LOST: The Final Season (Spoilers)

[RangerWickett]

At this point, I don't really care for either Jacob or Smokey. I'm actually slightly more fond of Smokey because he's got better style. Jacob's just boring as all get out. "I am yet another mysterious figure on this island who will not answer any of your questions."

I'm running a game inspired by Lost, with players who never saw the show, taking the roles of Kate, Jack, Sawyer, and Sayid. When they encounter Others, I assume they will ask questions. And I won't play to form and have the Others be evasive, because I still have no idea why the Others are so stingy with information.

Seriously, what benefit did the Others gain by being deceptive for so long? It's becoming apparent that

a) the Others work for Jacob,
b) Jacob has some plan that involves candidates,
c) the Others weren't supposed to hurt the candidates.

But I just don't get the logic of these people. Did they want the crash survivors off the island? Why not just kill them with all those guns they have, and just be sure to spare the ones on Jacob's list?

Did they want the candidates to trust Jacob and help protect the island? Well then why didn't they go to Jack and explain the situation that this is a magical ****ing island, and that . . . I dunno, the world will end if bad guys get on it? They could make a big to-do of letting people who aren't on Jacob's list onto the submarine, and then just kill them all with some of the handy nerve gas they've got.

It doesn't hold together.

 

[Remus Lupin]

RW, you're just no fun!

 

[Felon]

I'm open to that possibility, but I'm not yet convinced, for a few reasons:

1. It just smacks of cheap irony. It's just too easy to say, "see, we'll make it seem like they're evil, but they're REALLY GOOD!

2. Hurley.

3. Flocke's offer to Sayid was straight out of the New Testament: Fall down and worship me and all of these things will be yours."

4. While I'm not going to go so far as to say that Jacob was good or has acted good, and certainly I wouldn't say his followers have, there seems to be a clear moral distinction between Jacob and his behavior towards both his followers and his enemies, and Smokey. Jacob has never acted in a wrathful or violent way, has never sought revenge, and has put people into a position to make decisions (albeit often manipulated by Jacob) for themselves. Smokey has repeatedly killed, threatened, directly coerced, lied, etc.

5. Look who is now on Flocke's team: Con-artist-murderer Sawyer, torturer-murderer Sayid, thief-murderer Kate, crazy woman murderer Claire, mob go-between Jin.

6. Look who's on Jacob's team: Doctor Jack, all around decent guy Hurley, mother/nurturer Sun, unknown quantities Lapidas and Miles, and multiple murderer Ben. Plus the members of team jacob that came on the plane, plus, by all appearances, Richard. Now, I may be missing something. I didn't watch the show religiously for a good chunk of its run, by I don't recall any of these characters intentionally killing someone, except for Ben, maybe Richard, and the plane people. But of the core characters, the candidates, none have blood on their hands.

Now, the teams may change up over the course of the coming episodes, and I think it's highly likely that Kate and Jin will switch teams. But when you look at the moral quality of these two groups of people, is it really hard to pick which are the bad guys?

We've seen cheap irony before.

The only survivors decidedly on Jacob's team are Hurley and Jack, both of whom are huge suckers easily manipulated by their good intentions and sloppy emotions (Hurley's meekness and Jack's tantrums). Then you have Sawyer, Kate, and Sayid, who see people for what they are, making them of no use to Jacob.

Ben isn't on anyone's team right now. Killing Jacob kind of takes him off that team, and Smokey has washed his hands of him.

Claire I never got. Never understood how she can have fans. Someone once posted in this forum "I love Claire", and I remember shaking my head and furrowing my brow as I read it. She's always been a whiny, useless, selfish pig. She certainly took poor Charlie's devotion completely for granted. And now she's ticked off at Kate for spending all those years babysitting her kid while she was awol. Vintage Claire. Horrible, annoying person.

Jacob and Richard were behind the Dharma poison-gas massacre. Dogen and those who came before him had no problems with killing in cold blood.

 

[Felon]

But I just don't get the logic of these people. Did they want the crash survivors off the island? Why not just kill them with all those guns they have, and just be sure to spare the ones on Jacob's list?

