LOST: Pre-Game for “The Candidate”
And then spunkybuddy Dillon Font pointed out that Jack saw Christian after he left the Island, which is well outside of Smokey’s capabilities. He also noted that not all of Christian’s actions worked into Smokey’s plans. So spunkybuddy Larry Young and I got to discussing it. And yes, that’s what we Lost recappers do even when the show isn’t on. I wondered if maybe we’ve seen Christian wearing different outfits on the Island – after spunkybuddy Chicago Rachel noted Jacob’s all-black outfit and Larry’s frequent surveys of clothing and color choices, it’s pretty clear that we need to pay attention to this kind of stuff.
Larry went and reviewed every single appearance of Christian, and you should read his full findings here. The upshot is that he’s appeared in two different outfits on the Island. In the early days, he was almost always seen in his burial outfit. It was only later on, largely in Seasons Four and Five, that we saw him wearing a different outfit with a brown striped shirt. On the Island, he always wears one or the other. Larry’s thesis, with which I agree, is that Christian is either Jacob or a manifestation of the Island in his burial suit, and Smokey when he wears his brown shirt.
Remember, in Locke form, Smokey’s not wearing the burial suit. He’s wearing a short-sleeve-and-pocket number with a stab hole. And Christian’s suited appearances, he’s doing things like helping Jack find water. In his brown shirt, he separated Claire from Aaron, presides over Michael’s death, tells Locke to bring the Candidates (though we didn’t know that’s what they were at the time) to the Island, and told Sun and Frank that they have to listen to Locke. Brown shirt Christian is definitely advancing the Smokey agenda.
The only real hitch is that when Hurley sees Christian in Jacob’s cabin for the first time, he’s wearing the burial suit. Per Ilana, Jacob hadn’t lived in the cabin for a long time. However, this is Hurley we’re talking about. Rather than seeing a manifestation of the Island or Smokey, Hurley could have seen Christian’s actual ghost. That’s always possible here, and that’s kind of separate from the whole Jacob/Smokey thing.
Also, Dillon points out that we still haven’t seen Christian’s body – only his empty coffin. Could it be that the Island or Jacob animated Christian’s body? Maybe even resurrected him? So when we see Christian in his burial suit, that’s actually Christian’s physical body controlled by some force. (Clearly he grabbed his cheap sneakers out of that tree where we saw then hanging in the first scene of the pilot – the Island is not a good place to be barefoot whether you’re alive or not.) I’m pretty convinced here – suited Christian is the good guy, brown shirt is Smokey. Check out Larry’s analysis, and he’ll make a believer out of you.
Double the Smokey, Double the Fun: Speaking of Jacob’s cabin (which we totally were), I discussed Smokey with spunkybuddy Jennifer, and noticed something kind of cool and also frightening. She was watching the repeat of “Ab Aeterno” last week, and pointed out that while Isabel is in the hold of the ship with Richard, we can hear Smokey’s rumbling outside. Smokey’s appearing in one place and making noise in another. It’s bilocation!
We’ve had some implications this year of Smokey being in two places at once. There was a weird scene in “The Substitute” where we saw his reflection in a window over in New Otherton and then the camera rapid-panned to Look-a-Locke cutting Richard out of the tree. The way it was shot could either indicate that we were seeing through a Smokey-eye view, and he moved really fast from one location to another (like the unseen force in Evil Dead), or else it was meant to indicate that there wasn’t a time cut between those two scenes, and he was actually in two places at once.
Then there was the scene in “Dr. Linus” where Look-a-Locke appeared to Benry, seemingly unnoticed by everybody else. I’m willing to accept that he’s just really good at staying out of everybody’s line of sight, but at the time he was busy leading a bunch of Others across the Island. That’s another good indication that he can bilocate.
But here’s the important bit. Remember that something was in Jacob’s cabin, and it wasn’t Jacob. Ilana confirmed that at the end of Season Five – she said something had been trapped there, and Jacob hadn’t used it for a very long time. A broken ring of ash surrounded the place – clearly somebody had either been keeping Smokey in or out. From context, it seems pretty definite that it was Smokey, but he’s still been roaming the Island since the first season. I hadn’t been able to reconcile that until now.
Let’s assume that Smokey can be in two places at once, and let’s also assume he was being kept in Jacob’s cabin by the circle of ash. Now, have you noticed how much more powerful he is while in smoke form this season? He was no slouch before, but look at his victims. Seth Norris, the pilot, was mauled but still managed to live for a while. Jack, Hurley, and Kate manages to pull Locke out of his clutches in the Season One finale. He killed Mr. Eko, but it took some work, pounding him into the ground and throwing him over and over. Keamy was directly attacked by Smokey and walked away in one piece.
