Josh Holloway (Sawyer)
“There’s got to be a big blow-out war among everybody, and they’re all going to kill each other. There’ll be a few stragglers who have to make a choice, like the way ‘On the Beach’ ended, where the threat blows itself up and people will have to decide whether to stay or go.”

Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet)
“Like the end of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, I think something will happen where we all go back to where we were. Juliet was never brought to the island. The plane never crashes. These people have never met. But because of the odd nature of time, we keep on getting drawn back into the same situation again. So basically, the ending is just another beginning.”

Dominic Monaghan (Charlie)
“The remaining cast decides whether to walk the path of good or bad, and an epic battle reigns. Evangeline Lilly puts in the performance of the year and wins a Golden Globe.”

Henry Ian Cusick (Desmond)
“The resurrection of the dead—with someone singing [Hawaiian farewell song] ‘Aloha ’Oe.’”

Daniel Dae Kim (Jin)
“We all settle into Dharmaville, build our own homes and develop the island into a tourist destination and make millions of dollars.”

source : tv guide

Something I’ve long been fascinated with is how movies and TV shows with similar themes always seem to come out at the same time. While some of this can be explained by Hollywood’s copycat formula of success stories (vampires are back again thanks to Twilight and True Blood) or current fads (notice the plethora of 3-D films lately — especially in animation?), what I’m talking about goes a bit deeper. I’m referring to the tendency of certain story themes to come out in very close proximity to one another.  It’s as if there’s some kind of new information that humanity is ready to learn that’s buzzing around our collective unconscious. And writers, artists, poets, and even musicians — all being the modern-day shamans that they are — pick up on it and translate it into messages for us mere mortals to subliminally interpret.

I first noticed this tendency back in the late 1980s. I remember thinking how odd it was that all these adult/child switcheroo movies were coming out at the same time.  There was Like Father Like Son, Vice-Versa, 18 Again, Big and a few others. It’s easy to assume that after the success of Big, Hollywood just jumped on the switcheroo bandwagon, but actually, Big came out after those other films. Looking at our superficial society in the late 80s, perhaps the message of these films was to help us get back in touch with our inner-child. (With the more recent 13 Going on 30 and 17 Again in these stressful times, perhaps it’s time for a reminder.)

Then, in the late 90s we had a ton of cities-getting-destroyed movies. There was Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact, and Godzilla just to name some. Could this have been some kind of subliminal warning about 9/11? More recently we’ve had disaster films like The Day After Tomorrow, The Happening, and The Day the Earth Stood Still (remake) where nature seems to fight back against humanity.  In the wake of An Inconvenient Truth, is this some kind of wake-up call to begin taking better care of the planet? Interesting how all those movies relate to a time, i.e., a “day” or “happening.” The message seems to be that we need to get moving now or face the consequences.

Within the last couple years, superpowers movies — either with superheroes or ordinary people gaining super abilities — have been off the charts. Last summer alone, a new superpower film seemed to come out nearly every week. Is this a hint to some kind of new evolution coming for humanity? And what’s with all the time-travel themes lately? This year alone we’ve had the theme creeping into Lost and the new Star Trek movie, and there was also Land of the Lost, and of course another Terminator film. Interestingly though, the theme of the new Terminator didn’t relate to time travel as much as the question over what defines humanity. With technology becoming so advanced, that is an issue we are likely going to have to deal with in the next fifty years if not sooner.

My point in bringing all this up is to demonstrate that the similar themes and concepts of movies and TV shows are not just coincidental. There are real messages for us to pay attention to. So after watching Knowing and noting its many similarities to Lost, I began to wonder what the message was and if it could give us a hint about the conclusion of the show, or possibly even what’s to come in the real world.

Both Lost and Knowing contain apocalyptic themes. Early on in Lost, it wasn’t particularly obvious, but there were hints. Many fans noted that The HANSO Foundation was an anagram for NOAHS…as in the ark that saved life on earth. In Knowing (I need to give away some spoilers here so stop here if you don’t want ‘em) there were alien crafts that captured all species of life on earth to bring them to safety (I believe this also happened in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still as well). Getting back to Lost, there’s also the fact that Oceanic Flight 815 might refer to Genesis 8:15, where God tells Noah to rebuild civilization after the flood.

So is the whole point of Lost about saving humanity (or a select group of humans) from the end of the world? Is that where the story is going? While I’m not sure yet if this theme will be contained within the actual story, or just within the moral of the story, the show does seem to be heading in this direction.  I spoke a bit about cataclysm theories in The Myth of Lost — especially as they relate to the numbers. What if the numbers are not just a serial number of the Swan Station but a date for the end of the world — 4/8/15 at 16:23:42? While this theory has been around for a while, in light of the events of the season five finale, and a very similar use of a sequence of numbers in Knowing, it does give it new weight. The apocalyptic undertones of season five and Knowing also shed new light on another aspect of the Lost mythology.

Early in season one, we see two skeletons referred to as “Adam and Eve.” Surely, this nickname, which seemed like a joke at the time, was no accident. Will the old humanity be destroyed only to bring in a new Adam and Eve to repopulate the world (Aaron and Ji Yeon perhaps)? Is this the point of Lost, or simply another one of its hidden messages about the real world? In Knowing, the Adam and Eve theme is shown almost literally — with a tree of knowledge and everything. This is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil — a theme Lost focuses on quite often. Who is good? Who is evil? What is right? What is wrong? If you look deeper at the Biblical good and evil mythology, it’s not really so much about morality as is commonly interpreted, but about the material world we live in: a world of right and wrong, life and death, up and down, physicality, time, and the senses. These are aspects that did not exist in the Garden of Eden until humanity ate the forbidden fruit. It’s all an allegory for the creation of the physical universe. A world where we can experience ourselves as separate beings who seemingly have the freedom of choice to live life as we want.

