Lants wrote: Also, I feel like it's almost TOO obvious that Sayid will become Jacob.
I don't know if it's that simple. I think that whatever has happened to Sayid might have also happened to Christian Shepherd, who never actually claimed to be Jacob. With Jacob's counterpart, we know that he takes the forms of the dead, but Jacob might work a different way, like with resurrection of the dead.
Also, I don't 100% approve of this alternate reality situation, but I do like how the last season begins like the first season ended. In the first season, you knew everyone ends up on the plane, and in this season, everyone starts on the plane.
-Bryan Roberts a.k.a. LuBu McJohnson a.k.a. Ghetto Sketch Warlock
"This is for those that don't know the half"
-http://www.ghettosketchwarlock.com
"Any mistakes can be rectified without loss of life, unless they involve Lubu."
-Ratliff
Justin D. wrote:
All in all, a good start to the final season for me.
I was downright irritated they chose to draw out Juliet's death for no real reason other than more sad music. Assholes already got me choked up at her death at last season's finale, aint' gonna work twice!
Yeah, story-structure-wise it seemed a little wonky, but I think it could pay off later, particularly if we learn *how* Juliet knew that "it worked."
Also, we'll likely see Juliet pop up again in the new timeline/universe saying the same words there that she did to Sawyer when she was dying about going dutch for coffee sometime. She realized "it worked" because she experienced a bleed over from the other universe.
Ceej and I re-watched the episode today on Hulu. Good times. One observation I made this viewing was that the Natives (the original people, the Others' Others) are identical in many ways to the Dharma Initiative, with the primary difference between them being that the former are people of faith, and the latter are people of science.
Their similarities are, they both have bizarre rituals (pressing buttons for science, drowning people for faith), they both have a uniform manner of dress (uniforms for Dharma, and however one might label the raggedy earth toned fabrics and leathers of the Natives), they both have soldiers with guns, and they both have monuments concordant with their respective common belief systems (research stations and chapels).
This is conjecture, but I wonder if the Natives are Jacob's people, and the Dharma Initiative are Esau's people. If that's so, there is likely a more indirect relationship between Esau and Dharma, and a more direct relationship between Jacob and the Natives. In other words, the Natives are familiar with Jacob. They certainly know him well enough to know that his death means the unleashing of the terror of Esau.
Esau, on the other hand, would have a less direct connection with the Dharma Initiative. First, I'm working with the assumption that the Esau we saw (does that rhyme?) with Jacob on the beach died some time ago, and that's how his ghost was able to travel to LA and elsewhere to tempt people back to the island. Okay? Anyway, Esau wants off the island, "to go home," he says to Ben. So perhaps a while back, in some manifestation or other, he convinced the eccentric billionaire Alvar Hanso that he should fund a research project--the Dharma Initiative-- on a fantastical island that is the source of amazing phenomena.
Why did he do that? Perhaps he needed an unwitting army to come in and invade Jacob's people's territory, and perhaps he knew that experiments on electromagnetism and other peripheral phenomena there would lead to a way off the island for him-- a way off of the island in human form, which is the only form in which he's capable of performing whatever dastardly deeds he's planning when he talks about wanting to go home.
I'm sure I sound like an obsessed geek, prattling on about LOST like this, but I'm obviously obsessed with the show. Anyway, this is a LOST discussion thread, and I appreciate having a forum here to write out my thoughts on this stuff. It's fun to theorize with you guys.
Which leads me to The New Thread. Ceej and I just decided to open up a thread specifically for LOST Possible Endings That Probably Won't Happen. I find that, when enough new data has been revealed over the course of one or two or three episodes, I start to imagine some different possible conclusion that I hadn't thought of before.
Now I'm posting this and starting up that new thread. Chime in as you please!
Last edited by Jeff on February 4th, 2010, 10:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
A theory: Jacob and Esau have been posted on Earth to decide the fate of man at the End of Days (or the end of the Earth Initiative, if you will). They are God's Observers.
