【写于第3季结束之后】
The Greatest Mystery Series Ever—or the Most Deliberately Obscure?
During the hiatus after episodes 1–6 of LOST Season 3, I wrote The Secret of the “Black Smoke”: A Summary of LOST “Season 2.5” and Season 3, Episodes 1–6, offering some analysis and guesses about the story. My main argument then was that the Black Smoke was a petty-minded god. I analyzed its behavioral logic: why it chose to save some people while killing others. Some readers thought I was using religion to hand-wave things away, which is certainly the easiest explanation. But to me, explaining “why” is far more important than explaining “what.” With a series as extravagantly rich in elements as LOST, whatever the writers eventually say the Black Smoke is, we needn’t be surprised. High technology or supernatural mumbo jumbo, either way, the standard for judging whether a mystery series is being deliberately obscure shouldn’t be whether the writers ultimately answer “what,” but whether they answer “why.”
In the final ending of LOST, the writers might not even need to explain what the Black Smoke is. But they must give us an account of the motive behind the Black Smoke’s—or the island’s mysterious power’s—actions: what is its purpose in saving or killing someone? Without that, the whole thing would feel like a cheap trick. This is the essential difference between most excellent mysteries and low-grade ones. Fortunately, LOST seems to belong to the former category. The first three seasons are packed with details planted like a tiny snake whose trail runs for miles. It is hardly unusual for a small detail mentioned in one episode to be echoed dozens of episodes later. From what several creators revealed in interviews, they had mapped out the story’s overall outline long ago, while modifying and refining details as the story progressed in response to factors such as the actors’ performances. Their confident, even slightly smug tone practically said, “We figured it out ages ago—we’re just not telling you.” Naturally, this drove us viewers crazy. Still, various factors within and beyond the show suggest that LOST’s grand architecture was conceived from the beginning. Many of its mysteries are surely just hooks, but the core of it probably isn’t some cheap device for stringing us along. So I believe that unless some force beyond the creators’ control makes it collapse at the finish line, LOST will ultimately give us a satisfying answer—and establish itself as a landmark classic.
Variations
LOST’s plot goes through a variation in every season. Season 1 focuses on the psychology of the Flight 815 survivors. The science-fiction and mystery details never stop, but overall the pace is relatively relaxed, winning us over with nuanced character work. In Season 2, the mystery and science-fiction elements arising from the intersecting fates of the Others, the Dharma Initiative, and the Flight 815 survivors take center stage. By Season 3, the mysterious “island,” which had always served as the backdrop, officially steps into the foreground and becomes the true protagonist.
LOST’s constant variations were bound to unsettle viewers who were accustomed to classifying a story in advance and forming expectations, because the plot kept veering far away from what they expected. Thus, even though supernatural elements such as the “monster” and polar bears appeared in the very first episode of Season 1, by the end of Season 2 some viewers were actually asking, “Wait—is LOST a science-fiction series?” Some said, “If LOST explains everything through science fiction in the end, I’ll be terribly disappointed.” Others said, “If LOST doesn’t use science fiction to explain it in the end, I’ll be terribly disappointed.”
Why can’t a work have delicate character development, tense mystery, and science-fiction and religious premises all at once? In fact, I think LOST is so compelling precisely because it combines all these elements so perfectly.
The Island’s Greatest Secret
Although LOST left dozens of mysteries, large and small, unresolved at the end of Season 3, the most crucial one is undoubtedly this: what is the island’s most important power? Over the first three seasons, the writers repeatedly showed us the island’s mysterious power. It can induce hallucinations, cure physical illnesses, heal psychological wounds; the island’s Black Smoke can read people’s memories and possesses astonishing destructive power; and there is a godlike presence on the island—Jacob, … .
What is the source of the island’s divine power? We still have no conclusion. It is either the island itself, Jacob, or the Black Smoke. But one thing is basically certain: the powers of the island, Jacob, and the Black Smoke should all be one and the same. Even if the source is the island itself, Jacob should be its most important agent; the island’s true power is manifested through Jacob. The island’s power, Jacob’s power, and the Black Smoke’s power, as discussed below, are really the same thing.