According to all these media messages however, this world, as we know it may be coming to an end. On the one hand that could mean that the veil between our physical/illusionary world and the infinite world beyond may be thinning. On the other, it can be a warning that our days living on this planet may be numbered. Either way, it would seem that Lost, Knowing, and similar stories are telling us that humanity may be in for drastic changes.  We will probably end up stronger when this cleansing is complete, but getting there is going to involve a lot of growing pains for many of us. And those who cannot deal with this new world may not be coming along. Already, we see how the old greedy paradigms are failing, the selfish people are falling, the cheats, liars, and assorted scoundrels are being busted, and those who represent the flashy epitome of ego are dying.

Yes, there are certainly a lot of clues out there in stories beyond Lost. But one thing that Lost has taught us is how to look for them.  In fact, I think that has been one of the more important purposes of the whole show — to teach us that the clues of the universe are all around us — not just on Lost. As we move ever closer to Lost’s final episodes, that knowledge is reassuring indeed. The search for clues will not end with Lost. Regardless of its solution, the show has opened our eyes to a whole new beginning.

Marc Oromaner is a New York City writer whose book, The Myth of Lost offers a simple solution to Lost and uncovers its hidden insight into the mysteries of life. He can be contacted in the discussion section of The Myth of Lost Facebook page.

The Myth of Lost is available on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com.

Technorati Tags: abc, Knowing, Lost, Lost In Myth, marc oromaner, Numbers, the myth of lost

The exec producer of Ian Somerhalder’s new CW series, The Vampire Diaries, is close friends with Lost exec producer Damon Lindelof. So when he’s not sucking blood in the South, Ian may reappear on the island as Boone. While apartment hunting in Atlanta, where Diaries shoots, with his new on-screen vampire brother Paul Wesley, Ian tells me, “I’ve heard a little bit about what’s happening this season on Lost, and there’s definitely an avenue they’re going down to bring back a lot of us.”

Any crossover [with] Lost would “only help the success of our show…as long as it’s not screwing up production,” Ian says. So what if Boone, Shannon, Charlie and the rest of Lost’s “living dead” turn out to be vampires? “That would not be good,” says the actor, who currently lives around the corner from Maggie Grace (Shannon) in Venice Beach. “There are already enough vampires flying around the airwaves. If we can keep it at True Blood, Twilight and Vampire Diaries, the world will be better off!”

source : tv guide

First a few bullet points from the presentation:

• Initial thank you’s, then showed a recap video of Lost, D&C confirmed that Stranger In A Strange Land was the turning point for the studio, and they were allowed to establish an end date.
• Jack’s beard is bad.
• 16 episodes next year, but 18 hours of Lost. Jack Bender confirmed a two hour season premiere, and a two hour finale.
• After Lost, they will go in to hiding for a while, due to the inevitably interpretive quality to the series ending.
• Damon: You are married to your destiny, you can try to avoid it, but it will catch up to you. This is why Charlie shut the door in the Looking Glass station, because he embraced his death.
• Sometimes they get pointers from the studio, telling them stuff is too outlandish. Originally, in the season four premiere, Hurley was going to come across himself in Jacob’s cabin, but the network urged them to change the scene to Christian Shepherd, afraid it would set a precedent of weirdness. With season six, there won’t be any of that

Q: What was your favourite scene to watch or write?

CC: The scoring session we attended for the raft’s launch at the end of Exodus . These musicians were playing this incredible music without having rehearsed it, and the moment was so beautiful, there were tears in the control booth. That was just one of those great moments where you felt this blessed synergy of all these talented collaborators all come together and make Lost what it is.

JB: I love all of them

DL: I have many…but for me, during season one, when we first started writing the show coming out of the pilot, when it first started revealing itself, was really cool. I’m drawn to scenes that take place with just two characters and somehow they’re talking about very very heady things and I’m a huge fan of whenever Jack and Locke talk to each other. We’ve been very judicious in having those guys talk to each other, it happens very rarely. I go back back to White Rabbit and that 6 or 7 minute long scene where they’re just sitting in the jungle and Jack says he’s following the impossible and Locke says what if it’s not impossible and we were all put here for a reason, and that scene is the genesis for those guys’ relationship and if you think about how that was the 3rd episode shot out of the pilot, here we are now, 100 episodes later, and now Jack is finally saying ‘Y’know, Locke might be onto something’

CC: Jack’s kinda slow.

DL: It had to permeate through his beard

Q: My wife is fascinated with the artistry of delivering this idea into a script. We had, in a video podcast last year, a glimpse into the writers’ room and she’s fascinated that you get the idea and put it into a script

CC: We have a call centre in Delhi. We just ask them ‘we need a flashforward this week’

DL: We have a minicamp before we write, where we just discuss the season with the writers, the character arcs and we decide on the season’s final image so we know exactly our beginning and where we’re trying to get to. Once we start writing the show on a week-to-week episode basis it gets a bit more intense

CC: We spend a lot of time breaking each aspect of the story and once we have the story worked out from beginning to end, we’ll put it up on whiteboard and then pitch it back to ourselves, and we’ll have scenes in different colours, withan on island story, an off island story, and a C-story, split it into six acts for the commercial breaks and structure it so you’ll wanna come back after each act. Then we’ll give it to some writers to rewrite and send back, and we’ll give our notes, make some changes

Q: Jack was originally a protagonist for the show, but he seems to have gotten more antagonistic as it goes on. Was this intentional?

