May 15, 2009

• LOST Season 6 predictions? **SPOILERS**

  Alright, judging from how everything turned out on last night’s LOST Season 5 finale “The Incident, Parts 1 & 2″ (which I just now finished watching online), here are my guesses for next season:

  It looks like my pre-season 5 guess that the survivors might turn out (after some time-hopping) to be the ancestors of the Others might be off the mark.  Let’s hope this year’s prediction is a little bit more on the ball.  One thing I love about this show is that – unlike most shows and movies – I don’t always see the outcomes and plot twists a mile away.  Granted, I can predict the plot twists in some episodes of this series with reasonable accuracy, but there still remain times when LOST surprises me and therein lies the fun of it all.

  What do we have?  We have Jacob – long-rumoured seemingly immortal mystical head honcho of the island.  As revealed in the opening teaser to the episode, he has a companion or a rival from centuries ago (indeed, the time of ye olde sailing ships – the shipwrecked Black Rock sailing in the background).  We also have Richard Alpert, also seemingly immortal middleman to Jacob.  There’s also a pseudo-Locke who has had Ben kill Jacob, echoing the murderous intent of Jacob’s past companion.  We have Daniel’s plan to blow up the electromagnetic pocket at the Swan station (future site of the Hatch) with a nuclear bomb.  With Daniel’s death at the hands of his own mother, the plan has been carried out by Jack and the gang (still stuck in the 1970′s) to unknown results.  We also have time travel being a possibility and the island’s smoke monster, who instructed Ben under the guise of his daughter to obey Locke (or pseudo-Locke)’s commands without question.

  So, let’s start with my guesses for the group of survivors who are stuck in the past.  I say guesses instead of predictions, as the way the show is written really precludes predictions of any certainty.

  Since the success of the plan would erase the very conditions that make the show possible, I will hazard a guess that the explosion does not in fact have its intended effect.  That is, it will be unsuccessful at destroying the electromagnetic pocket that will eventually bring down Oceanic Flight 815.  Instead, it seems likely that the explosion will actually throw the group at the Swan station forward in time, back to the present to reunite with the remainder of the cast.  With the death of Daniel, they will need a new character to give technobabble explanations of what has occurred.  Since we know that Pierre Chang – the many-named star of Dharma’s orientation films, resident Dharma braniac, and Miles’ father – was not present (and presumed dead) for Miles’ youth after Miles and his mother left the Island, I will hazard a guess that he is also thrown forward to the present with our survivors.  It’s anybody’s guess whether Juliet survived the explosion.  The appearance of her death would make for good dramatic tension at least for a good five episodes into the next season, although there’s every possibility she could have been resurrected or thrown forward as well only to be reintroduced at a later point.  My theory that the nuclear explosion will be the catalyst for the survivors’ return to the present would explain Jacob’s last words:  “They’re coming.”

  Now to the present.  Jacob’s last words, and the revelation that he had visited many of our survivors incognito prior to their first arrival on the island, reaffirm the notion that there is something very special about this group of characters.  They suggest that there is a greater plan for these characters in the future and that they have each been guided to their ultimate destiny on the island throughout their lives.  My guesses here on in are purely speculative, as there is very little evidence either way.

  This is what I think.  Obviously, there are a number of ‘mystical’ forces on the Island.    I think we’ve all been led to believe that they all somehow led back to Jacob and that he was in charge of all the spooky happenings and goings on.  What if the so-called  mystical forces at work actually constituted two factions with independent agendas vying for control of the Island?  Jacob – obviously – represents one of the forces.  The other, perhaps, is what we have seen manifesting as the smoke monster. 

  Since it has been established that the smoke monster can itself manifest as dead characters, a number of the apparitions we have seen throughout the series may actually be the smoke monster’s work.  It is just as likely that Jacob – too – has some way of either manifesting himself as dead characters or conjuring up their images at his will.  Here’s the kicker:  I think that the smoke monster, Jacob’s companion/rival, Jack’s father Christian’s apparition, and Pseudo-Locke may all be the same being – a being who is in the service of Jacob but has been searching for a way to escape that service for centuries.  This being has appeared in the form of dead characters wherever Jacob needed to intervene in the life of a character, but also had his own agenda to ultimately destroy Jacob and escape his influence.  Hence, the ‘loophole’ of convincing Ben under his own free will to destroy Jacob.  He engineered Locke’s death so that he could assume Locke’s form and manipulate Ben into destroying Jacob. 

  This sets up an interesting dichotomy between Jacob and Smoke-monster-being: a dichotomy of good and evil.  Jacob is a being with the power to heal and restore – he gave Richard immortality and restored Ben to life as a child (Ben *has* actually met Jacob before!).  The smoke-monster-being, on the other hand has the power to destroy and subvert – he assumes the forms of the dead, co-opts Ben’s free will to do his bidding through his multiple guises, and has eliminated several characters (among them a priest).  Jacob lives in a temple above ground at the base of a gigantic statue, the smoke monster lives in a temple underground at the heart of the jungle.  It’s an almost biblical allegory.

  One note on the above:  the fact that Christian appeared to Locke and Sun to inform them that their companions were trapped in the past supports the hypothesis that Jacob is also able to assume the forms of the dead.  On the other hand, why then does Jacob appear as himself to the Oceanic survivors in their flashbacks?  The alternative is that the smoke monster is capable of manifesting several apparitions at once and that the multiple manifestations at the derelict processing centre were merely for Sun’s benefit, an alternative that also seems entirely possible.  Additionally, since we’ve seen apparitions of characters we later learn to be alive (Walt, for example), it’s safe to assume that should this hypothesis of Jacob and the smoke-monster-being as shape-shifters be true, their ability is not actually limited to the dead.

  I’m going to make one further guess.  The show has always tried to throw in pseudo-sci-fi explanations here and there where they served the plot’s interests: electromagnetic pockets, temporal displacement, fatalism and free will, paradoxes, and strange matter.  How might we explain the origins of Jacob and his smoke-monster servant/rival?  Here’s one possibility.  What with all the time-traveling taking place in the show, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that Jacob and his cohorts are from some point in the distant future.  This would provide a convenient explanation for his magical abilities, and also a hint at his grand design.  What if he were sent back from some distant future to either engineer the creation of or to seek out a specific group of individuals with specific qualities that are necessary in the time of his origin?  That is, he was sent – with all his abilities – backwards into the distant past all to bring the Oceanic survivors to the island, possibly to bring them back to the future at the conclusion of the series?  For what purpose?  Repopulate the species, rebuild civilization after some unknown cataclysm, who knows.  It’s far-fetched, but what on the series isn’t?

  How on target am I with these guesses?  We may never know.  As Heisenberg once postulated – the act of observing an event changes the event itself; the writers of LOST may just be surfing these virtual shores and may change their plans simply to avoid prediction.  Perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut after all.

  • 1:02 am
  • 1 Comment