• The verdict on Sayid and Shannon is deeply mixed, and I can’t say as I blame anyone for that. On the one hand, Nadia’s been a defining force/goal in Sayid’s life for as long as we’ve known the character and so it’s strange to think of him finding “enlightenment” with anyone else. On the other hand, I found myself weirdly, genuinely moved by Sayid and Shannon’s relationship in Season 2 when I rewatched it, and so I’m not going to gripe about this.
Those of you claiming that Nadia ought to be in the church aren’t wrong, but you’re also ignoring/not seeing the fact that Nadia might not be willing/able to move on, and the more important idea that Shannon helped Sayid “let go” of Nadia initially, on the Island. Why is it that someone like Sayid is chosen to move on despite not having worked through his issues while Ana Lucia is deemed not ready? That’s an area for legitimate debate. I invite you to give your theories.
• I like that Boone is Hurley’s accomplice, and that his apparent enlightenment happens entirely off-screen. I like also that it calls into question the seemingly-knowing conversation that Boone has with Locke in “LA X.” Was he enlightened already at that point?
Anti-Locke: “This remind you of anything, Jack? Desmond…going down into a hole in the ground…If there was a button down there to push, we could fight about whether or not to push it. It’d be just like old times.”
Jack: “You’re not John Locke. You disrespect his memory by wearing his face, but you’re nothing like him.”
• I’ve talked at great length about the variety of “mirrors” that are contained in Lost’s narrative – moments that “reflect” other moments, dialogue that “reflects” other dialogue. There’s a ton of this stuff in Lost as a whole, and a fair amount in this episode. Here’s one of the most obvious examples, helpfully underlined by the writers themselves.
This isn’t simply a cheap trick on the part of the show. These “mirrors” have serious meaning for the show as a whole, and that meaning is something I’ve been discussing since my Rewatch column for the show began last August. You can go back and read through old columns for episodes like “One of Them” and “He’s our You,” and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. I’d write more about it here, but this column is already twice the length of my normal ones, and I’d rather save that effort for the aforementioned Book (last mention, I promise).
• Charlotte pops up again and she and Daniel connect, but they don’t wake up – at least not right away. I find Daniel and Eloise’s presence and actions in Limbo to be fascinating. More on this below.
• Love the skeletons. And I love that the scattered ruins on the Island aren’t indicative of any one ancient civilization. They’re indicative of many. We see Egyptian hieroglyphs, Roman wells, a Temple that looks Eastern in design, yet carved as well in hieroglyphs. The history of the Island is jumbled, and I think, intentionally so. Someone managed to install a Wheel on the Island that allowed successful release from the Island. Someone told Ben about it. People long before John Locke may have gone Island-hopping just as we saw happen in Season 5. Who’s to say that the Egyptians didn’t do just that, appearing in time periods later than their own and inscribing new structures with their script? Or that Mother, the Island protector, wasn’t Egyptian herself, and responsible for the first of the markings, a tradition that her son Jacob carried on?
And there’s direct evidence in The End that the Egyptians weren’t the first people to set foot on the Island – if we’re to take something meaningful away from the almost-hidden hints we receive at The Pool, people have been coming to the Island since the dawn of “civilization.” It’s possible (and super-fun, at least for me) to draw comparisons between this space and the Swan Station – to argue that the “Pool” is in fact a primitive “Hatch.” It’s responsible, after all, for somehow regulating/containing mysterious energy, is guarded by an appointed person who constructs a “failsafe” option to ensure future safety, and contains evidence of murderdeathkill (for the Swan it was Radzinsky’s brains splattered on the ceiling, for the Pool it’s the skeletons), to name a couple of similarities.
I understand that some folks think leaving a place as important to Lost’s mythology as the Pool largely undefined and up to the imagination is “sloppy,” in that we’re left to fill in the details of the frame for ourselves. But for me, filling in the frame is fun. Imagining the possibilities is fun. Isn’t that precisely what we’ve done over six seasons? Hasn’t the act of that imagining been just as much fun as the story being told? Weren’t you liable to chat to strangers and read weird columns on websites that delve waaaay too deeply into minutia because it was a pleasure to do so, to consider the “what if,” the “maybe”? I’m not someone who’s going to tell you that it’s not about the answers, it’s about the characters and so these kinds of Answers “don’t matter.”
I’m way more infuriating than that. I’m going to suggest that it’s not about the answers – it’s about the questions (and it always has been). It’s about asking ourselves what we believe – about science and faith and good and evil and fate and free will and life and death and Smoke Monsters and polar bears and whatever the heck is happening on this show from episode to episode – and it’s about getting us to talk about these things on a level that television has rarely, if ever, achieved. To dismiss that achievement entirely because of some rightly-aggravating unanswered questions is to toss out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. You’re welcome to do it but OHMYGOD YOU JUST THREW AWAY A BABY!
