Richard, we hardly knew ye.

I had hoped to get this done before the Richard Alpert episode, but such is life. I actually haven't seen it yet (I watch Lost on hulu.com on Thursdays), so my apologies if my remarks seem obsolete, irrelevant, and/or sophomoric.

This is just a very brief entry to state my observation that Richard Alpert has been diminishing consistently in mystique since he first appeared on Lost. Originally he seemed to be this all-knowing oracle of the island, but that has changed; not that Richard actually became less-knowing, but the more we saw behind the scenes, the more we realized that he wasn’t all-knowing even when he seemed to be. Like in “Because You Left” the first episode of season 5, when he told Locke that he had to go bring the other survivors back to the island and how he had to die. Richard seemed to know everything even when the next time-flash would take Locke. “Next time we see each other I'm not gonna recognize you.” Then we found out in part 1 of “The Incident” that Richard didn’t know any of that; he was just repeating what Fake Locke told him to say. In fact all of Richard’s dealings with Locke were machinations of the Man In Black. This leads one to wonder if Richard was really told by Jacob to kill the Dharma Initiative or the 18 soldiers that he had killed in 1954, or if the Man In Black deceived him to do it (see my earlier post "How to fail at religion by not really trying"). In that event, not only is Richard not all-knowing, he’s almost the opposite: he’s clueless and easily deceived and manipulated (even by Daniel Faraday, “Jughead” (5.3)).

The fork in the road

Originally the bomb “Jughead” was to be detonated with the intention that by preventing the hatch from being built, the ill-fated Oceanic flight 815 would not crash and the remainder of history would be changed. But since the electromagnetic anomaly originally was there in 1977, blowing up the bomb had to change history from that point on. Even the lives of the survivors were changed from that point on. Evidence for this includes, but is not necessarily limited to, the following:

Sideways Jack had his appendix out when he was seven years old

He is the father of a teenage boy.

James Ford is a police officer and never was a criminal.

Desmond is on Oceanic 815.

Therefore a piece of conventional Lost wisdom has been that when the nuclear trigger to “Jughead” was detonated at the end of s.5 the timeline of Lost was split in two; put differently, the two versions of present reality diverged from a single point in 1977. That’s been rendered invalid now by at least one fact: Roger and Ben Linus left the island before The Incident. Also Sideways Ben is not one of the Others, so he was never taken to the temple, so he was never was shot by Sayid (because if he had been shot by Sayid and not taken to the temple, he would have died). This would explain why Sideways Ben is essentially a grown-up version of the kind, idealistic kid who was taken to the island by his father: if Sayid’s attempted murder of Ben started Ben down the path of evil, well, that event never happened in the Sideways universe.

This indicates that the divergence between Island or “normal” reality and Sideways Reality started at an earlier date than 1977 and I’m going to call it at 1974. That’s early enough for the Linuses to have left the island, but late enough for them to have arrived there. But there’s another reason for proposing 1974, namely…well, think about it. If the hatch was never built, then Oceanic 815 never crashed in 2004 (in fact the island is sunk by then), and none of Lost ever happened. Which means that none of the survivors went back in time to 1974. So the elimination of the electromagnetic anomaly would not change history just from 2004 or even from 1977, but from 1974.

Regina Austen, meet Kate Spektor

And now an off-the-wall moment. When I watched “The Incident,” Season 5’s finale, and saw Jacob talking to young Kate, I thought, “Hey! That’s, like, little kiddie Regina Spektor!”

Think I’m loony? Well, this morning I just watched a CBS Sunday Morning story on Regina Spektor originally broadcast three years ago and it included pictures of her when she was nine. Sure enough, little nine-year-old Regina looked exactly like the child actor who played Kate in that scene from “The Incident”! So what does this mean?

1) Does Kate consider Tom Brennan, her childhood sweetheart to be her “sweetest downfall”?

2) Is Kate the real mother of David Shephard and that’s where David gets his virtuosic piano skills?

3) If Kate ever makes her peace with the law, will she become an internationally famous pop star?

4) Did sideways Kate actually kill her biological father, or was it really Fiona Apple?

Self-centered vs. Other-centered

There was an interesting contrast on the “Sundown” episode that highlighted the difference between Jacob and MIB. Dogen described the deal he made with Jacob: Jacob heals his son and Dogen will move to the island and do Jacob’s work, never seeing his son again. Sayid made a deal with FLocke: FLocke will somehow give him Nadia back and Sayid will do FLocke’s bidding. But the fundamental difference is this: Dogen’s deal was one of sacrifice. He himself did not benefit from the deal, but his son did. Sayid’s deal on the other hand benefits Sayid himself. Indeed, it was defined in those very terms. “What if I told you you could have anything in the world that you wanted.” That is essentially self-centered. I submit that Jacob represents other-centered spirituality and MIB represents self-centered spirituality. That’s why when Widmore was acting on his own behalf for his own self-centered agenda (“I’m going to get back what’s rightfully mine”) he was unwittingly doing MIB’s will; which is why Ilana and Bram, Jacob’s people, saw Widmore as being on the opposite side from them in the great conflict. That’s why self-centered Ben played right into FLocke’s hands.

