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He is coming.

The most important person ever to walk jungle path and sandy beach is making his way to the Island.  But he cannot get there alone; he needs a guide–someone of clear and keen vision.  Jacob cannot be that guide.  For Jacob saw as through a mirror, dimly, but the guide will see face to face.  The guide sees not dim reflections of men and words written on stone.  Rather, he sees men as they are, and the words written on their hearts.

“Jack is here because he has to do something.  He can’t be told what that is–he has to find it himself.”  Tonight, in the lighthouse, Jack began to see with new eyes.  The Island has its guide.

You Have What it Takes

The previous four episodes seemed to delight in the strange contrasts between the Island spacetime and the sideways reality in California.  In this episode we were invited to draw parallels and observe similarities between the two worlds.  Particularly strong similarities were established for Hurley and Jack.

Hurley continued his discovery of unused reserves of self confidence, taking on the Temple Master in a match of wills–and winning.  From Hurley’s über-confidence during his scenes in the sideways spacetime, we know he had great potential not only for standing his ground but for effective leadership.  He made good use of decisiveness and persuasion in convincing Jack to accompany him to the lighthouse.  And after acting as accomplice to the destruction of the mirrors, Hurley had cojones enough to question the motives and methods of Jacob himself.

Hurley grew quickly in this episode, acquiring emotional balance and the sure ability to achieve goals, while losing not a bit of the ethical and moral filters he applied to every action.  He complained to Jacob, “you made me write down way too much stuff…and I just lied to a samurai!”  Even if a falsehood accomplished a good, it remained a lie in Hurley’s mind.  Hurley stayed the course as conscience of the Island, and a motivating force for Jack and the other Candidates.

Jack is going through a transformation even more profound than Hurley’s, requiring more time, emotional energy, and force of will than any of the other Candidates has to face.  While Hurley could call upon reserves of psychological strength he always possessed but never used, Jack is being re-built from the very centre of his being.  As we saw in 6.03 “What Kate Does”, science and logic no longer carried sufficient motivating force for Jack.  But what is the true nature of his transformation?  What would Jack see now, with his new eyes, if he could once again stare into the dark well of the Swan Station?

When young Ben Linus was dying in 1977, Jack Shephard, in his DI janitor uniform, knew at his very core that science and surgery were not adequate to “fix” the boy.  The surgery thirty years later did not make Ben a better person or magically bring about any improvement in the crash survivors’ predicament.  When Dogen asked Jack to give Sayid the green pill, Jack held onto a small shred of his former self, insisting Dogen tell him what the green powder was.  The old Jack would have pulled out a gun or raised his voice by several dozen decibels, shooting or shouting until he got answers.  The new Jack had a stronger motivation than science.  He knew that he was the vessel of Sayid’s trust.  In swallowing the green pill, Jack threw science to the wind and embraced his spiritual alliance with Sayid.

Jack is becoming a man of faith, a believer in miracles.  Last week we heard John Locke utter words that could never have crossed his lips on the Island:  “I don’t want you to spend your life waiting for a miracle, because there’s no such thing.”  The Locke in sideways spacetime is being transformed into a man of science, a devoté of reason and logic.

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The struggle between Man of Science and Man of Faith has been going on since the earliest days after the crash of Flight 815.  Many of us believed, even as early as Season One, that the conflict would ultimately find resolution in the cross-transformation of the two men.  Jack would become the Man of Faith, and Locke would become the Man of Science.

I am no longer sure this is the only possible outcome.  In fact, I will assert that the thesis of this episode negates the possibility of any such cross-transformation.  I believe the thesis for “Lighthouse” might be stripped down to seven words:  The struggle between opposites is an illusion.

I believe this is the message of “Lighthouse”, presented in imagery drawn from Lewis Carroll’s works and in motifs unique to the story of Season Six.

Through the Looking Glass

The imagery of Alice in Wonderland has recurred in key episodes over the past six years.  In “Lighthouse” the journey through the looking glass took centre stage.

Jack took “The Annotated Alice” in his hands and commented to his son, David, that he used to read to him from the book, especially the stories about “Kitty and Snowdrop”.  Those familiar with Carroll’s books know that Kitty is a black cat, while Snowdrop is a white cat, and thus Jack invoked yet another recurring theme in LOST:  White versus Black.  Jack went looking for his son, David, at his mother’s (presumably Jack’s ex-wife’s) house and found the key under a porcelain white rabbit by the door.  Carroll made use of rabbits in the Alice stories, and they have frequently appeared in LOST episodes, particularly in scenes concerning the Dharma Initiative.  A white rabbit was the central image in the Looking Glass Station logo and white rabbits were frequently used in scientific experiments of the DI.  White rabbits have even made appearances off Island, as with the rabbit used by the magician at Ray Shephard’s retirement home.

