History Repeated by Luhks

This review focuses on Episode 5.15 Follow the Leader. More Season Six reviews from Luhks will arrive in the future.


In a few short months, the network television show Lost will complete its initial run. As time passes, people will begin to look back on the series from its proper historical context. Lost might be regarded as the biggest cult television phenomenon of its era. However, even the show’s biggest fans must admit that ABC’s Lost most likely will not be remembered as the best dramatic series of its decade. (The cable-television triumvirate of The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men, will take the gold, silver, and bronze medals, in some order.) Within its own genre, though, J.J. Abrams’ Lost probably has ensured its spot on Mount Rushmore alongside Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, and Chris Carter’s The X-Files. Tracing the history of those four shows reveals a great deal about the evolution of the medium. When The X-Files was peaking in the 1990s, writers were beginning to shift away from the same creative mindset that had prevailed since the 1960s, that each episode operates as a self-contained, one-time broadcast. The ambitious X-Files team struggled mightily in their early attempts to convert their Monster-of-the-Week drama into a Grand-Mythological-Saga. Over time, technological shifts have changed fundamentally the way in which the artists are approaching the medium. After syndication, DVR playback, streaming media, and most importantly the DVD market, television programming carries a more permanent life than ever before. Today’s Lost writers operate with the understanding that their episodes will continue to exist long after their transitory time slots. Any fan would be naïve to believe that everything was planned from the beginning, but Abrams and Lindelof certainly understood that their Pilot was a Beginning that would lead to a Middle and an End. Each episode no longer needs to operate as an individual short story within a compilation, but as interconnected chapters in one great novel.


Perhaps more so than any other Lost episode, Follow the Leader represents the farthest frontier of this sci-fi television trek away from the original Leader, the Twilight Zone storytelling prototype. Episode 15 continues the trend set by its Season Five predecessors Because You Left and Namaste; it focuses on no character in particular. (Although many people will disagree with me, I would rank these three aforementioned Season Five episodes among the low points of the series.) The game pieces merely shift from one position to another in preparation for this year’s check-mate finale. As always, O’Quinn’s voice describes it best: “You and I have an errand to run, and we don’t have a lot of time.” The script from Paul Zbyszewski and Elizabeth Sarnoff can barely even be treated as a story in its own right. Each element only makes sense in relation to the episodes that it follows, and the episodes that will follow it. Its beginning, middle, and end exist only in the temporal sense, not in the functional sense. If Lost’s final season follows this lead (as well as whatever future successors who step in front of the line), then the paradigm will have shifted too far, and will require some course-correction back to a more stable equilibrium. Many months after that season’s end, almost every reader probably remembers the events of Faraday’s life story in The Variable, but I would expect that many people would need a refresher course for Follow the Leader. The human memory operates less like our home digital recorders, and more like Kirk’s Captain’s Log or Mulder’s filing cabinet. Without some unifying idea, theme, event, or character, the story will tend to fade away into nothing. The attempt to transform Lost episodes into pieces of an enduring novel has resulted in a paradoxical effect. An episode like Follow the Leader exists only to please the tastes of the plot-hungry immediate public, but it does not succeed (unlike many of its great predecessors from Serling down to Lindelof) in telling a complete story that will last forever.


BEN: So, which one are you? […] Are you the genius, or are you the guy who always feels like he's living in the shadow of a genius?
LOCKE: I was -- I was never very much into literary analysis.

While some people might regard Follow the Leader as the first Richard-centric episode, by no means does it tell a story about Richard Alpert. The ageless one, the only person present in both time periods, naturally appears in more scenes than any other character. This additional screen time barely reveals any special insight into his psyche or even his personality. Although his position on the Island hierarchy (and his status as a fan favorite) commands respect, his agency (and his appeal) remains severely limited. Alpert’s two exclusive story functions are referenced in this episode’s opening segment: to serve as a dutiful ‘advisor’ for whatever Leader the Island happens to choose for a particular decade; and then to sit back and ‘watch them all die’. Two key artifacts double as symbols for Alpert’s existence. First, Richard appears alone on the beach, arranging the sails of a replica ship inside a glass bottle, known as an Impossible Ship. The image conveys some characteristics shared by Alpert himself: an incongruous relic preserved from another time, a lonely vessel designed to travel forward but trapped inside a glass prison. Later, Richard interacts with the Compass, an object seen many times before, but whose exact nature had never been revealed. As suggested in the previous Luhks article Beyond Belief: “at no point during this chain did any person sit down and build a compass. If the compass Richard gave to Locke is the same one Locke gave to Richard, then it was never created, but it merely existed outside of time.” Like the Ship’s figurative moniker, the Compass is literally Impossible. During its fifty-year life cycle, the Compass remains completely intact, never wearing down, or 'aging' the way all physical bodies must. It is somewhat revealing that Richard shares stronger connections with these two inanimate objects rather than with other characters. The familiar face of Cane Consiglieri Carbonell has become as much a part of the scenery as the beaches and trees of Hawaii.


By practical necessity, history records only the names of its Leaders. As the Island’s foremost student of history, Ben Linus understands that only “a great man, a brilliant man” will be remembered beyond his years. No matter how much power he might attain during his regime, Ben’s legacy ultimately would be judged against that of his successor. For Linus, it was not enough for his cause to succeed, but he alone needed to receive the most credit. Despite his head start, no degree of effort and manipulation could account for the difference in their natural gifts. The Island gave dictation directly through John as its instrument, while it forced Benjamin to listen to second-hand accounts with an empty longing. To borrow from Amadeus, perhaps the greatest screen depiction of jealousy: “God was singing through this little man to all the world, unstoppable, making my defeat more bitter with each passing bar.” Although he retained the upper hand throughout their relationship, the existence of a genuine replacement cast a shadow over his entire life’s work. The brief career of Locke, the Island’s Mozart, would live forever, while Ben’s entire body of work would vanish along with the music of Salieri. Even after murdering his rival, Ben continues to be haunted by Locke’s image in its new form, a constant reminder of his ultimate failure. In Follow the Leader, the New Locke exposes the embarrassing secret that Ben was a false prophet: the Island never spoke to him, Jacob never appeared to him, and even a martyred John could take people farther in a single day than during decades of Linus' leadership. History may be written by the victors, but no degree of Linus’ revisions, with his weapons or his words, could erase the name and face of John Locke from Island annals.


HURLEY: Are we gonna get there soon?
LOCKE: How long?
BEN: I don't know. I've been following him.
LOCKE: What? What do you mean, you've been following him?
HURLEY: I'm not even in front!

Follow the Leader borrows its name from an activity played by children in those dark ages before television and Internet. The game requires the players to file behind the chosen person at the head of the line, and to mimic the Leader’s actions as they walk in his path, until everyone is eliminated except for the new Leader. This episode offers numerous suggestions that the true nature of the once-mysterious organization known as the Others might be a more elaborate version of that time-killer for schoolchildren. By all indications, the Followers, both during the 1970s and the 2000s, live a mindless and fruitless existence: they do whatever the Leader tells them to do, until a new Leader is chosen; then they continue playing the game until they end up with a gunshot, like the disposable Erik. (Not coincidentally, few readers are likely to remember Erik; he briefly distinguished himself with his spectacular roundhouse kick, before Sayid eliminated him for poor sportsmanship.) Our story now spans four rounds of the game, with the reveal that Widmore once served under Hawking, long before Linus seized control. Tragically and comically, Locke’s entire tenure as Leader involved about two seconds of introduction, a one-second flash in which he disappeared, followed by three years of sitting around a campsite and waiting for his corpse to return. As pointless as the role of Follower might be, the position of Leader seems to be share an equally thankless job description: sacrifice your autonomy, sacrifice your children, and accomplish nothing, until you end up banished. For how many decades did this pointless game continue before someone grew enough backbone to question its purpose? (In a cynical touch, the final moments of The Incident reveal that this particular someone was not even human.) The New Locke shifts the herd mentality as effortlessly as a shepherd prods his flock in a new direction.


