Brandon Otte's Blog

Lost: Through the Looking Glass

Walt the dilly, yo?!?!?!

Last night’s last night of Lost certainly packed a whole lot into the two hours it had to rock our worlds. I can’t wait to get into some of my theories heading into the summer, what I thought of the “Rattlesnake in the Mailbox” (as the producers were calling it online) at the end of the episode, and what I thought of the amazing reappearance of everyone’s favorite telekinetic boy.

But you’ll have to wait, because I didn’t write about last week’s “Greatest Hits Collection,” and I thought I should probably touch on that for a paragraph or two.

Last week we found out that Charlie was gonna die – no, seriously this time. Desmond let him know that by flipping the switch next to the blinking yellow light and drowning, Charlie would have the fortune of knowing that Claire and Aaron (and possibly everyone else) made it off the island. Charlie had to think about this for a bit, but he eventually decided that he would sacrifice himself for the good of every one of his friends on the beach (very symbolic, eh). But once they’re in the boat above the Looking Glass station (10 points to whoever can explain the why the writers chose that reference as a name for that station), Desmond has a change of heart. He offers to take the mission for Charlie, because Charlie has too much to live for in the forms of Claire and Aaron. Charlie agrees, but only so he can trick Desmond and hit him upside the head with a paddle. After swimming down to the looking glass, he is captured by two women and there is no flashing yellow light to be found.

I loved last week’s episode, because I think Charlie rocks. When the writers told us early in the season that he was going to kick the bucket, I was heartbroken. But then he never did, and I held out hope last week that he still wouldn’t die (more on that later). But how great was his list of the five best things to ever happen to him? Claire was the obvious No. 1 on the list, but my favorite was No. 2 – when a woman on the street told him that he was a hero, no matter what anyone said. That’s just the kind of emotional moment that Lost is so good at – surprising and sad at the same time.

Anyway, on to more important matters...

Let’s start with the on-island story. I don’t remember exactly where the episode started, but I do remember the beach. Sayid tells Jack to keep going – no matter what happens – and get the 815ers to the radio tower. When Charlie has disabled the communications jamming equipment in the Looking Glass station, then Jack and Parachute Girl can use her satellite phone to contact the ship that was allegedly sent by Penny Windmore to come and rescue Desmond, and that waits 80 miles offshore. Sayid, meanwhile, is going to stay on the beach with Bernard and Jin. They’re waiting for the Others to come and try to kidnap the women, and the guys are going to blow up some stacks of dynamite and hopefully a few baddies at the same time.

But things don’t really go according to plan.

Ben finds out that the 815ers know about their trip to the beach. He hears the news from the two birds holding Charlie hostage in the Looking Glass. Ben is a busy man in his walkie talkie conversations, because he also learns that Juliet has betrayed him, and that Carl (the boyfriend of his alleged daughter) has warned the 815ers that the Others were coming post haste. Ben is understandably pissed, and he sets off on a jungle trek with Alex to intercept the 815ers on their way to the radio tower. After he “convinces” Jack to stop his plan to bring help, Ben and Alex will meet up with the other Others at “The Temple” (what?!?!), and Mikhail will head to the Looking Glass to dispatch of the ladies and Charlie.

Back on the beach, the Others are making their Angel of Death night visits to the tents that are marked (seriously, either the show has been chock full of Bible references lately, or I’m just catching more of them). The boys take aim and prepare to shoot. We, the cynical viewers, know that something is going to go wrong. And we all assume (or at least I did), that it was going to go wrong for Bernard. He’s a bumbling idiot – let’s be honest. But low and behold, Sayid and Bernard hit their targets dead on. Jin is the one whose gun malfunctions (Get it? He’s sterile.) After some gunfights and a few more deaths by the Others (seven in all), they capture the boys and hold them hostage.