JB: Matthew Fox loved the idea of wearing the not so flattering jumpsuits and his character beginning to let go of his heroic side, which people accuse me of, taking Jack Shepherd’s character.

DL: Basically Jack spent a hundred hours majorly rejecting it, there was no purpose whatsoever to the island and now he’s come back in the 70s and he’s still waiting to be told ‘Here’s what you’re supposed to do’ and then when he is told what to do, he then gets to decide what he is going to do, so basically it’s contingent on what he feels his mission is.

Q: Can we get more Lost screenings where you project episodes in a cinema like this?

CC: I think so. It’s a good idea and it may happen in some form or other

Q: On the official website, there was a video of behind the scenes and you went into your offices and you had a wall of whose dead and whose alive, I want to know about Claire being on the wall of dead. [shocked gasps from audience]

DL: Are you absolutely sure

Q: I am

DL: [explains wall of alive, dead, undead] Well, uh, if you say you saw her there, I don’t know what to tell you.

JB: I think her agent slipped it in there

DL: She is going to be back on the show.

CC: Eventually all of them will be on the wall of the dead.

Q: My question is about the fate of Lost, because I know it ends with season 6, but do you think because of Bryan Fuller with Pushing Daisies continuing it in a comic book, and I love Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk (Damon’s comic) and with Lost it has a disjointed timeline and it comes together in the end, do you think that you’ll do any spin offs in a comic book form?

DL: We feel that if we hold anything back for the final season of the show, it will be bad. People have come along this far, and they need a conclusion.

Q: You make a lot about the characters searching for their destiny and their purpose, do you feel that you yourselves had a purpose in your own lives being involved in the show, or you’ve learned something about life from doing it?

CC: I think as writers we use the show to explore personal issues, spiritual or otherwise. We’re mainly concerned by how much faith and how much control do you have over your own destiny, something which is very fascinating to us, and obviously season 5 was an exploration of that with the time travel leading to an event at the end of the season, so that is going to be something we’re going to explore a lot on the final season of the show. The writers room is diverse and that diversity gets worked out in the characters.

Q: What’s Brian K. Vaughan like?

DL: Unfortunately he has left for greener pastures. When he first came on the show Jorge Garcia was ecstatic because he’s a huge fan of his work.

Q: Where are exactly are you with season 6?

CC: We are here, and the following Monday we’ll start writing.

JB: Shooting starts August 24th

CC: We’ll work continuously until the middle of April and the show will air sometime between January and February and will finish around May.

Q: I want to know about the end of Lost. Michael Emerson said in an interview this week that he suspects it will be quite bittersweet or melancholy. Is it going to be an upbeat ending or ambiguous? Just any kind of hint to the flavour of the ending.

DL: All of the above. We are aspiring for an ending that is fair. Bittersweet comes with the territory. The ending will be different as for once, we won’t leave you on a cliffhanger. You will stay on the cliff this time.

CC: We hope that if we like it, you will like it.

Q: I was sad Charlie died, but he had to die to give his story credibility. That makes me wonder about John Locke. The fact he is now dead, having hit his lowest ebb…what’s up with that character arc?

CC: We’re not prepared to answer any of those questions here tonight. We feel that the final part of the experience of Lost is that you have this time between to theorise, postulate, agonise.

JB: If the actors really need to know what’s coming ahead, they’ll ask. As an example, Josh Holloway did not know what he was whispering to Kate when he jumped out of the helicopter, and neither did Evangeline Lilly, but the actors sold it so well. Terry O’ Quinn was playing Locke with this dark mysterious quality, unintentionally playing into the ending which he didn’t know. I presented him with the script asking him he wanted to read it and he was sure. He came back after saying ‘I wish I hadn’t read it’

Q: How much do you know about each character’s story, are there any you’re particularly proud of, or not proud of?

DL: When you come up with an idea for a character, and they come into the show, like Eko, who was originally a priest who had a crisis of faith, and we found Adewale in New York, and we basically said we don’t buy that this guy is a priest who has lost his faith, we buy that this guy is a warlord impersonating a priest, and somewhere along the way he’d decide he wasn’t just impersonating a priest, he’d decide to be one. So we’re certainly proud of the way that one worked out, and as for the ones we’re not proud of, we bury alive…or have Michael shoot them.

Q: How do you come up with these amazing twists

CC: A lot of getting yourself to a point where you cry. We have a really brilliant writing staff and that’s part of the DNA of the show now, and that’s a big part of the writer’s room, how we re-route things one way and flip it back another. We love introducing a character in a certain way and then reveal the character to be very different. You know originally Sawyer tested the second lowest after the pilot, and now of course he’s a very heroic version of that character.

Q: Keep the Smoke!

DL: You’ll be seeing the smoke in a probably interesting character in itself

JB: And it will be in the shape of Jack’s beard

Q: Season 5 was hard work watching, with time travel. How are you going to pay that off

DL: We acknowledge with a degree of difficulty. We were ostensibly frightened at first with the time travel story, were basically desperate to get everybody back together again. Time travel is now complete and everybody gets back together in one form or another and we feel that season 6 is a lot like season 1 with its community.

Q&A ended here. The guys signed stuff for the fans. My friend had a copy of Half Blood Prince, Damon signed it saying ‘Locke is VERY similar to Snape!’

“It’s the end and I think we are going to start seeing more casualties. I would put money on major characters being killed. I believe it will be a sad ending to the show — or at least bittersweet. I think it will definitely be a series finale for grown-ups.”

