After the events of 'Across the Sea', the context of a post like this, concerning questions about the nature of the Island, is going to be radically shifted. Before Season 6 (when I composed the questions below) I just wasn't prescient enough to wonder about what might happen if the Island overlaid a golden river of something...special...that I have a little of in my heart, and you do too.
I'd still like a marker here to look back on later in post-finale retrospecting on what we did and didn't find out about the Island. So, written from some time around 'The Substitute' is...
THE ISLAND DOSSIER: QUESTIONS:
Obviously, the island is a place where impossible things occur. Some of these events (i.e., Dharma time-traveling bunnies) have a basis in pseudo-science, while others are more supernatural (Island apparations such as Yemi, Walt’s astral projections, the monster, etc). Finally, many of the island impossibilities may be rooted in a unified theory of both pseudo-science and the supernatural. So what the heck is the island?
1. Is it a natural place that gains its peculiar properties from being the playground/plaything of demigodish entities such as Jacob and MiB?
2. Is it an inherently magical place that draws humans to it, and then allows the latent capacities and archetypes of mankind to manifest in strange and supernatural ways? This idea is influenced by Dan Simmons’s books Ilium and Olympos (which in turn are influenced by, among others, The Tempest), in that they’re in a large part about the consequences of myths becoming real via sfnal means.
3. Is the island, in some way, personified? The key example here would be the mystery golden boy from ‘The Substitute’. Could he represent the Island made (visible to some) flesh? If this is so, is the personified island restricted to a role of neutral arbiter between conflicting sides?
4. Or is Jacob the island personified? And MiB is a sort of Ahab, obsessively trying to kill the Great White Whale that took his leg trapped him long ago?
5. Or is MiB the island personified? Although this would really be a variation on the above, in which a man is slowly, and eventually his great sorrow, turned into something else than a man.
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