Maybe it looked to him like they died – maybe there was a giant blast or flash of the Incident occurring and he didn’t see them get swept away into the stream of time.  Or maybe he’s not being honest.  If he has some kind of deeper understanding of whatever is going on throughout this period of time he might have thought it necessary to lie to Sun.

I had no problems with Richard until this episode, but now I’m having a hard time knowing what to think about him.  He seems to be autonomous from the leadership of the others, taking the side of the island when Widmore was angered over the saving of Ben’s life.  If Jacob and the island are one, as I had thought, and Jacob/the island chose John as the new leader, why would Richard make the comment “I’m starting to think John Locke is going to be trouble,” to Ben?  If John was chosen by Jacob, wouldn’t John’s decision to take the Others to Jacob be what was wanted?  Could Locke be throwing a wrench into an intricate and decades-spanning plan concocted by some combination of Jacob, the island, Widmore, Eloise, Ben, and Richard?  He did seem genuinely surprised when Ben said that he had tried to kill John, and I really want Richard to be a good guy…

What about John?  He’s certainly more confident than he has been in a long time (a welcome change.)  There’s little doubt that he’s actually communing with the island, considering that he knew just when he and Richard needed to be at the downed plane.  His accusation that Ben has never seen Jacob came as a surprise, further cementing the idea that Ben was never supposed to lead, but forcefully took the reins from Charles Widmore.  We know that Locke has seen Jacob, if only for an instant, which supports him being the true chosen leader.

Even if Ben hasn’t seen Jacob, he knows that he exists.  The flying objects in the cabin would be evidence enough, but we also have the ring of ash, which likely acts to confine Jacob to the cabin, and the fact that Ben shot Locke when Jacob revealed himself to him.

That was genuine shock on Ben’s face when Locke said that he was going to kill Jacob.  And when Locke says “kill,” I believe that he means it in the literal sense.  I don’t think that he’s turned on the person (or spirit) that asked for his help, but that he’s taking a cue from his own experience and intends to kill whatever fragment is left of Jacob in order for him to be reborn anew – whole and alive.  This may have been the help that Jacob asked for.  Maybe Locke’s resurrection wasn’t meant to serve so much as a rebirth for him (after all, he was communing with the island way back in season one,) but was meant to reveal to him what must be done for Jacob to be saved.  He means to kill Jacob and have the Others witness it, so the true power of the island (and John himself) can’t be denied.  The Other’s will no longer have to take it on someone else’s word that Jacob’s will is being followed.

One last thought, then I’ll stop: the season-ending “game-changing” twist!  It’s not something that I’m going to speculate too heavily on, both because I believe that it’s most likely a useless task (because whatever happens will likely be way out of left field,) and because I don’t really want to watch expecting something to happen – I want to be as struck dumb as I was when I realized that bearded Jack was living in a flash-forward!

I do think that there is a slight mislead, however.  The Incident will occur, and something will get all of our stranded castaways back into one time period, but I don’t think that the twist will directly involve any of the main characters.  Whatever will happen will involve Ilana, Bram, and Lapidus, and will most likely have to do with whatever is in the crate.  If the new arrivals are somehow involved with Dharma, then they may have access to machinery which could take advantage of the unique properties of the island.

I know that I said I wasn’t going to speculate too much, but I’ll end with this, only because it occurred to me as I was typing the above paragraph: Whatever is in the crate will utilize the properties of the island, perhaps linking with the device behind the frozen donkey wheel, and cause the final time jump of the season.  Everyone currently on the island (with Ilana and crew) as well as the time-travelers in 1977 will find themselves together in one time period – a long time ago, under the shadow of a fully intact statue.

And there you go.

Technorati Tags: Add new tag, Follow the Leader, Wild Speculation

That said, WOW! Wowee wowee wow wow. Didja see when the smoke monster…? And he shot Desmond…? And Locke looking all…? And Miles & Hurley going all Han & Chewy on us…? And Dan! Poor Dan. Poor Ellie. Poor everyone. It’s so not going to end well. At least Des is on the mend and looks like he’ll be OK. For now. (*insert ominous music here*)

Season 5 of Lost is now and forevermore to be known as the Greek Tragedy Season™. And it’ll be even more of a tragedy for me if I don’t start tearing through the last few episodes.

But don’t panic. Base eight is just like base ten really…if you’re missing two fingers. Shall we have a go at it? Hang on.

I know that the above quote from dear Mr. Lehrer doesn’t really apply so much except for the “Hang on” sentiment, except perhaps in that, throughout the present-day narrative in “Dead Is Dead,” Ben was starting to show us a side of himself that we’d rarely seen: the side that has a problem he’s not sure how to solve. In fact, harking back to “He’s Our You,” Post-Donkey-Wheel-Turn Ben has if anything been someone giving the appearance of fighting the future. Granted, he’s using a very advanced toolkit of skills and resources that allows him to improvise better than some people’s best-laid plans, and he’s fighting with the tenacity of an animal in a trap willing to gnaw off its own leg, but the fact remains.

In the grandest of Lost traditions, “Dead Is Dead” has re-contextualized previously-seen events, making us see them in a whole new way. From his reveal as the leader of the Others at the end of Season 2 to Ms. Hawking dressing him down in “The Lie,” Ben Linus looked like one of The Major Players in the grand game at the heart of the show. But the cracks in that façade started becoming more and more obvious as time went on…and around…and twisted back on itself…and, well, you get the idea.

But now…now we see it differently. We see Ben chastising Widmore for being too seduced by the perks of being The Other Lama™ only to become, if anything, even more seduced by them in the post-DHARMA era than Widmore likely ever was. Don’t get to literal in assessing the story of Alex as pertains to Ben’s life. When Smokey was showing him that montage (and, by the way, does Smokey moonlight as the background in inane political commercials for wingnut groups? Just askin’…), it wasn’t that Alex’s life was being held as more valuable to the Island than anyone else Ben ever killed, cheated, tricked, or lied to. It was that the story of Ben’s adoptive…OK, larcenous…fatherhood of Alex was indicative of lost humanity.

Ben went from sparing Rousseau’s life and adopting young Alex to being the doting father and faithful Island steward to being willing to sacrifice teenage Alex like a piece on a chessboard. He’d come to value his position and power more than the life of the person closest to him in the entire world. And even then he didn’t get it, choosing not to atone but to compound the wrong by storming down the path of vengeance, willing to take the life of someone who’s never done him a single wrong rather than admit his own complicity in Alex’s death.

It seems that the Island needs its leaders to be able to make hard decisions and do dirty work, but it also needs them to retain their sense of compassion for their fellow human. Why else would the knife be such a deeply wrong choice in the Other Lama Test™? The seed of that humanity remains, as witnessed by Ben’s hesitation to kill Penny Widmore when her golden-haired moppet showed up saying, “Mommy?” And I suspect that this is the only reason that Ben wasn’t killed outright by Smokey the way Eko was at the end of “The Cost of Living.”

And his penance of serving Locke faithfully with a great, big, bolded, italicized, all-caps OR ELSE? Priceless. The Island won’t have any of this self-preservation or -aggrandization. Oh, no, you have to give big, bad Papa Island everything—your pride, your faith, even your life.

You’re the largest liar that was ever created. You and Pinocchio are probably related!

Now, I don’t know if you’ve read your Dante, but the Ninth and lowest Circle of Hell was reserved for traitors and betrayers. And Ben’s betrayed everyone at every turn. He betrayed his father (who admittedly kind of deserved it) by killing him, he betrayed his extended DHARMA family by helping plot their slaughter, he betrayed his leader (Widmore) by mutinying, he betrayed the Island by going off course in so many ways, he betrayed Sayid by cutting loose after making an assassin of him, he betrayed both Locke and Juliet so many times it’s not even funny, and then he betrayed the Island again by coming back when he wasn’t supposed to.

Even despite the admonition…and threat…from Smokey-as-Alex, can anyone really think that he isn’t going to turn around and betray everyone (but especially Locke) again before all’s said and done?

What’s more, what always seems to lurk behind the betrayal is the raw, festering wound that was young, Roger-abused Ben. Think back to his tantrum to Juliet as Ben pettily showed her Goodwin’s decaying body, his petulance as he turned the Frozen Donkey Wheel, his “nyah-nyah” attitude anytime he’s one-upped someone.

The only conclusion I can draw is that Ben, for all his intelligence and endurance (I mean, the man spends most of his time in a state of recovery from being beaten to within an inch of his life, doesn’t he?), is like a child with a toy. Big, bad Charles has what I want. WAAA! Mean old John and Richard want to take my magic box away. WAAA! I’m being sent to my room (the outside world) for being bad. WAAA!

