LOST in tranlsation (2)

[I wrote this a few weeks back but never posted. I hope to try to get one more post vefore the season starts next week. Then we'll have all NEW stuff to talk about.]


welcome back friends.
My mind has been twisting and turning trying to grab a hold of the ideas floating around in my head. The more i try to piece together what is happening the more I realize I have forgotten a lot of details from the show. None-the-less I finished rewatching the Incident and will try to recap some of the interesting elements.

In my last post I focused on The Enemy. I will do so again, here. There really aren't many scenes in the Incident with John Locke. The final one, I think, being the most revealing. In that final scene we learn that the John Locke we've been watching since his return to the island is actually The Enemy "in disguise"! wwWWWHHHHAAAAAAaaaa!!!!? I know, right? I haven't gone back to watch the whole rest of the season to really find out the earlier implications of that, but looking at THIS episode with that info in mind is interesting. Locke(as I still refer to him even though it's now NOT him) spends time talking to Ben. He works his way into Ben's mind and convinces him to kill Jacob. We know this is because, as The Enemy, he can't do it himself. In the final scene Jacob knows he is talking to The Enemy and admits that he must have found his "loophole". Indeed he did. The Enemy says that he's been through a lot to get to this point. This has great impact on previous things we thought we knew. I will discuss that in a minute. First, Here are some other things we learn in this episode:
-Ben has never seen Jacob before. Ben was only pretending to talk to him in the Cabin.
-Richard would bring lists and instructions to Ben, from Jacob.
-There can only be one leader on the Island at a time.
-Richard has never met Ilana before.
-Jacob went to visit Ilana off the island, asking for her help. (as if she already knew him)
-Ilana goes to the cabin to find Jacob. There, she claims he hasn't used it for a long time and someone else has been there in his place.

so what does all that mean. Although we are definitely missing some details it basically means that The Enemy has been running a very elaborate and deceptive scheme (or con) on the Losties. He's been manipulating them into position in order to seize physical control of the Leader (Locke) without raising suspicion from those around him. It was the true Locke that left the Island and the True Locke that thought he had to die in order to get everyone back to the island. But remember that it was Impostor Locke who told True Locke he had to die (through communication with Richard Alpert) as he was jumping thru time. Phew! this is confusing. So questions this raises...
-Does Richard even know of The Enemies existence? or power?
After all, Richard questions the ability for someone to come back from the dead, but had he
known fully of the enemy you think he would have called "shenanigans".
-Is Ilana (and Bram) a former Islander who was brought there by Jacob and that was sent back to the "real world" by Jacob, unknown to Richard. Are they returning to fight for their master Jacob?

So here's a possible breakdown of the history of the island.

-Jacob and The Enemy are on the island. (as well as a possible indigenous people that worship them as gods)
-They are caught in some unknown dilemma where they can't kill each other and are fighting over control of the island (let's say)
- Starting a long long long time ago, Jacob constantly brings people to the island (The Black Rock) in hopes of proving The Enemy wrong.
-It never goes right. the people are incapable of doing whatever it is Jacob is trying to prove and they fight and die (or the enemy kills them)
-This happens over and over again throughout time.
-In the mean time The Enemy is trying to find a loophole to this problem as well as working on his recruiting ability.
-The Enemy creates (or recruits) the Smoke monster and uses it as his minion. Capturing souls and taking their form.
-Jacob lives in the cabin.
-One day Jacob manages to trap The Enemy in his own cabin.
-Jacob secures The Enemy in there with a ring of volcanic ash. ( I believe The Enemy is somehow linked to the briefly mentioned volcanic eruption that happened on the Island a long time ago. Perhaps that was his release from a previous capture)
-Jacob moves out of the cabin and takes residence at the bottom of the four-toed statue.
-Richard Alpert shows up and is put in charge of Jacobs people and they act as the forces of good. Richard is a liaison between Jacob and each new leader. As a "tribe" they are working towards Jacobs goal.-Former leaders Charles Widmore and Eliose Hawking are both, in turn, forced to give up their command as Leader.
-There is no immediate leader to replace them.
-The DHARMA people manage to find the island on their own accord.
-Jacob is not happy with this, but they manage to negotiate a truce.
-Ben is appointed acting leader after the hostile attack on the DHARMA camp.
-Ben only pretends to be able to know what Jacob wants. He is likely being manipulated by The Enemy.
-Jacob begins to recruit the Losties to the Island.
-due to the time travel The Enemy knows what the future holds and sees his opportunity to manipulate the Losties as they first come onto the island the first time.
-The Enemy weaves an elaborate scheme to convince those Jacob wanted on the Island, to leave the island...and then to return with John Locke's then dead body.
-This allows the enemy to take over Locke's identity without the suspicion of others.
-This allows the Enemy direct access to Jacob so he can finally kill him.

this isn't a completely accurate timeline. there are still many questions. Like if Jacob lives under the statue then why does Ben ever go to the cabin? Did he just find it and coincidentally and thought it would be a good place to stage his lies. Did the Enemy lead him there so he could manipulate him to bring potential Leaders there.?
I think there may be something like that happening. But time will tell.


