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Richard Alpert, Smokey and some other Lost thoughts

// March 23rd, 2010 // fun

Tonight’s episode of Lost was a pivotal point in the series. Not only did it deliver on an awesome backstory for Richard Albert (complete with a few tearful moments I thought, something almost equal to The Constant a few seasons ago), but it gave us some seriously juicy mythology tidbits that are going to make us ponder good and evil for the rest of the week.

At the end of last season we got this first glimpse of what stands to be an epic battle between good and evil. Jacob sits with “Esau” as I like to call him (or Smokey) and Esau reminds Jacob how badly he wants to kill him.

They also had the following discussion:

JACOB: I take it you’re here because of the ship.
ESAU: I am. How did they find the island?
JACOB: You’ll have to ask them when they get here.
ESAU: I don’t have to ask. You brought them here. Still trying to prove me wrong, aren’t you?
JACOB: You are wrong.
ESAU: Am I? They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt. It always ends the same.
JACOB: It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.

First off, let me just say that the guy playing Esau is awesome. Titus Welliver. Great voice, great look…he just oozes evil to me.

Back to the conversation above. It was cryptic when we first heard it. We assume it’s something about Jacob trying to prove that people are inherently good, and Esau doesn’t believe it. Maybe that was a good enough guess.

However, the “It only ends once” is very interesting. I’ll come back to that.

We find out tonight how Richard ends up on the Island. Good ol’ Smokey is already trying to get Jacob killed so he uses Richard’s wife to get the shipwrecked slave to do his bidding.  But he fails, Jacobs kicks his arse and then they have an interesting conversation.

The biggest development of all was the bottle of wine (I assume) that Jacob used as an example to describe what was going on with the Island.

Smokey is evil and the Island is a cork keeping him bottled up and unable to destroy the world (or as Hurley says latter, send us all to hell – or something like that).

Jacob is bringing people here to prove a point to Esau that people are not all evil. But they keep failing and Jacob can’t do a single thing about it. So he enlists Richard to be his helper. Maybe this is why he first found Ben and tried to test him to see if he could be good, but alas, he was evil too. Then he goes after Locke.

“It only ends once.” This has to mean something. Someone brought to the Island, some candidate, has to be able to end it.

Whatever “it” is. It could mean the end of the Island. Perhaps it goes away once someone performs some completely “good” act that proves to Smokey that he’s been wrong. Maybe it’s something worldwide?

I have no idea. But it’s interesting to ponder.

What I’m wondering mostly now is what exactly IS Smokey? The devil? Satan himself? Or just some figure to represent evil, which is kind of like the devil anyways right?

And how long as he been on the Island? How long has he been confined?

So here’s what I’m thinking, a completely insane idea of what is going on here. I probably just went off my rocker, but a lot of it fits.

Jacob is just another of a long list of guardians of the Island. He’s been looking for the next one. I can see the series finishing with Smokey sitting on the beach next to one of our original Flight 815 passengers going, “Do you know how badly I want to kill you Jack?”

Smokey is evil, or the devil, imprisoned on the Island forever unless he escapes and destroys the world.

The Island itself is probably like the Garden of Eden…which would make the two bodies in the cave Adam and Eve.

As my wife just kind of verified for me…Smokey does take on the appearance of a serpent. The writers always said the two bodies in the cave would just go to prove that they always knew all along what was going on.

After he was responsible for the fall of man, Satan was trapped in Eden.

Now, I have a hard time believing that Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindleof are going to end the series by saying this Island was Eden all along and the bodies are the first two humans ever…but maybe? That would be a pretty epic finish.

It’s interesting how there are “candidates” and that Smokey has to follow the rules and not kill any of them. He didn’t kill Locke in the first season, he didn’t kill Richard, etc. It’s almost like the book of Job in the Bible where God tells Lucifer he can do whatever he wanted to Job’s family and surroundings, but Job himself he could not touch. He was trying to prove Job was faithful.

Interesting.

This episode was epic. The backstory was awesome. The Black Rock breaking the statue was seriously cool.  Hurley was cool. The acting by Nestor Carbonell (Richard) was so amazing.

What did you guys think? Did you get anything different out of it than I did?