Uncharted Island

It drove me crazy that we never got to know who was in that coffin. We never got a really clear shot of the obituary that Jack ripped out of the newspaper. Well, that’s not entirely true. Some clever folks with TiVo and hi-def grabbed some screencaps to try and make sense of it all. But the props and editing folks were on the ball, and made it difficult to draw any real conclusions.

Facts revealed to the casual LOST viewer:

• No one showed up to the funeral except for Jack, who said he was neither friend nor family.
• The coffin looked small.

From the first part, we know it cannot be Claire or Christian in the coffin. (I know, Christian is supposed to be dead. But there are those who think he’s not.) Because Jack talks to Kate after the funeral, we know it’s not her either. From the second part, it’s not likely to be Hurley. We’re looking at the coffin’s occupant being either a child, someone really short, or someone who ends up as an amputee. Because of the [remote] possibility of an amputation, this really doesn’t rule anyone out.

We get a little bit more information dangled in front of us from an insider who leaked the text of the obituary, which admittedly may be a hoax.

What did we learn from this, the devout fans who scour the internet for this type of thing? (Assuming this information is legitimate, of course.)

• John Lantham, the alias of the dead guy, is from New York.
• He is survived by a teenage son.
• He appeared to have hung himself.
• He is a man.

The only concrete evidence this gives us is that the coffin is not occupied by a woman. A lot of people jumped to the conclusion that it’s most likely Ben, because he’s short and would be an obvious choice for having no friends to attend his funeral. Who would be his teenage son, though? I find it unlikely that he’d let Karl masquerade as his son if they both ended up off the island.

Other people think it may be Sawyer, but I think Sawyer is the “he” that Kate has to get back to.

I think the dead guy in the coffin is Michael. Assuming he and Walt didn’t perish in the open sea, he probably wouldn’t want to use his real name and draw attention to the fact that he was supposed to be dead in a plane crash. There would be far too many questions that he just doesn’t have the answer for. Let’s not forget that he murdered a few people in cold blood. It would be far harder for any of his fellow survivors to identify him if they should ever get rescued. Although it wouldn’t appear that any of them would want to attach themselves to the plane crash anyway, and certainly not to anything that happened on the island. They’ve all done things they’re not proud of.

Michael wouldn’t have many friends from the island because of his killings and because he betrayed them to the Others in order to leave with Walt. He has a teenage son that wouldn’t have to be contrived. And he’d likely have a lot of issues that could drive him to suicide - perhaps guilty feelings, perhaps estrangement from his son.

If I were a betting woman, my money would be on Michael. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

In “The Man Behind the Curtain,” we saw Ben unflinchingly murder his father with a nasty nerve gas, part of a greater plot that exterminated his fellow members of Dharma in the same horrifying manner. The systematic destruction of an entire people - genocide. Haunting echoes of the gas chambers used by the Nazis.

In “Through the Looking Glass,” Ben became even more Hitler-like. He ordered Tom and the Others sent to the beach to kill any of the castaways who got in the way of kidnapping the pregnant women. When he finally got radio contact with Tom after he met up with Jack and the crew, he ordered him to shoot Sayid, Jin, and Bernard. Although it’s a bit confusing, since Ryan told Tom it was on order they had to follow, and Tom muses they should’ve shot the men instead of the sand. Were we not privy to a previous order to shoot in the sand instead, that he was going to bluff Jack? In any case, Ryan was very clear about following Ben’s orders.

Bonnie tried to explain to Mikhail that she and Greta were following Ben’s orders. But Mikhail turns it back on her, confessing that he’s only following Ben’s orders by killing both women. He is a “loyalist” to Ben, he follows Ben’s orders to preserve Ben’s secret. And he follows through by pulling the pin on the grenade to finish off Charlie, since he wasn’t able to shoot him, possibly sacrificing himself in the process.

A lot of people who were not inherently bad people did a lot of terrible things by following orders. A famous psychological study by Stanley Milgram attempted to explain how ordinary Nazi soldiers could’ve senselessly killed so many innocent people based on Hitler’s orders. And what Milgram found was a horrifying glance at human nature; ordinary Americans, instructed by an experimenter in a lab coat, administered what they believed to be a lethal dose of electric shock to a man they believed to have a heart condition - just because they were told to. (I knew my Master’s degree in Psychology would come in handy some day.) People will follow dubious orders from an authority figure. And authority figures with as much charisma as Hitler or the character of Ben can get people to follow far more sinister orders.

The creators of LOST have gone to some lengths to make sure we acknowledge the similarities between Ben and Hitler. I believe that. For one thing, Hitler was not a member of his ideal Aryan race, blond haired and blue eyed. Ben was not a member of the group of Hostiles he came to lead; he was a member of the group he helped to murder.

It’s all very disturbing.