The ultimate tantrum/betrayal of wounded-child Ben can only be yet to come — probably as Ben tries to either a) ingratiate himself with the “Shadow of the Statue” people and/or b) destroy same from within — and you don’t want to be anywhere nearby when it happens.

Gimme head with hair…long beautiful hair. Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen!

OK, I have to ask. Are the hair & makeup people on Lost having an extended joke at our expense? I mean first, we get Jack’s chin-badger. Then we get the Michael Emerson in the ludicrous rug pictured to the right. And Alan Dale in a piece that looks to me eerily like a more “salty” version of my departed father’s kinky salt-n-pepper ‘do. The rest of the time, Lost’s actor image enhancers seem to do such a good job, too.

At least Dale got a stand-in to play his younger Widmore of Arabia self. And Fionnula Flanagan got no less than two stand-ins for various points along her personal history as Eloise “Don’t Call Me Ellie” Hawking.

But we’re actually supposed to buy Emerson as a twentysomething. I mean, the guy’s an amazing actor and all, but at this point I’m surprised they didn’t try to have him play tween Ben as well just to mess with us.

And the second we see Desmond in a novelty nose, glasses, and mustache, I’m taking a hostage.

Right before your eyes see the laughter from the skies and he laughs until he cries, then he dies, then he dies. Come inside, the show’s about to start, guaranteed to blow your head apart!

But the centerpiece (as opposed to the hairpiece) of the episode was the Ben & Locke Show, which has now taken a dramatic reversal. Suddenly, Ben’s mojo is completely gone with his former dupe, John Locke. He can still work a yokel like Caesar without difficulty (alas, poor Ceasar, did we hardly know ye?), even sow the seeds of doubt with no less a Ben-skeptic than Sun.

But rain-divining, Island-attuned, fully faithful Messiah Locke is having none of it, and is going to make a truth out of Ben’s probable lie that he came back to be judged for his misdeeds. And along the way from watching Ben’s waking eyes bug out over seeing him, the resurrected Locke played an oddly ascendant Virgil to Ben’s Dante, out to strip away all of Ben’s self-deception and ensure that the Island actually did get its chance to judge its former Anointed One.

From continued needling about Ben’s notion to engage in the New Otherton (née Dharmaville) “pharisee” life, to reminding Ben that all his manipulations have left him alone, to rubbing Ben’s nose in his previous treatment of Locke, to the repeated hints that Locke was “something [Ben] can’t control,” to ultimately driving home the point that it was no one’s fault but his own (well, and Keamy’s) that Alex was killed. The canary in the coal-mine of Ben’s soul was dead because the toxicity had gotten too high.

But it was Smokey in the guise of Alex who ultimately got through to Ben, laying bare his intent to kill Locke anew and assigning him that most humiliating of atonement: serving the very man he’s manipulated perhaps more grossly than anyone faithfully.

Let’s be completely clear about this. Somehow, Ben thought he could challenge destiny. And he got farther than anyone else…you don’t see Widmore back on the Island, after all. He still failed, just like everyone else has this season, and Locke finally gets to be the Other Lama™, even if it ends up being a comparatively short reign.

And speaking of John Locke, I’m going to part company with anyone theorizing that he’s now an Island manifestation a la Christian Shephard or Yemi. When he says he’s “the same man [he's] always been,” I believe him. He’s just unbound by all the things that prevented him from being the Island’s perfect instrument. His anger, his daddy issues, his need for a self-aggrandizing destiny. I think they’re all gone. I’ll grant that he took a bit of malicious pleasure at Ben’s discomfiture, but one can hardly blame him for that, especially when he’s doing what can only be described as the Island’s bidding. But this just points all the more strongly to the Island being Locke’s ultimate exploiter, which I’ve been banging on about for goodness only knows how long. Longer than I’ve been writing for this site, certainly.

Quick Hits From “Dead Is Dead”:

• I actually find I believe Ben both when he says he knew Locke would be resurrected and that it scares him to death because he’s never seen anything quite like it. The rest in both of those exchanges was typical Ben BS.

• The Temple’s outer perimeter is a half-mile in radius?!? With all the over “the line” galavanting that various Lostaways did, not a single one of ‘em saw a massive stone wall surrounding a circular mile?

• Locke should never tell Ben to “shoot.” Ever. Jus sayin’.

• Smokey gets summoned by unclogging an ancient drain? All I ever get in my bathtub is my discarded hair. Yeesh. The only way that could have been more underwhelming would have been if Ben had filled out a form in triplicate.

• Is it just me or did Anubis look supplicant to the image of Smokey in the Temple hieroglyph? I find this…disturbing.

• Ben looked genuinely surprised to see Jack, Hurley, and Kate in the DHARMA Class of ‘77 photo. Curious.

• Widmore got some of the best lines, what with constantly sneering, “Boy!” at Ben and getting in a sweet reference to The Prisoner.

• Locke got so very many great lines: “I was just hoping for an apology.” “You just make friends everywhere you go, don’tcha.” “No sense in me dying twice, eh?” And even his little smile and wave to Frank & Sun. Priceless!

• “What lies in the shadow of the statue?” doesn’t sound like the Snowman Joke so much as some kind of Illuminati secret signal. At last, we have our other party in the “war” that Widmore’s always going on about. I’m coming around to the notion that Ben, Widmore, Hawking, Alpert, and now Locke, are all on the same side here even if there’s internecine struggle.

And now, “Some Like It Hoth!”

That is why evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.

From a Ben-tastic mythology-fest to a Miles & Hurley, pop-culture-laden, authentic Lost throwback to the days of pure flashback storytelling…and another one of those “breather” episodes before the roller-coaster that is Season 5 goes into a three-gee barrel-roll en route to the explosive finish.

Now, the discerning Lost fan had long since figured out that Miles was Dr. ChangCandleWickmundHalliwax’s son. So, that revelation was a distinct non-event to anyone reading this blog. But we still got some good insight into Miles’ character…enough to know that he’s a walking, talking example of the Hedgehog’s Dilemma, more comfortable with the leftover impressions of the dead than with anyone living.

Me, I’d be surprised if someone being brought up under those circumstances and losing his mother so young didn’t develop intimacy issues and a larger-than-healthy dollop of bitter cynicism. And can you honestly imagine being privy to all the mundane, nasty detritus of a dead mind effectively trapped in amber? There’s a reason Douglas Adams construed telepathy as a punishment in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (And I thought working tech support could give you a dire opinion of your fellow human!)

Good thing that Miles was playing Han to Hurley’s Chewbacca with the DHARMA van standing in for the Millennium Falcon on their little smuggling run around the Island. Hurley, as always, laid on the wisdom. If people just communicated more, they’d be a lot less miserable. And Ewoks suck, dude. Yes, his spelling may be atrocious and he may be ignorant about the time-scale on global warming and he may not be too swift on the uptake about the nature of time-travel in the Lost universe, but when it comes to matters interpersonal, Hurley seems to have more on the ball than any other character on the show.

You’d also think that Miles would be able to take his own advice as given to Mr. Gray (played by Dean Norris, a regular on the truly amazing Breaking Bad. If you’re not watching this unbelievable show, then start. Now!) not to miss his chance to tell a loved one he is loved. But noooooo…or at least, not yet.

Running on a treadmill after you and I’m running on a treadmill now

But it wasnt going to just be easy-breezy Lucas references from opening to closing credits. No, it wouldn’t be a Season 5 episode if there weren’t a few more inexorable time-loops constricting our characters in their coils.

Yes, the one involving Miles is patently obvious. It’s going to be thanks to him and the rest of the time-travelers that Dr. Chang turns his back on his wife and baby to save their lives, thus making him much less of a “douche” than Miles had been led to believe during his upbringing. (Note the way Miles kind of “fell in” behind Chang at various points in the episode, as if indulging his desire to be a boy following his father’s commands?)

But did you see the look on Hurley’s face as he watched the Numbers be stamped into the Swan Hatch-to-be? It was as if the number chisels were being hammered directly into his tormented heart. That was more painful than watching Jack & Kate, the troublesome twosome, trying and failing miserably at allaying the suspicions of Roger Linus about his dying son’s sudden disappearance. Those two really can’t do a damned thing right, can they. *sigh*

Paternal relations aside, I can’t help but think that the reading of Alvarez of the lethal orthodonture was not Miles’ purpose in being back on the Island. After the events of “The Variable,” I can’t help but wonder if Miles won’t be reading poor, dead Daniel to get at the crucial information in his cranium. I also can’t help but think that Miles is also headed to a bad end along with the rest of the freighter people.

