LOST: Pre-Game for “What They Died For”
As to where the rules come from or where the cycle began, that doesn’t matter at this point. It’ll be fun to debate down the line, but with two episodes left, those aren’t questions that need to be answered. What’s most interesting here is what we’ve learned about the forces that make up the Island’s eternal battle.
Up until now, we’ve known Jacob almost entirely through the words of others. Benry and Ilana described him as “a great man”. He’s been spoken of by the Others as a spiritual leader. And now we know that Jacob is just a guy. Jacob didn’t set out to be seen as a religious figure, or be the object of worship. In fact, Jacob was raised believing there were only two other people in the entire world. And when he found out that wasn’t true, he simply watched those other people from afar. Jacob is a voyeuristic agoraphobic with mother issues.
You know, back on my old blog, I have a picture of Jacob in the sidebar. It’s from the episode where Benry takes Locke to Jacob’s cabin, and there’s just a brief flash where we see a shadowed human face in profile. Of course, we now know that was not Jacob, but more likely a manifestation of Smokey. Anyway, I posted it with the caption “Jacob is watching you”. That’s not a phrase that was ever used in the show, but it turns out, Jacob really is watching you. Whether he’s hanging out on the outskirts of the village, or turning a wheel of mirrors to the angle associated with your name, that’s exactly what Jacob is doing. He watches. And considering that for at least the first forty years of his life, he only ever spoke to his fake mother and his brother, there wasn’t much chance he’d ever do anything but watch.
Jacob’s a guy who, with an entire Island at his disposal, chose to spend his time in a cave and in the foot of a statue. There isn’t even an indication that he’d ever been to the Temple. And it’s not because Jacob places himself above mortals – he’s afraid. He’s confused and scared and he doesn’t know how to interact with people.
Over in the comments section for the last recap, long-time spunkybuddy Julie left an absolutely epic comment. (If you remember, she came up with the idea a couple of seasons back that Locke and Benry have the same mother. She probably should get co-recapping credit on sheer word count alone. I can’t really cover all of her points here, because I’m going to be writing about Lost a lot this week and I need some time to sleep and eat and bathe. But I’d like to get to some of them today. And let’s just say, Julie is not so much a fan of Jacob.
She points out that Jacob (who she, not unfairly, calls a “Mama’s Boy”) changed in some way, and it seems to have been recent. He avoided contact with other people while growing up, and appointed Richard as his go-between so he wouldn’t have to interact with any other people. (And doesn’t that scene play differently now? When “Ab Aeterno” aired, the implication was that he wanted people to make the right choices on their own, without his direct influence. But now we know he wanted Richard as his go-between so he could continue to be alone.) At some point, he decided to directly intervene in the lives of the Lostaways. What changed? Is it simply that he, like Crazy Mom before him, could tell when a cycle was coming to an end and it was time to pass on the mantle?
His earliest interaction that we’ve seen was with Sawyer in 1976. I’ve never thought about it before, but at that time, a time-lost adult Sawyer was living on the Island among the Dharma Initiative. If Jacob doesn’t show up in 1976 to give young Sawyer a pen, the letter doesn’t get written, and maybe Sawyer doesn’t end up on Flight 815. In a way, it’s like the way Eloise had to make sure that Daniel became a scientist so that he could end up on the Island in the past. The fact that Sawyer is on the Island in 1974 means that Jacob is going to intervene in his life, so Jacob is compelled to intervene in his life.
And frankly, I would love it if it turns out that Jacob is just as bound by “What happened, happened” as everybody else.
Another point of Julie’s – did Jacob finish building the wheel? And for that matter, is there only one well with a wheel? The wheel Locke turned is not the same as the one Benry turned. Unless they were in the same location, but separated by decades or centuries. (Remember, Benry’s wheel was in a room that was frozen.) Julie suggests that Jacob might have finished his brother’s work out of guilt, or because he went a little crazy. Remember, we don’t know what happened between when Jacob laid his brother to rest and when his brother in smoke form started appearing to him. He could have spent centuries alone, and it only took like a month for Tom Hanks to start talking to a volleyball.
