A Lost Place

Retroview: 1.1 Pilot – Part 1

2012-01-30T12:40:00.009Z

Briefly, what happened?

Flight Oceanic 815 crashed on a remote Island. The survivors gathered together, witnessing something monstrous in the jungle, before a plan was formed to retrieve the transceiver from the cockpit. Jack, Kate and Charlie found the cockpit and the pilot in the jungle but were then attacked. The three fled and hid, later making the grim discovery of the pilot’s body in a tree.

Note: Retroview posts are written with full awareness of everything that happens during the entirety of LOST and will contain SPOILERS.

Thoughts and Analysis

Knowing where LOST ends generates a momentary shiver of excitement at the very opening moments of this first episode. We’ll finish where we began – on Jack’s eye, with him lying in the jungle amidst bamboo, and with Vincent not too far away either! We also know that this particular spot is close to the cave of light that will become a pivotal and somewhat divisive plot point way, way ahead six seasons from here. What it all points to, of course, is destiny: the moment Jack landed on the Island he wasn’t far from where he needed to be, physically, but mentally and spiritually he is very much a man of science, and of ignorance, and has a long journey ahead of him.

Jack may be a man of science, but the opening sequence also marks him out as a man of action. It’s still a great scene, when he stumbles out of the jungle and into the chaos of the crash site on the beach.

Watched again, the crash site rescue holds up really well. In fact my first thoughts on seeing Jack arrive at the beach with the expanse of ocean behind him and the green foliage juxtaposing the golden sand was just how good this show looks. It really was, is, a beautiful-looking show and this immediate factor probably, on an unconscious level, accounted for the instant appeal of it for the mass audience. LOST just grabs your interest right from the get-go.

It’s great fun watching the crash site sequence flitting around characters we’ll get to know better further down the line. Charlie wandering around dazed, and Shannon screaming. Interesting also that the first person Jack rescues (a man trapped under a piece of plane) sees him enlist Locke’s help. Locke is kept very much out of focus during the moment, though I did like how his posture and stance had him slightly hunched, leaning on things for support. The first big walloping surprise LOST will spring a few episodes later is that Locke, moments earlier, had been confined to a wheelchair and had just come around lying on a beach to discover sensation in his legs.

I’ll take a brief aside here since I’m talking about Locke, as there is really only one other significant Locke moment this episode. It occurs when Kate takes the shoes off a dead man to have more appropriate footwear for her journey into the jungle. She makes eye contact with Locke and he smiles, revealing a mouthful of orange peel.

I know that this was inspired by Marlon Brando in The Godfather, and it works for Locke because immediately it sets him apart as a little off; menace masked with a smile. This is a man who doesn’t quite strike the ‘normal’ chord and a prevalent aspect of his character, this season especially, is of a man who presents a harmless, benign front that disguises a more dangerous liability (his thwarting of rescue attempts, his time with Walt and his fatal friendship with Boone) that echoes the ‘dark shell’ he will become when Nameless inhabits his form for more nefarious purposes.

Boone memorably crops up at the crash site eagerly wanting to help Jack. It’s Jack that sees him attempting to resuscitate Rose, badly, and sends him away on a fool’s errand to get pens (for an ill-advised impromptu tracheotomy!). Jack saves Rose (later she’s seen tenderly holding the ring on her necklace, that we’ll learn belongs to Bernard) but Boone’s actions here foreshadow his attempts to save the drowning girl, Joanna, that will cause Jack to suffer losing the first of his ‘flock’ (in the episode White Rabbit). Again, it’s nicely handled. Curiously, Jack does treat Boone like his right-hand man; he charges Boone with looking after the injured man whilst he is away, which prompts a debate to suggest Boone’s sense of being of a similar quality to Jack, in charge, ready and able to save the needy was part-fuelled by Jack’s misguided encouragement.

If you really wanted to mine that argument, you could take it further and suggest that Jack’s later abandonment of Boone (favouring Kate, Sayid, Michael and, to an extent, Sawyer) created a vacuum in Boone’s life that Locke would eventually fill. I do believe that Boone’s death is one of the heaviest that grips Jack’s guilt so it is intriguing to see their relationship develop here.

Most key members of the cast get short bits of screentime during this episode. Hurley and Claire get a decent amount of dialogue – though her pregnancy bump in silhouette looks truly ridiculous. Sawyer is seen but doesn’t speak. Sun also doesn’t speak, but is instructed by Jin that they stay together. The look on her face really sells the truth that she was on the verge of leaving him and isn’t wholly convinced she’s made the right decision in staying now his controlling, dictatorial traits are coming to the fore. Indeed, of all the characters, I believe Jin is one that takes the longest to be given sympathetic shading. Not a criticism, either. I like that he’s a hard-headed prick on the surface before we get to know who he really is on the inside.

Kate, naturally, isn’t around at the crash site. The moment Oceanic 815 landed and she realised she could move, she did what comes natural to her and ran. Jack unwittingly ironically remarks that she was made of stronger stuff than she gave herself credit for because she hadn’t run away from helping stitch him up. He sees in her more than she sees in herself: instant attraction is generated right here in this scene.

It was nice to see their first conversation, regarding Jack controlling his panic by counting, although when Kate runs away from the smoke monster and hides in a tree and starts counting it does look a bit stupid no matter how well she tries to sell it. Many seasons later, we’ll actually get to see the scene where Jack’s scalpel slipped in surgery and he had to control his wave of fear for real, and we’ll discover that shortly after this moment Jack will unwittingly meet and be touched by Jacob for the first time.

Interesting that Jack landing on the Island makes him recall that day, almost as if the stronger connection to Jacob has prompted that memory to surface. (I know the writers couldn’t possibly have had that in mind – but retroactively they’ve made it work really well, something I expect will happen a lot whilst I revisit the show.)

In reality there’s no doubt Kate ran into the jungle before not getting too far and realising that she had nowhere to run to, but at least removed her handcuffs (they’ll get found before long!) before she wandered back and came across Jack in need of some stitching. Her absence from the crash site would naturally go on to fuel crackpot theories that she was an Other, despite the fact that we will see her onboard Oceanic 815 in the very next episode! As would eventually transpire, pretty much every theory about LOST that was wrong was because it over-complicated matters. For the most part LOST generally flopped down on simple explanations. High-concept, sure, but mostly simple.

Perhaps the most refreshing part of this episode I noticed seeing it again was the sequence on the first night. There were a few scenes of different characters (talk of the plane crash, Hurley handing food out) but I noticed that there was no music to any of it. Even when the sounds of ‘the monster’ (I’ll get to that) rampaged through the jungle, there was no music cue. It really worked well, creating a kind of desolate feel. In my opinion LOST over-egged its use of music cues in later seasons and they became counter-productive to generating drama; watching scenes unfold like this only support that argument.

In fact this Pilot episode is really rather streamlined. There’s the crash site, some brief character introductions, a monster in the jungle and then a journey to the cockpit before the monster attacks. Again, I liked it. Some pilot episodes tend to overload on plot threads, generating future mythologies, whereas LOST kept things rather more straightforward. The only really big question this first episode poses is: What is that thing in the jungle?

It’s a shame that the first and arguably biggest question LOST ever presented is the one that provided the least satisfying answer. Don’t get me wrong – I didn’t mind that it turned out to be a Black Smoke. I didn’t mind that it was a Black Smoke that could shapeshift, though it does sound silly written like that. I don’t even mind that it was once a man that got cast into a ball of pure, white light and was spat out as this glowering turret of evil because thematically the Black Smoke is a manifestation of original sin, so it works. It really all works so long as you can swallow the high-concept. What doesn’t work is the internal logic of how it behaves in these early seasons, which does often betray that the show creators didn’t really know themselves what it was in the beginning.

I’ve made the point before that it’s not a criticism that the entire show wasn’t mapped out from the start. Let’s be realistic – that would be a hell of a lot of forethought and planning for a television show that might never get past the pilot episode stage. But what I do expect is that when revisions are made, when explanations are developed, they don’t conflict with what we’ve seen already. The Black Smoke’s behaviour this episode, for me, does just that.

Why does it attack and kill the pilot? Here’s an answer: It’s because he wasn’t supposed to be there. We’ll later learn that Frank Lapidus was supposed to pilot Oceanic 815 but dropped out and Seth Norris stepped up in his place. Since ‘supposed to be there’ means in accordance with Jacob’s design, and since really this is a show about Jacob and Nameless battling out a private game between themselves, Seth Norris the pilot was a piece that wasn’t supposed to be on the board and so got removed.

Don’t like that answer? How about this: The Black Smoke had learned a new tactic. The last time we saw people crash on the Island was when the crew of the Black Rock, with Alpert onboard, landed there. That time the Black Smoke (a.k.a Nameless) turned up and killed everyone apart from Alpert. Then Nameless attempted to trick Alpert into killing Jacob for him, but it didn’t work and instead Jacob landed himself a long-serving, dutiful servant.

Clearly that didn’t work out too great for Nameless, so with the crash of Oceanic 815 he tried a different approach. Take out the pilot, like taking a pawn in a chess game, as a tactical move to send a message to the remaining passengers. Same as stomping around the jungle, generating unease amongst the survivors. Beat the grass to startle the snakes. Then later Nameless can pinpoint individuals (like Locke, and Mr. Eko) to ascertain which might allow him to complete his endgame.

It’s frustrating that LOST didn’t take the trouble to really spell this part out, to be honest. I’ll always give the show grace for some elements of ambiguity, and even the very open-ending sits just fine with me, but on Nameless and the Black Smoke I feel they fumbled the pass and we, the audience, are left squirming to keep a hold of what they gave us.

Anyway.

The episode focused in on Jack, Kate and Charlie making a journey to the cockpit. Charlie is, of course, motivated to go so he can get his drugs back from the toilet. He certainly appears right from the off as self-centred, delusional (a couple of times he makes the assertion that Driveshaft are together, on a comeback) and overlooked (in the cockpit, Jack asks if Kate is OK and not him, and no one even notices he isn’t around for quite a while). Kate also mentions that Charlie seems familiar to her. Scouring my memory banks I can’t recall any instance where Kate and Charlie’s paths intertwined during flashbacks so I have to assume his being part of the band is where she knew him from.

The three of them venturing out like this do make for a strange trio, really. We’ll more come to expect it to be Jack, Kate and Sawyer, or Locke, or Sayid, or one such combo. Charlie feels like a fifth wheel here, though when this episode first aired Dominic Monaghan was the biggest name star in the show since his role in The Lord Of The Rings so it makes sense that he’d play a big part.

Last thing to say about this episode is about the ending, and the discovery of the pilot’s body up in the tree. It’s relatively well-known but worth mentioning again that in the original plans it was intended that Jack be found dead there as the ultimate shock: kill the apparent leading man in the first episode. It was even touted that Michael Keaton was going to take the role for added surprise value. Common sense prevailed, however, and the gimmick was dropped. Kate and Charlie wander back and rather than find Jack dead the three of them reunite to gaze up at poor old Seth Norris instead.

And we won’t even find out he’s called Seth Norris until Season 4!

Best Part

Whilst the discovery of the cockpit and the pilot are tense and exciting, and the subsequent Black Smoke monster attack is a terrific action moment the question marks it generates put me off totally loving it. No, the best scene of Pilot - Part 1 kicks off the moment Jack wanders into the crash site and dashes about the place being nothing short of heroic, meeting various main characters en route to saving Rose’s life. It looks great, cinematic even, and in a retroview it’s fun seeing the first appearances of characters we’ll come to know very well.

Time To Go Back

2012-01-16T15:41:00.005Z

It’s time to go back.

It’s actually approaching the two-year anniversary of the LOST finale. Does it seem like a lifetime ago? Or does it feel like only yesterday? For me, it feels like both. My memories of watching that last ever episode are crystal clear – and I’ve never actually watched it since.

Now there’s time between us and the end of LOST, there’s space for reflection and objective analysis. Enough distance has been generated to be able to go back to the Island without any rose-tinted spectacles, without being bogged down under the weight of theories and speculation. Now I can go back to LOST with a clear head and the full awareness of how it all ends.

I can go back to the start knowing what awaits at the finish.

I intend to do exactly that; go right back to the beginning, the Pilot episode, and watch the whole thing over. And in between each episode I’ll put down my thoughts, feelings and analysis of how it holds up now – where it’s great, good, and where it’s not so great and, whisper it, where sometimes it really was pretty bad. I’ll be looking for loose ends that perhaps didn’t get tied up, and hopefully spotting new clues, significances and meanings with the benefit of hindsight. It's going to be exhaustive, and exhausting. It's going to be gruelling and it's going to take a long, long time. And, you know, I think I'm rather going to enjoy seeing this mystery unfold now I know how it's resolved.

I intend to be thorough. I intend to be shrewd. This is not to be some wistful wander down a nostalgic path with a happy smile on my face. Right now I hold LOST as the best TV show I’ve ever watched. Now, going back to the start, it’s going to have to earn that accolade anew. Don't get me wrong - I intend to have some fun, too. If we can't laugh along with the thing we love then I don't think it's really love!

It’s a long road ahead. By my reckoning there’s around 120 episodes to wade through and pick apart. Revisiting the good old times can’t be a bad thing, though, can it? Let’s go back to the days of ‘the hatch’, of Mr. Eko and his Jesus stick, of Ethan and ‘Mr. Friendly’, of a time before Aaron was born, of pushing a button, of Walt and Boone and Ana Lucia, of flashbacks becoming flashforwards and then becoming flashafterlifes. It’s all there. It’s all waiting. All we have to do, like a drunken, drugged up Jack once exclaimed, is go back.

It’s time to dig out those old DVDs. Or maybe treat yourselves to a new shiny blu-ray collection. Whatever you watch, however you watch, let’s journey all the way back to the Island together. The Retroview will begin right here with Pilot – Part 1 at the beginning of February.

Are you ready to go back?

Analysis: 6.17 The End

2010-05-29T23:13:00.007+01:00

And so it ends. It finished where it began – with Jack lying in the jungle – and the notion of purgatory hung over proceedings just like it had from the very beginning. Yet despite such longstanding, almost predicted-to-death notions, the freshness of novel concepts and surprise revelations closed out the show. Indeed, the very familiarity of it was almost the genius of the execution: the truth had been there from the start.

Like in the beginning of the show, the actual events on the Island were relatively simple. Our heroes had a specific plan and there were some very clear problems in the way of them succeeding. For the majority trying to get off the Island was their chief mission – just like it was from the start! There was just a further complication in that there was someone else they wanted to prevent from getting off the place with them. . .

Nameless, it would seem, fundamentally did just want off the Island purely to get to that place across the sea, the place he considered home. One of the first things he did when he had assumed the body of John Locke was to stand at the beach and look out at the horizon. That purpose had been there all along – I guess we just all got so taken up with mysteries and grand ideas that distracted us from the simple purpose.

His talk of destroying the Island, of sinking it to the bottom of the ocean, was an afterthought idea that Desmond brought about (but did also serve the purpose of fooling we watching audience into concern that the Alternate Timeline was some form of consequence of his success – more on that later).

But no. Beware distractions, as someone once said. Nameless wanted to physically leave the Island. Given that Jacob’s eventual death and the cessation of power on the Island returned Nameless to a state of mortality, it has to be concluded that part of his ambition was not just to get off the Island but also to reclaim his humanity. His remarks to Ben, about how he didn’t always travel around in smoke form purely because he liked the feel of the ground at his feet, to remind him of being human, are more significant in this light.

Nameless told various other characters that he used to be a man and, really, it was this that he wanted back. Jacob, as we saw and heard he regretted, was responsible for what had happened to Nameless. And what is clear is that the only way Nameless could leave the Island would be if he was free of the place, and its power. Indeed, it may be possible to surmise that Nameless leaving the Island may have had a similar effect as what was produced when Desmond pulled the plug, or ‘uncorked’ the power.

Potentially it was the death of Jacob that returned Nameless to a state of mortality, and had nothing to do with Desmond pulling the plug. That works. Nameless only sustained an injury to display his mortality after both things had happened. Yet consider Alpert. . .

. . . who received his first grey hair on his way to Hydra Island with Miles. He was finally ageing! And the only reason that could be was because Jacob was gone, the ashes burned away completely, and the blessing of longevity that had been bestowed on Alpert died with him. The same thing could have applied to Nameless and his return to mortality and Jack could have killed him, like any man, before Desmond got anywhere near the cave of light.

Like much of the last episodes of Lost, the grand meaning behind much of what we saw was left deliberately free of detail so that the audience could ascribe their own meaning. There are religious interpretations, scientific interpretations, or more philosophical, moral-based learnings. So quite what the terrible thing that would have occurred had Nameless left the Island is left open to such interpretation. It’s like asking, What is hell? Some consider it a hot place of fire and brimstone, others consider it a state of mind, intolerable conditions, or simply other people. One concept, different meanings. Pick your most satisfying. The point was that it would have been bad had Nameless left, but luckily there was one man standing in his way.

In terms of climactic spectacle, there’s no doubt for me that the Jack versus Nameless showdown on the cliff was the highlight of the episode. Drenched in slashing rain, cliff rock tumbling into the broiling ocean and Michael Giacchino’s riotous score giving it all it was worth, Jack and Nameless’ scrap was exactly the kind of powerhouse moment we all tuned in to see. And it was, of course, the fight that would kill them both. Nameless met his end over the cliff edge thanks to Kate (who had been cited as a potential threat he had overlooked by virtue of that simple line through her name on a cave ceiling). . .

. . . whereas Jack’s wounds would take longer to finish him off. But this was where each struck the fatal blow. And now we understood why the cut on Jack’s neck appeared, and what the meaning of his scar was in the ‘Alternate Timeline’ (what it’s really called I’ll finalise, at least for myself, further on).

These cuts and scars were manifestations of the injuries he sustained in life, the ones that would see him to his death. Cleverly Jack on the Island knew his time was coming and managed to pass on the baton of Island Protector to, perhaps, the most unlikely of people (yet what a perfect fit): Hurley.

We would later learn that Hurley made for a great Island Protector, and that Ben made for a terrific “number two”. No doubt Hurley saw to it that Desmond was able to leave and be reunited with Penny, but what else he did with the place – whether the Island was filled with people partying and laughing, or was converted into a refuge for those that needed the most care – it’s all open to conjecture (until the DVD release which purportedly contains scenes showing Hurley and Ben's time on the Island). The one thing you can’t imagine, under Hurley’s watch and rules, was that the Island was ever as miserable and hostile as we had seen it.

Naturally, this line of thinking and the show itself leads us to question what the Island actually was. (I realise that for many this lack of clarity about the nature of the Island has given rise to their frustration. I believe that definite specifics about the nature of the Island would have robbed the show of some wonder.)

You can devote a whole show to selling the idea that the Island is really a spaceship from a dying alien world. You can even try to make that the most incredible story you’ve ever heard. But, for me, that level of underlining utterly destroys the magic. Besides, like Mother once said, answers only lead to more questions. Where did the alien race come from? Why were they dying? What did they use the Island for. . .?

You get the idea. You can’t be provided satisfaction with this. You have to provide your own. It's better that the fundamentals about the Island remain ambiguous. Just like Nameless was never given a name – it’s for you to decide if he really was bad, flawed or a victim with just cause for his actions. I fall down somewhere around the view that he seemed a decent man that had been dealt a very harsh hand, but that didn’t make it OK for him to kill as ruthlessly and carelessly for his own ends as he did. When Jack, with Kate, triumphed over Nameless it did feel like a victory for the ‘good’ guys, did it not?

If that’s what you felt then it’s your gut interpretation and no one can tell you you’re wrong.

As stated, the only reason Nameless could seemingly be defeated was because of Desmond – the ‘Fail Safe’ man pulling out the fail safe plug of the Island to pretty much ‘switch off’ its powers. It was actually a little bit like when Desmond was late in pushing the button on a certain September 22nd 2004.

On that day he wasn’t around when the button needed to be pushed in The Swan Station and the electromagnetic anomaly was triggered just enough to create tremors on the Island and a surging force that would rip apart Oceanic 815 from the skies and send it hurtling to the land below.

But then Desmond entered the button and the anomaly was dissipated and normality resumed. On a larger scale, the same principle was applied to the Island. Desmond unplugged it (and out came a lot of hot magma, because as we learned in Season 3 the Island sits atop a volcano plume) and for a little while the place rumbled and crumbled and would have eventually been destroyed, but then Jack returned the plug to its hole and normality was resumed. Once more the Lost creators had primed us for these grand ideas in small ways.

It is worth taking some time, whilst we’re dwelling around The Swan Station, to consider the truth about ‘the incident’.

Since the end of Season 5 and the vast majority of Season 6 we were lead to understand that ‘the incident’ had somehow created the Alternate Timeline. Juliet’s dying remarks, about how it had worked (not quite sure what she meant by that, in hindsight) and Alt-Daniel Faraday’s sense of concern about having detonated a nuclear bomb that could have triggered such a situation all fuelled that notion. It was, as proved, a great big red herring. So if ‘the incident’ didn’t create a divergent timeline then what did it do?

Answer is, not much. But that’s not exactly a depressing answer. Miles unwittingly nailed it when he raised the point to Jack that going setting Jughead off at The Swan construction site might very well turn out to create the very ‘incident’ that he was trying to avert. And it seems he was spot on correct.

It’s easiest to understand this from Dharma’s – or Pierre Chang’s – point of view. There he is in the 1970s working on this fabulous Swan Station. During this time he comes to learn that his own son, and other people from the future, have been sent back in time as a result of his own work. The disaster has to play out, however, in order to avoid a paradox – and it always would have. Radzinsky was already digging too deeply, but even if he hadn’t Jack was there with a bomb. . . The universe would have course corrected it no matter what so that ‘the incident’ always happened and The Swan would always have to be there, venting electromagnetism, and Desmond would one day fatefully fail to push the button and so would come down Oceanic 815.

As far as the Losties were concerned; Jack, Kate, Sawyer and the rest – they took their part in the 1970s history as they were always supposed to, as they always had done, and the electromagnetic jolt from Jughead and ‘the incident’ rocketed them back to their own time.

That’s all there is to it. That’s what happened. Again, like many aspects of the show, we audience had a tendency to over-think and convolute what was simple enough already. Now we know better. We know how streamlined the show was in terms of its focus on the main characters and mostly everything else can either be answered as ‘it was as we saw it’ or as an open-ended mystery we don’t really know (but neither did they).

So we don’t really know why there was a Dharma food drop in the jungle. And we don’t know if Ben deliberately got himself caught in a net. Why was Horace Goodspeed building a cabin just like Jacob’s? And who, for that matter, was the person whose eye we saw peeping at Hurley from that same cabin?

We don’t know for sure, but what we do know is this: we’ve been shown as much as we ever will so our guesses are now as good as anyone’s. No one can tell you your wrong. I reckon that Dharma preset food drops to arrive in the future from their time in the 1970s using a focused version of the Island’s wormholes through time (like what Ben and Locke travelled through to end up in the desert). That’s what I think and no one can tell me I am wrong!

If you find gaps in what you feel you need to know, find your own answer.

Nowhere, naturally, was ambivalence more prevalent than with the ending to the show. On this I do have my own fairly assured views on what it was all about, but like with all interpretations it is just that: my own interpretation. (I just happen to think mine is a pretty good one.)

Let’s just tackle directly the Alternate Timeline. We thought it was some kind of tangent world for our Losties. A world configured around how things would have been had they never remained, or been on, the Island. We saw the scene where Ben talked with his father about being taken off the Island and figured that was the case.

Only that wasn’t the case. This whole timeline, this whole world, wasn’t an Alternate Timeline at all. It was an Afterlife Timeline. Now an interpretation of this world is purgatory. As in a place between heaven and hell where lost souls work out their good and bad demons to earn the right to move on to a better place. Hard and fast, you stack that notion against what we saw Jack do then the concept of purgatory applies. He died on the Island and then was rendered in this Afterlife Timeline where he was the last to realise what had happened, the last to awaken. But slowly he came to a place where he learned to acknowledge the importance of letting go and eventually met those he could reconcile his time with and. . . no. . . not for me. It’s not that simple – the ideas here are more elegant.

The moment the episode opened with Jack looking against a skull, he was a dead man. There was a very obvious statement being made. But let me take you back to the opening of Season 6, with Jack on Oceanic 815 (that didn’t crash). Let’s be clear that this was the launch point for the ‘afterlife world’, and very tellingly we were plunged through an aeroplane window to the depths of the ocean to a sunken Island.

Funnily enough, in my first analysis for the Season 6 episode LA X I discussed the idea of the sunken Island being akin to the memory of the Island being pushed down into the subconscious of Jack, and other characters. (Don’t get me wrong, I had a great many other ideas back then that all turned out to be utter dead ends, but this was one where I hit a pulse I didn’t feel the pressure of properly.) The Alternate Timeline was fundamentally an Afterlife waiting room – one where people that mean the most to each other can reside until all are gathered to move on.

This, I believe, is a tremendous notion. It’s a comforting idea for anyone bereaved or fearing for their own mortality: there’s a place you’ll have, a place you’ll go to, where those that count will gather together. But away from interpretative ideas, in terms of Lost this concept explains every ‘ghostly’ encounter we have witnessed.

What was Charlie that visited Hurley? Nothing more than a ‘ghost’ from this Afterlife World, encouraging Hurley to go back to the Island to fulfill what needed to be done in his existence. Other ‘ghosts’ visited Hurley too, imbuing him with the same ideology. Why? Because they had learned better, but furthermore because they could not move on from their own ‘afterlife world’ until he was prompted into action that would propagate the required outcome.

It’s a big idea to grapple, really it is. The biggest idea being captured in Christian Shepherd’s throwaway line about how time had no meaning in the afterworld timeline.

This one statement explained why the ‘Alternate Timelime’ timeline didn’t quite add up. Jin and Sun arriving in LA and being captured, shot, rushed to hospital and told their baby was fine and leaving all in a matter of days, playing alongside Locke landing a job as a temporary teacher and getting friendly with the staff and students before being hit by a car and returning to work afterwards before having spinal surgery performed successfully. . . these things just don’t at all work out in reality. But this wasn’t reality. This was like a shared dream between all of the Oceanic 815 people – one they were all involved in and one they all had to collectively wake up from.

It turned out Desmond was the catalyst they needed to pop this dream bubble and make them realise: they were dead, had lived their lives, and now needed to convene with the people that had meant the most to them before progressing to the next world.

Time being an irrelevance in this place meant we could grasp that Kate and Sawyer and Claire probably went on to lead long lives, but never finding a place or people that meant as much to them as their Oceanic survivors and their time on the Island. Hurley and Ben could have watched over the Island for hundreds of years before they eventually passed away. Meanwhile Boone and Shannon and Locke and the rest were already dead, already ‘waiting’, and Jack was simply the last of them to realise what had happened. And he had some father issues he needed to work out.

Only in this afterlife could Jack get to tell his father what he felt, and vice versa. And then he could rejoin with all the people that had collectively meant the most in his life, and to each other, to move on.

For Alpert you could imagine the same scenario existed, only in a different setting. Him finding Isabella again and awakening to his own mortality for the two of them to be together. And we may have even seen a version of this ‘afterlife’ when Mr. Eko died. Remember how it flashed back to him and Yemi, as children, walking away together?

Just like Kate and Sawyer may have lived long lives, their ‘afterlife’ returned them to a younger age, a certain time in their lives that meant most. For Mr. Eko you could say he went back to when he was a boy, a happier time with his brother, and that was where he found his peace. (In reality Mr. Eko wasn’t present in this scene because the actor had demanded more money than the creators were willing to pay – so luckily that flashback to his boyhood works even better in hindsight!)

Interesting that Ben remained outside of the church, not quite ready to move on. If this ‘afterlife’ was to be likened to purgatory it was more like a self-judgemental form of purgatory. Note how Jack saw a smile of forgiveness in Boone’s eyes, and returned the smile, because we know that the death of Boone, like the deaths of many people, would have weighed on his conscience. But they had all found peace, and so could Jack. He had been enabled and was ready to “let go”.

Ben wasn’t quite ready. He had done good things and he had done bad things and all of that meant he wasn’t quite able to reconcile within himself what kind of man he was. I could almost imagine him remaining there interminably, puzzled, forever trying to grapple with his own justification. Just like all of us watching, we were never able to fully define Ben’s moral character. I particularly liked how his character was left in this manner.

Jack’s eye opening was the first image of Lost and so, how fitting, that it was his eye closing which was the last. As Jack staggered to his resting point and lay down in the bamboo Vincent bounded over, like a replay of that first scene. It was important that Vincent was present though – his purpose was to fulfil Jack’s philosophy, his saving ideology. Live together or die alone.

Jack had strived to live together and paid the biggest sacrifice and so he didn’t get to die alone. I thought that was dignified and beautiful. Just like the ending to the show itself. The church scene, with the gorgeous music accompanying smiling faces and warm embraces was a gloriously heartwarming happy ending free of sentimentality. Lost may have been an imperfect show, but The End, for the characters, provided a perfect finish.

Namaste to all. See you in another life. You will certainly be missed. . .

Analysis: 6.16 What They Died For

2010-05-21T15:30:00.009+01:00

The one before the big one. The deep breath before the plunge. Anyone going into What They Died For figuring they’d be in for an episode of set-up and arrangement for the final stage to play out on would have been kind of right, and yet mostly just unprepared for the whammies slamming out.

Pow!

Alpert strides out confidently for a more up close and personal meet ‘n’ greet with Smokey than he expected.

Slash! An inconsequential bit-player bites the dirt.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Down goes Widmore.

And in between all that there was Jacob gathering the remaining candidates and explaining his motives before ordaining Jack as new Island Protector.