The Otherse were in fact trying to abduct all of the people who were on the list, and kill the rest. Goodwin specifically indicated this to Anna Lucia before trying to murder her. Your suggestion that they simply storm the survivor camp and "just be sure" not to kill any candidates with all the bullets sprayed around during the massacre strikes me as a less-than-foolproof plan. It's not like they even had pictures to work with, just a list of names. I'm going to have to say that sending infiltrators in (Ethan and Goodwin) and then grabbing confirmed candidates with surgical strikes is about as good of a plan as that.

Now, perhaps a better plan for the Others would have been to just come forward and offer help. Maybe initially they just didn't know enough about what had happened to take the risk of exposure. Whidmore's been trying to kill them for a long time, after all.

 

[Remus Lupin]

I think it's worth bearing in mind that a lot of the activities performed by the Others under Ben's watch can't reasonably be understood to come from Jacob, since Ben never had direct contact with Jacob, and we don't know everything yet about what kind of an intermediary Richard was, and to what degree Ben acted on his own.

That said, I'm happy to concede that the Others, at least as we've come to know them, can be ruthless and merciless and "protecting" the island. However, most of the others don't qualify as protagonists on this show. And when you look at the protagonists, the breakdown between "good guy" and "bad guy" is clear in many of the cases we've discussed, with a few marginal cases that remain to be resolved.

By the way, i'd say that in the case of Sawyer and Sayid, their stories are really tragedies: Men with the potential to be good, who became evil largely as a matter of circumstance, who then had a shot at redemption, which they blew, largely as a matter of circumstance.

 

[RangerWickett]

Is the show trying to say Sayid and Sawyer are evil? I'm not buying it.

Sawyer definitely not. Ever since the middle of season 2 he's been pretty solidly a good guy, even though he hates himself and occasionally has vengeance issues. But he has never once since then tried to hurt others who hadn't already displayed themselves a threat. He has actively worked to protect people.

Bear in mind, I reject a large majority of stuff that happened in season 5, which felt to me like it was shoddily composed.

In particular, I found Sawyer's actions in the season 5 finale, with the whole "Let's drive in and shoot all these people I'm friends with" to be a horrible cop out by the writing staff, because it flew in the face of how Sawyer had been characterized for the entire rest of the show. And let's not forget Juliet's laughable "I saw you glance at Kate and despite us having been in love for several years now, I'm going to throw it all away and try to alter reality instead of suggesting we see a relationship counselor."

Are they trying to say now that Sawyer is a villain, just because he decided to tag along with Smokey? Just because he decided that, for once, it would be nice to get at least some answers about what this island is?


And Sayid? In what way is Sayid evil?

Sure, he has blood on his hands, but he always acted out of a desire to protect people. He was deceived by Ben, an issue he later tried to rectify by, quite reasonably in my opinion, shooting the hell out of Ben as a child.

Since then, what has he done? He killed Dogen and Lennon, and let Smokey into the temple to kill more Others. These same Others attacked and murdered innocent people and never showed any remorse or tried to provide a justification for why they did all those things. From Sayid's perspective, the Others are outright dangerous, and he was protecting his friends.

 

[Atavar]

Sawyer is on the Jacob team...he's just the only one who knows it so far. He's pulling the ultimate Long Con on Smokey (or Un-Locke, or War-Locke, or the Locke-ness Monster, or whatever it is you choose to call him).

I didn't come up with this theory on my own, but I do find it quite interesting.

Later,

Atavar

 

[Fast Learner]

Great thinking on someone's part, the long con makes perfect sense.

 

[Remus Lupin]

Sawyer is on the Jacob team...he's just the only one who knows it so far. He's pulling the ultimate Long Con on Smokey (or Un-Locke, or War-Locke, or the Locke-ness Monster, or whatever it is you choose to call him).

I didn't come up with this theory on my own, but I do find it quite interesting.

Later,

Atavar

This is a good thought, and I like it. It would certainly fit with Sawyer's character to attempt to deceive the deceiver.

But, in the case of both Sawyer and Sayid, I think they're acting from despair. They both had some hope of redemption, but it was lost when they lost those they loved.

As for "how was Sayid evil?" Well, he tortured people for the Iraqi government, which counts as evil in my book. And even if you grant that Sayid was justified in committing murder to protect his fellow islanders in his collusion with Ben (something about that still needs explaining; where's Whidmore this season, anyway?), it's still cold blooded murder. Finally, whatever Ben may have become as an adult, he was not that when Sayid shot him, and there's a very good argument to be made that Sayid's attempt to kill Ben is what made him into what he became.