Back on the trail, Jack and the 815ers have stopped to enjoy the scene of their victory. Only they notice that it isn’t all that victorious – they hear gunshots and only see two pillars of smoke. But Jack, remembering his promise to Sayid, keeps the group moving. That’s not right, in Sawyer’s eyes. He wants to head back to save the boys, and he wants to do it without Kate. Instead he gets Sawyer, and we get to run the gamut of emotions. I actually cheered out loud when Jack and Juliet shared their kiss – only to be heartbroken when Jack popped out the big “I love you” to Kate. Juliet is the better woman for you, Jack! I also got a big tug on my heartstrings when Sawyer tells Hurley that he can’t come along – he’s too big and he’ll just get in the way. It’s the exact same thing that Charlie told Hurley when the big man wanted to get in the boat with he and Desmond. Hurley is still my favorite character, and to see him get kicked around like that made me very sad and very mad.

Above the Looking Glass, Desmond wakes up and decides that he doesn’t like being shot at by Mikhail. So he dives into the water and pulls himself down to the Looking Glass. Mikhail decides to join him, and there’s suddenly a party underwater where everyone’s invited. After a brief powwow with the birds and with Ben, Mikhail is told it’s his duty to kill Charlie Pace and the two women. He shoots both women first, natch, and moves in for the kill on the second when he’s hit square in the gut with a spear from Desmond’s spear gun. Charlie gets the code from Lady 2 so he can turn off the jamming equipment. It’s a Beach Boys song, and we all realize now that Charlie really is going to die. The revelation that only a musician could really stop the jamming equipment was heartbreaking to me. I was still holding out hope that Desmond and Charlie could still both make it – working together. But when we find out that only a musician could really turn off the equipment, and that the musician has to be Charlie... Sigh. At least he picked a good way to go.

Charlie stops the jamming equipment, and all of a sudden there’s an incoming message from one Penelope Windmore. She and Charlie talk for a while, and she reveals that parachute girl is not with her. Mikhail taps on the window with a grenade before Desmond can talk to Penny. The moment Charlie realizes that everything happens for a reason on this island is very sad. He comes to the decision that he really does have to die if he wants to ensure that Claire will live. He shuts the door and lets the room fill up with water, but not before using one of his ever-present Sharpies to write the message on his hand that it, in fact, is “Not Penny’s Boat.” He gives himself the Catholic cross and drowns.

Goodbye, Charlie Pace!

Meanwhile, Ben has intercepted 815ers, and he and Jack decide to have a quick chat. Ben tries to convince Jack that Parachute Girl is not who she says she is (something that is confirmed in Charlie’s conversation with Penny). But Jack, citing a history of lying, tells Ben to shove it. Ben asks for his talkie back, and he tells Tom to shoot the beach boys (not the band, but the merry band of dynamite snipers) if Ben doesn’t talk again within a minute. Ben gives Jack the choice – call off his rescue plan, or let the three guys die. Jack chooses the good of the many over the good of the few, and we hear three gunshots. For a second, I thought they might have actually killed Sayid, Jin and Bernard.

After hearing the gunshots, Jack gets uber-pissed, and we see him in full-out anger mode. He beats Ben bloody, grabs the talkie and tells Tom that he is going to get his people rescued, and then he is going to hunt Tom down and kill him. Hardcore! But why not kill Ben right now? Because Jack wants to see him hurt. Jack tells Kate that he will wait until Ben sees rescue coming and realize that he’s lost. That’s when Jack is gonna kill Ben. Bam!

But, of course, the three shooters are still alive, and Sawyer and Juliet are there to help. They’re trying to decide what can be done when Hurley comes barreling out of the woods in his DHARMA van, running over the angry Other whose name I can’t remember, and getting Sawyer a gun – which he quickly uses to dispatch of Tom while Sayid strangles the other Other with his legs. Hooray! Everyone is safe!

And now that the signal jammer is no longer jamming, parachute girl can call her friends on the boat. Oh, and did I mention that Locke is alive, and that Walt helped him regain his legs? And that he has a gun? No? Well, all that is true. He comes up just in the nick of time to tell Jack not to call. He even points a gun at Jack and threatens him. It got to the point where I actually thought that Locke might go through with it and kill Jack. But he can’t. Instead, he tells Jack that this isn’t the way it was supposed to happen (more on that later), and walks off while Jack makes the call.