Incidentally, I wonder if anyone else picked up on the parallel between FLocke’s offer, “What if you could have anything in the world you wanted,” and Ben’s offer to Locke in "The Man from Tallahassee": “What if I told that somewhere on this island there’s a very large box and whatever you imagined, whatever you wanted to be in it, when you opened that box, there it would be.”

Now I’m going to take this a step further. Self-centered spirituality can also be connected to pantheistic spirituality. And this is the great opposition that the Apostle Paul saw as being at the root of paganism: “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature [or creation] more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.”

Let’s not forget that in the earlier seasons of the episode the island wasn’t seen as some thing to guard, but as a kind of a being all its own. Before we ever saw the Man In Black, before we ever heard of Jacob, it was all about the island.

Locke: Each one of us was brought here for a reason.

Jack: Brought here. And who brought us, John?

Locke: The island.

It was the island that did things. The island healed people. The island told people things. The island gave signs. After the hatch imploded, before Locke could go back to being Locke of the Jungle, he had to talk to…that’s right, the island.

Now I’m going to take this one step further: what if we didn’t know the Man In Black’s name because he didn’t have a name? And what if he didn’t have a name because [dramatic pause] the Man In Black is the island?

Whatever it is, we know that the island is not just the tip of a mountain sticking up out of the ocean like a normal island. This island heals people. This island can move through space and time. This island has a built in donkey wheel like a quarter mile underground, for crying out loud. I submit that this island is an incomprehensibly advanced, complex machine built by Jacob or Jacob’s people. If Jacob didn’t build it, he at least runs it. And over the millennia he has brought people to it to be blessed by its benefits. But the island is not just a machine; it’s a learning machine. Over the millennia it has been copying the experiences of the people who come to it until eventually it developed a consciousness of its own. Then it grew tired of just being an object to be protected, an object that helped others and it longed for an identity of its own, separate from the object of the island and separate from Jacob. This gives new meaning to Jacob’s answer to Hurley:

Hurley: Who killed you?

Jacob: An old friend who grew weary of my company.

This is why the MIB couldn’t kill Jacob: Jacob is its keeper, its master, if you will. This is why the MIB wanted to kill Jacob. This is also why the MIB/FLocke can’t kill the candidates: the island isn’t programmed to do that.

The numbers revisited at last!

So on “The Lighthouse” we learned that the numbers are degrees of a circle. That’s awesome. Seriously, now we know, at least in part, where the numbers come from. The remaining unanswered question, of course, is what, if anything, determines which names get assigned to which numbers on the compass.

But that’s okay because the really significance of this revelation is that there is no inherent power in the numbers. It’s reminiscent of George Martin’s comment on the public’s reaction to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” upon its release in 1967: “People were doing all sorts of things, turning it on its edge, playing it backwards, trying to find the answer, the cipher to this enormous enigma. And the really great joke was, there wasn’t one.” Losties went wild in the first couple of seasons trying to figure out some mathematical pattern or other such significance in the sequence 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. But the power didn’t come from the numbers. The numbers came from the power. That is, the sequence of numbers became significant because of the names they were assigned to, because after all others were eliminated those were the ones who remained as candidates.

This also has great implications for Lost mythology. If the power of the numbers and the very sequence of numbers derives from them being the final candidates, then they were selected decades ago. Recall that Rousseau and crew were brought to the island in ’88 by the numbers. How old were the candidates then? And in the same year, in “Numbers”, Sam Toomey heard the numbers for the first time. If the candidates had been narrowed down to those six by then, what does that mean? And how were the other people eliminated? It’s not from dying, because, for example the name Straume, presumably referring to Miles Straume was crossed out and he’s still very much alive.

And the big one: (Kate) Austen 51. What does it mean that Kate is the only person not in that sequence who is not eliminated (crossed out)? She is neither eliminated nor in the 4-8-15-16-23-42 sequence.

By the way, in Jacob’s cave, I saw the name Littleton crossed out. Is that really Claire inside Claire’s body? Now that Sayid has been “claimed,” will his name be crossed out?

As complete a list as possible of the names and numbers from the cave and lighthouse are found in the Lostpedia article, “The Numbers”.