As a lead-in to the grand finale this wasn’t mere filler. And yet, somehow, the episode did have to get on with the business of set-up to make sure The End had a platform worthy of the climax. Nowhere was this plotting more apparent than in the Alt-Timeline and Desmond’s machinations, where he’s been busy pulling together all kinds of character threads to weave into his own design – Jacob would be impressed!

Desmond’s experiences with electromagnetism previously, which we can now also tie-in as being part of ‘the source’ at the heart of the Island, have imbued him with this knowledge and power and purpose. In some respects he’s almost like a more pure Island servant than Jacob was (and Jack now is). He was characterised as a ‘fail safe’ for the Island, presumably suggesting that whilst he retains the power to thwart Nameless’ plans the resolution will come with drawbacks.

If we parallel him with the Fail Safe from The Swan the function there prevented the terrible electromagnetic overload that was happening but, as a consequence, destroyed the place. Does the same apply to the Island? Desmond the Fail Safe preventing Nameless from leaving but at the cost of the Island itself? It would make sense. A measure of last resort.

So what are Desmond’s plans in the Alternate Timeline? Well, ever since he requested the manifest from Oceanic 815 it was clear his intention was to gather together the passengers. Not all the passengers are going to be a part of this convergence, however.

Hurley’s offhand remark, upon seeing Ana Lucia, asking if she was also coming along showed us that his ‘Island awareness’ has very much kicked in. And Desmond’s answer, that Ana Lucia wasn’t ready yet, underlined the point that some people just aren’t coming along for the ride. That makes me think we’re not likely to be seeing the likes of Shannon or Mr. Eko, either, but I hold out hope!

Where are they going? Well, there seems to be a strong pull towards this benefit concert. Miles mentioned it to Sawyer, that his father, Pierre Chang, was going to be there, along with Charlotte. Whilst Sawyer declined the invitation I suspect he’ll get there somehow – even if it’s just to recapture Kate. (Aside: Kate leaned on Sawyer as they looked out to sea, and now Jack’s committed to the Island does that mean we’re going to get a Kate-Sawyer conclusion to the love triangle?)

Young David Shephard is playing piano at this benefit concert, and has invited his father along. I suspect Claire will also be in attendance. Throw in Desmond and Kate, and whoever else Hurley and Sayid have been sent off to rustle up and it’s clear there’s a solid meeting place. Expect other familiar guests. And one thing they’ll have in common is the Island, and the choice about whether they ‘awaken’ themselves to this other life or not. And then what?

Crazy theory: they’ll get on a plane together and head for the Island. Those that want to will go back. And maybe somehow they’ll crash on the Island in a renewed kind of timeline after a battle with Nameless and Desmond’s been a fail safe and who knows what else, and they will all possess memories of both their ‘lives’ and have a better realisation of how to live together and not die alone.

Yeah, it seems kind of remote, I know. But this close to the end I had to squeeze in one last long shot prediction! And an important axis of the Alternate Timeline surrounds, as ever, Jack and Locke. Locke may have been mistaking coincidence for fate (we’ve heard that before, and the reverse) but Desmond’s little nudge has made a believer out of him. When he says he wants to get out of the wheelchair it’s more of a metaphor that he wants to stand up and become the man he, deep down, was born to be. John Locke may literally rise again.

Quite how this fits in with the timescales is tricky, though. Does Jack have time to complete major spinal surgery, fix Locke, and get to the concert (whilst taking Locke with him!?). Unlikely. And what was Desmond’s fake call to Jack, about his father being found, setting in motion? Get Jack to the airport? Just remind Jack about his father, to foster that Island awakening? And, nicely, the cut on Jack’s neck made a re-appearance from its first emergence on Oceanic 815. I don’t know what it means still but I like that it looks set to mean something.

Maybe Jack the Island Protector will know. When he elected to take on Jacob’s role (well, of course, he was always going to be the man) and drank the water, when Jacob pronounced that he and Jack were now the same, did Jack suddenly become awash with knowledge and insight? Difficult to say because the recent humanising of Jacob has emphasised the point he made: that an Island Protector is a flawed human. He made a mistake with his actions over Nameless, and the people he brought to the Island to replace him were all, in their own ways, lonely and incomplete.

This criteria doesn’t just apply to the candidates here, mind, it applies to practically all of the Oceanic survivors. Consider Charlie or Boone or Shannon or Michael – they all had a lack of resolution when they came to the Island. (This was a necessary factor given that this is a dramatic television show, but the majority of characters also found redemption on some level during their time on the Island. Again, plot arcs dictate as much but it feeds in nicely to the theme of the show also. Those that are still ‘lost’ and alive remain as candidates.)

I liked Jacob’s amusing notice that Kate, despite having her name crossed out, was still viable as a candidate. She had become a mother and therefore was not ‘lost’, but that still didn’t preclude her from an Island Protector destiny if she so chose. It was, after all, just a line drawn in chalk! But, as stated, it was surely always meant to be Jack. . .

The place he landed in the jungle at the very beginning of the show wasn’t too far from the ‘heart’ of the Island, the cave of light. Whilst it’s been a popular idea that Jack was situated away from the crash site for all kinds of mystery reasons (mostly revolving around a time loop) I think the idea that he landed closest to the spot that was most treasured on the Island is good enough justification. He just had a lot of work to do before he’d evolve from the man of science to the man of faith before he could see it.

And it’s certainly not over yet because Jack has a couple of formidable adversaries in the shape of Nameless and his new acolyte, Ben.

The motivation of Nameless is clear enough. His instant brute attack of Alpert was due to the fact he knew he could not win him round. Alpert had had his chance, and he overestimated his value to Nameless. I’m 50/50 on Alpert being dead. I quite like how sudden the attack happened and Alpert was gone – but on the principle of a person not being confirmed dead without a body I expect to see a battered and crumpled Alpert found lying in the trees somewhere, still breathing. Same idea applies to Lapidus who, surely, got out of the sinking sub and is now over at the Ajira plane fixing it up ready for flight.

Nameless’ recruitment of Ben is a necessity; once again he requires his killer capacity against the candidates the same way he needed him to kill Jacob. The big question concerns how complicit is Ben in this. . .

His eventual murder of Widmore was understandable. The deft reminder of Alex, as Miles crossed over the resting place where Alpert had buried her, brought her back into our memories but she’d never have left Ben’s heart (and guilt). And seeing Widmore again would have brought back all those feelings of revenge. Remember how enraged he was when he killed Keamy – that same murderous intent was displayed when he shot Widmore, but it was certainly a lot more controlled.

In fact, I would go as far as to say it was more controlled than it appeared. That Ben’s apparently irrational killer impulse was a little too contrived; the urge to pull the trigger coinciding just as Widmore was whispering in Nameless’ ear. Nameless himself didn’t mind too much, since he had heard enough – but Ben was quick to justify his action with his remarks about how Penny, his daughter, didn’t get to live.

My interpretation is that Ben achieved his goals. He got Nameless on side, in his trust, and he also saw Widmore dead. I wouldn’t go so far as to consider Ben a ‘good guy’, but I doubt he’s as aligned and with Nameless as much as Nameless might believe. Let’s not forget he also sent Miles away with a walkie-talkie, too. The man with the masterplan looks like he’s cooking something up.

One last question, that I can’t answer, is how Ben was able to kill Widmore. When they met in The Shape Of Things To Come Widmore made a comment about how Ben could not kill him. We never really got a reason as to why that was, and now we don’t have a reason as to why that. . . wasn’t!

Typical Lost.

Alternate Timeline Ben, however, is in an altogether better place. Despite getting a beat down off Desmond (Ben has certainly made for quite the punching bag over the years!) he found emotional redemption in the Rousseau household – with Alex apparently looking to him as a father-figure and Danielle (looking absolutely fabulous and breezy) giving off heavy ‘you’re my man’ signals.

Whilst Desmond rained down the blows on Ben a memory triggered of the other time he received such a beating – from the Island Timeline. If there really is a matter of choice in whether or not a person elects to become ‘aware’ and accepting of the Island Timeline then Alt-Ben is one such character that is really not going to be thrilled about the man he was in the other place. Yet I don’t think that’ll be the way of it. I suspect we may have seen the last of ‘Dr. Linus’. Ben, on the Island, clearly has a big part to play but I still hold to the belief that death will be his resolution. Whether he goes as a martyr in the battle against Nameless, or is taken down as Nameless’ villainous sidekick remains to be seen. It’s good to see him get back to being conniving, though!

The episode reached the cliffhanging declaration from Nameless that he was now within the realms of possibility of destroying the Island completely.

Seeing that Desmond was no longer in the well, Nameless had put together whatever Widmore told him and been convinced his scheme could work. I suspect it may involve simply flinging Desmond into the cave of light – the very cave that made Nameless into the Black Smoke. Only with Desmond’s curious resistance to these forces the ‘fail safe’ result of such an action may mean the light is simply extinguished. As if Desmond’s durability would somehow enable him to try and claim the light (as Mother suggested all men want to do) and thus it would need to be snuffed out. The heart of the Island stopped dead.

Who let Desmond out of the well? Sayid’s last words to Jack inferred that Desmond was down there, so you have to assume that was the case. If none of the candidates threw a rope down to Desmond then the only other person who knew about where Desmond was, who heard what Sayid said, was Frank Lapidus. Maybe Frank figured he needed a hand getting Ajira 316 up and running and so swung by Desmond’s well on the way! (OK, the two locations are on separate Islands which means this isn’t exactly handy, but you get the idea. I say that if Frank isn’t at Ajira then he’s the guy that got Desmond out of the well!)

Like the last flickering ash embers denoting Jacob’s remaining time left, the group has been rapidly pruned down to just a few remaining key players. This certainly bodes for a tense, fraught finale that, no doubt, has a good few twists, turns, shocks and surprises before the curtain comes down. And probably some tears, too. The End awaits. The end of Lost. We’ve come a long way to get to this point and we face the final curtain with excitement and trepidation. The one before the big one. The deep breath before the plunge. Hold on tight. . . and I’ll see you on the other side.

Analysis: 6.15 Across The Sea

2010-05-13T17:13:00.007+01:00

Mother: “Every question I answer will simply lead to another question.”

It was a joke from the writers and also a form of warning. Anyone that ever sought answers was a scientist. Anyone that ever believed without question had faith. The quandary this episode and, I suspect, Lost will leave us with by the end is the matter of what questions to demand answers of, and what vagaries and mysteries we quench with our own interpretation.

So this analysis is going to be formed very much from my interpretation, the only stipulation that it be coherent without contradiction from previously established information. Somewhere within the rather distant and frustrating history of the Island this episode presented there is coherence to be found. . .

So we learned that Jacob and Nameless (even at birth he wasn’t prescribed a name!) came to the Island via their mother, Claudia. Non-identical twins, it transpired that they were to be raised by another when Mother took it upon herself to smash Claudia’s head in with a rock. First impressions are that Nameless’ remarks to Kate, about how he had a crazy, disturbed mother were duly deserved.

The matter of Mother is very much open to interpretation. Mad woman? Manipulator? Monster?

Probably she was mortal, at first, with a mother of her own. Somehow she came to the Island and remained there. Maybe when she got there she encountered someone else, a previous guardian, who bestowed her with the role of Island protector. A bit like how there were people working in The Swan Station pressing the button for a shift until other Dharma people showed up to take over. This theme echoes on different levels throughout Lost. You take your turn, you do your duty, and then you get to relinquish the burden to someone else.

Indeed, if I may take a brief sidetrack, parallel with The Swan is more pertinent than you might first think. Consider Live Together, Die Alone, that showed us Desmond’s arrival on the Island. Desmond was shipwrecked on the beach and there found by Kelvin who took him back to The Swan. Kelvin informed Desmond that there was an infection and he was unable to leave the place. Compare and contrast with Mother stating that there was nothing else beyond the Island. Desmond, drunk and upset, would actually cry out that the Island was all there was, like a snowglobe, there being nothing else beyond the sea!

Furthermore, Kelvin explained that there was a button that needed to be pushed, to save the world no less, and though he didn’t know the source or the reason behind this force it was still a matter to be dealt with. Compare and contrast with Mother showing Jacob and Nameless the cave that needed to be protected, it housing a white light power of indeterminate source.

As an extra, Kelvin and Desmond’s relationship came to an end when Desmond, feeling betrayed, sought Kelvin out and so ensued a struggle that finished with a dull thud of skull against rock. Again, parallels, with Mother shoving Nameless’ head against a rock in the proto-donkey wheel cave, but fundamentally ending when the betrayed mete out fatal vengeance, as in Nameless killing Mother.

So Mother was on the Island, and then along came Claudia and the twins. Would Claudia have been killed had she given birth to just one child? I think so. Mother had a fundamentally negative view about man, but a child she could raise as her own was one she could mould to her own design – as her successor. That they were twins simply doubled her odds at finding a replacement. They were both, in effect, candidates. The chilling matter is that I believe Mother only wanted - needed - one of them. What she would have done with the child she didn't need is the chilling element. What eventually happened with the three of them I can't quite decide if it's what she wanted or expected.

I believe Jacob’s assessment that Mother preferred Nameless was correct. She referred to him as special and appeared to indulge his capacity for deception, such as with the Senet game he had found. Indeed, Mother was almost certainly lying when she said she had left the game for him to find. Jacob, on the other hand, was said to never lie – he possessed different qualities, amongst which was absolute devotion to Mother that Nameless turned his back on when the lure of his people, of going ‘home’ across the sea, beckoned.

At this point it’s worth asking the question of how grand was Mother’s plan. I believe the fact that she was shown weaving constantly was a very adamant suggestion that she, like Jacob, was in the business of forging bigger pictures by painstaking means. So it’s worth asking the question: Did she intend all that transpired to happen purely so that she could find a successor to protect the Island? Or was the fact that she was presented with twins what changed her initial plans of just finding a successor into something more?

It was very telling that she actually thanked Nameless for stabbing her.

The idea that Mother could conceive such a longstanding plan would beggar belief, but then we’ve seen Jacob touch the likes of Kate and Sawyer when they were children as part of his longterm plan of them being candidates on the Island – such ambition is not beyond the realms of reality in this show!

That Jacob and Nameless came as a package certainly aided this plan. Had Jacob been an only child then it’s hard to imagine him accepting the mantle of Island protector and also having the necessary rage to kill Mother. And that Jacob and Nameless, these two, have eventually formed the ‘black and white’ evil and protector role of the Island (I appreciate these are not as well-defined as a literal black and white interpretation, but it’s applicable enough for now) it’s tempting to figure that Mother herself once fulfilled both functions. Namely, that she was both black and white. Put bluntly: she was the Black Smoke as well as Island protector.

There’s evidence to suggest there was more power in Mother than was immediately apparent. Consider the well Nameless and ‘the others’ had dug; Mother knocked Nameless unconscious and then, off-screen, apparently carted his body up the ladder and then filled in the entire hole in a very short space of time.

Then she went off to wreak fire and death on ‘the others’.

It’s hard to imagine her managing such a thing without more formidable powers. Consider also that Nameless delivered the fatal dagger strike by stabbing Mother before she got the chance to speak to him; the same means by which Sayid was instructed to attack and kill Nameless.

Of course, Nameless instructed Alpert to find and kill Jacob with the same instruction. Stab him with the dagger before he gets the chance to speak. Maybe this really was a genuine rule that held for all three of them Mother, Jacob and Nameless – or maybe the fact that Nameless managed to kill his mother in this way simply informed his belief that it was the only way it could be done! The more questions you ask the more questions you find.

Yet the very notion that Mother was really capable of assuming a Black Smoke form just doesn’t sit right with me, purely because of how I interpret what happened with Jacob, Nameless and the tunnel of light. What I think is that Mother was both, black and white together, but whatever power for good or bad she had was not as powerful as the force for ‘good’ that Jacob would eventually possess, nor the extreme power of ‘bad’ that Nameless would exhibit in Black Smoke form. Here we enter the interpretation zone and I’ll just tell you about what I think.

I do take a very religion-based angle from what we saw in this episode. When Mother showed Jacob and Nameless the cave of light and proclaimed it to be a pure source of what we’ll call ‘goodness’ for the sake of simplicity, I believed her. If there’s some conceptual profound power in the world beyond science’s reach it was shining out of that cave and religions of many types have given that force a name: God.

What it is defies explanation. And, as Mother warned, questions only lead to further questions. Sometimes you have to have faith and those that can’t, that won’t, they just aren’t candidate material. So, if we consider Mother was somewhat ‘old testament’ in her approach to how this shining source be protected then you can parallel her with the kind of ‘God’ that was ruthless as well as all-loving, vengeful as well as peaceful. The kind of powerful entity that can apologetically bludgeon a woman to death for the greater good of the children she could raise to succeed her.

To this end, Jacob can be considered more ‘new testament’. Rather than maintain an apathetic distance between himself and man, condemning them as corrupt out of hand, he seeks to see the good in them, the light they all carry within them burning without greed or destruction.

The Island was described, by Jacob to Alpert, as a place that holds up all that is ‘evil’. Now I believe we can better understand that concept. Previously, when the cave of light existed, this is where the ‘goodness’ was sourced, saved, protected. However, when Nameless was cast into the cave I could not help but interpret it like Eve taking fruit from the forbidden tree. The perfect Garden Of Eden was besmirched, man was imbued with sin – but the potential for redemption. There was a definite ‘fall of man, fall from grace’ allegorical vibe happening.

That the episode took a non-subtle reminder visit to the Season 1 scenes when the skeletons in the cave were found and dubbed ‘Adam and Eve’ this point seems more enforced.

(Personally I wish those scenes hadn’t been included. I got it without the reminder, but on this Lost was perhaps catering for the audience that might not remember these crucial moments from so many years back and the creators wanted this moment underlined as one of those pivotal proofs that they had this thing well-planned long ago.)

That Nameless became the Black Smoke was almost like a formation of ‘sin’, this evil force now brought about and capable of casting judgement against man. The punishment for eating the forbidden fruit. The Island therefore does ‘contain’ Nameless, this death-dealing force of judgement. I think of the bottle metaphor. The Island being a cork in the bottle therefore suggesting that the Black Smoke is akin to a wasp trapped inside the bottle, angrily buzzing inside, longing to escape.

As stated, that’s pretty much my interpretation and I must stress that I don’t consider this right. I think the only thing that can be considered correct is that there is no true answer. Interpretation does depend on the individual and the only provision for it to be considered worthy is in its coherence.

Naturally, I can’t explain what would happen if the wasp escaped from the bottle. I can’t explain what the sunken Island in the Alternate Timeline means in the context of this battle between Jacob and Nameless. I can’t even explain why it is Jacob can freely come and go off the Island. But in broad strokes there’s a gist, a feel, a faith-based comprehension I can hold to. And I certainly have to believe that there is a profound power at the source of the Island that defies explanation, purely because of the explanation-defying powers that have been exhibited.

Mother on the Island could create her own rules. She says that Jacob and Nameless cannot hurt each other (I presume she meant not kill each other, as Jacob was perfectly capable of pounding Nameless’ face into burger a few times) and it is so – thus it becomes a matter of Nameless needing to find a loophole around the rule Mother created.

Incidentally, the image of Jacob as a boy with bloodied hands that Nameless saw. . .

. . . can now be explained as how his arms were bloody after punching Nameless' face on the night he abandoned Mother and went to the world of men in search of freedom – the beginning of the end, if you like. And the boy Jacob apparition reminded Nameless that there were rules, rules that Jacob had been able to construct for himself in his own whimsy. Just like how Nameless had the game of Senet and was able to make up the rules of this game as he saw fit, he prophetically predicted Jacob would one day do the same.

The Island is an extension of that same principle. Perhaps that was why Mother indulged Nameless playing the game, back when she considered him ‘special’, as it was this mentality that would serve him well on the Island. This kind of power is absolute proof of there being something defying explanation. It’s why Jacob could effortlessly grant Richard Alpert agelessness, and why these bizarre rules around who can kill candidates or Jacob abound.

When Keamy shot Alex Ben said, “He changed the rules.” It’s a remark we can now mull over in all manner of interpretations, but we have a firm basis from which to do so. The Island is a giant controllable game, of which the rules are arbitrarily applied for the basis of seeking out the true ‘goodness’ of people who may be able to bring back and control the light within them without extinguishing it. The light that once shone from the cave on the Island but was since dispelled and cast out, it is now housed in the hope for goodness in all mankind.

The man that first stumbled across ‘Adam and Eve’, that perhaps symbolically pocketed the black and white Senet pieces, was Jack. I say symbolically because if it’s true that Mother once, metaphorically, was comprised of both black and white together within her then perhaps Jack may also manage the same balance. I wonder, if he were to become the Island protector, what kind of ‘rules’ would he apply to the place? One mantra immediately springs to mind; the founding philosophy of Jack’s view of how humanity should survive: Live together, or die alone. Amen.

Analysis: 6.14 The Candidate

2010-05-07T16:48:00.008+01:00

Devastating.

Hurley’s guttural sobs and Jack staring out to a dark night sea choking back tears pretty much captured the emotional landscape this episode left us all looking at. Indeed, this may actually be the very last night we see on the Island; dawn, daylight and illumination threaten to break but for now this is a dark, dark time.

Nameless finally played his hand, luring the potential candidates to the point that he had promised: escape. I can’t decide if he has been incredibly smart or bafflingly over-complicated.

The upshot of his plan was to promise the candidates passage off the Island. By gathering them together, united in this one aim, he could get them in one place and there engineer their demise. This rather elaborate scheme seems to have been concocted in accordance with a ‘rule’ that Nameless cannot directly kill the candidate, or candidates.

On this I am not so clear. Let’s consider that Jack is the candidate just for example purposes (even though I have for quite some time believed he really is!).

Whilst Nameless claimed that he could kill Jack and everyone else if he wanted to I have to believe that was a lie. Nameless could not directly kill Jack. If Nameless had gone all Black Smoke crazy Jack, somehow, would not have been harmed. Does the same principle extend to the other candidates? Was the fact that Jacob ‘touched’ them somehow enough to generate a form of immunity to direct murder at the hands of Nameless? I think that’s the conclusion I am falling upon unless I hear different.

So Nameless had the problem that he could not directly kill any of the candidates and so wanted to get them altogether and into a situation where they could be killed by their own actions. Why didn’t he just leave the C4 explosives on Ajira 316, get the candidates onboard and let Frank trigger the explosion?

Wouldn’t that have worked? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The practicalities of these rules are rather sticky to unpick. For example, we’ve seen Nameless save the lives of both Sawyer and Jack. He grabbed Sawyer when he almost fell off the rope ladder on the way down to the cave in the cliff, and he shoved Jack aside when Widmore’s rockets were landing on the beach. Why? If the goal was to get the candidates dead, why save them?

Well, the argument could run that the candidates simply could not be killed. If Sawyer had fallen off the cliff, he would not have died. Had the rockets directly hit Jack, he would have survived. What Nameless was doing, in effect, was ensuring they remained ignorant of their immortality.

Only that doesn’t feel quite right. Locke was a candidate, and he died. Sayid was, too, when he died the first time! If Jack really is the one and only true candidate then perhaps this invulnerability only extends to him – like with the way he stared down lit dynamite in the Black Rock with Alpert.

Yet that still brings me back to the question of why did Nameless save Jack’s life, or Sawyer’s life? Was it really as convoluted a reason as to purely get all the candidates together to take a shot at killing them all in one go?

As we saw it’s not as if all the candidates have to die at once, together, in order for death to claim them. Sayid, Jin and Sun didn’t make it. Jack, Sawyer and Hurley did. 3 died. 3 didn’t. Kate remains in a grey area regarding her status on the Island, for the Island, and the last we saw of Frank was him being hit with a door on the sub. (I’ll go by the principle that if we didn’t see him die then he’s surely not dead. I can’t help but wonder if Frank will return to Ajira 316 on the quiet and get busy fixing the plane to stage a late ‘surprise’ rescue.)

Like I said earlier regarding Nameless, I can’t decide if he has been incredibly smart or bafflingly over-complicated. It seems to me that Nameless could have let Sawyer fall off the cliff and that would have killed him; he would have had one less candidate to worry about, one body closer to achieving his mission. He literally put all his eggs in one basket but only some of them broke.

Let’s take the notion to the limit of credulity. As events transpired Nameless switched packs with Jack and left him with a ticking bomb. What would have happened had Jack not needed his bag to get an item of clothing to use as a bandage for Kate’s wound? What would have happened had the bomb not been discovered?

Jack was convinced that doing nothing would have prevented the bomb from exploding. Like the way he could stare down lit dynamite – his faith in the Island, in himself, was such he felt certain of it. I suspect he was right, too. That the bomb was rigged to detonate faster once tampered with insinuates Nameless set it up that way, aware of this same truth Jack believed in. So you have to figure that if the bomb had remained in the bag unnoticed it would have simply ticked down to zero and never exploded!

That’s a large piece of fortuity Nameless depended on for his plan to work!

I realise I do seem rather hung up on the mechanics of how the candidates were to be killed, and the murderous machinations of Nameless, but I feel that the whole series has almost built to this point and, really, it doesn’t quite logically stack up as tidily as I’d want it to. It should be stated that Nameless’ perspective has been that people are corrupt and selfish so, within his own comprehension of people, he believed strongly that they could be manipulated to this moment of total wipeout. It is on that basis that I can reconcile why Nameless saved individuals to serve his larger scheme – and it was his failure to see good in people, as Jacob does, that foiled his plot.

The fact that Nameless knew his plan had failed was interesting, though. He waited with Claire and knew not all the candidates were dead purely, I suspect, because of what didn’t happen.

Either Nameless expected the Island world to collapse, or that he’d be whisked off ‘home’ in some fashion. Whatever it was it was something he would have known about from where he was standing – and it didn’t happen. Now what? Now the remaining candidates are hurt and angry but are also, crucially, completely aware. Nameless isn’t going to be able to trick them easily – so how does he expect to achieve his goal? I can’t answer that, but it’s one factor that makes the next episode so tantalising!

Of course, criticising Nameless’ failure is also to overlook his ‘success’. The deaths of Sayid, Jin and Sun weren’t a clean sweep for him, but they were massive bombshells to the watching audience. Sayid didn’t give us much chance to fear for his survival; he found his redemption the only way he was ever going to find it since his soul was lost. . .

. . . by giving his friends a fighting chance, taking the blast away from them and creating an exit hole. His last words to Jack, after telling him about Desmond, were: “It’s going to be you.”

I can only assume that Desmond’s serene awareness means he understands something about the Island, Jacob, or Jack’s fate and has shared some of that with Sayid. The obvious conclusion would be that Desmond knows Jack is the true candidate and told Sayid as much, and thus Sayid sacrificed himself for the greater good. Not only did Sayid’s actions save Jack, his words may have also been enough to provoke Jack into abandoning Jin and Sun – Jack himself recognising that leaving them to their fate in service of a higher purpose was the right, albeit gruelling decision.

No wonder he looked so devastated afterwards. As were we all. Even to the very last seconds I kept dim hope that Jin would somehow find the strength or the ingenuity to free Sun and only that final, heartbreaking image of their hands drifting apart confirmed the awful truth. They were gone. Ji Yeon was orphaned. Jin and Sun were dead.

Quickly after this scene we were taken to the Alternate Timeline and saw Jin walk by, dressed in a dark suit, carrying flowers, almost like a salute to his own funeral. Yet his presence reminds us that there is a timeline where Jin and Sun live, where their baby survives. It makes me wonder if the brutality of this episode on the emotions will eventually be tempered by some form of compromise, or unification, of the Alternate Timeline with the Island Timeline to make happier times.

But this has been a longstanding matter since Season 6 began and we’re really no closer to understanding how any form of consolidation can be sought. I do feel reasonably sure that some form of happier conclusion will occur. The characters we have known for so long just seem on the Island too decimated, too bleak, to be the finishing line-up.

Whilst no one actually died in the Alternate Timeline there did transpire a tragedy of sorts that underlined a heartbreaking relationship central to the show. Jack and Locke here were unable to find common ground on their usual science vs faith differences, only this time it was reversed.

Jack was convinced he could help Locke walk again, but in the Alternate Timeline Locke is filled with remorse over the accident with his father and has no faith in hope, no faith in science. Jack could not turn Locke around, could not make him believe, and his “I wish you believed me” plea only emphasised this disparity.

Locke’s suicide note, to Jack, echoed the exact same sentiment. I wish you believed me. If Alt-Locke had believed in Alt-Jack maybe he would have one day walked again. On the Island if Jack had believed in Locke’s faith in the Island then the terrible tragedies Nameless had wrought would surely not have come to pass. It wasn’t as blatant as the death of Jin and Sun but, quietly, I found this just as moving.

So now what? Well, there’s still plenty in play. Desmond the wild card is inevitably going to prove crucial, and we still don’t fully know what Widmore is doing (or, indeed, who he is doing it for: Himself? Nameless? Jacob?). Someone ought to tell Widmore’s guys that shooting at the Black Smoke, or Nameless in human form, is utterly redundant. But Widmore clearly doesn’t want the candidates dead (or, at least, knows they can’t be killed!?) and presumably had some form of plan by wiring up Ajira with C4.

Ironically, when I saw the explosives on the plane I immediately wondered if Alpert, Ben and Miles had been the ones to plant it – the last we saw of them they were going to The Barracks with the agenda of getting explosives to blow up the plane!

Maybe they even were responsible for planting the C4 on Ajira after all and the next episode will depict events from their perspective and show as much (though the presence of Widmore’s men suggested otherwise). Maybe. Or maybe not. But either way they still have a part to play. I think what makes seeing an end tricky is that we’ve only ever been informed about how Nameless wins – we have no real idea how ‘the candidate’ (which, again, I am still backing as Jack!) steps up to take Jacob’s role on the Island. Killing Nameless isn’t the answer – the Island needs a successor so the two can balance.