Famously, the “Follow the Leader” game served as a key plot element in J.M. Barrie’s classic story Peter Pan, which takes place on its own fantasy island of Neverland, home of the orphaned Lost Boys who never grow older. The so-called Peter Pan syndrome refers to emotionally immature adults who ‘never grow up’ in the figurative sense, a common affliction among our Lost Men and Lost Women. Childhood became perhaps the prevailing motif throughout Season Five, with nearly every main character either visualized as, or at least analogized to, a child. (This script even adds one more name to the list of minors, with a throwaway line that confirms that Eloise, just like Charles, was only 17 years old during her appearance in Jughead.) Whether applied to the unnamed Others or the main characters, this episode’s prominent Peter Pan allusion makes for quite an unflattering comparison. The Island serves as a inverse Neverland for the ancient Alpert, trapped in his perpetual adulthood, watching each generation of children repeat the same mistakes. He offers this resigned summary of his years of experience as referee: “Let’s just say that love can be complicated.” From the convoluted efforts of Hawking and Widmore to sacrifice their love child for his salvation, to the unloved children Locke and Linus whose rivalry for the affections for a mound of dirt continues from beyond the grave, the advisor speaks the truth.


JACK: Every little bump we hit or turbulence, I mean I, I actually close my eyes and I pray that I can get back.
KATE: This is not gonna change.

Although Richard is the only Lost boy that never grows older, this episode’s core debate revolves around a one-time opportunity to become three years younger. Jack the Apostle seeks to convert followers into true believers of the martyred Daniel’s promise of resurrection. A safe 2004 landing at LAX is not exactly equivalent to the eternal life mentioned in John 3:16, but Shephard now views that urban airport as a paradise, relative to his Island adventures. Jack’s notion of "putting things back the way they’re supposed to be" begins with completing his own deeply personal mission, to rescue his father from the hellish Down Under, and return him safely to the City of Angels. The chance to reset time holds particular appeal to him as a doctor, as he can fix hundreds of his lost patients from Flight 815, with the push of a button. “All the misery we’ve been through, we’d just wipe it clean. Never happened.” Ever the practical thinker, Sayid puts his own spin on the notion of misery: “If this works, you might just save us all. And if it doesn’t, at least you’ll put us out of our misery”. As always, they walk Lost’s fine line between being a hero, and simply wanting to die. Their shared desire to detonate the bomb indicates a deeper impulse toward self-destruction. They even might desire the atomic explosion as an end in itself. Consciously or not, Jack probably wanted to nuke this infernal Island since he first landed. Each miserable man projects his internal frustrations onto some outside entity: Jarrah sent a bullet through little Benjamin’s chest. (Linus later plunges his knife into the heart of his father figure Jacob.) Dr. Shephard selects a plutonium thermonuclear core as his Occam’s scalpel, to euthanize his Island patient. He would regain control over his universe, by vanquishing the same incomprehensible landmass that had vanished without his permission last season.


This episode’s triumphant reunion of Jack and Sayid revives an annual Lost tradition. Even though the surgeon and the soldier might have a few disagreements during the early episodes of each season, the two men always manage to collaborate on some common master plan in the finale. Sayid tends to decide most of the war room details, while Jack tends to handle the public relations (and then to receive most of the credit or blame). The usual power dynamics of Leader and Follower do not apply to the Jarrah-Shephard partnership. Sayid’s rational assessments of the available options, and Jack’s intuitive judgments about what should happen, lead them to arrive eventually to the same conclusions. With an unspoken synergy, these two men alone agreed that it was okay to shoot kids and blow up hydrogen bombs. Kate serves as the emotional counterpoint against these mad efforts to rewrite the history books. The shared past of Shephard and Austen, of course, is much more complicated than Jack’s friendship with Sayid. The preferred Tabula Rasa moment of her life already occurred, with the crash of Oceanic 815. Kate desperately attempts to rescue her most cherished memories from incineration in the atomic fire. Either decision effectively results in genocide, either from the active annihilation of the Island’s 1977 population or from the passive indifference to the lives of hundreds of Oceanic passengers in 2004. Ultimately, this universal decision rests in the hands of flawed, self-loathing individuals each coming to terms with his or her own past. (Despite its shortcomings in other areas, I think Follow the Leader manages to suggest stronger, multi-dimensional motivations for the show’s male and female leads than the season-ending Incident.)


BEN: Not so long ago, Jack, I made a decision that took the lives of over forty people in a single day. I'm telling you this, because history is about to repeat itself, right here, right now.
JACK: Let me guess, you've got us surrounded, and if I don't do what you say you're going to kill all my people.
BEN: No, Jack, you are.

Although Follow the Leader emphasizes its defined hierarchies, the title also suggests the transitory and cyclical nature of power struggles. The Dharma Initiative, the more scientific counterpart to the faith-based organization of Alpert and his Lost Boys, follows its own set of laws. Despite vague references to the bosses in Ann Arbor, four power players dominate the Island decision-making. LaFleur, Head of Security, ceded all his legitimate authority the moment he crossed over the perimeter fence into the jungle. The friend who appointed him, Horace Goodspeed, loses his standing in the fallout. The voice of the eminent Dr. Chang might have carried more resonance under the old regime, but now he limits his role to damage control. Radzinsky emerges from the crisis as dictator, tacitly appointing the sycophantic Phil as his right-hand man. Dharma’s Head of Research views himself as another Great Man, the rare Black Swan of this Island pond, whose achievements will be recorded alongside those of Edison. His infant duckling, the Swan research site, must be protected at all costs. It might be easy for the viewer to condemn the methods of Radzinsky and Phil, because we watch these scenes through the eyes of Jim and Juliet. This violent reaction is hardly unique. The past decade of Lost’s history (as well as American history) more frequently places us in the position of captor. As the cycle of history has proven many times over, fear of the other will cause otherwise civilized people to corrupt their principles behind closed doors.


If there is one theme underlying Follow the Leader, it might be history’s natural tendency to repeat itself. Richard’s torch lights his path through the tunnels, just as he marches through the jungle thirty years later, still completely in the dark. The Hostiles capture Jack and Kate as Dharma insurgents; while the Dharma Initiative holds James and Juliet as suspected Hostiles. Miles relives a formative experience from the perspective of innocent child and omniscient adult observer simultaneously. Jack embraces his destiny as the reborn version of John, his old nemesis. James follows the footsteps of his old rival Jack, prepared to enter the submarine with Juliet and never look back. The New Locke establishes himself as the man who “always has a plan,” while the Ben now searches blindly for answers. (Hurley even echoes those exact words here, spoken by Ben one season earlier.) The episode even includes one entirely literal repetition of an earlier scene, by closing the season-opening loop of Alpert's Compass. Human nature guarantees that people will respond in the same destructive ways to similar situations. Lovers will quarrel, victims will victimize, new leaders will overthrow old predecessors, and groups will escalate misunderstandings into full-scale war. Any number of iconic Lost images convey the same core theme: Pierre’s skipping Willie Nelson record, the impossibly circular compass, the eight-fold wheel of the Dharma logo, the Swan timer that resets every 108 minutes, the spirals of the Oceanic corporate logo, even the iterations on Rousseau’s distress call from the Pilot episode. Eastern religions spoke of samsara, the cycle of rebirth, thousands of years before Western science-fiction writers delivered these time-travel causality loops.


