MAJOR spoilers below!
So, the LOST Season 5 finale. I think it pretty much goes down as “most fucked up and shocking season finale yet,” which isn’t exactly a small feat. I hardly even know when to begin with this one, but let’s see.
SORTA RECAP: 70s Time Line
I find it kind of hard to divorce some analysis from the recap for this one, so things are going to be a bit mixed in. I mean, I can’t even decide which of the two time lines we’re following (as I’ve divided them) is the most shocking.
Some of the smaller stuff out of the way: Rose, Bernard and Vincent (time-traveling dog!) are all okay, living in a cabin out in the woods (was it Jacob’s cabin?), and seemingly never to return. We saw perhaps the most badass gun fight on LOST yet, when the crew came rolling in to the Swan site in the Dharma van with guns blazing. Chang lost his hand, as we all knew he would. That piece of shit Phil got stabbed through the chest with a flying metal spike — yay! Radzinsky, of course, lived because he has to kill himself in the hatch some many years later (seemingly not because he can’t handle the monotony and pressure of pushing the button, but because this is all his fault) — boo! Juliet broke up with Sawyer because she believes that he’s really in love with Kate. Sawyer and Jack beat the shit out of each other, with Sawyer thankfully coming out on top.
And Sayid got shot by Ben’s dad. Here’s the thing. I went into this episode hearing lots of people predicting that Juliet was going to die. Over and over again, I kept hearing it. This pissed me the fuck off. Because I’ve mentioned the LOST vagina curse before, and we started this season with 10 main male characters and 4 female — if we were to end on 9 to 2, and if the female they decided to knock off is the one that I personally find to be the most compelling and least wishy-washy of them all (comparatively speaking), I was going to be absolutely furious.
So I really wasn’t expecting them to shoot and seemingly plan to slowly kill my favorite character. That pretty much had me yelling “noooooo — it’s fine, kill Juliet instead!” And then I realized, wait. They might kill off my favorite character and the best female character, leaving me with only my second-favorite character who is played by an unbelievably large asshole and didn’t even rate an appearance in the season finale.
Which is, it seemed, exactly what they planned to do. Right once they’d gotten me to a point where I was worried utterly sick about Sayid, and so much other exciting and wild shit was going down that I had completely forgotten that Juliet was expected to die . . . there she was, with chains wrapped around her, and getting sucked down into the giant electromagnetic hole. It was absolutely horrible — I sat there watching in horror, thinking not only did they have to kill off another fucking woman — they had to give her the most utterly horrific, awful death of anyone on the show yet. Seriously, only Boone can even begin compete with that, and only then if they actually had amputated his legs with a makeshift giant piece of metal before he died. Which they didn’t. And I’m just sitting there absolutely fuming like fuck this show, if they kill both Juliet and Sayid while letting Jack live, I’m DONE!
But, I forgot about the bomb. See, when Jack dropped it down that hole and it didn’t do anything at all, I thought there it is. Whatever happened, happened. The bomb didn’t go off because they can’t change it! And when we saw that Juliet was still alive down there, I thought Jesus Fucking Christ — there’s no way she can live through this, are you going to kill her twice???? Until she found the bomb, and she set it off, sending the screen to white, and leaving us wondering what the fuck happened.
Meaning that I’m assuming that Juliet is dead, but now we don’t actually know (more on this below), robbing me of my righteously indignant ranty post that I was going to write. But I guess that at least if she is dead, she got to die a heroic death.
SORTA RECAP: Jacob-Themed Time Line
So, the time line above left me slack jawed and just repeating the word “wow” over and over again. But this stuff with Jacob? Wow x 10.
Yes, we finally met Jacob, out on the island in the 1800s, waiting for the Black Rock to arrive. Then a dude in black — who based on theories I’ve read thus far, and primarily out of a need for name for him, I will refer to as Esau (in the same way that Tom was referred to as both Zeke and Mr. Friendly until we knew his real name) — walks up to him, and they have what might be the most important exchange we’ve ever seen on the show. Jacob is bringing the Black Rock to the island, despite the fact that “Esau” does not want him to. Esau says that it “always ends the same way” with the fighting and the destruction. Jacob doesn’t believe it has to happen that way. Esau then says he wants to kill Jacob, but seemingly he cannot. He then tells Jacob that someday, he will find his loophole and do just that.
Most shocking of all to me, at this point, was the revelation that Jacob was actually a real person with a physical body.
We then learned, as I have speculated for some time, that the “island” — here meaning Jacob — brought the Flight 815 people to the island. We saw flashbacks of him touching each and every one of the currently surviving 815 passengers, some after they already got back from the island, but all at relatively important moments in their lives. The touch itself was particularly focused on. What it means, we don’t know, but we do know, particularly based on the young age at which he visited Kate and Sawyer, that he personally chose them all, and their arrival on the island was not the “accident” that Jack and Faraday seem to believe it was.
We also learned that Jacob lives in the statue, which we got the best glimpse of last night that we will likely ever get. (The official recap confirms it as Taweret!) We learned that Ilana et al are working for Jacob. We learned that Richard doesn’t age because Jacob “made him this way” . . . which actually doesn’t tell us a whole lot. We learned that Locke (er, “Locke”) didn’t plan to kill Jacob himself, but wanted Ben to do it. We learned what lies in the shadow of the statue: he who will save us all.