Again, I see Jack and Locke as those two counterpoints. Dually-locked together, forever in disagreement and yet vitally important. Prospectively that’s how it’s going to be on the Island of the future – whatever form that may take.

On The Brink

2010-05-01T23:34:00.004+01:00

September 22nd 2004. That’s when Oceanic 815 crashed and when Lost the TV show landed on our screens. (Actually I’m from the UK, so it hit here a little bit later – but we’re all caught up in this together now.) 6 years on and here we are, down to the very last few remaining episodes. If you’re feeling nervous about this, good. It means you care. After all this time, all these years, if you didn’t worry that the whole thing was going to end satisfactorily then your heart isn’t as deep into this as mine is.

So yeah, I’m worried. But worried only in the sense that I want the best and fear the worst. The good news is that Lost has always thrived on two constants for me: one is the continuous frustration at a show that flourishes on ambiguity, two is that the show hasn’t let me down yet. And Season 6, so far, has maintained that measure of frustration and entertainment Lost is so defined by.

Whilst I write an analysis, and there’s always going to be a part of my brain whirring away on my ‘objective’ ideas about what’s happening, I try in the most part to enjoy each episode purely as entertainment because I am, first and foremost, a Lost fan. I watch the show because I love the show. And so here, this close to the end, I thought I’d try and put my analysis brain to one side and share a little of my thoughts about Season 6 so far.

Season 6 had a terrific opening sequence, for a start. It’s since created ruffled brows and much pondering, but the swoop down through the window of Oceanic 815 (that didn’t crash) to plummet into the water to a submerged Island was just awesome. I just laughed and shook my head, enthralled and agape at this latest mindbender Lost had just thrown our way.

Of course since then we’ve had the revelation that the Island is, as Jacob has indicated, a kind of cork that sits atop pure evil and is all that stops hell from being unleashed. This raises the question of why all this supposed evil hasn’t spilled out into the Alternate Timeline world, but that’s an answer that ought to become more apparent once we garner full appreciation about the entire purpose of this Alternate Timeline. And it’s on this narrative hook where Lost has hung its season so far and we don’t yet know if it’s a genius endgame piece of the puzzle or a bad sidetrack.

Initial concerns that the Alternate Timeline was something entirely separate from the Island-world have been allayed though. Chiefly through Desmond’s (once again) fantastic episode Happily Ever After there was a clear connection to the Alternate Timeline and the Island Timeline. That episode went a long way to restoring confidence that we were in good hands, that our Lost creators have this all worked out, and it’s going to come together beautifully.

I am a little cynical about the Alternate Timeline business, mind. For one thing I am absolutely certain that this was not a part of the plan back in the early stages of the show. Indeed, I’d be surprised to learn they planned on having Sideways Flashbacks when they were putting Season 5 together. That’s no crime, of course. I’m not one of these people that staunchly believes the creators of the show are somehow cheating us if they didn’t have it all worked out from the start. If they did, great. If they didn’t, well, they’re not doing too bad a job at winging it as they go and making it all fit. There’s something to admire in both methods of creative process.

Not that it’s all fitting perfectly. There are some snags with Season 6. We expected answers, of course, and all but the most blinkered of us would assume that every answer would deliver a mindbomb to blow our brains apart. The Whispers was one such reveal – landing within a short scene and perfunctory delivery from Michael (his appearance was a surprise though, I thought he’d fallen out with the creators!) about how they were souls trapped on the Island.

In one short scene we got an answer that we’d all kind of figured was the case anyway, handed over with all the momentous build-up of a silent fart. Yet there should be more to come about this entire matter of life and death and what’s in between on the Island. There better be.

If ever there was one matter that Lost and I could have a big falling out about it’s handling the spiritual aspects to its universe. I’m not much of a spiritual guy and religion isn’t for me, but I appreciate how the metaphors and symbolism of such can add depth to fiction. And Lost has presented very early on the balancing act, the pivotal question, of science against faith.

The arc of the entire show seems to have begun deeply scientific (it was all Dharma hatches and pseudoscience that fuelled our theorising) and slowly morphed into a more faith-based study (life after death, good and evil and the judgement of such). I’m fine with coming along for the ride on that, so long as Lost manages to retain a general stance.

Some time back I speculated that Jacob and Nameless, if we were to ascribe religious connotations to them, could best be defined as a ‘source’ of religion – that these figures have always been around and it’s through stories and ideas about them that religions were formed. I liked this idea because it, for one thing, didn’t link them in to any one religion (which would, by default, cast out all other religions as false and would be a serious misstep for a show that has embraced many faiths).

I also liked the idea because Lost is an Island-based show. Islands are good as generalising, microcosmic platforms. Think Lord Of The Flies. Symbolic events on an Island can be allegorically applied to larger scale principles. Lost, in all its details, doesn’t work wholly cleanly in this manner – but in Jacob and Nameless it’s got the feel of such grand ideology. The Island as a stage where good versus evil in humanity gets worked out.

It’s looking more likely, however, that Jacob and Nameless are to be humanised before the end. Nameless has said he was once a man. Possibly some bizarre ‘incident’ with electromagnetism on the Island occurred to Jacob and Nameless to create their current situation – that would be a ‘scientific’ launch point into the faith-based world of the Island our heroes are now caught up in! Pick the theological bones out of that one!

Away from such heady ideas, though, Lost is principally about our main characters – the ones that survive now that landed on the beach way back on September 22nd 2004. Lost is their story, even though it’s sometimes more like a tapestry they’ve been interwoven into beyond their control. Free will is a key driver – as much as there is a destiny there is a choice. Again, this is a concept Lost has held hands with very early on and it may be the axis upon which the Island Timeline, the Alternate Timeline or whatever timeline emerges as a concluding world is founded upon.

Season 6 certainly did have, and still does have, a lot of expectation riding on it but I am pleased to say I feel it’s certainly found its footing and delivered some top notch episodes that lived up to the pressure. Happily Ever After, the Desmond-centric episode already mentioned, was one such highlight. But praise also the Richard Alpert outing Ab Aeterno which unfurled the long-awaited backstory of the ageless one with a suitably epic feel. There are few episodes that have been as fine as this and it shouldn’t be taken for granted.

(Interesting, also, that both Happily Ever After and Ab Aeterno were both episodes that delivered a relatively straight narrative without interruptions of flashbacks, flashforwards or flashsideways. As good as the structure of Lost is with its trips back and forth along timelines it’s almost always compelling when it just tells a story in a regular fashion.)

There’s been a lot of other good stuff, too. Terry O’Quinn as Locke/Nameless is in delicious form, clearly relishing every second of every scene he gets to take centre stage. The Sundown episode, where Sayid turned on Dogen and the Black Smoke ran rampant, closed out with an eerie ‘Catch A Falling Star’ song and some of our heroes looking decidedly dark – I loved that! We’ve also seen Jin and Sun finally reunited, and the Alt-Timeline has allowed us some time with old favourites we thought we’d never see again like Charlie and Boone and Arzt, though Keamy was my personal favourite – Christopher Walken charm fused in Jean Claude Van Damme’s body!

Season 6 hasn’t all been rosy, though. Ben hasn’t been particularly well-utilised – indeed he’s been rather neutered. This once formidable conniver reduced to tagalong bit-parter. Ilana’s function met a rather abrupt and inconclusive (so far) finish and Frank is nothing more than a pilot waiting for a plane to fly off the Island (which is surely the only reason he’s been kept around and alive for this long).

The earlier episodes, the scenes with The Temple Others, were truly awful. What Kate Does is easily one of the worst episodes Lost has ever done. I was embarrassed by it, to be honest. Every week I get Mrs. Comet to watch Lost (almost always after I've watched it way before her!) and she's always quick to criticise and dismiss how rubbish it can all sometimes appear. Whilst for the most part I can deflect her critiques, with that particular episodes I simply had to nod and agree. It was a stinker. All that business with Sayid being tortured as a test and then Jack being made to give him a pill because of this ‘sickness’. Utter clag. A keen example of when being vague and mysterious doesn’t translate as compelling drama, just suspiciously inept storytelling with no firm foundation. We still don’t really have an explanation about this ‘sickness’ as Dogen understood it and now Dogen is dead so we probably never will. That’s just plain annoying. In any number of conversations and scenes Dogen could have relayed his point of view. Not for the first time has Lost favoured vagary over clarity but, when the show is done in just a few episodes time, it’s stuff like this which is probably going to bug the hell out of us all.

Claire was said to have this ‘sickness’ for example, yet she veers from being looney tunes to one of the gang as the mood takes her. Her character in particular this season has suffered from a serious lack of consistency. Maybe there’s a Claire-centric episode coming soon to tidy up some of these loose ends, though that doesn’t feel likely so close to the end; unless the surprise is that she is more important that we’ve realised?

Nagging points aside though, true judgement over the validity of prolonging certain mysteries, of leaving so much answered, can only be applied once the thing is finished. Going back to hoping for the best, Lost hasn’t let me down yet. In about a month’s time I hope I can say the same, just without the ‘yet’!

Analysis: 6.13 The Last Recruit

2010-04-26T21:36:00.005+01:00

Who is the last recruit? From the perspective of people like Claire, and probably Nameless himself, Jack has become the last recruit. Of the 6 candidates (7, including Jin), Nameless has managed to speak to every single one of them with seemingly little lasting success. But Jack was the last of the candidates Nameless spoke to directly. Like Claire stated, once Nameless has spoken to you you’re recruited.

Only this matter doesn’t actually feel quite so clear cut for various reasons I’ll identify in due course. But let’s just deal with the thrilling encounter between Jack and Nameless in this episode. I was giddily excited when the pair of them broke off for some one-on-one time. Interesting, also, that Jack still retained the hubris to defer to Hurley’s permission before he accepted Nameless’ invitation. That was the first indicator Jack’s recruitment was really no such thing. Remember Claire’s remark, that the minute Jack accepted to talk with Nameless he was already taken? It wasn’t a direct acceptance Jack made. He obtained permission. That’s crucial, I think.

Jack asked some good questions and, I think, Nameless was honest with his answers (though the matter of Christian Shephard is one that needs more analysis – I’ll get to that). Nameless’ remarks about Locke being a sucker who believed he had a destiny on the Island which was what made him so perfect to be used was, I believe, part of his attempt to persuade Jack to join him.

Just like Nameless dangled the proposition of what people wanted (Sayid for Nadia, Sawyer for freedom), I believe he thought this line of thinking would appeal to Jack’s ‘man of science’ sensibility. Nameless, evidently, possesses all of the thoughts and awareness that Locke had prior to his death – and that Locke was only ever in conflict with Jack. Indeed, Locke went to see Jack to appeal for a return to the Island which Jack flat out refused (The Life And Death Of Jeremy Bentham).

As far as Nameless is aware, Jack is still the guy that was the polar opposite of Locke’s faith, and as such he appeals to that sense of folly by ridiculing Locke’s ideological viewpoint. Only Jack’s shifted since then. He now sees things the way Locke used to see things so, if anything, Nameless’ criticism of Locke was going to further strengthen Jack’s resolve. As we saw, this proved to be so. On the boat – Desmond’s (formerly Libby’s, potentially Widmore’s all along) yacht, having miraculously lasted all these years moored safely in an Island inlet – Jack looked out to sea and thought some more. Eventually he reached the decision that if Nameless wanted them all to leave that was because he was afraid of what would happen if they stayed.

Jack’s return to the beach fundamentally provoked the situation where he, as the ‘last recruit’, looks also like being Nameless’ only recruit! Sayid, we can be sure, didn’t kill Desmond in the well. This means he’s betrayed Nameless. He’s lied to him, and learned he can get away with the deception. His once dreadfully cold loyalty has quickly ebbed away. Sawyer was never loyal at all – merely playing along. Kate never took Nameless’ hand, Sun ran away and Hurley hasn’t engaged him beyond peacemaker.

Fact is, for all Nameless’ recruiting his success rate is actually looking rather woeful. Unless this was part of the plan. . .

There has been an ongoing debate around some quarters of Lost fandom arguing the case that Nameless isn’t really the ‘bad guy’, and Jacob isn’t particularly the ‘good guy’. That the big switcheroo about to be whipped up to surprise us all is that Nameless, MIB, is really someone manipulated and used by Jacob and held on the Island against his eternal will and all of his actions are desperate measures for a greater good.

I don’t really believe that, personally. I agree Jacob hasn’t done a great job explaining his ambiguous, passive manipulation style all too well. Ilana’s devotion rewarded with a face full of dynamite, for example, and, really, what was the deal with letting Nadia get knocked down and killed? And Nameless dragging Jack away from Widmore’s explosions to safety did, for the first time, make me wonder if this surprise shift was beginning.

Potentially it was because that scene was juxtaposed against Widmore’s sudden turn against Sawyer and the gang. Just when it looked like Widmore, whilst unscrupulous, at least retained a modicum of decency he then turned the guns on our heroes. (For what it’s worth, that he didn’t just order their execution suggests he ‘merely’ intends to use them – either as a lure for Nameless or, more likely, as a means of getting Desmond back.) And so the end of the episode, with Nameless almost comfortingly telling Jack that he was now with him, did give me pause to wonder.

Yet now I think the episode ending was a little bit fluffed. That Nameless pulling Jack into his world, stating he was with him, was meant to be a dreaded ‘oh my God’ cliffhanger. That Jack was now in the darkest place possible – our golden Island believer caught firmly in the clutches of the Island’s most hated resident. The hero entangled in the web of the villain. That’s the effect I think I, as a viewer, was supposed to be hit with. But let’s play devil’s advocate. Let’s try and be positive about Nameless whilst we consider Nameless’ reveal that he was, indeed, Christian Shephard that had been sighted on numerous occasions.

With this confirmation, I think it’s reasonably fair to suggest that where a body has been on the Island and then the dead counterpart has shown up we can be certain it was Nameless in disguise. So that means Yemi, for sure. Or, where Nameless, as Black Smoke, has managed to ‘scan’ individuals he can then generate phantom visions of people they know – like for Mr. Eko and the gangsters he killed, or Isabella for Richard Alpert.

Yet Isabella is a good case in point because we know, from what Hurley saw, that her soul exists on the Island, too. And Young Ben also saw his dead mother on the Island, and she appeared on the inside of the sonar fence suggesting that it wasn’t Black Smoke/Nameless. (There’s an outside bet that Jacob possesses similar shapeshifting qualities and other appearances of dead people are down to him – I don’t think that’s the case.)

So what we have are instances of dead people appearing and they are either Nameless in disguise, or genuine souls of the departed. So far so not particularly new. Potentially we have enough information to ascertain how Ilana could be sure that Nameless, in Locke’s body, could not change again: the difference between him as Locke compared to Christian and Yemi is that Locke’s body was in their possession. Yemi and Christian’s corpses were never seen after they had been used by Nameless. I can’t explain what’s stopping Nameless from just doing to Locke’s body whatever it was he did to Christian and Yemi’s bodies but I’m figuring that’s part and parcel of his now permanent status. (Maybe the body got ‘used up’ somehow, but because Locke was a candidate it provided a more substantial frame of reference.)

And so this brings us to Christian Shephard. For those that saw the mobisode So It Begins there’s even further intrigue to be mined. In brief, it’s a short sequence set minutes before Jack wakes up in the Pilot episode.

We see Vincent come across strewn luggage and, eventually, Christian Shephard in the jungle. Christian Shephard there instructs Vincent to go and wake Jack up, that he has work to do. Now this was really Nameless. Right from the moment of the crash he had assumed the form of Christian Shephard and was issuing commands to get the ball rolling on his plans to find this loophole to kill Jacob and leave the Island. Evidently he knew who Jack was (the cave bore his name on the ceiling) and so understood his potential significance. The question is: Was Nameless here acting on intention of doing ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Only his speech here, of getting Jack up to get work done, and his explanation to Jack about how he lead him through the jungle so that he may find water, all of those don’t seem particularly bad. Could it be that Nameless has been more of a fostering guide for our candidates and really does intend to lead them out of the manipulative design Jacob created for them?

Hmm. It’s a compelling notion, although it should be noted that when Jack was chasing the vision of his dead father through the jungle it did nearly send him flying off the edge of a cliff (where he was, ironically, actually rescued by Locke!).

More troubling are the appearances of Christian Shephard, apparently as Nameless, that baffle. Christian turning up onboard The Freighter to tell Michael he could go seems incongruent with what we know. But more perplexing is his appearance to Jack in Something Nice Back Home, back in the regular world.

Now if all Nameless wants to do is get off the Island, and Christian Shephard’s appearances have all been Nameless in disguise, then Nameless appearing off-Island makes absolutely no sense at all. I don’t really have a good answer for that. I hope Lost does.

Even despite some positive spin on Nameless it’s still easier for me to see the ‘bad’ in him. Claire, for example, acknowledged that he was the person that pretended to be her father. She was very much in need of a father-figure, and with Nameless in the guise of family, when everyone else abandoned her, so formed loyalty. It’s still pretty hard to imagine what Nameless could have told Claire that would have caused her to leave Aaron in the jungle, mind.

The sweeping generalisation that once Nameless has spoken the allegiance is already confirmed doesn’t quite work for me. Especially when you consider that Claire also, rather quickly, joined up with Kate’s promise to get back to Aaron, leaped aboard the yacht and defied Nameless in a hearbeat. About a day or two ago she was an axe-wielding murderer and total Nameless convert apparently riddled with sickness!

Yet Claire remains another pertinent example of our leading characters willingly choosing to go against Nameless. (Unless this is a plot and she’s a double-crosser; again, I don’t think that’s the case.) Nameless is the same man that criticised all who come to the Island as being corrupt, of bringing destruction. Really it is Nameless that seeks to corrupt, and he who has been wreaking destruction. His treatment of Sayid is one such example – brought back from the dead as an unfeeling, merciless killer. What Nameless couldn’t conceive is that love – his love for Nadia and the thought of what he would look like to her now – would be strong enough to supersede his instruction to kill Desmond. It’ll be interesting to see where Desmond has got to!

Fact is, if Nameless did turn out to be a ‘good guy’ then it would mean all the instincts of our main cast, and the plot machinations orchestrated thus far, and the drama generated from this threat that Nameless is said to possess would all be undermined. Consider Alt-Sun’s terror, when she saw Locke being transported into the hospital.

Evidently this was another moment (a near-death moment) provoking a crossover of awareness between the Alt-Timeline and the Island Timeline. The sheer level of stricken reaction from Sun was so strong, so pertinent, to have that turned around and presented as her being mistaken is either the biggest and best misdirection Lost has ever played, or it’s a twist that will completely undercut the dramatic tension and stakes currently in play.

Alt-Sun, and Island Sun to an extent, did find happiness though. Mother and unborn baby survived the gunshot in the Alternate Timeline whilst on the Island there was the Jin and Sun reunion we’ve waited a long time to see (even though it did come with some moments of concern that they were going to embrace right in the sonar fence killzone and upset everyone that ever had a heart).

I don’t even want to talk about how bad Frank’s line of dialogue about Sun getting her voice back was. Sometimes, like Sun, it’s better when things aren’t said. What didn’t need saying was that it was once more a burst of love that reignited Sun’s unconscious awareness of her Alt-Timeline counterpart (or, perhaps, dispelled it to return her English-speaking knowledge). Moments of true love, or near-death. Heightened emotions creating heightened awareness. I wonder what kind of awareness Locke will have when he wakes up?

Could Locke re-awaken with awareness of his Island life? Could he come back as ‘old Locke’, with his belief and faith in the Island? And could he connect with Jack there to awaken his awareness and provide him with that last piece of information he needs to know what to do next, on the Island? It would certainly allow the Alternate-Timeline to culminate into something meaningful.

Jack’s conversation with Sawyer, about how he didn’t want to leave the Island because he had experienced what life was like when he left unfinished business there, felt very primed for Jack to become the genuine replacement for Jacob. Sawyer, of course, has never left the Island since he got there so doesn’t know such a feeling. But it’s actually interesting, indeed may be absolutely integral, that of all the candidates only Jack returned there out of a sense of genuine need.

Kate only came back to get Claire. Sayid only came back because Ilana captured him and put him on Ajira 316. Sun came back for Jin. Hurley? Well, Jacob told him to go and he kind of went along with it, but it wasn’t particularly convincing. There’s really only Jack that has felt a strong sense of being out of place off the Island, which makes it seem all the more inevitable he’ll find his place on it. And, furthermore, the way Kate looked back as he jumped overboard, I wouldn’t be surprised if she made sure Claire went back home safe and then remained with Jack.

If The Whispers can turn out to be as obvious as just the voices of dead souls then I vote that the skeleton cave couple turns out to be Jack and Kate after all! Season 6 is the season of surprises: the surprise being Lost wasn’t as complicated as we all thought it was! Unless, of course, there’s a seriously big switcheroo surprise heading our way. . .

6.13 - Pre-Post Update

2010-04-23T21:39:00.005+01:00

Hello everyone,

Given that there is a break of a week for next week's episode I thought it might be prudent that I take a little more time and reflection on the analysis for 6.13 -and probably do another more personal post about my current thoughts and feelings as a fan about how this season has turned out. Those will crop up this week and next. I've also got ideas about a stock take about the unanswered questions a lot of you had input in before Season 6 began that it might be fun to look back at and tick off to see how we're doing.

However, this means a little bit more work and a slight delay. Whilst I have got all my notes and organised my thoughts and opinions about the latest episode, I thought it might be nice to open up this blog page for comments from you guys, about The Last Recruit which we have just seen, which I may incorporate into my next analysis. God knows you guys have said some smart stuff along the way, and I don't pretend to know it all, and whilst we have this chance I'd like to hear what you say before me! Just for once! I rather like the idea, whilst we have this brief hiatus, of being able to connect a bit more with what you think and what I think.

Glad to have you around for the home stretch! How exciting is it right now to be a Lost fan!? Pity the fools that quit before now - they know not what they miss!

Namaste, friends!

Analysis: 6.12 Everybody Loves Hugo

2010-04-17T13:38:00.007+01:00

Shocks! Answers! Bigger mysteries! Lost is hitting the home straight and in this episode managed to juggle a good few plot threads, keep them all moving, all intriguing, all inexorably heading to a climactic resolution. But before all that we had the heady business of people dying, dead people returning and people we thought we’d never see again suddenly rolling back into the frame. Just when you thought Arzt and his slapdash manner with dynamite had made you shockproof, they pull the same trick and stun you again.

Whilst Ilana’s sudden exit certainly packed a wow factor, it was swiftly followed up for me with a sense of disappointment. Like, wait a second. . . Is that it? That’s Ilana done with? Whilst Ben ruminated on how abruptly those that the Island was done with (and, by extension, those Jacob had utilised) were dispatched I wasn’t satisfied we’d seen the last of Ilana. I mean, it’s irritating that we don’t know why she was all bandaged in hospital when Jacob came to see her, but it’s slightly more damning that Jacob would have used her purely to complete half a mission: reveal Locke’s dead body, deliver the candidates news of their importance and otherwise blindly trust that Alpert knew what to do next.

For the record, I’d have gone with Hurley, too. But it was interesting that it was Hurley now stepping up to fulfil his own role of importance, taking heed from the words of Dead Michael and acknowledging the fact that he figuratively carries more weight amongst the group than he realises. What was intriguing for me was the turning point, after Ilana was gone, when Hurley looked amongst her possessions and seemingly found something that made his mind up.

We didn’t get to see what was in the small bag Hurley looked inside but the likeliest thing it could be in my mind are the ashes of Jacob that Ilana scooped up. Yet why would Hurley see what amounted to a bag of ashes and be so moved? If he even realised they were Jacob’s ashes, why would that trigger this newfound resolve? Well, perhaps, it would have reminded Hurley that Ilana believed deeply, as Hurley himself does, and to turn his back on the hope Jacob held for his candidates would mean Ilana died for nothing. This does, at least, mean Ilana’s purpose wasn’t entirely blown away – her death had meaning. I am hanging on to hope that she’ll reappear to impart further wisdom and influence from the other side.

It’s hard to imagine Hurley calculated the plan of blowing up the Black Rock and forcing a choice of going to meet Locke or going to find more explosives, but it’s (as ever!) either fate or coincidence that has seen to it that the candidates Jack, Hurley and Sun (with tag-along Frank) have all delivered themselves to Nameless whilst Alpert, Ben and Miles have gone off to The Barracks to find more means of blowing things up.

The thrilling moment where Jack and ‘Locke’ faced each other after so long apart in the jungle was terrific, and underlined for me that here we were looking at the central protagonist and antagonist of the show. I know Desmond during this episode was rocking a distinctly Jacob-like vibe, but whatever he’s about at the moment (of which more later) one thing I don’t believe is that he is the new Jacob replacement.

I’m still pegging Jack as the Jacob replacement. How he completely relented control, handed himself over to the guidance of Hurley, was just another step towards absolute faith – faith in the goodness of others. The shit-eating grin of Nameless, however, certainly looked like a daunting proposition. I’m really looking forward to seeing that confrontation play out.

But back to Dead Michael. . .

. . . who quietly, calmly delivered some massive revelations that may have felt underwhelming or anti-climactic either because of how they were relayed, or by how rather unsurprising they were. First, Michael himself claimed that he was now fundamentally a trapped soul on the Island on account of the things he did.

Ummm. . . yeah. That does. . . you know. . . sound a bit like. . . ah. . . purgatory.

To be fair, the idea of the Island being purgatory is one that I properly aired as a possibility back in Season 5 (the analysis for the Dead Is Dead episode if you wanna check!). Note the difference between stating the Island is purgatory and the now-debunked theory that our Losties are in purgatory. There’s a difference.

For Jack and the rest of Oceanic 815 to be in purgatory they’d have had to be dead, killed in the crash. We know they weren’t. Instead, what has been a potential truth for a good while, is that the Island is purgatory. Only, like the way Jacob described all the evil that the Island keeps bottled up as being the thing that some people refer to as “hell”, the Island may just be the thing that some people refer to as “purgatory”. Again, the difference is subtle, but it’s there.

It fits again, though. Purgatory fundamentally being the waiting room between heaven and hell where the dead go to exercise their penance; Michael being trapped there for the murders of Ana Lucia and Libby fits that definition. And the further revelation that ‘the whispers’ we have heard belong to souls trapped between heaven and hell (or what people refer to as heaven and hell), dead souls stuck on the Island observing what happens, also slots into that idea.

And, yeah, for the record, ‘the whispers’ turning out to be voices of the dead both landed like the biggest non-surprise ever and an almost resentful feel from me personally that it doesn’t quite explain the matter properly.

Harper’s appearance in Season 4, The Other Woman, is a good example of where ‘the whispers’ have featured and, given what we now know, either give us an entirely different take on that scene or contradict what seemed to happen. Because, basically, that scene now plays out like Harley was dead and visited Juliet as one of these ‘trapped souls’. ‘The whispers’ sounded, Harper appeared and spoke to Juliet, then ‘the whispers’ sounded again and she was gone. If Harper was a ‘trapped soul’ then that works. If she wasn’t. . . that’s less clear.

There have been instances, such as Sayid alone in the jungle, or when Cindy was snatched by The Others, or even recently, when Jack and co first entered The Temple, where ‘the whispers’ have been heard that didn’t provoke any kind of dead apparition encounter.

On this, I suppose, we are to simply assume that ‘the whispers’, the whisperers, they are always watching and it’s only during moments of crucial action or high drama where they become agitated or forceful enough to almost try to exert influence. Perhaps only when they have a strong connection to the living are they able to ‘break through’ and communicate. Of course, if this were true, then it would mean Juliet had actually stood and talked with a dead person – which suddenly makes Hurley’s ‘unique’ ability to do this very same thing somewhat less unique.

I can only hope there’s a little more clarification on life, death and what’s in between on its way in due course.

Hurley: “Dead people are more reliable than alive people.”

Michael warned Hurley from going to Hydra Island on the mission to blow up the plane, ostensibly because a lot of people were going to die because people were listening to him. If Hurley hadn’t met up with Michael again later it might have given us cause to wonder whether Hurley suddenly stepping up, blowing up the Black Rock and lying about Jacob saying they had to go and face Nameless, was a big mistake. But that Michael later pointed out exactly where Nameless was suggests this was precisely what was meant to happen. And, as Hurley said, dead people are more reliable than alive people precisely because they have little reason to lie. Indeed, if the Island is a form of purgatory for the likes of Michael, then the very act of helping may be what allows him to serve his penance!

(Flipside idea would be that Nameless succeeding in his plans to leave the Island and wipe out the existence of the Island Timeline may mean that Michael wouldn’t be dead! As such, Michael leading Hurley and the rest to Nameless was a self-serving act, but I don’t particularly believe that notion.)

The dead from the Island Timeline, as this episode showed, don’t seem to be particularly affronted by it in the Alternate Timeline. . .

Ah yes, Libby. As one character (Ilana) meets a premature, inconclusive end another one (Libby) pops up to surprisingly offer up more depth to her premature, inconclusive end. But then still doesn’t really conclude it. Of course. There was one telling difference between the Libby from the Island Timeline and Alt-Libby – namely that Alt-Libby wasn’t on Oceanic 815 (OK, she probably wasn’t, I can’t say she definitely 100% wasn’t!), and she didn’t seem quite as away with the fairies as she was when Hurley was in Santa Rosa.

But there again, in the Alternate Timeline, Hurley evidently didn’t kill any people on a pier and enter a catatonic state with a compulsive eating disorder that sent him for a spell at Santa Rosa either. (Again, milder versions of the real thing that has been prevalent in the Alternate Timeline for all the characters.)

