Lost: In Afterthought

By Wolfen Moondaughter
Raise your hand if you, too, guessed that the man on the beach with Jacob in the beginning was, somehow, John Locke. Or rather, the other way around. The only aspect of this scenario that threw me for a loop was that there’s *another* John Locke — I was thinking John was the reincarnation of the guy until then. So Jacob and this Psuedo!John are gods, I’m guessing — specifically, as Lisa pointed out in her review, Jacob is Sobek, the crocodile-headed god under whose statue he resides.

Wikipedia is perhaps not always the most accurate source in the word, but I think this quote from it about Sobek, an Egyptian god of protection and creation, is quite relevant:

Sobek’s ambiguous nature led some Egyptians to believe that he was a repairer of evil that had been done, rather than a force for good in itself, for example, going to Duat to restore damage done to the dead as a result of their form of death. He was also said to call on suitable gods and goddesses required for protecting people in situation, effectively having a more distant role, nudging things along, rather than taking an active part.

And that’s exactly what Jacob did: he brought the dead back to life (and cured ills — another aspect of Sobek — like Rose’s cancer and John’s paralysis), and he nudged things along, but ultimately let everyone make their own choices. Psuedo!Locke did that too, with Ben, but otherwise, in using John’s body, he played a more active role in causing things to happen. Continuing with the notion that these are gods at play, if Sobek calls on other gods, does that mean that any and/or all of the rest of the islanders are gods as well? How about Locke’s dad — was he perhaps really a Trickster deity? Note that both Locke and Psuedo!Locke enlisted others (Sawyer and Ben) to kill for them: if Locke’s dad was a/the Trickster, and Jacob is Sobek, and Locke is a half-god and Psuedo!Locke is a god, perhaps only a mortal can kill a god, by the rules of the game or whatever — hence the talk of a loophole? On that note, which god is Psuedo!Locke? My guess is Set, the “evil black boar” god, seeing as the real Locke was so obsessed with boar-hunting?

Was Locke originally a tool of Jacob’s that the other man/god usurped? Michael couldn’t die: I assumed that John couldn’t either. In fact, I was very puzzled by Ben’s surprise earlier in the season regarding Locke’s restoration: he shot Locke point-blank in what, season three? And left Locke for dead in that pit, yet Locke came back. Locke was shot in the head, too, and lived — I had assumed at the time that the bullet had just grazed him, but when he came back to life after the pit it was apparent then that the island was keeping him alive. So I was shocked to see him Captain Marvel Dead here instead of Wesley Mostly Dead.

The whole “time alteration” thing has been driving me nuts. Jack, sweetie, if you alter time so that none of you never land, who will go back in time to make sure that happens? Granted, Faraday being a physicist, I’m sure he took time paradox into account, but I can’t see how there would be a way around it. I think the writers just chose to ignore that point, or else they just keep putting themselves in alternate universes, in which case how does anything they do really matter, since the bad still happens in some universe?

And so what happens now? If it worked, then what the heck would happen with season six, if none of them landed? And if it didn’t work, how did Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and company, survive the explosion? ‘Cause I can’t see them continuing the show without all of them! And if the three are still alive, maybe Juliet is too.

Speaking of Sawyer, as he’s my fave character, can I just say how much I loved the angst he had in this episode — and Juliet, too, for that matter? I appreciate that Juliet understood that his love for Kate was never going to go away, but I believed he loved Juliet just as much — if not more. The grief when she fell, and his state of shock as they pulled him away — a thing of beauty! I’m also happy that he finally told someone else — Jack, in particular — of his tragic childhood, and I’m satisfied with Jack’s reaction.

And I’m glad we got another glimpse of Sawyer as a child. I wonder: does the fact that Sawyer and Kate were approached as children as opposed to in adulthood, as everyone else was, does that mean there’s something more significant in store for them? Will Trickster return — hell, will Sawyer and/or Kate take up the mantle as they sort of did once already, in their criminal past?

I’ve soon a good many people complain that there were no answers this season, and I have to wonder: what show were you people watching? They answered (or at least partially-answered) plenty; almost all of the questions I have now are all related to points introduced this season, not the seasons before. We know a lot more about Widmore and his motives, and Daniel’s connection to the story, as well as his mother’s. We have a clearer picture of the lines between the Dharma Initiative and Widmore’s people, who are in fact The Other Others. We know what happened to Danielle’s people and why she went nuts. We have a clearer picture of Ben’s thought process and motivations, especially when it comes to his foster-daughter and why he kept the girl from her whacko mother. We know now that Penny is connected to the island, at least in the sense that both of her parents are from there. We know why “the hatch” was created. We know that Dr. Candle is Miles’ dad — a factor which may explain why Miles can hear dead people, since he was born on the island. We know that Hurley’s seeing dead people is not a hallucination but rather a gift from Sobek/Jacob. We know why Hurley came back. We know how Nadia died. We know that John wasn’t seeing ghosts when he saw his dad before: Jacob seems to have restored Christian to life just as we saw him do with Locke. We know that Richard isn’t nearly as mystical and all-knowing as we’d thought — now I just wonder why he doesn’t age (although it’s a safe bet that Jacob had something to do with that). We know that the black smoke is some sort of mystical force, not a thing of science. By the way, since the smoke is often accompanied by the sound of chains, and we have often seen people pulled off by it similarly to the way Juliet was, I have to wonder if the chains that grabbed her were, in fact, related somehow to the black smoke. And now we know the Black Rock was brought to the island on purpose, that everything has been some grand game of the gods; we just don’t know the precise details yet.

If I have any real complaint of my own at this point, it’s that while we’ve known of Jacob a long time, this other guy is a pretty big eleventh-hour addition to the story. But really, this conversation between the two guys made the episode so interesting, even as it made the story a different story altogether almost, I don’t really care about the writing conventions it messes with; the show was starting to bore me until that revelation. Now I’m interested in this tale of warring gods and want to see how it unfolds. I definitely intend to stick around to find out in 2010!

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Wolfen Moondaughter is on the editorial board for the comics industry webzine Sequential Tart, for which she has written since late 2001. She’s an artist, too, having done spot illustrations for Dragonlance, among other things. In her spare time, she’s a rabid fanficcer/fanartist. See more of her work at her site, Wolfen’s Webworld.

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