Ghost children

As speculation grows about the "ghost child/children" in the sixth season, here's my two cents' worth: I'm going to back pedal on my previous theory that the "ghost child" was Aaron. Now I say: they're the same people as the adults they're associated with. The first one we saw was Sawyer. The second one we saw, in "Everybody Loves Hugo," was Desmond. They do physically resemble their respective adults. Additionally, the first was somber and serious because Sawyer is and he's in dire straits. The second just flashed his million-dollar smile because, well like I said, he's the man. "Go ahead and scheme away, ya MIB. I'm the bloody MAN, Brotha!"

Desmond is the man

Desmond is special because he’s the only person who is only one person in both worlds. That is: there’s an Island Jack and a Sideways Jack: two Jacks. There’s an Island Kate and a Sideways Kate: two Kates. Etc, etc. But there’s only one Desmond. Whether in the Sideways world or the Island world, it’s the same Desmond. Widmore’s jolt fused the two. Now Desmond knows both worlds. In fact, he knows everything; more than any character on the show now; more than we know. He’s the most powerful man on Lost. Fear is weakness and he’s absolutely without fear. Knowledge is power and he has more knowledge than anyone else, including the Man in Black.

Wondering why Desmond ran over Locke? So am I. But the most significant thing about that scene was not what Desmond did, but the fact that he knew exactly what he was doing when he did it. He knows. He freaking knows it all. Desmond is the man.

The destruction of the temple

Okay, this is stepping back a few episodes, but I want to take advantage of this Lost hiatus to say something about the destruction of the Others' temple by the smoke monster.

When the survivors found refuge in the temple I thought, This is cool, for a few reasons: now we got the heart of the Others’ society spiritually and historically; as the heart of their society it not only offered answers to the island’s mythology, but was most untouched by the megalomaniacal influence of Ben Linus and Charles Widmore; and because I thought here will be the final conflict between good and evil. When Smokey came and destroyed everything I was traumatized. It felt like the series had ended and evil won. But I think in part I was blinded by a Jacob-like optimism that overlooked what was wrong at the temple.

See, as we got closer to the temple, the Others seemed to be revealed to have a more complex history than was revealed in Season 3 where they were just bad guys supreme. As I wrote in an earlier post (“A History of the Others”), the Others actually seemed to have started out as a good society which was corrupted first by Smokey’s interference, then in turns by the wanton power lust of first Widmore, then Ben. So by the time we got to the temple at the opening of Season 6, I was convinced that the temple Others were kind of representative of the original Others, and therefore actually good guys. Certainly they seemed more sympathetic than the Others of Season 3. But right from the beginning there was bad stuff. At first sight of the survivors, Dogen orders them all shot. Lennon only briefly hesitates then shrugs his shoulders and said, oh..ok. So much for valuing human life. Lennon and possibly Dogen lie to the survivors. The truth is the Others just aren’t a good community even at their very heart. Maybe they once were, but they have become corrupted also with much the same spirit as the other Others.

When an attempt to revive Sayid failed, Lennon callously announced, “Your friend is dead.” The body was left lying by the side of the pool. No attempt at consolation whatsoever. When he inexplicably revived, Dogen tortured him mercilessly as a test of the evil in his soul. When Sayid failed the test, Lennon lied and told him he’d passed. But that was only so Dogen could trick Jack into killing Sayid by unwittingly giving him poison. How would Jack unwittingly do that? By Dogen lying again and telling Jack that the poison was medicine.

And, as a bit of an aside, since when do so many guys walk around with loaded guns in a sacred place of worship like a temple?

Guns, cold-blooded killing, disregard for life and death, lying – since when are these the ways of a sacred people? Of a temple? Is this the kind of society Jacob wanted?

And so it came to pass that Smokey succeeded in destroying the temple and the people who insisted on staying there. Yes, I’m suggesting that the very corruption of the Others, the very choices they made to allow their ways to be corrupted, led to the very complex web of circumstances that opened the way for what would otherwise have been impossible: for Smokey not only to get out and kill Jacob, but to get in the temple and kill everyone in it. So, given the choices of the Others, this was meant to happen. Perhaps it was even prophesied. “It only ends once,” Jacob once told the MIB. The destruction of the temple seemed to be the necessary beginning of that end.

This means we have here yet another biblical parallel on Lost: the destruction of the temple by the Babylonians. That destruction also looked like the defeat of God by the forces of evil, but was actually judgment for Israel betraying God’s covenant. Like Smokey, Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians were the bad guys on the face of it, but when the time of captivity came God declared that He sent the Babylonians to destroy the temple.

“Therefore thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.
Then shall the cities of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem go, and cry unto the gods unto whom they offer incense: but they shall not save them at all in the time of their trouble.
For according to the number of thy cities were thy gods, O Judah; and according to the number of the streets of Jerusalem have ye set up altars to that shameful thing, even altars to burn incense unto Baal.
Therefore pray not thou for this people, neither lift up a cry or prayer for them: for I will not hear them in the time that they cry unto me for their trouble.”

(Jeremiah 11:11-14)

You can hardly read that without thinking of the smoke monster destroying the temple. But maybe that means that the smoke monster really isn’t a monster.

Interestingly, in the biblical case of the temple's destruction, God's prophet Jeremiah warned the citizens of Jerusalem, just as Sayid warned the others: surrender to the invasion or be completely destroyed. Now, I bet you haven't thought of zombie Sayid as a prophet, have you? But the parallel is inescapable (even if Jeremiah never killed anyone). Maybe Sayid's nasty state is all part of a bigger plan that ultimately works out for the good. In fact, maybe the good is not bound up with either side. Many have said that neither Jacob nor MIB is all good or all evil. Let's think of it another way: maybe good isn't all Jacob or all MIB. Not that they are bigger than good and evil, but that good and evil are bigger than them. Maybe there's some ultimate truth and good in which both Jacob and MIB play a role.

I’ll just say it out: maybe the evil here is not in Jacob or the MIB, but in their mutual alienation. Maybe Jacob and MIB are supposed to work together rather than strive against each other.

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.