scribble, scribble, scribble…

No real spoilers here, but I am going to wax hypothetical about what I think might happen as the show winds up; and since I am a genius at this stuff (former brilliant predictions of mine include: “Idris Elba’s character on The Office is secretly gay,” “CSS are going to be the next U2,” “N.E.R.D. are going to be the next U2,” and “Dumbledore dies”), you might want to click away. I’ll put everything below the fold, and to give people looking at this in their RSS readers a little space to hit the “next post” button, here is a bit from my latest Blogging the Hugos post at io9, on Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle:

His writing always seems solid but gentle and a bit heartsick to me — not tentative, but as if he was aware of what a tenuous thing life is and needed to break it to his readers both totally honestly and with great care. For as upsetting as his stories can be, I never get the sense that Dick delighted in upsetting his readers (or in putting his characters in upsetting situations), but rather that he was moved by an enormous compassion to do it.

(I think those are some of the better sentences I’ve written in this series. As it stands, I think the Hugos project has been a good learning experience for me, but in spite of the very nice feedback I’ve received from a lot of readers, I’m not sure I’ve said much yet. Still, there are almost fifty books left, so I have time to improve! And how nice it is to get paid to do it!)

OK, on to the Lost stuff:

Over at Threat Quality, Braak and Holland have been posting some thoughts on the show, with some particularly interesting discussion in the comments here. They are pretty good at organizing their ideas into essays. I am too, but instead I am just going to throw some stuff out here with bullet points, Shaolin-style:

• The most fascinating character in the show to me is John Locke, because I really dig the whole man-as-metaphor-for-all-of-Western-civilization thing. It’s not an especially complicated theme—I mean, they stick it right there in his name—but they’ve executed it neatly: This independent oddball whose strengths lie in his brains as a kid, but who’s instead captivated by a desire to make himself into something physically impressive—and who, to his credit, does. Locke as a young man is smart and knowledgeable about the frontier, thinks of himself as special, and has a lot of faith in destiny—specifically, his own; this is basically the United States, embodying the ideals of the West, for the first half or so of its history. And then he gets conned and crippled by a greedy special interest, struggles with his faith, has his faith renewed on the island to the point where he brushes up against fanaticism—and then dies in service to something unseen. Subsequently, a malevolent force starts using his image. If the resemblance between that and what’s happened with politics and religion and the American dream in the past several decades is a coincidence, I WILL EAT MY HAT.

• So what will happen next to Locke? I don’t think he’s coming back in the original universe; he’s dead. And Esau/Man in Black/Smoke Monster, who’s possessed him, is going to ultimately face off with Jack. They’ve been setting this up for so long symbolically, the Jack vs. John conflict, and if Jack’s redeeming climax isn’t a combination of both embracing the faith he always thought John was way too carried away by but tempering it with a little more clearheadedness, in such a way as to confound Esau, I will be surprised.

• Speaking of which, there was talk in the last episode of “candidates,” which I think we can safely say are people who might be chosen to, like, protect the island. Jack will end up getting chosen. He is the nominal hero of the story, and again, it’s been set up, what with his main goal always having been to get everyone off the island. Irony! But it will be a happy irony, I think, and will leave Kate and Sawyer together to pursue their love.

• Unless Kate dies. I don’t see that actually happening, but there’s something tenuous about the valence she occupies—she wasn’t one of the names written on Jacob’s cave ceiling in the latest episode, but he did visit her as  a kid—and I think one of the big final plot points will be that her life is in terrible danger. Also, she’ll obviously have to choose either Jack or Sawyer at some point, and betray one the other one. (I was thinking she might end up staying on the island at the end of the show, too, but I’m pretty sure that would make things too easy for her.) I’m very curious to see if the show’s writers can do something redeemable with her, something to make us like her. I’m kind of thinking not—the best she’ll get is some sort of acknowledgment/redemption from the blond kid from the last episode, who is totally Aaron.

• Ben will sacrifice himself to stop Esau.