I do wonder if Ben will meet the same fate in the end, if he’ll end up taking his own life. I guess that’s one more argument for Ben being in the coffin in the flash forward in the season three finale; the man in the coffin killed himself.

Apparently the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Jack’s father, Christian Shepard, was a raging alcoholic. Jack, in his post-island future, guzzles liquor and pops stolen pain pills like candy. And let’s not forget that he almost jumped off a bridge - and not even into water, it looked like concrete down below. He was certainly ready to die.

On the island, we know that Jack has made contact with Naomi’s boat. We don’t know who is on that boat, their motivations, what their instructions are… we don’t know what’s going to happen. The crash survivors believe they are going to be rescued. With three seasons to go, we know it can’t be as simple as that. Something bad is going to go down.

How many more of our survivors are going to die before anyone leaves the island? Charlie is the latest casualty, and Jack doesn’t even know about that yet. Although he admitted it was a suicide mission from the beginning. Could survivor’s guilt be enough to push Jack to this bleak future?

Or maybe the rescue that Jack longed for so much turned out to be like Hurley’s lottery winnings. Maybe what he thought was going to be such a good thing only led to negative consequences for the people around him. We don’t know who was in that coffin, but we know that Jack considered himself neither friend nor family. And yet he felt compelled to make an appearance. How many other funerals had he been to recently?

Whatever has happened, Kate doesn’t seem to have been affected by it. Is it because Jack was the leader, and therefore feels responsible for everything that happened? Is it because of the call he made that both Ben and Locke told him not to make? Maybe there’s going to be more blood on his hands than we know.

One thing is for sure, we’re going to have another three intense seasons to find out what happens in between the on-island “now” and the off-island future.

Damon and Carlton have been messing with viewers for quite a while about the issue of time. And this apparent “flash forward” only complicates matters even worse.

If all of those scenes with ugly-bearded Jack are supposed to take place after he gets off the island, we’re left with a few important questions. For one thing, who was in that coffin? But I’m going to have a separate blog entry on that. Also, what happened to Jack after the on-island events we’ve seen to turn him into a pill-popping bridge jumper? That’s another blog entry as well. For another thing, why does Jack talk about his father like his father is still alive?

The Christian Shepard issue has been long debated. Some fans want to believe that Christian is still alive because his coffin was empty when Jack found it in the jungle. I don’t think that. But even so, could Jack’s father be alive in this future scenario? I very much want to believe that time travel is not an issue here. But perhaps there is some alternate timeline in which Christian survived. It’s a possibility I don’t necessarily like, but I won’t write it off just yet.

More than likely, Jack talks about Christian as if he’s alive because he’s hopped up on pain pills and booze. His reaction when the pharmacist picked up the phone to call his father’s office was consistent with knowing he’d be caught in the lie. It’s possible that Jack is messed up enough to truly believe his father is alive at times, and other times just lie about it.

But another wrench in the works is the golden pass that allows Jack and Kate to fly free for life. After Flight 815 crashed, Oceanic Airlines ceased operations. But as we saw in the first flash forward, Jack was flying first class on an Oceanic flight. This again begs the question concerning alternate timelines. Could Desmond really have changed things in the past so that Oceanic never went out of business? So that Christian was still alive?

This may be the thing that we all obsess the most over as we wait impatiently for season four to start in 2008.

Be sure to check out the newest version of the LOST Character Relationships Chart, now up to date until the end of season three.

I’ve made a number of visual improvements in addition to adding new connections and removing some superfluous ones. The green and blue lines are now closer to primary colors, and hopefully they’re easier to follow that way. I removed the clunky “T” for Tailie, “O” for Other, and “RIP” for dead characters because they just looked a bit ridiculous that way. We only have Bernard left for the Tailies, and the line between who’s an Other and who isn’t keeps becoming less and less clear. Instead of using “RIP” I’ve decided to gray out any character who we know to be dead.

As always, let me know if I’ve missed any significant connections, or if you think there are some that I could remove to make it easier to read.

Charlie’s dying act was to warn Desmond that Naomi’s boat was not Penny’s boat. If Penny Widmore did not send Naomi to look for Desmond, then who did?

The popular thought, as there really isn’t evidence enough for anything to be considered a theory at this point, is that Naomi is working for Penny’s father, Charles Widmore. Charles wanted to keep Desmond away from his daughter at all costs. He must know that Penny’s been looking for him all this time. It makes sense that he wanted to beat her to it. Chances are, he had a pretty good idea where to look for him. And maybe Ben was right about this - calling Naomi’s boat wasn’t going to bring the happy rescue they’re all hoping for. If Widmore finds them, he may want to kill Desmond so there’s no chance of him reuniting with Penny - and he may not care about taking out the Flight 815 survivors as collateral damage.