Libby had seen a commercial featuring Hurley and this had awoken her awareness of the Island Timeline, however dimly that was. Are we to then reach some vague ideas that the Libby we saw provide Desmond with a yacht was somehow acting with awareness of events in ‘another life’?

Nah. Surely not. Like I said, whatever inconclusive ends Libby’s story left for some after her death in Season 2 have not been resolved by her appearance here. What did seem nice, however, was that despite her being dead in the Alternate Timeline she still had the feeling that the Island Timeline was the proper and true place where she belonged.

One kiss blasted over some awareness of the ‘other world’ for Hurley, like Charlie, Daniel and Desmond before him. And, in a very Jacob-like way, Desmond himself had been the gentle guiding hand coaxing Hurley towards this revelation. Unlike Libby, I don’t think there’s any question that Desmond does possess awareness of both timelines. The pertinent matter is just how much Desmond knows – in both timelines!

But before tackling what Desmond is, let me express what I don’t think he is: I don’t think he’s Jacob reborn, or the next potential candidate. Don’t get me wrong, he really suits the role. He’s spent years on the Island in the service of nothing more than faith (pushing a button) and with his benign manipulation of Hurley, just one person he’s working his way through in the Alternate Timeline manifest, he’s assuming the role of passive guidance effortlessly.

In McCluck’s he was, symbolically, assigned ticket number 42 – a candidate number in the Alt-Timeline. I don’t want to read too much into trying to compare and contrast the idea of the Alt-Candidates, but I think the number 42 connection distinguishes Desmond in the Alt-Timeline as intrinsically important on behalf of the Island Timeline.

As stated, I don’t think Desmond’s function is there as replacement for Jacob, or the reincarnated version of him somehow. Maybe Jacob’s own powers, the history of his life and how he became who he is, stem from ‘an incident’ with electromagnetism, only on a grander scale, and so Desmond’s Jacob-like qualities are purely a manifestation of a similar type of process. Maybe.

Consider when Nameless took Island Desmond out to the well.

He talked of how people had dug down to a deep point on the Island, trying to tap into the source of this strange power they were aware was down there. Now I suspect we are going to be treated to the backstory of Nameless and Jacob, and I can’t help but wonder if they were perhaps part and parcel of these long ago people, digging down deep. Literally like ‘the incident’, history repeating and creating anew. One thing was certain: Nameless seemed intrigued by Desmond’s experiences with electromagnetism, and he was unnerved by his lack of fear, and his mask of innocence and ignorance didn’t stop Nameless from perceiving him as a direct threat.

If the rules state that Nameless cannot directly kill Jacob, then I believe it ought to have been impossible for Nameless to shove Desmond down the well if he really were the rebirth version of him. Again, another reason why I don’t think Desmond is ‘it’.

But Desmond has certainly marked himself out as special. Unlike Alpert, but like Sawyer, he too could also see the strange boy, who had aged and had slightly darker hair this time around.

The grin on the boy suggested malevolent superiority, a mocking sneer at Nameless directly. Perhaps the boy could see the concern in Nameless about this man, Desmond, who showed no fear. But for me it was the smile of someone who knows better, who is confident that all Nameless’ plans and schemes won’t work out the way he wants. Who is the boy? I’m stuck between it being Jacob or Nameless himself.

Since the boy is ageing, and how quickly Nameless wants to ignore him, I rather like the idea that it is Nameless himself, as a boy. (Previously the boy had distanced himself from being Jacob with his remark “you know the rules, you can’t kill him”.) I suspect Nameless, like most characters we meet, has a past he’d rather not face up to - blood on his hands - but as the boy ages he becomes more and more the man he has to confront. Nameless has never sought out redemption. If there is a disparity between genuine ‘good’ and ‘evil’ on Lost, I’d say the lack of acknowledgment of bad things is as close to it as human people can be judged.

I’m sure there was water in the bottom of the well. Whilst anyone really ought to have been killed by such a plunge down there, I suspect Desmond will have survived. We’ll see him again.

But we saw him a lot sooner than we perhaps anticipated in the episode's final, brutal, hit-and-run.

So what? Is this a moment where Alt-Desmond was somehow aware of how ‘Locke’ threw him down a well on the Island and this was his payback? I’m not so sure. Desmond did prove awareness of the Island Timeline by how quickly, unblinkingly, he remarked to Ben that he had a son named Charlie. He didn’t – his Island counterpart does. But in Desmond’s mind they are one and the same now. Yet I am not so sure the link is there so that Alt-Desmond remains conscious of whatever happens to Desmond on the Island – that just seems too much.

So why knock Locke down? Maybe trying to trigger a connection with his Island Timeline, I’d say. Awaken his consciousness. Whereas Desmond and Hurley and Daniel used love, Desmond also heard Charlie’s story of swallowing heroin and nearly choking to death which induced his moment of revelation.

A near-death experience served as the catalyst for Charlie, potentially Desmond was trying to trigger that same awakening in Locke by a similar process. That’s my favourite idea (I mean, if he really wanted to kill Locke surely he would have reversed, right!?). But maybe killing Locke was his intention, the idea being that the events in the Alt-Tineline can have an effect in the Island Timeline (again, we’ve seen that reverse bleed through with Sun, her non-English speaking Alt-consciousness awoken on the Island after she bumped her head). Damage Alt-Locke to hinder Nameless in Locke's form; that would be the logic.

Here’s what I think seems certain, though. A reunion is on the cards. And I think it’s going to take place at Jack’s hospital. Locke will, evidently, be rushed there. (And certainly he’ll be under Jack’s care when he arrives – a meeting that might parallel their meeting on the Island.) Sun, don’t forget, was shot last time we saw her and is hospital-bound (potentially her physician will be Juliet!?). Charlie might even still be at the hospital. . . Sayid could be found there just visiting his injured brother. . . Kate and Sawyer can invariably find their way there through any number of means. . .

They’ll gather together on the Island. They’ll gather together in the Alt-Timeline. I’m sure of that. What’s thrilling, what I don’t know, is exactly what’s going to happen when they do.

Analysis: 6.11 Happily Ever After

2010-04-09T16:33:00.008+01:00

‘Please don’t give up, Des. Because all we really need to survive is one person who truly loves us.’ – Letter from Penny Widmore to Desmond Hume

For the first time in Season 6 we spent a sustained period in the Alternate Timeline courtesy of that temporal wildcard, Desmond. Consequently we learned much of what the very nature of this Alt-Timeline is and, surely, received verification that the Island Timeline is the dominant one, the ‘true’ reality, and the foundations of the show’s resolution seems to have its way paved in front of us.

The now-standard mirror-reflection moment in this episode showed Desmond caught walking towards a door. He was wearing sunglasses, but in the reflection he removed them. Pretty rudimentary symbolism here; the blinkered, lonely soul of Alt-Desmond suddenly seeing clearly, a new awareness presented to him. And it took Charlie, a near-death experience, and a mind-altering blasting taste of love to get him there.

Probably the one big ‘whoa’ moment of the episode came courtesy of Charlie planting his hand against the glass in the submerged car and triggering that iconic image ‘memory’ for Desmond:

Here was a moment of true awakening. Jack and Sun, arguably, have had moments where they became dimly aware of their ‘other’ reality, but this was the clinch point. The best way I can think of it is almost as though this whole Alternate Timeline is a vast dream, collectively shared by everyone. Desmond, in this instant, had his dreamworld punctured very briefly by flashes of the reality he really ought to be in.

The idea that the Island Timeline is the Prime Timeline isn’t exactly a clear-cut one, mind. Consider Minkowski.

I liked how he offered Desmond free run of his contacts in the city, and how Desmond turned them down. Minkowski’s remark about how this was why Desmond was the main man married events in the Island Timeline. Both Desmond and Minkowski had their consciousness hurled back and forth through time – it was only Desmond that managed to find his Constant to save himself. Desmond was the main man and Minkowski a poor proxy.

If Desmond were to have convinced Minkowski that this world wasn’t the world he was supposed to be in, that the universe to have taken priority was one where he would wind up on a Freighter in the middle of the ocean, strapped to a bed whilst his mind short-circuited, do you think Minkowski would have been thrilled by that? Seems unlikely. So whilst I have stated that the Island Timeline seems to be the prime timeline (and I do believe it is), it doesn’t necessarily follow that it will be the promised land for everyone.

Charlie, for one.

With his talk of this blonde woman that he felt such overpowering love for, we can be sure he was talking about Claire (personally I believe this interpretation of Charlie’s feelings for Claire doesn’t quite match with the relationship we saw them have on the Island). Now what if he knew that Claire was in town, in L.A.? That he could find her, meet with her, and maybe make that romance real? You tell him he can trade his Alt-Timeline existence (with, admittedly, a suicidal disposition) for one where, on the Island, he gets this love but makes the ultimate sacrifice for it, would he make that trade? Maybe. It would seem he'd rather die than exist in the Alternate Timeline, so what difference does dying in the Island Timeline make?

But by the end of the episode Desmond, with help from Minkowski who can amazingly get his hands on the Oceanic 815 manifest (!), plans on gathering everyone together to, I believe, awaken their consciousness’ to the existence of both timelines.

Again, not sure how thrilled this guy would be about what his ‘other life’ had in store. . .

Maybe, like Charlie, he'd rather be dead, to be released from his miserable Alternate Timeline existence. The fundamental question being posed is where would our characters find their ‘happily ever after’? Is it in the Island Timeline? Or is it in the Alternate Timeline? I’m still leaning towards it being the Island Timeline (purely because that’s the one we’ve invested most of our interest, and where the battle lines for Jacob and Nameless are marked out). And we mustn’t forget that death seemingly isn’t quite the end on Lost; whether it’s from Miles communicating, Hurley seeing and interacting, whispers or visions – the dead have a presence, and maybe, like Charlie, once sampled it’s a taste of paradise.

Daniel Faraday was also on hand to talk about how this Alternate Timeline, from the quantum mathematics he had conjured despite himself, was surely one that was a product of some terrible event committed elsewhere, elsewhen.

It was interesting that Faraday was a musician in the Alternate Timeline. And also still had his father, Charles Widmore, in his life. I’ll get to Charles and Eloise shortly, but I wanted to spare a moment to consider the facet of the Alt-Timeline that has more often than not showed our characters gaining the kind of life that seems more like a ‘happily ever after’ than the one they forged on the Island.

Faraday, evidently, was steered away from science and allowed to pursue his interest and enjoyment in music. Jack had managed to become a father-figure more adept than his own father. Locke had managed to subdue his rage and find happiness with Helen.

It’s been tempting to consider the Alternate Timeline as an ideal outcome, a what should have been. Yet consider Charlie. His band Driveshaft are evidently more of the success he hoped for (note his clean brother, still in the band, popped up in a previous episode asking after him – the importance of that now making more sense).

Charlie wasn’t a washed-up junkie rock star. He was just a junkie rock star! A slight improvement. . . But his near-death taste of love from the Island Timeline convinced him it wasn’t what he wanted. Daniel, too, had figured his alternate self of complex maths had provoked this inferior timeline, and his ‘real’ timeline was what he has lost, not been averted from. And Desmond himself, apparently so happy to be travelling the world, free and single, only had to chance upon the name Penny to sample a force way more intoxicating and alluring than this life he had in the Alt-Timeline.

Again, it makes me fall back on the idea that this Alternate Timeline may, on the surface, appear ‘better’ but it is fundamentally not as good as the real thing. I’ve said it previously, but it’s like a watered-down version of the full life experience the Island afforded. The bigger question: Is this apparent fulfilment our characters are reaching in the Alt-Timeline merely chance, or design? On this I am not so clear.

My initial take, for example, was to assume that there was no design. Take Charles Widmore and his behaviour towards Desmond. In the Alternate Timeline he embraced him with care, deigned to share a glass of his prestigious whisky. We hear that all Desmond wanted was to earn the respect of Charles Widmore in the Island Timeline and here, in the Alternate world, he had managed it.

My initial interpretation was, as stated, not to see design in this. Just one of those ironic things. Desmond believed he had all he wanted, but that was before he met Penny. But then I thought of Widmore’s encouragement and respect for Desmond at maintaining his single life. And how quickly he turned when Desmond failed to rein Charlie in and get him to Eloise’s function. For a man that showed such care he didn’t seem overly-concerned with how Desmond felt after surviving a car crash plunging into deep water.

Dare I say it, but was it possible that Widmore in this timeline was manipulating Desmond into not finding this blast of love, this Constant, Penny? That he was playing the role of caring figure to provide what Desmond thought he wanted as a sidetrack to what would wake him up?

(Aside: Note that Penny's surname (somehow!) was Milton in this Timeline. Not going to labour the reference, but it was surely a nod to Milton, writer of Paradise Lost. Again, the message I am getting here is that the Alternate Timeline is the less-perfect version of the world.)

Eloise Hawking – sorry, Eloise Widmore here. . .

. . . was even more blatant than Charles. The moment she turned to look at Desmond for the ‘first’ time there was a widening of her eyes in recognition, and her remarks about how it was a shame they hadn’t met earlier didn’t seem genuine. And then she turned. When Desmond enquired about Penny the façade dropped and Eloise Hawking emerged, demanding that Desmond stop travelling down whatever new road he was forging because he wasn’t ready.

Given the likes of Desmond, Charlie and Daniel have all tapped into becoming consciously aware, on whatever level, of this ‘other world’ then it’s not impossible to surmise that Eloise holds the same awareness. (Indeed, this may be the very nature of her power of knowing the future, and her active interest in making Desmond ‘push the button’ in Flashes Before Your Eyes.)

In Widmore’s office there was a picture of black and white scales:

Does this indicate that Widmore actively wants to maintain the balance in this Alternate Timeline? Or the Island one? It ought to be remembered that Widmore and Eloise in the Alternate Timeline were the same people we saw together on the Island so perhaps the black and white scales picture is merely a throwback, a momento, of that time. The time when they were The Others and served the will of Jacob to maintain the Island’s integrity.

I’m not overly-keen on Alt-Widmore possessing the same dual awareness that Eloise probably possesses, but it’s a maybe. What may make sense is that Eloise, remaining married to Widmore, has manipulated and shaped him into the kind of man that would embrace Desmond so warmly (his remarks about how fearsome Desmond may find Eloise would suggest he’s been on the end of her sharp tongue enough to know she’s not to be trifled with). And Eloise herself, of course, was responsible for the death of her son in the Island Timeline and here, in the Alternate Timeline, she got to raise him with love and indulgence for his music and keep him safe, so she has motive for wanting this timeline to sustain.

I, however, don’t imagine it will sustain. The endgame resides on the Island. One very pertinent point is that the creators didn’t have this Alternate Timeline in mind when the show was conceived, and so whatever end they have planned will surely play out on the Island.

On the Island, Widmore is refreshingly free and open with his intentions and information to the likes of Jin. Is he genuine, or is this a manipulation? I’m going with him being genuine. He’s honest enough to inform Desmond that he needs him, and that it will involve a sacrifice. Even the little detail of Widmore pulling back the sheet to view the poor soul that got electro-fried suggested a level of care behind that stern demeanour.

What sacrifice for Desmond? I can only think of three things that matter enough that Desmond could sacrifice: Penny, baby Charlie, or Desmond’s life. The intention of Widmore would seem to be one of marching Desmond out to one of the Island’s electromagnetic hotspots (as identified by Jin on the map created by Zoe) to expose him to more massive electromagnetism – maybe creating another ‘incident’, one that erases the Alternate Timeline?

Why would that matter? Well, as previously suggested, the Alternate Timeline does seem to be one that fuels the desires of the Losties. Nameless is very much in the market of dangling the idea of escape and wish-fulfilment over people – maybe it’s the erasure of the Island Timeline and rebirth in the Alternate Timeline that he is intending. Maybe his plan to gather the Candidates together is similar to Desmond’s plan to gather the Oceanic passengers via the manifest: so he can show them a promised land. Only when Nameless shows people their ‘other lives’, I would imagine he’ll omit anything bad and forgo the sense of it being a lesser version of what they should be.

When Nameless says he wants to escape the Island, maybe he doesn’t mean physically leave rather he intends to literally wipe out the Island Timeline to render the Island at the bottom of the ocean. . .

. . . into an Alternate Timeline where Jacob has no influence and, presumably, one where Nameless is granted the freedom to go ‘home’ like he so seeks. Again, we can’t equate Nameless’ desire to leave as to be just to go out into the regular world. His ‘home’ may be release from immortal bondage to the Island. Tying this up with Widmore’s previous remarks about how allowing Nameless to leave would mean everyone and everything would cease to be makes this notion feel pretty accurate. In short: If Nameless leaves the Island Timeline will be wiped clear and the Alternate Timeline will become the actual one and only timeline. That’s the bad ending – the one Widmore, and probably Jacob, are seeking to avoid.

By the end of the episode Desmond is in a strange duality, seemingly aware in both timelines of the ‘other side’. He willingly goes along with Sayid, perhaps with the same intention he has in the Alternate Timeline – so he can get to the Oceanic 815 people, gather them all together, and make them aware.

His pacified manner, his new-found acceptance, possesses something of the messianic. I believe he will gather the Oceanic 815 passengers in the Alternate Timeline and tell them, There’s a better reality than this where you really belong. In the Island Timeline he’ll tell people, This is where you’re supposed to be. And the sacrifice for this, that I suspect he knows already, will be the end of him in both timelines. For the sake of Penny and baby Charlie, he’ll sacrifice himself to maintain the Island Timeline. Or maybe he smiles because he knows that he’ll survive – because like Penny said, all he really needs to survive is one person who truly loves him.

After that, there’s just one slot left open: Jacob’s replacement. To maintain balance on the Island, to continue the black and white equilibrium in the Island Timeline. Our Candidates are all still in play and the stakes are as high as you can imagine.

Analysis: 6.10 The Package

2010-04-03T00:23:00.008+01:00

Indulge me a moment. I have, for a long time, held a penchant for Sun. And this episode delivered. We’ve not seen much of Jin this season, and we’ve seen even less of Sun. This episode certainly addressed this matter. . .

. . . with a little bit of teasing undressing, one button at a time. . .

Holy hell. How is a man supposed to make careful and considered analysis when this is happening?

Jin certainly couldn’t keep away, and for the first time in a long time we finally saw he and Sun reunited. But that was only in the Alternate Timeline – the Island Timeline reunion remains on ice, if it ever happens at all. The first big surprise about the Alternate Jin and Sun was that they were not married.

In the Original Timeline Jin and Sun did get together in secret before Jin finally confronted Sun’s father, Mr. Paik, and announced his intentions to marry Sun. This resulted in Jin being tasked with soul-destroying, tough work that almost broke his marriage, with Sun all set to elope. In the Alternate Timeline Sun’s intentions to elope were still present, she was just fully intent on including Jin in her plans.

What she didn’t bank on, literally, was that her father was well aware of it and planned on getting Keamy to kill Jin, this insolent employee getting fresh with his daughter. Are we to perhaps see parallel warning signs here? Only Widmore cropped up in this episode with talk of caring for his daughter, and having good intentions for Jin. Was this the equivalent of being told one thing when the intention is the other, like Keamy spelling out his intention to kill Jin to his face in calm, soothing tones knowing he wasn’t being understood?

Personally, I am still sticking with Widmore as being on the level. I believe he has a longterm plan, and I believe he’s been unscrupulous about achieving it, but I don’t believe he is a major threat. When Zoe and her people zapped Nameless’ followers they could have slaughtered the lot of them. They didn’t. They just took what they wanted and left the rest. Again, I am reminded of Widmore’s claim that he had nothing to do with all the people dead from the Ajira flight and I believe him.

The other pertinent difference about Sun in the Alternate Timeline was that she had never learned how to speak English. Now with this, potentially, we have been given an absolutely massive revelation.

The pivotal ‘mirror scene’ in the Alternate Timeline in this episode showed Sun looking somewhat confused at her own reflection, touching her head. Now there’s no easy way to state what I think happened here without it sounding crazy, but on the Island, just before this scene, Sun was running away from Nameless and smacked her head on a tree and knocked herself out cold. When she woke up. . . she couldn’t speak English.

Alternate Timeline Sun couldn’t speak English, and it’s very tempting to suggest this element of her crossed over to the Island Sun, when she was unconscious. And if this was utterly unprecedented I’d probably dismiss my own thoughts as mad, but we’ve seen Jack confused by an appendix scar he doesn’t recall receiving, one he surely received on the Island. Sayid in this episode, too, when he blankly handed Jin a knife with a token “Good luck” seemed rather unfeeling, don’t you think? Like the emotionless vessel of Sayid on the Island was somehow informing Sayid’s actions in the Alternate Timeline.

It’s like both these two timelines share a loose connection, via these people, and maybe this will grow stronger. I thought it was interesting that we paid a brief visit to Room 23, when Jin was held there. This was the place Dharma had used to experiment with subliminal testing – the idea being that a person could have their mind changed, their perception altered, via the introduction of almost imperceptible outside stimuli.

Could the Alternate Timeline be serving as just such a near-imperceptible outside stimulus? Possibly the people on the Island will become more aware of this Alternate Timeline. Maybe they will realise what their lives would be without the Island, without Jacob, and this will encourage them to fight for the Island Timeline and oppose Nameless. Alternatively there may be some kind of merging, or maybe the Alternate Timeline will be the dominant universe. . . but I personally prefer my first notion: that awareness will prompt action to fight for the Island and oppose Nameless.

Things aren’t exactly going great for Nameless, either. Sun didn’t have any problem with instantly not trusting him, running away from his insistent beckoning hand. (I am guessing that the moment Sun was unconscious Nameless was unable to do anything – I believe he needs his candidates to willingly choose to join him.)

To the matter of which of Jin or Sun is the candidate, I thought it might have been a subtle hint that there was only one Kwon on the Alternate Timeline (Jin, given that he and Sun weren’t married). As it was Kwon whose name was on the cave ceiling maybe it’s indication that Jin is the candidate. Maybe. Is that why Sun didn’t ‘zap back’ to the 70s with Jack and Hurley, because she wasn’t a candidate? Or was it a red herring? Or a meaningless interpretation? Maybe.

But like Mikhail on the Island only had one eye, his counterpart in the Alternate Timeline got a bullet through his eye – what happens in one timeline tends to resonate in the other. (With that being the case I do have a positive feeling that unborn Ji Yeon, in pregnant Sun’s shot womb, will survive. I wouldn’t be surprised if Doctor Jack Shephard played a part in that, too.)

Nameless indicated that in order to leave the Island he needs to have all of the candidates with him. Perhaps this is some kind of bizarre reversal of that same rule that meant the Oceanic 6 had to try and best replicate Oceanic 815 in order to return to the Island. It never really meant much sense but it working in this way does at least present a form of balance.

Nameless’ plans seem ever more unlikely. For one thing I don’t see the likes of Jack, Sun or Hurley suddenly figuring ‘Locke’ to be a man they can trust and follow off the Island. Nameless has his work cut out in getting them to come anywhere with him. And even the people he does have in his group are hardly safe as houses. Jin wants away, Sawyer’s plotting his own scheme and Sayid, as mentioned, is now unfeeling and therefore liable to lack allegiance.

Even Claire was concerned for her own worth within the group, but Nameless showed his true dark side beneath his crocodile smile with his insinuation that Kate could be dispensed with once she had served her purpose.

Any illusions anyone had that Nameless is a misunderstood good guy seriously need to give it up. Here we see him advocating cold-blooded murder once his own interests have been served. Case closed.

And so this brings me back to that other ‘bad’ guy, Charles Widmore.

Plainly he is in direct opposition to Nameless, this figure of myth and stories he claims to barely understand (as explained on the other side of a sonic fence, natch!). I expect Widmore still wants the Island as his own, maybe to reclaim his Island Chief role, or perhaps to utilise its healing properties. Right now that’s a tough motivation to identify, but slightly more immediate is the matter of what he wants to do with his ‘package’, Desmond (of whom I predicted was in the locked room a couple of episodes back for those not paying attention!).

I mentioned earlier that I had pegged Widmore as potentially having a longterm plan, and I can’t help but wonder if Desmond is a pivotal part of this plan. So I’ll run this through and see where it takes us. The first point to gather is what Zoe the geophysicist was doing, and why Jin was kidnapped. As was explained, they needed Jin because, during his time in the Dharma Initiative, he knew the locations of points on the Island Widmore’s team had pinpointed as locations of high electromagnetic properties.

OK. So they’re looking for strong electromagnetic areas as one part of their strategy. And they’ve got ‘the package’, Desmond, as a crucial part of their plan. You put those two together and. . . well. . . let’s face it, Desmond’s not exactly been a stranger to electromagnetism before has he?

From the years he spent in The Swan Station, to being at ground zero when the Fail Safe was turned, he has had his mind blasted back to his own past in Flashes Before Your Eyes and had his consciousness flipping from the past and the present in The Constant as a consequence of leaving the Island. Desmond is unique in having experienced and survived such extraordinary experiences. And there’s a case that would suggest this wasn’t even coincidental.

Consider:

Desmond had an experience where he blacked out after a lot of drinking and, when he woke, he suddenly found himself wanting to turn away from his old life and to go and spend time in a monastery.

I have previously theorised that this ‘blackout’ was a period of time where a future consciousness took over for a little while, but that’s a really remote theory. More pertinent is that the monastery was run by Brother Campbell who, via a picture on his desk, we know was connected to Ms. Hawking.

OK. Now this is getting a little juicier. Because Ms. Hawking was, as we know, with Charles Widmore on the Island for a long period of time and the two of them would have been aware of Nameless, of what the future may have held (indeed, Ms. Hawking knew a great deal about the future somehow, possibly through Dan Faraday’s journal!).

So being incredibly generous, we could suggest Hawking somehow knew that Desmond would prove pivotal. More realistically, we can surmise that Hawking, and Widmore, knew what type of person they’d need. Enter Desmond, at the monastery. Willing to do his solitary confinement in his room, holding to his vow of silence.

Sure seems like a strong candidate for time spent in a confined space pressing a button every 108 minutes.

And then Penny shows up.

On behalf of Widmore’s wine drop, Penny meets Desmond. Intentional? Could be. It certainly hooked Desmond in. Next thing is he’s totally in love with Penny and he arranges a meet with her father, Widmore, who basically instructs him that he is not good enough to earn the right of his daughter’s hand. This rich, imposing military man Widmore stares down at Desmond and perhaps provokes the next reaction from him:

Desmond’s life in the military further taught him discipline (again, military discipline required in The Swan - note that Kelvin Inman was also a military man), and then he also committed some still unknown crime (though surely this is something we will come to understand, and maybe another result of a ‘blackout’ caused by conscious-shifting that I shall further elaborate on) and wound up in prison. Widmore was there to meet him when he got out. Told him he still wasn’t good enough.

So Desmond trains for a boat race (on the boat that fortuitously turned up via Libby – jury’s out on whether that was coincidence but I’m thinking maybe not) that Widmore runs. And, through this Widmore-run boat race, Desmond finds his way to the Island. Now, of course, it’s been said by Desmond himself not to confuse coincidence with fate (or was that the other way around!?) but this all does seem suspicious. When it's all laid out in black and white like this, doesn't it just all seem more like design? And, if so, can we not credit it as Widmore's design?

Desmond is apparently a fundamental part of Widmore’s plan. Almost as though he had used Desmond, manipulated him steadily over the years to be this perfect tool he could use in this war he always knew was coming. You’re either reading this and nodding, onboard with it, or your brain is screaming a ton of different nagging reasons why it seems incredible. Fair enough, either way. Personally, I see a lot of potential loose ends tied up in one Desmond-centric episode and a reason why Widmore would find him useful.

I can envisage a future episode where Desmond is transported to one of these points on the Island that triggers another ‘time consciousness shifting’ episode, like Flashes Before Your Eyes and The Constant. Perhaps he’ll whip through his own past and explain some of those curious moments in his backstory, like how he woke up in the street and wanted to become a monk, brotha, and why he wound up in prison. And what else? Well, to shift into a point in time where he could find out something important, something that Widmore needs to know about the Island, or Nameless, that will prove crucial.

Even more outlandish? Desmond’s consciousness actually doesn’t shift into his own past, it somehow moves into someone else’s.

Ha! Surely that’s just too nuts. That Desmond shift into someone else! (But why are they battering him into a subdued state?) But hey, I was right about Desmond being the guy in the locked room so I figured I may as well address the imbalance by throwing out an idea that’s surely too crazy to be right. Right? Just keeping up the black and white, yin and yang balance of all things Lost. You want something more plausible? How about the obvious.

Maybe a lot of people have forgotten this, but the last time Desmond was on the Island he was able to see in to the future. Maybe that’s all Widmore needs Desmond to do. Get Desmond to an electromagnetic hotspot, trigger his brain into a future vision so he knows how to change it. It's almost so obviously simple it seems improbable. . . Happily Ever After is the next episode. Sounds like a fairytale. I suspect we’re not quite at the point of happy ever afters just yet, and I don’t need to be able to see into the future to make that prediction.

Analysis: 6.9 Ab Aeterno

2010-03-26T17:25:00.009Z

Ab Aeterno. From the beginning of time. The long-awaited backstory of Richard Alpert didn’t extend the ageless one’s lifetime to quite that long ago. The title Ab Aeterno can perhaps be interpreted as referring to Jacob and Nameless – that their contest on the Island has been running from the beginning of time. But we’ll get to them. This was Richard’s show – probably his one and only. Who would have thought back in Season 3 that this Richard Alpert. . .

. . . was a rugged, devoted man of faith from 1869 who went by the name Ricardo!