• Sawyer seems like he might get killed at this point, but I’d be surprised if it happened. He’s already done the noble-sacrifice thing at least once, on the helicopter (and the “I may look like a criminal, but I’ve gotta do the right thing” thing numerous times), and he’s lost his lady-love. I guess I’ll be disappointed if he does the selfless thing again as a major plot point, because it’s lost its power (even if he is Really Upset and Bitter now). Instead, by my count, he’s got one awesome con left to run, on Esau or another bad guy, resulting in a highly satisfying gotcha moment. (He could end up being the one who stays on the island, instead of Jack, simply because I think he’d be the one main character who’d be happiest there. That feels like a cop-out, but maybe I’m asking too much of the show.)

• Over at Threat Quality we were talking about whether the whole story would turn out to be simple good vs. evil or more complex than that. I say: slightly more complex good vs. evil. This is still a mainstream TV show, after all, and a science-fiction one at that, so no matter how they dress it up, it’s not going to be a super-in-depth examination of moral gray areas. Esau is going to turn out to be a Bad Dude—I mean, besides being a frickin’ smoke monster, he sort of radiates indisputable nastiness—even if the terms of his imprisonment turn out to be somewhat unreasonable. And the terms of his imprisonment will probably turn out to be somewhat unreasonable, but he will, like, have agreed to them beforehand. When that’s revealed, Jacob will still look like an asshole for following through, but when The Candidate or whoever gives Esau a shot at redemption, Esau will throw it in his or her face, ultimately validating Jacob. Yeah, that’s pretty basic fantasy storytelling, but that’s because it’s one of those big archetypal mythic themes, and if Lost is anything, it’s a pop-culture venue for big archetypal mythic themes.

• I mean, Esau is essentially Lucifer, in the sense that it’s going to be his pride, after everything is said and done, that forbids any reconciliation with Jacob (who makes a few rules but essentially doesn’t directly interfere much in people’s lives). But, you know, he’s also Apep, who was conflated with Set, who was identified with Typhon—whose name may be derived from the Greek word for smoke, and who, Wikipedia and this page tell me, hisses. Typhon was defeated and imprisoned by Zeus—who was also the god who imprisoned Prometheus. And I’m sticking with the “Richard Alpert is Prometheus or a Prometheus stand-in” theory, because: We know Jacob, Esau, and Richard (at minimum) are nearly ageless and very old, and there’s only one major ancient character who was a benevolent guide to humanity but still got chained up (as we’ve learned Richard did), and who was later freed. And as Typhon and Prometheus were both prominent titans, they totally knew each other.

• I don’t really think much of this mythic stuff will get revealed like it’s a perfect fit—like, if Richard is Prometheus, it won’t be “Oh, there were really titans and that’s who this is” so much as “There was a great conflict many millennia ago, and that’s where some of those myths came from.” And I’ll be kinda surprised at this point if Atlantis doesn’t play into it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Atlantis/the island was also from the future.

• Like I said about Jacob, I think it’s going to become clear that he intervenes only rarely in people’s lives—when they just need “a little push,” as he tells Jack—and generally lets them make their own choices. He’s been terribly emphatic about choices. Whereas Esau, I think, will be one of those sort of well-intentioned bad guys who wants to choose for everyone else ostensibly for their own good. And at the end of everything, though Esau will be defeated, Jack (or someone, but probably Jack) is also going to question Jacob’s methods—like, “So you don’t interfere except to strand us on this frickin’ island?!?” But we’re going to see through the alternate universe that by getting stranded, the characters still had the freedom to make their own choices, but were in a better position to really, like, self-actualize. The alternate universe, as others have already suggested, is going to be lacking in some way, and the ultimate idea will be that the safety the characters have been striving for (and that Esau sort of places in position of primacy; his conversation with Jacob on the beach is all about how the people coming to the island are going to hurt each other), for the entire run of the show, isn’t nearly as important as the self-understanding that results from their being in semi-perpetual crisis.