Personally, my favorite commentary on this concept comes from the Greek author Thucydides, arguably the West’s first genuine historian. One of the most forward-thinking individuals ever to live, Thucydides broke free from his culture’s subjective re-tellings of past events. In his seminal text, a record the fifth-century Peloponnesian War, between the Athenians and their polar opposites from Sparta, he prefaced the work with this legendary disclaimer:

"And it may well be that my history will seem less appealing to read because of the absence of a romantic element. It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.”

His work indeed will last forever, because people continue to make the same mistakes twenty-five centuries later. Every subsequent historian has followed his lead, studying the past in the hopes of understanding the future. His argument, of course, depends upon his basic premise that human nature will remain constant, rather than progress over time. The poet Santayana famously claimed: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” A cynical historian might argue that even those who do remember the past must suffer that same cycle. Thucydides might help us understand the causes of suffering, just as a cinematic serial novel like Lost might dramatize our enslavement to time and space. Even if we learn to predict tragedy, we would be powerless to prevent it. Our historians and artists can only offer some level of catharsis by describing the big picture. Regardless, one thing is certain. After failing his pop quiz from Dr. Chang, Hugo is one person who will need to repeat a few history courses.

The Dark and the Light by Luhks

There are only two types of Lost fans: those who watch the show for the Characters, and those who watch the show for the Mythology. The statement I just made is, of course, a false one. It reflects a gross generalization, which oversimplifies the complex motivations of a wide spectrum of individuals into two categories. Look no further than the Season Five finale, The Incident, for evidence that the definitions of ‘character’ and ‘mythology’ overlap each other as to make the classification nearly meaningless. Jacob, the central force lurking behind all Lost mythology, is in fact a character. Nevertheless, that exact thought has probably crossed the mind of every person reading this article, in one form or another, at some point in time. Our world is so complex and chaotic, that if we never made such generalizations, if we never drew such dividing lines, then we could never understand anything. All science, art, and even language depends upon a binary choice between ‘X’ and ‘not-X’. Even when we stare into a random and meaningless abyss, a Rorschach inkblot, we instinctively need to find some greater meaning within it, to find some pattern in the black ink on white background.



When presented with a choice between two options, neutrality is nearly impossible. Personally, I know where I stand on most of Lost’s dueling opposites. The characters are more important than mythology. Season One is much stronger than Season Five. Terry O’Quinn is a far better actor than Michael Emerson. Jack is many times more interesting than James. Exposé kicks ass. Jack belongs with Juliet, and Kate should be with Sawyer. I hope that Widmore defeats Linus, and that Jacob loses to his nemesis. Science should always triumph over faith. I prefer one immutable timeline over alternate universes, and I prefer John Locke over everyone and everything. (While I’m at it, Elvis made better music than the Beatles, Manning is a better quarterback than Brady, Batman is better hero than Superman, Latin is more beautiful than Greek, but the Greeks themselves were more interesting than the Romans.) On an intellectual level, I understand the validity of the opposite perspectives, but, on an emotional level, I’m also 100% convinced that my opinions are correct. At its best, Lost presents us with a world of black-and-white dichotomies in perfect symmetry, but then exposes the truth in all of its shades of gray. Along the way, we can revel in the conflicts and enjoy choosing sides. Those who refuse to take sides, in the words of Rose and Bernard in this episode, simply don't care. True objectivity functions no differently from apathy. Ultimately, our reactions, opinions, and preferences reveal more about ourselves than about the artwork itself.



The two-part episode The Incident presents two stories in parallel: a science-fiction adventure involving time-travel, electro-magnetism, and a mad scientist hoping to change things with a hydrogen bomb; and a fantasy myth involving mortals enslaved by ancient demigods, trying to change things with a knife and sacrificial fire. (In keeping with the disclaimer introduced earlier, it must be noted that ‘science’ and ‘fantasy’ are terms loosely applied, and that perhaps even the Jacob story might craft a more plausible scientific explanation than the Incident itself.) This work of fiction exists somewhere at the intersection of drama, sci-fi, and fantasy, but wholly within the category of Mythology. The episode’s first images evoke the dawn of human culture, the harnessed power of fire, shelters made of rock, hand-spun clothing and sandals, and primitive tools to gather fish from the ocean. After mankind adapted the necessary technology to survive, his mind began to expand to other pursuits, darkening his bare walls to produce painted images, carving majestic statues into rock, weaving decorative tapestries dyed different colors, telling stories through language, and even building ships to explore the seas (and planes to conquer the skies). Although Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey still holds the record for the longest flash-forward in cinema history, the centuries-long transition after the opening scene achieves a similar narrative effect. Even though man has evolved from taming the Promethean fire to building Edison’s light bulb to unleashing the power of the atom, our civilization is still in its infancy. Human beings themselves have not matured at the same rate as our technological progress. “They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.” The same petty jealousies that motivated the biblical rivalry of Jacob and Esau, also inform our nuclear-age warfare. A doctor can now perform once-unthinkable paralysis-saving surgery on your spine, but can that same doctor ever fix his own backbone when dealing with his father? Even our artwork, after generations of progress from cave paintings to wireless transmission of digital media, have also taken us from Homer to New Kids on the Block.


LOCKE: Years later a visiting prince came into Michelangelo's studio and found the master staring at a single 18 foot block of marble. Then he knew that the rumors were true -- that Michelangelo had come in everyday for the last four months, stared at the marble, and gone home for his supper. So the prince asked the obvious -- what are you doing? And Michelangelo turned around and looked at him, and whispered, sto lavorando, I'm working. Three years later that block of marble was the statue of David.

Two special artifacts from this classic opening scene, which are revisited at the ending of the episode, deserve special attention. The first is Jacob’s tapestry. The meticulously hand-crafted decoration initially appears in incomplete form. He has emblazoned the top section of the tapestry with ancient Greek lettering, a phrase from Homer’s Odyssey: “May the Gods grant thee all that thy heart desires”. Under those letters, the Egyptian symbol of the Eye of Horus, a symbol of divine power, occupies the center, between two massive wings. When Ben arrives at the statue centuries later, Jacob’s masterpiece is complete. Arms stretch down from the eye, towards nine human figures, while two kings observe from both sides. The image offers a visual representation of Jacob’s long-term plan, to give each piece ‘a little push’ into place for his endgame. Presumably, those nine individuals correspond to Kate, Sawyer, Sayid, Ilana, Locke, Sun, Jin, Jack, and Hurley (although Ben might be the final person, as Ben received Jacob’s touch rather than Ilana). Much like the sequence of literal and figurative long cons that preceded this one, the tapestry doubles as a metaphor for the show’s writing process. The gods of this particular story, writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, strung the audience along for several years, slowly revealing pieces, painting each character with care, until it was time to unveil this man behind the curtain. Of course, they understood that the journey was more important than the final destination. As Jacob later confesses: “It takes a very long time when you're making the thread, but, uh... I suppose that's the point, isn't it?”.