Who are some other likely candidates? Alvar Hanso. Mr. Paik. They would have the means, but that wouldn’t explain why Naomi had the picture of Desmond and Penny. No, I think that I’m going to put my money on Charles Widmore for this one.

My husband raised a good question that I don’t have a good answer for yet. Did Alex give Locke the gun because she knew he would need to defend himself? Or did she know that Ben would grab it and use it on Locke, hence the “Happy birthday, Dad?”

“God loves you as he loved Jacob.”

That was one of the frames on the screen Karl was forced to watch in Room 23.

Jacob also had a list, and Jack was not on it. There has been much speculation about Jacob since he was first mentioned on LOST. There was speculation about him even before his name was first mentioned… more correctly, speculation about Him.

Did “The Man Behind the Curtain” really give us answers about Jacob?

Some people seem to think that everything witnessed in Jacob’s cabin was more of Ben’s smoke and mirrors, possibly assisted by Richard or someone else, since Ben made a big point of telling everyone where they were going. I’ll admit that I thought Ben was more than a little bit crazy talk to an empty chair for a while. But when Locke heard the voice, I did believe it to be Jacob’s voice. The fans who managed to grab a screencap of Jacob’s profile helped confirm that in my mind. I tried not to blink during the scene, but I certainly never saw Jacob in the chair until I signed on to read the fan forums.

So who - or what - is Jacob?

Some people believe that Jacob is a ghost or a spirit. The dust on the ground that Locke had stopped to check out may have been ash used as a binding circle to keep the ghost inside. I’m not sure I hold with this theory. My first thought was that the dust was powder from the dynamite that Danielle was swiping from the Black Rock. Ben could’ve been taking it as well. But I won’t completely count this out as a possibility. After all, Jacob was invisible to Locke and to us for all but a fraction of a second. Without TiVo, I don’t think any of us would’ve known he was there at all.

But does that hold with the interviews given by Damon and Carlton saying that the show would remain grounded in science and pseudoscience?

Ben’s original bit about how no one else had ever seen or spoken to Jacob did make him sound like his imaginary friend, but it became apparent that Jacob only reveals himself to those he chooses. How does he do this? He appears invisible somehow. Is this because he does not have substantial corporeal form, or because he is able to bend the light around himself so you can’t see him even if you’re looking right at him? He “speaks” to people telepathically. Is this a choice, or does he not have an audible voice? When Locke “heard” Jacob, I was reminded of reading the character of Death in Neil Gaiman’s books, where there aren’t any quotation marks to denote speech. He would’ve said HELP ME to Locke… in capital letters, denoting a voice that comes from everywhere and nowhere.

Whatever he is, it’s possible that Jacob is Ben’s prisoner. Perhaps that ash line really does confine him to the spooky hermit shack. Is that why he said HELP ME to Locke? Or was it, as I’ve seen suggested, an interrupted thought, such as HELP ME GET RID OF THIS ANNOYING LITTLE GNAT?

That line of dust does seem to me like it should have some significance, but it really opposes my own personal concept of Jacob. My first thought, which I admit is hard to shake, is that Jacob is what we’ve been referring to as Smokey. If the dust or ash keeps Jacob confined, then he cannot be Smokey. But I’m going to ignore the dust for now, and explain my line of thinking.

The way Ben first described Him when he was a prisoner in the Swan hatch made Him sound like a great and terrible man. Unforgiving. Harsh. The Others certainly seemed intimidated by Jacob even though they’d never met him. And what do we know about Smokey? We don’t know what Smokey physically is, but great and terrible certainly seems to fit the bill. It seems to have a consciousness. It came face to face with Locke, killed Mr. Eko, threatened Kate and Juliet… among many other incidents. I hate to take a comic book approach, but maybe Jacob was a man who came to draw too much of the island’s mysterious power, and now he can take on the form of this shape-shifting smoke creature. Or - and this could accommodate for the binding circle that keeps Jacob in - Smokey answers to Jacob, like a familiar, and serves as Jacob’s scout and servant while he is imprisoned.

Much more discussion is sure to come, as more fans come together to brainstorm, and more secrets are revealed.

After seeing the carnage of the orchestrated gas attack, it’s hard to see how Ben can possibly think that his group is really made up of the “good guys” he claims they are. The castaways versus Others fatality tally really doesn’t matter anymore. We know now that the Others brutally murdered a whole town full of hippies. Would the term genocide apply in this case? I’m not quite sure.

Ben was exposed as a liar from the moment we first met him. He had claimed to be Henry Gale; he had an elaborate backstory that was entirely believable until Sayid and company dug up the grave containing the body of the real Henry Gale. Now we know the extent and depth of his lies. Everyone he’s recruited believes he was born on the island. Why is that so important to him for them to believe that? What would happen if they knew the truth? And more importantly, why hasn’t Richard come out and exposed him for the fraud he is? He gave Locke a means to take Ben down, but he has some damning information of his own. Does he keep Ben’s secret because it would also expose him as a murderer?

