Lost: The Incident
Television!
Some recap, theory, and discussion below…
Second Lost finale to feature a dead Locke in a suit, in a box. Excellent reveal. Now, about the box, are we to assume that Jacob asked Elana to gather that team just to show that Locke was actually Fake-Locke? Did he see that coming?
I would love a translation of the answer to, “what lies in the shadow of the statue?”
I can’t wait to see what Richard does when he realizes that things got hairy as hell in the foot house. Ooooor… did Richard know all along, and like always, simply sat back and observed. He is usually just ever-present but ever-impartial. Could he be the referee of the epic war that Widmore always brings up?
At first I wasn’t very appreciative of the love-themed parts of the finale. But then, after seeing some flashbacks (and just remembering others), I began to side with Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and Juliet. They may not be wildly miserable or complete nutcases, but they haven’t had it easy. So it’s understandable that they crave a solid relationship (and can’t seem to hold on to one). And anyway, their despair and drive has been helpful in the advancement of Jacob’s recent shot at victory…
Can we be sure the bomb finally detonated? I don’t recall if Lost ever faded to white at the end of an episode. I thought perhaps Sayid decided to secretly not rig the bomb properly. But then I thought maybe it just hit water or something.
I watched the opening again, after the episode completed, to revisit the conversation between Jacob and Fake-Locke. I’m going ahead and assuming that fella in the black tunic (Jacob wore white, by the way) is the same one embodying Fake-Locke in present time. They are playing some sort of philosophical/science experiment with their island.
Jacob has something to prove and Fake-Locke says it can’t be done. Jacob believes that this gifted island will (sooner or later) be used for absolute good in order to better humanity. Fake-Locke thinks their present of a healing land mass is too good to be true and that it will never be properly utilized peacefully.
Or… (And?…) they have a civilization of Others consistently living on the Island and an outside group continually comes to try to get along with the Others: Black Rock crew, Dharma Initiative, Oceanic 815, etc.
Either way, Jacob keeps trying new combinations of people each iteration. He doesn’t see each mini-war as a failure. He sees it as progress toward a final victory in the game he plays with Fake-Locke. He uses the errors, shortcomings, etc. to hone a better group of people for the next round.
Fake-Locke has managed to kill Jacob through a loophole. That loophole probably has something to do with the concept of choosing. However, Jacob will have the last laugh. This most recent grouping, the Oceanic 815, is very special (so special that they made a TV show about them!). Jacob managed to change the present by setting forth a timeline which causes an incident which probably-somehow-in-a-way prevents that Ajira flight from happening (and therfore Jacob is never murdered).
One more thing, the title of the show, Lost. It has had many meanings to me throughout its series. Obviously, it all began with people lost on an island somewhere in the Pacific. Then it leaned toward lost as in confused about what on earth is going on around you. Lost love. Lost opportunities. Lost in time. Now, with the introduction of the black vs. white tunic people (Jacob and Fake-Locke), there seems to be another meaning. By the end of this series, someone will have won the epic bet, and someone will have lost.
Poor Juliet. Poor fucking Ben. “What about you?” says Jacob.
Comments
I’ll be the first out of the box to say I was dissapointed. The Sawyer/Juliet thing was touching. And there was a lot of action. And watching Ben go from the puppetmaster he was introduced as years ago, to a bitter, broken man was also well played as usual by that dude.
But I just failed to see how so much of it tied up anything or answered anything. Yeah, we got to see what Jacob looked like. And we got to see that he had contact with all the original castaways at some point in their lives. But that doesn’t really tell us anything. And the ending, with the guy from the beginning as Locke? So what, now they’re adding shape shifting to the already confusing time travel deal? C’mon. I’m hoping that somehow next season loops this all together because I didn’t really feel this was one of the better season finales with regard to either drastically changing the dynamic of the show, or answering major questions.