Allusions to outside mythology, of course, occur quite frequently on Lost. For every direct reference that the show makes, there are a dozen other meaningful comparisons to be made, some intentional (such as Apollo the son of Zeus, or Everything That Rises Must Converge) but many others are merely fortuitous. Minds working independently across the globe tend to converge on the same core ideas or mythemes. Mythology scholars have produced a number of different theories to explain why authors from different cultures, without any direct contact, produce legends with such striking similarities. Each theory of mythology necessary rests on a simplification and generalization, more valid for some works than for others. In my assessment, the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss offers the deepest insight into the objectives of Lost-style myth-making. Lévi-Strauss posited that human beings organize information primarily through binary oppositions (pairs like faith-empiricism, freedom-determinism). The underlying storytelling purpose of any myth is to unify those irreconcilable opposites, or at least create the illusion that the conflict has been resolved. Through the clash of thesis and antithesis, we can arrive at a synthesis. The commonly-cited analysis of the tragedy of Oedipus Rex offers a useful example: Sophocles revealed the consequences for a son showing not nearly enough affection for one parent, by killing his father; and far too much affection for the other parent, by marrying his mother. The great Lost myth revolves around the mirroring psyches of its pair of heroes, Jack Shephard and John Locke, one child who received far too much parenting (with Christian pushing his adult son around the clock) and another child who received far too little parenting (with Cooper pushing his adult son out of the eight-story window). The endless dichotomies of Lost are indeed false ones, and no one who chooses one extreme side, can ever be fully correct.


LOCKE: Backgammon is the oldest game in the world. Archeologists found sets when they excavated the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia. Five thousand years old. That's older than Jesus Christ.
WALT: Did they have dice and stuff?
LOCKE: [nods] But theirs weren't made of plastic. Their dice were made of bones.
WALT: Cool.
LOCKE: Two players. Two sides. One is light … one is dark.

The second key artifact is Jacob’s home, the Statue itself. As confirmed through outside sources (although hardly apparent from the actual episode), the Statue represents the hippopotamus-headed Egyptian fertility goddess Tawaret. (The interior chamber also includes a painting of the Egyptian deity Isis, another goddess similarly associated with protection, birth, and motherhood.) Before this revelation, many people, including myself, predicted incorrectly that the Statue would depict Anubis, the jackal-faced god of death, judgment, and the underworld. Images of Anubis last appeared during Season Five's Dead is Dead, on the tunnel walls where Linus confronted the black Smoke, also known by its Greek mythological moniker, Cerberus. The overall implication here is that the dividing lines have been drawn, with Jacob’s light side linked to Life, with the Man in Black associated with Death. In flashback, Jacob’s touch breathes life in Locke’s fallen body, while his nemesis apparently has been manipulating corpses for years to help him commit a murder.


Among the ancient secrets revealed in this episode, Ricardus answers Ilana’s ongoing riddle “What lies in the shadow of the Statue?” with the Latin phrase: ille qui nos omnes servabit. The standard translation apparently characterizes Jacob as a messiah figure: the one who will save us all. Despite all preliminary indications, it would be a premature mistake to equate the light-dark imagery with a good-evil metaphor. As Frank Lapidus wisely remarks: “In my experience, the people who go out of their way to tell you that the good guys are the bad guys.” The basic conclusions are undisputed: Jacob wants to keep bringing people to the Island to bring about an Ending, while the Man in Black wants to kill Jacob and keep the Island isolated. (The physical acting of the two rivals even conveys their dueling outlooks, with Mark Pellegrino relaxing as he scans the horizon, but with Titus Welliver squinting uncomfortably in the reflected sunlight.) Conceivably, Jacob’s Ending, his desire for change, could include the death of all mankind, to make way for the birth of a new progressive era. A phrase on the bottom of his tapestry offers a foreboding hint of Jacob’s final solution to end human corruption: “Only the dead have seen the end of war”. Keep in mind, the first on-screen action of Jacob, the great fisher of men, was to gather life from the ocean, rip its guts out, and then devour it.


(Here is another fun etymological fact for all of the Latin lovers out there. Early in the episode, Bram and Ilana share a cryptic exchange about whether Frank might be a Candidate for their side, a term that undoubtedly will reappear in Season Six scripts. The Latin adjective candidatus literally means “dressed in white,” and Mr. Lapidus clearly fits that bill. The word developed its English meaning from the white gowns worn by Romans seeking senatorial election. The word also shares a common origin with the adjective candidus which could be used for its literal meaning of “white,” or in a more figurative sense as “clear”, “candid”, or in other words “Frank.”)


MIKHAIL: Ha! Don’t waste your time. For ten years I have tried to defeat that game. But it was programmed by three grand masters. And it cheats.
LOCKE: Hmm. Well, I’ve played a lot of computers and I’m pretty sure they don’t know how to cheat. That’s what makes being human so distinctly wonderful.

For the first time, The Incident allows the viewer to rise up from a ground-level view of the game pieces on earth, to see the chess board from the player’s perspective in the sky. The story begins with the Man in White and the Man in Black trapped in an eternal stalemate. The fisherman Jacob gathers people from the seas, and then his enemy the hunter watches them destroy each other. Like the layman’s definition of insanity, Jacob repeats the same action over and over, while expecting a different result, faithful that one day the humans will change their nature, and the outcome. As Jacob points out, though, time is on his side: only one counterexample is necessary to disprove a negative. The rules of the game favor an endless cycle of perfectly symmetrical violence, until one of the players can find a way to change, break, or at least bend the rules. The Man in Black found the loophole in the rules that would allow him to kill Jacob. Evidently, he needed to impersonate Locke (and a number of other departed souls along the way) in order to persuade Ben, the leader of the Others, to choose to murder Jacob. At the same time, Jacob knew that his opponent would exploit the technicality eventually. In response, Jacob found his own way to cheat the rules: he brought a handful of special individuals to the Island, so that they could erase the events that lead to his death. To borrow a key phrase from Lost creator J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek opus: “Going back in time, changing history ... that's cheating.” Both master plans required a tremendous degree of faith in mankind: Jacob placed his confidence in the better angels of our nature, the ability of separate individuals to collaborate on one final goal; the Man in Black went all-in gambling on the inherent weakness of Locke, the corruption of Ben, and the mindlessness of his followers.


Their debate about whether mankind can change its nature arrives alongside the time-travel corollary question of whether human beings can alter their future. The “we’re the variables” framework presented in Season Five - note the emphasis on the plural - suggests that one person acting alone cannot alter history. Due to our natural tendency to oppose each other, the reactions of some other person will negate that action. Season Five's test case demonstrated the principle, as Kate's efforts to save little Benjamin negated Sayid's attempts to destroy him. The light will drive away the darkness, and vice-versa. However, if enough individuals combine in an effort to alter history, then the magnetism of their aggregate positive charge can overcome the negative pull. When the dark energy approaches the Swan (Jack, Sayid, Jin, and Hurley - all shown as adults in flashback), the forces of light gather to stop them (James, Juliet, and Kate – each one appearing as a child). The ensuing argument between echoes the central time-travel issue of Season Five: James asserts “What’s done is done,” and Jack responds “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.” The resulting boxing match between the Black-Jack and Light-LaFleur depicts the larger war between the dueling demigods in microcosm: the two men are evenly matched when trading punches, so James exploits a few holes in Jack’s rulebook. In the end, though, one side prevails with nothing more than a little push to tip the scales. Juliet’s paradoxical, circular logic, a freely-willed decision grounded on her concept of predestination, resolves the conflict into its synthesis.



BERNARD: You realize we're the only two married guys on the island?
[He shows his ring]
BERNARD: Married?
JIN: Married.
BERNARD: Yeah, well, no, not to each other. No. (laughing) You got it. It's not easy, is it? Oh, I mean, it's--it's wonderful, but... let's face it, every decision that you make takes twice as long. 'Cause you always gotta talk them into it.