It is in the use of mirrors and reflections that LOST most frequently invites comparison with Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”.  Mirrors have been prominent in every episode of Season Six, and the mirrors of the lighthouse were central to the major revelations this week.

The brazen and unapologetic appropriation of imagery from a classic of children’s literature might cause us to believe that we should seek broad parallels to Carroll’s stories in constructing a better understanding of events on the Island.  I think the positing of such parallels would again be illusory.  In the case of “Through the Looking Glass”, we would have to find a character, most likely a female, making her way across a giant chessboard with ranks separated by brooks, intent on being crowned a queen at the end of her journey.

I think just such a misapplication of LOST imagery was made in the very creative Season Six promo designed by the Spanish television network Cuatro.  The thesis of the promo:  The characters of Perdidos are nothing more than pieces on a chessboard, their destinies determined not by them, but by the two players moving them from one square to another.  While the ad was breathtaking in its creativity, I think it was far off the mark in terms of the overall message of the series.

If LOST is nothing more than a story about several dozen characters being manipulated to take pre-determined actions at the bidding of two or three godlike entities, I think the story will very quickly fade into obscurity.  The story must be more than an accounting of moves across a chessboard.  It must be more than the triumph of free will over the enslaving forces of someone else’s idea of destiny.  If either of these two outcomes proves to be the one-sentence summary of life on the Island, I will be disappointed, and not a little surprised.

“Lighthouse” gives solid clues that something much more significant than inevitable destiny or Triumph des Willens is at play here.

I Came Back Because I Was Broken

Jack is a man broken, his deepest beliefs uprooted, his ideals discarded as useless rubbish.  He remains in his heart a healer, but his heart is wounded now.  Jack is, and forever will be, the wounded healer.

Tonight we saw more evidence of his chaotic spiritual state.

Jack’s reflected face was distorted in the pond at the Temple.  This image might have been taken as a chance decision of the director to include a meaningless but well composed shot of troubled waters, if not for several images of similar content placed throughout later scenes.

We could indeed interpret the active rippling of the pond water as suggestive of general troubles to come, but I believe the distortion was intended to apply to Jack alone.  In Episode 6.01 Jack on sideways Flight 815 took a trip to the rest room, peered at his reflected image in the mirror, and wondered at the wound on his neck.

In tonight’s episode, Jack again peered at the image reflected back to him from the mirror in his bathroom, and for the second time saw an old wound.

He didn’t remember the appendectomy.

My father had his appendix out at the age of eight–the same age Jack’s mother, Margo, claimed Jack had his operation.  My dad recalled his appendectomy as the most traumatic event of his youth.  My best friend had her appendix removed at the age of eleven.  Her experience was not just traumatic–the event nearly took her life.

I cannot imagine an eight-year-old child shrugging off extreme abdominal pain causing a breathless, high-speed car or ambulance ride to hospital, a swarm of doctors and nurses peering with concerned eyes at the child’s abdomen, and the unexplained piercing of the child’s arm or hand with a huge needle followed by the sudden, dreamless loss of consciousness.  Perhaps a three-year-old would forget.  Perhaps a thirty-year-old would shrug it off.  An eight-year-old?  I think the eight-year-old would recall, even years later, every bewildering and painful second.

Faraday’s Boulder has wreaked havoc in everyone’s life in both the sideways and the Island spacetime realities.  Turbulence created by the stream-splitting rock has caused sideways Jack to have no memory of life-changing events, and a vague unease about even mundane occurrences.  The wounds inflicted by the Island showed up on Jack’s neck on trouble-free Flight 815, even though in his reality there was no Island.  Sideways Jack had no recollection of the appendectomy because on the Island he had no such operation until three months after the crash.  The rift created by the simultaneous detonation of a hydrogen bomb on top of the instantaneous release of nearly unlimited electromagnetic energy was not a slice in the arrow of time, but a shredding and reordering of spacetime itself.  The appendectomy did not occur when Jack was eight or when he was thirty-eight.  It didn’t ever occur, at least in his memory.  The weird, spacetime-torn Jacks are patchwork jumblings drawn from two very different realities.  Is it any wonder the sideways Jack consumes vast amounts of psychic energy trying to figure out where he is, what he’s doing, and why he’s doing it?

As Through A Mirror, Dimly

Mirrors presented Jack with information for which he had no explanations.  Worse, the reflected images were distorted and topsy-turvy.  The appendectomy scar appeared to be on the left side of his abdomen, not on his right side as it ought to be.  We had to apply a correction in our minds (the image is reflected, therefore we need to reverse it) in order to figure out the meaning of the image.  If we wish to obtain something close to the whole truth, we must supplement additional information (in this case, our understanding of the laws of physics) to the image obtained from the mirror.  The critical idea here is simple:  Reflected images contain only partial truths.

No mirror in the world reflects all the light falling on the object.  All mirrors are dim.