Charlotte seems to have been brought back just to realize she’d been there before and to motivate Faraday to work himself up to thinking he can change the past. Faraday had to fail at that and get killed at the hands of his own mother. And Miles? I have a bad feeing about this…I don’t think he’s going to survive The Incident while Chang does, thus forcing another parent to see the ultimate fate of their child who was unnaturally transported to the past. But I hope I’m wrong. Miles has kind of grown on me.

Things that make you go, “HAH!”

• “Circle of trust.”

• “Why don’t we carpool? It’ll help with global warming, which hasn’t happened yet, so maybe we can prevent it.”

• “You’re just jealous my powers are better than yours.”

• “Polar bear feces.”

• “That douche is my dad.”

• “Third day we were here, I was on line at the cafeteria, and my mother got in line behind me. That was my first clue.”

• “We should all… get together for a beer sometime. How awesome would that be?”

• Miles’ deadpan reading of Hurley’s alternate script for The Empire Strikes Back.

• Phil getting beat up and tied up.

Hurm

• Is it even possible that the DI was managing to build the Swan without the knowledge and at least tacit approval of the Others?

• Emotional scenes with the dead always seem to cost extra with Miles, then end up getting refunded.

• Did anyone not know that it was Widmore who staged the fake 815 wreckage?

• OK, it was nice to know how Miles settled on exactly $3.2 million, even if it was a little underwhelming.

• Wow, but Bram came off like a recruiter for Jonestown in his attempt to persuade Miles. Kind of creepy. Also, their “team” clearly has nothing to do with Widmore, Hawking, Ben, or Alpert. Makes me happy Miles was so snarky with them.

• I so need to make myself one of those stylin’ black jumpsuits Dan was wearing when he got off the sub.

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion of me working through my backlog after “Follow the Leader!”

Technorati Tags: Ben Linus, Charles Widmore, Daniel Faraday, Desmond Hume, Eloise Hawking, Greek Tragedy, Hurley, Jack Shephard, John Locke, Kate Austen, Looking at the Little Things, Miles Straume, Pierre Chang, Richard Alpert, Sawyer

After watching The Variable three times, and paying special attention to the significant ‘destiny’ references, I experienced an epiphany that I believe to be plausible given the time travel we’ve witnessed this season.

We now know that Daniel Faraday is a talented musician, a piano prodigy.  My theory is that Faraday programmed The Looking Glass station security code.

We don’t know exactly when The Looking Glass station was constructed, but we know it existed in 1977 (Namaste). Faraday was stuck in time in 1974 after one of the island’s time shifts, but we do not know when he left for Ann Arbor before returning on the sub in 1977. So it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that Faraday programmed that station’s security mechanism with a song at some point during that era, especially if he KNEW that it would alter (but not change) the destiny of the 815 survivors.

DESTINY IS A FICKLE BITCH

In The Variable, Faraday’s mother Eloise Hawking told him that destiny “means that if one has a special gift, it must be nurtured.” She was also quite adamant that her son disregard his musical skills and personal relationships to focus on science and mathematics, but he argued that he “can make time” for all of his interests. Perhaps he did just that on the island, combining his many talents to program the security code using a song.

Faraday told Jack in The Variable that “We make choices. We have free will. We can change our destiny.” In the Season 3 finale Through The Looking Glass, Charlie reminded Desmond that “you said it’s my destiny to turn off that jammer.” Charlie made a choice to sacrifice himself so that his friends would be rescued, and he was only able to fulfill his destiny because Faraday designed the musical code.

It is striking to me how both Charlie and Desmond eventually affect the destiny of everyone on that island by simply flipping a switch and pressing a button, and perhaps gives credence to my theory about the early level of involvement by both Faraday (The Looking Glass) and his mother Hawking (The Swan). Let’s revisit the following:

Desmond (Greatest Hits): “You’re inside a hatch. It’s a room full of equipment. There’s a blinking yellow light and switch. You flick the switch, the light goes off and then you drown.” Charlie: “So, before I drown, I just have to flip a switch.”

Charlie (Through the Looking Glass): “I just turn off your little jammer and the helicopters come and rescue all my friends.” Bonnie: “But if this station floods, what happens to you?” Charlie: “I die.”

Eloise Hawking (Flashes Before Your Eyes): “Breaking her heart is what drives you in a few short years from now to enter that sailing race, to prove her father wrong, which brings you to the island where you spend the next three years of your life entering numbers into the computer until you are forced to turn that failsafe key. And if you don’t do those things, Desmond David Hume, every single one of us is dead.”

Faraday (The Variable): “The Dharma folks at the Swan site, they’re gonna drill into the ground and accidentally tap into a massive pocket of energy. The result of the release of this energy would be catastrophic. So in order to contain it, they’re going to have to cement the area in, like Chernobyl. And this containment, the place they built over it…I believe you called it the hatch, the Swan hatch? Because of this one accident, these people are going to spend the next 20 years keeping that energy at bay, by pressing a button; a button that your friend Desmond will one day fail to push, and that will cause your plane, Oceanic 815, to crash on this island.”

THE ‘CONSTANT’ FACTOR

Keeping in mind that Desmond is Faraday’s constant and that Desmond’s constant is Penny, Faraday’s half-sister….

Right before meeting Faraday’s mother Eloise for the first time in 1996 during Flashes Before Your Eyes in Season 3, Desmond ran into Charlie in London outside of Widmore Industries (owned and run by Faraday’s father Charles Widmore). Charlie is singing Wonderwall by Oasis, “maybe you’re going to be the one who saves me…”

During their brief time together on the island, Desmond does save Charlie’s life on several occasions (the golf club as lightning rod, rescuing Clarie from drowning, saving Claire’s migrating bird, Rousseau’s arrow trap in the jungle). Desmond intended to take Charlie’s place by swimming down to The Looking Glass, but Charlie knocked him out and said “you and I both know you’re not supposed to take my place.”

FARADAY & DESMOND’S SWAN CHAT

So what does all of this have to do with Faraday programming the song in The Looking Glass?

Consider the following conversation between Faraday and Desmond in Because You Left (which took place before 815 crashed & long before Desmond met Charlie for the first time on the island); Desmond’s original vision of Claire and Aaron being rescued via helicopter, the very reason that Charlie chose to dive down to The Looking Glass station, is suddenly quite relevant:

Faraday: “You’re the only person who can help us, because Desmond, the rules don’t apply to you. You’re special. You’re uniquely and miraculously special.”

Desmond: “What are you talking about?”

Faraday: “If the helicopter somehow made it off the island, if you got home…”

Originally, I assumed that Faraday was referring to the freighter helicopter that the Oceanic 6 were on, but it is open for interpretation that Faraday knew about Desmond’s future vision that set off the series of events leading to Charlie’s actions in The Looking Glass.

In addition, I believe that the Easter egg featured in The Variable (the rabbit, which is literally THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS of Faraday’s mother) is a visual clue to this particular puzzle piece of Lost…

Everything happens for a reason. Don’t mistake coincidence for fate. These are not merely Lost cliches; they are applicable mantras in the tangled web of possibilities that has been woven before our eager eyes over the last five seasons.

I realize that it requires a leap of faith to link these characters and events. Earlier this year I explored another path which would require fans of the show to suspend our disbelief even further; I dubbed it my Crazy Charlie Theory, and if you’re interested, it somewhat relates to this road less traveled.

Now that I have outlined the reasons why Faraday and fate have intertwined on the island, resulting at least in part with Charlie’s destiny decision to save his remaining 815 friends, I would love to hear what you think. I would only ask that if you strongly disagree with the general theory or any of the points outlined above, you express it constructively. Namaste!

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Technorati Tags: Charles Widmore, Charlie Pace, Daniel Faraday, Desmond Hume, Eloise Hawking, Penny Widmore

First off: is Daniel dead?

I want to say no, but I’ll have to stick with probably, but maybe not.  He seems to have died, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.  However, Eloise did look very sad as she told Daniel that he should accept the job offered by Widmore, and when Widmore mentioned his sacrifices, her reply was “I had to send my son back to the island, knowing full well that…” before she was interrupted.  It could be that Daniel didn’t die – maybe the shooting would ruin any mother-son relationship that they could have, and that saddened her.  Or maybe he received the same treatment as the wounded Ben – maybe Jacob chose to heal Daniel, thus changing him from the person that he was.  Eloise could have caused the event that would have changed Daniel from the son that she knew.

But, as much as I hate to admit it, he’s probably dead.  Or will be soon.

Now on to variables, and the bigger question: is Daniel right?  Can the past be changed.

The short answer: no.  It can’t.