But behind all these mysterious powers, what is the island’s greatest power and most important secret?
Putting together the details revealed in Season 3, my guess is this: the island is a “God”-given land of eternal life! The island’s greatest power is allowing some people chosen by “God” to gain eternal life on this land. Under the protection of “God’s” power, the island is an ideal kingdom. “God” uses his own standards to redeem his people or punish those who are guilty. Most importantly, God grants the chosen eternal life, making them “perfect.” The island is a God-given land, a kingdom of eternal life! That is the island’s greatest secret.
I arrived at this conclusion by teasing out clues from various details. Still, I’ll retell the story of LOST from the beginning, using my hypothesis as the perspective—
Four-Toed Jacob and the Invisible Island
Somewhere in the Pacific lies a secluded island, occupying a strange position in space and time. Under normal circumstances it is invisible to the outside world. Only under special conditions—for example, massive electromagnetic changes, a special route, or guidance from electronic signals—can outsiders enter or leave the island from somewhere in the Pacific.
Jacob came to this island at least several hundred years ago. (Many viewers speculate that Jacob was the captain of the Black Rock, and this is quite possible. Judging from Jacob’s fear of modern technology and his clothing, he should be an ancient man!) On the island, Jacob became a half-human, half-godlike, half-physical, half-spiritual being, to the point that ordinary people could not even see him directly. A group of followers seems to have gathered around him very early on, revering his power much as people revere a god. For reasons unknown, Jacob seems to have an almost pathological attachment to his pre-technological past. Even many years later, when they carried out Jacob’s will, they still had to dress like Jacob. (This is actually why the Others so often dressed in rags.)
We might even venture the bold guess that Jacob was a “remarkably built” four-toed man. To express their reverence, his people erected a statue of him on the island long ago—only for it to be destroyed later during the conflict between his people and the Dharma Initiative.
Apostles
Even among God’s people, it seems not everyone could communicate directly with Jacob. Only individuals with certain special qualities would become specially favored by Jacob-as-god, able to see and hear him directly. This created a privileged class among God’s people, made up of these individuals. These especially favored people became apostles: they listened directly to God’s will and then spread the gospel to the other believers. Ben was clearly one such apostle, and before Locke came to the island, Ben was the only one. This special status made Ben the absolute leader of the Others. After all, apart from him, no one else could speak directly with God. So there must have been an apostle before Ben, before Richard’s group of natives brought Ben into their ranks. Apparently that person was either abandoned by God or killed by the power-hungry Ben. Season 4 will surely flash back to the process by which Ben became the leader of Jacob’s believers. Then we can see whether my guess was right.
“Perfect” People
In short, under the apostles’ leadership, these believers treated Jacob as a god. They protected their god while enjoying his gifts. The gift was that they became “perfect” people. Ben once said to Juliet, “Have you ever seen anyone on this island get cancer?” On this island, people protected by God do not suffer fatal illnesses, and even fatal injuries can heal rapidly. In fact, in this God-protected land, they neither age nor die; they possess eternal life.
Richard may even have been one of the earliest believers. The island’s natives represented by Richard—now part of the Others—are an ageless, immortal people. Richard’s appearance did not change at all over the decades from Ben’s childhood onward. This clearly wasn’t an oversight by the production team. When the same actor plays a character across a span of ages, makeup details are always used to show that span, yet none of this was visible with Richard. Ben later teased XX by saying, “Do you even remember your birthday?” He was really mocking him: “You’re so old you can’t even remember your birthday, can you?”
Mikhail, who suffered fatal injuries several times and came back to life miraculously each time, also seems to be one of God’s protected people, though he may not be a native of the island. After being captured by Sayid and the others, he hinted that he was a perfect person, while Kate and the others were “flawed,” and therefore had “no capacity” to understand what he knew. Clearly, Kate, Sayid, and the others had not been favored by Jacob. After taunting Kate, Mikhail turned to Locke and said, “But you, John Locke—I have a somewhat hazy impression of you.” Clearly, Locke was a “perfect” person favored by God. And Season 3’s plot also shows that Locke could do more than Richard and Mikhail: he was even an apostle who could speak directly with God.
