Jacob and Smokey heart Dharma Coffee Sleeves.

LOST: Across the Sea

I just watched it again yesterday and I'm ready to go on record: This, after the finale, was my favorite episode of LOST. This one episode explains EVERYTHING.

The real mother was stoned by the island mother after she snubbed the darker twin and refused to name him. Later the island mother admitted that if she had let the woman live, she would have taken the boys to her people and they would have become bad. She has a negative view of people, this island mother. "Because they're people, and that's what people do. They come, they destroy, they corrupt, and it always ends the same." She also seems to know that the dark-haired twin leans toward the sinister, as she explains "Jacob isn't like you, he doesn't know how to lie," and "you're . . . special."

Since Jacob ends up being the one to eventually guard the island, and since he admits to Richard that he wants people to be able to help themselves (believing people are good at heart), he seems to have more faith in humanity than his mother and brother.

When she first shows the boys the light, it's bright enough to take up the entire cave and spill out onto the surrounding water and rocks in the stream. By the time Jack gets there, it's much, much smaller. If this means anything, it probably means that through time, the power and beauty (life, death, rebirth, etc.) that she described has been diminished by evil. She called the light the source, something that each man had a little of inside. The source of the souls of mankind? Have our souls diminished in brightness over the years? In The Howling Man, Serling put in a bit about how having the devil out and about, free to roam the world resulted in the unleashing of massive, widespread evil that brought disaster and world wars--things humanity couldn't have managed without the Devil's help. Might the light have lessened because the inhabitants of the island were corrupting and destroying? Might the fertility on the island have gone away for the same reason?

The island mother leveled the dark twin's people when he showed her his makeshift donkey wheel being built in what would become The Orchid Station. Maybe later, Jacob had to do the same kind of thing (the purge) when the Dharma folks were getting too close to the light (the donkey wheel in The Orchid, the business in building The Swan, etc.) and order Richard to gas them all in order to protect the light. They were getting too greedy, curiosity killed the cat? God made that flood rain down on everyone for a similar reason, right?

Island mother was a weaver. She pulled strings. The dark twin said to Jacob, "it's easy for you, looking down at us from above." Jacob was able to touch humans and alter them somehow. He was the knower of things, he wasn't physically present when Jack crashed into the bamboo fields, but he knew that it happened. He was able to know of things happening off-island (Sawyer's parents, Kate's decent into the world of crime beginning with the lunch box, etc.)

I know, go ahead and jump on me, but I think the island was literally the source of man, and the island's keepers were what we have come to know as God. The beginning of land and life didn't come to be in a blink, but it became. The keeper wasn't a super power but a human being. The island had been moved, probably many times, once the donkey wheel started spinning and the people figured it out. This could explain the polar bears, or the fact that the exit from the donkey wheel was in Tunisia (proximity to what we know as The Holy Land?). I think it's a beautiful fairy tale.

And Jack. The fixer. The savior. The one who rescued everyone! What if a group of writers and producers posited that the Messiah was a character you were emotionally invested in? What if there was something tangible that this character was saving you from, not just a general far-off concept? This idea did more for me than watching Jim Caviezel getting beaten to a pulp. . . what if it was someone you knew?

I think it took six years to get to this end for that reason; we needed that much time to get invested in Jack. True, he's had his moments, good and bad, but that last haggard walk, shoe bloodied and clutching the wound Locke gave him? Come on. Juxtaposed with the reunion with all the people from the island he saved, all the people he doctored, all the people he cared about where for once and for real, he actully looked happy? This show was a sentamentalist's (my) wet dream.

(Again), Bravo.

My aunts used to tease my mother when she was a little girl because she cried every time she watched Lassie. I might be crazy, and I might be reaching, but I know how she felt.

The Life and Times of Richard Alpert

HAPPY RICHARD ALPERT DAY, EVERYONE!

Tonight, at long last, we get something we've been waiting YEARS for! How exciting! I want to know everything about Richaardus, EVERYTHING!

A few items, just for the hell of it.

1. What is it about the island that makes people want to destroy it? Did the armed forces bring JUGHEAD to the island, and if so, for what purpose? How is it that it was never detonated (before Juliet)? How would anyone be able to find the island and then get a nuke onto it? Was that the work of The Smokey Man? (It's an island, it doesn't need protecting.) I think he was telling a big lie with that one.

Is the island the only place that can **contain** The Smokey Man? Is that why he wants to leave it and then have it destroyed? If this really is like The Howling Man, then he can only be contained by the staff of truth, maybe the island is a bigger, more special staff, that can contain the devil, and that's why he wants to go? He can't leave as long as his opposing figure (Jacob) is keeping him there, but now that Jacob is gone, he's free to bolt?

