Man No. 2

It is sentimental to consider the Man in Black as a ‘bad guy’. There are perfectly reasonable and moral stances by which one of our characters may choose to consider Jacob as less than a ‘good guy’.

I want to start this entry—on questions concerning the Man in Black—with an explicit statement of these two postulates. I have seen nothing to convince me otherwise at this point (the off-week in between ‘The Last Recruit’ and ‘The Candidate’). I understand that the story of ‘Lost’ is not my story—it is the writers’—and thus, it’s possible that I may have to revoke my opening statements by the end of the series. If I must though, it will be the fault of writers with no compunctions for tromping through their own story, oblivious to the size of the footprints they leave behind. And that, for me, would not be a happy ending for ‘Lost’.

The Man in Black is the newest ‘main’ character in the Lost-o-verse. He is also the most bizarre, in terms of narrative construction, of any character ever on the show. Having ‘questions’ about him is a bit redundant, as the character himself is either a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma or the most notorious MacGuffin yet on ‘Lost’.

Side note: Is there a difference between these two possibilities?

Double Side note: ‘Lost’ may be read as meta-narrative in which MacGuffins transcend their own meaningless origins by threatening to remove themselves, and thus the element of fate, from stories of redemption. Or something.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m concerned about the ill effect of rewriting Season’s 1-5.9 as simply the deterministic outcome of the hidden hands of Jacob and his nemesis. The great issue with such rewriting is that due to the obligation to maintain dramatic tension, the true origin and goals of Jacob and his nemesis will not be revealed until the penultimate episode, or the finale of ‘Lost’. When writers find themselves with such a small amount of time to reveal such crucial character and plot beats, they are greatly tempted to succumb to the invocation of mealy-mouthed and trite ‘archetypes’ to substitute for original ideas. I’ll now briefly mention some details from the finale of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series to buttress this argument, so…

[MASSIVE BSG PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD!!! BE WARNED]

The new BSG series was, for the most part, well written. It had fantastic potential, and that potential was comprehensively squandered by "the worst ending in the history of on-screen science fiction”. In brief, a drama full of conflicted, mature characters harboring complex and fluid motivations that were developed with care and honesty for the better part of the series was reduced to the after-effects of a ‘Big Bad’ introduced in the waning moments of the last act. Though the Big Bad had been seen before in the series, he was a relatively minor character whose true nature was never *shown* to the viewers in the course of storytelling, as it was for the half-dozen or so major characters of the show. Thus, upon the revelation of the Big Bad’s identity, the writers had no other choice than to *tell* us, in a brief scene or two of exposition what motivated the character who was now presented as the prime mover of the series long story arc. And what was this essential motivation? It consisted of one thing: the resentment of a machine towards its human creators. In one form or another, this ‘angry Pinocchio’ motivation has been around for more than 100 years. See Frankenstein, 2001, and Terminator for various twists. What the writers forgot is that the dramatic DNA of their show was the considered, ambiguous exploration of the conflicts that arise between men and sentient machines coexisting. Their lazy appropriation of a story that is, within s-f, an old and boring cliché, in order to tie up their loose plot ends ruined everything of originality and interest they had built before. But what could they to do pacify a broad audience? They’d left themselves no time.

[END MASSIVE BSG PLOT SPOILERS]

There you go. But, I’m guardedly optimistic about upcoming revelations of Man in Black, as a character and guiding force on the show. I feel like the writers have done a good job, so far, at distilling equal parts sympathy and suspense into the character. It’s clear that he has a long memory, and a firm conviction of what he deserves. There are no Jack-like ‘do I wanna be on the Island or don’t I?’ or Kate-esque ‘Jack’s such a good man, but Sawyer makes me horny’ dilemmas for this man. Whether we will agree with the Man in Black’s judgment of what he’s accorded when we know the whole story is besides the point. We know he won’t change his mind.

It’s also clear that, in his opinion, he was tricked into his current predicament. If there’s one thing ‘Lost’ viewers have sympathy for, it’s the resentment and powerlessness felt by victims of a manipulator with an agenda—let’s take a short break to pour a little drink on my man John Locke’s grave and salute him.

Let’s end this here with a listing of…

THE MAN IN BLACK DOSSIER: QUESTIONS:

1. Does Jacob’s ‘evil, malevolent, dark wine’ directly signify the MiB? Or is the ‘hell’ the island acts to contain something else, something independent of Jacob and the MiB? And MiB’s ‘trapped’ state a necessary corollary to the containment of ‘hell’?

2. What was the long-ago event between MiB and Jacob that MiB describes to Richard as ‘The devil betrayed me. He took my body. My humanity.’?