I'm not going to say much else here, except that at the end of the episode when Jacob is stabbed he says. "they're coming". The Enemy gets kind of a worried look on his face and kicks Jacob into the fire. Whoever THEY are, I don't think it's something The Enemy necessarily wanted to happen.
THEY may mean the outside world at large, or perhaps someone else seeking control of the island. In either case I think the Enemy probably just wanted control of the Island himself and thought killing Jacob would do the trick and that would be the end of it. So now we could possibly see a three way way between Richard Alpert and his crew fighting The Enemy as well as the new threat that is "coming". Intense.

Next time I want to try to take a brief look at the flashbacks where Jacob visited our Losties and see if there is a stronger connection to those people's destiny other than just ending up on the Island

LOST in translation.

Welcome, my friends.

If you are like me then the forthcoming sixth and final season of LOST has you as giddy as a school girl on Christmas who just got a pony that lays golden eggs. For those of you that don't know, I use to do a lot of dissection of episodes after they aired. This was mostly shared with my friends and coworkers in a very closed circuit conversation. Last season I had uprooted my life right at the start of Season 5 and I never got fully adjusted back into my episodic commentary (despite the efforts of friends pushing me to do so). So last season played out sans evaluation by yours truly, but I hope to change that this year. Since this will be our last chance to experience new LOST episodes I think it would be fun to speculate and dissect the events of the show much like the seasons before.

One other reason (or excuse) I give for not keeping up on season 5 is that, to me, it was pretty self explanatory. That is until the very end. Not to say the season wasn't filled to the brim with unanswered questions, but if you kept up with the writers interviews you kind of always knew where it was generally heading. You knew they would get back to the island. And once there (in 1977) you knew they would all have to meet up again in the same time (which is where I believe they land at the start, or near start, of season 6)

***SIDE-NOTE*** The opening episodes of season 6 have been revealed to be entitled LA X (parts 1 and 2) this is obviously a play on words open to interpretation. Is it simply referring to LAX; the airport in which flight 815 departed from and where the Losties would find themselves if Faraday's theory about the bomb detonation is to believed. OR is LA X referring to some, or all, of the Losties being back in LA at a undisclosed point in time or parallel time and universe( where X is representative of a variable as in math) Note the deliberate spacing between the A and the X. My guess is that is what we are meant to believe going into the episode. But I believe (as I said above) that even if that happens, the Losties will quickly find themselves back on the island in “present” time with those that didn't travel back to 1977 and this will all build up to the battle with the bad guy...(who ever that may really be). I'm pretty confident in my feelings, mainly because the writers are not stupid..nor are they cheap. At Comic-Con in San Diego last year, LOST had it's usual well attended panel discussion where fans we able to ask questions. In an amusing planned event Jorge Garcia (Hurley) appeared in the audience and basically said to the writers that if Faraday's theory was right and the bomb goes off and prevents the crash of flight 815 then the past will have changed and the Losties will never find the island and basically the past 5 season would have never have happened and all past events would be negated. He went on to say that that would be “bullshit”. This is obviously voicing many of the fans thoughts and concerns found on the forums (which the writers are clever to include in many episodes as well). They were smart to set themselves up for the opportunity to address the fan base at large about this during the long lull between seasons. They pretty much said, “Yes. that would kinda be bullshit. So just trust us.” That obviously doesn't give anything away other then the fact that they're not idiots and they know where they're going with it. Which is why I could see them toying with the alternate time possibility just to tease us with the notion. But I think this will play out as a device to progress the story back to where it was always going to end up... on the island in a war. *****

Since going through all of Season 5 would take a LOOOONG time, I'm just going to try to get back in the groove by recapping the last episodes (The Incident Parts 1 & 2). I'll do this over the course of the remaining 29 days until LOST comes back. So I don't know how many entries it will take or how often I'll be doing it, but I'm going to try to get through all my thoughts before February 2^nd.

Since I'm only talking about the last episode, let's concede that all previous episodes we're mainly about getting our characters into the positions they find themselves at the start of “The Incident”. Sure, new information was revealed and some holes were filled in but all of it was to support old facts or to set up much bigger ideas that came out in the season finale. The biggest underline questions, for me, was “what the motives of characters in Season 5?” Mainly speaking of people like Eloise, Widmore, Ben, and Richard Alpert. Those truths will not be revealed until we get into Season 6, so I don't want to pretend we can know anything for sure just yet. I will however focus on new information and new characters and the events that will finally connect our Losties to their destiny.