So if the Black woman Mikhail shot dead, or Tom, whom Sawyer shot dead, comes back to life next season, don’t be too surprised.
God’s Intimidating Power
Jacob had enormous intimidating power over his people.
For example, the flight attendant from Flight 815 was kidnapped and became one of the Others. There are many ways to explain her strange reactions to Jack, Locke, and the others, but I think she may have been stunned after witnessing miracles that were simply beyond reason. So when Jack demanded to know what was going on, she answered cryptically, “It’s complicated.”
Another example came when Juliet argued with Ben on the beach over her sister’s cancer. Ben suddenly raised his voice and said, “Jacob says he’ll take care of himself, unless you don’t have faith in him.” The emotionally agitated Juliet was immediately silenced by these words.
Jacob’s List
So who can become one of Jacob’s people? Jacob has his standards, though we still don’t know exactly what they are. Based on my analysis in the earlier The Secret of the “Black Smoke”: A Summary of LOST “Season 2.5” and Season 3, Episodes 1–6, Jacob is not a particularly broad-minded god. His standard may be: “Those who believe in me shall be saved.”
So if there is one kind of person who could never become one of Jacob’s people, it would be a man of science like Jack.
Interestingly, we know that Jacob has a list.
I suspect Jacob’s list is actually a “list of his people.” Those on Jacob’s list are people connected to God, protected by God, made into his people, and made perfect. Those not on the list, even if they are on this God-given island, have no share in God’s gifts. So don’t assume that if Jack or Kate were shot with a speargun like Mikhail, they could survive. God treats different people on the island differently. The Other who was hunting Jack once said, “Jack isn’t even on Jacob’s list.” What he meant was that Jack wasn’t even one of Jacob’s people; there was no chance he could ever become one of us, so what did it matter if they killed him?
According to what Mikhail told Kate, Kate and the others aren’t on the list because “you’re quick to anger, weak, and easily frightened.” I don’t think people on the list, like Mikhail, Ben, and Locke, are any better in those respects, so those can’t be the real criteria for Jacob’s list.
Obviously, the names of the vast majority of the Others should be on the list.
Juliet’s Branding
After Juliet kills one of the Others to help Kate and Sawyer escape, the Others prepare to execute her. Thanks to Jack’s efforts, Ben asks for Juliet’s sentence to be changed to branding. Why are Tom and Alax so shocked when the woman in charge says Juliet is to be marked? Branding is merely a not particularly serious physical punishment. They had no reason to be so astonished that Juliet was taking such a minor injury.
My guess is this: could the woman in charge’s explanation of “the eagle that strikes the sky” at the end of the episode—“he walks among us, but he is not one of us”—also refer to Juliet’s situation? Once marked, she would no longer be one of them. The Others have always been able to move freely through the jungle without being threatened by the island, but Juliet is later photographed and attacked by the Black Smoke. Although Juliet escapes the Black Smoke’s attack behind the sonic barrier, that barrier was built by the Dharma Initiative and wasn’t originally meant to protect the Others.
This suggests that after Juliet was marked, she was no longer automatically one of Jacob’s people. Maybe next season we’ll immediately see Juliet face a judgment like Mr. Eko’s.
The Dharma Initiative’s Invasion
Before the Dharma Initiative discovered the island, Richard and the other natives probably spent several hundred years living in a paradise cut off from the outside world. The Dharma Initiative was a mysterious research organization. Somehow, they discovered the island and began studying some of its unique properties.
A war then broke out between the Dharma Initiative and Jacob’s people. The Dharma Initiative had ways to resist Jacob’s divine power. For example, the sonic barrier could keep out the Black Smoke, which, judging from the first three seasons, seems to be the primary agent of Jacob’s (or the island’s) power.