The Island is under water during the beginning of the flash sideways. If LOST=Howling Man, someone let the Devil out, and if the island (staff of truth) is underwater, the only thing that could contain him is gone, leaving him free to unleash his evil all over the world.

2. What is up with the Statue and what is up with the loss of fertility? How did that statue get reduced to just a foot? Does that symbolize The Smokey Man having more power over what happens on the island than Jacob? (Bad is more powerful than good, by the time Jack and Locke get there?) They COULD have successful reproduction before, what changed that? Wikipedia says that the Sobek Statue symbolized The River, Warfare, and Fertility. Sobek = God of Creation, often paired with Ra, God of Sun. Sobek was also said to be a repairer of evil. If the statue got hashed, chances are good that 1. the evil cannot get repaired and 2. the evil did it.

More later, I have a feast to prepare and some heavy black kohl to apply.

If the clues to LOST really are in seasons 3 and 4, I am guessing the Orchid Station is going to hold all the answers to what happens, WHY, and how they're going to fix what happened.

When the crew is there (Jack, Sayid, Kate, Sawyer, Juliet, Hugo, Jin) in the 70s, the Orchid Station hasn't been finished yet. Faraday goes to it, knows it's there, and talks to Dr. Marvin Candle about being from the future. Dr. Marvin Candle doesn't die in the Swan Station incident, but he presumably loses his arm in that little crunch (which Miles saves him from), as the later Dharma videos show him with a prosthetic. Dr. Marvin Candle somehow gets involved with the rest of them and then together they use Faraday's journal and information to create or further the Orchid in order to be able to time travel to change or prevent some event from happening. The event could be anything. . . .

1. There was some confusion over WHO was really supposed to move the island at the end of season 4. Ben insisted that it had to be him as he claimed (to Locke) that Jacob wanted him to suffer the consequences (not being able to return). But later, when Locke talks to Christian after he falls down the well, Christian insists that JOHN was supposed to be the one to move it. ? ? ? ?
If John was initially the one to move the island the first time, he never would have been the one to fix that wheel when it was all cockeyed off its axis and maybe the interaction between Locke and Widmore would have been different? Or the flashes through time would not have happened the way they did because John would have done it right the first time. He would not have been out and about trying to get everyone back to the island and Ben would not have been able to kill him? We know that Richard can come and go as he pleases, maybe he could have brought John back?
Maybe the event they need the Orchid for involves preventing John's death (and subsequently Jacob's?)

2. Maybe they need the Orchid to fix something with Ben, to either prevent him from doing something or eliminating him altogether?

3. Something happened between Eloise and Widmore. What was it? She took off after having Dan, knowing what, that he would need to go to Oxford to figure out all his quantum physics and do his rat experiments? Dan just wanted to play piano.

4. Did Widmore order the Dharma extermination? Ben seemed to claim it was someone above him but never said who it was. Ben really only killed Roger Workman, and then when he returned Richard asked if he wanted them to get the body, Ben said NO. Richard **shot** Martin Keamy but did not kill him, and he did it to protect Ben. Widmore seems a little kill-happy. . . .(Rousseau, baby Alex). What if the whole time the OTHERS were in charge they were acting more by NOT-JACOB'S philosophy? Team smoke monster does not want outsiders on the island but if they happen to show up, they pick and choose which ones to keep on their team and then kill the rest? Ben seems to have a very Dharma-ish situation going on with the fertility experiments and recruiting. Locke taunts Ben for needing a submarine and having chicken in his refrigerator and therefore CHEATING; John is an island purist. Maybe Jacob thinks that everyone can share in the island and its miracle power which is why random people keep getting pulled in there?

5. Jack is going to have to DO something. It's gotta be about him in the end. His dad is roaming around the island and Claire just wandered off for absolutely no reason. Was this so eventually Jack and Kate would come back, because they felt responsible for her, Jack as a brother, and Kate as a surrogate mother for Aaron? I still think they need to explain Kate totally jumping Jack's bones the night before they left. . . .is she knocked up or what? Are they supposed to spawn a new breed of others?

Jack's Daddy Issues

So what gives with Dr. Christian Shephard being so instrumental on the island? First he leads Jack to water but then it's revealed that the casket was empty? My question is, did the ticket agent at the airport totally pull a fast one and simply board the casket (after all, Jack insisted that THE COFFIN had to be on the plane and said really nothing regarding the corpse of his father that technically should have been inside THAT) without the body, did the body somehow fly out in all the chaos during the crash or has Dr. S just randomly taken to walking around the island in all his deadness, body and all?

What link does Christian have with the island that makes him important enough to be the new Jacob in season 4, telling Locke to MOVE THE ISLAND?!?!?!? They better explain this.