Here's to Being Dead

Quick Hits

• This Island is so full of mysterious stations, hatches, villages, temples and caves, it’s a wonder there’s any jungle left at all! We visit some new geography tonight with the aforementioned Cave, where Jacob spent some periods of quiet reflection on the nature of good and evil before writing names on the walls in chalk.

  

  I found it intriguing the dark side of the scale seemed to be slightly heavier prior to Evil Locke/Esau removing the white stone.

  

  I’m wont to read way too much into these seeming trivialities, but I’d like to think that slight imbalance signified Jacob’s death as a small victory for Esau and the dark side.

• While Esau/Evil Locke certainly appears to be fully in control and all-badass most of the time we’ve seen him (nothing says badass like transforming into a giant pillar of black smoke and laying the smackdown on gun-toting Jacob disciples), his disdain for the fear inherent in the real John Locke may be tinged with a hint of hypocrisy. Esau didn’t look too comfortable when the apparition of a young boy (young Jacob?) appeared before him.

  
  Anyone else think of the stigmata when they saw the bloody arms? A foreshadowing, perhaps (“perhaps” count for this blog post is currently at 87) of Jacob’s eventual resurrection.

  

• Esau cements his hypocrisy by shouting John Locke’s favorite woe-is-me line, “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” when the young boy tells him he can’t truly kill Jacob. “You know the rules; you can’t kill him.”

  

  Now, this just occurred to me, but perhaps “him” isn’t Jacob at all. I posit “him” could be Sawyer (especially since the boy probably wouldn’t refer to himself in the third person if the “him” were Jacob). I assume there must always be some sort of balance between light and dark on the Island. If Sawyer does eventually take the mantle as Island protector, Esau cannot kill him. Jacob may be dead, but those Rules will ensure the work to achieve his goal (whatever that happens to be, whether saving humanity or something else) continues.

  

  A last, incomplete thought on the boy. The automatic (and probably safe) assumption is it’s a young Jacob. Perhaps it’s just the actor’s striking resemblance to Claire, but could it actually be Aaron? Is Aaron actually the one who could take over for Jacob? This bears further examination in future posts, as one thread still left out there right now is why the psychic insisted Claire be the one to raise Aaron and shield him from evil. If Locke’s replacement as #4 isn’t Kate, perhaps it’s Kate’s job to get Aaron back to the Island somehow.

• While the real John Locke certainly appears to be dead (and buried), I’m not convinced we’ve seen the last of him. And I’m not just talking about his appearance in the flash-sidewayses. That’s a discussion for another time, however.

  

  John 2.0 has a pretty similar life to the 1.0 timeline. He never actually went on the walkabout (having lied to both Jack and his wife) and he still works for the box company.

  

  His existence, with that aforementioned, self-imposed woe-is-me attitude, is pitiful.

  

  All is not completely lost for the man, however, as he still has his fiancee, Helen. You’ll recall she left him when he chose to again go find his asshole father (the real Sawyer) to get an explanation from the man as to why he essentially stole his kidney and didn’t love him. We all know how that turned out in the 1.0 timeline.

  

  So what does her appearance here mean? Locke’s still in a wheelchair, so we could consider a few explanations. He never went after his father and became a paraplegic some other way; he did go after his father and Helen supported him; or maybe Helen simply decided to reunite with him after he came back from Australia. The whole plot thread could be completely irrelevant, I suppose, so we’ll drop it until some more clues are thrown are way down the line.

• Speaking of the box company, that douchebag Randy is still in charge, and sees fit to fire Locke for using the company dime to travel to Australia for his failed walkabout attempt.

  

  Randy’s had several appearances throughout the show’s six seasons, and we know he’ll eventually end up working as one of Hurley’s lackeys when he takes over the Cluckin’ Chicken fast food franchise.

  

• Hurley’s 2.0 fortunes continue to be on the upswing, having narrowly avoided some damage to his Hummer when Locke’s wheelchair ramp malfunctions again. Something that surely would’ve resulted in Hurley’s car exploding in a giant explosion in the bad luck 1.0 timeline.

  

• Hurley pays that good fortune forward by offering Locke a chance at a new job, directing him to another of his HurleyCo. subsidiaries, a temp agency.

  

  Said temp agency is run by none other than Rose Nadler, last seen on Flight 815 with Jack in the 2.0 timeline.

  

  Fresh from her trip to the faith healer in Australia, Rose seems fully at peace with her terminal cancer prognosis.

• Ben as an uppity European History teacher works very nicely. Is he there to teach kids about the French Huguenots, or to keep tabs on Locke 2.0?

  

  I found Ben’s remorse at Locke’s makeshift funeral to be genuine, and it’ll be interesting to see how that grief combined with his ill-fated decision to kill Jacob eats away at the former Others leader as we move along.

  

• That graveyard’s getting pretty full, by the way.

  

  And while Eko’s long gone, it’s nice to see his church is still there. He must have some pretty outstanding construction skills if that thing is still standing after three years of Island weather.

  

• We heard the term “candidate” several times tonight, in reference to those Jacob assigned numbers and brought to the Island. Ilana and Bram used the term last season when they were talking about Locke on the mainland. This isn’t much of a reach, but Ilana and the now-dead Bram seem to have been part of a squad that roamed the mainland looking for Jacob’s candidates. Not a job that has very good prospects when you’re up against a giant pillar of death-dealing black smoke.

  

  I nearly forgot this, but Ilana takes a handful of Jacob’s ashes in a pouch with her. For protection? We’ve seen ash’s power to repel Smokey in the past, and the Temple’s inhabitants are using it as a perimeter to keep him out of the compound, so it stands to reason yes. So where did all that other ash come from?

  

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