 

[Shayuri]

I just want to say too that 'good' and 'evil' are being thrown around in this discussion as if they're states of being. That is, you're good, or you're evil, in much the same way you're alive or dead.

But good and evil are really descriptions of decisions and actions.

Sawyer, to my understanding, has thrown in with Flocke because he wants off this island...he wants to wash his hands of it. All it's given him, in the end, is misery. He doesn't know who or what Flocke is, or what the cost of his decision will be. But his choice was not evil...just self-serving. He doesn't want to hurt anyone, but it's unclear if he really -cares- if his decision will hurt anyone either.

Sayid's another matter. He took his time making up his mind, and showed the Others in the temple extraordinary patience and gave them the benefit of the doubt...most likely because he's seen and experienced a lot of truly effed up stuff on that island, and their claims could not therefore be simply dismissed out of hand. In the end, Flocke's offer to restore to him the only thing he ever really loved was too much temptation. His choice was different than Sawyer's. His choice was, I believe demonstratably evil, including full foreknowledge of its consequences. Does that make Sayid evil? Of course not. The problem of course is that Sayid himself believes otherwise, and that belief is corrosive to one's conscience and sense of self-direction...things that encourage non-evil decisions. It's likely Sayid will get worse before he gets better...

As for the taciturnity of the Others, and Jacob, I can offer one possible explanation. Lost is a story that involves, among other things, time travel. Not only that, but it explores the idea of small perturbations in personal histories creating 'butterfly effects' that lead to certain, seemingly coincidental, but utterly critical events taking place. Jacob is tampering with the Losties pasts, and presents, to create a future. The trick is that a person who knows he's being manipulated will naturally try to resist it. Further, someone who has awareness of the future can easily change it by reacting to it in the present in ways that negate it. Witness The Lighthouse, where Jacob wanted Jack to smash the mirrors. He could have told Hurley, "Tell Jack to go up and smash the mirrors." Would that have worked? I don't think so. Jack's at a stage where he mistrusts things that friends hear disembodied spirits tell him. He'd want to know WHY Jacob wants them smashed. His reaction to them would have been different. His attitude going forward would have been different.

We can discuss the morality of what Jacob's doing...he's most definitely using people to accomplish ends that we know nothing about. At best he can be said to have a sort of 'big picture' view, where deaths and personal tragedies are regrettable, but unavoidable, and that he weaves them into the tapestry of the future he's trying to create with no actual malice but rather a pragmatic understanding of human nature. Or, his facade of calm could hide an alien, amoral being with no regard for human life or dignity as he dances them like puppets to achieve his ends. Either way strikes me as a legitimate viewpoint at this stage of the show's narrative. But either way, Jacob has substantial reason not to tell anyone "too much."

As for the Others, I think they're tight lipped for several reasons. One, I think in many cases they don't know. I doubt Jacob's anymore forthcoming with them than he is with anyone else. They may know SOME about what Locke is...enough to recognize him and to try to protect themselves, but I doubt they really understand his true nature. The leader may be an exception to that, but... Two, they try to emulate Jacob. That is, he's enigmatic, so they try to be too. I also think the Others, being human, probably have succumbed to human weaknesses like pride and vanity, and they don't want to share what they know with people who haven't earned it like they have. They'd resent "candidates" like Hurley that just declare themselves out of the blue. Who does he think he is? And of course, the Others never really trusted any of the Losties...who knew if they were part of some scheme from Flocke?

And that's just the Temple Others. The "other" Others, the ones outside that Ben used to lead...they're even farther removed, and have in fact been under the sway of Smokey for the duration of the show. It's no shock to me that they're just as paranoid and unforthcoming.

But yeah, the Others, all of them, seem to see themselves as special, as a chosen people who are guarding something that everyone will want if they ever find it. They have that kind of siege mentality, where everyone's viewed as an enemy.

And since Jacob let it go on, even while he was alive, it's probably part of his plan...or at least not destructive to his plan. Smokey did warn him, after all, that bringing humans to the island would result in bloodshed. Smart man.