The boat promises they can zero in on Jack’s location with the phone. Hooray! Everyone is safe! (Or not, depending on how much you trust Ben’s assessment of parachute girl and her friends at this point.)

Wowser! We haven’t even gotten off island yet, and I’m on page three!

The rattlesnake in the mailbox surprise was that the flashback this week wasn’t a flashback – it was a flash forward. But we don’t know that until the very end of the show.

I thought I was seeing the story of Jack, post-tattoos, heading home as an alcoholic and a drug addict. He was obviously upset about something he read in the paper. Apparently when Jack gets upset, he turns into Jim Morrison of the Doors, circa 1970 – bigger, bearded and ridiculously self-involved and obnoxious. Jack was about to jump off a bridge (he said “Forgive me” while standing on a ledge) when a car accident happened right behind him. Being the good doctor, he rushed to the aid of the woman and child in the car.

He also moped around town for a while, stealing some pretty heavy drugs to feed his habit. His ex-wife was still listed as his emergency contact and he mentioned his father (which all added to the “in the past” assumption). He went to a funeral and was the only one there (although we don’t know whose funeral it was, we did learn that Jack was neither friend nor family to this person). Distraught, Jack calls someone to meet him at the usual spot at the airport. Turns out, it’s Kate, and she’s all glammed up with no place to go. Jack yells at her for a while, saying that he’s trying to get back to the island – that they made the wrong decision in leaving. Kate said she had to get back because “He” might notice she isn’t there. Jack still wants to go back to the island – he said they were never supposed to leave. And season!

Well I’ll be darned. That was an awful lot of stuff to happen in the final episode of the season. Fist, we learn that someone knows where the island is now. We learn that Locke isn’t dead, and that he still isn’t willing to kill to get his way (I don’t think he ever will be willing). We learn that Walt is still on the island in some form (most likely the form of the smoke monster), and that he’s telling Locke to do stuff. We learn that parachute girl isn’t who she says she is. We see a mother and daughter reunion with Rousseau and Alex, and we learn that Rousseau is going to join the 815ers on the beach. And, perhaps most importantly, we learn that at least a few of the castaways make it back to the real world – or at least Jack and Kate do – and that they shouldn’t have. Am I forgetting something?

Rather than list a bunch of references in this already overly long post, I’m going to jump right in with my new theory. First, though, let me ask and answer this question: Who hit the time travel nail right on the head? Answer: Brandon! (way back in February for sure, possibly earlier)

What do I mean? Well, here’s my big theory heading into the summer. It’s really more of a string of ideas that might tie in together as I type them, or they might not.

Jack and Kate did make a mistake in leaving the island (if we can assume they ever do leave the island). They are supposed to be there, and here’s why – they were there when the plan crashed. Here’s how it works:

The DHARMA folks claimed to be on the island to live in harmony, to study things and all that jazz. But they were funded by a military industrial complex-type guy in Alvar Hanso. Hanso wanted some applicable technology to come out of this hippie lovefest, and he found it in the form of the electromagnetic anomalies specific to the area of the island of Desmond’s former hatch (the Swan, was it?). A lot of what I’ve been assuming is that the experiments had to do with the mind, with psychic abilities (via Walt) and things like that. What I think it really has to do with now is time travel.

The DHARMA folks (or someone working through them) were hoping to develop a way to travel through the time space continuum, and they were going to use the electromagnetic energies of the island to do it. That’s why they were on the island.

But, as things often do in science fiction science stories, things went awry. The original inhabitants of the island attacked the members of DHARMA (under the leadership of Richard and Ben) and killed them. But where did those original inhabitants of the island come from? The obvious two choices are from the Black Rock slave ship and from Adam and Eve, the two skeletons found in the caves early in season 1 (with the black and white stones). The other connection might be to Jacob, the presumed father of the island and leader of its original inhabitants. I think they came from Adam and Eve, and from intermingling with the crew and slaves from the Black Rock.

