Analysis 5.16 The Incident - Part 1

The Season 5 finale, The Incident, almost immediately broadened the scope of Lost and what our understanding of the show is to be. We saw the man we would come to know was Jacob weaving, a process he later remarked takes a long time (but he stated that was the point). Can’t help but figure that’s symbolic, really! Jacob is a God of some kind, on the side of free will and goodness, weaving the strands of the tapestry of life with eternal patience until the “one end” that he completely believes in.

The discussion on the beach with the unnamed man – that I shall herein refer to as Nameless – pretty much struck up the two sides each represented: Jacob’s optimism for mankind, and Nameless’ fundamental pessimism about man’s corruptive and destructive qualities. I can’t help but recall Locke’s talk with Walt, right back in the very first Pilot episode (an episode that gets references elsewhere, too). . .

Locke: “Two players. Two sides. One is light, one is dark.”

It’s no accident that Jacob and Nameless are both dressed light and dark. (Staunch believers in the ‘clue in the Pilot episode myth’, you have found your answer!)

Now this is seriously high-concept, grand scale stuff to grapple with. The eternal struggle between good and evil at the heart of man’s soul, with Jacob and Nameless lending themselves all too conveniently to no less than God and Devil respectively. Jacob being a fisherman emphasises the Christianity angle. Are we to take it that they are the God and the Devil? Personally, I hope not and I don’t think so anyway. They’re evidently powerful and timeless enough to be decent approximations to those archetypal religious notions – but their world appears to be entirely based on the Island. If the Island is a microcosm of the world, then Jacob and Nameless are its microcosmic God and Devil. It is on that basis I settle upon.

Consider them as two Gods of the Island, both vying to prove their own beliefs. On seeing the Black Rock the two are no doubt forced to wonder if this new group of Island arrivals (after who knows how many ages and how many visitors), these pieces on the board, will this time be the ones to end their deadlocked game.

Nameless, it can be surmised, doesn’t welcome strangers to the Island as each new person presents one that could prove Jacob right. What he wants is Jacob dead – then there will be no one to challenge him. On the Island, it seems, there are rules about how they can conduct themselves, how much influence they can exert over people and, as such, Nameless has to bring out their dark sides – but this only continues the ‘loop’ of corruption and destruction. Jacob simply awaits the time when this cycle ends, the “one end”; everything that happens is just progress leading up to such a moment. Jacob has all the time in the world to be proven right, in effect, unless Nameless can intervene. . .

The actions of Nameless I shall focus more on in Part 2 of this analysis, but it’s Jacob’s actions and his visits upon the main characters that I shall concentrate on here. Consider it the ‘light’ side of the analyses!

It’s worth mentioning that the existence of a complete four-toed statue as the Black Rock approached means the thing was destroyed at some point between the 1800s and the 1950s. Perhaps whatever cataclysmic event that brought the statue down was also responsible for landing the Black Rock in the middle of the jungle? A whopper of a tidal wave? Speculate away. It was amusing that Nameless pondered aloud, and probably rhetorically, about how the Black Rock found the Island. I think we learned enough to reach a decent conclusion: Jacob brought them there. That’s what he does. Brings particular individuals to the Island, this staging ground between good and evil, to see how much ‘progress’ can be made towards this “one end”. Weaving the threads of this epic tapestry. . .

Let’s look at the flashbacks. First up was Kate, with her childhood friend Tom (the guy from What Kate Did, of the model airplane, who was shot in the car with Kate when she was escaping from the cops), stealing a lunchbox (was New Kids On The Block merely a reference to the time period, or an inference that our Losties are the new kids on the island block being given a shot at proving Jacob’s belief in human goodness?).

After being caught shoplifting Jacob absolves Kate of her crime by paying for the lunchbox, tells her she ought not to steal again, and then touches her on the nose. I won’t insult your intelligence in pointing out how pertinent it was that Jacob touched each of the people he visited, but there’s speculation to be made about the reason for it (I’ll get to that). In this instance, Jacob was symbolically warning Kate against a life of crime, to be good. Not exactly advice she heeded, but a crucial part of Jacob’s approach is in the provision of free will. This adherence to free will probably cost him his life, but I’ll get to that, too. . .