Am I the only one who thinks that Fake-Locke is the smoke monster, and the smoke monster is a slave to Jacob and could not kill his master himself? The monster has assumed human form before (Eko’s brother, et. al.). The guy who talked to Jacob on the beach was wearing a black shirt, so who knows?
I have to say I am intrigued by this whole thing being about the question of whether humans are naturally good and will choose good, or naturally selfish and will choose evil if it suits them more. Although something tells me this being an entertainment tv show that their answer to that question won’t exactly jibe with my own.
Jeff, sure sure, the Fake-Locke guy could be Smokey. That works very well.
Kevin, I wouldn’t necessarily say that there is shapeshifting going on. I took the Fake-Locke thing to just be another instance of a dead person being used for contact. Like Hurley’s crazy friend, Christina, etc.
Richard’s answer to Ilana’s question (“What lies in the shadow of the statue?”) was in Latin, He said, “Ille qui nos omnis servabit.” Translation: “He who will save us all.”
Paris said:Jeff, sure sure, the Fake-Locke guy could be Smokey. That works very well.
I don’t pay nearly enough attention when watching this show so I am prone to missing things here and there, but is it not clear or at least plausible that all of the re-animated dead people and visions from the past have been the smoke monster “shape-shifting”? Didn’t the smoke monster turn into Alex when confronting Ben earlier this season? Is shape-shifting really a new development?
No, it isn’t a new development. Smokey has been Yemi, Ben’s Mom, Alex, Christian, and I’m sure endless others. That’s one of the reasons I feel that Smokey could be Fake-Locke and the beardy guy on the beach with Jacob.
Yes, this is true but we always assumed those people to be incarnations of those dead people not (what is not posited) a whole other person/entity taking over their appearance and posing as them. It just feels like another cop out. I hope I’m wrong.
Just to be clear I didn’t HATE the episode. I just thought it was another case of raising more questions than it answered and I suppose that by this point I expected things to be winding down a little more than they have.
Kevin said:Just to be clear I didn’t HATE the episode. I just thought it was another case of raising more questions than it answered and I suppose that by this point I expected things to be winding down a little more than they have.
Did you honestly expect anything different? That’s all this show does. I’ve become so jaded about it that I really don’t know how I justify watching every week anymore.
Hey, I stole this from the internet somewhere:
“Anyone want to know about that Greek that Jacob was weaving in the beginning?
The words are ancient Greek—Homeric Greek, in fact. They say:
θεοὶ τόσα δοῖεν ὅσα φρεσὶ σῇσι μενοινᾷς. (Hope this Greek display works).
It’s from the Odyssey, Book 6, line 180. It means “May the gods give you everything that you desire in your heart.” They are the words Odysseus says to the princess Nausicaa when he washes up on her island while he’s trying to get home to Penelope—Penelope who is, by the way, weaving and unweaving a tapestry back at home even as he’s doing this."
Jay said:Kevin said:Just to be clear I didn’t HATE the episode. I just thought it was another case of raising more questions than it answered and I suppose that by this point I expected things to be winding down a little more than they have.
Did you honestly expect anything different?
Yeah, I guess this late in the game I kind of did.
Couple random things I looked into from last night’s episode.
Jacob’s tapestry appeared to depict a winged sun, which is associated with divinity, royalty and power in the Ancient Near East. This symbol was also present on the wall of the room under the statue.
The name Jacob means “struggler with God”.
The book Jacob was reading on the bench as Locke dropped out of the building behind him was Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor’s writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. In 1951 she was diagnosed with disseminated lupus. She was expected to live only five more years; she lived nearly 15. Everything That Rises Must Converge was published posthumously in 1965.
The statue on the beach is either one of the following Egyptian gods Sobek or Taweret (or a combination of the two). My vote is for Sobek who symbolizes fertility and rebirth, and is the symbolic strength of the ruler of Egypt. In some Egyptian creation myths, it was Sobek who first came out of the waters of chaos to create the world. Taweret was a deity of protection in pregnancy and childbirth, closely linked to Sobek.