But after a massacre, the Dharma Initiative was wiped out, and Ben, an outsider who had originally belonged to the Dharma Initiative, became one of Jacob’s people. Eventually, somehow, he became Jacob’s apostle.
The Price of Divine Grace
There is no such thing as a free lunch, even when the gift comes from God. Living forever on the island as one of the “perfect” people comes at a price. Viewers who have seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade may remember that after Jones finds the Holy Grail, the immortal knight guarding it tells him that drinking from the Grail can indeed grant eternal life, but its power is limited to the area inside the seal. The price of immortality is guarding the Holy Grail for all eternity.
This kind of plot device is common in stories of this type: divine grace always comes with conditions. Jacob’s gift is no different. The price of living forever on the island is that his people have permanently lost the ability to reproduce. Jacob allows only those he chooses to gain eternal life on the island, but he doesn’t allow them to create new life of their own. As a result, every pregnant woman on the island dies. Jacob doesn’t allow his people to nurture new life in the land he has given them.
A life that is eternal yet unable to create new life is undoubtedly made more precious. That is why Ben, Goodwin, Mikhail, and the others all react with such extreme fury when they hear that one of their own has been killed by the Flight 815 survivors.
LOST began by depicting the impermanence of life, and it may ultimately end by exploring the eternity of life.
Pregnant Women
The inability to reproduce was simply the fate God’s people had to endure. But Ben doesn’t see it that way. He wants both to live forever on the land God has given them as one of God’s people and to break that fate, turning the island into a truly ideal kingdom. The reason Ben is so desperate to break the curse may be revealed in a flashback in Season 4.
So Ben starts using equipment left behind by the Dharma Initiative to recruit fertility specialists from the outside world and study why pregnant women die on the island. That’s how Richard recruited Juliet to the island. In Juliet’s flashback in episode 7 of Season 3, XXX shows Juliet a set of X-rays. The X-rays show a 26-year-old woman with the uterus of a 70-year-old. This woman is obviously someone who became pregnant on the island.
The island’s original inhabitants and the researchers recruited later together make up the group everyone knows as the Others.
The trouble is, their research never produces any results.
Children
In fact, judging from what Seasons 1 and 2 reveal, the Others are interested in children as well as pregnant women. Whenever they get the chance, the Others kidnap children from among the Flight 815 survivors. What the Others want to find in the children has never been directly explained. But from Claire’s recovered memories after Ethan abducted her in Season 2, it appears that babies on the island really can be infected by a virus. And Ethan’s purpose in abducting Claire really was to inject her with a vaccine.
Is this virus also one of the prices of divine grace? Perhaps Jacob not only prevents women on the island from becoming pregnant, but doesn’t even allow babies to survive. The Others care so much about the island’s children because they’re trying to protect them, so they can survive safely and grow into adults? It seems the Others have found a way to keep children from paying the price of divine grace, while still being unable to free pregnant women from the “curse.”
The Imprisoned God
All the signs suggest that although Jacob is a godlike being, Ben has somehow managed to control him (perhaps with the strange powder around Jacob’s cabin). Ben may be controlling Jacob because he wants to occupy the unique position of apostle forever and become the de facto god.
Jacob certainly isn’t willing to remain Ben’s puppet, but he seems able to begin fighting back only in very limited ways. Ben, who is supposed to be unable to get sick as one of God’s people, suddenly discovers that he has a tumor. This is proof that God has begun to abandon him. But after only one day of panic, a tumor surgeon drops out of the sky, making Ben believe once again that he is still somehow under God’s protection, even if that god may not be Jacob. His conversation with Jack about whether God exists seems to come straight from the heart.
Flight 815 at the Bottom of the Sea
At the end of Season 3, Naomi, who drops out of the sky, says that the outside world has discovered the wreckage of Flight 815 in a trench off the coast of Bali, and that a probe has found the bodies of all the victims. The wreckage and the bodies inside it are of course fake. By placing the fake wreckage in a trench, they make it impossible to salvage, so the outside world has no way to determine whether the wreckage and bodies are genuine.
