![The Final Judgment — A Review and Preview of LOST Season 5 Part 1 [Doomsday]](https://weizhichao.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/55353-1024x640.jpg)
[This is a review and theory piece about the plot after the end of LOST Season 5, with major spoilers. If you haven't finished the first five seasons, enter at your own risk!]
The piece I wrote at the end of Season 4, The Book of Revelations, which I proudly called my most glorious theory so far in this life, now looks mostly, completely off the mark. Embarrassing. The writers’ plans for LOST’s architecture were far grander than my guesses.
The furthest off was that, even after watching the island vanish right before my eyes at the end of Season 4, I never once analyzed the story from the perspective of time travel. Plenty of friends had long suggested using theories of time-space travel to explain LOST, but I always refused to go there, because almost every time-travel story is logically hard to make self-consistent: the more closely you examine it, the deeper you fall into an endless loop of causal paradoxes. And yet, in my mind, LOST ought to have a wonderfully perfect logical system. I really didn’t want to see it trap itself in that kind of logical black hole. Sadly, I was wrong.
The theory in The Book of Revelations that the island originated in Atlantis still seems worth keeping on the table. After all, the connection between Atlantean and Egyptian civilizations is frequently mentioned in popular legends, and much of the evidence I offered back then still holds up. Based on the connection between the two civilizations, I speculated that the statue might be the Egyptian god Thoth. That turned out to be wrong, but I suppose it still counts as an early analysis correctly guessing that the statue was an Egyptian god.
After LOST Season 5 ended, I originally wanted to write an article sorting through the writers’ sources of inspiration, because ever since Season 4 ended I’ve been fascinated by how they came up with this story. But that would require digging through a lot of material on American cultural trends, social movements, literature, and film and television from the 1960s to the 1980s—and I simply don’t have the time or energy right now. Hopefully, after the series finale of LOST, I’ll have the energy to write it. For now, I can only organize and speculate based on the plot itself.
This article is mostly a summary of questions. Friends hoping for deductions like those in The Book of Revelations may be disappointed—like Supreme Treasure’s second sneeze.
Jacob’s Purpose
Let’s start by taking a look at Jacob.
After Season 3 ended, I said the island was a “God-given land,” and nobody cared. Now that Season 5 has ended, I don’t think anyone doubts that LOST is a story about a struggle among gods.
A lot of friends now think this story is really just a bet between Jacob and the Man in Black, with humanity as the miserable pawns in their hands. So Jacob and the Man in Black are both rotten, toying with the poor 815ers just to prove themselves right. But is that really what is happening?
Why does Jacob need to prove that humans don’t always “fight, destroy, and corrupt”? What is the point? Is it merely to spite the Man in Black? Many friends take it for granted that the bet exists only because two gods are fighting, and conclude from that that the two gods are vile for ignoring human free will. But what if this bet isn’t merely the result of Jacob’s competitive streak, and instead serves a very important purpose? If that purpose is so enormous that the suffering and cost paid by the humans chosen as pawns are still worth it in comparison, then this bet can hardly be called evil. If such a purpose exists, Jacob’s arrangement of the bet is practically an act of painstaking care.
I think Jacob does have such a purpose.
Although it’s hard to guess what Jacob is actually trying to do, judging from the Season 5 finale, Jacob doesn’t seem like a god who toys with humans. In almost every encounter with an 815er, you can feel his sincerity; looking into his eyes, I think you can even sum it up in two words: compassion. That compassionate look didn’t change even when he faced Ben, who was about to kill him. I have never believed Jacob was a god who toys with humanity.
So what exactly is this compassionate god trying to do?
Wait. Before that, we have to solve another question—how sure are we that Jacob is a god?
Actually, I don’t think he is!
At the very least, he is definitely not God in the Christian sense, the master of all creation.
Does everyone remember that key mysterious line from Season 3?—
God loves you as he loved Jacob！
God will love you as He loved Jacob!
That line appeared in the brainwashing video, Karl said it, and Ben used it to intimidate Juliet. From the limited clues available at the time, it seemed to be the sacred maxim the Others used to support their faith. In fact, it was basically the Others’ “hallelujah,” “amen,” or “may Buddha protect us.”
If God loves Jacob, then Jacob presumably shouldn’t be God.
Here’s another piece of evidence: in the Season 5 finale, we saw Jacob living beneath the Statue of Taweret, weaving a tapestry. What was he weaving? A scene of people worshiping a god: above them on the tapestry was a hybrid of the Egyptian gods Ma’at and Ra, and below was a group of people worshiping them. If Jacob himself were a god, he’d be impressively narcissistic.
We can certainly understand the feeling of celebrities practicing their signatures at home and fantasizing about being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. But can you imagine Buddha secretly molding a statue of Buddha out of clay in his house?
So I figure that any god with even a little ambition or spiritual depth wouldn’t do something so embarrassingly self-admiring. (The promiscuous Greek gods are, of course, outside the scope of this discussion.)
If the two theories above make some sense, then the identities of Jacob and the Man in Black become rather questionable.
