How Lost Ends

These are my current thoughts after watching the Richard episode of Lost.

This is pieced together from various conversations I’ve had on Google Buzz and small private message board I frequent.

For the record, I don’t look at any spoilers, including upcoming episode titles or anything else.

There are spoilers in what follows for any episodes that have already aired, and also what I guess you would call “speculative spoilers”.

This may be a little jumbled also, but it all ties together.

1) The show is obviously dealing with various spiritual and pseudo-religious concepts.

It’s not going to prescribe to any particular one – it can’t take the stance of “Christianity is the right one” without alienating huge number of people.

Lost takes the idea that all religions and even philosophies are based around certain core concepts of “good vs evil”, and different cultures interpret this in different ways.

Smokey called it “hell” because Richard is Catholic – that’s the one Richard prescribed to and what he would conceptually accept.

That doesn’t even mean a place consistent with what we would traditionally think of as “hell” exists. Just that ultimate evil does. Many religions need a place for that evil to live, thus the creation of hell.

If you really want to stretch this out farther, both Smokey and Jacob may only be manifesting themselves as people because that’s what they’re dealing with in terms of the survivors of Flight 815 and other humans.

If the Lost universe believes in alien life, this same struggle is probably taking place on “Planet Ant Monsters” with a race of intelligent Ant-Monsters, and Smokey and Jacob look like intelligent Ant-Monsters over there.

2) We really know quite a bit at this point.

Just because nobody smacks us in the face with long-form exposition doesn’t mean we’re not learning things.

Like take Jacob stopping Richard from killing him on the beach, compared to how he totally just let Ben stab him to death, which always seemed a bit odd.

Why the difference?

Well, when Richard first got there in the 1860s, one could assume there were still a bunch of candidates left on that wheel in his lighthouse. Jacob still had work to do.

When Ben came for him, there were only six left, and they were all on the island. Jacob knew his job was nearly done and it was time for him to step aside so that one of the candidates could take over his job.

There’s enough there to infer that that’s basically how it works.

When someone from our 815 buddies steps up to become the new Jacob, we’ll learn how a candidate becomes the new keeper of the island and what that means and entails to a deeper extent.

Who was Jacob before he was “island keeper Jacob”?

I don’t think it matters – he was some guy who was a candidate once, went through trials and tribulations just like Jack, et al are now, and stepped up when he realized it was his destiny to be the personification of “good” against Smokey’s “evil”.

3) If you look at various religious allegories and stories – and my primary (and admittedly remedial) knowledge is of the Bible – most times the “god” figure is vague in message, putting the person through many trials to test their faith and will.

The “devil” figure is straight-forward and promises them whatever they want, but there’s always a catch.

This is exactly how Jacob and Smokey operate.

4) When it all ends, I think we’ll see Jack looking into his version of the mirror (maybe it will be an iPhone!) and writing out the names of the next round of candidates.

Smokey will remain trapped in Locke’s form, just as he was trapped in that other guy’s form from the last time this climaxed.

The two may converse on the beach, as well.

5) What’s it all mean?

At the absolute baseline, it’s the world’s spiritual battle between good and evil, and as I said in my first point, that relates and correlates to the base ideas of how most religions work.

Anything more than that gums this show up, like how Midichlorians gummed up the Force in Star Wars.

Another key point is that the producers have been adamant that the show itself is about this particular set of characters, not about the island.

If we’re talking about the world’s eternal struggle between good and evil – and Jacob’s description of what Smokey is says we’re talking about exactly that – I don’t think we’re going to see that struggle end on this show.

That’s too big and abstract of a concept to have it end as “Jack and friends stopped evil in the universe for all time”.

6) My only questions are:

a) What is the Sideways world and how does it tie in?

b) Technology like the donkey wheel and the magnetic forces on the island – what’s that all about?

(In theory, that could be summed up in spiritual mumbo-jumbo related to how their minds can interpret being on the island or something – much like they “see” Jacob and Smokey as people.

To account for the mystical aspects, the island gives them “magnetic pockets” and other science-based rationalizations?)

7) One last note – the statue got taken out by a huge TIDAL WAVE, not the Blackrock. Unless you think the Blackrock popped a wheelie out of the water or something.

But about that statue…if this is a ages-old conflict that plays out forever between good and evil, all the Egyptian stuff (including the statue) may just be the mark they left on the island from their time, much like Dharmaville and the Dharma stations are what “our people” have left there.

What would that stuff look like to a newbie in 3010? Ancient and mysterious ruins from a long-dead culture.

(On April 6, I wrote a Part 2 to this post after the Desmond episode that explains how the Sideways world fits into this theory.)