Oh, and we learned that Locke really is dead. Like, seriously, actually dead. As a doornail. Dead enough to carry around in a box and present to the Others.
What. The. Fuck.
So who is the Locke visiting Jacob with Ben? Well, before Ben killed Jacob for getting sassy with him, Jacob looked at “Locke” and said “I guess you found your loophole.” And before he died, Jacob also said, I believe, “they’re coming.”
ANALYSIS/THEORIES/QUESTIONS
Ahem.
I believe it’s safe to say that “Locke” — who I will from here on out refer to as Focke (Fake Locke, duh) — is really Esau (again, for those who skipped down to this section — what I’m calling Jacob’s beach buddy who wants to kill him)? I mean, it seems pretty obvious. What other loophole could Jacob and Focke been referring to? And why else would Focke have wanted Ben to kill Jacob — other than being unable to do it himself?
So, then who is this Esau fellow? My husband theorized last night that if he takes on shape-shifting forms, he was also Christian. This makes sense to me, actually. Christian’s body arrived on the island in the same way that Locke’s did (though of course we have a body for Locke, but not one for Christian). Christian also told Locke how to do everything that he did that got Locke to the point where he would die. Which is, it seems, what Esau wanted all along.
I also saw theorizing this morning that Esau is actually the smoke monster. This makes sense to me, too, and I think that both ideas can coexist. Could it be that rather than working for the island, the smoke monster is working in opposition to it? Remember, also, that the smoke monster can shape shift. And that Esau was wearing black while Jacob was wearing white. The island might indeed not have let Ben live — but it makes total sense now that Esau would have. It further makes sense that the Smoke Monster’s incarnation of Alex would tell Ben to do everything that Focke said, despite the fact that Jacob knew right away that Focke was not Locke. And if Alex had not told Ben that, it seems that Ben would not have really ever been in a position where he could be talked into killing Jacob.
If Locke is dead, and it seems pretty damn clear that he is, this also furthers my theory that he was not “special” at all or supposed to be the leader. A lot of other stuff also starts adding up — why he would lie to Sun when Locke never ever breaks his word, to begin with. Why he knew so much about the island, for another. Why Richard seemed so sure that something was different about him. And why Richard never thought that Locke was actually special to begin with. It seems that this Focke character is likely in it for the long haul, but Locke? Locke seems unspecial, and certainly gone.
Also, am I the only one who feels like it was just a tad too easy to kill Jacob? I mean, the dude has been alive for centuries, has all kinds of crazy ass powers, controls the island, can leave it at will . . . you’d think it’d take more than a stab to the chest, right?
But, seeing as how he seems to be dead, what is going to happen now? Is this the “war” that was coming? Who did Jacob say was coming? You’d think Ilana’s people, but Jacob seemed concerned about them coming, right? Rather than saying it as a dying threat towards Focke/Esau? And Ilana’s people were working for Jacob.
Further, if what lies in the shadow of the statue is he who saves us all, who was that? All signs would point to it being Jacob. And if that’s true, and Jacob is now dead, what is going to happen? (Most interestingly of all, is Richard going to shrivel up and die now?)
And then back to the 70s time line: does any of this even fucking matter?
We closed not on Ben killing Jacob, but on Juliet setting off the bomb. And this seems absolutely fitting, not only because it was the biggest most shocking moment, but because we don’t know how her doing that is going to affect the future.
Did she change anything? Or was it just what happened all along? After all, something had to end the Incident. Judging from the fact that they had to keep pressing a button, the energy isn’t just going to burn out on its own. And I don’t know how else they filled it up with cement if not with a truck made out of metal. So, did nothing change? And this is what stopped the Incident so they could install the hatch, and Juliet just killed them all with an atomic weapon? (Because seriously, in that close proximity, they’d have to all be dead, right?)
It seems unlikely to me that they would leave not a single Oceanic crash survivor left alive except for Sun. But if you asked me before, I would’ve said that they’d never really kill Locke, and that Jacob wasn’t actually a person with a physical body. So LOST seems to have kind of thrown out the rules here. Again, unlikely, but. I feel like we can’t 100% rule it out. Only like 99%.
So then there’s the possibility that, as some suggested last week, the bomb going off caused them to time travel. Which, I assume, would mean that Juliet is dead and Sayid will likely die, but the rest will be okay, and put hopefully in the show’s present.
And then there’s the chance that Juliet really did change everything. Meaning that any number of things could go down. I’ve thought for some time that the bomb might “change” it, but the plane would just end up crashing on the island some other way because it’s what was meant to happen. Which could also mean any number of things, such as them going through the exact same time line again, or things ending up differently because there’s no hatch involved.
Or it could mean that Juliet just really changed them completely, and the plane doesn’t crash at all, and therefore everyone would be alive, including Juliet, because then she’d still be an Other and never would have time traveled to begin with. But this seems like the least likely of scenarios to me, as while they may have thrown out the rule book, I’d be really fucking pissed if they just erased the whole show as never having happened, with the final season being the only one that really matters.
I’m sure there are other possibilities I can’t even begin to fathom, especially after this episode. All I know is that I’m totally, um . . . lost. And that while I’ve seen some people really grumbling about this episode, I’ve mostly seen proclamations along the lines of Best. Episode. Ever. And while we won’t really know until we find out where this takes us, I’m leaning towards the latter.