The episode’s black-and-white motif takes on a completely different meaning in the context of the Island’s two married couples. Part One includes the long-awaited return of Rose and Bernard, a couple whose bond transcends not only the color barrier between black and white, but also the perhaps deeper divide between a woman of faith and a man of science. The retired couple sets the example that the children refuse to follow, to lay down their differences and evolve into peaceful harmony. Subsequent flashbacks also reunite our other married couple, the wedding between Sun in her white dress and Jin in his black tuxedo. Western observers often mistakenly refer to the prominent Eastern symbols of yin and yang, as images of the struggle between good and evil. On the contrary, the black-and-white emblem common from Chinese philosophy (also incorporated into the flag of South Korea) represents duality rather than polarity. The dark and the light, the male and the female, instead of opposing each other become unified halves of a stronger whole. Jin provides another useful image: “We will never be apart, because being apart would be like the sky being apart from the earth.” Their wedding rings reinforce the idea of interconnectedness between the two halves of the same story, an unbreakable bond despite decades of separation. Sun’s later discovery of Charlie’s Driveshaft ring suggests a similar connection between the living and the dead, the past and the future. On a more depressing note, this episode also includes a third married couple, with the tragedy of Sayid and Nadia. While Sayid bleeds to death from his gunshot wound on the island, he suffers a deeper wound in flashback, his own sky being ripped away from his earth.



In what is either a sheer accident, or the product of intelligent design, the dark and light phenomenon even extends into the ongoing turmoil between the episode’s four romantic leads. On the physical level, James and Juliet share the same light-haired, lighter-eyed look of Jacob, while Jack and Kate share the same dark-haired, darker-eyed look of his nemesis. As Radzinsky might attest, basic electromagnetism holds that like charges repel and opposite charges attract. Even heading into the final season, the love quadrangle has never settled into a stable equilibrium, due to a peculiar mix of shared-physical-traits-with-opposite-personality-traits and vice versa. If you wanted a second opinion from Dr. Freud, then he could tell you a thing or too about Ms. Austen and Mrs. Shephard, Ms. Burke and Mrs. Ford. (Speaking of Freud, what can a psychoanalyst say about writers who changed temporarily the name of one of its leads from the revenge-driven Sawyer to flower-sniffing LaFleur. The Flower, as it translates from French to English, is traditionally associated with femininity, fertility, and even serves a common symbol for a certain part of the female anatomy. Fortunately, The Incident confirms that, “there ain’t no more LaFleur,” and with it the nominal castration of James Ford comes to an end.) The Incident focuses much of its creative energy on manufacturing motivations for each of the four lovers, to join forces to detonate Jughead, mostly at the expense of the supporting players. For each of these four characters, Lindelof and Cuse go too far in spelling out the answers to the audience in childish black-and-white terms, when shades of adult gray would have sufficed.


KATE: So, do you believe it?
JACK: Believe what?
KATE: That everything's going to be okay?
JACK: Yeah, I do.
KATE: Kind of unlike you -- the whole glass half-full thing.
JACK: There's a glass?

The childish immaturity of adults often comes across in a negative light, but child-like innocence can also be seen as a positive trait. Hurley, more than any other character, has been blessed (or, depending on your perspective, cursed) with the heart of a child. The adult Hugo not only enjoys a nice cherry Fruit Rollup on his ride home from jail, but he is thoughtful enough to offer to share it with a stranger. Just as any girl Juliet’s age will blame her own actions for her parents’ failed marriage, Hurley similarly internalizes the misfortunes of others as his own personal shortcoming. Hurley’s conversation with Jacob carries the same tune as any kid in need of parental guidance. Jacob’s words add another classic binary opposition to this tapestry of black and white: optimism and pessimism. There are always two ways to look at any situation. Even the darkest curse might be viewed as a brilliant blessing in disguise. As a point of caution, though, the converse of that principle also holds some merit. Throughout this story, Jack plays the unlikely role of a zealous optimist. Absolutely confident in the plan’s improbable success, he illuminates all of the wonderful merits of the revised timeline (Sayid’s life will be saved, Jin will get reunite with Sun, Claire will have the chance to keep Aaron, etc.). Foolish optimism can be a more dangerous force than cautious pessimism. His alternate future easily could result in an abyss of darkness, rather than a beacon of sunshine.


After so many rays of hope, the story of John Locke now ends in the gloomiest depths of tragedy. Frank quotes the same eternal question that links together Through the Looking Glass with There’s No Place Like Home: “What’s in the box?”. Three years later, the answer remains the same: Locke’s rotting corpse. John's life ended with him alone, miserable, and a failure. He was a puppet on strings, pulled by Cooper, by Ben, and by the Man in Black, and then discarded as a piece of trash, like on the day he was born. In a way, the entity now occupying Locke’s body has been fulfilling John Locke’s lifelong dreams. Locke always wanted to become a decisive leader, a man strong enough stand up to the Coopers and Linuses and Jacobs of the world. This master pulling the strings is unburdened by John’s emotional scars, his neediness, his self-doubt, even his morality. John’s ambitions of divinity could not be reconciled with his identity as a mortal, so one of those two needed to die. Even so, Locke’s tragic curse can be viewed as a blessing of martyrdom. Seemingly, Locke’s last chance for redemption hinges upon the success of Shephard’s mission to erase history. His phony resurrection in The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham could be explained only by a cheap deus ex machina. The alternative option, resuming his life in a wheelchair at LAX, would be the product of his own leadership, the effect of mentoring Jack into a true believer. Jack drops the warhead onto the Swan site, like a kid tossing a coin into a wishing well, with the hope that when the magic box opens again, whatever he imagines will come true.



LOCKE: You have to do it.
JACK: You do it yourself, John.
LOCKE: No, you saw the film, Jack. This is a two person job, at least. […] I can't do this alone, Jack. I don't want to. It's a leap of faith, Jack.

Jack’s mad quest to detonate the bomb and prevent the Incident should remind the audience of Locke’s equally mad quest to end the 108-minute cycle of button-pushing once and for all. The content of Season Two’s Live Together, Die Alone resembles The Incident in other ways as well, a two-hour flashback episode to introduce a new character, with a timer ticking down to a scheduled event, which ends with one last heroic gesture to "make it all go away" in a flash of light. (Also, it never hurts to add liberal doses of the Great Radzinsky into your script.) These two episodes pull their characters violently towards the same magnetic focal point, with metal projectiles flying through the air. In each case, the man of faith puts his blind beliefs to an empirical test, to find a yes-or-no, black-and-white scientific question. Locke told us: “I’m more sure about this than anything in my entire life,” and he was wrong. For Jack, the words are: “Nothing... nothing in my life has ever felt so right.” (These statements also reveal a great deal about the degree of confidence the two men felt in themselves over the years.) The destinies of these two great men have been intertwined quite beautifully. Indeed, the outcome of one question hinges upon the answer to the other. If Jack had succeeded in destroying the energy, then Locke would have been correct as the timer ticked down to zero. On the other hand, if the Button truly served no purpose, then Oceanic 815 would have crashed regardless of any Incident, and Jack’s plan would have no effect on the timeline. I cannot help but admire their pure strength of will required to risk everything, seemingly beyond good and evil, beyond fate and free will.


Lost’s famous Live Together, Die Alone dichotomy reappears in another form, in the story of Juliet. When Jack first spoke those words in Season One’s White Rabbit, he phrased it as an either-or choice: “if we can’t live together, then we’re going to die alone.” When Juliet references the mantra in The Incident, she makes a crucial misstatement, “Live together and die alone” (at least, according to the closed-captions on my DVD.) A few minutes later, Juliet indeed does die alone, in the hope that everyone else might live again, together at LAX. The method of her death, proved to be an inspired creative choice. James, who tried desperately to lift John from the well in This Place is Death, once again found himself on the losing end of a tug-of-war with the grim reaper. Despite moving on from the death of his parents to build a new life, he finds himself in the same place as his childhood self in Tennessee, losing the woman he loves most in the world. The magnetically-charged chains, pulling her down into the gaping hole, offers a more scientific counterpart to the fantasy-inspired image of the Smoke Monster’s black hand of Death. Chains commonly serve as a symbol of restraint, imprisonment, inevitability, the antithesis of human liberty. In the famous words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Pulled underground against her will, Juliet makes one last free choice, to erase countless freely-willed decisions of others. She achieves her destiny by destroying the chain of events that caused her to fulfill that destiny.