The forgers must be Ben and the others. They don’t want the island to be discovered accidentally by the outside world. If Flight 815 mysteriously disappeared over the Pacific, the outside world would inevitably pour enormous resources into searching for the victims, putting the island at risk of being found. So they created the appearance that Flight 815 had crashed in a trench.
Before communications at the Flame station were destroyed, Ben had enough power to remotely orchestrate major operations in the outside world.
Locke’s Threat
From the day Flight 815 crashed, the passengers were closely watched by the Others. It didn’t take long for them to notice one man in particular: John Locke. From the beginning, this man radiated a strong “apostle” quality. He seemed to have a special connection with the island; objectively, he was someone especially favored by it, and subjectively, he had an unshakable faith in the island’s power and will. We can infer that Ben came under intense pressure from the other Others. Richard and the others seem to have long resented Ben’s arbitrary rule and his obsession with researching pregnant women. Locke, who very likely has a stronger connection with Jacob than Ben does, offers Richard and the others hope of escaping Ben’s dictatorship. The rivalry between Ben and Locke becomes almost the main storyline of the second half of Season 3. Ben does everything he can to make people think Locke isn’t as special as he is, while Locke pulls out all the stops to get closer to the island’s core secrets.
Ben seems to have gone looking for Locke under pressure from the Others (as seen in Season 2). Although an accident leads to his capture by Rousseau, he still manages to meet Locke. But given Ben’s personality, he certainly isn’t going to sit around and share his unique position as God’s apostle with Locke, so he keeps looking for a chance to eliminate him. The best way to kill Locke while walking away clean is to make Locke “kill himself”!
The Swan Station Implosion
Then the opportunity arrives. During the malfunction at the Swan hatch, Ben, who of course knows the consequences of failing to press the button on time because he came from the Dharma Initiative, lies to Locke and says he never entered the sequence of numbers that releases the electrical charge. Locke falls for it, his faith begins to waver, and the Swan hatch ultimately implodes.
In The Mystery of the “Black Smoke”: LOST “Season 2.5” + A Summary of Season 3, Episodes 1–6, I argued that Ben deceived Locke in order to trigger the Swan hatch’s implosion. But at this point, it seems Ben may simply have wanted to use the implosion to kill Locke. As for the series of strange phenomena caused by the implosion, those must have been beyond Ben’s expectations.
The bizarre consequences of this implosion practically form the main storyline of Season 3. In this season, even Jack, the male lead, is somewhat pushed to the margins. The real core of the season revolves around Locke, Desmond, and Charlie. And those three, along with the prematurely deceased Eko, happen to be the survivors of that implosion!
Who rescued Mr. Eko, Locke, Desmond, and Charlie from the center of the implosion and caused all those bizarre consequences?
Let’s look at the consequences of the implosion:
(1) First, Mr. Eko. I already analyzed the cause of Mr. Eko’s death in The Mystery of the “Black Smoke.” Mr. Eko also left behind a stick bearing a “direction.”
(2) Next, Locke sees the “direction” on Mr. Eko’s stick. This “direction” guides Locke all the way to finding and blowing up the Flame station, and eventually blowing up the submarine.
(3) Then there is Desmond’s ability to see the future. Strangely, from beginning to end, Desmond only predicts events involving two people: Charlie and Locke, who happen to be the survivors of the implosion.
(4) As for Charlie, who should have been struck dead by lightning long ago, Desmond’s “help” keeps postponing his death, until he finally dies at the Looking Glass station. And the result of shutting down the Looking Glass station is that the island is finally discovered by the bad people in the outside world.
In the end, the ones who benefit from the bizarre consequences of the implosion turn out to be the bad people!
Through the directions he receives after the implosion, Locke destroys the good people’s means of communicating and traveling to the outside world. Although this seems to be what Ben wants too, Ben is nevertheless deeply wary of Locke. Ben probably wouldn’t actively summon Locke, so it seems he merely took advantage of these “accidents” to accomplish his own goals. The most important consequence of Desmond’s ability to see the future, meanwhile, is that it keeps postponing Charlie’s death until Charlie’s death allows the bad people to discover the island’s location.
