[This is a retrospective and a set of theories written after the end of Season 5, Episode 8 of LOST, with major spoilers. If you haven't watched through S05E08, enter at your own risk!]
With the fifth season of LOST now past its halfway point, the writers have once again proved that they are gods, while ordinary mortals like us can only gaze up in awe and guess at nothing. After Season 4 ended, I wrote an absurdly long The Crazy Diamond LOST Book of Mysteries, confidently analyzing the writers’ sources of inspiration and the direction of parts of the story. As things look now, apart from a few points that haven’t been verified yet, I was wrong about almost everything. Still, I’ll keep analyzing the show shamelessly in the future. Heh. For now, here are some scattered thoughts on the first half of Season 5.
1. The four-toed statue is almost certainly THOTH
In The Crazy Diamond LOST Book of Mysteries, Part One: The Island’s True Origins, I inferred from the connection between the legend of Atlantis and ancient Egyptian mythology that the four-toed statue was very likely the god Thoth (THOTH). The complete statue shown from behind in S05E08 pretty much confirms my theory. The four-toed statue is almost certainly THOTH—the high priest in the legend of Atlantis, and the god of wisdom in ancient Egyptian mythology.
This is the back of the statue shown in S05E08:
This is the comic-book version. Notice the headdress—it matches the back of the statue in S05E08:
This is the usual mural version. Egyptian gods seem to favor standing with one foot in front of the other, which matches the back of the statue in S05E08:
This picture shows the divine object THOTH is holding. Notice the thing in his hand. Looks familiar, right?—
This is the amulet Amy took off her husband’s corpse:
In the picture of the back of the statue in S05E08, only part of the ring-shaped object in its right hand is visible. It should be this same object:
This is an excavated ancient Egyptian artifact, a THOTH pottery figure. Just imagine what this pottery figure would look like from behind—I’d say it’s about a 90 percent match:
Comparing the two pictures above, the slight difference seems to be that in the picture of the statue’s back from S05E08, there is an extra piece on top of its head. This is very likely the support for a headdress; the headdress is gone, leaving only the support. A lot of Egyptian gods have something perched on their heads:
Now take another look at the hieroglyphic spelling of THOTH’s name. Uncannily familiar, isn’t it?—
Since I got most of the other guesses in my Book of Mysteries more or less wrong, let me enjoy being right about this one for once. Heh.
2. Jack’s dad was an insider all along?
In Season 5, Locke takes the place of Jack’s dad, Christian, from Flight 815 and boards Flight 316. To increase the odds of entering the island through the correct “window,” Hawking wants as many of the people from Flight 815 as possible to board 316, so Locke’s corpse has to come along too—and it doubles as a cosplay version of Christian from back then.
Calling in everyone who went to the island back then in order to increase the odds of entering through the correct “window” is strikingly similar to my theory in The Crazy Diamond LOST Book of Mysteries, Part Three: A Brief History of the Fall that the people on Flight 815 all had connections or similarities to Locke, thereby increasing the odds of getting Locke onto the island. I guess I accidentally hit on a tiny piece of the truth.
This time, on the surface, Locke is cosplaying Christian. But we can turn it around and look at Christian through Locke. Since Locke returned to the island this time through self-sacrifice, did Christian do the same thing back then? Maybe Christian didn’t go to Australia out of frustration to visit his illegitimate daughter at all. Maybe he actually went to say goodbye to her!
The show still hasn’t directly explained why Christian became depressed, drank himself silly, and died such a bizarre death. As Jack’s mother put it, the children’s father was carrying a burden Jack couldn’t understand. What exactly was that burden? Did Christian accept some mission he could barely bear, and become miserable because of it? The drinking and the failed surgery may both have been the results of him coming apart under that pressure. If this theory is right, Christian did not simply die by accident in Australia and then happen to end up on the plane. What he did was essentially what Locke later did—sacrificing himself to bring certain people to the island!
Christian did not end up on the island and die as a ghost because of a “coincidence,” only to be “coincidentally” chosen by Jacob as his proxy. He was an insider all along!
In fact, he may even have been the previous leader before Widmore. When he was young, he may have been raised and trained on the island alongside Widmore and the other children who were candidates for leadership. Later, for reasons unknown, he was replaced as Jacob’s proxy and the leader of the TO, then driven off the island. Only after that did he begin his life off the island.
If my theory in The Crazy Diamond LOST Book of Mysteries, Part Three: A Brief History of the Fall is correct—that the connections among the people on Flight 815 were intended to increase the odds of getting Locke onto the island—then the most important person among them may have been Christian, who had once served as Jacob’s proxy. In other words, when Jacob or Richard secretly tried to get Locke onto the island behind Ben’s back, they remembered that Christian, once Jacob’s proxy, could perform his final act of loyalty to the island by sacrificing himself to get Locke there. (Clearly, self-sacrifice was not merely about increasing Locke-like “scent” for the island to detect; the meaning of Christian’s and, later, Locke’s self-sacrifice is still unclear, and the writers should explain it eventually.) So the inner turmoil Christian went through back then was exactly the same as what Locke went through later when he was desperate and preparing to kill himself. That is also why Christian drank and failed at surgery. In the end, I think it is quite possible that, like Locke, he only made up his mind to sacrifice himself at the very last moment.
Of course, the mission was completed, and Locke successfully arrived. So Christian, the former proxy, naturally became a temporary proxy once again under the special circumstances of Jacob’s proxy being unavailable. That is why Christian’s ghost has such a different status from the other ghosts. It’s even possible that Christian, like the later Locke, was resurrected. But Locke really looks resurrected, whereas Christian feels a little more like a ghost.
3. The real bad people still haven’t appeared?
In Season 5, Widmore tells Locke that war is coming. Whose war, exactly, and against whom? My gut says the war Widmore is talking about is not a war between him and Ben. These two may be sworn enemies, but I keep feeling that their goals—possessing and protecting the island—are the same. They just happen to be a little more obvious about their desire to possess it. Even if Ben is this bad, even if he means harm to everyone else, he does not mean harm to the island.
So I think the real bad people may not have appeared yet. Will Widmore, Ben, and everyone on the island eventually have to face an unimaginably powerful enemy together? Who could this enemy be, an enemy that has even a powerful man like Widmore so worried?—That’s just my gut feeling; I have no idea what the answer is.
These are just some fragmentary thoughts from the middle of Season 5. I’ll continue with the rest after the season ends.
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