Since I've already been long-winded enough, I just want to look at the first scene of “The Incident”. The one where Jacob is on the beach with...ooohhhh let's call him......The Enemy.

I think this is the most coded scene of the season. I bet there will be much to look back on once we know all, and we can see how they hinted at a lot of it in this scene. On first viewing this scene is very mysterious since we don't learn that that man in white is Jacob until the end. Also at the start we are lead to believe these men might be friends. It's not until almost the end we learn The Enemy wants to kill Jacob. I think this info is vital to understand what was going on in the scene prior to this information being revealed. So we'll move forward with that knowledge already known (as well as what else we already know about the Island).

There is definite tension when The Enemy enters the scene. Jacob is casually eating the fish he just cooked and politely offered to share. The Enemy says no thanks, “I just ate”. I think this could be our first hint. Nothing major, but I think it has bigger implications. It seems like such a throw away line..so why even include it? We know that this person is indeed Jacob's enemy and he is the “thing” that has been impersonating Locke since his return to the Island. I think it's safe to say that he (as well as Jacob) has powers. Super powers, magical powers, god-like powers....who knows exactly which one. Since Jacob is eating fish like a normal person we assume that whatever The Enemy “just ate” was an equivalent normal meal. But what if it wasn't. I mean, he says the line with a kind of smirk or sarcasm to it. I'm not saying he's eating people (although that would be a nice set up to the teased 7^th “Zombie” Season of Lost). But Since we now know he has the ability to inhabit the bodies of others...does that nourish him somehow? Or is there another similar process where he collects souls. I don't think he IS the smoke monster, but are the souls the monster collects delivered to the Enemy (unknown to Ben or anyone else who ever “controlled” it) for consumption? Watch him deliver that line again and tell me if you see any other meaning behind it.

The two men then proceed to discuss the arrival of a ship (the Black Rock) they're watching at sea. Since we already know the ship sailed a long time ago this gives us a rough idea of when this conversation is taking place. It is also made clear that Jacob summoned them and that The Enemy does not want them on the island. Jacob brought them to the island because he is “still trying to prove [The Enemy] wrong”. What exactly he is trying to prove I think is the answer to why the Losties ever showed up in the first place. Perhaps this is the ultimate answer we will learn at the end of Season 6. For now we are just left to guess. Based on the Good vs. Evil nature of this whole show as well as the two characters in the scene, I would venture to say they are discussing the true nature of man. The Enemy argues that “every time it's the same thing. They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt.” This not only shows his side of the argument, but also that this is not the first (or last) time Jacob has done what he can to find truly good-natured people. It's a deep debate, for sure. But why bother to have it? Are they just arguing or is Jacob looking for good people for a reason? I would assume there is a reason. Perhaps to take the place of himself and The Enemy as overseers of the Island. If that is the case maybe The Enemy is convinced it's useless and wants to kill Jacob and seize control of the Island for his own uses. They can't kill each other (as implied by The Enemy). Could it be that they represent the balance of good and evil on the island (or the entire world) and one cannot have influence over the other. Which is why The Enemy must get Ben to kill Jacob. It begs the question why then can't Ben and Widmore kill each other? Where they already given similar powers or rules of balance to the island? Was that they roles Locke and Jack were originally meant to fill?

When The Enemy says “it always ends the same” Jacob retorts that it “only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress”. This statement surely shows Jacobs intentions of bringing SOMETHING to an end. Again, is it their rule of the island? The island itself? The end of evil?

Speaking of progress only reiterates the idea that Jacob has done this time and time again, trying to make it work. The Enemy then admits his desire to kill Jacob as well as his need to find a loop-hole to do so. This would indicate that there is some set of rules in place. Were the rules put on them by the Island? A god? - were they sent there as in some tale of Greek mythology were they are bound to each other and the island until their differences are solved? The four toed statue that they show in full at the end of this scene has been revealed (outside of the show) to be Taweret- the Egyptian goddess of birth, rebirth, and the northern sky (also sometimes stated as the goddess of fertility). The ankh that the statue holds is an Egyptian symbol for “eternal life” that is often depicted with the gods. So there is a definite theme of life and death going on here...as well as the struggle to keep it. But who's life are they all fighting for? Their own? The Islands? Mankind? That bigger picture will be revealed in time, I'm sure.

So there you have it for now. Sorry for the length but I was trying to catch up some.I hope to post again soon. In which I think I'll try to cover more thoughts on The Enemy and how (now in hind sight) we can see his influence in the past...and how he's been manipulating the situation to find his loophole. Thanks for reading this far. If you have any questions or elements you would like to hear my take on, feel free to ask.. otherwise just wait for my next lengthy installment of my LOST posts.

-C