After I saw the previous episode, two weeks ago, I thought the show was basically done, at least the plot-related narrative. The writers openly embraced the idea that Jack is the one among “the candidates” appointed to take Jacob’s place.

Adam Roberts wrote this at the beginning of this season:

All the smoke-and-mirrors of [Lost] are on the surface, as it were; narrative misdirection designed to spin out the franchise as long as it’s commercially profitable. But it’s all in service of a much more straightforward ‘solution’, which this final series is now galumphing towards.

In fact it seems that the four seasons in the middle were generated by plugging “science” into “mysticism”. So we got the Dharma and all the rationalization of the plot. 1 & 6 seasons got back to the mysticism and completely dropped the scientific aspect. Ideally all the seasons in the middle were filler. Or at least feel like filler now (I actually started to like Lost AFTER season 1, when the plot started to look grounded on something).

Which is the reason why every revelations this season is accompanied by some disappointment. Don’t misunderstand this aspect, it’s not something unavoidable and that is in the nature of mystery itself. It happens when mysteries aren’t properly hung onto a solid framework and are revealed as just “curtains”. They come in a gratuitous, untruthful way. Instead of being hooked onto something bigger, they are solved and then pushed out of the picture (for example: Jack’s father appearing on the island in Season 1. Jack asks the smoke monster, gets a confirmation. And so the whispers in the jungle. Explained, acknowledged and put aside. Nothing of this is contributing with purpose. It’s only done to archive questions left hanging for far too long).

What happened to Sayid in this last episode follows a similar pattern. I was never convinced that he went through a “transformation”. It was just a typical Lost “dressing” of characters motivations and purposes. I think Sayid is out the show. Meaning that the motivation of his behavior is to be looked in what we have already seen. Sayid for the whole time has never been “evil”. What happened to him was entirely un-mystical. He was resurrected by the smoke monster, so convinced himself that he owed to him. He’s evil because he thinks his destiny is in doing what Locke asks. He was being granted life, so he owes everything to Locke. His transformation is the one of someone who, after death, has lost all points of reference. The only beacon being owing his life to Locke, because what Locke did was the only “truth”. Being reborn and without a real explanation means that he lost entirely his “moral”. As if you play a video game, losing contact with the physical reality.

But then he understands, right when Jack explains it, that Locke is doing everything to his own advantages (including resurrecting Sayid, to then use him as an ally/tool and then proceeding to persuade everyone to join his side). Saiyd regains a purpose as he understand Locke true motives. Locke can’t kill the people in the sub, and he can’t kill Desmond. That’s why he needed Sayid to kill Desmond. Carlton Cuse commented this directly:

“There is no ambiguity. [The Man In Black] is evil and he has to be stopped…”

That’s the purpose of this last episode: they wanted to clear the ambiguity about Locke in order to prepare for the finale.

The dropping of all misdirection, as the season progressed, lead to the dropping of layers of the narrative, and the result is something that comes out weaker. Instead of acquiring solidity, this surge toward the end gets more and more shallow. Being only held together by the dramatic intensity, but more due to the spectators’ personal investment in the characters than to a story that moves toward its apex. Characters die, but the plot has lost drive and purpose. It feels as if the rest is filler to keep the very last trick for the end.

So we get to the end. It is now obvious that the duality of Jack and Locke throughout the whole show, along with the themes of leadership and faith that represented the struggle and friction between the two, is neatly flowing in the duality represented by Jacob and the smoke monster (then one could even groan at the names Jacob/Jack). It all fits so well that I’m sure there’s no possible misdirection here. We got the pattern.

Locke the believer who clings to the island and becomes the one who wants to get away, and Jack the unbeliever, who now embraces the belief and predestination and is the only one convinced he’s there for a reason.

This I was writing two weeks ago. The next episode (yesterday’s one) was focused on Jack and Locke, the next is Jacob/smoke monster. After that there’s another episode and then the season finale. They won’t stray form the Jack/Locke pattern.

Sayid (awakened to the real truth) says to Jack: “It’s going to be you.” Meaning that Jack is the true Jacob successor (Jack for the whole episode confirms this).