To invoke my second utterly-pretentious DFW quote for the column:
“[T]here is real and alienating stuff that stands in the way of our appreciating Dostoevsky and has to be dealt with – either by learning enough about all the unfamiliar stuff that it stops being so confusing, or else by accepting it…But the larger point (which, yes, may be kind of obvious) is that some art is worth the extra work of getting past all the impediments to its appreciation….The thrust here is that Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that’s really important. He wrote stories about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being – that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.” David Foster Wallace, from the essay “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” included in “Consider the Lobster.”
You remember Dostoevsky. He’s the guy who wrote Notes from the Underground, the book that popped up prominently in Season 6. Much of what his fictional narrator has to say in that book goes to the heart of the themes that Lost has explored over its six-year run. I wrote about those themes here and here.
I’m in no way equating Lost’s writing with Dostoevsky. But I think Wallace’s point about his writing is a point that’s equally applicable to something like Lost. “Some art is worth the extra work of getting past all the impediments to its appreciation.” That means choosing to grapple with the “game” of references, thematic “mirroring,” allusions, and structural tricks that Lost plays with its audience throughout its run, or choosing to accept that there’s a level of alienation to the unfamiliar stuff and running with what are inarguable strong points: the acting, the drama, the mysteries (which are distinct from, and enjoyable away from, answers), the themes, the allusions and references and subtextual stuff that’s floating around waiting to be discovered on the edges of the show.
• On a related note, those complaining that Lost is “philosophy 101” would seem either to have no interest in playing Lost’s game, refusing to acknowledge that a deeper appreciation of the subjects that populate Lost’s background might enrich appreciation for the plot and drama of the show, or have little respect for the difficulty of the Philosophers that the show actively encourages the audience to grapple with. Either way, that particular complaint falls on deaf ears with me.
• I love that this space suggests a whole unseen history with its multiple skeletons and inexplicable architecture. As mentioned above, I love that it seems to be a kind of proto-Swan Station, with various tunnels leading away from the Source just as various passages led away from the Swan’s central hub, and a man-made, cuniform-etched ‘cork’ keeping something at bay just as the man-made, hieroglyph-adorned Swan counter and computer kept something at bay.
• What does time/consciousness-traveling have to do with Desmond seeing “Limbo”? Well, his consciousness has jumped backward several times at this point – it stands to reason that it might jump forward, and jump past his own death. His consciousness, which those science-minded among you might see embodied as energy – specifically a form of electromagnetic energy – and The End tells us where that energy goes. After all, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. That’s, like, science, man. When we die, where does our energy go? In Lost’s universe, it goes to the heart if the Island. It’s reborn/reincarnated there on another level of reality – a quasi-“quantum” level if you’d like. Electromagnetism and Quantum Physics are, after all, interrelated concepts.
• More evidence that the Pool connects the science-grounded Time/Space stuff from past seasons with the “heart” of the Island: Desmond’s nose bleeds out when he enters the Pool. Some more conjecturing along “scientific” lines: the behavior of time around the Island suggests that the Light might be “rationally” (ha! Hahahaha!) classified as a “wormhole” or a “black hole.” As one approaches a black hole, light, space and time all bend. That’s exactly what happens to light, space and time on the Island.
• Some of you have complained that the ultimate obliqueness of the Island is a misstep/a show-killer/too vague/whathaveyou. Personally, I love it. It mirrors the essential dilemma at the heart of the Swan Station, the Pascal’s Wager (as one Chud commenter aptly called it) that was pushing the damned Button. In accepting the position of Island protector, you accept that you do not know whether your actions accomplish anything. In this sense, The Swan is the answer to the nature of the Island, and to the Existential problem at the center of Island guardianship. The protectors do what they do because to not do it would be to risk annihilation. If and when you choose to rewatch the show I think that returning to Season 2, to the Hatch and the conversations/arguments over it are going to color your view of the Island’s heart in a warmer light (no pun intended). Of course, as always, your mileage may vary. If you’d like to consider some of this without rewatching you can always head over to Back to the Island, where a full archive of my Season 2 Rewatch Columns is available for your eager peepers.
• So why is it that Desmond is Jacob’s “failsafe”? Well, he’s uniquely resistant to electromagnetic energy, of course. But what does that mean, exactly? Near as I can tell, it means that he’s been exposed to the Island’s unique brand of Limbo-flavored energy for a tremendously long period of time through his stationing in the Swan. On top of this consistent, low-grade exposure he’s also been bombarded by the stuff when he turned the Swan’s failsafe key, and again when Widmore deployed his Giant Electromagnetic Doohi key (patent pending). Think of Desmond’s Electro exposure as similar to The Dread Pirate Roberts’ slow-built immunity to iocane powder.
IS IT THE END YET? NOT YET! MORE, AFTER THE PAGE BREAK!