The statue is holding 2 ankhs which is known as the key of life.
Jack’s stuck candy bar was the Apollo bar. In Greek and Roman mythology, Apollo was seen as a god who could bring ill-health and deadly plague as well as one who had the ability to cure.
I’m no thermonuclear physicist, but does anyone else find the idea of an impact-detonated hydrogen bomb completely laughable?
Did the season finale clear some things up? Yes it did. Did it also raise more questions? Yes it did.
But with this being the final season coming up, I am fairly certain that our heads are going to explode with all of the answers that we will be getting.
Also, did Miles just prevent his dad’s death? Or was he not supposed to die yet and will die at a later time?
shmEvan said:Also, did Miles just prevent his dad’s death? Or was he not supposed to die yet and will die at a later time?
In some of the Dharma videos, his dad is missing an arm — an arm which just got crushed in that incident. Soooo yeah, up until the atom bomb explosion, which we don’t know about, everything that happened there seems to have happened as it should.
I thought just his hand got crushed? But yeah, I get you.
John said:I’m no thermonuclear physicist, but does anyone else find the idea of an impact-detonated hydrogen bomb completely laughable?
Well, I think they only detonated the fission part of the bomb (hydrogen bombs are two stage weapons, fission initiating a fusion reaction), but that doesn’t make the idea any less laughable. I’m not sure I understand how a nuclear explosion is supposed to contain a pocket of extreme electromagnetic energy either, though, but this is Lost right? You’re not supposed to understand what’s going on.
Wait, isn’t the electromagnetic energy the result of the island’s energy pockets? And that was happening because the bomb didn’t detonate when they dropped it? The nuclear explosion only happened afterwards when Juliet detonated the device.
Yes, yes, and yes. But I’m not sure why you are asking these questions…? John and I were just commenting on the validity of the bomb design portrayed in the episode last night.
Destiny is the sort of wheel that never stays in one place for very long, but it always – always – comes to rest in the same place again. This finale was full of circles: rings on fingers, gaping holes over electromagnetic hells, circles of ash, loopholes, rings of fire, and wheels that weave a multitude of thread. As we’ve seen all season long, the castaways have circled back from potential freedom and made the choice to avoid breaking off and stand back astride whatever war is about to happen all over again.
And now we finally get to see Jacob, carefully and gently pulling all those threads together into something coherent. At first glance, he’s the only character we’ve seen with legitimate empathy for other people… he feels bad for their suffering. Flannery O’ Connor is one of my favorite authors and she’s directly in line with this empathy. But, as she posits in story after story, suffering and enduring the grotesque is the only way a person can bring themselves closer to grace. So Jacob furrows his sad brow over sad eyes and rests a comforting hand on each lost Lostie in succession, but he hopes the pain gets them to make the right choices in the end.
That’s all Jacob really seems to do. Encourage, not lead, leaves people to make their own choices. The one who demands to be followed, gives orders and expects fealty, is this guy:
Locke saw this trapped entity in the cabin a couple seasons ago, when it rasped for his help. It claimed to be Jacob, had ghostly emissaries like Christian to give directives and claim to know Jacob’s will, but it seems like it was all one long con to get itself out of bondage. In a way, this thing is the Ultimate Other and wears his disguises flawlessly. When Illana and the other statue-folk stumble upon the cabin and notice the broken ring of ash, she looks horrified and murmurs that something else has been using it for its own devices. Then they burn that mother to the ground.
Jacob and this guy seem to have been locked in opposition for years, like those classic stories of God and the Devil having a gentlemanly discussion about the true nature of man. Jacob believes free will eventually brings progress, but this Other Guy thinks that the circle is endless, always begets violence and corruption. There’s a reason why he’s clad in Black and Jacob is swathed in White, I guess.
And now he’s free, walking in someone else’s skin (meaning Locke truly died as he lived: blindly following the wrong authority). Ben’s in his thrall, but I have a feeling that might swap sometime in season 6. Ben thinks he’s one of the good guys, after all. And this new Locke seems evil.