“I killed Jacob… maybe…probably,” he hedged. “It isn’t like we haven’t seen plenty of other people be killed and somehow come back. And what does it mean if I did kill him? Who the hell was he anyway? Obviously, Ben wanted a father. So much of our show is about bad fathers. It is one of our biggest themes. And Jacob disappointed in those final moments. And maybe Jacob made it easy for him. Maybe that was all meant to happen. Is it all ordained? Maybe. And for that matter, can Jacob even be killed? Stay tuned is my response.”

source : ausiello at EW

As you can plainly see, the packaging harkens back to the era of the Dharma initiative.  Disk sheaths are designed to look like 5 3/4 discs, just like your old Apple ][ used, there are phamplets, stickers, and various other recruitment materials for the good old D.I., all bound in an authentically weathered slip case.

You know you want it! Order The DVD here and the Blu Ray Here.  The sets will ship on December 8th.

Image from tvshowsondvd.net

Read the full review here

As for his role on Supernatural, you can read all about it at our sister site, TVOvermind.

Technorati Tags: Jacob, Mark Pellegrino

As you may recall, the final 3 seasons of Lost were originally scheduled to run 16 episodes each. Although, the actual number of hours is unknown since Season 4 of Lost, which had 13 episodes, ended up making 14 hours of television due to the 2 hour season finale. The writer’s strike forced Season 4 to be cut down to 13 episodes/14 hours, so the agreement became that the two missing hours would be attached to the remaining seasons, making Season 5 and Season 6 17 episodes each.

The news that ABC wants 18 episodes of Season 6 is good news to us fans. We get another hour of our favorite TV show. On the other hand, the story was reported somewhat ambiguous as to which direction the request to increase the episode order came from. While in traditional television, it’s somewhat unheard of that showrunners negotiate the number of episodes/seasons to make. The studio funds the pilot, orders the Back 9, and then the rest of the season. So normally, my gut would tell me that ABC just wants to milk the final season of Lost for more money in ad revenue.

However, Lost is no traditional show and neither has been it’s television-making process. We all know that Darlton are more than comfortable negotiating episodes and seasons with ABC. They did so with the final 3 season agreement. So instead of ABC just wanting to market the heck out of Lost’s grand finale, I’m thinking Damon and Carlton went to ABC and said, “We need another hour.” They did it with the Season 4 finale, which was supposed to be one hour and they stretched it to two.

I recall near the end of Season 3, when the show-endgame agreement came about, a podcast where Damon and Carlton discussed how they always imagined Lost only having 5 22-episode seasons. However, ABC wanted at least 3 more seasons. Thus, the final 3 16-episode season agreement came about.

Now, if you go off that comment and apply what we know story-wise of the end of Season 5, if they imagined only 2 remaining seasons, when do you think the atomic bomb was meant to go off? That seems pretty big to me, so I’d imagine that was the Hypothetical Season 4 finale, right in the middle of what they imagined were the 2 remaining seasons. Thus, all the events after the atomic blast, in the hypothetical Season 5, were planned to take place in 22 episodes, the standard television episode number. So they were facing the same story to tell but in 5 less episodes than originally planned.

Where am I going with all this? My point is that I’m leaning towards the theory that Damon and Carlton went to ABC to ask for an extra episode in Season 6 to tell the story with the proper breadth they want it to have. Why did I go through all the trouble to point out what is easily assumed? Well, it’s the off-season and I don’t have anything else to speculate about.

“Tweexclusive: ABC confirms that Lost’s sixth and final season will total 18 hours, including two-hour premiere and two-hour finale.”

Do you think this extension will allow for more story, or did the producers realize that they didn’t want to finish the LOST saga at a breakneck speed?  I’m pumped either way!

Solitary is an example of a really well rounded episode of LOST, perhaps of a caliber rarely seen on LOST, and therefore television in general.  On one hand, it offers background information that both informs a characters past actions – Sayid’s – and at the same time establishes a key motivator that will resonate through the rest of the series.  All of LOST’s characters are intense to the extreme, and the story of Sayid’s need for forgiveness, truth, and ultimate redemption is told effectively against a backdrop of heavy mythological advancement.

From the character arc perspective, Solitary revealed how Sayid was called upon to torture his childhood sweetheart, a task that tugged at his warm interior through a cold layer of loyalty.  We know now what that poor chicken learned this season, Sayid is a weapon in two senses: one, he is dangerously skilled at the craft of hurting people, and ‘blessed’ with an innate ability to shield himself from any remorse or pity for his ‘victim.’  Also, he is fueled by a sense of purpose.  He’s not the pull-the-wings-off-flies type of torturer, he is the ‘greater good’ style torturer.  Second, he is a weapon in the sense that he is wielded.  Throughout Sayid’s flashback, we see Sayid being pretty effectively controlled by his masters in the Iraqi military, while Nadia seems to be calling out to the human being within.

Ultimately, what saved her also saves him.  Finding himself on the torturee side of things, at the hands of the infamous French Lady, Sayid appeals to whatever signs of her humanity he can find that she still has a connection with.

Of mythological importance: we meet our first eyewitness to “The Others” in Danielle, who lays further seeds of future events by telling us about Alex, and her crews encounters with the island’s defense systems.  Sayid’s brief stay in Danielle’s ground house also nets a cache of island maps and various documents that will become increasingly important as the series progresses.

One of the new mysteries introduced in Solitary also turned out to be one of the longest running and most frustrating: the cable.  Sayid finds a cable leading into the ocean.  The cable appears again in the episode “Numbers,” but merely as a landmark.  It isn’t until much later that we learn the cable connects to the Looking Glass Station.

