If You Haven't Seen the Season Five Finale, Don't Read Any of This

Hello my dear friends -

I realized less than a half-hour into "The Incident" that my final Season Five post is going to take me a loooong time to pull together -- as in, more than a week. I may divide it into two parts (one for each hour)... I'm just not sure right now.

In the meantime, I'm breaking with tradition and have decided to share a few of my initial, not very well rationalized thoughts with you on this depressing Morning After. Some of you who've been with me for a while may recall that the only other time I've ever done this is when I thought Locke had been shot by Ben at the Skeleton Pit and I was positive he'd been killed. Therefore, my motivation for writing today is probably pretty transparent: I'm extremely upset that Locke appears to be dead again.

So here are my knee-jerk responses to "The Incident," with a full recap and analysis to follow... eventually.

- Sometimes I think about this show so much that I don't see things that are actually kind of obvious. Which is why it was helpful that my husband was watching along with me. During the first scene... the one with the man we came to learn was Jacob (dressed in white) and the other guy (dressed in black), my husband said, "This is just like Dogma." And I replied, "What?" [For those of you who have never seen it, Dogma is a movie by Kevin Smith (Clerks).]

"You know, in Dogma there were those two angels [Ben Affleck and Matt Damon]. That's what these guys are. One is sympathetic to humans, the other's the Angel of Death or something."

My better half didn't get the movie comparison exactly right, but he did start me thinking about Jacob and the Anti-Jacob guy (referring to him as A-J for now) in this context. I have always believed that, despite the fact that the show has had several very obvious religious undertones since the beginning, it would never be "in-your-face religious" because that might alienate a lot of its viewers. So I disagree with my husband that Jacob and A-J are angels, or, should I say, that the show will ever explicitly reveal them to be angels. Nor do I think we'll find out that A-J's name is Esau (Jacob's brother in the Bible - thanks to reader JP for the link). In fact, I'm not sure we'll ever learn precisely what those two are, but I don't think it's all that important. I think what we're meant to take away is that Jacob is a force for light (good) on the Island, and A-J is a force for the dark side (evil). If people want to believe they're characters from the Bible or angels or whatever, so be it, but the show probably won't ever plainly spell it out for us.

Jacob has been luring people to the Island for years to test out his theories that humans are inherently good, whereas A-J's just like, "Humans suck." Richard was probably on the Black Rock and Jacob thought he was a cool guy and chose to freeze him at his current age, and Richard’s been ageless and working for Jacob ever since.

Oh, and the statue? Not Anubis. Not Taweret. According to reader TC, it's Sobek.


- Bram and Ilana surprisingly do appear to be "good," and are on Jacob’s side. There goes my New Dharma theory. They're probably some of the original Hostiles or descendants of them or something. So does that mean Widmore is aligned with baddie A-J, as Bram said that Miles should NOT go on Widmore’s mission? I'm finding it hard to believe that Widmore would knowingly cooperate with such an evil character, but I'm keeping my mind open at this point. I also have no idea why Ilana was all messed up and in the hospital when Jacob visited her and asked her to help him. But since part of that mission must have been to get Sayid back to the Island, we can assume that Jacob thought it was important that all of the 815ers return. And I'm sure we'll get an Ilana flashback next season to fill in the story about her hospital stay.

- Let me now get the thing I don't really want to talk about out of the way: yes, I was actually physically nauseous when Locke's body rolled out of the crate, and I woke up this morning all depressed that it was Thursday and the episode hadn't been a dream. BUT -- I still have hope that we'll see Real Locke again. More on that later, but for now, my biggest point of confusion about the finale is that I don't understand how there could be TWO Locke bodies.

My belief is that Locke was Real Locke up until Ben strangled him off-Island and he was placed in the coffin at Hoffs-Drawler. Otherwise, when he was running around in the real world trying to convince the others to come back, he wouldn’t have cared to stop and see Walt or Helen’s grave, right? Plus, he just seemed like Real Locke during "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham." But somewhere along the way there must have been a SECOND Locke Body for A-J to possess. We saw clones in the Orchid video with the bunnies before... so maybe that’s what did it -- when Locke turned the wheel a Locke clone spun off? But maybe A-J couldn't possess the second body, which had perhaps always remains somewhere on the Island around the Orchid station, until Original Locke was dead? [I should admit how torn I am about the show right now because I always swore I would stop watching if there were either clones or evil twins. Oops.]