Daniel stated that people had free will and that they have the power to change their destinies.This is true, but there’s a catch.  Daniel, Jack, and the other future-ites have free real because they are existing in their own present – therefore they can make their own choices.  However, they are existing in the island’s, and therefore the world/universe’s, past.  So the decisions that they make in their present have already occurred in the universe’s past.  When 815 went down in 2004, their free-will-based decisions (though they hadn’t made them yet) had already been chosen, and their impact felt.  Basically, the free will of the time travelers had already shaped past events.

Whatever happened, happened – and their free will in the 1970s had cemented itself in the timeline, making the choices of the time-travelers a part of their destiny.  Their destiny was partially created by themselves.  Yeah, it’s complicated, and it might hurt the brain a little, but I’m convinced that this is the case.

Daniel gave some evidence in favor of this.  In spite of his insistence that he would not talk to young Charlotte, he does so anyway, because “I didn’t think I could change things, but maybe I can.”  By trying to change the past, he fulfilled his destiny, giving Charlotte all the fuel she needs to tell Daniel, in her own future, about the creepy guy who told her not to come back.

It seems that Jack might carry on with Daniel’s plan to stop the incident, thus performing the very actions that lead to the incident taking place.  Daniel was wrong: Jack and the gang were supposed to go back to 1977 – if not, why would the island have taken them?  Why not leave them in 2007 with Sun and Locke?  Jack was supposed to go back because his actions are necessary to set in motion the events that lead to the crash of 815.  It’s Daniel’s attempt to prevent these events that cause them to occur.

A few questions remain.  Why does Daniel believe that 1977 Eloise can get them back to when they were supposed to be?  When confronted by Locke and Jim, Richard didn’t seem to be familiar with time travel – why would Eloise be?  Daniel told Dr. Chang that the incident at the Swan would occur six hours from the time of their conversation.  How could he know this?  If he was stuck in the 1970s, with access to 1970s information, how could he know the time of the incident?  Maybe future Eloise does know a bit about time travel and somehow travelled back to her past to give Daniel some information.  But that seems a little far-fetched.

And now for the upcoming war.  Or, more specifically, the sides in this war.

I’m convinced that there are two sides to this war, and Ben, Eloise, and Widmore are all on the same side.

It was Widmore’s actions that brought Desmond to the island in the first place, and, in “Flashes Before Your Eyes,” Eloise ensured that Desmond kept to his destiny.  Widmore offered Daniel the job that would get him to the island, and Eloise encouraged Daniel to take it.  It also seemed that both Ben and Widmore wanted the Oceanic 6 to be on Ajira 316.  They weren’t working together, but their separate attempts got everyone (except maybe Hurley) onto the plane.

My guess is that they are on the same side, though they’re not very happy about it.  Ben and Widmore’s war could have been for control of the Others – for leadership in the real war to come.  Perhaps this scuffle is why the island chose Locke to be the new leader.  If Widmore returns to the island (and I believe that he might,) he and Ben won’t have to fight over who’s in charge, because the island has made it fairly clear that it’s John Locke.  Not that Ben and Charles will ever get along, though they will likely reluctantly work together for the greater good.

It seems that Ben and Charles Widmore have been working toward the same goals, while remaining willing to attack and kill each other’s operatives in the process.

The other side in this war?  The Children of Dharma.  Ilana, Bram, and others who were on flight 316.  Their goal just could be to make the island visible to their associates, who can then arrive so that the real war can begin!

I’m thinking that there’s a hierarchy to the Others that extends beyond our sight.  Ben was clearly in charge of the Others on the island, but was he truly the only one that could see or hear Jacob?  Eloise was off island and seemingly working on her own, though was still involved with business pertaining to the island.  There seems to be Others in various parts of the world – Jill was in the butcher shop in California, Greta and Bonnie (though secretly stationed in the Looking Glass) were thought to be in Canada.  There’s a lot to the Others that we haven’t seen.  If Jacob is the leader on the island, does he have an off-island counterpart?  Does he exist simultaneously on and off-island?

We subtly entered a new chapter in this episode.  Eloise Hawking confided to Penny, “For the first time in a long time, I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”  So far, someone had some kind of control – some knowledge of what’s really going on.  Now it seems that everything is up in the air.  Eloise has reached the point where her knowledge of events has run out, and now anything can happen.  Maybe “The Variable” refers to this new stage, where events have stopped being predetermined and the island can truly be won or lost.

Technorati Tags: The Variable, Wild Speculation

Let’s start in grid 334, once and future home of the Swan.

Poor Alvarez, who took a filling through the brain thanks to the unique electromagnetic properties of the island.  Jack mentioned his fillings aching when he walked past the wall back in season 2…  Is this due to the natural properties of the island or some machinery that’s being built for use in the Swan?  Perhaps to enhance the natural electromagnetic energy to serve whatever purpose the Swan is to have.  The button only has to be pushed after the Incident, meaning that the mysterious looming event could have something to do with a malfunction of this machinery – either as a cause or an effect.

It could be that the Swan is the cause of and solution to the potentially earth-shattering electromagnetic buildup – which could potentially throw off the Earth’s magnetic field and lead to planet-wide disaster.

I’m guessing that the failsafe was constructed as an absolute last resort, with the Dharma engineers having no idea just what would happen if the key was turned.  Maybe everything would be okay, or maybe it would enhance the problem and destroy the world.  If something went wrong, as it did when Locke busted the Swan computer, a 10% chance of salvation with a 90% chance of destruction beats the 100% chance of everything going all to heck.

And the dreaded numbers are a serial number that was placed on the hatch door.  Maybe that’s all they ever were.  They weren’t cursed, as Hurley believed – the only “curse” was what the island did to him to ensure that he ended up on the plane.  Back in “This Place is Death,” when I first heard the transmission in what I believe to be Hurley’s voice, I was disappointed and in denial.  I didn’t like the idea at all.  But now I do.  It has a kind of poetry to it – the numbers belong to Hurley.  If he’s the one whose voice is on the transmission.

It could be that the numbers had no real importance to the Dharma Initiative, and the only reason that they had to be entered was because, after the Incident, Dharma needed something to enter into the computer, and those numbers were waiting innocently outside of one of the entrances to the Swan.

Speaking of Alvarez: after Miles enquired about the body, Chang responded with “What body?”  Was this just Chang’s way of reminding Miles and Hurley to keep quiet, or was the body literally gone?  Could the demise of Alvarez have been a convenient opportunity for Dr. Chang to use the body in an experiment at the station?  The exterior is still under construction, but we don’t know how much of the sub-level is complete.  A teleportation or time travel experiment could have destroyed the body – or left it lost somewhere in time or space.  Or possibly it was just examined and destroyed.  The point is that Dr. Chang had interest in it, so something was up.

Felix “told” Miles that he was delivering papers to Widmore – the same photos and purchase order that Tom (a moment of silence…) showed to Michael (and again…) to convince him of Widmore’s deception on the world.

It’s safe to assume that Felix was killed by the others, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that Widmore staged the fake plane crash.  This could have been done by a mysterious third group (more on Bram in a bit,) and Felix was only delivering the evidence to Widmore.

I want Bram to be a good guy, but he’s with Ilana and she hit Frank, and that puts her on my bad side.  I thought that they were working with Widmore – another attempt by him after his last group failed – but I’ve been proven wrong.  And we’ve been given no indication that Ben had anything to do with Bram or Ilana, so it appears that they’re not working with the others.  The only affiliation that leaves (that we’re aware of) is Dharma.  Could Bram and Ilana be connected to Dharma?

If Miles and his mother were sent off the island because Dr. Chang learned of the upcoming purge, which I suspect, then were others sent to safety as well?  Could the Children of Dharma want to continue the war that the Dharma Initiative lost?

Widmore said that a war was coming, and I assumed that it was between Widmore and the others for control of the island, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.  The war could be between the others and the Children of Dharma.

Widmore knew that the Oceanic Six had to return to the island because he knew that some of them were present in the days of the Dharma Initiative.  When he was banished he left the island on the sub, which was in control of ther others, which means that Widmore was still the leader when the purge took place (assuming that his banishment and loss of leadership occurred at the same time, which I do.)

Ben and Charles Widmore are fighting each other, but the entrance of a third side could force them to work together, possibly under the leadership of John Locke.  The Dharma Initiative knew that the island was powerful, and it’s possible that the Dharma Kids know enough of what the DI knew to be formidable opponents to the others.

The giant crate being lugged across the island could have equipment left over from the DI days, possibly developed with the assistance of the island’s abilities.  Could it involve them trying to change the past?  They may attempt to stop the purge from ever happening, which just may be the cause of the Incident.

Kate, Kate, Kate…  Oh, Kate…  I’m with Roger: mind your own business!  Juliet said it best after Roger stormed from the room: “Well, here we go.”

