What Lies In The Shadow Of The Statue

I have less time than I'd like to write this and I have not had nearly enough time to digest what happened, so this Lost finale post will probably be fairly short.

By the way, this would be a good time for those of you who haven't seen the finale or who really just don't care about Lost to wander off and find something else to read.

As I said, this will not be a review nor will it be comprehensive. It's mostly going to be thoughts I had that I wanted to get out as well as some questions and almost certainly incorrect theories.

-I've never been a huge fan of the love triangle or love triangle plus Juliet part of the show. Juliet and Sawyer together after those three years in the DI worked better than any of the other attempted couplings of this group of four, so it disappointed me to see how Sawyer looked at Kate.

-I'm not one of those people who claims they'll stop watching if a character dies, but Hurley and Sayid are two of the characters who I would hate to have the show be without, so I hope Sayid pulls through somehow.

-I'm so used to Ben lying that I thought he was lying when he said that he didn't know Locke would come back to life and that he'd never seen the island do anything like that.

-This was the first time since at least the second season maybe even the first season that I had not heard (intentionally or inadvertently) what happens in the finale. I like it better this way, but at the same time theories take longer to form.

One of the big topics of discussion is what happened with the bomb and whether it really did what it was supposed to do. I don't think it did, and (if you'll forgive me for quoting myself from a comment I left elsewhere) I'm with Miles that what they did was cause the incident. Whatever happened, happened. See also: Chang staying, but sending his wife and child, just like before. Chang loses an arm, just like before. Daniel's mother shoots him, just like she knew she would have to when she sent him back. All of these things were already going to happen, and they happened in the events leading up to dropping the bomb down the hole. They are causing the events that are in the past, not changing them. Jack always threw the bomb down into "the pocket" and caused the incident and Sayid always shot 12 year old Ben, the events happened in the past, but they didn't remember because it was their future. You basically have two options with time travel (ok, more if you start creating new realities, but what does this look like, Star Trek?), you can change nothing important or you can have issues with the Grandfather Paradox (simply stated, you cannot go back in time to kill your own grandfather because then you would never have been alive to kill him). Allowing the 815ers to change anything that brought them to the island creates a paradox: The bomb keeps them from coming to the island, but if they never came to the island they couldn't have set off the bomb, and if they didn't set off the bomb they would come to the island and set off the bomb, preventing them from ever crashing on the island. This goes on in an endless loop. The only way to have a change of this nature work would be to have someone who exists outside of time (or has a paradox-correcting time code) be the one to reset things. Someone special. Someone like Desmond. Craphole Island's not through with him yet.

Now, about the whole NotLocke thing...Early in the episode, we see Jacob and some other guy (he needs a name, so I'm calling him Esau...He's got a nice rivalry going with Jacob and it's better than calling him that guy who isn't really Locke.) watching the Black Rock approach the island, and we find out that he wants to find a loophole to kill Jacob. As we saw toward the end, that loophole was to become Locke, who is dead and take the position of the leader of the Others. So, was Locke ever truly special? I think so. He always had a connection with the island and it healed him. In addition, we saw Jacob speak to him just after he was thrown from the building by his father. (For the sake of my theory, I'm going to assume that whenever we saw Jacob off the island, we really did see Jacob.) This connection made Locke the choice as leader of the Others and meant that when Esau pretended to be Locke, he could get access to Jacob. (Tangent: It's interesting to see that he was able to be Locke, because this makes me wonder if perhaps the other dead people we have seen might also have been him: Christian, who sent Locke off the island and told him he'd have to die, Alex, who told Ben to do whatever Locke--who wasn't Locke anymore-- said, anyone else who was dead and gave advice that lead to Ben killing Jacob. Ok, tangent over.) With Jacob and Esau, I couldn't help thinking back to the theme of duality that has run through the entire show. Black and White. Good and Evil. Locke is a playing piece in that centuries-long game of backgammon. Just before Esau-Locke takes Ben to meet Jacob, the new group from Ajira 316 reaches Richard and asks him what lies in the shadow of the statue. He knows the answer, so they show him what's in the box, and rather than Gwyneth Paltrow's head, it's the corpse of John Locke. With Jacob stabbed and apparently dying, I can't help thinking about what lies in the shadow of the statue. "Ile qui nos omnes servabit"He who will save us all." And who is lying there right now is John Locke. Could this mean that we will soon see a Jacob version of Locke and an Esau version of Locke? I don't know, but at this point nothing seems to be out of the question.