His journey to the Island had quite the epic sweep about it, beginning with his flight to the bad doctor’s house to try and save his wife, Isabella. This meeting with the doctor was filled with symbolic omens. Consider the doctor dressed in black, for example. Here was Ricardo, at his direst need, requesting help from a man in black. And the man in black, when handed a crucifix so dear to Isabella, tossed it aside as worthless. It’s not subtle when laid out like that, eh?

Even the medicine the doctor in black offered was white, looking a little like ground down powder of a certain white stone that Jacob would, later in the episode, use as a symbolic gift for Nameless. The resonance here is hard to miss. Ricardo tries to win the favour of a man in black that casts aside goodness (the crucifix) and dangles the promises of what he wants most (the medicine) before considering him unworthy.

Interestingly the other man that returned and witnessed Ricardo’s struggle with the doctor that resulted in his death was carrying blankets – which did remind me of that time Michael killed Ana Lucia which Libby, carrying blankets, witnessed.

Not saying that was intended, but it was a nice thematic harkening. And it’s not the only time events in The Swan serve as a thematic reference to events in this episode, but that’s big, meaty stuff we’ll get to later. Before then Ricardo was locked behind bars and facing a death sentence. Another man in black, this time a priest, came to offer a chance to repent. But Ricardo didn’t feel fully guilty. He said it was an accident. The priest declined to save his soul as a consequence of his weak confession.

Does this remind anyone of anyone?

“Confess,” Mr. Eko was told, by Yemi, who we now know was Nameless in disguise. Mr. Eko did not confess. He was, like Alpert, steeped in the belief that his regrettable crimes had been a result of actions he could not have controlled. Mr. Eko was served a death sentence as a result. As was Ricardo.

Only Ricardo’s English-speaking urge to visit the New World prompted a visit from Black Rock shipmate Jonas Whitfield. We didn’t get to see the elusive Magnus Hanso, alas, but it was nice that he was mentioned (Magnus Hanso being the forefather of Alvar Hanso, founder of the Dharma Initiative). And so it was, as many of us had long-suspected, that Ricardo came to the Island on the Black Rock as a slave. It would seem the boat we all thought was the Black Rock in The Incident. . .

. . . wasn’t actually the Black Rock at all. As the real Black Rock came crash-landing onto the Island, through statue Taweret’s face, on a stormy, stormy night. (Unless the Black Rock had been to the Island previously and this was something of a return voyage, not entirely impossible due to some timeline discrepancies found within the Black Rock ledger about the date of its disappearance – but I digress.)

We got two birds with one stone, here. An answer as to how the Black Rock wound up in the middle of the jungle (a giant wave picked it up and pretty much threw it there) and an answer as to why the four-toed statue was broken (a ship being picked up by a giant wave slammed into it – presumably both ship and water being forcible impact combined to produce the shattering rubble that remained).

It may seem miraculous that a ship could have slammed into a statue and crashed into the middle of the jungle on a giant wave and still been relatively intact and had people onboard alive – but then, you know, there was that time a passenger aeroplane split into three pieces in mid-air and hurtled to the ground below leaving about a third of the people onboard pretty much fine and dandy. The show set a precedent for miraculous survival events right from the get-go so we can’t go crying foul six seasons in!

Just like how the Oceanic 815 pilot was quickly despatched by the Smoke monster, the crew of the Black Rock were also rapidly wiped out. Justification? Maybe Smokey just gets really mad at those directly responsible for bringing people to the Island! Obviously the root cause is Jacob, who Nameless wants to kill, but as a substitute he goes after the literal people that brought others – for Oceanic 815 it was the pilot, for the Black Rock the crew.

It was lucky for Ricardo that Smokey did run riot, arriving just in time for him to not be shish-kebab on the pointed end of Whitfield’s sword like the other helpless slaves.

The confidence trick on Ricardo began with a scanning. Just like Mr. Eko and in the same fashion Juliet and Kate once got flash-scanned in the jungle, Black Smoke took a deep look at Ricardo and then retreated to formulate a plan. First, it left him trapped, thirsty and desperate. Ricardo pulled out a loose nail only for a boar (that I don’t think was the Black Smoke in disguise but just another nice reference to earlier episodes with pesky boars truffling through dead people) to knock it away. Then Black Smoke took on the form of Isabella, the one thing Nameless knew Ricardo wanted more than anything else.

Managing to convince Ricardo he was in hell, Nameless (as Isabella) managed the conjuring trick of making it sound like the Black Smoke was approaching. Let’s just pause for a second and consider this, because there is a reasonable explanation. See, there’s the big Black Smoke we are now well-familiar with, but there have been fleeting appearances of the ‘little’ Black Smoke.

Now I’ll venture this little wispy Black Smoke, like some kind of extra offshoot, is the bit that can transform into other people. The big Black Smoke is the one that can scan, travel long distances and, of course, pick people up and drag them off and smack them around to death. No doubt the ‘wispy’ bit rejoins the main Black Smoke when it’s not been sent off, clicking away, on manifestation duties. Maybe I'm over-thinking it. But I digress.

Through this Isabella encounter, and then faking her ‘death’, Nameless turned up in the ‘man in black’ form we have, perhaps, considered to be his original body but which, by the episode’s end, we can figure probably isn’t. Nameless would later remark that Jacob had stolen his body. Maybe that means Jacob now physically occupies the body that was once his – or the body that was once his is long gone and he has since had to exist in different forms, such as Man In Black and Locke.

Nameless had now got Ricardo mentally and physically in a state where he was very amenable for coercion and, with the offer of some food that this time Ricardo did take (note that previously, with the priest in black, Ricardo declined the food offered in prison – he was of stronger will back then – but it was left there for him, for later!), he was ready to believe he was in hell and that there was a devil out there he could kill with a dagger through the heart, just so long as he didn’t let him speak, which would earn him the gift of seeing Isabella again.

A few things here. First, Nameless’ promise that Ricardo would see Isabella again is certainly one he could provide. He’d done it once already! Sure, Ricardo, you can see her again – just give me a minute to go and turn into her. . . In that sense, Ricardo wasn’t quite making the bargain he thought he was (and makes me figure the promises he's been making to The Others and the Candidates is also equally rife with 'not quite as it seems' smallprint). Second, this business of a dagger through the heart before the victim could speak was, of course, the same instruction given to Sayid to use against Locke (as Nameless).

Locke managed to speak before Sayid stabbed him, and Jacob managed to intercept Ricardo when he attempted his assassination. Are we to believe that if Sayid or Ricardo had managed to stab Jacob or Nameless before they spoke it would have killed them? Is it really so vital, the not-getting-to-say-a-word-beforehand part? I don’t have an answer for that.

Also rather flummoxing was why Nameless, when speaking to Ricardo, elected to divulge that he was, in fact, the Black Smoke. For viewers watching it did make us wonder whether Nameless was really the honest one, and that what he was telling Ricardo about Jacob could potentially be the truth. But why tell Ricardo this?

Me? I think he made a mistake. I think Nameless, so filled with such bitterness and evidently cut off from humanity, wasn’t quite as refined a confidence trickster with Ricardo as when he became Locke and manipulated Ben. With Ricardo he didn’t rein in his own way with the truth quite enough, but he’d learn better as we recently saw when he omitted telling The Temple Others that he was the Black Smoke that had slaughtered the people left behind. Jacob, too, when he had eventually battered and drown-threatened Ricardo into accepting he wasn’t really dead, came to a new realisation that showed him he needed to refine how he was conducting himself on the Island.

Jacob’s attitude was that people’s innate goodness would ultimately rise above Nameless’ tactics, would surpass their corrupt ways, and they would find their own realisation about how to be good without him having to “step in”. Ricardo’s remarks that Nameless certainly would step in gave him pause. How does Jacob, who needs man to use his own free will to find the right path, get around this? He appoints an advisor, a go-between.

Unlike Nameless, Jacob would not grant promises he could not keep. He could not bring Isabella back, nor could he absolve Ricardo of his sins. And so, to avoid a fate in hell (very important, his belief in hell), Ricardo didn’t want to die. One touch from Jacob later, instant immortality is granted. And for the next 150 years Ricardo served Jacob’s bidding, changing into Richard and seeing the Island become more populated with people – Others – considered to be ‘good people’ that, unbeknownst to Richard, were potential candidates as Jacob’s successor.

As is fitting, Jacob didn’t even tell Richard more than bare minimum (he, too, needed to have free will to choose the right path) which, following Jacob’s death, was what caused his crisis of faith and made him return to that deep-rooted belief that the Island really was hell and Jacob had lied to him all along. Thank goodness for Hurley!

Richard’s collapse of faith meant he finally stepped up to the door Nameless had left open for him all those many years ago with that invitation to return should he change his mind. The longterm strategy very nearly paid off; Richard almost gave himself over to ‘the dark side’ until Hurley popped up with messages from Isabella.

Now, if the Isabella Richard saw and interacted with on the Black Rock was really Nameless in disguise – as it surely was – then what is this apparition that Hurley can see and speak to? It would appear to be a stronger manifestation of the same spiritual life-after-death world that Miles can tap into. It’s not something exclusive to the Island, but it’s a capacity that Miles and Hurley have perhaps only possessed because they have been on the Island. There are dead people on the Island that are Nameless in disguise. And there are dead people seen that aren't him, which must be sourced from somewhere else. . .

Let’s hold on to the idea of their being a ‘source’ for dead souls, like Isabella, as we consider the metaphor Jacob presented to Ricardo about the function of the Island.

Jacob: “Think of this wine as what you keep calling hell. There’s many other names for it too: malevolence, evil, darkness. Here it is, swirling around in the bottle, unable to get out because if it did it would spread. The cork is this island and it’s the only thing keeping the darkness where it belongs.”

I mentioned earlier that this episode induced parallels with The Swan Station, and this metaphor of Jacob’s is a big one. Consider The Swan, and the function of pushing the button every 108 minutes to vent electromagnetism. Fundamentally The Swan functioned as the only thing keeping this devastating power in check. Seems the Island works on a similar principle, serving as a cap on a nebulous mass of all that is bad to prevent it from spreading out into the world.

It’s a pretty big concept to swallow, no question. But whilst we’re here, let’s really think big about this.

I believe Lost may be trying to introduce notions of there being a good and evil – sources for each that exist in the world. Now we are presented with Jacob, and Nameless, and our religion-aware minds wonder if they are representations of characters we know already. Is Jacob God, Nameless the Devil? Or are they angels – one fallen, one pure? I am forming up a belief that Jacob and Nameless, these notions of good and evil, they’re not of religious iconography, these are what religious ideas are based on.

Jacob remarked that Ricardo called it hell. That is, in Ricardo’s understanding of the world due to his religious upbringing, the place where all evil lies is termed hell. But hell is just a name, a religious interpretation of the real truth which is this nebulous source of darkness and evil the Island sits above, like a cork in a wine bottle. And maybe, if there’s this vague source of evil that some religions call hell, there is also the opposite – the white to this black – that some religions call heaven. Is this where the likes of Isabella, that Hurley can see, stem from? Is there a paradise Island somewhere, serving as a cork for this place also? Or does the Island cover both these sources – evil and goodness together – hence why both can, indeed need to, exist there?

Black and white, opposing forces, locked together. The theme has been there from the very beginning and the Island might just be the epicentre of both.

Jacob and Nameless, it would seem, are the determining balancing act keeping a lid on things. If one leaves then, like a one-sided see-saw, there is an upset in the equilibrium and the cork pops off and it all goes wrong. If Nameless leaves, it’s over.

When they spoke together at the end of the episode, Nameless once more re-stated his urge to leave with the connotation being that it was Jacob, and purely Jacob, that was preventing him from doing so. The only way he can go is over Jacob’s dead body, and even that comes with the caveat of their being no replacement to take over, to take up the seat on the other side of the see-saw and return the balance.

The real ab aeterno we’re interested in concerns these two – the story of Jacob and Nameless, of how Nameless lost his body and developed the urge to kill Jacob. That, I feel, is subject matter for a finale. The finale. In the end we’re going to need to understand the beginning, and I am starting to believe the end is going to represent a new beginning.

Some day, maybe, these two men will sit together on the Island. . .

. . . immortally locked in an opposing battle on the Island interminably. They’ll watch over the Island, expecting more people to come, and the game will go on. Lost was originally going to be called 'Circle'; maybe with Jack and Locke as replacement guardians of the Island everything will come full circle and start anew with them, ab aeterno.

Analysis: 6.8 Recon

2010-03-20T14:17:00.006Z

I’d been waiting for a Sawyer-centric episode this season because I believed it would provide good grounds upon which to gain a foothold in understanding the Alternate Timeline. Why was Sawyer so important in this respect? Because he was the only character that we have seen Jacob touch before ‘the incident’ in 1977.

In essence, this could have meant that Sawyer was the only person in both timelines that had been touched by Jacob. Everyone else – Kate and Jack and the rest – in the Alternate Timeline were existing in a world where Jacob almost surely had no guiding hand because the tangent Alternate Timeline stemmed from a point before Jacob intervened to guide them to the Island (and what we were seeing then, arguably, is the people they would have been for better or for worse). After Recon, however, I am now fairly convinced that Sawyer in the Alternate Timeline was never touched by Jacob. Indeed, in this timeline Sawyer doesn’t even go by the name Sawyer at all.

What are we to make of this? Well, the finer points about how Jacob’s touch doesn’t exist in this Alternate Timeline is a debate you could turn your brain inside out trying to fathom. I shan’t bother with that, rather I’ll deal with the broad view: The Alternate Timeline is a world where Jacob has exerted no influence (at the very least on our candidate Losties, but potentially on no one – suggesting this is a completely Jacobless world).

This is an idea I’ve been kicking around in my thoughts for a few episodes. The fact that the Island is a part of the Alternate Timeline does pull me away from casting Jacob completely out of the Alternate Timeline picture. We know Ben and Roger were once there, for example. Miles in this episode remarks that his father works in a musuem - but you have to figure that Miles was still more than likely born on the Island. The finer details probably don't need to be puzzled over; I am now fairly firm in the belief that Jacob definitely is not a part of the candidates’ lives (or the lives the candidates interacted with, such as Miles and Charlotte) in the Alternate Timeline and this is the entire point of it.

What does this mean then? Actually, it gives me good grounds to form a basis about the Island and what it means. Slowly, over the course of Season 6, episode by episode we have been seeing various characters on-Island and in the Alt-Timeline and slowly that has allowed us to compare and contrast to begin to reach conclusions. Fundamentally, I believe the Alt-Timeline lets us see the person as a lesser version of who they really are – it was Jacob and the Island that allowed the real person’s character to flourish and present itself.

In fast and loose terms, Jack was a man struggling to be a father to his son in the Alt-Timeline. He was a good man under tough circumstances. Who is he on the Island? The same, only larger-scale. Struggling to be a true leader under incredibly tough circumstances.

It’s as though, through the Alternate Timeline, we are getting a glimpse at the person Jacob knew was there and the potential for the person they could be on the Island. He just had to bring them to the Island to test his theory – just like he had brought many people before. Candidate after candidate. The whole point of the show Lost we are watching is that this group – the Oceanic 815 people – they’re going to be the ones that finally prove him right.

Consider Sayid. In the Alternate Timeline he was a tempered version of his torturer nature, struggling to be a good man even at the cost of himself (with Nadia). Even in that timeline his murderous impulse could not be suppressed. On the Island, this was further emphasised.

Sayid sat idly back and watched girl-on-girl action whilst Claire deviated from nervously reaching for Kate’s hand to turning on her with a knife before deciding she’d done right with Aaron and liked Kate again. I didn’t really like what went on with Claire’s character this episode so I’ll put it down to a slight aberration and move on.

In the Alternate Timeline Ben proved to be a better ‘father figure’ to Alex in forsaking his own lust for power for her. He didn’t quite manage as much on the Island but, eventually, a humble man emerged out of his tormented lost soul as Ilana showed him pity. That man, the man that Jacob hoped existed, was there inside him. In short: Ben is a good guy in both timelines - the Island provoked extremes.

In this light, what happened to Locke was even more tragic. The Alt-Timeline showed a good man at peace with his limitations and finding happiness. It was Nameless that fundamentally got to him and corrupted him. The Locke on the Island, the one that looked into the Black Smoke and saw a hopeful white light, got suckered in and used entirely.

Is there anyone still making a claim that Nameless is a potential good guy who's just misunderstood? I'm not. But the trick with Nameless is he believes he's got just cause for doing what he does - and that what makes him so charming and beguiling and, well, believable. Like all good con men, Nameless is incredibly convincing because he tells people what they want to hear and provides what they need. There was a great deal of irony when he told Sawyer – just before he sent him to the Hydra Island – that he was the best liar he had ever met!

Sawyer’s reconnaissance mission (the ‘recon’ of the title, but you all knew that, right? as well as it being a play on ‘re-con’, as in a confidence trick redone) was an intriguing sidequest. Did Nameless know what Sawyer would find over there? Or was it purely coincidental that he went over there and ran into Widmore? Me, I think Nameless sported a look of surprise when Sawyer told him about what he had found on Hydra Island which leads me to think he got a lot more than he expected.

What did Nameless send Sawyer over to Hydra Island for then? At the very least, I think, it was to get him out of the way. Note how he pulled Sawyer away from the group when he was becoming a voice of dissent? That’s one reason. Also, with Sawyer out of the frame for a while, Nameless could make some time with Kate and start drawing her into his circle. To her credit she wasn't easily-swayed (again, makes me still think she's hidden-candidate material!).

The conversation between Nameless and Kate felt like fertile ground for seeding future truths about Nameless. His remarks about having a crazy mother, about growing pains that he is still working through – it was all too oblique to be purely about manipulating Kate (though there was a bit of that going on, naturally!). Nameless also told Sawyer that he didn’t want to die and it seemed very pointed.

Pointed to what? I don’t know. We just don’t know on how big a scale we are supposed to consider Jacob and Nameless – whether they are uniquely mortal men caught up in an epic game between each other with an indefinite lifespan, or if they are more on a par with Godlike status. I’m veering more towards the former rather than the latter but, whatever the truth, it’s the basket within which Lost has put most of its eggs so let’s hope for a satisfying explanation before the end.

Meanwhile, over on Hydra Island. . .

. . . Sawyer quickly saw through ‘survivor’ Zoe. Realising she was part of a larger group, and sensing she wanted to get over to the mainland to conduct a little recon of her own (“How many people did you say were with you?” “Do you all have guns?”), he handed himself over for a meet ‘n’ greet with their leader.

Widmore, evidently, is setting up a defensive stronghold on Hydra Island. Busily erecting mobile Black Smoke Proof sonic fence perimeter I think it’s fair to say that he’s not come to the Island to become best friends with Nameless.

What we don’t know is whether Widmore has come to the Island to fight for the side of Jacob, or whether he’s simply come to fight for the Island for himself. I believed him when he said he and his people were not responsible for the deaths of all the Ajira people. (I suspect Nameless went over there and did all that – remember he once told Alpert that those were people that needed to be dealt with? I wonder if he didn't just send Sawyer over to make sure he hadn't missed any.)

After Widmore was no doubt manipulated during his previous tenure on the Island I reckon he’s looking to make reparations. (I hope he’s got a good explanation about how he looked after Locke when he came back in The Life And Death Of Jeremy Bentham, mind!) I’m not sure Jacob would wholly endorse coming to the Island with gun-toting personnel either, though – so if Widmore is part of Team Jacob I can’t help but wonder if he’s acting on his own initiative rather than following further instructions.

Who or what is behind the locked door on the submarine?

I’ll keep this simple. I think it’s Desmond. I’m either right or wrong.

Sawyer’s big agenda was revealed by the end of the episode to purely be one of playing Nameless and Widmore against each other and in the middle of the skirmish sneak off and make his escape. Old Sawyer, the every man for himself Sawyer, would have plotted this without involving anyone else. However, New Sawyer makes promises to never let Jin leave without Sun and to also take Kate with him. He's come a long way but I am getting a distinct vibe of sacrifice on the horizon for Sawyer. . .

We’ll see how that goes.

On-Island Sawyer is very much more the man he wanted to be than the Alternate Timeline James Ford. He remarked to Charlotte that, at the point where he could have gone one way or another, good guy or bad guy, he went to the side of the law rather than working against it. Trouble was that the ‘real Sawyer’ inside of him still wanted to exist, to right the past wrongs. Ostensibly, Alternate Timeline James Ford was a lesser version of Sawyer on-Island.

On-Island, Sawyer’s a top class con man and liar. In the Alternate Timeline Miles knows he’s keeping something secret, Charlotte sees through his tired chat-up façade. Sawyer on-Island wanders in with a sloppy grin and a sunflower to see Juliet and it’s idyllic. In the Alternate Timeline the sunflower-routine is weak and almost scornfully derided by Charlotte with, “You blew it.”

James Ford knows it, too. In some ways his ‘inner-Sawyer’ was dying to come through. He pointed Charlotte towards the drawer that housed his big secret because he wanted to catch her looking. Deep down, he wanted her to see it – maybe so he could talk about it, or so he could throw her out for not being, say, Juliet. When he looked at his reflection in the mirror his response was to punch it, frustrated at what he was seeing.

See, in Alternate Timeline world, reflections have been a symbolic element. They’ve been much-discussed so I won’t labour the point (but I will encourage you to keep your eyes peeled for the next episode for Alt-Timeline reflections and see what you make of them). Consider Jack; looking in mirrors he has seen a cut on his neck and a scar from an operation he doesn’t remember – truth of another timeline reflected back. Locke was looking in the mirror when he made the decision to call Jack about spinal surgery – seeing the man that wanted to reach out to the ‘man of faith’. Sayid, when reflected in the glass of the door before Nadia answered, had a face half-obscured in darkness and, significantly, he didn’t look at himself (literally not facing up to his own self).

James Ford looked at his reflection in the Alternate Timeline and saw Sawyer. It was a taunting reflection; the man that could hunt down Anthony Cooper and exact revenge and be the man he wanted to be. The difference is James Ford never had Jacob’s guiding hand, leading him to the Island – the place where he could be his true self. Again, it's pertinent that Sawyer actually exacted his revenge on the Island when he killed Anthony Cooper - it was the place he got to be who he really was.

I’ve said it before, that the Island serves as a form of ‘proving ground’ for people to find their true natures. Perhaps it’s the very nature of the Island that makes it such a fine place for Jacob and Nameless to have staged this battle between themselves. It won’t be that simple, of course. Like the Alternate Timeline, it’s close to the truth but not quite hitting the mark. Like the truth watered-down. It’s on the Island where the real truth lies, and we’re getting closer and closer to finding out precisely what that is.

Analysis: 6.7 Dr. Linus

2010-03-11T20:06:00.009Z

Where did Dr. Linus come from? Upon initial meeting, and with some vague theorising around Season 6 so far, I had wondered whether Dr. Linus – Ben – was one and the same as the boy we saw on the Island, the one that Sayid shot, the one that got carried into The Temple.

With this episode we got just about enough information to cast aside such theorising and start dealing with pertinent facts. Dr. Linus, whilst tending to his father, Roger, held a brief conversation about what their lives might have been like had they remained on the Island. It’s the first time an Alternate Timeline character has made any reference to the Island but it was a much-needed and pertinent clarification. The Alternate Timeline is, then, a Tangent Timeline. It was a divergent timeline created in 1977, during ‘the incident’. (Indeed, it’s what ‘the incident’ is!)

This is worth clearing up. It explains why the Island Timeline continued to exist for the likes of Jack and Kate and Sawyer after ‘the incident’.

See, imagine they hadn’t continued to exist on the Island. Imagine the Island Timeline had ceased and simply switched to the Alternate Timeline. Well, as we know, that’s a timeline where Jack and the rest take a flight on a certain Oceanic 815 and arrive safely at L.A. That means they don’t go on the Island. They don’t find The Swan. No electromagnetic anomaly, frozen donkey wheels and time travel trips to the 70s to, ultimately, be a part of ‘the incident’ at all.

Inevitably then, this would have created a paradoxical collapse of the space-time continuum. So instead the Tangent Timeline, or Alternate Timeline, was created and the Island Timeline and the key people in it simply remained in existence as a causality necessity. Strangely, this actually suggests that the Island Timeline is the subordinate timeline, but that’s not really the case – Jack, at least, bears curious memories and trace marks of the timeline his alternate version stemmed from.

Scars of an operation he doesn’t recall. His mother believes it was an event that happened when he was a boy. Course corrected memory? Or was it a real event in the Alternate Timeline that Jack’s brain, still filtering out Island memories, doesn’t recall? Probably not a key question but the important point I am making here is that the Alternate Timeline exists. It isn’t some narrative construct for us, the audience, to have juxtaposed against the Island events. The Alternate Timeline has forged a viable place in Lost – it’s a part of the tapestry. (I guess we can stop thinking about the show as a flat mosaic of timeline pieces and more of a sculptured assembly of events.)

Heavy-going stuff this, I know. But to my opening question. Where did Dr. Linus come from?

He came from the Island. We have to figure that all events we saw up to 1977 happened as we saw them. Ben got shot. He got taken to The Temple and revived. Then he found himself back amongst the Dharma people and, instead of living at The Barracks for most of his life, he instead departed the Island with Roger and went to live a ‘regular’ life.

Interesting that Roger ruminated over what their lives could have been like had they remained on the Island. Despite the fact that his relationship with his son in the Alternate Timeline appears far better than it ever was in the Island Timeline, Roger still muses that their lives would have been better on the Island.

So far we’ve seen examples of characters whose lives appear better in the Alternate Timeline, without the Island. Jack, with his son. Locke, with Helen. Claire was doing OK, too. Sayid was the only real exception – being as ‘bad’ off-Island as he was on it. And Dr. Linus? Well, by the end of this episode, I reckon it’s fair to say he, like Sayid, is similar in both timelines – only he’s now as ‘good’ off-Island as he is on it.

Off-Island, in the Alternate Timeline, Dr. Linus sensed a chance of seizing the power he could barely acknowledge he wanted – to become principle of the school. Encouraged by none other than “the substitute”. . .

. . . and aided by the ever-flustered Arzt (formaldehyde on his shirt at school a slight reference to his death-by-dynamite on the Island (formaldehyde being the preservative chemical pumped into dead people to stop them rotting)) Dr. Linus had temptation dangled before him. The cost? Alex.

Alex Rousseau in this timeline makes me smile, thinking somewhere there’s Danielle and Robert living a good life together, raising a super-smart daughter. And whilst not at the level of daughter, Ben is certainly fond of Alex beyond care he'd oblige other students. Like on the Island, Ben is faced with the choice of power at the cost of Alex’s life (off-Island her educational progress to do well, on-Island her literal life at Keamy’s gunpoint).

We know what choice he made on the Island.

In the Alternate Timeline Ben didn’t have to make the horrible mistake he made. In the Alternate Timeline Dr. Linus relinquished the chance of power for self-contentment and the good of others. He even gave Arzt his parking spot! Why was Dr. Linus able to be so selfless? Put it down to daddy issues. He did firmly state that he was a doctor after all, and there’s a certain other doctor that has daddy issues well-publicised. Like Jack, Ben it seems is a character whose daddy issues drove him down some tormented roads.

In the Island Timeline Roger Linus was a mean, lousy father for the most part and so, cast out from his love, Ben found a new father: the Island and, by extension, Jacob. He was the dutiful son for many years and yet, towards the end, he felt betrayed. He killed Roger with poison gas. He killed Jacob with a dagger in the chest.

Miles stated something intriguing; up to the last moment Jacob held hope for Ben, hope that he was wrong. “What about you?” Suddenly that last defiant question now sounds like a challenge of Ben’s worth, and one he failed. Jacob may have hoped for the best but, it seems certain, he expected the worst and made provision for it (Hurley and his guitar case with a note for Dogen pretty much exemplifies that point).

Jacob’s hope for being wrong wasn’t misplaced, though. Just ill-timed. Ben, by the episode’s end, and his wonderful confession scene with Ilana, had finally learned humility and penance for his mistakes.

The very thing that Nameless, as Locke, came to offer Ben was the very thing he had finally realised wasn’t the most important thing at all. He didn't want to rule the Island. What he wanted was something to work for to earn affection that he never got, and to ultimately fill the hole left by the thing he held most dear. It was Alex. It was always Alex. Ben, the poor boy with the bad father, he just wanted to be a better father to someone else. In this we can better understand why he was apparently so consumed with finding a resolution to the Island’s fertility issues that Richard Alpert was so dismissive of. Alpert dismissed it because it was not in the interests of the Island, or Jacob. It was something Ben, under his own leadership, was directing – for once serving his own needs rather than the will of the Island.

I believe it was significant that Ilana herself remarked that Jacob was like a father to her. We don’t know enough about her story, how Jacob touched her life or where she learned all she knows. But one thing is certain is that her faith is absolutely devout - in the name of the father. . .

When Ben states that he will go to Nameless and his people, Ilana realises that it would be better to have Ben with her rather than against her. Despite the pain at housing Jacob’s murderer, there are bigger concerns. Ilana sacrificed her own vengeance for the greater good. In counterpoint, the other faithful servant of Jacob’s was reeling from the news of Jacob’s death.

There was a little more dust blown off the pages of the very old book called The Richard Alpert Life Story. He had been to The Temple and met with scenes of a massacre – many of his people dead, the rest forsaking what he had followed his whole life. Jacob’s death was, again, an echo of daddy issue betrayal. Alpert had been touched by Jacob and given everlasting life for a purpose he fully believed would one day be revealed – and then Jacob died and hope was extinguished. So Alpert went to the Black Rock, clearly to where his Island life began. (Again, there was an echo of this same idea with the surviving heroes going back to the beach camp – the place where their Island life began.)

As has been subtly hinted at on occasion, Alpert almost surely arrived on the Island on the Black Rock. Was he a slave or a member of the crew? We don’t yet know. Yet that he claimed to have never been back there would suggest that the place held bad memories for him. Either he did something bad there, or something bad happened to him. More information please!