What exactly are Jacob and the Man in Black? I think they aren’t gods, but people very close to gods. You can call them “apostles” or “immortals”; they may possess some of the gods’ powers, and may even be able to influence the gods. But the key point is that they aren’t the masters of this world. The fate of this world isn’t theirs to decide.
God loves you as he loved Jacob! God is the Big Boss.
At this point, I can finally state my theory. The bet between Jacob and the Man in Black isn’t really about Jacob proving something to the Man in Black. Just as the two sides of a debate may argue themselves red in the face, the point of the argument isn’t really to convince each other, but to convince the judge watching coldly from the side. Jacob started this contest with the Man in Black not to convince him, but to put on a show for the Big Boss. What Jacob really wants is to prove to the Big Boss that humans don’t always “fight, destroy, and corrupt.”
Why is Jacob so eager to prove this? If Jacob can’t prove it, what will the Big Boss do?
My theory about this is pretty outrageous, and the evidence amounts to a tiny handful of crumbs.
First, look at the conversation between Jacob and the Man in Black—
JACOB: You are wrong.
The Man in Black: Am I? They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.
JACOB: It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.
Pay attention to the bold parts. After the Man in Black says, “It always ends the same,” Jacob’s answer is very strange. By normal logic, Jacob should rebut him with something like, “I’ll prove it won’t end that way next time.” But Jacob says: “It only ends once, and anything that happens before that is just the process.”
What does “it only ends once” mean? Clearly, it doesn’t make sense.
Actually, if we translate it another way, the whole conversation becomes perfectly coherent. Jacob’s answer is really: “There is only one true ending. Before that true ending arrives, everything is just part of the process.”
In other words, Jacob doesn’t directly refute the Man in Black’s conclusion. He points out that the endings the Man in Black describes aren’t the true ending. There is only one true ending. Before it, everything is just part of the process, and nothing has been decided yet!
So my theory is this: Jacob’s job is to prevent the arrival of the “true ending.” If Jacob can’t prove that humans don’t always “fight, destroy, and corrupt,” then the true ending will arrive.
What is this true ending? I think the Big Boss is about to make a move against all humanity!
That’s right: the final ending Jacob refers to in “it only ends once” is the “final judgment” of humanity by God, as depicted in many religions!
The final judgment is coming, and all Jacob wants to do is prove to the Big Boss that humanity isn’t beyond saving, that it hasn’t fallen so far that it needs to face the final judgment.
This is a pretty outrageous theory, and I don’t have much reliable evidence for it. But I think Jacob’s experiments and bet only make sense if they serve an “important purpose” on this scale, rather than him having nothing better to do than mess with people for fun.
Jacob believes that before the final judgment arrives, everything is still in process and everything can still be salvaged. So he keeps sampling humanity, hoping to use the ideal results from his experiments to prove that humanity as a whole need not be judged. The science-fiction writer Cixin Liu has a short story called The Village Teacher, about a few human samples saving the fate of all humanity through their performance. I think Jacob may be doing the same thing.
How large were Jacob’s various experiments—did he look only at the 815ers, or at the combined performance of 815 and the Others? How were the results judged? There is too little evidence to say. But one thing is certain: for this experiment to be valid, a demigod like Jacob must not exert any significant influence over the subjects’ behavior. That may be one reason Jacob has always played mysterious. From the limited clues, his previous experiments failed, such as the Black Rock. But those earlier failures don’t matter. As long as he gets one chance before doomsday to prove to the Big Boss that humanity isn’t beyond saving, that may be enough. Judgment is just around the corner. 815 may be Jacob’s last experimental opportunity. The performance of this final selected sample, 815, may ultimately determine the fate of all humanity. In the scenes where Jacob meets the 815ers, I feel his high hopes for them. This is Jacob’s last chance—and humanity’s. Miss this one, and humanity may be headed inevitably toward doomsday judgment.
This is how the Bible records the “final judgment”:
"God has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness through Jesus Christ, for the Father has given all judgment to Him. On that day, not only will the fallen angels be judged, but everyone living on earth will appear before Christ's judgment seat and give an account of their thoughts, words, and deeds, receiving according to what they have done in the flesh, whether good or evil."
"God appointed this day to display the glory of His mercy in the eternal salvation of the elect, and His justice in the eternal punishment of those who reject Him in evil and rebellion. Then the righteous will enter eternal life and receive the fullness of joy and glory from the Lord; but the wicked, who do not know God and do not obey Jesus Christ, will be cast into everlasting torment, separated from the presence of the Lord and the glory of His power, and punished with eternal destruction."
Sounds like a barrel of laughs, doesn’t it?
Since this theory is already pretty unreliable, I might as well make it even less reliable: I theorize that the date of doomsday judgment is December 22, 2012 (don’t ask me why ╯□╰). So Jacob and 815 don’t have much time left.
There may be one more bit of circumstantial evidence for the theory that Jacob’s purpose is to save humanity from the doomsday judgment: the Dharma Initiative. I’ll continue analyzing that in Part 2.
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