Now, we know that somebody turned the wheel before Benry did, because there’s a polar bear skeleton in Tunisia. And Widmore knew exactly where Locke would end up – clearly other people have left the Island before. And if you really want to have your mind blown, when Locke turned the wheel, there wasn’t a well there. He started to climb down a well, then there was a time shift and it became solid ground. No well, but still a wheel. Even stranger, Smokey as Christian was there, even though it was in the distant past. So when the Island was skipping through time, did it pull modern day Smokey and Jacob along with it? I guess it would make sense that it would, but it never occurred to me before.
So here’s an idle thought. If the time-jumping Island pulled Jacob and Smokey along with it, did they encounter their past selves? Since Jacob seems to stay in one place, that seems pretty likely. Maybe that’s how Jacob knew he had to interact with the Lostaways – Jacob from 2008 told him so. Actually, that could explain a lot.
Ready to have your mind blown? What if the Smokey sealed in Jacob’s cabin was a time-lost version of Smokey? So at some points in time, he existed twice – the one that belonged there and the one that didn’t but was trapped. And then at other points, he didn’t exist at all because he was stuck in another time period. I’m not certain that the ash circle would hold him in time as well as space, but I’m convinced now that that the licensing people at Bad Robot should let me write my Horace Goodspeed tie-in novel. (And just to sweeten the pot, there’s a significant role for Dr. Marvin Candle in the story…)
Before I went all crazy there, I was going to make another point. The point is that the wheel (or wheels) were in place before all the wells were dug. They’ve been talking about tunnels under the Island forever (remember when the Others “left no footprints”)? Sounds like somebody with a lot of time on their hands dug a lot of tunnels. Silas (or Jacob) had plenty of time to try and find the points where the energy could be accessed. And hey, even if Jacob didn’t go crazy, maybe he just wanted to give people a way to leave the Island. He wanted people to make the right choices, not to live there forever. And after his brother slaughtered the first boat load or two, Jacob might have built an escape hatch – the Island Underground Railroad. Remember, Jacob has had a lot of time to think about this, and he could have gone through a phase where he helped people leave after they failed. (Larry Young puts “Across the Sea” at approximately 23 AD, so we’re looking at almost 2000 years of this. And yes, Larry actually came up with a specific year. He is smarter than all of us, and none of us be able to stop him if he uses his power for evil.)
Julie’s last point that I want to cover (and I do recommend you read her entire post – there’s great stuff there, and she also has a crush on Smokey in all of his forms) is fantastic. How do we know that the cave with the names is Jacob’s? Maybe it’s where Silas lives when he’s not roaming around in smoke form – he has his own list of candidates. Let’s face it, that’s a hard cave to reach, and very inconvenient for Jacob or Richard. Not so tough when you can billow like a certain smoke monster. And I can’t shake the idea of the scale with the rocks on it – Jacob had Richard give Silas a white rock. Is that the same one that Look-a-Locke picked up and pitched into the ocean? Again, they’ve had centuries here, maybe Smokey went though a phase where he wanted to feel like a human so me made a little home.
Thanks, Julie!
Now that we’ve seen Jacob’s limitations, we really have to question what we’ve assumed. For example, just how often does Jacob give instructions to Richard? Does he involve himself in the day-to-day lives of the Others? The only orders we know for certain that he’s actually given are his instructions to Dogen and Ilana to protect the candidates. And presumably he named Locke as the new leader of the Others, but we’re taking Richard’s word for that. We don’t know that he ordered the Purge or any of the Others’ attacks on the Lostaways. At this point, all we know for sure is that Jacob stops protecting people at some point, but we can’t definitively attribute any deaths to his actions. Other than his brother’s, and you could maybe even find the technicality that it was the energy in the cave that killed him. In fact, Crazy Mom does say that the cave wouldn’t kill him, but it would be worse than death. Point is, Jacob can’t necessarily be blamed for what people are doing in his name.
