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)).