The finale: Locke is evil, wants to be free, and he can only gain freedom if all the candidates are dead. But he can’t kill them himself, and so needs some other way out of this. That’s our context. We get two missing pieces: the first is how the alternate timeline fits in all this, with the missing link being obviously Desmond. The other missing piece is where Widmore fits in this big picture and what he’s trying to achieve.

If you want, an italian website has published six pages of the screenplay of the first part of very last episode. I’ve read it and the script seems legit since it’s plausible and well connected with what happened previously. It’s relatively safe, with the exception of who’s there, whose presence may be a spoiler already.

Yeah, almost over, even if it doesn’t seem set for a satisfying end.

I meant to write this after the Kate’s episode, and especially after reading this long but interesting commentary. So this works like an unplanned follow-up to my previous conclusion about Lost.

It’s here, but also in other similar stories, that two parallel tracks start to get revealed. One is strictly plot. What people do, how the story develops and ends. Another is thematic and about abstraction. As to squeeze “meaning” or “purpose” out of a story. Some kind of message that is supposed to reach you. The first track, about the plot, in this show is about the medium that carries the message.

In my previous post I explained my theory about Lost: it’s empty of meaning because it may represent the triumph of form over meaning (metalinguistic study). They show you the power of storytelling but it’s nothing more than that. Power without purpose or moral. The plot is convoluted around the medium and hides a secret core that in the end will be revealed for what it is. A fraud.

I explained the reasons for this theory in that previous post. What happens here instead is that Lost writers may have a far greater ambition. One that, if revealed as true, is staggering and awesome. Maybe Lost has a point, and it’s something quite powerful and that I admire. This new perspective & interpretation is revealed in that article I linked, and the problematic part is that the idea, if proven false since at this point it is as reliable as fanfiction, risks to be way cooler than what Lost actual writers have planned for the show.

That theory was written after the second episode of this last season. Now we are at episode eight. The theory still holds, maybe also because not much is happening even if time’s running off. But it’s still a theory that is consistent and coherent with everything else, little subtle aspects that make sense.

What’s this theory about? It is about the relationship between the two timelines. We all expect that they are going to connect plot-wise soon. That one will collide with the other in some way, but the relationship, see above my reference to the two parallel tracks, may be entirely thematic. Consider this: I’ve said this show is a display of competency in the use of medium, and that the show may be a study done only to refine it. One of the most obvious methods used in the show, as a medium, is the flashback, flashforwards, flash-sideways. These are methods of screenplay. How you tell a story. Pacing and so on. If you analyze how flashbacks are used in the show, you notice that they are very carefully placed to maximize tension and curiosity. Obviously they aren’t random, but till this season they worked simply as well placed insights into some character. What if this season changed the rules and the relationship between the two timelines lies right in the way they are connected? The thematic purpose linked to their use as a medium. The two timelines are related thematically in how and when they appear.

The Sideways world story line very clearly mirrored the Island world story line. Kate chases after Sawyer; Kate chases after Claire. Is there a physical, cosmic connection between the two realities?

is Lost doing this just to be all fancy-pants literary, or could it be that Lost is trying to tell us something? Could it be that the creative design of Lost’s sixth season, embedded and suffused with past episode resonance, is a clue to resolving the mystery of its seemingly split reality?

I am wondering — and perhaps you are, too — if these corresponding events across parallel realities are meaningful synchronicities. It’s almost as if no matter the world, these people are destined to intersect and to play out variations of the same essential drama.

That’s the suspicion. Here’s the theory:

Now here’s the crazy thought I had — an alternative to past-life/reincarnation theory. I submit that when Kate saw Jack at the airport, she established a psycho-spiritual circuit with her doppelganger self on he Island, and specifically the moment between Jack and Kate in Temple. This circuit facilitated a transference of psychic energy that flowed from Island Kate to Sideways Kate — or rather, from Redeemed Kate to one of her Fallen Kate selves in another world. That energy? Strength. Selflessness. A sense of sacrifice. A sense of ”You All Everybody” idealism. All qualities that Kate embodied in her Island story — and all qualities that Kate gained during her Sideways story.

In fact actors trigger these flashes with more active acting than usual. Flashes don’t just happen between a scene and another, placed carefully, but they are “acted” as afterthoughts. As if the character is influencing or being influenced by the transition. They are fluid. What happens in a timeline kind of flows into the other, and not by mere thematic association, but concretely with meaning.

