My review
Thar be Spoilers below:
"The Incident"
Season 5 finale
Lost
ABC
What lies in the shadow of the statue?
“Ille qui nos omnes servabit”
“He who will save us”
Genesis, Sigmund Freud, the Odyssey, Flannery O’Connor, Carl Jung, “Dr. Strangelove” — Wednesday night’s season finale of “Lost” was so chockablock with archetype, mythology and cultural references it was like watching Joseph Campbell on crack. A better look at the statue would seemingly lead one away from the gods Tawaret and Anubis, introducing another Egyptian Diety as the island’s potential avatar… Sobek.
A powerful and frightening deity, it was Sobek who first came out of the dark waters of chaos to create the world. Sobek was often thought of as being beyond good or evil, though he was seen as a repairer of evil that had been done. In one reference, Sobek was also said to call on suitable gods and goddesses required for protecting people in need, effectively having a more distant role, nudging things along, rather than taking an active part.
Sound familiar? If you watch Lost it does.
It opened with a man (in a cave, so throw in Plato) hunched over a spinning wheel (Ghandi? Penelope at her loom? Or just a reference to the Blood, Sweat and Tears song?), then cut to two men on a beach. Their garments vaguely period, their speech decidedly modern, they argue over a frigate in full sail on the horizon. One man (in black) says in disgust that he knows they are coming because the other man (in white) brought them.
Clearly Jacob, previously a mysterious authority, has been around for a while. (We later learn that he has in fact visited each of the key characters at significant moments of their life.) But who is he really? God? And does that make Mr. Black some incarnation of Satan, the two perpetually battling over the basic nature of the human soul? Is the island then Eden, existing outside space and time to serve as a kind of spiritual laboratory?
The rest of the episode never quite lived up to the opening.
You’re trying to prove me wrong.
You are wrong.
They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt.
It always ends the same.
It can only end once. Everything before that is progress.
~Jacob and The Man in Black
And so it goes, the eternal back and forth between these two timeless adversaries. Both manipulating people and events in an ongoing conflict that is a game with set rules, not the least of which being that they are barred from killing one another. It’s been hinted at as far back as season one, when John Locke explained the game of backgammon to Walt as being a contest between two players, on black and one white.
The Man in Black finding the loophole and, in the guise of John Locke, leading Ben to slaughter Jacob. But Jacob seemed almost eager for the killing blow, offering himself up like an aged Jedi prepared to “become more powerful that you can possibly imagine.
Jacob was assembling his army, pushing and prodding the Losties toward their destined Island venture so that they in turn could be his chess pieces in his little game of redemption, absolution, and perhaps the exercise in free will.
Look more closely at the paths he laid out for them.
Kate: Busted for shoplifting, he paid off the shop owner to keep him from calling her parents. Had she been disciplined, how different would Kate have been?
James: Jacob offered up the pen in which the boy could write his vengeance-fueled letter, the defining moment in the young boy’s life, that carried him through to adulthood and forging him into a mirror of that which he hated most.
Locke: Forgiveness and hope offered to a broken man betrayed by his father.
Jack: A little push in the right direction, with an Apollo bar no less.
Sayid: Poor Sayid, was culled from harm's way as Nadia was struck down, opening up for him his path to revenge-fueled, killing machine madness.
Is Jacob good or evil? Is he beyond these simplistic classifications?
“It’s always something with you people.”
~Rose Henderson
Rose and Bernard who quickly inform them the fresh off the sub Sawyer, Kate and Juliet that they are not at all interested in either the Dharma/anti-Dharma, the hydrogen bomb/no hydrogen bomb or even the old favorite Jack/Sawyer conflict. They are “retired” and disappointed to find that their old beach comrades are still looking for ways to shoot each other. Bernard and Rose, the island’s John and Yoko, just want to be together.
Sawyer and Juliet’s relationship was tossed into the abyss last night, with destiny and a hydrogen bomb. She dies wearing a red shirt and I could care less. Their relationship seemed contrived and ridiculous and her poorly acted death ( on Josh Holloway's part, god his acting was so bad in that scene)
Of course there was another little matter that took me no time to figure out…
R.I.P. John Locke. In the end, John Locke… the real John Locke, not the black shirted, smoke monstered doppelganger… was what he’d always been: a failure. A led around by a ring in his nose, self-defeating, screw up who was played and manipulated by everyone and everything. The Man of Faith… and in the end, he was weak and pathetic, despite how hard he tried to be otherwise. Is there still hope for redemption for John Locke? God, I hope so, he deserves better, and as Jack said never give up on John Locke.
Did they succeed in resetting Time? How has the nuclear detonation effected the present? In a nutshell, where do they go from here?
The writers have positioned themselves perfectly. At this point, anything can happen. We are now completely and utterly lost… cast adrift in a sea of uncertainty. Much like the new Star Trek. We are connected but nothing we know works anymore.
And it’s a odd feeling.
In a negative reflection of “The Sopranos” finale, the screen goes white.
One thing we know for sure, there is a war coming and season six can't come quick enough.