Over the last couple of days, spunkybuddy Colleen and I have been discussing this. Jacob’s people have done some pretty bad stuff, but we don’t know how much Jacob has been involved with. It’s interesting that Jacob, the one who doesn’t have any experience with other people, is the one who doesn’t hate them. He’s afraid, sure. But Silas decided that Crazy Mom was right – the villagers he lived with were weak and stupid and greedy and he hated them. And yet he wants to leave the Island and find more of them. As of Richard’s arrival on the Island, everybody Jacob observed had disappointed him, and yet he’s keeping Smokey on the Island where he can’t run amuck.
And that’s how we know which one’s the good guy. Smokey lived among people, hates them, and wants to kill each one that he encounters. Jacob, creepy Mama’s Boy that he is, may not be able to bring himself to look people in the eye or do anything more than watch them from the bushes, but he thinks they’re somehow worth saving. He’s seen the same SOB’s as Silas, but he’s not willing to give up on humanity, no matter how many times they disappoint him. Now that we know Jacob, he doesn’t seem like any kind of hero, but he’s the one doing the right thing. Like I said last week, it’s frankly a miracle that they both didn’t grow up to be serial killers.
There’s probably more to say, and a lot of people had good ideas that I hope to revisit in the future. It’ll be really interesting to go back and see it all again and be able to put those stray early references into a new context.
There are some minor things I want to bring up. First, I’d be remiss in not crediting spunkybuddy Dr. Brian who’s been telling me that Smokey and Jacob are brothers since right about the time we found out that Jacob was an actual guy. You’d think being a doctor would be enough for him, but now he can add bonus points to his list of accomplishments.
I wasn’t sure at the time, but now I’m convinced that the blade with which Silas stabbed Crazy Mom is the same one that Dogen gave to Sayid. That’s a knife with some history right there.
Obviously, the wine that Fake Mom and Jacob share comes from the same bottle that Jacob will later use to illustrate his metaphor to Richard. (And Silas later smashes.) Now, here’s the cool bit. Fake Mom passes her mantle to Jacob by sharing the wine. (And the chilling “Now you and I are the same”.) Now if the wine itself is what imparts the power and the knowledge, then Richard would be the new Jacob, since Jacob gave him a drink. And it would have been pretty foolish to leave the magic wine with Silas who took about ten seconds to smash the bottle.
The way I see it, it wasn’t the wine itself, it was the act of communion that passes on the mantle. Now in Catholicism, the doctrine of transubstantiation holds that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ. (I don’t know if that’s still something that the Catholic Church subscribes to, though. I’m out of the loop.) But Jacob’s no Catholic – he told Richard that he couldn’t hear his confession or grant absolution. In Protestantism, the wine is merely a symbol and the power of communion comes from the practice of the sacrament. It’s just regular Welch’s grape juice that every family takes turns coming in early to pour. The wine by itself doesn’t mean anything until Jacob makes it a communion. It could be Dharma Box Wine for all it matters.
You know what? Every woman who’s come to the Island pregnant has had their baby taken away to be raised by another. Claire, Rousseau, Claudia… And it really hasn’t worked out well for any of them. Roger the Psychic may have a point.
And finally, there are two neat little callbacks in this episode. First, back in Season Four (I think), when Benry was asked about the Smoke, he said “We don’t even have a name for what that is”. And guess what? It really doesn’t have a name.
Also, Crazy Mom correctly predicts rainfall in this episode, and it’s hard not to see that and think of that scene with Locke and Boone, the one where Locke predicts rain right down to the second. That guy was in touch with the Island all along.
Thanks to everybody who wrote this week – there just wasn’t a way to cover it all this time around, but I’ll try to get to it sometime this week. Remember to check out Spectacularry and watch him take on the doubters.
I’ll see you back here in 24 hours for “What They Died For”, with more updates throughout this final week. I’m excited and scared and I will probably cry more than once before the finale is over.