The lighthouse mirrors were particularly dim, and severely distorted every reflected image.

“He’s been watching us… the whole time.”  But what has he seen?  Jacob’s view of the Candidates’ lives was dim, warped, incomplete.  He had a partial and misleading vision of them.  And perhaps, as with the rosy-coloured and distorted mirror image of Jack’s house, he saw what he wished to see and nothing more.

The mirrors and their warped half-truths suited well their primary user.  Jacob may have had what he considered pure motivations, but his methods were tainted by his bias and his agenda.  He was the purveyor of free will only if human volition would serve to lead the Candidates to the Island.  Otherwise he used any trick available to him to coerce, cajole, and compel those he’d chosen to the destiny he carved out for them.

Now I Am Become Life

Jack speaks only the truth.  He does not speak to coerce.  He does not compel anyone to even the greatest cause.  He does not speak in half-truths, in warped sentences, in falsehoods or distortions.

Jack speaks only the truth.  When Sayid asked what the green pill was, Jack told him.  Jack will have no truck with the dim and shady manipulations of Jacob, of Ben, of the Smoke Monster.  He is Jack:  Wounded Healer, Doubting Thomas, Wrecker of Falsehoods.

Listen as he utters the full truth:  Now I am become life, the destroyer of mirrors.

It’s Okay, I Know Her

Justin and Jin were guests at Claire’s camp.  While she was away sterilizing instruments, the two men shared quick snippets of whispered speech.  “It’s okay, I know her,” Jin told the Other.  Justin responded, “No, I know her.”  Justin urged Jin to loosen the ropes around his hands.  “When she comes back I’ll snap her neck.”  If he didn’t do it, she would kill them both.  Jin wasn’t so sure; after all, he knew her.

Jin and Justin were the reflections of each other.  The crash survivor and Dharma Initiative member staring at his opposite, the Temple dweller, the Other.  Because they opposed each other, it could only mean that one had the correct idea about Claire, and the other was completely wrong.  There they sat for several minutes, Jin the reflected opposite of Justin, sure of his understanding of Claire, her history, her motivations, sure that Claire would act in accord with everything he knew about her.

Claire was their mirror, the dim, imperfect, distorted medium through which they acquired their understanding of each other and of her.

The full-force delivery of the axe into Justin’s chest seemed perfect proof of everything the Other had said about Claire.  “She’s going to kill us both.”  Jin re-evaluated on the spot.  No, Kate doesn’t have your baby–the Others took him, just like you said.  But he was not convinced.  Hadn’t she just cleaned his wound and stitched and dressed the gash on his leg?  Wasn’t it she–with Locke–who helped Charlie turn his life around?  The perplexed expression on Jin’s face must have been the result of these and a hundred other thoughts flashing through his mind.

The Concert

Jack didn’t know David could play.  Not like that.  “How long has he been playing?”  Dogen asked the question that the parent of a prodigy would know better than any other span of time.  But Jack didn’t know.  The “little push” from the Temple Master was enough, though.  The Island wounded him, but now it provided the means to make amends with his son, and eventually, with his father.

Hiroyuki Sanada gave a most thoughtful response during an interview just a few days ago.  Matt Mitovich was the interviewer.

MM:  Why are Dogen and Lennon so obstinate, so secretive? Why not just be forthcoming?

HS:  That’s because for us it’s a matter of: Who is a stranger to the island? Jack and Sawyer and their group are alien to the island, so….

MM: You’re saying it’s a simple lack of trust.

HS: Yes. To save the island we have to keep secrets and keep things out of touch from these “aliens.”

MM:  It’s just that we always run into this pattern. One would think that if, say, the fate of humanity was at stake, all involved parties could cut through the posing and have an open exchange with one another.

HS:  But they need to keep secrets from each other, fight each other, and hate each other in the beginning.

Secrets.  Hatred.  These are the things that tear people apart, that cause people to wish for failure.  “I didn’t want you to see me fail,” David told his father.  Looking for failure was the common thread between the three generations in the Shephard family, after all.  Why would David believe his father would seek to find anything other than failure in him?

David believed his father hated him.  He believed it because it was the only thing he thought he could believe.  But it was an illusion, born of dim and distorted images, of incomplete, misleading reflections.  Jack told him the truth:  “In my  eyes, you can never fail.  I will always love you.”

Mirrors create opposites, distorted reflections of ourselves.  The distortions create mistrust.  We hold secrets from each other.  We come to hate each other.  But all of it is illusion.  Not that we hate each other, but that we must hate each other.  That is the illusion.

The mirrors are gone now.

The task of destroying the illusions can begin.  I don’t know if Jack will be the one to initiate this work.  If trust and love form the basis for overcoming secrets and hatred, Jack will not be alone–he will need to find others.  But he can’t be told these things.  He has to find it himself.

Pearson Moore

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