It was all about inversions. We learned a lot and things really changed, but not in a way that destroyed what came before. It just took everything and, kinda, flipped it over like a fish cooking on a rock. Same fish, different side.
O.K. When you asked how the nuke would “contain” the electromagnetic force I though you meant contain as meaning have it inside the deviceas though it were released with the explosion rather than contain meaning restrict it from releasing.
John said:I’m no thermonuclear physicist, but does anyone else find the idea of an impact-detonated hydrogen bomb completely laughable?
It was certainly funny to see it sticking out of a backpack, yes.
Justin, I like everything you said there, and it applies well to what I was saying.
The loophole that Fake-Locke-and-or-Smokey found was: get an Other leader to leave the island, die, and come back. Then, use the disguise of that leader to convince an ex-Other-leader to melee kill Jacob.
Ben killed Locke but then insisted on having the Oceanic 6 bring Locke’s body along, right? Was he in on the loophole plot with Fake-Locke-Smokey the whole time? Has Ben been sorta double-lying this ultimate con that well? I wouldn’t put it past him!
So — was the Ash some sort of prison for Jacob’s Nemesis? It being broken… that’s how he’s up and walking about? So who broke the Ash? Seems there is a traitor in the ranks of the others. And what’s especially interesting is Ben’s connection; bringing Locke to that exact cabin couldn’t have been an accident. And making them bring Locke’s body. He knows more than he lets on. He wanted to kill Jacob, I think. Ben could be the big bad guy after all…
Yea, Hutch, big time. Ben was innocent when we first met him, then we realized he is a conniving, witty liar. Then we started to pity him, and he was getting tossed around by Locke and others. I’m about ready to think he’s a bad guy again.
I think there’s going to be a huge Locke comeback in season 6. Jack told Richard not to quit on Locke, possibly foreshadowing his comeback. If not, what a shitty end to his character. His life of being a pawn is complete.
What if the bomb wasn’t a bomb at all? Sayid is not a nuclear weapons tech, he was an interpreter. Faraday was a genius, maybe he figured out a way to return them all to the present, but had to play the bomb angle to get everyone to work with him. The bomb had all the parts and gadegtry he needed to get whatever reaction he needed to shoot them forward in time.
OOo…good one Jeff.
And the more I think of Jacob in white, not-Locke in Black at the beginning of the episode, I keep thinking back to the first episode or two of the series when Locke shows the backgammon peices to Walt and says a “one white, one black” line. pretty nifty stuff
I’m bored and adding more thoughts.
• If Ben killed the real Locke days ago and was allowed both to return to the Island and an audience with Jacob, I think this means Ben is once again the leader of the Others and just didn’t know it. Since cycles figure so heavily into the mythology of the episode, I’m thinking that previous leaders have had the mysterious Man in Black goad them to kill Jacob, only to refuse. Ben breaks the cycle because he’s the first one to make the choice to do so. Makes Jacob’s reply of “What about you?” more sensible, since Ben is putting his self-interest ahead of the people he should be leading.
• And maybe Jacob killed the Man in Black first, leaving his incorporeal shade to accumulate power and plot revenge through indirect means.
• That scene where Richard tells a time-traveling Locke that he has to die feels so creepy and sinister in retrospect. Dark Locke is ensuring the delivery of the perfect corpse that he needs to complete his plan.
• When I started watching the first season on DVD, I told Heidi that I thought the backstory might be that God and the Devil were using the Island as a way of settling an argument over the nature of humanity (like the book of Job). As time passed, that theory looked completely ridiculous and random. Now it’s weirdly less so.
• Just realized over the weekend that weasel-faced Dharma Phil was the guy from “Mulholland Drive” who died of fear when he saw that horrifying nightmare-creature behind the restaurant. Now I know why he’s been creeping me out so much.