The chances that Desmond is lying dead at the bottom of a well are approximately 0%. Nobody kills off a major character off-screen. Also, nobody would forgive Sayid, zombie or not, for doing that.
Pure speculation, but:
Claire killed – smoke zombie
Sayid killed – smoke zombie
Jack blowed up. Was he killed? Flocke said Jack was one of his now, so Jack was killed – smoke zombie.
But here’s my twist:
Desmond died in the dynamo thing. He’s either Jacob or a Jacob zombie.
And, of course, Sayid did not kill him, because he couldn’t.
We were explicitly told earlier in the season that the Smoked Evil was stuck in the form of Locke, plus we have no reason to believe that he can take more than one form at once. I highly, highly doubt that Claire, Sayid, or Jack is a smoke zombie. And, as I keep spoilering, the producers have said that Jacob has never taken anybody else’s form, so Desmond can’t be a ‘Jacob zombie.’
You know… that’s not all that bad an explanation. It will probably end up making more sense than the actual ending. It’s certainly how I feel about the show frequently.
He has been asked once or twice. I think Richard asked him in his flashback. But he gave a non answer.
Here’s a big Wired article about Lost, with Cuse-Lindelof interview, charts, lists of stuff, side interviews with other people involved in Lost, and more!
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/ff_lost/all/1
I wasn’t too crazy about what Cuse and Lindelof had to say. Apparently the only aspect of the mysteries they feel compelled to explain is how the alternate timelines fot together.
Here was a particularly nice quote:
Lindelof: “…when you spend time with a 3-year-old, you quickly find out that one question just begets another—there’s a “why” in the wake of every “why”—and the only way to end the conversation is to say, “Oh look, a Chuck E. Cheese!” The show is doing its best to say, “Oh look, Chuck E. Cheese!”…”
:smack:
This was a great part that explained a lot, it’s not necessarily a spoiler, but just in case:
Carroll: At times you’ve made nods to science-y-sounding concepts —wormholes, the Casimir effect. How are these scientific concepts useful to you?
Cuse: It’s inspirational. We try to connect the show with a plausible sense of scientific concepts, recognizing that of course we’re ultimately telling a fictional narrative that is implausible. It has to make some kind of elemental scientific sense to us. It helps us as storytellers to say, OK, a massive amount of electromagnetism could create a wormhole that could allow someone to travel from the island, but that wormhole is unstable and sometimes they might pop up in Tunisia and it’s 10 months earlier than they thought it was. Those kind of things help us.
Dang…I totally missed any hint of dialog that they were turning off the fence or any sound effect indicating it was powered down. Probably because I was too busy yelling at the TV “STOP! Don’t cross the fence line!”
Then I started concocting elaborate scenarios to explain why they were sitting there with the fence down. Things like, it isn’t a barrier to keep Smocke out, but the walls of a trap to be activated after he gets to Hydra island to take the bait of the plane. After all, how hard would it be to knock down something mounted on a tripod set up on a sandy beach?
But I guess that was all for naught. Still, Widmore must think he’s got an ironclad way to defeat Smocke since he’s operating so much in the open.
Heh, that would be great. The ol’ “Shhhh, they’re watching us.” “Who’s watching us?” “Them.” as they point to the camera. Then they slowly walk up to the camera and knock on the screen.
This isn’t really about this episode in particular, but is there any sense of whether Ben was lying all the time before he killed Jacob? For whom was he working? Was he deluded? Why did he have Sayid kill all those people? Why did he try to get everyone back to the island? Why did he kill Locke?
I think that, like Charles Whitmore, Ben became more interested in the power he had as leader than in the machinations of Jacob. Once Ben was off-island, he saw himself in a kind of war with Whitmore, due partly to Whitmore’s mercenaries having killed his pseudodaughter. The people he had Sayid kill were all members of Whitmore’s organization who were supporting his hunt for the island.
Ben’s jealousy was also directed in part at Locke, since Locke more or less usurped his position as leader of the Others. He initially prevented Locke from killing himself, but when Locke told Ben that he was supposed to find Eloise Hawking, Ben proceeded to kill Locke. This could either be because he’d gotten the necessary information from him (what the “next step” was), or because he Locke “knew too much” by knowing about Hawking.
By killing Locke, Ben can go back to the island and resume his role as leader, he hopes. I think this all goes out the window when he sees “Locke” is still/again alive, so he says that he only wanted to return to the island so he could be “judged” for leaving and killing Locke.