I get that Ben was screwed up by his drunk father’s bitterness over his mother’s death and being pigeonholed as a janitor when he thought he was going to be doing something more glamorous on the island. But even that doesn’t explain why he became the monster he is now. Sawyer’s daddy issues are far worse, but he only wanted to kill one man because of it, not a whole village full of people. I wonder if the grown-up Annie had left the island at the time of the Purge, or if Ben allowed her to become a mere casualty.

I was right about one thing, Ben does believe, in some way, that he was reborn after the Purge. He told Locke that that’s where he came from. I guess it’s the truth… from a certain, rather twisted point of view.

And what about Ben’s connection with Jacob? Who or what Jacob is will be the subject of another entry. But Ben certainly looked like a raving lunatic talking to an invisible Jacob, from Locke’s perspective. But then Locke heard Jacob, too. And that’s when Ben lost it. Ben had told Locke that no one else has ever seen Jacob. Apparently that’s because Jacob had never wanted to show himself to anyone else. Ben jealously guarded that honor. I think he shot Locke because he couldn’t stand that Jacob had chosen to reveal himself to someone else. After Locke told him what Jacob had said, it looked as if Ben wondered if shooting Locke had been a mistake, but maybe it just confirmed his need to eliminate the competition.

I want to know why Richard and the other “Hostiles,” the island natives, allowed Ben to step into the role of leader. They had obviously been there for quite some time. It had to be more than just his help in the systematic extermination of Dharma from their island. Was it because of Jacob? I guess it’s with that question that I leave this Ben-centered piece to start working on some Jacob speculation.

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?  Locke’s father is shaping up to be the big bad guy here on LOST.  We got to know him as Anthony Cooper.  But he’s also gone by Adam Seward.  For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to him mainly as Cooper.

What’s in a name?

Cooper (noun) - a person who makes or repairs casks, barrels, etc.

Sawyer (noun) - a person who saws wood.

Seward didn’t have a similar definition, as I first thought it did, but it does sound similar to Sawyer.  Many fans have long speculated that Locke’s father is the “real Sawyer” who slept with James Ford’s mother.  Considering the importance of names on LOST, it would make sense for the con man to choose similar pseudonyms.

The big baddie

It was bad enough when the man conned his own son out of a kidney.  It was sick and twisted, but it was at least self-preservation. Literally.  He would’ve died without a new kidney.  It was bad when he faked his own death and convinced John to get the money from the safe deposit box for him, only to be ambushed by thugs.

When Peter Talbot ended up dead, I thought that Cooper may have paid someone to take him out.  But when he took a running start to push his own son out an eighth story plate glass window… killing Peter Talbot would’ve been nothing to him.  He is bad.  Evil might not be too strong a word.

This helps the case for Cooper being Sawyer, the man who was responsible for a murder-suicide that scarred a little boy for life.  Cooper is not just a con man.  He’s a very good con man.  And he was willing to murder his future son-in-law and his own son - even though the second attempt failed - to keep his cover. He is narcissistic.  Ruthless.  Is there anything good about this man?

The Man from Tallahassee

“Bring me the man from Tallahassee,” Ben said. Locke wanted to know if it was some sort of code word.  It was, just not how he had assumed.  Ben didn’t want to tip his hand too soon and reveal that he had Cooper before Locke blew up the submarine for him.  Locke wouldn’t have known that Cooper ever ended up in Tallahassee; the police detectives told him in the hospital that he could’ve been anywhere in the world.  And they really meant anywhere.  But before turning up at the ends of the Earth here on the island, he first made a stop in Tallahassee.

What was Cooper doing in Tallahassee?  Dodging the authorities, for one thing.  Did the Mittelos recruiting team of Ethan Rom and Richard Alpert swing by Tallahassee after picking Juliet up in Miami?  They certainly could find a place for a man with Cooper’s talent for lying and manipulation… It seems second nature for the Others.  Cooper could’ve been recruited.  Maybe the con man got conned into whatever he ended up on the island for.  (This moment?)

Or maybe he hasn’t been on the island that long.  He could’ve been recruited, conned, or kidnapped sometime after Flight 815 crashed.  Once Ben’s crew had done their research on John Locke and realized he was valuable to them, they still had mainland communication and the ability to come and go from the island as they pleased.  They could’ve sent for Cooper at that time in order to use him to manipulate Locke.

The question now is whether Cooper’s been locked up in a cage all this time, or if he’s been walking around freely as an Other in Otherville until Ben needed him for this.  That would be a nasty surprise.  I’m just wondering when “bring him to me” suddenly meant “bind and gag him and throw him in the back room.”