Things are going to go downhill fast for the visitors from the next millennium.  Here’s where we’re at, from the Dharma Initiative’s point-of-view: Ben disappeared, or was taken, and Juliet, the doctor on duty, didn’t report it; Kate, who has only been on the island for a few days, has shown an unusual interest for Ben – enough for Roger to be suspicious; Jack admitted to being friends with Kate, insinuating that he knew her well, even though they were supposed to have met only a few days previous; Phil knows that Jim and Kate were involved in the disappearance of Ben – and that they crossed out of Dharma territory in the process – though Phil is being held captive by Jim and Juliet.  Nothing good can come of this, and all of it is linked to Kate, who just can’t seem to stop causing trouble.  But the show would be a lot less interesting if she did just mind her own business.

Our friends are about to be exposed, which could end up with them toughing it out alone in the jungle, or possibly seeking shelter with the others.  This would introduce them to Charles Widmore, making him familiar enough with Kate, Jack, and Hurley to recognized them when the 06 are rescued.  Plus, if Sayid met up with the others, who knows what information he passed on to them.

I believe that the Incident has something to do with the reconnection of those stranded in 1977 with Locke, Ben, and Sun in 2007.  I can’t even imagine what the details of this might be – maybe something that Locke has to do in the temple, which may still be housing the others after Ben sent them there.

As Miles and Hurley are heading to the Orchid the song “It Never Rains in Southern California,” by Albert Hammond, is playing.  That seemed to be a bit of foreshadowing: “It never rains in California / But girl, don’t they warn ya / It pours, man it pours.”  For three years Jim, Juliet, and Miles lived a fairly calm and comfortable life, but now that their friends are back, it’s about to get rough.

Daniel is back!  His 2004 knowledge of physics had to be a great help to the Dharma scientists in Ann Arbor, and it’s likely that he was vital in the development of the Swan.  The notes that Caesar was leafing through in the Hydra were the same as those that we saw in Daniel’s notebook in “The Constant,” so he obviously shared what he knew with the Initiative.

For an episode that was centered on Miles, I don’t have a whole lot to say about him.  He has daddy issues, which puts him in league with just about every other character on the show.  Were his powers a result of being born on the island?  Maybe that’s why the others had an interest in Aaron.  He was conceived off-island, so it doesn’t seem that he would have been much use in determining a solution for whatever is killing women who conceive on-island.

It could be that anyone born on the island has the potential to be special in some way.  Maybe that’s why women who conceive on the island can’t survive: whatever was done to prevent children being born on the island was done to prevent them from being special.  But would that mean that Ethan was special?

And does the Incident have something to do with expectant mothers dying?

We did learn that Miles’s primary motivation seems to be money.  He wanted 1.6 million dollars from Ben to match the money that Widmore was going to pay him.  Of course, spending three years living in the same community as your dead parents and younger self might have an effect on your priorities and motivations.

And finally: Hurley.  Not much to say other than how much I loved that he was writing The Empire Strikes Back, “with a couple improvements.”  Seriously, how great can this character be?

That’s about it.  I do have this theory that Dr. Chang already knows that Miles is his son, but when I tried to put it down in a logical form everything went haywire.  I still think that he might know – I just got that feeling.

I think I’m going to watch the original Star Wars trilogy this weekend, and maybe wonder what might have happened if Luke and Vader had had a nice father-son talk instead of a hand-amputation and a leap into the abyss.

Technorati Tags: Some Like it Hoth, Wild Speculation

At first, the notion was an odd intuition.  It was brought on mostly by how calm and cheerful Bram and the rest of the Miles-Nappers seemed to be.  In terms of rough play, even their ejection of the stubborn Miles was nothing resembling intimidation.  Conclusion:  they were looking out for Miles best interests, just as they quasi-claimed.  These are not people looking to cripple the other team by taking out their assetts; Bram and his crew had Miles emotional and physical well being at heart.

Another thing that rings true, from what we’ve seen so far of the “Shadow of the Island” people, they are roughly the same age group.  That may mean nothing, and surely in the future that may change, but in the here and now I look at this fact as back-up for my central thesis: these guys are the Island’s LOST children.

One aspect that helps feed this belief, for me, is that the story of Miles father throwing him and his mother to the curb is – in some regards – false.  Seeing Dr. Chang with young Miles defied the image momma-Miles painted of her husband. Now, however, think of this another way.  Going back to the comic-con video, we know that Chang was aware of a pending purge, so we can assume it was known throughout Dharma at some level.  For whatever reason, the Dharma-folk decided to stay.  It is extremely likely, however, that they sent their children away.

In this respect, Charlotte and Miles have a few things in common; they both left the island prior to the purge and left father’s behind.  Both of them had mothers who did all they could to persuade them to believe the island either didn’t exist, or was unreachable.  And, of course, both of them wound up inextricably drifting back to the island through the same forces that seem to be affecting all of our characters.

Bram here also found his way onto Ajira 316, and we can assume a few of the gentle-goons that were with him in the iconic black abduction mobile.  Up until now, their alignment has only been postulated by a few possible exchanged glances and nothing more.  Are they with Ben, or someone else?

If this is the return of the children of the Dharma initiative, what is their directive?  Are they afflicted with powers like Miles, that somehow tune them into the island’s situation room? Or are they there because they believe they can un-do something themselves, something that led to the death of their parents?

Of course, as many of you will no doubt point out, it is just as easy to believe that these benevolent soldiers are aligned with Ben – exactly as it seems at first blush – lending more credence to the argument for Mr. Linus’s de-eviling.  But that is the problem, it is too easy – and LOST is never easy.  That they are a third force in the Widmore/Linus feud seems fairly obvious, what they are up to, of course, does not.

NOTE:  I want to give a shout out to Gustavo who didn’t catch the Podcast last night, but e-mailed me this morning proposing the very same theory!  More proof that there is something subtextual going on here that suggests this connection between Miles, Bram, and the island.

The big question on last night’s Lost, “Dead is Dead” might have been “What’s in the shadow of the statue?” but our question is “What is the statue, and what does it have to do with the smoke monster?” To get the answer, PM turned to James P. Allen, a Wilbour Professor of Egyptology and Chair of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University.

As Ben explored the chamber beneath the Others’ temple that seems to be Smokey’s lair, he comes across a variety of hieroglyphics etched into the walls. But one in particular caught his eye: A strange creature kneeling in front of a snake-like (Smokey-the-monster-like?) entity. The creature on the right looks like it could easily resemble the four-toed statue. Even though the only full-size glimpse we’ve had of the statue was from the back, many are speculating that the statue is of Anubis, the Egyptian god associated with the afterlife who protects the deceased and guides them to the great beyond. Anubis is usually portrayed as half-jackal (top), half-human (bottom).

Allen agrees that the animal-headed human in the hieroglyphic Ben is fixated on is probably based on Anubis, though he says in actuality, no Egyptian scene looks like what’s shown on Lost. “I suspect that the colossus is also meant to be Anubis, too,” he says. But he points out, it’s actually more of a hybrid of Anubis and Taweret, the demon-wife of the Apep, the Egyptian’s original god of evil. (It’s said that Apep was only present at night, and therefore any evil happenings during the daytime were attributed to Taweret). “The thing on the head definitely looks like Taweret’s, but she never wears a kilt, which is clearly there in the back shot of the colossus. The colossus is probably holding two ankh-signs, like the one Anubis holds in this image, but he’s holding them like Taweret holds the two signs she holds, which are ‘protection’ signs, not ankhs.” Allen also notes that “the four toes on the statue fragment are more Taweret than Anubis, who has a human body and therefore five toes.”

Another interesting fact about Taweret: She’s the goddess of maternity and childbirth, the protector of women and children who was said to guard mothers and their newborn children. The creatures she’s made up of—hippopotamus, crocodile and lion— are all animals that would kill to protect their young. So if the statue does have elements of Taweret, and it was destroyed, could that explain why mothers who conceive on the island can’t carry to term?

Allen notes that the other hieroglyphics in Smokey’s Lair are actually quite good, even though they don’t really say anything. He suspects they were copied from some publication of the Book of the Dead, the ancient Egyptian funerary text.

We could theorize until the cows come home about what this all means—is the smoke monster supposed to represent Apep, the god of evil, or is he more akin to Anubis, determining the afterlife of the dead? —but we’ll leave that up to you

Best. Last Line. EVAR!

I mean, really, did you see the look in Ben’s big, bugged-out blues? Classic! Then, Locke smirks, smash-cut…*pah!*…”LOST.” That, my friends, is how you end an episode and leave ‘em wanting more. Truly, do you ever get enough of Locke and Ben? I know I don’t!