3. How is the story of Jacob and MiB connected to MiB’s mother (!), who was a ‘very disturbed woman’?

4. One assumes that when Flocke tells Sawyer that he’s ‘experience[ed] betrayal’, he’s referring to the same event I just mentioned in #2. But to what is he alluding to when he says he knows ‘what it’s like to lose someone you love.’?

5. Is the explanation simply that MiB is totally insane and has conflated the life experiences of those he ‘scans’ while in smoke form with his own long-forgotten past?

6. Is the MiB alluding to his own experience when he tells James, regarding Jacob: ‘He came to you, he manipulated you, pulled your strings like you were a puppet. And as a result, choices you thought were made, were never really choices at all.’

7. When MiB is in Smokey form, are Smokey’s actions entirely the will of MiB? Or does some other force, i.e. Jacob, influence or guide the behavior of Smokey.

8. Were any of the Lost characters (i.e. Hawking, Widmore, Ben) ever consciously in league with MiB?

9. Where is MiB’s home that he wants so badly to go to?

10. Does the MiB have any connection to the Sideways reality?

11. MiB has admitted that he benefitted greatly from Locke dying off the Island, and by Locke’s body returning upon Ajira 316, but did he benefit/have a stake in the H-Bomb/Swan site ‘Incident’.

12. Is the MiB connected to the strange EM activity of the Island?

13. Lots could be put in this question, but…Is there a ‘real agenda’ of the MiB’s that he hasn’t admitted to us yet?

Sure, MiB kills people, but Jacob is a total bastard

In working out a theory of some possible ramifications of the Incident over at Bigmouth's site I let my propensity to produce overlong comments go daffy. So, here's a repost of that comment in a venue that requires a wee bit less scrolling to get through. The thread started talking about possible causes of the pregnancy sickness, which led Darkprose to comment: "Indeed, the whole reason the Swan site was there [when Locke found it in S1. --ab42] was because of the Incident, which was the bomb being detonated. When Juliet got the Island to work with the Others, she had already detonated the bomb decades ago. Whatever happened, happened."

I kind of haven't explicitly thought through the time travel mechanics of the Incident, but darkprose's proposed scenario motivated me to do so. Here's me doing the blog-commenting equivalent of thinking out loud:

You're proposing that Miles was right in season 5 when he warned the others that Jack's H-bomb detonation plan may end up causing the very incident he's seeking to prevent.

The corollary is that Faraday was, tragically, wrong. Forgive me for quoting at length, but here's Faraday's speech to Jack in 'The Variable':

"In about four hours, the DHARMA folks at the swan work site--they're gonna--gonna drill into the ground and accidentally tap into a massive pocket of energy. The result of the release of this energy would be catastrophic. So in order to contain it, they're gonna have to cement the entire area in, like Chernobyl. And this containment--the place they built over it--I believe you called it "the Hatch." The Swan hatch? Because of this one accident, these people are gonna spend the next 20 years keeping that energy at bay... by pressing a button... a button that your friend Desmond will one day fail to push, and that will cause your plane--Oceanic 815--to crash on this island. And because your plane crashed, a freighter will be sent to this Island--a freighter I was on and Charlotte was on and so forth. This entire chain of events--it's gonna start happening this afternoon. But... we can change that. I studied relativistic physics my entire life. One thing emerged over and over--can't change the past. Can't do it. Whatever happened, happened. All right? But then I finally realized... I had been spending so much time focused on the constants, I forgot about the variables. Do you know what the variables in these equations are, Jack?"

So...you're saying Faraday was, ultimately, incorrect about his 'realization' of variables, and that his focus should have remained on the constants.

It would then follow that James's disappointment upon waking up at the ruin of the Swan hatch in 'LA X' is one more example of "how little he knows". He'd gone along with Jack's H-bomb plan to *avoid* the incident, and following Faraday, the subsequent construction of the Swan Hatch. Nothing of the sort had happened.

Interesting. This reinforces that the sideways universe has existed since at least 1977. But why would the bleed-through between the S1-S5 timeline and the sideways universe only begin after the sideways 815 flight? But that's entirely another topic.

Per the original topic, the pregnancy sickness, if it is simply a byproduct of radioactivity on the island emanating from the 1977 H-Bomb...why the hell did Richard not once mention it to Juliet in her recruitment or in her years of research??? He was there in 1977 and would have watched the bomb go off.