What I say (or mostly who wrote that article) is that we use to think to these flashes structured by a third party narrator. We got someone who’s putting the story down for us in a way that is compelling. So scenes are placed following a “screenplay” that was made by this hidden narrator. But the story in the flashes is, like, real world. As if you go dig in a attic, find an old toy, and start remembering some past scene that involved that toy. In the real world your past DOES influence what you do in the present. So something that you remember can influence what you decide to do. Maybe it’s not a case, to underline something special is going on, that these flashes’s influence goes backwards. The 2004 timeline seems influenced by the 2007’s one. There’s something new that goes on there. The link is made plain and can’t be ignored or considered normal as previous flashes. These characters seem to communicate to their alternate version. Arguably, we could also consider the 2004 timeline like some kind of improvement. Implying an idea of “progress”. Let’s say human betterment.

So here’s the thematic meaning:

To put it more simply: Island Kate inspired Sideways Kate. Bottom line: The Sideways-Island relationship is a metaphor for our relationship to fiction. It’s about how fantasy redeems reality.

What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true? Lost answers, They teach us how to make the real world a better place.

And that’s how everything may come together. I theorize that Lost is all form and execution. A wicked study on how you can manipulate an audience. An cynical experiment not unlike Dharma’s own. But here, if this other theory is true, we get to see the other side of the moon: what is fiction ultimately about. A soul. Something that tries to reach out and actually tell us something that is TRUE. Especially in a show (see 8th episode) where everything is a trick and deceit. The possibility is that once all layers of this onion made of lies are peeled off, we get to something that is truthful.

Fiction, like every form of culture, makes us better and strive for progress. The only concrete aspects that makes us different from all other animals and living things of this world is that we have language (whose most peculiar function is, interestingly, metalinguistic, so about the medium itself), and so culture. In this war against nature, culture’s the only weapon men have. And its use, a choice (another theme of this show), is what makes the difference. It’s about us.

Let’s hope the smoke monster saves us (but this will be explained at another time).

There’s veeery subtle subtext here. Can you spot it? ;)

Straight from tonight’s Lost episode (also: the episode starts with a nice and well executed subversion):

This is quite fitting since I’m reading Infinite Jest and in the book there’s an experimental movie called, incidentally, “The Joke” that represents a metalinguistic experiment with an audience (where the audience isn’t simply spectating, but actually the object of spectation).

Now you expect I draw a parallel between what I’m reading and the TV show I’m watching, but the truth is that I only see even more evidently, and am convinced of having been right and to the point, what I write down after the very 1st episode I watched, back in 2006 when Lost began airing here. Comments particularly interesting because warning about “premature” judgment, and “giving it some time” in order to “be surprised” since “it’s not what you think it’s going to be”.

Four years and six seasons later I can now declare that I’m now even more convinced that: it’s exactly what I thought it was.

Actually during the show I started to think that maybe it was going to be something more than I thought, but now that the end approaches I’m more and more convinced that my first interpretation was the very best and more precise.

This is how I rephrased it even before going back to read the old blog post:

—
Was its worth 100% dependent on payoff?

Season 1 was a big metalinguistic joke about TV series. It was the american Battle Royale, filled with gratuitous spooks and illogical plot twists to show that you could make a good show out of nothing just through good execution of technique.

Then they saw it worked, grew attached to it, and decided to add a plot that would somehow give a sense to what was actually built for the purpose of being senseless.

Lost is basically an exercise to show how much writers can be in control and use their own audience as a joke that the show is ultimately about.

—
Quoting the 2006 post:
It has the exact same scheme and feel, the exact same use of narrative structure and expedients, like the mix of different characters that don’t know each other and then the use of neatly placed flashback to reveal part of their stories just before the character is involved into something in the main plot. Making the audience connect & sympathize a moment before something horrendous and life-threatening happens to them.

Basically there’s nothing original if not a nearly infinite list of stereotypes and references (across all forms of media). Borrowing hands down from sci-fi and horror expedients to “conceal” and keep up the tension. Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is another one, the expedient to never let you “see completely” to build up the tension (also “Alien”) and the shaky camera + “close up” of a terrified face taken right from “Blair Witch Project” (the trick of not-showing, or seeing an horrified face but not seeing the object of horror).