But look at this season – nobody who’s encountered him in smoke form has survived. He’s killed dozens of people inside the statue and in the temple. The smoke has picked people up, snapped their spines and tossed them aside. He’s splintered blocks of stone, and he managed to knock Bram out of his ash circle by dropping rocks on him. Smokey has moved from “scary” to “unstoppable”. How did that happen? Well, part of him is no longer imprisoned in the cabin!
When he divides himself, he’s less powerful. And with a hunk of himself trapped in the cabin, he spent years making do at a lower power level. What we’re seeing now is the full-powered version. And if, for example, Dogen didn’t know that the circle around the cabin had been broken, that would explain why he thought Sayid could actually kill him with the blade. And it explains how he slaughtered the temple in about three minutes flat, while back in Season One he lost a tug-of-war with three Lostaways.
The Unsung Hero of Lost: So if this is right, it helps build one of my favorite theories that will probably never be addressed. Who built Jacob’s cabin? None other than our second-favorite mathematician, Horace Goodspeed.
I think Horace is going to be lost in the shuffle of the final episode, but I think he has a potentially fascinating backstory. We know he’s had two different wives while on the Island, and that can’t be an easy feat. And we saw that his ghost not only had a bloody nose, but was caught in a time loop. I’ve mentioned this before, but I think he was unstuck in time when he died. Yes, he died during the Purge, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t having simultaneous temporal issues.
I’ve mentioned this before, but if the world went crazy and I had the chance to write some officially licensed Lost material, I’d write about Horace. In my mind, as a result of coming unstuck in time, he provided the early Dharma Initiative with a lot of their information about the Island. After all, if people can’t get to the Island, they don’t have any way of knowing that it has bizarre properties that are worth studying. (And that’s how they built the Sonic Death Fence in the first place. They knew it would work against Smokey back in the 70’s, because Horace’s 90’s self could tell them that it did work.) And then, maybe he built a cabin and somehow tricked Smokey into entering. Horace might just be the reason why the Dharma Initiative managed to even set up a barracks, and why the Lostaways didn’t get killed where they stood on the first night.
My point here is that I work cheap and I would totally be happy to write a tie-in novel about Horace Goodspeed and the early days of the Dharma Initiative. I’m just saying – Dharma was founded by Dutch people from Michigan. I am a Dutch guy from Michigan. How much more perfect could it be?
G-g-g-g-ghosts!: Generally, I’m perfectly willing to accept that Hurley really does see ghosts. However, spunkybuddy Julie wrinkled my mind grapes by suggesting that the ghosts Hurley sees are actually Jacob. See, I accepted ghosts because they’ve told Hurley things that he couldn’t have known otherwise. Only problem is, Jacob could reasonably have known all that. And yeah, as Jacob actually admitted to Hurley, all you have to do is hop in the cab and tell Hurley what to do. For my own personal well-being, I need to believe that the ghosts are real, if only because of the scene with Isabel and Richard.
She also has another suggestion that I love – Smokey might be trying to find his own replacement. Maybe he can’t just leave the Island without finding a replacement – and maybe they both have to work with the same list of candidates. That’s why he wants to gather up the whole group on his own. Julie also offers that Widmore may have been a candidate way back when, and that’s why he was exiled from the Island. It was supposedly Jacob’s decision to force him to leave, and the reason given was that he’d left the Island too often. I don’t see that as being something that Jacob would specifically worry about, but if Smokey and Widmore had been working together, that was a way to remove him from the equation. After all, I still can’t bring myself to believe that Jacob ordered the Purge. We know now that Widmore was the leader of the Others at the time, so presumably he made the decision. I just don’t see Jacob wanting to slaughter scientists with mustard gas. Man, now that I think about it, Widmore and Smokey might go way back.
That’s all for this Pre-Game. I have a feeling that tomorrow’s episode is going to be a big one for Timeline X, what with the way it’s started to come apart at the seams. Remember to check out spectacularry – not only did our buddy Larry write about Christian’s wardrobe, he also analyzed the pilot episode through a set of Season Six eyes (that probably changed color as he wrote).
Send me your questions, theories, or offers to write licensed material about Horace – you can reach me in the comments below, e-mail me at ejfeddes@spunkybean.com, or find me on Facebook. And we’ll see you back here in 24 hours for “The Candidate”.