Besides, the circle looked pretty big. Unless you deliberately walk the entire circle you could very easily miss the single broken section.
Now I’m convinced they’re not making it up as they go along. :rolleyes:
I’m stilling think that the cabin is how Smokey makes himself look like other people. Remember that Illana said that he was stuck as Locke now, but only a few days before that he appeared as Alex. The only thing that changed (that she knew about) was that Jacob died and she burnt down the cabin. So maybe someone else was showing up as Christian before. Perhaps the kid that’s following Smokey around?
So Smokey can only take the form of dead people (and specifically dead people he’s come in physical contact with, I think) and can’t appear off Island. Jacob has only ever been Jacob. That leaves me wondering: Who was Walt? Specifically, Wet Walt and Mass Grave Walt? Or Boone on Locke’s vision quest? Or the “Help me” man in the shack? Or Shepherd in certain times and locations? They can’t be MiB or Jacob, the only two people on the Island who have exhibited supernatural powers…
I’m beginning to think that they’re the Island and also reconsidering that the Island itself is alive. I mean, the producers stated back in, what, the first season?, that they wanted this trapped-on-a-deserted-island (ha!) to be different, that they wanted the Island itself to be a character. How many people have said that the Island isn’t finished with X yet? Not Jacob or a strange name that might be the MiB, but “The Island”. Maybe with all the life-restoring exotic matter (which I think is really mirror matter, explaining the alt timeline), the land itself became sentient?
I have more to that theory, but actually, I think I kind of like BlackKnight’s instead 
Yeah, after reading that interview, I’d say it definitely looks like they’re trying to back off the whole answers thing and go all guru-on-the-mountain with it. “Ah, but these questions are ultimately unanswerable, my son.” Which is, frankly, BS. Sure, the *philosophical *questions behind the show – i.e. fate vs. free will – are unanswerable, but the plot/character questions – i.e who is so-and-so and what motivates him/her and why did this person do that thing that one time and why did this other thing result from that person’s action and why did this other person etc. etc. – would be answerable if the writers would just bother to come up with something. It’s not as if they’re dictating from the Oracle here; the “answers” are whatever they make them up to be. But it seems they’re trying to cover their butts by combining the mystical/philosophical questions with the practical/narrative ones, when in fact they are two different things.
I’m still enjoying the season so far, and it looks like we’ll at least get some answers regarding the two timelines and the Jacob/MIB conflict. But the first of those mysteries is brand new to this season and the second was only really introduced in the season 5 finale (yes, it could be argued that it was implied since season 1, but that still plays like a retcon to me). At this point I’ll be shocked if we get any more information about Walt, Dharma, the Others, etc. And Lindelof flat out admits in that interview that we’re getting nothing more about the Numbers.
Nope. Richard’s wife. Unless they stowed her dead body in the Black Rock’s holds as potential zombie gruel.
FADE OUT
(Yeah, that would be bizarrely awesome.)
This is all well said, and exactly how I feel. I don’t understand it either.
The numbers, for example. They say they’re done with the numbers because there’s nowhere else to go with them. But that online “Lost Experience” they introduced after the end of the (second?) season, to keep the fans interested, had some interesting plot teasers that I thought were going to be worked into the script-- like the numbers being this “Valenzetti Equation” that predicted the end of the world. And the primary goal of Dharma being to change the equation, and save the world. That’s a pretty interesting explanation for the numbers (and for Dharma), I think. And why did the Others murder all the members of a group trying to save the world, if they were the “good guys” as Ben said? Was Dharma doing it wrong?
But no mention of the Valenzetti equation on the show. That “Lost Experience” was Carlton-Cuse approved “canon”, right?
Frankly, I don’t give a rat what any website, official or not, had to say about it. I’m watching a TV show, and if it didn’t appear on my TV screen during the hour, it wasn’t part of the show in my book.
I’m perfectly satisfied with the explanation of the numbers, to wit: Each identifies one of the main characters as a “candidate.” The nature of that candidacy has been partially explained and presumably will become clearer by the end. Cool. That’s about as straightforward as it gets on this show.
Beyond that, the fact that collectively the numbers seem to have some coincidental meaning in each of their lives doesn’t need any further explaining as far as I’m concerned. I’m totally fine with writing that off as part of whatever mystical influence the island has had over them.
I’m hoping for an exciting and thematically satisfying conclusion to a ride I’ve thoroughly enjoyed since episode 1. Spoon-feeding me an “answer” to every question, big or small, that’s ever been raised over the past 6 seasons is strictly optional.