And what about Miles and Hurley? Much like Sawyer and Hurley in the pre-Sawyer-as-derring-do-er days, those two sure know how to provide some great comic relief doubling as being the in-show voice of the fans. Ahhh…good times, good times.

And Sawyer and Juliet! What great chemistry they have. How heroic, how noble, and how smart are they, eh? Truly the golden couple of the show right now, and not just for both being blondes.

Oh, wait… *le sigh*

I suppose I should mention Kate seeing as “Whatever Happened, Happened” was one of her centric episodes and all. And really, where does she get off having a second centric episode in the time travel season anyway? All right, all right. We’ll start with her, and then get to the good stuff, m’kay?

How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

Thankfully, the Kate-related content of this episode wasn’t any kind of ’shipper’s delight. The more the ’shippers are tortured, the happier a girl I am. Ahh, schadenfreude…

And I do have to be fair to old ferret-face. She’s shown some character growth even if she hasn’t picked up any acting chops. Kate did The Right Thing™ at every step along the way of this episode, both on the Island and off it. Let’s break it down:

• She gave Aaron to the one person who should really him in Claire’s absence, Claire’s mum, thereby paying proper attention to her near-Claire experience. (Called it!)
• She told Carole the truth about Aaron and that the O6 lied.
• She told Cassidy the truth about the O6’s lie.
• She honored her promise to Sawyer to deliver the money for Clementine.
• She went above and beyond to save a poor tween boy who’d been shot, even if that boy grew up to become the Ben Linus we all love to hate.
• She never once reproached the suddenly contrite Roger Linus for his woeful lack of quality parenting.
• She delivered news back to a grateful Sawyer about Cassidy and Clementine.
• She even took the news of Sawyer’s “doing this for her (Juliet)” with its accompanying backhanded message about Kate’s prospects with Sawyer without even flinching.
• Even though we saw it in “316,” Kate still got on that plane to face up to her destiny on the Island.

So, this isn’t the same old “making messes and running away from them” Kate. We get it.

You want answers?
I want the truth!
You can’t handle the truth!

But there’s something even more important going on in there, in the off-Island bullet-points. Can you see what it is? No, it’s not that she’s going to be single for at least the foreseeable future, though I’m pleased as punch about that, too.

It’s that Kate has joined Hurley and Locke in a very exclusive club of off-Island people: those who’ve exposed the lie of the Oceanic Six. But why, you may well ask, is that important?

Because this little trend is putting into place something I think is going to be a very important plot development for Season 6. Call it the “815 Truth Movement.” To paraphrase the ever-pithy über-pilot, Frank Lapidus, you know those nuts that think 9/11 was an inside job? Well, this is like that…only real.

The list of people who know some or all of the truth about the Oceanic Six’s deception, or who will vociferously question their re-disappearance is growing. Carmen & David Reyes, Cassidy & Clementine Phillips, Carole & Aaron Littleton, Mr. Paik & Ji Yeon, and Waaalt could sure grab some media attention if they went and validated the conspiracy theories about Oceanic 815 that have already been hinted at by the “The Oceanic Six: A Conspiracy of Lies” bonus feature on the Season 4 DVD set. And none of them would be the sort to be silenced or placated by anything Ben Linus, Charles Widmore, or their operatives have to offer. (I’d have added Desmond, Penny, and wee Charlie, but I’m somehow sure they’ll be on the Island sooner than next season.)

There are also just too many on-screen instances of this sort of “loose end” being left now to ignore the evidence. I’d actually been pondering this going all the way back to Hurley’s original admission to his mom in “The Lie,” though I only brought it into these pages with my treatment of the last Kate-centric episode, “The Little Prince.”

In the larger sense, the only confirms to me that the off-Island world is actually going to be a major factor in the end-game rather than just fading into the background to focus solely on the on-Island chess-match, which I still think is all about finding out whether or not the time-stream can be altered after all…or else, in the words of the always-cheery Eloise Hawking, “God help us all.” Or is it the alteration that one side wants to perform that God needs to help us avoid? Alas, we have too little info as yet.

Oh, of course! It’s all about you, isn’t it?!?

Of course, one of the benefits of having the “present-day” storyline happening in 1977 DHARMAville (future site of New Otherton!) is that everything has become something of an extended Ben flashback, allowing us not to have to think about dramatically lesser characters like Kate too terribly much if we don’t want to.

And before we get into the heavier plot elements, I just want to take a moment to reflect on the fact that we actually, finally got to see a different side of Roger Linus than “abusive asshole” or “dessicated corpse.”

I have to admit that, after seeing Jon Gries playing far gentler souls like terminally shy savant Lazlo Hollyfeld in Real Genius and lovable techie Broots in The Pretender, seeing him be so mean to young Ben was causing me no end of cognitive dissonance. So it was a bit of a relief to finally see Roger express a positive human emotion by confessing to Kate his shortcomings as a father and expressing due concern for the life of his boy.

If only it weren’t a case of “too little, too late.” Just another one of the many poignant stories woven together on this crazy drama we all love so…

Now, in the latest performance of the predestination loop mambo, we have evil, cruel, nasty Ben bringing assassinified Sayid back in time to shoot young Ben so he can become cruel and nasty enough to want to do that to Sayid. (I’m still holding out for Hurley to be the one in whose voice The Numbers were being broadcast when Leonard Simms heard them…)

We also have Hurley raise his one good question in his dialogue with Miles about the nature of time travel—that of why Ben didn’t remember Sayid shooting him—only to possibly have a possible answer given shortly thereafter by Mr. Guyliner himself.

Annnnnd a big question about the mysteriously-migrating gunshot wound flip-flopping which side of the Prime Meridian of Ben’s hoodie it’s on between “He’s Our You” and “Whatever Happened, Happened.”

There’s already been a lot of wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments about both of these questions. Some people think that the “he won’t remember any of this” line was too facile in explaining why, as Hurley was curious to know, Ben wouldn’t remember Sayid as his would-be killer upon being tortured by Sayid as “Henry Gale” in the Swan hatch in 2004. And does it mean that Ben suddenly doesn’t remember anything before that point at all, making his lie about being born on the Island into his belief of the truth? Or else surely that means he actually remembers everything!

Well, I’m going on record to say that both are wrong. The only “all this” Ben won’t remember is being shot and handed over to the Others…and probably the day or two previous, in which he would have met Sayid. The rest of his fucked-up upbringing, including the fact of being brought to the Island at 8 years old, he’ll remember. After all, he’s still going to need a reason to still hate Roger enough to gas him up close and personal even though I’m quite sure Roger will moderate his parenting style upon miraculously getting his son back alive. And what’s more, some part of Ben, conscious or otherwise, is going to retain the memory of being shot by Sayid, adding fuel to the fire of Ben’s treatment of Sayid from 2005-2008. But I’m betting it suits the Island’s/Jacob’s/Smokey’s purposes for Ben not to remember Sayid clearly when he’s captured in 2004 despite having other foreknowledge of the time-tripping Lostaways in DHARMAville remain intact.

And to the “total amnesia” proponents I only ask this, did Robert and the other members of the French team forget their past lives after being mysteriously reprogrammed by the smoke monster in “This Place is Death?” Based on the intimate knowledge of their past together displayed by Robert in his final standoff with Danielle, the answer to that is a very clear “no.”

The whole world keeps spinning around me. All life is future to past, every breath leaves me one less to my last.

Now, about that gunshot wound…

A quick look at the screencaps is enough to show that this wasn’t a simple case of horizontal inversion, which is more common than you think in TV shows. Checking out Young Ben’s hair in both scenes nixes that. So we’re left with either a pretty colossal continuity error on the part of Lost’s costume and makeup people or else another one in an ongoing series of small alterations indicating that someone or something is somehow constantly changing the timestream in small ways, as in the case of the mysterious pictures on the stairs (pictured right) during Miles’ ghostly powwow back in “Confirmed Dead.” There have also been slight dialogue differences in each revisiting of the scene at the pier between the O6 and Ben, which strikes me as very odd since it’s not like they didn’t have the script for “This Place is Death” lying around to double-check against.

I’m certainly not beyond believing that it’s easy to make mistakes from one episode to the next or even one day of shooting to the next on a show as complicated and intricately-plotted as Lost, nor even believing that at least some of the examples I’ve cited, or that others would cite, are in fact bloopers. But there are just too many of them and some of them are just plain too egregious to simply be errors. I’ve been saying it for some time now, but it bears repeating: the timeline of Lost isn’t fixed and fully fated…for the right people or beings.

Like the Island itself. And Desmond. And quite possibly Walt.