Watching the episode again was a hoot, particularly for how wide reaching some of the events and themes became.  Every episode of LOST is integral to the whole, naturally, but Solitary is one of the few that could be counted as essential to both future plot advancement and character arc.

Solitary was written by David Fury, and directed by Greg Yaitanes.

Talking Points

Here are some thoughts I had about the episode as I watched.  Feel free to discuss/respond below:

• Is it just me, or is Ethan just too conspicuous.  I can’t recall thinking it at the time, but watching it now he just seems too hidden in plain site.
• Rousseau gradually becomes a caricature of herself later in the series. She is dangerous, mysterious, and seems imbued with secret island knowledge here. As time goes on, she turns out to be more of a gazetteer than a grimoire.. I don’t disagree with anything they have done with her character, but she became more of an element than a human being as time went on. Cue the crazy French lady, exit stage right.
• The b story with Hurley’s golf course is a brilliant piece of humanization. The tighter constraints of season 4 and 5 are almost completely devoid of this imperative amongst the characters to normalize amongst their situation.  They have completely given in to the weird.  Is the story better for it?

Visit the Lostpedia Rewatch page for all of the most up-to-date Rewatch information, as well as their blog.

12►

Apparently their explanation for even retrieving the footage is that the camera was destroyed, but the memory card came out unscathed.

Ok, ok, I’m a little bit late with this finale review. Just a little. OK, like six or seven weeks late. But who’s counting? By now the dust has cleared, the new and improved theories have been stitched into the warps and wefts of the interwebs, and the last ever Lost finale cliffhanger is a memory. There’s just one thing left to add. And so, with no further ado, I present, at long last, Fishbiscuit’s Review of “The Incident”.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Expectations are always sky high for a Lost finale. We expect them to enlighten and clarify, even though we know by now that all they ever do is discombobulate and confuzzle. Like many Lost fans, I’ve come to the rueful conclusion that the puzzle will never fit exactly right, will never look the way I imagined it would. But I still want to try and figure out what it will look like! I’ve decided that, like any other existentialist-ish dilemma, the best way to approach it is from the side. Peripherally, not directly. And my operating theory is this: The answer will never make ANY sense.

After all these years of wandering in the forest of fantasy, it’s a foregone conclusion that Faith is going to win out over Science in the end. Which means, right off the bat, there’s no way this will ever make sense. So that takes a lot of the pressure off, doesn’t it?

Lost dropped a few of its finale traditions this year. The story actually ended ON the Island, something it hasn’t done since Season One.

But overall, tradition was upheld. Including recent traditions, like Hurley running a VW Rescue Bus service.

Or Ben going Psycho with Mr. Pointy.

For the third straight finale, Locke was in the box.

Kate was still mopping up Jack’s blood.

Juliet received the dubious honor of not only speaking the Official Lost Finale Slogan, but illustrating it as well. It seems like no matter how hard people try to Live Together, everyone still pretty much ends up Dying Alone.

Of course the most hallowed of Finale Traditions was observed.

Important stuff blew up!

This year they went atomic, and really the outcome is very much up in the air. Thermonuclear weapons of the Jughead variety were quite capable of decimating small islands.

That’s probably not what happened here, since Jack only dropped in a piddly thermonuclear trigger warhead, but there was still a lot of nostalgia, a lot of looking back. From the reappearance of Charlie’s Driveshaft ring,

to Ben and Locke reminiscing over mementos from their first date,

to the return of the unsinkable Vincent,

from Kate’s New Kids on the Block time capsule lunchbox,

to yet another reminder that Jack knows how to count to five,

there were shout outs and callbacks and handshakes with past seasons riddled throughout the episode. Just like Alice returned from her adventures Through the Looking Glass to the same sitting room she started out in, it feels like Lost has begun to circle around an ending that is going to take us right back where we started.

“If you want to know the end, look at the beginning”
- African Proverb

That seemed like the working premise to me, a theme split between the two halves of the episode.

Wherein the faith based mad scientist was on the move again, this time racing as hard as he could to get back to the future he could have had if he’d never gotten on that goddamn plane in the first place. And…

Which sucked us back through the vortex of time to Island antiquity, back to when the inscrutable Saint Jacob was weaving the cloth of history down deep in the Shadow of the Statue.

This was Jacob’s Coming Out party. All these years, watching men tremble at the mere mention of his name, we’ve wondered about him. Who is this omnipotent potentate?

Well, first off, he looks exactly like, but clearly isn’t, Paul, Rita’s creepy ex-husband who Dexter beaned with the frying pan.

(I hate when I get distracted like that.)

Turns out Jacob is a blond. An excellent fisherman.

A patient craftsman. A world traveler. And a linguist.

In the Bible, Jacob was a famous Twin. His elder twin brother, Esau, struggled and wrestled with him even while they were still trapped in their mother’s womb. They’re the ancient poster boys for the kind of brotherly strife we’re very familiar with on Lost.

Esau was a “cunning hunter, a man of the field”,

while Jacob was a “plain man, dwelling among the tents.” They were never friends, though they eventually made a wary truce, and it’s easy to see why they never got along. God had already played favorites.

“Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?” the LORD says. “Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated, and I have turned his mountains into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert jackals.”
- (Malachi 1:2-3)

We have yet to learn what event created the murderous stalemate between Blackshirt and Whiteshirt, but the bitterness between the Biblical Jacob and Esau was due to an ugly shared scar. When they were fifteen, Jacob had tricked Esau, who was hungrier than he was smart, to trade away his birthright for a bowl of stew. Then, years later, when their father Isaac was dying, Jacob tricked Isaac into blessing him as his firstborn, by wearing an animal skin and pretending to be his hairy brother. In the Bible, Jacob was known as a great and successful conniver. A deceiver.