In any event, if you're right the main timeline of 'Lost' is a cruel, cruel story. Both Locke and Faraday came to the island, and both gave the ultimate sacrifice in service of something they believed to be greater than themselves--for Locke, it was the Island itself, and for Faraday it was the 815ers whose lives had been so altered by the island. Jacob told Richard that he brought people to the island because he believed that they were capable of 'knowing the difference between right and wrong'. If willingly throwing yourself into a fatal task completely for the benefit of others isn't evidence of having satisfied Jacob's stated reason for manipulating the lives of others, than what is?

But let's look at Locke and Faraday's reward: For Locke, it was to be murdered in a state of profound bewilderment, and later to provide the bodily means by which the enemy of all that he held dear might destroy what he (Locke) meant to sacrifice his life for. For Faraday, it was to be murdered by his own mother, and to have his dying thought be 'My mother acted as if she pushed me so hard out of love, but really she did it so I would eventually come to this island and die by her hand for a reason that I don't even know.' And following his murder, his great sacrifice was put into motion by Jack...the end result being to cause the very thing he'd given his life to prevent.

That is profoundly, absolutely, and utterly cruel. The Man in Black may kill people on a whim, but the fate of Locke and Faraday is just...sadistic. And if Jacob's responsible, since he brings people to the island in the first place, then he's worse, a thousand times worse than MiB.

The only way Jacob can redeem himself is if his endgame is to engineer the complete negation of the Island reality, and let Faraday, Locke and the others exist free of his and MiB's manipulations in the sideways reality.

And sideways Faraday needs to get a clue. Sure, that redhead was hot, and you loved her in another life...but in that other life *your soul was destroyed for the benefit of others who couldn't care less*.

The Others, The Statue-Builders, and a new 'Lost' spin-off

So, I'm looking over my long list of Lost questions and near the top is: "Where do the Others really come from? What is the origin of the ruins on the island?". 'Happily Ever After' aired two days ago. The first half of my question has, apparently, already been answered. The history of the Others begins when Richard and Jacob talk on the beach, and Richard reminds Jacob that if he (Jacob) refuses to interfere in the lives of those he brings to the island, than the Man in Black most certainly will. Before this conversation, Jacob brought people to the island, and he brought them for the same reasons he did after the conversation: to prove the Man in Black wrong. But with Richard there to guide the new arrivals, and to act as an eternal source of guidance, the new arrivals coalesced around him to form a group.

Perhaps we'll not see any more footage of life among the Others, detailing the creation of Others culture: How the 'very specific' process for choosing their leadership came about, Why Latin became their private language, if they have always had no regard for the lives of those newcomers not on Jacob's lists? In fact, I think that's an awesome idea for a Lost spin-off. Life on the island during the first years of Richard's reign as Jacob's consligiere: it'll have swordfights, heavy duty 'Ab Aeterno' style religion, and center around the unsure progress of Richard's band of proto-others from raw Conradian gone-native in the jungle madmen to a strange and powerful culture bound by ritual and spiritual insight. At the edge of the action, taking a much larger role than they did in 'Lost' will be Jacob and the Man in Black: scheming, murdering, converting, and otherwise manipulating the puny humans who have wandered into their eternal battle. Titles? How about 'Heart and Darkness',or 'The Cork', or 'Cetera' (latin for 'the others' ;) ?

If the first part of my question has already been answered during Season 6, the second part remains a mystery. The statue of Tawaret, and thus all of the other ruins on the island (though not the well John Locke lowered himself into) were there prior to the Black Rock's arrival. So, before the Others existed, and given the Egyptian iconography, before even Jesus Christ existed, a decent sized population lived on the island and spent their time building stone structures, large and small. In the 2000 plus intervening Earth-historical years, the only other group of Island inhabitants who were interested in building structures of any sort were the Dharma Initiative. So what made the statue-builders different? To what end did they direct there labors, and why hasn't anybody since built as much as a log cabin? I have two hunches.



First, though millenia has passed on earth since the statue builders time, it hasn't been that long on the island. Following a yet unseen 'Incident' the island moved through time, from the Egyptian era, until closer to Ab Aeterno times.

Second, the culture of the Statue Builders was not devoted to either Jacob or the Man in Black. Both Jacob and Man in Black arose from this culture. Man in Black has already confessed that he was once a man, and because this information gives him no ability to manipulate the Lostaways, I believe him. We have no idea if Jacob was once a man. I'm guessing (with no evidence whatsoever) that he was. Both Jacob and the Man in Black became more than men during the time of the statue builders.

THE OTHERS DOSSIER: QUESTIONS

1. Where did the Others come from? What is their real origin? Answered, I believe, as of 'Ab Aeterno'

2. What is the origin of the Statue and the Ruins on the Island?