I mean, just think of the ripples through time it would have taken to ensure a failure to fire in both Michael’s and Keamy’s guns, preventing Michael from dying before his appointed time, for example. Or to orchestrate a rare bird smacking itself dead into the Lloyds’ window right as Walt and stepdaddy were talking about it all the way back in “Special?”

It’s just that for poor schmoes like the rest of our Lostaways, all they can do is follow along the tracks through time that only they can’t see.

You’re worn and used and you cant talk. Your flight has been postponed, now you must walk…straight up that hill, now you must push your own rock.

Which brings us to easily my second-favorite scene in the show: Hurley and Miles sounding a lot like arguing Lost fans with Miles playing the generally clued-in role and Hurley being mostly sans clue, aside from the insightful question about Ben’s memory that probably has nothing to do with time travel at all.

What Miles was trying to explain to poor, unequipped-to-cope Hurley was the difference between objective and subjective time (which I was busy defining way back at the beginning of the season, if you’ll recall). All of which makes me wonder why there weren’t more sci-fi geeks among the Lostaways. Maybe the Island didn’t want anyone around who could really explain things properly to the returned O6ers, hence the disappearance of Faraday.

But getting back to the point, it really is quite simple, as I’m sure the vast majority of the readers here will agree. But for the confused few, it’s quite simple…everything that the time-travelers experienced up to the point at which they were thrown back to the ’70s is subjectively “past” to them. They lived from their respective birthdates one day at a time until the Island started its time-skipping (in the case of the Left Behinders), or until the flash aboard an out of control Ajira 316 (in the case of the time-tripping O6ers).  So, their existence in early 2005 or early 2008 is in no way contingent upon their surviving their experience in 1977.

But people who haven’t time-traveled to the past, but are merely the 1977 versions of people we know in the 2000s can neither die (e.g. Ben) nor be prevented from dying (e.g. most of the DHARMA Initiative) no matter what the time-travelers do. By the time we get to 2004 and the crash of Oceanic 815, Ben is alive and the DHARMA Initiative is dead, and that’s all there is to that.

Got it? Good. Miles was 100% right and Hurley was 100% wrong, as much as we love him.

That’s what the title is all about. Nothing that any of these people do during the DHARMA days can even possibly be anything different than what the future knows they did. No matter how “unpredictable” you try to act, your actions will inevitably be exactly what they always would be. And it’s that knowledge that drove poor Daniel Faraday quite mad after the last time-skip took him away from the mortal remains of Charlotte Lewis, which now resides forevermore on the Island in whatever ancient time that was when the statue still stood.

The only exceptions, as previously stated, are those special, exceptional “wild-cards.” But will their influence be enough to enable whatever alteration one side or another of the Great Game of Lost is trying to get away with? This is exactly why Season 5 is all about giving fate the edge, so that free will can be the fan-favored underdog going into the all-important Season 6.

Hello there, ladies and gentlemen! Hello there, ladies and gents! Are you ready to rock? Are you ready or not?

And finally we complete the circle and arrive back at that most triumphant episode ending. That better-than-classic-Lost moment we’ve been waiting for since “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham“…Ben getting an eyeful of one seriously resurrected Locke.

And it was all we could have hoped for and more.

We got some genuine-looking shock from The Man Who Always Has a Plan™, a righteous smirk and verbal smackdown from The Once and Future Island King™, and the setup for what looks to be a big-time, bad-ass Ben episode called “Dead Is Dead”…even if it should be called “Dead Is Dead (Unless You’re the Island’s Miracle Boy).”

So, is Ben’s look actual shock, as in “How can you be alive?!? I killed you!”? Or is it disbelief more along the lines of, “I knew you’d come back, but…holy crap, it actually happened! Now there’s something you don’t see every day.”? There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there. And even then, Ben might lie through his teeth.

Still…”Hello, Ben. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

Brilliant!

Technorati Tags: Ben, Hurley, Jack, Juliet, Kate, locke, Looking at the Little Things, Miles, predestination, Richard, Sawyer

I’ve already given my personal theory on whether or not Little Ben is dead. This still remains a hotly debated topic with some people saying this has all happened before, and others saying Sayid changed everything when he hand delivered the gift of steel to Little Ben’s middle regions. I’m on the Little Ben is alive, and this has happened before side. Why?

The episode is called: “Whatever Happened, Happened”

I feel like that says it all right there. The infamous words from Dr. Faraday help sum up what’ll most likely be the overall feeling for the rest of the season. As we saw last week, Sayid shoots Ben. Is this something new? No, Sayid has always shot Ben. Big Ben recognized 815 Sayid as the same guy who shot him when he was a kid. Also…how does Big Ben know that Sayid is nothing more than a killer? Because Sayid told Little Ben right before he shot him.

Thank you, Miles!

I really hope the next few episodes start to put to rest some of the “So and so will remember this in 2004 now right?” theories. The answer to that question, is…no. As Miles says, they haven’t experienced this yet. How can they remember something they haven’t experienced yet? Jack, Sawyer, Kate, Juliet, etc may be in the past, in regards to time and the universe, but in terms of their life, they’re still in THEIR present. Jack isn’t going to suddenly remember in 2004 that he refused to save Ben when he was a kid. Because 2004 Jack hasn’t experienced this yet.

But what about Desmond, you say?

Right we did see Desmond wake up in 2007ish with a brand new memory. How did this happen? Basically, because a new memory was inserted into Desmond’s past. Which caused present Desmond to be given this new knowledge. The same thing could have happened if Faraday met Jack in 2002 at the hospital and said: “Hey, someday you’ll meet some one named Ben Linus. Do not trust him, ever.” And boom! Jack has a new memory. That’s just an example, by the way. I don’t think that’d happen, because you can’t change things like that. Unless it’s Desmond, because the rules don’t apply to him.

Jack’s being a…what’s the term, Rebecca? Doodie head?

So Jack does not want to save Little Ben. A good point was brought up in the comments on the video’s page, about whether or not Jack will eventually succumb to his nuerotic need to fix things. I wonder how long he’ll hold the feeling that somewhere, something is being fixed, and he’s not a part of it. I think Jack is going to cave. He’ll be a jerk about it, but eventually he’ll do it. Remember, he was a jerk once about fixing Ben’s tumor, and eventually he did that. Kate and Juliet and Sawyer will all guilt trip him into it, and mention that their whole lie could come unglued if people find out what’s going on. And Hurley will talk about how he’s afraid of disappearing. Then, in the end, Jack will come to the rescue, being the hero that the island needs him to be.

Hurley + Miles = Miley?

I’m hoping we get to see the start of a Hurley/Miles pairing. Two comedic characters, each with their own sense of humor…I think it’ll bring an awesome element to this season. Judging from one of the press releases for an upcoming episode, it looks like this won’t be the last we see of the duo hanging out. The only thing I’d be worried about here is Miles’ safety. Both the people Hurley’s gotten close to on the island have died. First Libby, then Charlie. Even poor Tricia Tanaka took a dirt nap while around this guy. Could Miles be next? Maybe we’ve been wrong about Hurley all along. Could it be possible that he’s more than just a rich unlucky guy stuck on an island? What if there’s more than meets the eye here? I’m going to go out on a limb with this one. Hurley doesn’t know it, but he’s actually the grim reaper in a fat suit.

Give me some Richard this week!

This work last week. I asked for some Ben, and we got some Ben. Now I want some Richard! I beg thee, Lost Gods, just give me a scene with Richard. Every time that guy’s on screen, it seems like you hear the entire Lost community cheer in unison. Is there anyone out there that just doesn’t like this guy? I’m hoping with the whole Sayid being a hostile/Little Ben getting shot thing, he’s bound to show up soon. Maybe he’ll confront Sayid in the jungle. Or maybe he’ll find a gunned down Little Ben, and tell him that his patience will be rewarded. Just give us our Richard fix. Just enough to hold us off for when the heavy stuff starts coming. Because he’ll definitely be around for that.

Spoiler! This is Aaron as an adult!

Blah.I’m guessing a flashback to what she did with Aaron. Do I care? No. I don’t care at all. Call me heartless, but Kate could’ve dropped Aaron off at a shelter for all I care. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I can’t stand baby “actors.” They’re worthless, and never provide any real purpose to things. And if you’re going to argue: “But they’re cute!” That’s fine. But Aaron is not cute. It’s almost as if Charlie was predicting the future when he gave the nickname “Turnip Head.” What do I think Kate did with Aaron? Like most people, I think she probably gave him to Cassidy. This means we’ll get to see “awesome” scenes with Cassidy and Kate, and if we’re lucky, baby Aaron and baby Clementine! Woooo…anyone else as excited for all the baby action we may see?