When the final white screen with black letters appears for the first time, after five years of white-on-black writing, the implication is clear: the Lost universe as we know it has inverted itself. The central binary dilemma of Season Five hangs in the balance with the flash of light. Two players, two sides. Did the events of the Season-Five-ending Incident prevent the Season One-opening Pilot’s crash of Oceanic 815? Or did the characters cause the very future they were trying to prevent? Both options offer a mix of positives and negatives. A brand new timeline would offer fresh storytelling opportunities, and a chance to revisit old friends long gone. On the other hand, the explosion would also incinerate the entire five-season hand-crafted tapestry of the Island story. The entire post-1977 universe, including the 2007 storyline of the Incident, would amount to nothing more than a dream. Preserving the old timeline would re-affirm the show’s fundamental rules for meaningful storytelling stakes: dead is dead; whatever happened, happened. With that solution, the entire time-travel story arc that lead to this finale event, and all those post-cliffhanger months of anticipation, would become meaningless. (Logistically, I don’t think either solution even makes much logical sense.) Perhaps the fatal flaw of this debate is that we view it as a debate. As Juliet did, maybe we should simple replace the word ‘OR’ with the word ‘AND’. There can be two universes, one in which Jacob succeeds, and one in which the Man in Black succeeds. Instead of conflict, we can find harmony. As the men who first painted on cave walls understood, one color is not enough. A world of pure white and a world of pure black would be indistinguishable from chaos. But, when you combine the dark and the light in some kind of balance, then any work of art becomes possible.

No One Is An Island by Luhks

Every Lost season finale can only be described as a bittersweet event. The final episodes of the past three seasons all have offered a sweet, thrilling conclusion to a year of storylines, and set the stage for new ones. At the same time, the audience has no choice but to accept the bitter reality that they must endure many months of waiting before the story resumes. The audience is not alone in experiencing this range of emotions, as the characters themselves also experience both the pinnacles of joy (the Oceanic Six family reunions and Desmond’s rescue by the one and only Penny’s Boat) and the depths of sorrow (the division of the group and the apparent deaths of three classic characters: Michael, Jin, and Locke). The three-part Season Four finale, There’s No Place Like Home, lives up to the daunting reputation of its forerunners on both accounts.

Not surprisingly, There’s No Place Like Home borrows more than a few key elements from its three outstanding predecessors. The structure of the episode most closely resembles Season One’s Exodus, another three-hour epic that chronicled the paths of multiple characters on and off the island. Other references to that first season finale also appear throughout the episode. The thrilling greenhouse showdown between Jack Shephard and John Locke makes a direct reference to the events of that episode, and revives the tone of their classic conversation outside the hatch. Later, the ultimate night-time rescue of the Oceanic Six, floating on a survival raft at sea, provides a roundabout resolution to the raft scenes from the end of the first season, but with a completely different set of characters.


Like so many other Lost episodes, the storyline of Exodus actually turned the literal meaning of its title around on its head. The episode began with the group’s efforts to find rescue on the raft, but in the end no one managed to escape. Instead, a series of flashbacks showed the characters moving in the opposite direction, making their mass migration onto the fateful Oceanic flight. The title of the Season Four finale, There’s No Place Like Home, also serves as its own enigma as it sets up a similar reversal. Throughout literature, there are countless stories about characters returning home from adventures mysterious faraway lands. Frank L. Baum’s famous story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which made famous this episode’s title phrase, offers one major example. Lost, however, by no means follows this typical story structure. Instead, the opening scene of the finale actually begins where most of these stories end: a group of lost characters safely returns home to their families after a harrowing journey abroad. From there, the series of flash-forwards reveals what happens next after that ‘happily ever after'. The momentary happiness from their return steadily transforms into a more lasting state of despair, and our characters remain as lost as ever.


Even the earliest flash forward scenes include plenty of suggestions of these trials ahead. The prevailing mood aboard their flight home is not the excitement for their homecoming, but regret for the people left behind mized with dread over the lifetime of lying that must await them. Kate’s supreme sense of isolation undercuts the sheer joy of the family reunion scene. She stands alone on the breezy runway, without parents to greet her, clinging to someone else’s child. After the press conference, Sayid finally reunites with his beloved Nadia after so many years apart. Meanwhile, the viewer already knows that their happy marriage is doomed to meet a violent end after less than a year. From the beginning, though, Sun stands out from the group as the most troubled and reluctant member of the Oceanic Six. Her spiteful remarks to Jack in the opening scene reveal a sense of resentment and hostility against the situation. In a later scene, she becomes the only member of the group absent from the memorial service for Jack’s father. Two later flash-forward scenes focus on her own vengeful dealings with Paik and Widmore, apart from the group. Whatever her plans might be, her motivations certainly stem directly Jin’s fate on the island.


The heated exchange between Sun and her father proved to be a main highlight of the first hour, as it offers some provocative turns for both plot and character. Sun confronts her father with the accusation that he hated her husband and she holds him responsible for his death. Season Three’s The Glass Ballerina revealed that Paik actually shared a closer relationship with Jin rather than with his daughter before the plane crash. Mr. Paik felt tremendous shame over his daughter’s affair, but proudly referred to Jin as his son. (Although the wordplay obviously would not work in Korean, could there be some intentional irony in the fact that Paik tried to name his daughter Sun?) As Paik’s daughter usurps control over the family business, she essentially transforms into her father. Sun mirrors his hardball negotiation tactics, his sharp vocal rhythms, his sly head tilts, and even his signature cockeyed facial expression. In Sun’s later confrontation, she even makes Widmore an offer he can’t refuse, which sets up an improbable new alliance for the coming season. On some level, old Paik must feel proud to see his daughter transform into a ruthless business executive, even if it comes at his expense. In an unexpected way Paik actually may have found what he wanted all along: a worthy heir to his empire. (Surprisingly for him, though, Paik’s true Sun also happens to look great in a bikini.)


The two remaining flash-forward scenes of Part One, which focus upon Hurley and Jack, offer some strong parallels to each other. Both scenes present the character with an opportunity to resolve their deep-seated emotional conflicts with their fathers. Both efforts then transform into nightmarish failures. In Hurley’s case, David Reyes gives him the keys to the Camaro, the symbol for their deepest hopes as well as of the bond between them. The cursed Numbers serve the opposite function of the Camaro image, as they emody Hurley’s fears that he will be doomed to lead a life of misery and insanity. Moreover, the numbers remind him of the lie resting between him and his father. Hurley tries his best to run away from his problem, and we all know that running is not exactly his strong suit.


Later, the memorial service for Christian Shephard also offers Jack the chance to make peace with his own father. After months of delay, Jack finally gets his chance to respond to the loss of his father, and to move on with his own life. These feelings of closure last for only a few minutes, before he learns of a whole new element of the situation. The ghost of Christian immediately returns to haunt him more strongly than ever before. This time, the elder Shephard does not revisit him in the form of an apparition, but in the form of a message from Claire’s mother, Carole Littleton. Immediately after his attempt to bury his father forever, Jack learns that his father lives on, in the form of Claire (whom he was forced to leave behind on the island) and Aaron (whom Kate is raising falsely as her own). Both Hurley and Jack suffer from tremendous guilt complexes, and neither one can escape the truth for very long. As Locke predicted, the knowledge eats them alive, from the inside out, until they decide to come back.


