TV Watch: Lost, The Incident

Spoilers obviously reside here.



Hands down my favorite moment from the two hour finale (which sadly, through absolutely no fault of its own but rather the same work week which has kept me off blogging for nearly a week - I struggled to stay awake through) was Miles wondering if maybe Jack wasn't setting up The Incident after all and maybe they should just go back and have tea with Bernard and Rose.

Honestly my only critique of the episode was the ease with which Jack convinced people that setting off a hydrogen bomb is at any time a good idea. And especially because most of the rationale seemed to be based around emotional relationship issues - not necessarily a thought out plan about time travel.

Still, it would have been hard to see an efficient workaround for the plot. Bomb had to be dropped somehow.

So we finally get a good long look at Jacob. Jacob appears to all of our Losties at random times around the plot of the entire show, including post island escape events. The encounters seem to always have some kind of kindly advice and apparently to the watchful (awake) observer, some kind of physical contact. He may have brought Locke back to life.

We also know that Jacob was the source of the lists, which clears up a lot of oddness about The Others from the early seasons. Jacob's clearly been busy, manipulating events on and off island for a long, long time (if the ship in the distance is indeed the Black Rock - before our entire known history of the island). Jacob is squared off with a mysterious stranger and the two of them seem to have the same ruleset as Ben and Widmore. They can't kill each other.

So Jacob is spending a lot of time bringing people to the island for some reason we don't entirely understand. Mysterious Stranger is against this because of the "corruption" it causes. While there is a lot of setup here, including shirt color, that Jacob is Good and MS is Bad - we should remember that Ben and Widmore reflect more of a grey area themselves.

If we draw back from the point that Locke is clearly not Locke (which The Girl predicted, and on reflection was a remarkably well broadcasted twisted for the show), but Mysterious Stranger and go backwards through the plot - it seems entirely possible that it is the stranger in the cabin, not Jacob. If the cabin at some point became the stranger's prison, it might explain a) how more people got to be on the island like DHARMA and the military and b) how the person in the cabin seems trapped (including the circle of ash) and yet Jacob seems to be quite free.

Mysterious Stranger might also explain some of the various ghosts and apparitions we've seen, although Jacob's dialogue with Hurley puts that in some ambiguity. It could be both - with MS being able to take the form of various people who have died on the island, and yet perhaps Jacob has a similar function as well.

It's hard to guess what The Incident and inverted logo will mean for us in the future. I have to say that my gut is that we will see the Losties in their non-Incident future/present at some point. I just hope we don't have a big plotline about "getting back to that other timeline" though, as it would echo way too much with "getting back to the island".

I'm guessing that if there's any material which might lead us into the final season, it may be Donnie Darko. We can't lose track, though, of all the broken connections someone has promised to fix. Clearly Jin, Sun, Claire, and Aaron are in that group - and perhaps Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Juliet as well.


Great episode, can't wait for the final season now.