Last night featured the long-awaited Richard Alpert backstory. Spoiler-y goodness behind the fold:
Who knew Richard Alpert was such a romantic? Maybe we should have guessed with those eyelashes. Turns out Richard’s story is a 140 year tale of love and loss, suddenly vaulting him to #1 on the “Tragic Island Denizen” list.
I want to focus on one specific thing from last night’s episode though, the first conversation between Richard and Jacob. Jacob wants Richard to be his right-hand man, and asks Richard what he wants. Richard asks to be with his wife or to be saved from hell, and Jacob replies to both requests that he “can’t do that.” Finally, Richard says he wants to live forever so he won’t go to hell, to which Jacob replies, “That I can do.”
So who is Jacob really? Is he god/God? I think that, despite his claimed limitations, he might well be. He says that he doesn’t act directly so that the people he brings to the island must exercise free will. This could explain why he “can’t” reunite Richard with his wife — she’s dead and he’s alive, and Jacob is not going to kill Richard. As for being saved from hell, I think there’s another interpretation: Jacob literally can’t save Richard from hell, because he’s not going there anyway. Jacob’s bargain with Richard and his refusal to “save” him may simply be Jacob’s way of allowing Richard to live long enough to realize that he’s a good man.
On the other hand, Jacob could just be a proxy for god, a servant of good. There are definite Jesus parallels: his sacrifice in allowing himself to be killed by Ben Linus (John 3:16 — “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”); his placement on the island as the “cork” in the wine bottle holding in evil.
It’s been a recurring theme for the writers this year to make reference to the theories of Lost fans. Last night’s episode was no exception, digging out the biggest early theory of all, that the survivors are actually dead and living in hell or purgatory. Hearing Richard say it out loud was a reminder of all of the promise that this show had back in Season 1 (and also a reminder that Cuse and Lindelof swore in interviews that the characters were NOT dead). We weren’t intended to believe Richard, but instead were invited, as we have been so many times this final season, to remember seasons past.
I thought this was a brilliant episode, topping even the massively entertaining Sawyer ep from last week. Also, that it was incredibly brave to conduct more than half of one of the show’s most important episodes in Spanish with subtitles. Lost keeps raising the bar, and I’m growing more and more optimistic that the ending will be satisfying.
What did you think of last night’s episode? Like the spiritual component? Or do you think Lost is disappearing down the same hole as Battlestar Galactica?
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