At the funeral of his parents, we saw Young James Ford writing his letter to ‘the real Sawyer’, the one that would be a focal point of the episode Confidence Man in Season One. Here Jacob gave Young James a pen that would allow him to finish the letter. Again, free will over whether he chose to, emphasised by the conversation with his uncle afterwards where he was encouraged to take up the “what’s done is done” philosophy. It’s interesting that Sawyer does eventually abide by this principle – using it as a basis to persuade Jack to stop his ‘Bomb The Swan’ plans – but that’s only since he fulfilled his vengeance and killed ‘the real Sawyer’.

Whaddaya think? Did Jacob step in here, pretending to be lost, so as to prevent Sayid from wandering into the road with Nadia and also being hit by the car? If Ben’s claims to Sayid, about how Nadia had been murdered, were true (though it seems they probably weren’t given he’s now totally ‘fessed up about being a big old liar) then Jacob may have been saving him. There’s hope for Sayid’s survival, despite his desperate bleeding out by the end of this episode.

Jacob’s encounter with Jack came just after the moment in surgery that he told Kate about way back in the first Pilot episode (as I said earlier, there were a couple of references to the beginning tucked away), where he learned to count to five and focus on himself to do what needed to be done. Jacob handed him an Apollo bar, lightly touching his finger as he passed it over, pointedly remarking about how it just needed a little push. A nod to Jack’s push away from a man of science into a man of faith?

Speaking of men of faith, here Jacob apparently touched Locke and ‘healed’ him. Perhaps this paved the way for Locke’s eventual recovery from paralysis once he landed on the Island? It certainly appeared like some of the Island’s healing potential crossed over when Locke was touched. And I am reminded of Ben once promising to Juliet that Jacob could cure her sister’s cancer (so long as she remained on the Island with him). Juliet’s sister was later shown to be cured. A touch from Jacob? Or just manipulation from Ben, using a basis of truth to make his lie work? Jacob can heal – it’s just unknown whether he healed Rachel.

When Jacob met Jin and Sun on their wedding day he reinforced the idea that they ought to stay together, no matter what. It’s reasonably self-explanatory, serving as an underlying driver of their urge to bridge the decades between them to be reunited, and also a bit of evidence to Jacob’s linguistic skills (not only very good Korean, but he also speaks Russian in this episode!). Much like Jin and Sun’s entire plot arc this season, Jacob’s appearance keeps them in the midst of things without provoking any great sense of importance.

Jacob’s meeting with Hurley was the least enigmatic of them all, with Jacob blatantly coming out of leftfield to reveal he is part of the Island world who intended this meeting to happen and is not some random passerby or well-wisher. His soothing of Hurley’s worries – that seeing dead people is a gift and that he is not crazy – were precisely the kind of things he needed to hear, and so we were given an explanation as to how and why it was Hurley turned up to board Ajira 316 with a guitar tucked under his arm.

No guarantees there’s a guitar in the case, mind. The way Lost has panned out lately, whenever there’s a large box we don’t know the contents of the smart money will wager there’s a Dead Locke inside of it!

It may or may not be pertinent that only Sayid and Hurley were the ones visited by Jacob after they had already been on the Island. It could be argued that Hurley was never meant to be on the Island – since he only just about made flight Oceanic 815. . .

. . . but Sayid seems like a harder person to justify in this respect. Personally I feel like Sayid and Hurley were the only two of the Oceanic 6 that were unlikely to return to the Island without “a little push”, and so Jacob leaned on their free will a little (perhaps by saving Sayid’s life and convincing Hurley his ‘curse’ was a gift).

Of course, there were two other flashbacks in this episode that were notable in their differences to the above. Juliet’s didn’t feature Jacob, instead focusing on the moment her parents broke the news of their divorce (with sister Rachel – her of the eventual cancer cure – also present, which neatly indicated the presence of Jacob without him actually being there).

As well as Juliet’s flashback informing her that some people, no matter how much they love each other, are simply not meant to be together (a tough honesty that would ultimately prove fatal when she acknowledged her love for Sawyer was no match to his love for Kate) it’s also tempting to think that Jacob’s lack of appearance in her life meant that she was extraneous to events on the Island and was thus ‘doomed’. That’s not a line of logic that works particularly well either way (people survive without Jacob, and people have died that Jacob touched (e.g. Locke)) but, in the frame of this episode, it casts an extra air of fateful tragedy over Juliet that works nicely.