But in this story, it doesn’t feel like Jacob has been the one pretending. There were many hints and clues that the No Name Man in Black, who we can call Esau for convenience sake, was the one who has been shifting shapes all this time. Was it Esau who appeared to Eko as Yemi before destroying him? Was Alex really Esau when she ordered Ben to obey Locke? Was it Esau that had been in the cabin, the one that Ilana burned in a kind of exorcism when she realized Jacob had not been there for a very long time?

Has Esau been appearing as Christian? The way he now appears as Locke?

What were we to make of the black and white tunics?

Is this like a private grudge match or are they planning to take this global?

With all the transmogrification going on lately, is it possible we’re headed for an ending that looks something like this?

Is it a black and white morality play, like it once seemed Locke was hinting at?

If so, is Jacob the Good Guy? He did have a saintly glow and he went willingly to his slaughter, almost like Aslan, like Christ.

With Locke as his mouthpiece, Blackshirt Brother was ominous when he spoke to Richard about “taking care” of the rest of the Ajira 315 gang, and brutal in the way he shoved gentle Jacob into the firepit. If he’s been appearing as the Smoke Monster, as it now seems likely he was, is it safe to say then that No Name Guy is:

This is not a blood sport; it’s more like an existentialist chess match. There are Rules.

As Ben could not kill Widmore, neither can Esau kill Jacob…unless he finds The Loophole, in this case a Proxy Killer to do the dirty deed. As he said, he had to go through a lot to get there. First he had to grow little Ben Linus up into a skeevy little goblin. Then he had to get crazy John Locke involved in all kinds of head games with him. When Ben left the Island, Esau had to scheme a way for Locke to get himself murdered - by Ben, of course - and then carted back, all so Esau could impersonate Locke before anyone found out Locke’s corpse was still in the box! Jacob did have a clever defense mechanism in place. By only agreeing to see one person at a time, he knew that Esau, as a single person, would never be able to kill him. But he hadn’t counted on the diabolical cleverness or the eternal patience of his Bad Twin brother.

In this picture from Jacob’s Tapestry, we see nine figures (like the nine people Jacob visited in the episode flashbacks) arrayed as if in battle, controlled by the outstretched hands of the Sun God, while at either end two figures sit, on thrones, like kings. A war is coming, as we’ve been told and told. But how can there be a war if one of the kings is already dead?

Is it even possible for Ben to kill one such as Jacob? It’s remarkable how much the above picture resembles the famous Rembrandt, of Jacob fighting with the Angel. Is it possible that Jacob is not dead at all, but merely transformed, just passaging another stage of some eternal struggle?

What happens if Jacob is dead? What happens to the Tapestry he was weaving? Jacob not only weaves the cloth but he spins the thread. Jacob keeps bringing people to the Island, where as we learn they do nothing but destroy and corrupt. But Jacob does more than just lure people to the Island, he goes straight out and spins them into the kind of thread he’s looking for to complete his great masterpiece.

In his dying moment, Jacob pleads with Ben to use his Free Will. But is Jacob really the best spokesman for that cause? After all, for almost his whole life, poor Ben had sublimated his own Free Will to Jacob and his incessant decrees and commands and his lists.

You can see why Jacob advocating for Free Will enraged Ben. Like Jacob in the Bible, this Jacob is very expert at manipulating people into doing his will. Biblical Jacob was known for his Covenants, which is another word for contract or promise. We saw Jacob make contracts with little Kate

and little Sawyer,

getting both of them to make promises they’ll never be able to keep. He uses Death to force his will into the life of Sayid

and he uses the touch of Life to capture Locke.

Jacob, who robbed his brother of his Blessing, blesses Jin and Sun’s marriage, another promise, contract, covenant.

He tells Hurley that he is also blessed. And just to prove it, he gives him a free guitar.

Last but not least, he reminds Jack that if you really want a candy bar,

you could at least try to jiggle the machine before you storm off to do something rash.

What does it mean to receive the touch of Jacob? Is it a blessing or a curse? And, for all the lip service he gives to Free Will, how much is that part of Jacob’s shell game? The clue here, as to Jacob’s true agenda, might just be in his chosen symbolic icon: the spinning wheel. Historically, the spinning wheel is symbolic of the famous man of peace, Mahatma Gandhi.

“I am like God wanted me and I do as he advises me to do. Let him do with me as he pleases. If he wants to he may kill me. I believe that I do as he orders.”
-Ghandhi

Mythologically, it was Penelope who spun and wove, unmaking each night the weaving of the day before, to keep her 108 suitors at bay while her Desmond-ysseus was at sea.

But that symbolism seems all wrong for Jacob. First of all, he’s a dude, and secondly, he’s not unbuilding anything. He’s moving in the direction of Progress. He’s got a plan and he’s carrying it out. Jacob’s spinning wheel is more like that of the godly Greek sisterhood known as The Fates.

Specifically, Jacob is analogous to Clotho, the one on the left, the one who spun the thread of human life and, as such, was responsible for the magical mystery of Birth. So here we have Jacob, spinning like Clotho, creating the fates of human lives, all in the shadow of the statue of Tawaret, another ancient goddess of…you guessed it… Birth!