By the time of the subsequent flash-forward scenes, which take place years later in the future, the members of the Oceanic Six begin to put themselves on a return course back to the island. The future death of Jeremy Bentham serves as the intervening act to begin to bring the survivors back together finally to address their situation. Jack and Kate come into conflict, Sayid releases Hurley from confinement, and finally Jack joins forces with Ben. By the end of the episode, the title phrase There’s No Place Like Home no longer refers to their return to the mainland. Instead, it becomes increasingly clear that the Island is the one true Home for all of these characters. Along the way, there are several other suggestions to this effect: Locke’s desperate plea to Jack, Miles’ decision to stay, the revelation about Charlotte’s birthplace, and Juliet’s reluctant acceptance of her fate. Even Charles Widmore himself seems to be yet another man obsessed with returning home to the island. Home meant one thing to these people before they came to the island, but it transformed into another.


Many elements from the Season Two finale Live Together, Die Alone also play a major role in the concluding moments of Season Four. That two-hour flashback episode introduced the story of Desmond’s odyssey to return home to his lost Penelope. After eight years apart, those two ill-fated lovers finally return to each other's arms. Meanwhile, Michael Dawson, out at sea on his third and final boat, reverses his actions from two seasons ago. Michael sacrifices his own life in an attempt to save the same group of friends he left for dead two seasons ago. John Locke finds himself repeating history as well, as he once again finds himself underground in another Dharma Initiative station with the fate of the island in the balance. Whereas Desmond once turned the failsafe key inside the belly of the Swan, now Ben volunteers to turn a much larger device at the Orchid, a mystical wheel far deeper below the island. The ‘purple-sky’ event caused by the destruction of the Swan station helped make the island visible to the outside world, but this second flash of blinding light creates the opposite result.


As expected, the climactic ‘movement’ of the island served as perhaps the most important event of the episode. Moving the entire island sounds like such a ridiculous scenario on many levels, and so the writing of the episode wisely decided to highlight its humor rather than avoid it. The interplay between Ben and Locke at the Orchid station ranks as perhaps the funniest sequence of the entire season. Afterwards, though, Jack’s reaction of intense denial of the event (“No, he didn’t.”) almost topped it for comedic effect. Hurley’s response to Jack comes across an open challenge for all men and women of science out there to ponder for the rest of the year: “One minute it was there and the next it was gone, so, unless we … like … overlooked it, dude, that’s exactly what he did. But, if you’ve got another explanation, man, I’d love to hear it.” Essentially, though, I actually think Jack may be right here: the island did not travel from one place to another in any conventional sense. In my assessment, two main theories about what happened deserve the most consideration.


The first explanation is similar to the one offered by our trusted old friend Dr. Mark Wickmund in the orientation video: the island did not physically move though space, but it moved forward into the future. The island disappeared for some period of time, although much longer than the few milliseconds that the bunnies traveled. As the earth moved, it re-appeared in the future, perhaps in the same spot or at a different location. Apparently, Ben himself experienced this same effect, as he instantaneously arrived in the middle of the Sahara desert over ten months later. Of course, there are a few major problems with this explanation. Unlike a bunny (or a Benny), the island is not a movable object. Instead, the land mass must remain attached to the earth itself on the ocean floor. A person can be picked up and dropped anywhere, but the island could only be dropped back in the same location, or one with the exact same supports underneath it. Even then, there would be the nagging issue of displacing the ocean water that now occupies the same space at the same time. Although this theory might be correct, it certainly has some logistical issues to overcome.


The second main explanation (which I think is more likely) maintains that the island did not move through time or through space. Instead, the machine under the Orchid closed one pathway to the island and opened up another. In this case, the island still physically exists at the exact same place, but now it becomes impossible to reach its location by moving through that same region of the South Pacific. To use a metaphor familiar to everyone: do not think of the island as a conventional physical location, but instead more like a website on the Internet. A website cannot be reached by just any means, but you can only use specific pathways to connect to it. Similarly, the region of space around the island is bent, so that only certain pathways allow you to reach it (key bearings such as 305). This description actually fits pretty well with other accounts of how characters find the island. The island was always practically invisible in the South Pacific, because it was never there in the first place. Instead, that region contained only a gateway to it.


When the island appeared to move, the situation would be analogous to the following one: Suppose darkufo.blogspot.com suddenly changed its web address to shirtless-sawyer.blogspot.com, without notifying anyone. The content on the website did not change at all, but anyone typing in the old URL or clicking on the old links would be unable to find it. To make matters worse, no one has any information to help find the new address other than searching randomly. Anyone hoping to get their daily fix of Lost content would wind up lost in the middle of cyberspace. The people on the helicopter, trying to reach the island through that obsolete pathway in the South Pacific, encountered the parallel situation. From their perspective, the island disappeared, and left them floating over the sea without anywhere to land.


Apart from these details of the nature of the island’s movement, the chain of events that it caused it holds some different significance for the story. For the entire season, and indeed the entire series, Jack Shephard had been trying to lead his people as far away from the island as possible. In their final conversation on the island, Locke made one final plea to Jack to stay on the island before his descent underground to move the island. Thanks to the detonation of the bomb on the freighter, though, those plans to escape the island failed. In the last moments before the island disappears, the helicopter is not flying away to the mainland, but frantically trying to get back to the island safely. Jack did not lead the people away from the island as he wanted, but instead Locke actually moved the island away from the people, which he did not want.


This turn of events creates what is apparently a strange contradiction in Locke’s worldview. Locke believes that he was supposed to move the island, and that the people on the helicopter were not supposed to leave. However, moving the island actually turned out to be the primary cause of their escape. Thus, either both of those two things were supposed to happen or neither of those two things was supposed to happen. Personally, I think that this unexpected consequence of Locke’s plan was actually an intended effect of the instructions to move the island. Perhaps the purpose of moving the island was not only to hide it from Widmore, but to allow the Oceanic Six to complete whatever work they needed to do outside the island. Time and again, Locke affirms to himself that ‘everything happens for a reason’. If he is truly a man of faith, then his concept of everything must include everything that happens, even things that did not go exactly according to his own plans.


Last but not least, the Season Four finale shares its most important connections with Through the Looking Glass. Each of the first three finales involved escalating confrontations between the crash survivors and the Others. At the conclusion of Season Three, the castaways managed to defeat the most dangerous members of the Others by luring them into a deadly trap. A full season later, the Others finally make their triumphant return, seemingly stronger than ever. This time around, the Others collaborate with the survivors to spring another trap upon Keamy and his team of invaders. Ultimately, all it took to get these arbitrary, merciless kidnappers on their side was to introduce a group of arbitrary, merciless killers who sought to murder everyone for no apparent reason. (Has Lost stumbled upon the secret to world peace?) Keamy’s awakening from apparent death provides a nice echo to the similar resurrection of Mikhail Bakunin from the Season Three finale. Just like our cyclopean comrade, Keamy manages to go out with a bang. In that same episode, Ben Linus ordered to kill everyone at the Looking Glass station; now he has graduated to killing even more innocent people on the freighter, for even more selfish reasons.


