Ok, this is REAAALY the LAST LOST post ’till Jan 2010
A lot of people I talked to today loved the finale but are a bit confused. Lots of info for two hours. Below I’ve cut and pasted a recap from a LOST blogger in cyberspace who is typically right on the money. This painted the clearest picture yet for me.
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Mid-1800’s: A man in white creates thread on a spinning wheel, then tends to it on a loom. He’s in a dark, ancient room, light by flames and marked with Egyptian symbols. He goes to the shore, catches a fish, and cooks it upon a stone. As he eats the fish, a man in black comes from behind. They both gaze at the Black Rock, a few miles off shore.
The man in black accuses the other of bringing them to the Island, saying the man in white is trying to prove him wrong. “You ARE wrong,” says the man in white. The man in black notes that the cycle is always the same: they come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt. The man in white notes that anything up until his ideal outcome is merely “progress.” After a pause, the man in black says, “Have any idea how badly I wanna kill you?” He speaks of trying to find a loophole to accomplish his goal, and leaves by speaking the man in white’s name: Jacob. We never learn the man in black’s name. Instead, we see the camera rise up on a full intact statue, standing right behind them both.
We finally met the puppet masters! Remember in “The Shape of Things to Come,” there were those few shots of Ben in the desert as the camera started close, then jump cut a few times ever futher back, revealing a bigger picture? Tonight’s episode was the narrative version of the last shot in this sequence, where at last, on a quiet beach in the 19th century, we met the two players responsible for the forces of light and dark on the Island.
Many might be tempted to assign the Man in Black’s name as Esau, given the Biblical references rife with the name Jacob itself. But me? I like “Man in Black,” as it harkens to a work that I think runs rampant throughout the show: Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower.” In that 7-volume series, “The Man in Black” goes by many names across variety planes of reality, but always serves the side of evil. So it’s only fitting to me that we take Jacob’s adversary as a nameless entity for now. In any case, the backgammon game between Locke and Walt came full circle tonight, with the sides fully set and the true leader of each side revealed.
Free will matters in the “Lost” universe! This to me was the most important takeaway of Jacob’s visits to various people currently on the Island. He didn’t give them explicit instructions, he gave them OPTIONS. He gave them CHOICE. And by doing so, he gave them the capacity to both do good and evil. All this gets back to what I’ve long thought was the most important exchange in “Lost” history, from the early part of Season 3. In the Hydra Station, Ben and Jack discuss Ben’s impending surgery:
JACK: All of this… you brought me here to operate on you. You… you want me to save your life?
BEN: No, I want you to WANT to save my life.
“Lost” inhabits a universe in which choice matters, in which free will matters, in which there are seemingly omnipotent beings who still need us to do us to things for them. The Man in Black cannot kill Jacob. But he can set things in motion that pray upon the frailty of man: their pettiness, greed, violence, insecurity, in order to position people where he wants them. But he can only lead them to a certain point. At that point, individual will still takes over.
This, to me, does not negate “whatever happened, happened.” The people in 1977 were not acting out some passion play for the gods in an endless loop. As frustrating as I found the seemingly incoherent actions of the characters (who made choices based on dramatic need versus consistent reasoning), they at least all eventually chose in some capacity to end up at the Swan at the time of the Incident. (I’d love to know how Richard claims he “saw” them all die there, but hey, that’s another tale altogether.)
The most powerful force in “Lost” is not electromagnetism, but Austenism! Seriously, when the show explains every major character decision in 1977 around Freckles, I have to make a crack about this. I kept waiting for Radzinsky to say he named the Swan after Kate’s beauty after a while. I don’t even blame Kate for this; I blame the writers who are clearly in love with the character more than they should be at this point.
Ilana and Company are Others! Or, sons/daughters of Others, as several of you theorized. Nice call, there. The fact that Richard knew the answer to the riddle indicates a connection to me that aligns the two forces together. And it looks like Jacob put them all on Ajira 316 to help him along.
My “Cabin Christian” theory is looking stronger than ever! I have stated in the past that “Cabin Fever” started a long con by which the artist we know now as The Man in Black” sought to take over the Island. Rewatch everything from Season 4 and 5 and I think you see that’s pretty darn accurate. It’s a ridonkulously overelaborate plan, but that’s what happens when you’ve got ageless creatures that might be human, might be gods, might be good/evil themselves forever measuring the worth of man using the Island as a testing ground in the name of “progress” towards some evolutionary end Jacob foresees and the Man in Black abhors. But rewatch the Christian Shephard in the brown shirt very, very closely your second time around. His interest in John Locke is purely to get the Man in Black on the Island. That’s his mission. And he succeeded quite brilliantly