One way or the other, A-J possesses a version of Locke's body. In my last post I wrote about the vicious cycle of Locke telling Richard to tell Other Locke (the one time-traveling and shot by Ethan in the jungle) that he had to die in order to get all of his people back. I assumed that Locke had Richard tell Other Locke that just because that's what he'd previously heard -- it was another "compass-like" loop where it's impossible to figure out with whom the "Locke has to die" idea originated.

But NOW we know that it wasn't Real Locke who was instructing Richard. It was A-J in Locke's form, and he would of course NEED Locke to die in order for his entire plan to work. A plan which consisted of possessing Locke's body, scaring the crap out of Ben when Locke appeared to be resurrected, and then manipulating Ben into killing Jacob. That's the loophole... A-J cannot kill Jacob himself, but someone else can.

Speaking of this "loophole" business, it reminded me of Widmore and Ben's exchange about "the rules." Are we ever going to learn the rules that those two are/were bound by?

- One more thing about Jacob -- after that first flashback with Kate as a child (SO happy they gave us another shot of the NKOTB lunchbox), I assumed that we'd see Jacob visiting all of the other 815ers as children or at least pre-crash. But his interactions with Sayid and Hurley seemed to be only pre-Ajira 316. So I'm not convinced that Jacob "chose" everyone to be on the original flight, though that did seem to be what was implied (and he did physically touch all of them, I double-checked). At least we finally know who put the bug in Hurley's ear about Ajira, though. (The contents of the guitar case, however, remain a mystery.)

- Finally, here's the translation of what Richard answered to Ilana (in Latin) when she asked, "What lies in the shadow of the statue?"

"He who will protect/save us all."


Now a few thoughts about the 1977 events:

- I don’t believe the blast killed any of the main characters, possibly even including Juliet. But I also don’t think it erased their pasts like Jack and Faraday assumed it would. Their pasts are their pasts... but, as I've said in other posts, perhaps Flight 815 will now be different for their future versions. As for the main characters, I'm assuming they will all most likely flash to 2008 (the end "Lost screen" was white, just like how the sky turned white during time-jumps...), where "the war" is now beginning. The question is, who else will be on Evil Locke’s side? Will all the Hostiles just blindly follow him? When will Ben catch on? I'm assuming very soon, since Richard now knows the truth.

- I HATED how Jack and Sawyer and Kate and Juliet were changing their minds and making important decisions based on their freaking love lives. Awful. All while poor Sayid is bleeding out. In my notepad I wrote, "The Love Quadrangle Is Responsible for Blowing Up the Island."

- How sad is it that the best part of this Lost finale for me was seeing Vincent for a few seconds? As soon as I heard his bark, both of my arms were in the air and I shouted, "Yes! YESSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!"


A few last words:

- Yes, I admit to being in complete and utter denial about Locke, but I REALLY don’t believe that they would have such a great character’s story arc end with Ben killing him. That would mean that Locke's destiny was to inadvertently help the BAD guys win!?! NEVER! Therefore, I still have hope that Locke will live again in his original form. Maybe if Des goes back and changes something from 2004, that can happen. Further, I really don't think the creative team behind the show wants to deal with millions of angry Locke fans staging sit-ins and protests (which I will be spearheading, naturally) if they choose to end the series with Terry O'Quinn playing a dastardly Agent of Evil that everyone despises. So I'm holding tight to my vision of Locke living out the rest of his days hunting boar, eating mangoes and randomly throwing knives all around the Island as the sun sets over the horizon. And... scene.

- My #1 favorite line was when Rose said, "Oh, hell no!" when Sawyer, Kate and Juliet showed up on the beach. Second favorite line was when the guy discharging Hurley from prison listed off his possessions: "... and one fruit roll-up."


There you have it. I'm looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts and reactions... but please don't leave comments like, "I can't believe you didn't mention Phil's death!" or "How could you not have mentioned Chang's arm!?!?" and whatnot. My "real" post is still coming... the above was not meant to be all-encompassing by any means. I still need proper time to mourn before I can fully process the entire two hours, so bear with me.

- e