Lost – “The Lighthouse” (6.05) review

All the Lost promos are saying, “The time for questions is over.” Well, a casual observer of this episode would beg to freakin’ differ. So many questions! Who is Jack’s baby mama, and why is his progeny so damn sullen? What is the Lighthouse, and what kind of freaky stalkers have been living there? And just exactly what kind of unholy sexed-up throwdown are we going to see between Claire and Kate in a couple of episodes? These questions and many more popped up during this television hour. But a few answers started to come into play too. This way, quick!

Like all Shepard-o-centric episodes, this one had a heaping helping of father-son drama. We learn that Alt.Jack has OMG A SON, David, and a divorced wife to be revealed later, and that he’s kind of a distant dad but that he has a big ol’ heart. Also, that his son is kind of a dick but just wants approval *awwwww* and is a musical prodigy. Furthermore, we see Jack and his mom learn about Claire for the first time. So if the plane never crashes, Dr. Christian is still a philandering globe-trotting ass, and his son is trying hard not to replicate the same pattern but not entirely succeeding, and Jack also somehow forgot that he’d had his appendix out. (This is related to the mysterious cut on Jack’s neck in the airplane bathroom, but we don’t know how.)

Island-wise, we also have Jack tromping through the woods with Hurley to a mysterious structure they’d never seen before–loved Hurley’s armstructions from Jacob and smooth dismissal of Dogen, btw–and his sister Claire in full survivalist murderer mode, trying to give that Temple guy CPR with an ax. Also, it’s pretty clear that Christian has been tied in with the Man in Black before Fake Locke ever popped up anywhere, but that it’s all running together for poor little Rousseau 2.0.

But enough of all that. Let’s get to the Lighthouse and what it has to do with the intolerant and insane Christian sect that founded this country: the Puritans. Oh, you think they were some kind of saints? Are you in kindergarten? Look up their mass-murdering treatment of the Native Americans, for one thing; then, if you still have the stomach, read any book about the Salem Witch Trials or The Scarlet Letter. But hey, you believe what you wanna believe, and it’s immaterial anyway, so just hang on.

The two central notions of Puritanism can be summed up in the brilliant sermon speeches that marked this long-winded sect’s finest literary achievement. Two spring to mind here: Jonathan Edwards’ famed “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which compares humans to spiders that could be squashed any second by a pissed-off deity, and “A Model of Christian Charity” by John Winthrop, wherein he says that his little band of fanatics are building the fabled Biblical “city on a hill.” You might have had to read these between bong hits in college (or high school or junior high depending where you grew up), or maybe you are a modern-day Puritan or theologican, in which case GOOD LUCK TO YOU.

Boil these two down to their essences and they go like this: 1. We are all worthless and weak, and we cannot even control our own destiny through being nice or praying hard or anything, because God has already made his choice of The Elect; and 2. America is the chosen land of God and Jesus, as well, and it is our destiny to be here, so we can pretty much do anything we want because God said so. The Puritan religious code is pretty much “it’s out of our hands, and we might not all be Elected to enter heaven no matter what, but as a people we are better than everyone else, sorry to say it but we just ARE, and that is all there is to say about that.”

Now back to Lost–the parallels should be clear by now. So we learn, kinda, that Jacob has been observing Every Single Passenger since his or her childhood, to try to choose some kind of Candidate to take over the island. Isn’t this just The Elect all over again? Jacob = God, or some kind of god anyway, with infinite resources (including time travel perhaps?) and a judgmental streak a mile wide. None of the Oceanic Six Or So was actually consulted about his or her candidate status, nor does it seem like they became better people in anticipation–they are just Elect, lucky and doomed enough to repeat the same pattern no matter what. And they will go on to afterlives (or sideways-lives) (or island lives) with impunity, because the Elect can pretty much do whatever they want–anything they do is holy by definition.

Like Jack, who has gone from saintly leader to whiny solipsist and now just looks like Everyman. Like Hurley, the mentally ill loser with a heart of gold. Like Sawyer, the homicidal con man who just wants to find love. Like Sayid, a good-hearted man who will always be haunted by the evil he has done. Like Jin and/or Sun, both trying to break free of stultifying family roles. And like John Locke…okay, maybe not John Locke anymore.

Of course, this raises other questions: why not Kate? Why only one of our favorite emo Koreans? Why not Aaron? How long has Jacob been using the Lighthouse to spy on everyone written around its wheel’s perimeter, and why? Why can’t Jacob’s ghost make up its mind about whether to be nonchalant or intensely insistent? Why can’t we find Christian’s body no matter what reality we are in? Why do Island personalities keep running into each other in the Slipstream reality (here, it’s Dogen as the father of a young musician, giving props to Jack’s whelp David)? Is it significant that the Shepards are originally from Massachusetts, home of the Puritans? Could Hurley be right that they are looking at their own bones?

Aw, hell, I don’t know, I’m going to bed. Just think about it, though–could Jacob and the Man In Black both be angry gods, not caring who they have to sacrifice in order to win?

Check out promo pics for next week’s episode, “Sundown.”