My feelings on this episode are very mixed. Some things were great, but I think they introduced some of these new central plot concepts way too late in the game at the end of this season and they should have been building up the Jacob bits over a number of episodes and not all stuffed into one, or I guess technically two.
It isn’t really clear if he was talking about the people from the past or the Arija people. I actually got the sense he was commenting on the latter.
A lot more than 30 years but yeah it seems like that’s the gist of it and one interesting aspect of it is how their relationship seems to be echoed in the relationship between Ben and Widmore. Back in the past at some point Ben visited Widmore off-island after Alex died and the take away from the scene was that for some reason Ben couldn’t kill Widmore him (but he told him he was going to kill his daughter), sort of the way unnamed dude couldn’t seem to kill Jacob (directly). I’m not so much on board with the idea that the unnamed guy is actually Widmore, but I do think there is some sort of association or parallel there that will be revealed, and Ben will realize he got insanely played.
Random interesting things about the episode:
I knew the thing in the box would be John Locke as soon as they arrived at the beach and planned to show it to Richard, though I’m not sure why I knew that, because earlier in the episode I figured it was some sort of parallel for the bomb in the past that would play a part in linking the two time periods… Something just snapped into place though about half a minute prior to the reveal that they would have Locke’s body.
This past weekend I visited and took pictures at the Byodo-in temple on Oahu, which is where Sun and Jin got married (pics here: http://www.funxed.com/PhotoGallery Hawaii Week 1 section). Surreal to see it on Lost so soon after being there.
As I type this I’m currently less than a block away from the street corner over which John Locke fell out of the window to be greeted by a book-reading Jacob. It is right in front of an Aloha Sushi place on Kalakaua in Waikiki and I often stand there on weekday mornings waiting for the B City Express bus to downtown Honolulu when I’m here in Hawaii.
One other thing I noticed in this episode is that (IIRC) Juliet’s family lived in the same house as the one Walt lived with his Mom and step-dad way back when. I don’t think this is supposed to mean anything, I think they just reused somebody’s house for filming and hoped that enough time had passed that nobody would recognize it and honestly I’m not even sure why I did since that episode was years ago now. Nice house, though.
My friend met Terry O’Quinn on the street here two nights ago; he’s in town for some charity golf tournament. He joked that he stopped to talk with them and got his picture taken because the island told him to.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Jacob was maneuvering - well, let’s call him anti-Jacob* - into killing him all along, for some unknown reason. (Perhaps an Obi-Wan or a Gandalf the White thing, where he has to die in order to ascend to a higher level, but can’t kill himself by his own hand for some reason.)
My main support for this is how he treats Ben. Everything Ben says (and anti-J tells him) about Jacob is true - Jacob really did seem to be unduly harsh with him over the years, and then when Ben confronts him he very deliberately says something to antagonize him even further. That seems premeditated to me.
Anybody know what the translation is of Richard’s answer about the shadow of the statue was?
- By the way, was the actor who played anti-Jacob in Deadwood? He looked familiar.
According to Lostpedia it was Latin for “He who will protect/save us all”.
Khoram
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From lostpedia: The answer to the question is “Ile qui nos omnes servabit”, which is Latin for “He who will save us all”
At the end, I thought we got crossed with the Myst storylines: two brothers that hate each other.
Pretty sure that was the dude from Deadwood.
My biggest problem with the Locke doppelganger (which otherwise would’ve been great) was that Ben facilitated so much of Nega-Locke’s progress this season without even prompting. Ben said himself that he was going back to be judged - setting himself up to be tricked. Ben took the initiative to get Locke back to the island. Ben insisted that Locke would have to die and come back. (And why? Because all he apparently needed for this plan was Locke and Ben!)
If False Locke had been playing him all along, there should have been some influence shown - some leading questions. Where else was all this coming from?
This might all make sense if we were informed about the politics and mythology, but instead we’re being played through a courtroom drama whose rules and motions we have no way to understand.