—
So what’s the deal with the polar bear?

Not something brought there to be the object of some sort of scientific experiment, but just a dissonant note used to amplify the effect of a spook. “A polar bear in a tropical island”, that’s the correct way to see it. It’s something unsettling and mysterious that is shown not for a logic reason or external purpose, but solely for its properties of being unsettling and mysterious through the univocal act of being shown, so made to be, existing. Everything on screen in Season 1 (and the exact reason why each following season failed to recapture both the mood and the ratings) appears solely for its effect and never for its meaning. It’s use of (visual, cinematographic) language not for its meaning, but for what it is. It’s the use of language applied to language. So metalinguistic, or the property of the language to describe itself.

Put in another way: it’s a joke that the authors played on the audience. A game whose object is the audience itself and its reactions. Where the audience’s theories are part of the puzzle. A recursive game and sort of annular relationship between audience and showmakers. One feeding the other in recursive fashion of obsession.

It also says: we have the power of doing everything. We have control even when there’s NO control, because it is language that represents the perimeter of what can be experienced and it is through language that we can manipulate what is perceived/true, and change it, overturn it, every time we want. They tried to push this to the point that the relationship writers-audience was so bent that it was on the point of snapping: in Season 3 they introduced two new characters (the loved Nikki & Paulo) that have always been there but never seen, put in place through an elaborate ret-conning exploiting plainly the “perimeter of what can be experienced” represented by the limited and finished space that comprises a filmed shot. You can’t see what’s behind or what’s at the far margin. With the purpose of showing the audience that they could be shown everything and they would still fall for it. “Open wide and wait for the spoon”. Only that the relationship was so bent that this didn’t actually work out and the writers had to stagger back and reappraise the power of their egos.

This means that “Lost” is a study on language, its power and its effect on the broadest audience possible. A use of medium not to convey a message, but a medium that feeds on itself and is self-aware. A study on the production of meaning or its absence in favor of form.

Ultimately, whatever “plot” or “ultimate meaning”, that the show may or may not have, is entirely secondary and tacked on. That’s why up here I wrote: “Was its worth 100% dependent on payoff?” It’s not. The payoff is supplementary in order to not delude the audience and entirely break the relationship of love. It’s akin a spectacular action scene that serves no real purpose beside amusing & contenting (also called fanservice). But the truth is that the true experiment is involving the audience in the same way one Dharma experiment involved observers being observed. Which is exactly the type of mockery they love the most: they show you exactly what they are doing, in a slightly refracted context, and yet you fail to put the pieces together.

I think it worked perfectly.

We got the first two episodes that pave the road for the beginning of the end, and I tried to parse the elements while ret-conning them to the considerations I wrote at the end of season 5 (part 1 – part 2).

To begin with, Lindelof own words:

We will say this: season 6 is not about time travel. It’s about the implications, the aftermath, and the causality of trying to change the past. But the idea of continuing to do paradoxical storytelling is not what we’re interested in this year.

I’m rather glad about the first part of the show because the plot at the moment is extremely simple, and, especially, it is coherent with what I had written a year ago when the series closed.

After the finale a year ago I wrote:

If I have to guess the anti-Jacob is also the smoke monster, who is also evil-Locke. Jacob enjoys messing with people, while anti-Jacob is the one who prefers being left alone and would like as well to get rid of Jacob and enjoy a quiet life.

I think this is going to be a theme important to keep in mind. It’s Jacob who messes with people, who calls the boat the first time and who gets the losties on the airplane the second time.

The anti-Jacob instead is the one who now wants to “go home”. Whatever it means.

We also know that anti-Jacob killing Jacob means that the island (2007 version) isn’t anymore in the balance of power. But. It’s also possible that Sayid is now possessed by Jacob the same way Locke is now anti-Jacob (what is sure is that Jacob wants to keep Sayid alive and has sent a message to his “Others” faction through the message hidden in the guitar case that Jacob himself gave to Hurley).

It’s also interesting because the way things went had the result of solving the time paradox they created last season. Me again a year ago:

But before they (the losties) can save themselves, they all have to die. Those in the past in order to complete the plan and let their copies live. Those in the future because they are orphans of a timeline (the island blew up, so Locke and Ben can’t be on it, timeline-wise those scenes happen BEFORE what we’re seeing in the past).