At the end of Season Three, Charlie Pace played the biggest heroic role with his dramatic dive down to the underwater station. Michael similarly sacrifices his life to help his friends to safety, but his role was nowhere near as prominent in this episode. In only a few brief scenes, Michael’s martyrdom (as well as Jin's) received barely any attention from the script. Instead, the powers that be send Michael away with a decidedly cold-blooded farewell from Christian: “You can go now”. (Not surprisingly, actor Harold Perrineau took offense to this unceremonious exit.) Personally, I have no idea why Christian appeared in this scene instead of Taller Ghost Walt or even Libby, either of which would be a better fit the tone of his story. Instead of giving Michael due credit for his dying actions, the episode chose to lavish more attention on Sawyer as its biggest self-sacrificing hero. His drop into the ocean was not quite as dramatic as Charlie’s dive into the abyss, but reminiscent nonetheless. Still, one element of this scene seemed particularly strange to me. Why exactly did Sawyer need to ask Kate to see his daughter for him right at that moment? The audience knew that Kate would make it off the island without him, but Sawyer did not know what was going to happen. At that point in time, with the helicopter flying back to land on the freighter, there was no reason to believe that the boat would need to sail away without him. Unless Sawyer actually expected to die from the fall, then he really did choose to stay on the island for his own reasons.


The flash forward scenes of There’s No Place Like Home also provide a direct connection to Jack’s original forward flashes from Through the Looking Glass. Part Two of this finale begins exactly where the third season finished, with Kate meeting Jack outside the airport. The core mystery of that episode, the identity of the man inside the coffin, also becomes the centerpiece of the final two hours. Instead of piecing together screen-shots of Jack’s newspaper clipping here, characters now openly refer to the man by the name Jeremy Bentham. Many people, including myself, mistakenly believed that the name on the obituary was John Latham, a 20th-century artist and sociologist famous for his concept of Flat Time. In a series of cryptic conversations about him, Kate, Jack, Walt, Hurley, and Sayid each reveal different clues for the man’s identity. Michael, one of the leading suspects to be the man in the coffin, dropped out of contention fairly early in the contest, but other prime candidates emerged. The alias Jeremy Bentham served an inspired, ambiguous choice that kept the coffin mystery alive until the final frames.


The most direct clue rests right in the letters of the last name. In a pleasant coincidence, the name BEN stands out within the name Bentham. Philosophy buffs, though, will recognize the larger significance of the name selection. Our deceased character Jeremy Bentham shares his name with an influential 19th-century English philosopher. In the canon of political philosophy, Bentham ranks right alongside two of the other famous historical figures referenced in this story, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (namesake for our Desmond David Hume) and the Englishman John Locke (a man who needs no introduction). Although Bentham falls much closer to Hume chronologically, his work shows a strong influence Locke’s ideas. The episode included some subtle foreshadowing that Desmond’s life was in danger off the island, and the show's makers even filmed an alternate ending in which Desmond was inside the casket. Sawyer also filled the coffin in another possible ending, which would have made even less sense in the context of the story. Ultimately, though, John Locke became the best fit as the one to end up back inside yet another box. (Did the final scene also intend to make one last hint, an extraordinarily bad pun on Jack breaking the 'lock' to the funeral parlor? If so, then I like it.)


The death of John Locke no doubt shocked many dedicated fans of his character. John survived some phenomenal near-death experiences in the past, but he would need to accomplish his greatest miracle yet to return from this one. The story of Lost seems almost unimaginable without the man who is arguably its most popular character and its most central protagonist, who is also played by its most acclaimed actor. After Cabin Fever, the episode that immediately preceded the finale, many viewers judged that Locke was destined for much greater accomplishments. Personally, I argued that Locke was headed down a much darker path, toward villainy or tragedy rather than triumph. (For the more detailed argument, check out the Luhks review entitled ‘The Alpha Male’.) In some of his last words to Locke, Ben makes a painfully ironic prediction to reassure him about his destiny: “You’ll find your way, John. You always do.” The prevailing themes of Locke’s back-story always proved the exact opposite. John lived his life as a perpetual journeyman, roaming from one idea to the next while trying to find his calling. In light of his past, no one should feel surprised that 'some very bad things' happened under Locke's command, leading Locke to his ultimate destination.


A previous Luhks article from the Theories section, entitled “What’s in the Box?”, discussed the implications for the story if Locke did indeed end up inside the coffin:

The final two scenes in Through the Looking Glass call attention to a mirroring between on-island Locke and post-island Jack. Locke warns Jack not to make the phone call by claiming, “You’re not supposed to do this.” In the final scene, Jack agrees, “We were not supposed to leave.” Jack's complete reversal of perspective recalls Locke's famous prophecy from Exodus ("I don't believe in destiny"; "Yes, you do. You just don't know it yet"). In this interpretation, the Season Three finale essentially depicts how Jack evolved from Locke's greatest nemesis to become Locke's spiritual successor, the man to carry on Locke's work after his death. Even Matthew Fox's physical acting in the flash-forward scenes is so strong that he seems to be channeling Terry O'Quinn. Off the island, Jack became an emotionally crippled man, who believed that there was only one destination on earth that could make him whole again. Essentially, Jack Shephard became the new John Locke. (As much as I love the John Locke character, and as sad as it would be to deal with Locke's death, I have to admit that this version of the story would be both extremely satisfying and true to the tone of both characters.)

Since the early days of Season One, the Jack-Locke relationship has remained one of the core conflicts of the work as a whole. The seminal episodes Walkabout and White Rabbit (still my two personal favorites) intertwined the fates of Jack, Locke, and Christian in a way that continues to gain new shades of complexity. Jack first arrived at upon the island while trying to bring his father’s coffin home for burial. Now, the final scene of Season Four establishes that Jack must bring Locke’s coffin back home to the island. Essentially, Locke assumed Christian’s place as a primary force in Jack’s life, clashing against him time and again, but also challenging him to achieve his potential. Cabin Fever added an even stronger connection between Locke and Christian, as the ghost of Shephard also became John’s own personal island guide. In their final discussion on the island, Locke not only speaks for himself, but also delivers Christian’s message to Jack from the other side.


Certainly, there is still a major chunk of Locke’s story left to tell. Regardless of what happens, Locke will always be a major part of the show over the next two seasons, in one form or another. Many fans speculate that, if Locke’s body returns, he will rise from the dead to walk on the island once more. Personally, I do not expect that John's body will be literally resurrected. Instead, I would predict that Locke will return to the show in the same form as Christian. When Jack returns to the island with his new sense of purpose, Locke would seem to be the ideal choice to serve as the next spiritual guide. Ultimately, then, the younger Shephard can resolve his old conflicts with John and Christian as they lead him to his true destiny.

Over the course of these four seasons of Lost, two opposing trends have defined the overall direction of the original group of characters. First, the group physically has moved further apart from each other. During the first two seasons, aside from a few exceptions, every character more or less lived together and interacted with one another in the same place. In Season Three, different sets characters began to branch off in different directions for extended periods of time. The fourth season brought more drastic changes, first with the split of the camp in the premiere episode, and then with the ultimate departure of the helicopter. The number of future scenes between classic sets of characters seems to be diminishing. Many of the show’s key relationships have been suspended indefinitely, and some characters were forced to say their final farewells.


At the same time, though, the story also deepened the levels of connections between all of its characters. Family relationships dominate many of the off-island scenes, but the character interactions on the island also emphasize the family-like nature of the group of survivors. The show not only highlights the number of literal connections between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, but also the undeniable sense of kinship between different members of the group. More than ever before, There’s No Place Like Home affirms that these characters represent a family unit. Teamwork is evident almost everywhere from start to finish. Everyone is interconnected and dependent upon others for their survival. The core concept of ‘live together or die alone’ never held more relevance than in this particular episode. In the final scene, the words of Jack’s former adversary offer him a surprising reminder of his forgotten mantra.

“The island won't let you come alone. [...] You have to do it together. All of you.”

No one is an island. No one, not even John Locke himself, can survive this crazy world of ours on their own. Locke may have died alone, but through his death, he might have ensured that everyone else might once again live together.