Metakritikomentaryo: Lost

Adam David loves Lost: watching it, thinking about it, reading about it, listening to podcasts about it, talking to people about it. Now, he’s blogging about it!

Lost Season 6 Episode 9: “Ab Aeterno”

Seeing as I have a word-count limit for these things, I’ll just say that it was great hearing Hurley speaking Spanish at length at last. I’ve been waiting for that for a long time, so I was really happy hearing that, and I just want to remark once again how much I appreciate the gall of everyone in Lost to just up and decide to do episodes that are 70 to 90% non-English. They did this quite a few times with Jin and Sun’s episodes, and this was a great reminder of just how unusual this show is in form as well as content, and how consistently it has played with form and content since it first came out. There’s simply nothing like this out there, despite V and Flash Forward’s attempts to be the next Lost. And with that out of the way, I want to go into a mad-dash-run-through of quite a few ideas this episode produced in my head, namely about what I think has been happening in the show, ie, on the Island, since – and actually even before – the Lostcasts entered the picture.

I believe Jacob suffered extreme tragedy back when he was still human, whenever and wherever that may have been, ie, BC or AD in Rome, maybe. Maybe his family died a tragic death in the hands of someone? A tragedy so extreme he began to doubt the fundamental truths of the universe, or at least, the fundamental truths he’d been made to believe since childhood, the fundamental truths he’d been told make up his reality. He began to doubt it so much he decided to change it by basically trapping All the Evil in the World into one vessel, and maybe as consequence, or maybe even as a completely lucid decision – out of guilt, out of a sense of responsibility – Jacob chained that vessel on to the Island – which I believe predates the two – with himself as constant guard and guardian.

Jacob manages to trap Evil into the man we can probably call Esau, ie, the man who later becomes the Man in Black. I still can’t really hazard a proper guess as to their original relationship – although there have been hints throughout the show that Jacob and Esau may be brothers, which I subscribe to (obviously, ie, Esau) – but centuries of being trapped on the Island with only the two of them for each other’s company has given their relationship a rather passive-aggressively homicidal air, and also an escalation of what may have started as a spirited debate between idle minds opposing turning into a high-stakes backgammon game for souls, later compounded by Esau’s desire to leave the Island.

As far as the information we’ve been given is concerned, it seems like Jacob has since time immemorial constantly been bringing people into the Island to enact/ensue his debate with Esau. Jacob, via Ricardo, orchestrates and manipulates events that result on getting a set of people on to the Island. Once there, Jacob and Esau proceed on putting to test their own respective hypotheses on human nature, quite possibly hypotheses hatched in no small part because of whatever extreme tragedy Jacob – and maybe even Esau – suffered way back in the beginning, ie, the Balance between Good and Evil inside every person, both of them intent on disproving the other.

As far as the information we’ve been given is concerned, it seems like all the people that have been brought into the Island – from Ricardo on to Lapidus – have always been meant to come to the Island, either by orchestration, ie, Jacob, or destiny, as evidenced by how utterly complexly intertwined all of the characters’ lives are with one another’s, so intertwined that even in a Parallel Reality where their life conditions are widely different, they are all still intertwined, destined to meet.

I believe that this latest leg in Jacob and Esau’s spiritual backgammon tourney has been in slow set up since Ricardo started working under Jacob. Somehow, in the 1950s, the US Army discovered the Island and set camp there, and quite possibly very much like in the show’s current timeline, the subsequent chaos that erupted between the soldiers thinned and divided them into separate camps, the Jacob camp and the Esau Camp. Maybe the Esau Camp was eventually eradicated by the Jacob Camp, the show hasn’t shown us much of anything about the Island’s history circa 1950s, but it is very clearly implied that the Jacob Camp, ie, the soldiers Ricardo and Young Widmore and Young Ms Hawking were leading back in the 1950s, are the very same Hostiles in the Island’s Dharma Initiative-era.