We saw Jacob meet with Ilana, but there was no clear ‘touch’ moment, for one thing, and for the other it appeared that Ilana and Jacob knew each other already. Quite what the hell happened to her to be bandaged the way she was is, surely, a story for Season Six. I am interpreting Jacob’s request for help, however, to be for Ilana to bring Sayid to the Island as part of whatever larger mission her and Bram and the other Ajira people are involved in. (Difficult to quantify this precisely as there is no clue about timelines but we have to bear in mind she and the rest didn’t arrive on the Island to spring the reveal about Locke – that was just something they found out after the crash.)

Ilana’s actions and interactions lead me to a simple but most likely explanation: Ilana is an Other. An off-Island Other, perhaps, but an Other all the same. If The Others are to be categorised as a group that follow the will of Jacob, Ilana is a pure Other. If anything she is an Other that has not been tricked by Nameless – let me grace you with my theory on the matter.

Back to the idea of black and white, of two sides opposed to each other, like backgammon pieces. We think of Jacob as white, Nameless as black, and the Island as the board they play their game of good versus evil on. All the people that come to the Island, they can be considered ‘pieces’ on the board. And, for my theory, I propose that the people Jacob touched beforehand were people he had marked out as his ‘key players’ in his game.

Again, think of Nameless and his remark about how the Black Rock found the Island. The inference for me was that Jacob somehow ensured the ship got there, and on board were people – key markers – he had previously interacted with for the next ‘loop’ of the game. It’s still possible that Richard Alpert came to the Island on the Black Rock.

Alpert: “I’m this way because of Jacob.”

Maybe Alpert proved himself worthy in some way, earned the right to be considered a major player on the board. Agelessness was his reward, or maybe it was his curse. Hard to say. But I am reminded of how often The Others have been referred to as good people.

Ben: “We’re the good guys, Michael.”

Bram, during this episode, told Lapidus that they were the good guys. If they’re on Jacob’s side, that stacks up. We can think of The Others as ‘white pieces’. It also makes sense why children would be so highly desirable, being uncorrupted and therefore pure and good, and hence why Zack and Emma and Walt were kidnapped by The Others. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot of grey areas to this theory - like how come, say, a man like Pickett could be considered an Other when he was such a horrible piece of shit to Sawyer who, as it turned out, was on Jacob’s list and had been touched by him?.

I’m not saying it’s cut and dried, but then maybe that’s the point. If it were perfectly black and white, if The Others were entirely good, then Jacob would have won. What we can’t underestimate, and what we can only now really start speculating about, is how much of a force Nameless has been. How good a game have the black pieces been playing so far?

Ilana visited the cabin and concluded that Jacob had not been there for a long time. There was a man behind the curtain after all, it just wasn’t the man everyone thought he was. These lists, these orders, all supposedly from Jacob in his cabin, almost surely weren’t from Jacob at all – rather Nameless, the trickster, masquerading as Jacob. Maybe that explains how an Other like Pickett could be around – evidence of the disruptive, corruptive agent at work within the “good guy” Others.

I’ll discuss Nameless, and other aspects of The Incident, in Part 2 of this analysis, but I’ll end with Jacob’s apparent end – at the hands of Ben.

It was a curious exchange, when the distraught Ben (a good episode for him, actually, in peeling back the bug-eyed layer to reveal the whimpering weak liar beneath) confronted Jacob, demanding to know why he had been ignored. (Why had Jacob forsaken him!?) “What about me?” he exclaimed. “What about you?” Jacob replied.

Was Jacob intending to be cruel? To make Ben feel worthless at this desperate moment? I return back to this idea of free will. Jacob adheres to the ‘rules’ of this game that dictate people must make their own choices – to “want to want” to do the things they do, if you like. Nameless knew the rules, knew what Jacob’s response had to be, and Ben had been delivered into the position of killer – a state he displayed in the Season 4 finale when the red mist descended as he killed Keamy. In short, Ben the master manipulator got manipulated by a trickster more skilled – and it prompted the result Nameless had wanted for so long. Jacob’s not quite done yet, though.

Jacob: “They are coming.”

If my theory is even close to right, then Jacob is talking about his key pieces. Jack, Sawyer, Kate and the rest of those he had ‘touched’. (Perhaps Faraday would consider them ‘Variables’!) Nameless may have managed to corrupt one of them – Locke – but the rest are apparently on their way. ‘The incident’ and the nuclear blast may be the catalyst that reintroduces these key pieces back on to the board immediately, or there may be more twists to come along the way, but I believe Jacob: They are coming.

Widmore: “There’s a war coming, John. And if you’re not back on the Island when that happens, the wrong side is going to win.”

Part 2 – the dark side – of this analysis will follow. . .