If you’ve read my blog at all in the last week, you’ll know I’m embarked on the ambitious project of re-watching all of the LOST episodes to date before the beginning of Season 6. So, please excuse me if I get a little (my daughter would say more than a little) obsessed with the topic of LOST.
The show itself is masterfully produced, the themes a seemingly endless maze of twisty little passages all the same. Going back to the beginning and re-watching it my thoughts return to what might be the best starting point for a potential möbius strip through time:
BLACKIE: I don’t have to ask. You brought them here. Still trying to prove me wrong, aren’t you?
JACOB: You are wrong.
BLACKIE: Am I? They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.
JACOB: It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.
This is the struggle where our beloved Oceanic survivors were plunged. I view this series through my series of lenses, part geek, part pop-culturist, part husband, part father… However, the over arching filter is that of my faith, and the more I watch the early episodes, the more I’m reminded of a passage from the bible:
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. – Ephesians 6:12 (NIV)
We have been viewing the continuing drama from the eyes of men, and have allowed the hidden battle of two mystical opponents to be obscured by the characters we’ve grown to love. A struggle summed up by John Locke while explaining a game of backgammon to Walt in the series pilot.
LOCKE: Backgammon is the oldest game in the world. Archeologists found sets when they excavated the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia. Five thousand years old. That’s older than Jesus Christ.
WALT: Did they have dice and stuff?
LOCKE: [nods] Mhhm. But theirs weren’t made of plastic. Their dice were made of bones.
WALT: Cool.
LOCKE: Two players. Two sides. One is light … one is dark.
Seeing the characters from the beginning with that perspective shines new light on everything. Our characters, are they nothing more than pawns played against each other in an unseen game, where chance, choices are played along with strategy and foresight on behalf of higher powers? Is Locke’s guru like wisdom, as we observe early in the first season could colored by influences of one side versus the other? Do the manipulations of the various factions in the struggle effect the different passengers on the flight, and start to ripple outwards as we’re introduced to more of the inhabitants of the island?
Those questions along with others are worthy of inspection as we’re introduced again to Rousseau and Ethan, the mysterious, nameless whispers in the jungle, the shrouded others that plot against those plopped on the island by the coincidental fluke in the crash of Oceanic flight 815.
I’ll use this space to ramble more as I worry these thoughts in the back of my mind.
Namaste.
When looking at the reveal in Season five’s finale of our Players, Jacob and Blackie, I’m reminded of what Mel Brooks once said to Carl Reiner.
Mel Brooks was pretending to be a two thousand year old man, and he said back in the caveman days everybody worshiped Phil, cuz he was the biggest guy in the caves. He’d stand outside a lot and announce to everybody that he was God and since he was so big no one ever questioned him. They’d worship him and do whatever he asked. Then one day it was raining and everybody ran into the caves and they looked back and Phil was still standing out there in the rain. They called to Phil and begged him to get out of the rain and Phil stood there proud and insisted he wasn’t afraid cuz he was God. Then lightning struck him dead and that’s when the two thousand year old man realized “there’s someone bigger than Phil.”
There’s always somebody bigger. Jacob and Blackie may seem to be powerful, but they too have someone to whom they answer. They too have rules in their little game to which they must comply. They have to find ‘loopholes’ to bend those rules, and if they fail to comply as they should, there is an arbiter of some sort. There’s always someone bigger.
good points, and I’m not equating either of them to that of ‘the bigger’, that isn’t what powers and principalities either, they answer to a bigger too.