It seems to me that most Lost reviewers can’t resist playing symbolic tic tac toe. In Jeff Jensen’s finale review alone, he managed to compare Juliet to not only Tawaret, but Isis, Nausicaa, Oedipus’s mommy, the Holy Mother of God … oh, and Stephen King’s Carrie, too! Basically there’s almost no god, goddess or fictional archetype that can’t be swapped into this story to suit almost any interpretation. It’s childsplay.

But I have a harder time making these connections. I mean, this is how Tawaret was portrayed by Egyptian artists:

You may be wondering, like I am, what happened to the stumpy legs, the big belly and the saggy boobs. Hippo head aside, many thought, with no small justification, that the statue more closely resembled Sobek, the god of Chaos.

TPTB have apparently confirmed for all the world that the statue is indeed meant to represent Tawaret, so all we can do is go with that. Think of it as a kind of Hollywood version of a fertility goddess. Hollywood, where even a pregnant hippo can be tall and tan and lean and lovely. As a matter of fact, this fertility goddess was built kind of like a certain fertility doctor we know, the one whose heartrending death transcended the silliness of the quadrangle storyline that she was so unfortunately trapped in this year.

The character machinations of the quadrangle were so downright dumb in this episode, it’s embarrassing to even try and remember them.

Juliet jumps off the sub to save “all those people” but then they run into Jack who needs to bleach Kate out of his memory bank so he’s going to blow up the Island and hope that puts him back to never knowing her, which prompts Juliet to change her motivation completely and jump on Jack’s bandwagon because she also agrees she wishes she could go back to never having known Sawyer! Seriously!

I mean, words fail me, but… Seriously??? This is the best they could come up with for character motivations for four grown adults?

Maybe that’s why the players in this year’s triangle were all featured in flashback as immature children. We saw that Kate was getting into trouble with Tom long before she managed to help him get dead.

We saw that Sawyer never would have written his vendetta letter without Jacob’s helpful assistance.

Both Sawyer and Kate were touched by Jacob. Very tellingly, Juliet was not. Juliet learned a different lesson. When her parents gave her and her sister the divorce “talk” they managed to frame the whole thing in very fated tones. Some loves aren’t meant to be. Just because Juliet didn’t want to accept it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Pinkshirt Juliet’s worst nightmare had come true and Redshirt Juliet was cutting Sawyer loose. Why? Well, it seems the whole plot hinged on Sawyer accidentally choosing a most inopportune time to give Kate this one sad, longing Look.

Faced with the all-too-revealing question of who he’d most wish to spend Forever with, Sawyer looked at Kate when he shoulda looked at Juliet. And that, as they say, was that.

Juliet was all charged up and ready to help Jack drop some Go Away Bombs. Looks on Lost are important, especially between lovers and ex lovers and would be lovers, and as we all know, finale Looks are the best kind, the kind that can send message board ship wars into hyperdrive. Even if they’re almost always misinterpreted.

As Jack dropped the bomb, our Season Five Quad Kids had their very own Finale Look.

What did this Look mean? Was it Goodbye?

With Sawyer and Juliet now separated by a death scene that had about a thousand times more feeling than their entire unbelievable relationship ever had, it’s hard to see how the Look meant anything other than farewell for this pair that was never meant to be.

But what about Kate and Jack?

Who the frack knows? Or cares? Sure, Jack wanted to destroy Kate’s memory forever and sure, he was fine with sending her ass back to jail and sure, he couldn’t be bothered to walk even a few steps to jiggle the candy machine before he blew up the Island. All of that is true. So, yes, Jack and Kate remain one of the most unappealing and uninspired couples in the history of tv romance, but that doesn’t mean they’re gone for good. All we can do is offer fervent blessings to Jacob and hope that the Quad Looks were a casting off of that entire knitting row, that we’re done, finally, with all such relationships that are not “meant to be”.

I know, I know, who am I kidding? There’s really nothing much else to be said about the silly Quad plot that mucked up the Jackisode half of the finale, except to note that there is a very loud and determined internet contingent that is unwilling to accept any possibility that Juliet, despite falling to the center of the earth and detonating a nuclear warhead, might in fact be dead. It’s true that Desmond survived a similar (?) kind of explosion in Season Three, landing naked in the middle of the jungle, none the worse for wear.

So I guess that might be a nice fantasy for Juliet’s horndog fanboys. I sympathize with those fans who’ve lost their favorite character, and Lord knows we could ill afford to lose another female from this Boys Only Club, but the clues for a living Juliet just don’t seem to be there.

It was Juliet, and only Juliet, who wasn’t touched by Jacob. Am I putting too much faith in one clue? Should I be thinking more like the geniuses who put together Bernard’s offer of tea (the fetus loves the folic acid!) and Juliet’s hand touching her stomach (or adjusting the gun sticking into her crotch), and concluded…

Yep! It’s a baby for Sawyer and Juliet in Season Six! She’s not dead. She’s going to be a mama!

Yo. There’s a limit to how far parsing clues will get you on Lost. You can use them to justify any wishful theory your heart desires, and at least for as long as the hiatus lasts, you can convince yourself that you’re the only one who truly gets it. And why not? It’s not as if actually reading the clues we’re given is all that helpful. It’s easy to get confused. For instance, did it mean anything that when Jack got clocked, it was a big red Toolbox that hit him?

I like to think so.

But then I thought the big car sized box Ilana’s boys were carrying was akin to the Ark of the Covenant. Who would have thought that guys carrying a dead body around a tropical island would want to make it ten times heavier, just for the hell of it?

Was that an icebox they had Locke in?

Clues can be tricky. Some of them may be inside jokes, but others, which might at first glance seem goofy, turn out to be quite meaningful. When Hurley painted a Sphinx as a Rehabilitative Art project, it wasn’t anything to scoff at.