If Jacob rescued the four of them from the center of the implosion and caused these events to happen, does that mean this was also Jacob’s way of striking back at Ben? If all this was Jacob’s will, then Jacob wouldn’t have needed to make Locke, waiting to die in the Dharma Initiative’s grave pit, stop Jack from contacting the bad people.
So the directions Locke saw on Eko’s stick after the implosion, along with Desmond’s ability to see the future, could only have been given to them by the bad people!
If that’s the case, then above the bad people, is there also a god as powerful and elusive as Jacob, a being who similarly stands above the good people? During the implosion, the outside world was briefly able to see the island. Penny could see it, and of course the bad people could too. Could they have used that fleeting moment, drawing on a power like Jacob’s, to influence Desmond and the others, causing these people, without realizing it, to somehow help the bad people find the island?
Desmond’s Dream
Take Desmond’s gift of prophecy. After the implosion, Desmond experienced an extremely realistic flashback. In it, a mysterious old woman told Desmond that he had to return to the island and push the button, or everyone would die (the old woman’s appearance isn’t important; she was “generated” from the appearance of a person in a photograph on the abbot’s table at the monastery, as remembered by Desmond). She also said, “The universe has its own course corrections.” In fact, this was a classic case of pretending to retreat in order to advance: on the surface, the old woman seemed to be telling Desmond not to change the rules of the universe and to let Charlie die. But in reality, it kept showing Desmond images of Charlie’s death. If a force like Jacob’s can see through people’s minds and memories, manipulating Desmond would be child’s play. It had calculated that Desmond would never refuse to save Charlie—unless Desmond believed Charlie’s death could save everyone!
So, after Charlie “died” in one accident after another, the images in Desmond’s flash-forwards increasingly began to look as though they had been arranged for some purpose. Charlie had “died” by accident every time before, but in the end he died according to the “arrangement” shown in Desmond’s flash-forward. Doesn’t that strike you as highly suspicious?
In this way, the bad people used Desmond and Charlie indirectly to remove the greatest obstacle to landing on the island.
The bad people may well possess that kind of power, because Ben even said this to Mikhail: “This island is threatened by forces stronger than anything.”
The Identity of the Bad People
Ben has always stressed that the Others are the good people, the ones who protect this island, while there are other people coveting its power. Ben calls those people the bad people. So who are the bad people?
The following clues may give us some hints:
(1) Naomi, who dropped from the sky, knew about Penny and Desmond’s relationship and used it as a pretext to win the trust of the 815 survivors. Naomi also knew that Penny was looking for Desmond; she even had a photograph of Penny and Desmond together.
(2) Penny clearly knows some secrets about the island, as well as ways to detect its location; she even knew that Desmond was on the island, to the extent that she had hired people long ago to monitor magnetic anomalies around the world in order to pinpoint its location.
(3) Penny’s father, Mr. Widmore, enjoys funding all kinds of round-the-world voyages. At least two of the vessels he funded entered this island: Desmond’s ship and Henry Gale’s hot-air balloon.
(4) There is a drawing of a polar bear in Mr. Widmore’s office.
If these things are not coincidences, then it is almost certain that Penny’s father, Mr. Widmore, is an important member of the bad people. The round-the-world voyages he funded were merely a cover for searching for the island’s location. Penny must have learned some of the island’s secrets from her father, without knowing that her actions were being monitored by him. Could the bad people have close ties to the Dharma Initiative of those days?
Ben claims that if the island is discovered by the bad people, everyone on it will be killed. It looks as though, in Season 4, all of this is about to come true. I expect Season 4 of LOST to go through another variation, with “the bad people” becoming its theme.
Epilogue
Bloodshed and turmoil are about to descend. The 815 survivors think they have already seen true evil, but they haven’t! Unless they defend this divinely granted land together with the good people, they will helplessly die in this originally immortal kingdom…
Leave a Reply