There’s a problem, though. Sun has a picture of them in the Dharma initiative, and there’s also a sixth season to fill. So this hints that, if the future is their future as that picture hints, they won’t succeed in blowing up the island.

Lindelof again:

We knew that the ending of the time travel season was going to be an attempt to reboot. And as a result, we [knew] the audience was going to come out of the “do-over moment” thinking we were either going start over or just say it didn’t work and continue on. [We thought] wouldn’t it be great if we did both? That was the origin of the story.

My theory at that time (before the end of season 5) was that the entire timeline would be erased, because that future (Lock revived returning to the island with Sun & Ben) was strictly dependent on the past going the way it did.

So, either that timeline was “true” (hence losties not succeeding exploding the bomb) or it was going to be erased, so that, in order to trigger the “better world” (what we now see as flash-sideways) all of them had to be erased from existence. Meaning that in order to have themselves in the future have a better life, they had to sacrifice all they lived till that point. Also meaning that the whole TV series would be basically erased because they were successful in preventing the whole thing and triggering the reboot.

We now know things didn’t go that way. The bomb did explode and the (arguably) better future was triggered, but the “copies” of the losties weren’t “erased” and now persist in another timeline that goes to overlap exactly with the old 2007 version from season 5. Where anti-Jacob kills Jacob and now probably wants to take over the island in order to take off and return to Mars.

The big question in this series is about how the alternate timeline (2004) is going to fit in the context. Either it is there simply thematically to prove a point (that the new life isn’t that better) or it will have to collide again in some way (Widmore maybe?).

Theories?

Thematically the theme has been already highlighted. Locke revived in this episode talks with Ben about the former Locke and says:

“He (Locke) was the only one who realized how pitiful the life he left behind really was.”

And this kind of commentary is mirrored by something similar that happened last season, but that referred to the exact opposite situation (the life they lead after the crash):

“It was not all misery.”
“Enough of it was.”

We have now these two realities: the 2004 reboot and the 2007 as we know it.

A few important things to keep in mind:
– The main point is that it is JACOB who has caused the bomb to explode and the new 2004 timeline to exist (this inferred by the fact that it’s Jacob himself who persuades most of the losties to return to the island. And if he’s not manipulating them directly for his own will, at the very least he is the one who gave them the “choice”).

This may lead somewhere if things are considered that way. We do not even know that anti-Jacob is aware that his timeline (the 2007) is now somewhat secondary. Jacob at this point is apparently successful. Anti-Jacob may be the one tricked and now trapped not in the island, but in the surrogate timeline.

It’s also possible that the two timelines will be personalized: Jacobs has the “white” 2004 no-crash timeline, while anti-Jacobs has the “black” standard timeline where he’s now free.

Also, let’s work with two archetypes. Jacobs represents white and progress made of men, and the will of men to alter destiny and have a role, and decide their own life and try in spite of all misery and failure and whatever. It’s a kind of positive, merciful drive that often fails but always tries.

Anti-Jacobs represents wild nature. Unmerciful, cruel. That doesn’t tolerate men messing up. That wants the island untouched, and wants it back, away from men. That also represents destiny as a self correcting fixed thing that has its own survival as first priority.

We know Lost is built through dichotomies, and the dialogue at the end of Season 5 crystallizes the contrast between Jacob and anti-Jacob:

anti-Jacob: “Still trying to prove me wrong, aren’t you?”
Jacob: “You are wrong.”
anti-Jacob: “Am I? They come. they fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”
Jacob: “It only ends once. Anything that happens before is just progress.”

Which is also one of those broad themes about the human condition, and here’s a link to what Steven Erikson writes:

The Chain of Dogs had fallen at the foot of Aren. Pormqual’s ten thousand danced on trees. Leoman’s rebel army was destroyed at Y’Ghatan. It was clear — it could not be clearer — that for all there was to learn, no one ever bothered. Each new fool and tyrant to rise up from the mob simply set about repeating the whole fiasco, convinced that they were different, better, smarter. Until the earth drinks deep again.

This is where things stand now and the whole thing was fairly simplified as I expected. As for the last season we lack a lot: “motivations”. So the big mistery is how the two timelines are related, how they’ll resolve, and in particular what’s Jacob and anti-Jacob’s plan.