The plot isn’t unfolding so much as flopping about.
‘Jack, you can’t set off the bomb! What if you kill everyone on the island? That would be irreconcilably horrible!’
‘Geez, Kate! I have low self-esteem!’
‘OK, Jack. I’ll help you.’
‘Yah! We’ll all help, too, now!’
‘I’m completely crazy now because my parents got a divorce when I was a kid!’
OK, electromagnetic buildup vented … Apologies.
My theory is that anti-Jacob is Esau.
Christian mythology: Esau is Jacob’s brother and vows to kill Jacob after their father Abraham dies, for some reason I don’t remember. Also, one of Jacob’s sons is named Benjamin.
My other theory is that the Island is some sort of Fantasyland where religious/mythological/subconscious things become real. It might exist because of the combined energy generated by the Lostie’s emotional problems (they are all “lost” in some way, aren’t they? and were all together on the original airplane, thus achieving some sort of critical mass, as it were) and provides a sort of playground for them to resolve their issues. The smoke monster would represent nebulous fears and nightmares, Jacob and Esau are the Christian mythology contribution, the Others are Egyptian, the Dharma Initiative is New Age, and so forth. Eventually something will happen to break them out of Fantasyland and the series will end. Hopefully we will NOT discover that they have been in suspended animation on a spaceship about to land on Mars.
Richard was the one who said Loche had to die. The irony was it was the doppelganger that told Richard to do it.
Ah, I was thinking of the chapel scene. The second bit would actually make sense in terms of machinations … But that still requires Locke to be shot elsewhen and time-ported to the point when such a thing could be set up - who is controlling that?
nabeel
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On simply an aesthetic level I loved how the episode closed with a fade-to-white.
Khoram
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There’s a long line of Jewish folks who might take exception to their ancestors being labeled both Christian and mythological. :)
I took it as that’s where anti-jacob had been. Somehow restrained by the ash ring – since it was a big deal (apparently) that a break had been made in it.
The chick (Alleya?) that jacob asked for help seemed to be hunting anti-jacob down since she went for the cabin. And when they got there, she found the clue about the statue which seemed to be a “I’ve gone here” sort of thing.
If anti-jacob was shacking up there, he’d be an easy explaination for what did all the weird crap when John/Ben went there.
When they revealed the contents to the pilot but not to us is when I suspected it was Locke’s body.
I’m of this opinion, too. But I’m not sure at all why Ben would have led Locke to the shack originally or why he would have thought that was Jacob’s shack. But it is clearer that the figure in the shack wasn’t Jacob, because it doesn’t seem as if Jacob needed to ask for help or couldn’t make a full appearance.
I think Esau’s been “Jacob” all along. The Others have been following Esau thinking he was Jacob for centuries.
It also explains why Jacob’s lists seem to be populated with people with serious Daddy issues.
I’d thought about the fact that they’d been erroneously following anti-Jacob all this time. But then why didn’t he just carry out his plan earlier? If he just needed Ben to wield the knife, surely he could have contrived a far easier way to get the both of them in there long ago. It’s not as though Jacob didn’t see them coming so far away that the subterfuge was for anyone’s benefit but the audience’s …
So it’s going to hinge on what effect the bomb actually had, I guess. Speculating is wide open without any proper facts.
Pedantry alert.
Their father was Isaac, not Abraham. And the death threat was because Jacob impersonated Esau and got the paternal blessing of greatness meant for the older brother. Jacob runs away but they make up when they meet again.
Troy
This also further cements the theory of Esau* taking the form of dead people in order to manipulate and trick people into doing his bidding. When they visited the cabin, they saw Christian (who I believe Esau has been impersonating since the very beginning). Later on, they saw Claire. Both people were dead, both people were seen only in the cabin, where Esau had been trapped.
My question is - who broke the binding ring?
*(which is what I’m gonna call him, because it’s less silly than Fake Locke/Evil Locke/Pseudo Locke, and all the other derivatives)