Because here we are now, smothered in Egyptian imagery, unriddling the mystery of what lies in the shadow of the Four Toed Foot.

Candy bars named after Greek gods might have seemed frivolous,

but this passage on Jacob’s Tapestry forces us to speak Greek. Under a picture of tall masted sailing ships are these words:

Richard was seen building a ship in a bottle in the episode before the finale, “Follow the Leader”.

Jacob was seen awaiting the arrival of a very similar 19th century sailing vessel, another one of the many he has brought to the Island. There is a big beached boat marooned improbably on the interior of the Island, the slave ship Black Rock, out of Portsmouth, England.

Can we put two and two together here and conclude that Richard was the Captain of the Black Rock and that Jacob, after bringing him there, favored him and bestowed on him immortal life?

It sure seems possible.

What are we to make of all the Eyes we see on Lost? Jacob’s Tapestry is topped by the Eye of Horus, a symbol of godly protection being woven into history by He Who Protects Us All.

Although Ilana is a new character I seriously wish I didn’t have to care about, I couldn’t help noticing that the only thing left uncovered by her mummy makeup was her one Cyclopean eye.

What did Ilana look like before she was mummified? Is it significant that she maybe sees out of only one eye? Or is it a different eye analogy they were going for? Maybe a Third Eye kind of thing?

It’s so hard to say. In any case, it seems inevitable from what we have that Ilana has come to fight in The War on Jacob’s side. Is she a Good Guy, like Bram said, or the kind of Bad Guy who keeps saying she’s a Good Guy, like Frank hipped to?

Who will fight on the other side of The War? Not Bernard and Rose, I’m thinking.

These two were looking chill, and their Zenlike tranquility was so deep even death could not frighten them. Does this mean they are the carcasses found by Jack and Kate in the cave, the ones with the symbolic black and white rocks in their pockets, the mysterious Adam and Eve, the favorite message board guessing game for true Lost fanatics?

There’s no such thing as a straightforward clue on Lost, which is why so many of us are paranoid. It seems many fans jumped to the conclusion that the fish Jacob was seen cooking in the opening sequence was in fact an honest to God Red Herring, a trick clue designed to throw us off the trail.

But I don’t think so. First off, it’s not a Herring, which is a coldwater fish. It’s more like a Rockfish, or tropical perch, but it is a RED fish. Or yellowish anyway. Maybe it is another joke they’re playing on us, but wouldn’t that negate the entire mystical, enigmatic drama of Black and White Beachboys exchanging cryptic dialogue? That would be underhanded even for Lost. I think the fish is meant to represent instead the Ichthus, the symbol of Christ.

“Once again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish…The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
-Matthew 13:47-50

In its most primitive form, the Jesus Fish was portrayed by ancient Christians, as an eight spoked wheel, here marked with the Greek word for Ichthus.

It’s a symbol we’ve seen so very often on Lost, the recurring theme of the Dharmachakra, the great Wheel of Life and Death. It’s another one of those instances on Lost where unrelated cultures clash and find common ground, where things that have no relationship to one another - like say, Egyptian gods and Christian saints and Buddhist imagery - are synthesized into one great big unified theme. I think the Clue of all Clues in the episode was this one:

I don’t think it was Flannery O’Connor’s story that was being referenced. Or the inside joke that “Everything Rises” just as Locke is taking a dive. Or the dove with the arrow through its heart, though certainly that soon became Jacob’s fate.

I think the important point was just the title itself: “Everything That Rises Must Converge” The title is a reference to the philosophy of the fascinating Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

No one has ever tried harder to synthesize both Science and Faith than this man, who attempted to reconcile the scientific study of evolution with the orthodox teachings of Catholicism. It wasn’t easy and he risked condemnation from his Church by doing it, but he perservered. He believed in his philosophy that all evolution, by increasing the complexity of organisms, from cell to organism to planet to solar system and whole-universe, was resulting in a Unification of Consciousness that spiralled inevitably towards an irresistible point of perfect harmony, a condition he named the Omega Point.

“”Evolution is nothing but matter become conscious of itself.”
- Julian Huxley

We have seen many times on Lost this perpetual intermingling of cultures and faiths and languages and themes.

“‘Be not afraid, open, open wide to Christ the doors of the immense domains of culture, civilization, and progress.”
-John Paul II

Instead of splitting the world into Black and White halves that can never be joined,

perhaps Jacob represents the Omega Point, the force that is drawing humanity together towards a Supreme Consciousness. If so, then Bernard and Rose were probably right. It won’t matter whether anyone lives or dies, only that they find a way to finally attain the harmony and peace that Destiny has designed for them. Jacob draws people to the Island, where time and again they are destroyed and corrupted, but all this is just the upward converging progress of human consciousness, being drawn to the one and only endpoint, towards Omega.

There are many questions left hanging for next season. Was Jack’s great race after Destiny nothing more than him creating the very same Incident that had always happend, as Miles theorized, when nobody was paying attention to him?

Did whatever happened just happen all over again?

Will Sawyer be able to overcome his grief?

Will sexy Sayid survive?

Will Sun ever get a plot?

One thing that seems inevitable is that all clues are progressing towards WAR next season. But maybe that’s the ultimate red herring. Maybe we’re being thrown off by the idea that this is a story of blacks and whites, that must inevitably clash and create chaos.

Maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe the story isn’t circling around its own beginning. Maybe instead it’s circling around Omega. And everything that happens along the way is just … Progress.

“I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”
-Anais Nin