Alright so that’s it. Let me just say, I expect another slow week. But I really think things are going to pick up with episode 5.12. Something about Ben summoning the smoke monster has me thinking it’s going to be a good one. So what about you? Anything you want to see this week?

Technorati Tags: flashing forward, Lost, Lost Spoilers, lost theory, miley

Have I mentioned Sayid’s always been one of my very favorites since the pilot episode, along with Locke? ‘Cause he is.

All the more pity, then, that his self-assigned “purpose” will only bring about the exact fate he hopes to avoid, in the very best Greek Tragedy™ tradition, sealing the latest in a series of known Lost predestinstion loops. Or, to use a more recent example, like Bruce Willis’ character in Terry Gilliam’s amazing 12 Monkeys.

Unfortunately, this leaves your humble author in a bit of a bind. What to theorize about when the direct effects of this episode are completely obvious despite an inevitable attempt (and failure) to set up dramatic tension next episode about young Ben’s recovery from Sayid’s gunshot. He’s gonna live. Duh. Like the man said and like they also named next week’s episode: Whatever Happened, Happened.

Thankfully, that’s not all there was to “He’s Our You.”

One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small…

We also had this guy. (Pictured left.)

And I have to say that I was more than a little disappointed. I mean, yes, we got ourselves our umpteen-thousandth inversion on Lost and got to see Sayid suffer poetic justice for his time as an torturer (again). But really…when Sayid had Sawyer tied to a tree, we got some “bamboo shoots under the fingernails” action. All “psychopath” Oldham had was some light bondage enhanced with drugs.

In some of the circles I’ve been known to run in, this constitutes “a fun way to spend a weekend.” And the use of “truth serums”—particularly ones that will make a hardened ex-Republican Guard cackle with glee—hardly seems an inhumane form of interrogation.

I can only hope that we’ll see Oldham again, if only so that we can get some actual evidence of his allegedly psychopathic nature, ’cause so far, I’m just not buying it. If he hasn’t flayed anyone alive or performed an act of equivalent lunacy by the time we get to The Incident™, I’m going to feel severely let down. Though, that said, it’s always nice to see an old friend from Newhart getting work.

But I’m betting we’ll get more from DHARMA’s resident psychopath before we’re through. Keep reading.

In the meantime, Sayid got to play Cassandra and Chicken Little all rolled up into one, spilling the beans about his origin, Sawyer’s old handle, an intimate knowledge of DHARMA stations yet to come, and the mass murder of the Purge, only to be believed by nobody but his fellow time-traveler. Well, maybe by Radzinsky a little.

By the way, is it just me or are you also starting to feel less and less sad about the fact that Radzinsky ends up a splotch on the Swan station’s ceiling? Every time he opens his mouth, I like him less and less.

And he wore a hat, and he had a job, and he brought home the bacon so that no one knew…

Sawyer, as usual, had the pithy quip to sum things up perfectly: “Three years, no burning buses. Y’all are back for one day…”

But all the excitement and the “kiss kiss, bang bang” simply has got to result in the blowing of our time travelers’ cover. There really isn’t any other way this can go down. It may not happen next episode, or even the episode after that, but it will still be the release of Sayid and the shooting of young Ben that ends up being the root cause of Sawyer, Juliet, et al being found out.

Even if they manage to smooth over the actual release—play it off as a young boy entranced by one of the mysterious Hostiles to do his bidding—the Oceanic 815ers are going to somehow break character or otherwise act suspicious. And, despite Roger Linus’ opinion of the DHARMA Initiative, it’s not exactly full of dummies. Horace, Radzinsky, Chang…clearly big brains, all. Once they actually have reason to scrutinize all the mysterious arrivals in their midst, their shoddy cover stories will develop more holes than a centipede’s bowling ball.

Besides, we still haven’t seen Faraday kneel to fate and warn off young Charlotte yet or do his Radio Free DHARMA act with Pierre Chang, so we know that they’re going to be believed as being time travelers from the future before the season’s out at the very least.

You’re so vain, I’ll bet you think this song is about you. Don’t you? Don’t you?

And speaking of time travelers with flimsy stories who attract chaos, I have to admit that it was with no small amount of schadenfreude that I saw Jack and Kate reduced to practically being spear-carriers in this episode, actually requiring Hurley to bring news from over at the cool kids’ table. If you’ve been reading my synopses and analyses here for any length of time, you may have developed the entirely correct opinion that I don’t care for either of these characters or actors very much.

Matt Fox, when not making Jackfaces, could easily be replaced by a tailor’s mannequin and Evie Lilly still looks like a ferret to me.

I didn’t really have much else to say with regard to those two except to ask what the hell Sawyer was thinking going knocking on Kate’s door instead of Juliet’s before the burning bus rolled in and all hell broke loose. And, oh yeah, is it just me or is it completely obvious that sooper-surgeon Jack is somehow going to be required for the saving of young Ben, in yet another of Lost’s many mirrorings (going back to “I Do,” when he operated on an adult Ben)?

Stupid predestination.

I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat myself when under stress. I REPEAT!

If there’s one thing this episode had in spades, it was mirrorings, echoes, and inversions. These are common in Lost, of course, but this episode was chock-a-block…see for yourself:

• Young Sayid kills to prevent his brother from having to, echoing Eko’s flashback in “The 23rd Psalm.”
• Ben “frees” Sayid from assassinations in the future in a perversion of his freeing of Sayid from captivity in the past within this single episode.
• Sayid is, yet again, tortured…though this one most closely resembles his torturing of Sawyer in “Confidence Man.”
• Illana flirts with a drunken Sayid in a bar, mirroring Ana-Lucia sitting next to both Jack and Christian Shephard at various points.
• Illana dupes Sayid with sex only to attack him, much like Ilsa in “The Economist.”
• Sayid knocks back glass after glass of extremely expensive MacCutcheon whisky, the same whisky denied Desmond by Widmore, then presented to Desmond by Charlie and Hurley (both in “Flashes Before Your Eyes“).
• Sayid sees an echo of his own hard-ass father in abusive Roger Linus…not that it stops him or anything.
• Young Ben’s repeated sandwich deliveries aimed at getting something from Sayid mirror Juliet’s plying of captive Jack with cheeseburgers on several occasions during early Season 3.
• Sayid’s lie that he was actually there to bring Ben back to the Others mirrors Ben’s later lie to Locke that he was the Lostaways’ captive for the same reason. (”Two For the Road” Thanks, Bundt! -SL)
• Sayid denies that he’s a killer by nature to Adult Ben on one tropical Island only to affirm it to Young Ben on another.
• The cyrillic writing over the door as Sayid leaves the building after killing Andropov reads “Oldham Pharmaceuticals” and later, Sayid will be interrogated by Oldham with pharmaceuticals.
• A be-hoodied Ben uses fire as a diversion to liberate Sayid much as a be-hoodied Charlie used a fire as a diversion to abduct Aaron in “Fire+Water.”
• Ben gives a book to captive Sayid like Locke will give books to a captive Ben on two separate occasions.
• Young Ben burns a vehicle, creating chaos, just like Walt burned a vehicle (the first raft), creating chaos. (”…In Translation“)
• Even Hurley, practically in a cameo, echoed his stint as Keeper of the Food in “Everybody Hates Hugo” by becoming a cook for the DHARMA Initiative.

Like I said, even by Lost standards, that’s a lot. In this case, I think it’s meant to drive home with all the subtlety of a jackhammer (but hey, sometimes subtle is overrated) that our characters—and particularly our centric character, Sayid—are trapped in the machine of this giant time-loop and cannot escape.

Whatever happened, happened. The record of everything our heroes did in the ’70s has already been written and nothing they do can be anything other than what they’ve already done. And even worse, some people know more about this than they do, what with living in 2004-2007 with a solid thirty years to review things.

Can there be any doubt now that Ben knew exactly what would happen when Sayid returned to the Island, that Sayid’s subjective future held the event Ben could hardly have forgotten from his subjective past? Or, for that matter, can there be any doubt that Ben remembers the entire Class of 2004 from his youth and has at least some foreknowledge extending beyond the crash of Ajira 316? Really, the only unsure question in this paragraph is this one: Did Ben know in advance that Locke would be resurrected upon his return to the Island? His dialogue in “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” inclines me to think he didn’t know, but it’s still going to be very interesting to see his face when confronted by the Island’s risen messiah.

Getting back to what I said at the beginning, though, you really have to admire Sayid’s moxie for being the one person to try to defy fate, even if it’s completely impossible.

Much like Sayid himself, if you think about it.

Technorati Tags: Ben, Hurley, inversions, Jack, Juliet, Kate, Looking at the Little Things, Mirrors, predestination, Sawyer, sayid