montyfood

For some misbegotten reason, I just want to weigh in before the season 5 finale airs stateside tonight with some ideas, predictions and general stabs in the dark. As ever I tend to see this blog as a pointless prognostication engine. And yes, I do have plans to make some vague guesses about this weekend's Eurovision contest. How could I not?

But back to Lost. This season has been reminding me - somewhat nerdily - of a short story by Robert A Heinlein called By His Bootstraps (actually published under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald). Heinlein has been previously been alluded to in the Lostiverse with regard to his novel Stranger in a Strange Land, used as the title of episode 9 of season 3, fact fans. Without telling the whole story of By His Bootstraps, it is essentially a time travel puzzle wherein the actions of the protagonist are both the cause and the effect. In other words a loop in time where there is no prime mover, no deus ex machina (s1 e19!) just a wonderfully perplexing circularity.

Witness Locke in the penultimate episode this season being the source of the instruction to himself that Alpert should convey how he must bring the others back to the island. Or there's Eloise Hawking killing her future son in 1977 only to send him off in later life to meet his demise by her hand. We are starting to see the characters inescapably trapped in a series of events from which there is no deviation. Whatever happens, happens.

But then there is Faraday with his notebook, trying to record every twist and turn so as to figure out a way to prevent the inevitable. It seems to me he is being mirrored in Hurley who also has a notebook in which he is writing The Empire Strikes Back. But the big guy is making a few ameliorations of his own. Star Wars geeks will tell you that Lucas of course had already written Empire in 1977. The course of events can't simply be changed on a whim. Empire also alludes to the missing hand motif, an injury which we can expect Dr Chang to receive at some point soon, and something that was forshadowed by the Smoke Monster taking the French crew member from his fellow hands by dismemberment, so to speak.

Iain Lee, Geeky Tom and Paul Terry on Sky's online Lost fan show have wondered whether this season's finale might offer us more about the Black Rock, but I think Richard Alpert's ship-in-a-bottle moment is a brief glimpse ahead in that direction. It makes me wonder if Alpert was one of the Black Rock's crew or maybe a dead man who, like Christian Shephard and Locke, was re-animated never to die again. But then again, we know the American military photographed the island in the 50s, about the time of the Jughead warhead when Widmore, Eloise and co seem to be dressed in army fatigues - perhaps he's some kind of immortal military agent. Certainly, Alpert is being revealed as someone who is not in control or even prescient of oncoming events. But then, so is Eloise Hawking. The only one who seems to have an idea is the resurrected Locke who wants to kill the island's totemic leader.

So who is Jacob? I find it interesting that the three leaders of the Oceanic group all have inter-related names: Jack is a common abbreviation of both John (Locke) and James (Sawyer) and James is the Greek form of Jacob. That's not to say Jacob is any of those characters per se, but in setting off to kill Jacob is Locke merely going to reveal the "man behind the curtain", somehow unveiling a ruse that Alpert and Ben have perpetuated?

I've reached the point where I expect the end of season 6 to either loop back to the start of the first season making the entire story arc self-contained, or the events are averted and the Oceanic flight lands safely in LA and the entire run of six seasons are truly lost time which the millions of viewers will never get back.