Alpert was also certain of one thing: due to being touched by Jacob he was unable to kill himself. We have seen that before, of course. Most notably there was Jack standing on a bridge. . .

. . . but there was also Michael and his various attempts at ending his life that didn’t pan out (does this mean he was once touched by Jacob?). . .

Michael maybe even had a bigger purpose he never managed to fulfil due to Nameless, in the form of Christian Shephard and Libby, steering him away. There's a big theory to be mined out of that idea. One for another time.

Last time we saw Jack he was staring out to sea. Jacob was sure he’d work things out that way, was sure he would realise he had big things ahead of him. Well, the tide is turning Jacob’s way because Jack is now a man of real faith. His decision to light the dynamite fuse and sit with Alpert with absolute conviction of his survival showed a level of unswerving steel in Shephard’s eyes that encapsulates Jacob’s belief: He’s got what it takes.

Note how Alpert almost instantly deferred to Jack’s leadership (ever the slave, ready for commands?). Hope rekindled that Jacob’s death was not pointless – but it was so his successor could emerge. It’s fitting that as Jack is assuming the role of Jacob’s champion his opponent resides in the form of John Locke. Ever since Season One Jack and Locke have been at odds – forever on opposite sides of belief to each other. Jacob and the Man In Black were rivals. Now the battle continues in its new form of Jack vs Locke.

That’s assuming Locke is still definitely dead, mind. Only, you know, Ilana said something worth pulling up on when she was telling Sun about ‘candidates’. Ilana said there were just six left.

Six? Only I count five still alive. A ‘Kwon’. Jack. Hurley. Sawyer. Sayid. Ilana knows that Locke is dead, that Nameless has claimed his body. Surely that counts him out as a ‘candidate’ right?

(Aside. Nameless, when he met up with Ben. With one subtle force-like gesture of his hand he released the ankle chains that had Ben bound. Hold up. Nameless can do that? Since when!? Aside over.)

Ilana says there are six candidates left. A slip of the tongue? Doesn’t seem likely. So either she still believes there’s hope for Locke as a ‘candidate’ yet, perhaps in whatever flickers of Locke survive within the form of Nameless. Or there’s a candidate that’s remained hidden in plain sight. The one key person missing from the cave ceiling of names that Jacob did touch. Kate Austen.

That’s what I think, anyway. Jacob’s secret candidate, last seen managing to secrete herself in plain sight within Nameless’ group in order to keep close to Claire. She just very well might be Jacob’s ace in the hole. Meanwhile, brilliantly, the remaining band of Jacob's people got together at last and we were treated to another slow-motion reunion on the beach accompanied by Michael Giacchino’s sublime musical score.

And that’s about it. Nothing else in this episode of major note, I believe. Yep. Another week, another episode of Lost, and we’re all just about up to speed. Our heroes are now together to plan their next move. Nameless has his band of people, being lead to surely be used and betrayed by him to achieve his own ends. The stage is set. Oh, but wait. . . What’s that poking out of the water. . .

Straight out of leftfield, here comes Widmore in a submarine!

Was it symbolic that he ignored the people on the beach to continue with his mission? Does that mean he is set on working alongside Nameless? When he once told Locke (in The Life And Death Of Jeremy Bentham) that if he didn’t go back to the Island then the wrong side was going to win the war, was he talking about Team Jacob or Team Nameless? Only Locke going back to the Island is the very thing that facilitated Nameless to be in his current position of ascendancy.

I’m going with the idea that Widmore is there to oppose Nameless, though. When Widmore was leader of The Others maybe he was duped by Nameless, in some form or other, and it resulted in some bad decisions (kill Alex?) and bad judgement that lead to him being banished. Since then he has learned the error of his ways and now he returns to the Island knowing the situation is dire since his plan to have Ben removed failed, Did he somehow know Ben would be the implement Nameless would select to effect the loophole murder of Jacob? Was that what the Freighter mission was about?. I don’t know the answer, but I can’t wait to find out!

Analysis: 6.6 Sundown

2010-03-05T19:43:00.008Z

Last week I predicted that this episode was going to be a Sun-centric one. Turned out I was flat out wrong. And you know what? I don’t mind. This episode was all about wrongfooting the audience so it could smack us upside the head with its knockout surprise sucker punches towards the end. From my personal entertainment point of view being wrong never felt so right!

Sayid, the torturer with the tortured soul, just before he ‘died’ wondered about where he would go. Given the life he has lead and the things he has done his heart of hearts knew he could only be going someplace bad.

Sayid: “I’ve tortured more people than I can remember. I murdered. Wherever I’m going, it can’t be very pleasant. . . I deserve it.”

Whilst this episode apparently dispensed with the ‘flashback template’ of Season One, it did have tie-ins with Sayid’s Season One focused episode Solitary. In that episode we saw his journey after he had imposed banishment on himself as a punishment for having tortured Sawyer. Thematically Sundown retread the same ground, with a banished Sayid venturing out into the wilderness hoping to find redemption on his own terms – only this time he had ventured out into the wilderness of death and the Sayid that returned had, as Dogen described it, an imbalance between the black and white sides of himself.

I’m still not clear on how electrocution and branding with hot metal displayed the findings Dogen was so certain of but, by the episode’s end, I think it’s fair to say that the test was proved fairly conclusive: the dark heart of Sayid had very much taken hold.

So let’s look at the events leading up to the best double-murder jaw-dropper since, well, a certain Michael Dawson pumped a few rounds into a couple of unsuspecting tail-end ladies in The Swan, and let's give some credit to how this episode so excellently swept the rug out from under us.

The Alt-Timeline story was, as it turned out, a parallel of the on-Island events, showing us for the first time a character in that timeline who wasn’t particularly any better off. Here Sayid was clearly still devoted in his heart to Nadia but, like exiling himself from the group as a form of penance as he did in Solitary, he had pushed her into the arms of his brother as a result of his belief that he wasn’t worthy of her.

Of course the episode kind of lulled you into believing that Sayid was being a little too hard on himself and that Alt-Timeline Sayid, like Alt-Jack and Alt-Locke, was surely worthy of a better life. One where he could be more of a father to his nephews than his brother was, and more of a husband to Nadia. But when pushed, when drawn to the fundamental nature of kill or not kill, Keamy and all his egg-making skills tipped the scales towards murder.

Whilst it’s still difficult to rationalise exactly how these Alternate Timeline forays are going to tie in to the Island events it almost felt like something tangible was being touched on when Sayid encountered Nameless. Under Dogen’s instructions Sayid took the special dagger and, first chance he got, stuck it in Nameless’ chest to absolutely no effect.

Did Nameless not die because he got the chance to speak? Or was it really like he suggested, that Dogen had sent Sayid out on a pointless mission in the hope he would be killed for his murder attempt?

It’s hard to say. I’d like to think Dogen held hope for Sayid (tragically for him it was that belief that caused him to lower his guard and therefore be surprise-dunked and drowned in the pool). We learned that Dogen hadn’t been on the Island all that long. He wasn’t some all-knowing templar of the Island. He was there, like Juliet on the promise that her sister could be cured of cancer, so the son he felt responsible for seriously injuring would be saved.

Like Sayid, Dogen was serving a self-enforced penance for personal sins. This is interesting, because it’s only through this angle of thinking does Sayid being made a candidate by Jacob make any kind of sense.

Let’s face it, Sayid isn’t exactly the first name that springs to mind when you consider who ought to make ‘candidate’ material. A once-torturer turned ruthless assassin, he’s not anything like approaching good and wholesome. Yet Dogen was a drunk-driver that almost took his own son’s life. Again, hardly a great role model. But what he and Sayid share is the character trait to exile themselves to work out their own morality.

Dogen referred to every man harbouring a black and a white element within them, and it being a balance of power over domination. Note how Dogen also contains this struggle – in the (absolutely bloody awesome!) scrap he nearly delivered the fatal strike, but held himself fast. A murderer nestled in Dogen’s soul, too – unlike Sayid he managed to rein it in.

Original Sayid might, maybe, have been able to do the same thing. But that was before he was brought back after two hours being dead, returned by some force surely connected with Nameless but not fully explained. This made Sayid susceptible to Nameless’ instructions, more pliable, and less resistant to prevent a black imbalance within him. If Nameless is said to exert control over people it is in this internal struggle does he wield his power. But before we get to that, let me briefly return to the matter of him speaking with Sayid.

Similarly to telling Sawyer that he could provide the answer to the most important question of all, Nameless told Sayid he could give him the thing he desired most of all. (Was it just my interpretation of Nameless here, or were there visible signs of him conjuring up the right temptations before he spoke his selected words to lure Sayid in?) What Sayid most desired was, surely, Nadia – but she’s dead. Except not in the Alternate Timeline. . .

Like I said earlier, it felt here in this moment there was almost some tangible connection being hinted at between the Alternate Timeline and how it may come into play for the Island Timeline. It feels just out of reach, but there’s a sense that maybe it’s something Nameless can show Sayid, or give him the possibility of having as real? It infuriatingly feels so close and yet so far removed from what seems plausible.

What I do think is interesting is that these Alternate Timelines do seem to reflect, or exacerbate, the fundamental elements of our main characters. Jack came to the Island with father issues – in the other timeline he is making efforts to be a good father. Locke came to the Island restlessly seeking purpose – in the other timeline he has reconciled hope with reality to find happiness. Sayid? Came to the Island wanting to absolve himself of his past and find Nadia – in the other timeline he wanted the exact same thing. I believe this may be the fundamental reason why Nameless’ battle to claim Sayid’s soul won through.

I don’t hold out much hope for Sayid ever getting back to the ‘white side’ now. Like he told Ben, it’s too late for him. Yet by the end of the episode Claire and Kate were counted amongst the ranks of Nameless’ legion of followers.

Claire, I believe it’s fair to say, through a mixture of manipulation and who knows what else over the years has had her mind and soul converted, bent over the loss of Aaron – but I don’t think she is lost like Sayid. She did something very important before she marched into The Temple. Something incredibly demonstrative. She questioned Nameless’ command. She asked him why he didn’t just do what he was making her do. If Claire’s mind was wholly surrendered to Nameless, if her will was not her own, she wouldn’t have done that. And, also, she is going to eventually realise he lied to her about Aaron. That’s not going to go down well.

Kate was the more confusing conversion – apparently entranced by something she saw in the Black Smoke as it zipped over her head, after this she adopted similar mannerisms and vacancy of stare as the rest of Nameless’ followers. Question is: Is she really converted, or just playing along?

Nameless seemed a little surprised to see Kate emerge and join the group, suggesting for one thing her conversion was not intentional. Potentially he’s complacent with his power and casually accepted her joining the ranks, which is understandable. Plenty of other Others have swiftly joined up, why not Kate? And Kate, let’s not forget, has not been marked out as an official candidate so, for Nameless, she really doesn’t afford too special a place of importance. That may be Nameless’ big mistake and Jacob’s quiet triumph.

I am literally 50/50 on what to believe about Kate. I feel like she seemed to change as a result of what she saw in the Black Smoke and, as such, I believe her joining Nameless’ group was not an act of subterfuge. However, if she really isn’t faking it I don’t believe the grip will be as tight on her as it is on, say, Claire. A meet back up with Sawyer (what is he up to at the moment!?) might be enough to jolt some ‘sense’ into one, or both, of them and give the ‘good guys’ a couple more allies.

There is the argument that Nameless isn’t the bad guy, of course. That all of what he says – that he was once a man that was betrayed, that all he wants is to be free and to tear down the machinations of Jacob and the world of the Island, that he will lead everyone to freedom and a life of free will – maybe it’s all true. Maybe that’s exactly it. Not good vs. evil. More fate versus free will. Jacob controlling fate, Nameless endorsing free will. There’s merit in that view, for sure, but I’m still not buying.

Dogen referred to him as “evil incarnate”. Richard Alpert certainly knows something that has him running scared. Maybe their beliefs are entirely because of Jacob and are wrong? Hmm, maybe. But then I remember this kid. . .

. . . and the look in Nameless’ eyes, in the body of the man with the last pitiable thought that ran ‘I don’t understand’ telling Ben that all he wanted was to go home. . .

. . . as well as the manipulation of Ben into committing murder for the sake of the loophole he had been seeking for many long years. None of this strikes me as good. Jacob’s trouble is that his benign, almost passive-aggressive silence means he isn’t making a good case as to why we should really be getting behind him.

Right now we’re listening to the devil, who has all the best tunes, and it’s tempting to tap your foot and nod your head along with the music. Jacob drives a hard bargain, for sure. Too hard? Preventing Dogen from ever seeing the son he saved? Yes, that’s hard. But we don’t know Jacob’s endgame. As stated, he isn’t making a very good case for himself so far but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.

In a classic good versus evil war, though, it’s only dramatically right that Nameless is gathering power. If he wasn’t formidable then the eventual triumph of our heroes wouldn’t be so remarkable. Jack’s staring out to sea right now – unaware of the gathering threat. But he’s got what it takes. Have faith.

Couple more points to make, though they’re more like highlights of the unknown. The first, and probably for me the one element of Sundown that really stuck in my craw, was Dogen’s death seemingly allowing Nameless, in Black Smoke form, to storm The Temple and cause carnage.

I don’t understand why it was purely Dogen being alive that was what afforded the Temple protection when we were previously lead to believe it was the circle of ash. I don’t have any good answers to this. Possibly it was that a ‘candidate’, Sayid, acting on the word of Nameless, had murdered Dogen – kind of like effecting another loophole exploitation.

No, I’m not thrilled by that either.

More thrilling, yet equally mysterious, was this:

What the hell is Jin doing in a fridge? Evidently held there by Keamy and his men, it would follow that he met with them and they turned on him. If the reason why he was making the flight on Oceanic 815 to LA was the same as in the Original Timeline (that he was delivering gold watches as part of a business arrangement courtesy of Sun’s father, Mr. Paik) I can hazard speculation. That Mr. Paik was somehow in business with Keamy and his people (or maybe whoever Keamy answers to – Widmore again?). Unimpressed with the gold watch, or whatever else Jin represented as an offer (perhaps he was sent there to kill Keamy and it backfired?), Keamy and his men captured Jin and, almost literally, kept him on ice for later.

Whatever the way of it, one thing is evident: In the Island Timeline and the Alternate Timeline Jin cannot catch a break.

I suspect Jin being imprisoned in the fridge strongly suggests he has also been bound and held by Nameless over at Claire’s camp, potentially whilst he works out whether it’s this Kwon, or Sun, who is a genuine ‘candidate’. Maybe Ilana and Miles and Sun will get to him first, but I doubt it. They’ve proven surprisingly incompetent every step of the way so far! Yet they are still in the game. Like Jack and Hurley. Like Alpert. Sundown has fallen on the Island as events move into their darkest ever phase, but those white pieces are scattered around trying to take shape against surmounting odds. There’s everything to play for. Maybe really seriously everything to play for. Sundown is over, a showdown beckons.

Analysis: 6.5 Lighthouse

2010-02-27T09:26:00.009Z

To be honest I’d noticed this last week but didn’t really think it was going to bear out. And then this episode turned out to be Jack-centric and confirmed the pattern that has, initially at least, been paralleled. Season 6 is following the same template as Season 1. Both seasons started with a two-part opener featuring various characters, and then we’ve had Kate-centric episodes (S1: Tabula Rasa / S6: What Kate Does), then Locke-centric ones (S1: Walkabout / S6: The Substitute) and now a Jack-centric offering (S1: White Rabbit / S6: Lighthouse).

White Rabbit was referenced a lot, too. The whole drive of that Season 1 episode was for Jack, by chasing his dead father through the jungle, to stop pursuing this phantom and instead draw on his own qualities. As such he became self-appointed leader of the survivors with that “live together, die alone” speech. Here with the Lighthouse Jack was once again to be convinced he has what it takes to step up to the challenge he is destined for. Cue: pensive staring at the sea.

This episode even revisited the “rape caves”, showed us the empty coffin Jack once trashed and even, for those not picking up the references, had Jack pick up an actual white rabbit! The clear relation between Season 1 and Season 6, White Rabbit and Lighthouse, couldn’t be more apparent. Next week, with the episode Sundown, we can very much expect to see a Sun-centric episode. I’m not sure how they’ll stick to the pattern beyond that though, because the next episode that would follow is a Charlie-centric one!

But I’m getting way ahead of myself. There’s this Lighthouse in front of us that needs the door’s kicking down so we can get inside and see what’s what. Fundamentally the lighthouse served a similar function for Jack as the cave did for Sawyer in the previous episode: it pulled back the curtain to reveal a masterplan they were part of. Interestingly both men reached the same reaction (a sense of being cheated that their sense of free will was apparently superfluous). Yet whereas Nameless is utilising this emotion to recruit Sawyer, Jacob seems confident that Jack will eventually come around to realising it’s the better way.

As things stand, Jacob’s way is actually the harder sell. Nameless, with all his seductive talk of freedom and free will, no doubt has an easier time getting people to follow him. (Though I still recall the hard look in his eyes when he told Ben all he wanted was to go home, and Claire’s murderous qualities are no doubt formed through his manipulations, so I am still, mostly, reckoning he is a force of ‘evil’ though it’s hopefully not as strictly black and white as, well, black and white stones on a scale may indicate.)

The Alternate Timeline flashbacks are a hugely debatable aspect in this whole idea. We were shown Jack has not only wrestled with his ‘daddy issues’ to a far more mature level than he has managed on the Island, he’s a father himself and, by the end, actually making as good a job of it as he can.

Crucially, Lighthouse proffered another Alternate Timeline flashback that showed a character, if not so much finding outright happiness, at least finding contentment or a sense of moral rectitude. Again I wonder if the Alternate Timeline is a version of the world where Jacob had no hand in the lives of our main characters and what we are seeing is how things would have been without his interference.

Fact is, on the evidence so far, the Alternate Timeline is fairly damning of Jacob’s meddling and enforces Nameless’ opinion that he has done no good bringing people to the Island. But this brings me to an interesting question: Who are these Alternate Flashbacks for?

The regular flashbacks served two functions, basically. They gave us information about characters that helped us understand who they were on the Island (and, in the case of flashforwards, what became of them when they left) – to that end they were for us. But they were also fundamentally part of the characters. When Sawyer was chasing a boar through the jungle because of a whispered voice we learned it was because of the murder of Frank Duckett that he had done previously, plaguing his thoughts – to that end they were integral to the characters and events on the Island.

The Alternate Flashbacks aren’t cut from the same cloth. The events on the Island and the events in the Alt-Flashbacks are separate. At best they offer juxtaposition and irony (Jack’s remarks to Hurley about how he wouldn’t make a good father, for example) but in terms of integral meaning there’s a complete discrepancy. So I ask again: Who are these Alternate Flashbacks for? Because the immediate reaction is to consider them a pure narrative device designed entirely for us, the viewing audience.

I’ve got a couple of problems with this. For one it means that these Alternate Flashbacks are almost dispensable. To understand events on the Island we don’t need to see Alt-Flashbacks (and vice versa). And secondly, they undercut each other’s value. If everyone dies horribly on the Island then there’s always this entirely separate, out of nowhere version of events where everyone ends up happy. That, to me, feels like a cheat. If it’s to be the way of things that Jacob’s intervention means a miserable end for all concerned then so be it – don’t try and cushion the blow with this conjured-up happy ever after.

Fortunately there’s still very much the prospect that these timelines are linked and will ultimately come to be meaningful to each other, and as in the first episodes it seems Jack is that throughline. Just like he had a small nick on his neck on Oceanic 815, here we saw him puzzling over an appendectomy scar he had no recollection of. His mother’s assurance that it was an event that occurred when he was nine still didn’t really register and that seems very improbable; if you’d had surgery at nine-years-old and bore the scar for the rest of your life you wouldn’t need reminding about it. You’d just know.

What seems to be really the case is that the scar is a remnant of Jack’s time on the Island – at the end of Season 4 when Juliet performed surgery on him.

Trace recollections and physical reminders of the Island persist into the Alternate Timeline. Dogen’s appearance at the piano recital, like Ethan’s appearance in What Kate Does, draws together the feeling of fate rather than coincidence. These people find each other because of their shared Island heritage they can scarcely recall. I can’t help but be reminded of Desmond in Flashes Before Your Eyes – travelling mentally back in time to his life with Penny and all the numerous Island references that eventually awoke his memory and, with a whack from a cricket bat, sent him right back to the jungle.

I will linger on this to make just one more point that is a potential justification of the Alternate Timeline and the reason why they appear to have such positive, happy results. Perhaps the shape of the show’s conclusion, and the result of whatever happens on the Island, will fulfil whatever masterplan Jacob has and these Alternate Flashbacks are the finished resolution. In effect, we’re seeing the ends already – on the Island we’re just watching what our characters did to reach them.

I’m not crash hot on that last idea but it’s sitting in my mind so I figured I’d give it an airing. Getting back to the topic of scars, Claire showed us her own branding mark she had apparently received at the hands of Dogen and the Temple Others.

I thought it was interesting that Claire’s scar hasn’t healed. Is this a physical presentation that Jacob’s healing powers no longer apply to her, since she was claimed by Nameless? I believe so. I think we can better understand what happened to Sayid now. It was the talk of ‘sickness’ that was misleading. Better was the explanation that he had been “claimed”. I now think of it like ‘stained’ – that Nameless managed to put his mark on Sayid, like an invisible blanket.

Claire, being claimed, doesn’t seem in full control of her mind. I don’t think she’s doing the bidding of Nameless, rather she’s more amenable to coercion and has had her mind twisted by deceit (fuelled by the missing Aaron) and provoked into vengeance by years in the wilderness. Claire isn’t the astrological Earth mother – she’s an axe-wielding lunatic. She claims to be in contact with two people – her father and her friend. It would be interesting to know if Christian ever appears again to her. At the moment I believe that Christian’s appearance was Nameless in disguise. But if Nameless really is now locked in Locke’s form then an appearance by Christian would completely dispel that notion.

It seems easiest to believe Nameless has taken various forms – Christian, Yemi, Alex, Locke – to manipulate people into doing his bidding. That we last saw Claire in Jacob’s cabin with Christian, where Nameless had apparently taken up residence given Ilana’s findings and burning of the place after seeing the circle of ash was broken, only further validates that idea. Claire got taken away, ‘claimed’, and had her mind warped beyond rational thinking. The only hope for her, and Sayid, is that somehow putting a stop to Nameless permanently will release the hold he has on them, otherwise I don’t fancy Claire will ever be fit for motherhood again!

Claire reveals her friend, Nameless, as Locke, at the end of the episode.

Curiously she corrected Jin when he identified Locke, stating it wasn’t him. Explanation? Either Nameless doesn’t look like Locke to Claire (perhaps he looks like the guy we saw talking to Jacob, the man in black, at the start of The Incident), or Claire’s ‘claimed’ mind understands enough about Nameless to know that, though he may look like Locke, he isn’t Locke yet he is not someone to be feared. I go with the latter. He managed to turn Sawyer around in a day (or, at least, so it appears, though I still want Sawyer to be running a long con about this!) so over the course of a few years there’s no telling how twisted Claire’s beliefs have been screwed.

Jin, of course, is now in a pretty tight spot.

Nameless doesn’t know if he is or isn’t a candidate, which would therefore suggest that he’s going to try and recruit him just to be on the safe side. However, as Jacob has warned, next stop would appear to be The Temple. Claire will be all set for killing (cannot wait to see what happens when she and Kate catch up!), and Nameless will no doubt be exploiting her to get access. Jin is sure to be dragged along and I expect he’s going to be Miles’ best chance of getting out of there alive, and Miles might just be his – carrying him out of there on his injured leg. That is unless Nameless manages to recruit Jin first. . .

All the rest of the candidates have managed to move themselves out of this apparent firing line. Jacob got both Hurley and Jack out of there (loving Hurley’s Obi-Wan reference) with his usual blend of benign cryptic benevolence. Question: what the hell was he fishing for in the Temple pool?

Ah, probably he was just trying to return his healing powers to the water but you know what, never mind; there’s bigger fish (ha!) to fry. Such as:

The lighthouse that no one has seen before now because they weren’t looking for it (I don’t read anything profoundly ‘magic box’ like about this – I think it was the writers using Hurley to make a joke, similar to his musings about going back to “dinosaur times” to wind up becoming Adam and/or Eve). At the top of the tower, a wheel of names attached to a mirror; a mirror that reflects back the world of the person connected to the bearing; the mechanism Jacob used to watch over his candidates from the Island and guide them in.

We briefly saw Kwon and Sawyer’s home world, as well as the house that Jack grew up in – that prompted him to get smash-happy. It’s all as farfetched as it is reasonable. This is Lost. There’s an Island with a lighthouse on it with a mirror on the top that a guy used to view people he wanted to bring there. OK. Fine. If you say so. There were two interesting pieces of information, though.

First, Kate Austen was present as one of the names on the wheel: Number 51. Aside from being ‘15’ backwards it would take some tenuous maths to force her into being one of the key ‘candidate’ 4 8 15 16 23 42 numbers. I suspect the whole list of names and numbers indicates everyone Jacob has brought to the Island (them being crossed off indicating when they’ve either died or served their purpose) so it does, at least, indicate Kate serves some purpose.

Jacob also instructed Hurley to move the dial to ‘108’, a number occupied by a crossed-out name ‘Wallace’, to ensure someone came to the Island.

There’s speculation that this person due to arrive on the Island could be Desmond – he’s the one key character suspiciously out of the frame at present. Quite how Desmond Hume fits to the name Wallace is beyond me. I’m torn between wondering whether anyone is actually coming to the Island at all, or whether Jacob simply picked the number ‘108’ to ensure the wheel got turned and Jack would look in the mirror and catch glimpses of his old house.

My heart says, Let Desmond be due to arrive. My head says, There’s no reason for such hope.

But let’s have some faith. Jack, staring out to sea, is slowly finding his way to becoming the same kind of man of faith that Locke once was when he first arrived on the Island. Nameless may have claimed John Locke, but there’s another man slowly realising that there was nothing accidental about his arrival on the Island. That there is a fate and a destiny and, most importantly of all, he’s got what it takes.

Analysis: 6.4 The Substitute

2010-02-20T08:11:00.009Z

It’s OK. All is well with the world. Lost as we know it has been restored to full working order. There are those of us that spent all of Season 5 consumed with a sense that something was missing, something integral to the Lost universe had been mislaid. Mercifully, Season 6 rectified this state of affairs. With The Substitute we finally had an appearance of uber-douche Randy Nations.

Randy has featured in almost every single season of Lost and he was a glaring omission from Season 5. This has now been put right. All is well with the world. And, amazingly enough, Randy’s appearance in The Substitute didn’t even turn out to be the most interesting thing about the episode! Imagine that! Oh no, instead, this top notch Locke-centric instalment proffered up some mighty morsels for us to feast our brains upon.

It’s worth tackling the Alternate Timeline story first, not because the intricacies and crop of character appearances were particularly illuminating but because of the potential larger idea that may be developing. Although it is worth pointing out that this Hurley. . .

. . . knew this Rose, as she was his employee. . .

. . . and both of them were on the same flight from Sydney to L.A.! Whether they realised this or not, it’s curious enough to mention. How many times have you been on a long haul flight someplace and bumped into someone you work with making the same journey!?

But that’s by the by. The bigger idea is what the state of things are with the Alternate Timeline. Locke, for example, appeared to have a vastly different life than the history we already know. He was in a wheelchair, yes. And he went to Australia and failed to make a Walkabout journey. Fair enough. But in this timeline he is getting married to Helen. And, more startlingly, he appears to be in good relations with his father, Anthony Cooper.

Now Cooper isn’t expressly mentioned by name so let’s not go riding right out on any assumptions – but I personally think the intended point was explicit: in this timeline Cooper was not the guy that robbed Locke of a kidney or shoved him out of a high storey window. Does this, then, mean Cooper was also not ‘the real Sawyer’? Was he not the guy that would trigger a chain of events that would lead Sawyer to a lifetime pursuit of revenge?

Only if this is so, then who is Sawyer in the Alternate Timeline? The finer details aren’t important, but what I am driving at here is this fundamental point: If Anthony Cooper didn’t swindle James Ford’s parents then James, as a boy, would never have attended their funeral and so begun a letter of vengeance that Jacob would offer up a pen for.

We were made very aware of these visitations Jacob made in the Island Timeline, affording us a direct counterpoint of comparison. The brazen idea is that Jacob never ‘touched’ the lives of our main characters in the Alternate Timeline, and this may be a very important point. Hang on to it for the moment.

In the same vein, we were also introduced to this rather fey version of Ben in the Alternate Timeline.

As well as comically inducing memories of that time Ben wore an apron and minced around the kitchen cooking for Juliet, and posing questions about this timeline Ben’s sexuality, we have to question if this Ben was ever on the Island at all.

Consider that in 1977, at the time of Jughead and ‘the incident’, Ben had been stolen away into The Temple to be revived. We have rationalised that, in the Alternate Timeline, 'the incident' occurred and the likes of the Dharma people evacuated the Island before it sank under the ocean. Hence Ethan Goodspeed. . .

. . . surely transported off the Island as a baby and raised by Horace and Amy Goodspeed? Right now, for simplicity, that’s my interpretation. When the sunken Island was shown we saw it had Dharma Barracks there, so we know that even in the Alternate Timeline it was an Island that had existed much as we knew it had up to 1977. I just leave a small caveat about Ben. Maybe he was taken off the Island after being revived in The Temple, or maybe he really was never there at all. As though ‘the incident’, as well as creating an Alternate Timeline future also sent ripples of distortion into history that changed the past – like a kind of retro course correction.