Esau takes the position that man is not worth redeeming & should be destroyed (e.g. their discussion on the beach about the sailing ship & the nature of man.) The sooner, the better, so he can "go home." He's not above bending the rules and feeding mankind's worst nature to hurry their end along.
Jacob "has faith" that mankind can and will prove itself worthy of its existence. When Ben stabs him, he tells Ben that he has a choice, and follows through on that statement by not resisting. He is not too concerned that Ben fails this test because "there is only one end" (the decision at the End of Days). Everything else that happens up to that point is "progress."
What is to give light must endure burning. - Viktor Frankl
I agree with the thematic parallels that are being drawn.
It started with The Doctor and the Man of Faith (Jack, John), and that remains:
Jack/Widmore/Esau : Science, Technology, Want to Go Home
John/Ben/Jacob: Faith, Nature, Leadership, Want to Stay, Injury, Death, Resurrection
Where are there parallels between those characters? Well, for one, nearly all of them have severe daddy issues. I would not be surprised to find out that Esau and Jacob are brothers.
Since day 1, I've thought of the Smoke monster being a nanobot cloud (a la Crichton's 'Prey'), and we know that the smoke monster is immortal, as it can be summoned/controlled using ancient devices), and we've seen that time can be manipulated into the past, but never the future. This seems strange, so I also would not be surprised if these beings are from the future (I hope not alien, but the 'want to go home, that's possible). So it's possible we have a Terminator/John Connor thing going on with Esau/Jacob.
zyrain wrote:
... we've seen that time can be manipulated into the past, but never the future... (I hope not alien, but the 'want to go home, that's possible). So it's possible we have a Terminator/John Connor thing going on with Esau/Jacob.
Ben traveled to the future when he pushed the donkey wheel.
I don't hope that there are no aliens involved in the story. I've wondered for a few seasons if the island is some ancient spaceship. Now it seems more like a containment facility, but maybe it's both, maybe neither.
The Terminator needed to travel to the past to ensure that John Connor was never born. Now that Esau has killed Jacob (without using time travel), I don't think he's interested in killing him even more. It seems that he just wants to go home. Going home probably means returning to some place where paranormally powerful people who can live for hundreds of years come from, or it could mean going out to do an activity that he holds dear to his heart, such as genocide.
Maybe Esau and Jacob and Alpert are from the future, though. Maybe the reason Richard Alpert doesn't age is because he traveled to the distant past, and one can't age until one "catches up" to the moment one traveled back in time.
Jeff wrote: Maybe the reason Richard Alpert doesn't age is because he traveled to the distant past, and one can't age until one "catches up" to the moment one traveled back in time.
Hey! I said that!
I think there has to be another time loop involved. Or at least it seems the easy answer out
and my brain is twisted with all these time elements. My nose is gonna start bleeding.
WIDMORE=on essaus's side
BEN=was (maybe still will be) on Jacob's side.
Science/faith etc...
Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.
--David Byrne
Jeff wrote:
Maybe the reason Richard Alpert doesn't age is because he traveled to the distant past, and one can't age until one "catches up" to the moment one traveled back in time.
I think it's possible that Jacob can use people as vehicles and once he does, they become eternal. This happened to Alpert and the ancient Japanese dude and now it's going to happen to Sayid.
Loophole also may be an important word. Especially when you consider the island seems to be on a time loop.
Maybe whatever it is that Jacob and his nemesis are "wagering"(?) has a time limit and the time-loop is one of the loopholes they're using in which to prove it (giving themselves more time to prove whatever it is they're trying to prove by waging all these wars).
KathyRose wrote:I thought the most compelling image from the season opener was the island under water a la Titanic. Any thoughts?
This has been vexing me. Do you mean Atlantis?
I think she means Titanic, the movie. There are lots of shots of the wreckage under water.
The main difference being that the over-ten-years-old CG in Titanic is a hundred times better than what they used in Lost.
Dang, Lance, way to find something to complain about. I'm sure the LOST crew could make it prettier with the time and money put into Titanic. I still believe LOST has some of the most interesting and thoughtful art direction on TV.