I have a feeling that the Dharma Initiative found the Island because of Jacob; aside from the fact that that is pretty much how things happen in the show, it is no strange coincidence that the captain of Ricardo’s slaveship – Magnus Hanso – was the ancestor of the founder of Dharma – Alvar Hanso – and it wouldn’t have been too much of an effort for Jacob and Ricardo to plant a few choice evidences from Magnus Hanso’s ship, evidence meant to lead Alvar Hanso’s Dharma to the interest and subsequent discovery of the Island’s strange properties.

So far, my overall impression is that Jacob and Esau hadn’t anticipated Dharma’s largely capitalistic/secular interests on the Island, interests that more or less discarded the two’s ongoing debate on Human Nature, which eventually led to the Incident – the discovery of the EM mother lode that eventually turned into the Swan Station – and then the Purge – Ricardo (and Ben, and also Widmore, apparently) leading the Hostiles to eradicate the entire Dharma Initiative Personnel – which eventually led to a splintering of the Hostiles, ie, Jacob’s Camp, into two distinct sides: Ben’s Village Others, which as far and as primitively as I could tell, with its fascination to in a way continue and/or reap the benefits of Dharma, can be described as Rejectionists; and Dogen’s Temple Others, which as far and as primitively as I could tell, with its fascination to in a way continue a luddite existence, are Reaffirmists. Ben’s Village Others’ interest on Dharma-centric concerns seems to have forced Jacob and Esau’s debate into a stalemate, up until Esau somehow found a way to exploit this to his own ends, ie, killing Jacob and leaving the Island once and for all. This is actually an important plot point in season five, I think: the realisation that the whole show’s narrative – virtually every crucial turn in the story – has been in large part due to the manipulations of Esau, all basically a long con job to kill Jacob, to upset the Balance of Good and Evil, to escape the Island. It was Esau who had been giving Ben orders from the crazy shack in the woods. It was Esau who had manipulated Locke into forcing the Oceanic Six to come back to the Island. It was Esau who had shaped and influenced each and every decision the Lostcasts made to survive.

Somewhere along the way, Jacob realised that Esau just might win their debate, and so he started the machinations on assuring the production and survival of a set of people whom he might need to call on to replace him and continue his duties – whatever they may be – on the Island, ie, the Candidates, of which only six remain as the story circles back to Jacob and Esau’s initial debate about Human Nature as at the same time it hurtles towards Esau’s plan to escape the Island.

There are of course still quite a lot of plot holes in this one thousand-word wrap-up of what I think the story is so far (like: What happened in the Island between Jacob and Esau’s exile and Ricardo’s landfall, a good twenty centuries-worth of events, most probably? What’s up with all the weird displaced animals in the show like Kate’s horse and the Hurley bird and the CGI butterfly in this episode? Were they Jacob in disguise? How could Jacob and Ricardo leave the Island? How could Jacob and Ricardo leave the Island and not have Esau following them through the 108-degree hole in the Island’s EM shield? Etc etc.), but what’s utterly amazing about all of this is how the foundations of the broadstrokes of the narrative had been laid down all the way back in the first three episodes of the first season of the show, and how all these connections are instantly made all thanks to a well-placed well-written well-thought-out episode – this is actually something the creators had planned, had been planning for quite a while, a story that can only be told like how Lost tells it: serial television that’s infinitely more rewarding when watched and rewatched in DVD marathon viewings. It’s a novel translated for the small-to-medium screen. It’s a setup that has its precedents in anime but this is definitely the first time it’s been used in this scale and to this great an effect. My own theory is only one of a countless variety, all generated by fans who obsess on the show’s each and every frame per second, each and every online discussion and annotation, which ultimately made the show successful. I’m not saying that without these things in place that the show would’ve been a failure, but it definitely wouldn’t have been as successful as it is right now if it weren’t for DVD technology, if it weren’t for TiVo and torrent downloads: Lost is a production that is dictated by and at the same time dictates the technology surrounding its production and gateways of appreciation, the technology that allowed its popularity to increase and live beyond itself. There’s nothing else much like it on TV. It’s quite the achievement.

Next: Jin and Sun and a mysterious package!

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