Like, yeah, Dharma did find the Island and set up Barracks there. But Horace and Amy weren’t part of it. They were course corrected to find each other in the regular world and there they had a son together, and they called him Ethan, and he grew up to be a surgeon and none of them ever knew the Island at all.

As such, does this ‘retro course correction’, or Alternate Timeline history, therefore extend to periods before 1977 for other characters? Such as Jacob coming to see Sawyer? Is the Alternate Timeline actually presenting us with how the world would have been for our main characters had Jacob not intervened?

Nameless seduced Sawyer with promises of answers and basically proposed the idea that Sawyer’s entire life’s course had been because of Jacob’s intervention. The insinuation was that Sawyer’s life was worse because of Jacob’s actions. Potentially the Alternate Timeline will serve to suggest, amongst other things, that it either isn’t or that, really, it wasn’t that much different at all.

Locke may have seemed happier in this version of 2004, perhaps. But he was still in a wheelchair – his spine still got broken somehow. And who’s to say that in Alternate Timeline 2007 Locke won’t still be just as dead as he is in the Island Timeline?

I mean, we’re definitely all now sure that Locke’s dead, right? Right? Because me, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t just a little flicker of Locke ticking away inside the body that Nameless has approximated. We know Nameless took Locke’s memories, his thoughts up to the very last one – so what’s to say that Locke’s personality and spirit hasn’t also somehow survived the transition and are simply struggling to surface? Claire once had a dream where Locke featured – his form sporting a black eye and a white eye. It would be a neat symbolisation of the ‘white’ of Locke co-existing within the ‘black’ of Nameless, would it not?

I believe we were very much shown that Nameless, as Locke, is perhaps at his most vulnerable. He’s taken a risk to get what he wants, to get “home”. The moment he ran through the jungle and fell was a fine example. Compare and contrast with the swift and speedy rush through the jungle and Barracks in the form of the Black Smoke with the clumsy human form. There’s no doubt Nameless is formidably dangerous, but he may not be invulnerable – and Ilana’s remark about how he is now permanent in Locke’s form was incredibly important and frustratingly vague. How does she even know?

And if Nameless genuinely is stuck in Locke’s body then, seriously, what the hell does that mean for Sayid?

I guess we can safely assume that whatever Sayid is, he isn’t another counterpart of Nameless/Black Smoke. I don’t know what he is (my first instinct was that he is pretty much Sayid as we knew him brought back but with a little bit of Jacob inside him – I’m not discounting it yet) the same way I don’t know why Nameless could go from being able to shift into, say, Alex to being a permanent resident in the form of John Locke. The only significant event between ‘the Alex appearance’ and Nameless being ‘locked in Locke’ was the death of Jacob, and it’s certainly the only crucial knowledge Ilana has been made aware of to form her judgement. So I don’t know why but that’s the reason for it. Now Jacob is dead Nameless is stuck in the form he took when it happened.

Just go with it, I guess. We’ve got a whole lot of other complications to occupy our sense of sensibility. Like this kid:

Nameless saw him, and it freaked him out. Alpert couldn’t see him. But like the time Kate saw a Black Horse in the jungle, Sawyer could see the child as well. Perhaps it's the fact Kate and Sawyer have both been touched by Jacob, as has Locke. (There’s that idea, again, that suggests Locke’s still ‘in there’, somewhere – “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”). If the child is a Young Jacob (my first instinct) there’s a sensible enough logic to be arrived at. That’s a big if, though. The child remarked, “You know the rules. You can’t kill him.”

We naturally reach the assumption the ‘him’ meant Jacob. But if this child was a Young Jacob (reasonably close approximation in terms of physical looks, I should add). . .

. . . then it’s an odd turn of phrase to talk about himself like that. So whilst it seems like a nice fit I have to figure it’s not the case. There’s a popular idea that the boy is a more grown-up Aaron. Maybe he is. I can’t rationally dispute it for precisely the same reason I can’t rationally support it. That he had blood on his arms seemed important, mind. Blood on the hands symbolises guilt. Blood on the hands and arms? Maybe symbolises a lot of guilt.

Nameless, as Locke, spoke of how he had once been a regular man. He said, “I know what it’s like to feel joy. . . to experience betrayal. I know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”

Maybe the boy was Nameless’ son, the someone he loved that he lost. Or the boy is some higher power, responsible for Nameless being trapped and direct cause of his knowledge of betrayal. But mostly I think that Nameless is a top class liar and there’s no reason not to believe that when he says he’s experienced betrayal it’s because he was the betrayer. Maybe the boy so shocked him and made him lose his cool, made him so quickly want to forget, because it was a death he was responsible for – like the time Mr. Eko was visited by the ghoulish apparitions of the gangsters he slaughtered. One thing seems certain: this boy is an aspect of Nameless’ past coming back to keep him on the ‘right’ path. Is that not what all the weird apparitions have functioned as, more or less?

But let’s steer towards a conclusion with the idea that Nameless isn’t being as honest and upfront with Sawyer as he seems. Richard Alpert, despite having the same promise of answers dangled before him, wasn’t so easily swayed. Whilst I like the idea that Nameless is being portrayed with more than jet-black villainous qualities, he’s still the guy that used Ben’s dead daughter to make him murder Jacob whilst pretending to be Locke – he is, until I know better, the black to Jacob’s white.

The tossing away of the white stone, heavily signifying the balance of power had shifted in favour of black, pretty much stated where Nameless considers himself, in-joke or not. The big hope is that Sawyer, that confidence trickster, hasn’t been as hooked in by all of what he has heard but is just playing along until he spies an advantage. Surely he wouldn’t have taken Alpert’s warning that everyone he cared about would be killed in complete disregard? Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

And so we come to the numbers. Ever the conundrum, more enlightenment leads to further perplexion. Here we saw that our core values – 4 8 15 16 23 42 – had been carved into the rock and attributed to key characters.

4 – Locke; 8 – Reyes; 15 – Ford; 16 – Jarrah; 23-Shephard; 42 – Kwon

Daniel Faraday’s chatter of people being variables primed us for this moment: to accept key characters as being values in the equation that, purportedly, calculates the end of mankind. Potentially, Dharma and Valenzetti all just somehow tapped into this cosmic set of numbers but, being unable to comprehend an unscientific entity such as Jacob, reached conclusions about the equation’s results that don’t align entirely with what Jacob himself was calculating.

But enough with the heady mathematical theory, how about the white elephant in the room? How about the complete non-appearance of Kate Austen amongst the numbers? I got three ideas – two simple, one a massive theory that I’ll end on. So the two simple ideas are that Kate was not present as one of the regular numbers because she is more important – her role is bigger than the other variables. (I’m not really keen on this, to be honest.)

The second idea is the opposite of her being important, it’s her being entirely unimportant. When Jacob touched her on the nose as a little girl, marking her out as a candidate, he told her that she should stay out of trouble. Murder, robbery and a fugitive life later, it’s fair to say she didn’t maintain that side of the bargain.

As such, maybe Jacob struck her off the list of candidates. Maybe he then went to Hurley (he who wasn’t even supposed to make the Oceanic 815 flight, if you remember, maybe he’s the substitute!), and marked him out as a candidate rather than Kate – perhaps her kidnap of Aaron was the final straw? (I do like a lot about this theory except for the fact that it rather callously throws Kate on the scrapheap. She’s worth more than that treatment, surely?)

However, the last alternative is also a rather cute one that paves a theory to one of Lost’s long-standing mysteries. Consider ‘Kwon’. Nameless remarked that he didn’t know if it referred to Jin or Sun. However, it was pointedly shown that Jacob touched both of them.

Kwon, therefore, could stand for the pair of them. Jin and Sun. They, together, are the variable number 42. And so what if – and just run with me here – Kate was also looped into the candidate list in a similar way? Like, you know, if she happened to marry a certain spinal surgeon, she would then become a ‘Shephard’. (He already proposed and she already said yes – they just didn’t seal the deal!)

It seems crazy, but I can imagine a little Island beach wedding ceremony taking place. Jack and Kate, Lost’s leading couple, getting together in perfect circumstances. And furthermore, maybe they would then become the permanent candidates for the Island’s protection. A couple united on the Island, calibrating a perfect balance between black and white. And hey, wasn’t there a certain other male and female couple on the Island with a black stone and white stone on them? Our Adam and Eve, skeleton cave couple? Maybe their bodies were laid to rest there, permanently, whilst their eternal spirits presided over the Island. Maybe they really are Jack and Kate after all. Mr and Mrs. Shephard: variable number 23.

Analysis: 6.3 What Kate Does

2010-02-11T22:10:00.009Z

Traditionally, Kate-centric episodes aren’t usually ones to fill a Lost fan’s heart with excitement. This is due in part because Kate’s episodes invariably come early in the season, when events maintain less impetus and mysteries are being set-up rather than revealed. But it’s also inherently to do with Kate’s character being mostly defined by other characters. Take the love triangle, for example. It’s less about whom Kate will end up with and more about which of Jack or Sawyer will get her. And in this Kate-centric episode, who do we most think about once the credits roll? Claire, Sayid, Jack and Sawyer – in roughly that order of importance. Poor Kate.

Riffing on the Season 2 episode What Kate Did, the use of the present tense of What Kate Does is indicative of what Season 6 is all about. There are no flashbacks now. We’re not concerned with what happened. We have two timelines running parallel and we’re interested in what’s happening. (Indeed, if Sayid’s question at the end of the previous episode was “What happened?” then surely the response to the end of What Kate Does is a near-exasperated, “What’s happening?”)

Let’s pick up the alternate timeline first, to start us off relatively simply. Here was Kate escaping the airport in the taxi, with Claire (who, yes, was pregnant). Like Jack in the last episode, we were given the sense that remnants of the Island Timeline permeate into this Alternate Timeline and characters’ unconscious. Kate taking a momentary glance at Jack in the car mirror. . .

. . . to Claire’s almost ludicrous willingness to remain with Kate, there’s more recognition and familiarity than they quite know how to rationalise. If the person that had kidnapped me at gunpoint came back I wouldn’t hang around to chat. And I sure as hell wouldn’t get back in the car with them! Yet perhaps some distant recollection from another timeline flickered in Claire, telling her Kate could be trustworthy, that she was even the right person to have by her side when she went into labour – and so Claire got in the car with Kate.

That name, Aaron, was a significant ‘out of nowhere’ titling. Claire surprised herself by announcing the intended name, and even Kate had a look of startled recognition when she heard it. Again, further hints that this Alternate Timeline holds some memory of the Island Timeline. Maybe they depend on one another. That there’s reconciliation between the two being paralleled whereupon we will find our resolution – this point I’ll pick up again towards the end.

There was some stuff here for the longtime Lost fans to sink their mental teeth into. Consider Richard Malkin, for example, who way back in Season 1 told Claire that he had lined up a couple for her in L.A. that would look after her baby.

Now since Claire was onboard the non-crashing Oceanic 815 and was there to meet up with a couple to take her baby, it would seem that the events we saw previously – of her meeting up with Malkin – happened the same way. If so, this perhaps clears up the matter of whether or not Malkin was really psychic.

At the end of Raised By Another Charlie reached the conclusion that Malkin really was a psychic and had simply made up the story of the couple in LA to get Claire on the flight – Oceanic 815 – knowing it would crash and she would have to raise the child herself. Yet, confusingly, Malkin did himself say he was a fraud to Mr. Eko in Season 2.

And now, in What Kate Does, we find there really was another couple waiting in LA (albeit in this Alternate Timeline which affords wriggle room for doubt) and the notion that Malkin had some psychic vision for Claire looks dubious. In short, for those fans left wondering whether Malkin was psychic or not, I am falling down on the conclusion that he wasn’t. See? Who said we wouldn’t get answers this season!?

And hey, how about this guy showing up?

No longer Ethan Rom as he was once ridiculously anagrammed to, here he was Ethan Goodspeed. A quick re-jigging of Alternate Timeline history then suggests that baby Ethan born on the Island in 1977. . .

. . . was shipped off the place before it plunged beneath the depths (validation that the Jughead explosion didn’t immediately sink the Island), probably with mother Amy and maybe with Horace, and raised as a ‘Goodspeed’ where he became a doctor. Retrospect made his remarks about not wanting to stick Claire with needles somewhat sinister, considering how he treated Claire during the Island Timeline, but I don’t believe we’re supposed to read anything untoward into it. Just one of those irony-things.

Before we leave the Alternate Timeline, one more piece of arcane Lost trivia. Kate used the name ‘Joan Hart’ to pass herself off as at the hospital. She’s used this name before, at a motel in the episode Born To Run, where she was, at the start of the episode, sporting blonde hair that from the right angle would have seen her mistaken as Claire!

Other blasts from the past came on the Island in the shape of obscure minor Other Aldo, who was all pissy because Kate once busted him in the face with the butt of her gun when she was making a break off the Hydra Island during Season 3, Not In Portland.

I don’t particularly want to dwell on the excursion Jin and Kate made with these Others. Their petty bickering and insistence on keeping things secret got on my nerves. Further from last week, the Temple Others are doing little to enthuse me. I mean, let’s not forget, the likes of Jack and Kate and Sawyer and Hurley have been hand delivered by Jacob to be amongst them at The Temple – you’d think this would afford them some measure of respect! Sayid certainly didn’t receive any such respect, but then no one’s really sure about what he’s all about since he came back from the dead.

The torture test of Sayid (the torturer being tortured, another one of those irony things) was a confounding element. Dogen (Japanese leader) remarked to Lennon (bespectacled translator) that Sayid had failed this test. I can’t really figure out how Sayid could have passed the test of being electrocuted and then branded with a hot poker, but my best guess is derived from estimating what little we know about Ben and his time at The Temple.

Back in Season 5, Young Ben was shot and delivered to The Temple. Like Sayid, it was a certainty that he would die but there was a cost associated with being revived in that his memories would not be the same. What other changes may have been induced we don’t know.

So for Ben we can assume that he was taken to The Temple, to the pool there (which would have surely been full of sparkling, clear water rather than the murky liquid Sayid was immersed in), and ‘drowned’ to have been brought back to full vigour. The crucial element here, it seems, is that the water was murky and whatever was supposed to happen – whatever happened to Ben – did not happen to Sayid. Maybe it was as simple as Sayid retaining his memories that gave him away as being infected, but that’s as close, or far, as my guesswork can take me to an answer.

Unless, of course, you prefer the idea that Sayid isn’t infected at all and the whole torturing business, and the green pill, was just a ruse to get Jack involved.

The logic would run like this: Temple Others convince Jack that they have deduced Sayid has a problem that only this mysterious pill can solve. Jack has to be the one that gives Sayid the pill, to make him “want to want” to take it, a bit like how Ben wanted Jack to “want to want” to do the spinal surgery on him. It’s a theme we’ve seen before but it’s like the water in the pool: very murky. The crucial element here is that Jack, as he told Dogen, feels responsible for Sayid getting shot. Dogen even tweaks Jack’s guilt by asking about people that had died during his time on the Island.

And if this was the case, Jack giving Sayid the pill was Jack’s task of making reparations. Or, as has been said elsewhere, “cleaning up his own mess”. I suspect if the intended goal was to make Sayid take the pill to kill him, it would only really work if Sayid did so willingly and if Jack was the one to do it.

Consider it a ‘loophole’. Sayid as he is now can’t be murdered by just anyone, but he can willingly kill himself (even if he doesn’t fully realise he’s doing so) because Jack was the one to give him the means since he was the reason Sayid was the way he was. Hence the poison pill he had to “want to want” to take.

It should also be noted that Dogen might still be wrong about Sayid. Jacob’s spirit might still be fighting its way through Sayid’s system rather than this dark infection. Dogen and the Temple Others don’t know about Locke and how his body is being used – they only know Jacob is dead. Jack nearly swallowing the pill might have quietly been one of the most heroic things he’ll ever do. . .

On an interesting note, I did think Sayid’s gratitude towards Jack for saving his life rang a little hollow. It makes sense. Ever since he shot Ben, Sayid has been in the wilderness, a damned soul, and prepared to face the penalty of whatever the afterlife brings. His atonement whilst he lives is to do whatever those he trusts will ask. Ben utilised this exact same character trait of Sayid’s to do his assassinating bidding during Season 4.

So now we get to the real meat of the episode. Let me tell you, I thought I was ahead of the curve on this. I had a thrilling moment of relief that this rather limp and frustrating episode was presenting some quality revelation. When Dogen was talking to Jack about this infection, this darkness, that slowly takes over a body, I was thinking. . .

. . . Christian Shephard’s initial appearances in the jungle and his guidance for Jack that, perhaps via this infection, eventually consumed him and turned him more into. . .

. . . the Christian Shephard rocking in Jacob’s chair and leading Locke to his doom – the more bad Christian Shephard. It all made sense, all felt like it was coming together. So when Dogen remarked that Jack should have known all about it, I was totally primed for him to say Christian’s name. Totally. Absolutely. You pause the show right there and I would have guaranteed that was where the conversation was heading.

And then Dogen goes and says the same thing happened to Jack’s sister and all of what I thought I knew went out of the proverbial window.

Right then. What’s to be made of this? Without the troublesome idea of an ‘infection’, we could see Claire here, in a clear similarity with Rousseau, and draw immediate parallels. Both women lost their children as babies, and then both were left in the jungle to fend for themselves. That both then resorted to booby traps and appearances so similar suggests either coincidence, or eventuality: that is, if you were left in the jungle to fend for yourself you’d set booby traps, too.

Yet there’s the matter of this infection that Dogen has brought into the matter. This blackness that attacks dead (do they have to be dead?) bodies and takes them over (I guess we’re really talking about Black Smoke/Nameless here). We’re lead to believe this has happened to Claire. Well, that idea throws into the mix that old theory from Season 4: the theory that Claire died.

The theory was fairly straightforward. During the attack on the Barracks by Keamy and his men, there was a house explosion that Claire was caught up in. Sawyer dug her out and carried her away.

The theory thus runs that Claire died during this explosion and the ‘Claire’ that Sawyer pulled free was a counterpart version – like Christian Shephard or Yemi. I didn’t like the theory back then, and I don’t really like it now – but if it were so then it might explain why Claire abandoned Aaron; she had been infected. The good Claire was gone and explains why she happily wandered off with Christian; these different elements of the Black Smoke all uniting together at Jacob’s shack.

It’s persuasive all right, I admit. But I still don’t like it. For one thing, why has Claire – a dead person – apparently been setting booby traps and surviving alone in the jungle? We don’t see Christian Shephard hunting boar to keep himself going. Furthermore, why make Claire so strikingly comparable with Rousseau? Is this some suggestion that Rousseau herself was infected in this manner? Only the way it transpired was that her team went down into the Temple walls and came out infected, resulting in Rousseau realising Robert was not the same person and so shot him.

I am not buying that Rousseau was somehow infected all the time she spent on the Island. That doesn’t ring true with me one little bit. And so, similarly, I am not buying that Claire as we saw her at the end of What Kate Does is a re-animated version of dead Claire that has been taken over by the Black Smoke or some form thereof. Maybe the Black Smoke did somehow get a hold of her, and maybe it did convince her to leave Aaron behind – but I believe her bond with Aaron and her determination to one day be re-united with him brought her back and kept her going, the same as it did with Aaron. I’m quicker to believe Claire is channelling the spirit of Danielle than the idea this is her dead body counterpart running amok.

I am further convinced that Claire is alive, and salvageable, because of Kate. Despite the apparent marginalisation of her character, this was still an episode about what Kate does, and what she has to do. Her sole reason for being back on the Island is to get Claire and Aaron together. To say Claire is dead is to say Kate’s reason for being back is gone and I’m not ready to accept that.

An interpretation of the Alternate Timeline is that it will show, with a sense of fateful inevitability, the same resolutions that our main characters on the Island will discover. Even a new timeline can’t change what is meant to be. If this is so then we have witnessed Kate already there to guide Claire towards being Aaron’s mother. In effect, ensuring they are together.

What Kate did in the Alternate Timeline may very well be what Kate does on the Island. Claire can be saved and Kate can bring her back to Aaron. If this holds, and maybe pans out for the other characters in a similar parallel manner, we may see a convergence where the Alternate Timeline and the Island Timeline mirror one another. Consider the Alternate Timeline as an almost ideal version of what should have happened – if that can be made to occur on the Island maybe all these events and failings, that Jacob marked down as just ‘progress’, will culminate in a final reconciliation.

Analysis: 6.2 LA X - Part 2

2010-02-07T16:34:00.011Z

One of the last things Sayid wondered about when he was last able to talk was to query with Hurley where he would go when he died. In just the first couple of episodes of Season 6 it’s a question that is being put to us, but it’s always been a part of the Island. Right back at the start when probably each one of us, however briefly or otherwise, thought that the Island might be a place of purgatory for the people that died in Oceanic 815, death and beyond has been a matter of interest.

The ‘beyond’ part remains a mystery, but we know that death can certainly not spell the end of a particular character. Like Christian Shephard, or you-know-who.

That Locke’s body would be subverted and used by an altogether darker force was proposed back in Season 3. Recall Mr. Eko’s dying words to Locke – “You’re next.”

Mr. Eko had refused to repent, perhaps proving an unyielding ‘soul’ whose body could not be used. Locke, more wide-eyed and willing to believe, came next and we know how that all ended up. Nameless, in the body of John Locke, told Ben that he has just one agenda now he has killed his nemesis, Jacob. He wants to go home.

Like the question of what’s beyond death, the question of what a restless soul like Nameless calls ‘home’ is an interesting one. I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that the path there, and Season 6 in general, is going to be an altogether more spiritual one than ever before. And as for Sayid. . .

. . . it’s hard not to reach the conclusion that Jacob has now subverted his body in a similar fashion to how Locke’s was used by Nameless. When Jacob met with Hurley there was a moment where he stared at Sayid, bleeding out, and I couldn’t help but think Jacob was sizing up his new home! Only are we to believe the first words the all-knowing Jacob would say are, “What happened?” Doesn’t seem to fit. But the ‘resurrection’ of Sayid wasn’t quite as clear, literally, as it could have been since the pool he was ‘reborn’ in was now murky.

At the same time, it was hard not to think some form of resurrection took place as Sayid, when lifted out of the water, had a very Christ-like crucifix pose going on that looked almost heavy-handed in its symbolism. I guess you can’t help but draw parallels when a person that was supposed to be dead is miraculously brought back to life.

We can appreciate the pool itself was supposed to be the source of healing properties. The Temple Others (I’ll get to them) leader, Dogen, cut himself with a knife and put his hand into the water where the intended result was surely for it to heal. It didn’t because the water was impure and contaminated. Why? Probably because Jacob was dead, and Jacob’s lifeforce and the rejuvenating qualities of the Island, and this water, appear to be intrinsically linked. One cannot be without the other.

To take the point to its logical conclusion, if someone like Locke, with a broken back, were to crash land on the Island now Jacob is dead we have to assume that they wouldn’t miraculously find themselves able to walk. Or, like Rose, have their cancer cured. Or, like Jin, have full-power sperm! (Did we ever get an answer as to why fertility was suddenly enabled? I don’t think we did.)

Miles had a very curious look on his face just before Sayid’s awakening. Having already proved his pedigree at beyond-the-grave communication ‘chatting’ with Juliet, Miles’ confused and concerned expression gave off the vibe that whatever was going on with Sayid was not what usually happens.

My guess? Miles wasn’t getting any communication from Sayid because Sayid wasn’t yet dead. The person that woke up probably was Sayid, mostly. But my hunch is that now he has become imbued with a little bit of Jacob. I suspect Sayid will inexplicably find himself knowing things he didn’t previously know, and in possession of power he didn’t otherwise have. And he will, for sure, be an absolutely essential ally in the battle against Nameless.

Quite what Nameless’ next move is certainly feels vague. The last we saw of him he was striding into the jungle with the unconscious Alpert slung over his shoulder. That was, of course, not before briefly remarking how much nicer it was to see Richard out of those chains. Hm. Is this really as obvious as it sounds?

We’ve seen the Black Rock approach the Island many years ago. . .

. . . which we know was a slave ship, with slaves and chains. . .

. . . and Richard was seen playing with a ship in a bottle, suggesting some form of link between himself and the Black Rock. . .

. . . and since Richard doesn’t age he can certainly have been around all those years ago. Maybe Richard was a slave on the Black Rock and came to the Island and there met Jacob and Nameless and somehow became a servant, interminably. (Is that not also a form of slavery?) Heck, we know he was once known as ‘Ricardus’, but he quickly corrected Ilana when she referred to him as that and said he was just ‘Richard’. Why? Was Ricardus his slave name, a part of his life and identity he has rid himself of?

Or, you know, is all this slavery and chain and Black Rock thing just one big obvious misdirection? I can’t wait to find out. (Since I think we’re due a story about the Black Rock, and how it ended up in the middle of the jungle, I am kind of hoping the obvious is true and we get that whole tale told in flashbacks in an Alpert-centric episode.)

Nameless was very quick to silence Alpert from saying anything further with a strike to the throat. As though he didn’t want anyone else, like Ilana and the rest, realising who he was. Makes me wonder if Nameless, in Locke’s body, isn’t going to try and pass himself off as Jacob in light of John Locke’s body being revealed on the beach.

Even still, The Temple Others have fired their warning fireworks, which surely must mean something to Ilana. And let’s not forget Bram and a few guys went in to see Jacob and all ended up dead, before Locke and Ben came wandering out of there as sinister and cocksure as you like. If Ilana and the rest still believe ‘Locke’ is trustworthy then they’re more foolish than I gave them credit for. But even more foolish would be Nameless to underestimate Ben.

Ben now knows all about Nameless, and has been used by him in the most devastating ways imaginable (his own dead daughter’s vision coaxing him to commit the murder of his beloved icon Jacob). Nameless, as Locke, provoked Ben into murdering Jacob. Now that question can be asked of Nameless: Why would Ben not want to kill him after all he had been put through? Let’s not forget that this is still Ben, much as he may have been cowed and humbled recently – he’s still fiendishly clever, a master manipulator and a cold-hearted tactician. There’s a reason Ben is keeping what he knows quiet. Nameless would do well to keep a very close eye on him, as should we.

Meanwhile Hurley was taking point on a ‘save Sayid’ mission as directed by Jacob. Jin lead the gang to the Temple walls and, following an inevitable sequence of whispers and disappearing people, The Others had kidnapped our heroes and lead them to The Temple – prompting a good deal of us to wonder how on Earth no one had ever found this place before now.

Despite the fact Dharma gave The Temple a logo on a map, this place was very definitely nothing to do with them and very much to do with The Others. Genuine, original Others. It’s tempting to think we may have even glimpsed these guys already, in Season 2 – when Jin and Mr. Eko hid as Others traipsed by their faces in the jungle.

Maybe this really was a small part of ‘Temple Others’ – or it was just The Others we know already, in disguise. At least we now understand where the template for the disguise The Others used to wear came from. And since 2004 Cindy has very much integrated herself with these new people.

She went from being an air hostess, to being captured and taken in with The Others. Not soon later she was appearing to Jack when he was in a cage, talking about how she was there to watch. And then she journeyed with Alpert and the Others on an exodus to The Temple. It would seem she has stayed there since, under the leadership of the Temple Master, Dogen. I consider these the true Others, ones that refused to involve themselves with the modern luxuries of the Barracks, and who remain loyal to the cause of Jacob.

Still, that the spring water had turned impure without them noticing and that they didn’t know what was happening with Jacob (or that Jacob, evidently, had to get ‘outside help’ in the form of Jack and Kate and the rest) doesn’t inspire much confidence in this bunch having what it takes to get things resolved. If Hurley hadn’t spoken up and handed over the ankh from the guitar case The Others would have shot and killed them all without blinking.

Let’s hope they start making a better impression soon. Holing themselves up in The Temple, surrounding it by ash in a siege mentality, isn’t going to get anything done, I feel. Yet if Sayid really is conveying the spirit of Jacob, at whatever level, further instructions can’t be far behind.

In the alternate timeline, having touched down in the airport, many of the main counterparts found themselves almost trapped in the place – as though they were never supposed to be there and events were conspiring to prevent them from going further. Locke had lost his case of knives. Jin and Sun were detained at customs. Kate, of course, was apprehended but managed to get herself free and, as is standard for the girl that was born to run, make her escape. In the same taxi as Claire.

It was impossible to see if Claire was pregnant though I can’t imagine any real reason why she wouldn’t be. Mind, if Aaron really is a special child that Claire needed to raise then her not being pregnant would be further evidence about how this alternate time was not supposed to exist. Whatever the way of things, it seems Kate and Claire, having been thrust together in this way, are set to share some kind of future plots in this alternate world. Similarly Hurley caught Sawyer’s attention with his lottery win remarks, suggesting the con man might try and gain some of those riches for himself. First stop would be a Mr McCluck’s for James Ford, I guess! Lastly, inevitably, Jack and Locke met face to face and will surely meet again should they ever get out of that airport.

During their conversation Locke once more raised the issue of what happens beyond death. Jack said the airport authorities did not know where his father was, but Locke corrected him to state that they only didn’t know where the body was. Not only was this a direct reference to an everlasting soul it’s also a reminder of events we’ve seen before, in Season 1 episode White Rabbit.

Jack found the coffin on the Island but his father was gone. Curiously in the alternate timeline Jack cannot, once more, find his father’s body. It can’t help but feel significant that the body has disappeared like this – like Christian’s attachment and belonging to the Island was so strong that even in the alternate timeline the bond was too strong for him to be brought along with it. I doubt those airport authorities will ever find the body. I am less doubtful that Jack, even in the alternate timeline, won’t ever see his father again.