So then the question becomes, who were Adam and Eve, and I think we got that answer last night – Adam is Jack and Eve is Kate.

Because of the time travel experiments gone haywire, Jack and Kate (or Penny and Desmond) somehow become the original inhabitants of the island. They were meant to be there. Their offspring and the slaves/crew of the Black Rock (along with various others who arrive on the island) form the group of “original inhabitants” Ben joins and eventually leads.

The island’s electromagnetic abilities may also have something to do with aging on the island. Have we really seen any old people on the island? The oldest are probably Tom, Mikhail and Locke, and they aren’t really that old. We also know that Batmanuel (AKA Richard) seemed not to age at all between the time he and Ben first met, and the current time on the island. Maybe the time-traveling capabilities of the electromagnetic anomalies are causing unusual aging patters. This could also explain why Walt seemed to age faster than the rest of the castaways (as well as providing a handy toll for the writers to explain why the actor changed so much over the course of the show).

But wait, there’s more!

This theory can also be used to explain the mystery of Jacob. Have you seen pictures of the mysterious figure that we see a flash of in the chair during “Man Behind the Curtain?” I have, and I think it’s Locke. Using the time travel solution and a reference to a book (something Lost certainly likes to use), I think we can explain both why he is only visible at certain times and to certain people, and explain how Locke could see himself. In the book “Slaughterhouse Five,” the main character becomes unstuck in time. He can travel back and forth in time, visiting different parts of his life (according to Wikipedia, it’s also implied that this is caused by a plane crash and brain damage). He cannot change anything, though, as he travels. Vonnegut uses a similar situation in “Sirens of Titan,” where a character exists along a wave stretching through the universe. When a planet intersects that wave, the person can be seen on that planet. Vonnegut often writes about ideas like fate, freedom, religion, death and time – ideas that the show Lost touches on often.

On the show, this makes sense because it also ties into a Biblical analogy. When the show represents Biblical stories (most notably the story of Abraham and Isaac), the island is seen as the God figure. It’d also be easy to infer that Locke is a Christ figure, because he is in communion with the island god. Taking this one step further, there should be a holy trinity – the father, son and holy ghost – who are one in the same. This would mean that Locke is also the holy ghost of the island, or Jacob. Sweetness!

Of course, there are a few things that this theory doesn’t really explain. The ideas I can think of off the top of my head include how the Black Rock go so far inland, and where exactly the four-toed statue leg came from. But I’m sure those could tie in somehow.

So when Locke confronts Jack at the radio tower, he is right to say that this isn’t the way it was supposed to happen (because he knows how it was supposed to happen). And when Jack tells Kate it was the wrong decision to leave the island, he’s right because they were supposed to be on the island and will return there in the future or past.

Any thoughts on that one? Please share, even if it’s to tell me my theory is total bunk.

(On a side note: I didn’t sleep very well last night, because I was tossing and turning with this idea. I kept dreaming in cycles – and for some reason I dreamed about the X Files in cycles, too. I think there was an episode where they did that, right?)

But now, because this was a super-long post and a super-long episode, I have a lot of questions to get through the summer with:

1. Whose funeral was Jack attending?
2. Walt?!?!
3. Who does parachute girl work for?
4. How did Jack and Kate get off the island?
5. Who else got off the island?
6. How great was Sawyer tonight? I mean really, he saved the guys, shot Tom because he took Walt, and even had a heartfelt moment with Hurley. Awesome.
7. How long until someone finds the island now?
8. Who will take care of Aaron and Claire now?
9. What was the work that Walt told Locke he had to do?
10. Will the format of the show change now, with future flashes instead of flashbacks? Or will we start in the off-island future and flash back to on-island events that got them there?
11. How do you feel about the announcement of an end date for the show (48 more episodes between now and 2010, I believe)?

Posted by Brandon O at May 24, 2007 9:43 AM