Christian has appeared to Jack before, and not always on the Island. If he can cross oceans I won’t be surprised if he can transcend timelines, and serve as another reminder and guide to get his son to where he needs to be: back on the Island, assuming the role of leader. In the alternate timeline Jack met with Locke and offered to help him walk again. I expect Jack and Locke, as Nameless, will ultimately meet on the Island for the showdown they’ve had coming for a long, long time. Previously Jack was more a man of science – his victory will come as a man of faith. It may actually take the alternate timeline Jack to find faith in the Island life he left behind, turn away from it, for the Jack in 2007 to fully awaken and acquit himself to the task set before him and his friends.

Analysis: 6.1 LA X - Part 1

2010-02-04T17:36:00.006Z

“What happened?” Sayid asked, roused from beyond the grave. It’s a question that many a shellshocked viewer might have echoed at the end of Lost's sixth season debut – but Sayid’s resurrection is for the second part of this analysis. Here I shall be focusing on Part 1 of the two-part season opener, up to the point where Locke, in his wheelchair, departed the safely-landed Oceanic 815 (though I may stray ahead on occasion - do forgive me!).

That Oceanic 815 didn’t crash was the opening gambit here, though the big wow was saved for the sky-to-ocean plunge to reveal a submerged Island, Dharma sharks and the remains of a four-toed statue all underwater.

Before we go any further it’s important we grapple with this split between the two plotlines, or realities. As we know, in 1977 Juliet detonated Jughead with the intention of destroying The Swan to prevent the crash of Oceanic 815. Apparently, in one reality at least, this worked. The detonation, fused with the electromagnetic 'incident', resulted in the Island apparently sinking to watery depths. (I am willing to believe that something further could have happened to sink the Island yet if the detonation of Jughead didn’t directly cause the sinking it did at least begin a sequence of events that produced the same result.)

Considering that this is an Island that moves freely in time and space I suppose we have to think of it as capable of being above water, below water, or floating in mid-air. Since the electromagnetic anomaly went haywire, which apparently controls this time-space orientation, it would seem the Island was eventually sunk and, presumably, all who were on it were killed. People like Widmore and Ms. Hawking, for example.

Remember, this was in 1977. And the resulting effects of this in 2004, when we meet Jack and the rest of the gang onboard Oceanic 815, are noticeable. In this version of the world Hurley is always lucky and Boone didn’t persuade his sister to return to LA with him. . .

Maybe Rose didn’t have cancer. Perhaps Sawyer didn’t kill Frank Duckett. It’s difficult to know, but some things remained as we knew them: Jack’s father died, Kate was still arrested, and Locke was still in a wheelchair (and I am thinking that he did, indeed, lie to Boone about that whole walkabout trip – but, who knows, maybe in this version of the universe he was allowed to go!?).

Obviously this whole scenario is fantastical, but we can accept it. History got changed and produced this alternate timeline. A timeline where Oceanic 815 didn’t crash and the Island was rendered to a watery grave.

Of course the problem here is that Jack and the gang that were on the Island during the moment Jughead detonated did not suddenly get erased from existence, or remain on an Island doomed to sink below the depths. Instead they were transported to 2007, to the same timeframe that Sun and Frank and dead Locke were all existing in at the end of Season 5.

So we have an Original Timeline. It’s the one where Oceanic 815 crashed in 2004. Where Ajira 316 crashed in 2007. And where, in 1977, there was ‘an incident’ but it didn’t prevent The Swan from being built and Desmond from being there and everything else we’ve seen and know of. Then there is the Alternate Timeline that got introduced in this episode for Season 6, one where Oceanic 815 didn't crash. Everyone with me? Everyone comfortable so far? Good.

I’m going to keep it simple and state that the reason the Swan hole looks different is because, during the detonation, like Jack and Hurley and Juliet, bits of rubble and some of the construction work got shifted through time also. This does beg the question of what happened to Radzinsky and Pierre Chang and the rest, of course, but for now let’s consign them to being blasted by a massive explosion and rendered to a watery demise back in 1977 on a sunken Island and leave it at that.

I’ve got the feeling this alternate timeline, and the submerged Island, is only a temporary one anyway. Like Charlie’s remarks to Jack after he had saved his life, it was an event that wasn’t supposed to happen. Charlie was supposed to be dead, is supposed to be dead, and this isn’t the first time he has cropped up to say as much despite the circumstances.

Back in Season 4 Charlie was an instance of a character appearing in a place in time that he couldn’t have possibly been, and in LA X there was another:

Since his brush with The Swan Station electromagnetic anomaly the rules of time and space have never fully applied to Desmond, the wild card element, and so there he was, on a flight he didn’t seem to have any reason to be on. There’s a good chance that no one else could actually see or hear Desmond other than Jack, like how only Hurley could see Jacob. It may be that Desmond is fulfilling the role of a temporal police, a bit like how Ms. Hawking once coaxed him towards making the decision not to ask for Penny’s hand in marriage in the episode Flashes Before Your Eyes. Desmond turns up, saying “brotha”, prompting Jack to wonder if he knew him. Of course, once upon a time, Jack and Desmond had met previously. . .

. . . but that was back in the old timeline. In this new timeline there is no indication or reason to believe Jack and Desmond ever met at that sports stadium. Desmond was only there running to train for a race around the world on a yacht to win Charles Widmore’s favour to earn the right to Penny Widmore’s hand in marriage. But Charles Widmore may have died on the sunken Island, or even if he didn’t he’d not be the same man, so it’s highly improbable Desmond would have ever even met Penny. The whole ‘history’ of Desmond as we know it would be very different. Yet despite this Jack’s memories still prickled with the hint of recognition and I believe this was very much Desmond’s purpose and intention. To prompt Jack into recalling the reality he averted. Like how he bumped into Kate outside the toilet, familiar recollections may have been distracting him whilst she was pickpocketing his pen! And what about the little cut on his neck?

Actual physical residue of a different timeline, a different universe? It’s inexplicable yet must be significant and it’s these such things which convince me this alternate reality can only be temporary. It’s a timeline produced from a freak event in the Original Timeline that probably can’t be sustained. Either one will ultimately collapse, or they’ll collide. Personally I think this offspring timeline will eventually falter. I suspect that Jack may have a full awakening and realise this alternate reality is worse than the one he tried to erase and it will bring the whole thing to an end. He’s a stranger in a strange land at the moment – he walks amongst the alternate timeline but he is not fully part of it.

Symbolically, the Island being submerged works on the level of Alternate Timeline Jack's psycholoogy; like the Island has been pushed down to the depths of his unconscious mind.

Meanwhile, back on the above-water Island in 2007, Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Miles and a dying Sayid remained to shake out the ringing in their ears and dig out the trapped-under-rubble Juliet (I always had her marked out as dead, but she surprisingly hung around into Season 6 anyway) who was somehow in possession of the knowledge that her efforts at changing history had succeeded.

Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if those bizarre remarks she made about grabbing a coffee were not her mind lapsing into this alternate world and we will witness, at some point, Juliet suggesting getting a coffee in the other timeline. That would be cool.

Meanwhile Jacob appeared to Hurley to, as ever, cryptically bestow guidance from his apparent omniscience beyond the grave. We find out that at this point. . .

. . . Jacob had already written down a list of the exact people that would show up at The Temple, stuffed this paper in an ankh and then sealed it in a guitar case. Even after death Jacob proves he’s got a magician’s showmanship and further validates what we probably all suspected: everything that is happening is exactly how he intended it to happen. Meanwhile, his counterpart, in the body of John Locke, blew open a whole new set of speculation and revelation for us.

It was revealed that the man in black, Nameless, and the Black Smoke are, indeed, one and the same. Probably not that big a surprise for most of us. But what I found interesting was how the ash was used as a potential defence, by Bram, when ‘the monster’ went on the rampage.

I don’t believe that Nameless has always been the Black Smoke that we’ve seen rampaging through the jungle. I think the circle of ash that we saw surrounding Jacob’s cabin, that Ilana and her people discovered had been broken, clues us in to this idea. I believe that, at some point, Nameless was trapped within the circle of ash, in the cabin. The ash served as a barrier that prevented him from ‘rejoining’ with the Black Smoke, and so this destructive and powerful force remained apart from him. Perhaps it was operating under its own ‘instinct’, or it was part-controlled by the will of Nameless.

I think of the Black Smoke in the early seasons now like a dismembered limb – a restless element cut adrift from its host, Nameless, that had been incarcerated in a weird wooden shack.

The Black Smoke still functioned via similar rules to Nameless. Note how Nameless didn’t attack Bram and the rest until they fired at him. They needed to do a terrible act before he could inflict judgement and death upon them. Consider that alongside, say, the death of Eko and his defiance at repenting. Indeed, this may quite simply be the reason why Nameless could not kill Jacob – Jacob never did anything bad to him to deserve it! Maybe it was that very same lack of sin that was the very source of the hatred Nameless felt towards Jacob.

Ben’s realisation of who ‘Locke’ really was will, I feel, represent a major turning point for his character. There was always something very telling about the “What about you?” remark Jacob hit Ben with at the end of Season 5. Ben, now realising what he is dealing with and what he has done, will be forced to ask himself that question. I’m staking a prediction that Ben’s atonement will come in the form of self-sacrifice for a greater good.

“They are coming,” Jacob remarked, meaning Jack and the rest of the people he once touched in the past. As of the end of LA X – Part 1 they have arrived in the same timeframe as Nameless, but there’s a long way to go before they comprehend the scale of the battle they are involved in. The foundations for war appear to be marked out at The Temple – a place we’ll see up close in LA X – Part 2 where, in grand Lost tradition, answers always come with further mysteries. . .

Dharma Stations Part 10: The Lamp Post

2010-01-29T16:21:00.008Z

So far the only Dharma Station we know of that exists off-Island, it’s a fair bet that The Lamp Post was also the first Dharma Station built – at least of the ones we know of. This is hardly a major logical feat to proclaim: The Lamp Post exists to find the Island so it follows that it was built first, located the Island, and then all on-Island Dharma Stations subsequently appeared.

The Lamp Post resides beneath a church in Los Angeles. There’s no real way of knowing for sure, but I would imagine that the church was not built by Dharma. What was important was the location – it being the case that the church was reported to be situated over a pocket of electromagnetic energy. There’s been a precedent for this during the episode S.O.S., when Rose and Bernard traveled out to Australia to see Isaac of Uluru, the spiritual healer, who talked of there being particular energy points on Earth with more concentrated power.

Consider the healing properties of the Island as a more focused composition of such energy and it’s a perfect illustration of why the Island is such a desirable location. If there are these pockets of energy all over the world then could it be rationalised that the Island is an ultimate product of this energy? Maybe even a control source, or combined end result? Bear with me, as this does all tie back in to The Lamp Post.

Think of a magnifying glass prism, with a beam of light shone through it.

You set this prism down in a large empty room and shine a light through it. The intensified beam is shot out to some other point in the room. Now you take another prism, and set it down in a different place. You shine another light through the beam and angle the prism so that the intensified beam crosses with the beam emitted from the other prism. You repeat this process, all around the room, with various different prisms. You angle it all just right and, somewhere, at some point, there will be one focused point of all these light beams combined.

Take that idea and apply to electromagnetic pockets of energy, all over the world. Is the Island, like the focused point of light, the central element for all this energy and it is this very truth that makes the place so unique, and so incredible?

The difference with the Island is that it is not easily located, especially given it can move around in time and space. Yet here is where The Lamp Post enters the picture. Imagine you’re a Dharma scientist, studying these electromagnetic pockets of energy. You come to understand that they are dotted all over the world and then you wonder, like the prisms and beams of light, whether there might be some centralized source or end product for all this energy. You theorize about the existence of such a place, such a place of electromagnetic energy, based on the evidence you have already gathered.

It would be like an astrophysicist realizing a black hole existed. Black holes being these dense, all-powerful suction forces, the astrophysicist wouldn’t need to find the black hole, only observe the behaviour of gravity and light around the area where a black hole may be to figure one existed.

The light from a star bends in a certain direction towards an apparently empty piece of space, therefore the conclusion is the existence of a Black Hole in that empty space. Elementary, dear Watson, as some detective may have fictionally muttered. Again, apply the principle to the Island and the energy pockets all around the world and I think my point is made. And, again, this is where the Lamp Post enters the picture. A Station designed to find the theoretical place of ultimate electromagnetic energy.

Dharma may not necessarily have been as brilliant as all that scientific deduction may imply, mind. In the Lamp Post there was a photograph of the Island as apparently sourced from the military, who we know were there before Dharma were.

Not to mention the scraps of evidence from the story of the Black Rock, that Island-fanatic Widmore was intent on picking up. . .

We’ve been given pieces of evidence to suggest the Island is a myth that certain interested parties have been investigating for a long period of time. Dharma – via a “very clever” individual we don’t yet know – figured out how to actually pinpoint the place.

(On a sidenote, Charles Widmore almost certainly could not have known anything about The Lamp Post or else he would have surely used it to find the Island for himself. Penny Widmore, and her Listening Post (again, potentially located on one of these ‘energy pockets’ of the world) basically tracked down the Island using the principle of finding a larger source of electromagnetism, which is similar to how the Lamp Post functions, but without the aid of prediction.)

So. The Lamp Post. Dharma discovered a pocket of energy they were interested in. Probably they discovered there was also a church over it, but figured the church provided a decent cover so long as they could monopolise the underground area. The complicated banks of computers and co-ordinates. . .

. . . sell the idea of an elaborate mathematical process at work, but the fundamental notion is simplistic enough. Via these energy pockets, and the existence of a strong electromagnetic energy emanating from (or to) the Island, The Lamp Post can register where the Island is, and, as was important for the return of the Oceanic 6, when the Island will be. Simple stuff, really. There’s just a couple of other bits and pieces to address in the interests of completeness.

The name of The Lamp Post itself is derived from the C.S. Lewis book The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. In Narnia, one of the first curious sights seen upon entering the world through the wardrobe is a lamp post in the middle of the forest.

There’s an explanation for this in a prequel story of Narnia, about some guy finding a means of traveling to different realms – one of those realms being London. A piece of London – a bit of lamp post – got brought back to Narnia and it ‘grew’ like a tree into the lamp post standing in the forest. Symbolically the lamp post in the story stands as proof of an other world, and also a signal that the means by which to travel to this other world is close by. Dharma’s Lamp Post could be held by the precise same symbolic definition, but for the Island.

If this is perhaps the last Dharma Station we will ever learn of (I appreciate The Temple has been affixed with a Dharma logo, but there’s really no evidence thus far to support any research or purpose or even existence of a proper Station there), it’s perhaps fitting that it is with this post I consider the idea that The Lamp Post when we saw it, as run by Eloise Hawking, serves to prove that the Dharma Initiative is no more. Eloise herself remarked that it was “they” that built the place, distancing herself from association with Dharma. And, as we know, she was very much an Other which makes it even further unlikely she has anything to do with them.

There was that curious moment, in Desmond’s flashback with Brother Campbell, where Eloise appeared in the same (badly photoshopped) photograph.

I could make a wild reach and state that Brother Campbell learned of the Lamp Post beneath the church (because all members of the clergy know about all churches, right!?) and informed Eloise Hawking about it and she took it from there – but it’s utterly unsubstantiated guesswork on the basis of one photograph. Not that important either, really. Though I am intrigued with the one, lingering mystery around who this “very clever” individual was that designed the pendulum that could locate the Island. Insta-hunch-guess: Daniel Faraday.

Reared by Eloise to be scientifically brilliant enough to potentially circumvent the time-travelling narrative that resulted in her killing her own son, maybe there’s further time shifting, alternate timeline events that somehow make Dan become this “very clever” man! And hey, if such a thing as that is possible then who am I to write off the Dharma Initiative at all? Maybe somewhere, somewhen, there’s a hitherto unknown Dharma Station keeping the Initiative’s flag flying – but until such a revelation this is the end of the line as far as this series of posts is concerned.

There’s really nothing more to say but. . .

Dharma Stations Part 9: The Tempest

2010-01-21T17:54:00.004Z

Let us try to put aside certain prejudices we may hold towards The Tempest. It being a Dharma Station that appeared out of nowhere to serve a shaky plot in one of the lesser episodes of Season 4 (The Other Woman) and was never seen or heard of again doesn’t encourage us to embrace the place with affection. Initial reactions of it being a little too convenient, of it being shoehorned in to the show and lazily justified – these are the kind of prejudices I mean, and shall try to avoid. Indeed, on closer inspection, The Tempest musters intrigue and pertinence within Lost that initial inspection may have overlooked and possibly signifies a damning indictment of Dharma’s Island-worthiness entirely.

The Tempest logo depicts a large wave, alluding to Biblical-style events, like the flood that Noah built an ark to survive. (Consider an ark sailing in endless water, then think of the Island – there’s a thought to run with, for those inclined.) If Biblical proportions seem too outlandish, consider it a Tsunami-sized wave. Point is The Tempest is a Dharma Station capable of wreaking disaster to human life. And perhaps the most shocking notion is that this is exactly what Dharma built it for.

The naming of The Tempest, aside from being a devastating storm, also stems from the Shakespeare play of the same name. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest a sorcerer and his daughter – Prospero and Miranda – are stranded on a mysterious Island. Prospero summons a tempest to shipwreck his enemies and then uses magic, spirits and a monster to manipulate and divide them for his own purposes. Sounds strangely familiar, doesn’t it? Can’t help but feel that Dharma certainly saw and appreciated the similarities with the Island and Shakespeare’s work (but I acknowledge this was probably more about the Lost creators also getting the reference in there).

The Tempest first gets mentioned into existence in the episode Namaste (on a bank of monitors in The Flame), which puts the earliest known time of it having been built as 1977. This is a good while before 1992, which is roughly around the time of ‘the purge’. This fact leads me to branch into two strains of thought. The first is that The Tempest was built purely to distribute poison gas as a result of the conflict with ‘the hostiles’, and Dharma retained the use of this Station for approximately fifteen years before it was eventually used against them.

I believe this is the truth. The alternative idea is that The Tempest was originally built for other purposes and it was only the increasing hostilities on the Island that prompted Dharma to up their defences and create the capacity for more deadly response. Very little is known about The Tempest but the ‘kindest’ remarks could argue it was used for all manner of chemical testing before the distribution of lethal gas became its pure reason for existence. As there is no evidence to substantiate this argument, however, I am forced to defer to the principle that The Tempest was built as we saw it: to produce and release a fatal gas with the intention of inflicting multiple casualties.

Let’s turn our attention to the gas and the distribution mechanism. The gas itself would appear to have been a nerve agent, VX or a variation thereof. A computer display of chemical names such as thionylchloride and O-ethyl 2-diisopropylaminoethyl methylphosphonite are components of this nerve gas. Wikipedia has this to say about VX:

‘VX has a high persistence in the environment. It is odourless and tasteless and can be distributed as liquid, or as an aerosol. It works as a nerve agent by blocking the function of the enzyme acetylcholinesterase, thus resulting in sustained contractions of all the muscles in the body. Sustained contraction of the diaphragm muscle causes death by asphyxiation.’

VX seems to fit the bill from what we’ve seen – if not the actual nerve agent certainly something within the ballpark. The next matter concerns distribution of this gas. Evidently the gas manufactured at The Tempest was ultimately used against Dharma in ‘the purge’. The temptation, then, is to figure that ‘the hostiles’ gained access to The Tempest and triggered the release mechanism when they were ready with gas masks to protect themselves.

I, however, sense that this was highly unlikely and that the Island-wide release of poisonous gas that The Tempest is capable of has never been activated. Goodwin, one of the few Others entrusted with working at The Tempest, remarked that, with the wrong flick of a switch, he could kill every man, woman and child on the Island. Furthermore, The Freighter landing crew’s first mission (through Charlotte and Daniel) was to disable The Tempest so that Keamy and his men could land on the Island and stage their attack without being wiped out.

The point seems clear that The Tempest was entirely capable of distributing a lethal gas over the entire Island.

Now considering ‘the purge’ during Dharma’s time, it doesn’t seem feasible that such an event actually happened. (Danielle Rousseau, for one, was on the Island at this time with no warning or gas mask protection. Did every single Other have a gas mask, also?) More likely is the notion that The Others used The Tempest to engineer a whole bunch of the poison gas canisters similar to the one Ben used on his father.

Alpert and The Others could have distributed the Tempest-made gas using these canisters all over The Barracks, or tossed one down The Pearl hatch, or scattered them all over the Hydra Island and taken out the Dharma Initiative with more localised assaults. (That Dharma members survived – in The Swan, for example – is made even more probable and, since we know Dharma members did survive, makes this theory of ‘the purge’ attack via gas canister more valid.)

The alternative is the idea that The Tempest can somehow score ‘direct hits’ of lethal gas distribution and this was how ‘the purge’ was effected but, again, there’s absolutely no evidence to support this idea so I am inclined to defer to my previous rationale. The Tempest served as a kind of failsafe, or ultimate last ditch measure – if Dharma found their battle against ‘the hostiles’ was turning against them they could always trigger the lethal gas and end it for all of them. Curiously, after ‘the purge’, The Others elected to retain this facility (although Goodwin’s secrecy suggests it wasn’t common knowledge amongst all of them) for the same reason as Dharma: should ‘hostile’ people invade their Island they’d rather kill everyone than have the Island taken from them.

The function of The Tempest serves as that of a deterrent, like how countries with nuclear bombs refrain from using them to avoid mutual destruction. If the battle for the Island became too intense then The Tempest gas could be released and no one would win. The similarities to a nuclear bomb, however, do portray Dharma in a less-than-flattering light and add to a growing theme on the show.

Consider that prior to Dharma the Island, and ‘the hostiles’, had to contend with a military force intruding on the place. Potentially they considered the Island a fine place for nuclear testing, but whatever their purpose what they left was. . .

A potentially devastating weapon was their legacy. Now move forward a couple of decades and Dharma are the new intruders to the Island that ‘the hostiles’ must contend with. One of their legacies?

Another potentially devastating weapon. Not very ‘Namaste’, is it? Suddenly The Others and their claim that they are “the good guys”, from their perspective, certainly shoulders a lot of credibility. And consider also the observations of Nameless. . .

Nameless: “They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”

For all their earnest scientific pursuit, Dharma, via The Tempest, have presented themselves as no more worthy of a place on the Island than all those that have been before. Rather than retreat and leave the Island they were prepared to kill everyone, even themselves, so that no one could have it. As I stated near the beginning, this is a rather shocking realisation. By this one aspect of the Dharma Initiative The Tempest Station ultimately proves to signify their lack of worth, and justifies itself as more than just a poorly-considered plot convenience. That The Tempest served to bring about Dharma’s demise is a bitterly ironic punchline. You reap what you sow.

Dharma Stations Part 8: The Orchid (Redux)

2010-01-18T16:29:00.005Z

As no doubt all are aware, The Orchid Station was introduced via a rough edit of an Orientation film (it doesn't have Dharma music, or a title card). The story goes that the film was discovered in a building in Norway. We are shown the familiar Dharma narrator (Pierre Chang, here working under the name Edgar Halowax - continuing the Candle/Wick collectivism for all things candle-related in his naming convention) holding a rabbit with a number ‘15’ on its back. He tells the intended audience of the video that The Orchid is Station 6 of the Dharma Initiative and that they had been misled into believing it was a biological station. Then another rabbit, with a number 15 on it, appears on a high shelf behind him. Small-scale chaos ensues with Halowax panicking about keeping the rabbits apart. And that's pretty much it.

So let me make an assumption. The two rabbits that featured are one and the same otherwise why bother having the two be number 15? So, taking that idea as a given – that a rabbit in a man’s arms could suddenly appear, duplicated, in close proximity – we then come to the pertinent question: How?

Edgar Halowax: "The unique properties of this Island created a kind of Casimir effect..."

Ah yes, the Casimir Effect. A familiar term to many Lost theorists but let me not take it for granted that you know about it (or have become misconstrued into thinking it's something it's not). In simple terms, the Casimir Effect is the force between one object and another object, and how that force acts on both. Seriously, that's it.

This force takes place at a particle level, so you're forgiven for not noticing! Understanding of this Casimir Effect is important in the real world as things get smaller. Smaller circuit boards, nanotechnology – these become concerned with the interaction of objects at a particle level and how they will influence the construction and function of sophisticated technologies. This doesn't quite explain why one rabbit turns up in the same room as itself, though, does it? Well, no, it doesn’t. But then no science on the show really can – because The Orchid is about engineering the manipulation of time and space: teleportation and time travel.

In Season 4, in The Orchid, Locke found a videotape containing the official version of the Orientation film for that Station. We can assume that, despite the near-disaster the duplicating rabbits created, Dharma went back and set themselves up to re-shoot the film the way they intended. The duplicating rabbit version of The Orchid Orientation is, therefore, to be considered an out-take, but the version Locke inserted into the video player was the official, finished product.

Pierre Chang: “In our first demonstration, we will attempt to shift the test subject 100 milliseconds ahead in four-dimensional space. For the briefest of moments the animal will seem to disappear, but in reality. . .”

Cue inexplicable tape reversal for which I cannot provide any sensible rationale. But what now seems clear, and what Pierre Chang was set to demonstrate, was the projection of the rabbit from one point in space-time to another point in space-time. The same way Sawyer and Juliet and Locke and the rest all appeared to ‘disappear’ when they were bouncing around through time on the Island, really they were ‘simply’ skipping periods of time, times they were not present to witness and experience, to arrive at other points. Same goes for the rabbit. This explains Chang’s urgency at keeping them apart – the same way it was paramount that, say, Sawyer didn’t walk into the moment where Claire was giving birth.

We saw this scene in Season One, and Sawyer never turned up there, so for him to go back in time and then emerge out of the jungle in front of Claire and Kate would disrupt the original timeline. Whatever happened, happened, right? Same goes for the rabbits – where a future rabbit could not possibly be allowed to tamper with its own previous self. (Not sure what the ramifications of that would be, particularly, but Doc Brown from Back To The Future would fret about a collapse in the space-time continuum. Dharma, and Chang, worried about the same thing or similar.) Yet it would seem the rabbit was purely for demonstration purposes – Dharma had bigger fish to fry. . .

Swap one small white furry animal for one large white furry animal. That, it seems, is what Dharma did when conducting their experiments at The Orchid. I am certainly not about to attempt to labour the pseudo-science posited to legitimise the phenomena (it’s a lot of jargon about negative shifts), all we need to do is accept what we’ve seen flash before our eyes.

Ben and Locke were both here. . .

. . . and wound up in the middle of the desert, like a polar bear did. . .

They went from one point in space (the Island) to another (the desert) and, furthermore, moved from one point in time to one in the future. Therefore it is validated: the strange energy located at that particular point in the Island facilitates space-time travel and Dharma, via The Orchid, were looking to harness and manipulate that power. And they used polar bears to do it, at least as a test.

There have been spurious theories concerning the idea that Dharma trained the polar bears to turn the frozen donkey wheel. Personally I find that rather absurd. It seems to me that the donkey wheel was there long before Dharma, used by whoever inhabited the Island in times long past. These same people dug a well directly down to the source.

Did this well once function properly? Did it provide water straight from this energy source that, perhaps, altered a person’s capacity to exist in space and time? Did someone we know potentially drink from that well. . .? Is that the cause of his apparent agelessness?

I’m getting a little sidetracked from Dharma here, but I thought it was an amusing and potentially worthwhile diversion. Dharma ignored the source and instead drilled down to near the source and there built The Orchid, blocking off the cavern of the frozen donkey wheel, apparently more interested in using ‘the vault’ as their method of testing.

Pierre Chang: “This is the vault, constructed adjacent to a pocket of what we believe to be negatively charged ‘exotic matter’. Great care must be taken to avoid leaving inorganic materials inside the chamber. The electromagnetic energy within the Island can be highly volatile and unpredictable.”

I’ll be honest, that Vault doesn’t look big enough to hold a polar bear. Perhaps the bear was already dead, which is possible but perhaps not very useful to determine if a living thing can survive the trip so more like it was heavily-sedated and had a hell of a wake-up call in the hot sand!) Possibly they just conducted tests on polar bears elsewhere, or it was something they did earlier before they refined the Orchid Station and its practices. Point is they definitely did do it because there's skeletal remains of a polar bear in the desert to prove it.

Really, then, The Orchid Station is a rather simple facility to grasp. Dharma discovered a peculiar and powerful source of energy at this particular point at the Island, and through investigation, apparently lead by Pierre Chang, they learned that it could be used to manipulate time. They no doubt moved to make this secret, and so created the greenhouse above it, a fake botanical station, as a cover – hence it’s name: The Orchid.

The only thing really left to ponder is what Dharma intended to use their research at The Orchid for. You would have to assume they expected to find something like this (The Lamp Post basically found the Island via this space-time warping electromagnetic energy) but it’s hard to affirm what their intention for it was. How far do you want to go with this idea?

You can go all out and tie it in with the Valenzetti Equation. That is, Dharma were aware of an equation that calculated the end of mankind and either realized that the Island and its properties were central to this doom, or were the very means of averting it. The capacity to manipulate space-time, to potentially buck the ‘whatever happened, happened’ mentality and change history to save the future, maybe that was the crusade Dharma were on.

There again, they may have just been a bunch of hippy, freeloving scientists that happened across the most amazing place on Earth for scientific discovery and revelation, tried to contain and control it, and things got out of hand.

The latter notion seems the more likely. Right at the very beginning, back when they were experimenting on white rabbits, they tampered and tested and flirted with disaster when one bunny almost arrived back in time to meet itself. Messing around with the properties of space-time is a tricky business and, for Dharma, I get the feeling it cost them dearly. The full repercussions of their work are set to reverberate into Season 6 where we may get to see the extent of the damage. . .