I guess it could work either way.
So is Jacob going to represent good and “Smokey the Locke” going to represent evil?
Is there any consensus on who that long haired gentleman in Jacob’s cabin was, back in season 3? He made stuff fly around the room and told Locke to help him. Everyone assumed him to be Jacob at the time. Maybe it was the Smoke Monster tripping out (cracks open egg This is your Smoke Monster on drugs.)
I just have to say that Terry O’Quinn is great. I loved the contrast between his glare to Ben (“I want to go home”) and his big smile to Jack at the airport.
Despite seeing Jacob and his apparent nemesis “Esau”, we know very little about them.
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We know the “Esau” guy can take the shape of the smoke monster, and that of dead people on the island.
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We haven’t seen Jacob take the form of anything yet.
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Both Jacob and “Esau” are apparently mortal, but can still communicate from the afterlife, and only to certain people.
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We know that there’s some cosmic rule that didn’t allow them to kill each other directly.
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We know that Jacob is now dead, but is “Esau”?
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We know a circle of ash keeps the Smoke Monster at bay, but we don’t know why.
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Jacob’s cabin is still mostly a mystery. We’ve seen multiple apparitions in there, and then it was eventually burnt to the ground.
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We know the cabin was surrounded by a circle of ash, either keeping the smoke monster (aka “Esau”) out, or perhaps Jacob trapped (or, it could be that it was “Esau” who was trapped in the cabin, calling himself Jacob).
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We know they both have been around for a very, very long time, they don’t age, and at least Jacob could go off island and communicate with people, and even give them things. That is, before he was killed by Ben.
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We know “Esau” wants to “go home.”
That’s all I got for now.
So basically Jacob and “Esau” are totally fucking with people, for whatever reason. It could be completely selfish acts on their part, some grand cosmic game, or even pure good vs. evil.
Hasn’t “Gods fucking with people in some grand cosmic game” become the leading theory after last season’s finale?
Didn’t Ben summon the smoke monster in one episode?
Did he actually summon “Esau” then?
Agreed. O’Quinn’s been given a complex, nuanced character (or set of characters) to work with, and he’s done amazing things with it. John Locke has been alternately sympathetic, monstrous, or just plain goofy likeable - and O’Quinn has sold each entirely. Dude needs more work.
My first thought when Fake Locke remarked that Richard looked better out of chains was that maybe a long time ago? Richard was Prometheus. Being a chained captive on the Black Rock makes more sense though 
I wonder if the Fountain of Others is connected to the water used to summon BSM.
Funny thing, Ben knew the cabin was empty when he took Locke there. In order for the cabin to be empty, the circle of ash probably had to have been broken, whether allowing BSM in to chase Jacob out or freeing a trapped BSM.
Did Ben release the BSM from a prison? Is that why Jacob never talked to him? Is that why BSM would come when Ben summoned?
BOOOOOOO!!! (he says with grudging appreciation).
We’ve heard about the Temple a number of times before, but we’ve only really seen its outer wall (and perhaps a bit of the tunnels, when Fake Locke and Ben went underground, and Smokey “judged” Ben). We’ve never seen the Aztec pyramid looking temple itself, I don’t think.
I also had the impression that Cindy was just talking about the two flights that actually dropped in on the island – Oceanic 815, then Ajira 316. (And not the “parallel timeline” flight).
Oooh, that’s interesting – I get it. I like this theory. It would also seem to imply that Jacob set these events in motion not only to stop bad things from happening to the people on the flight, but to also somehow SAVE the island (which is sunk at the bottom of the ocean in that timeline). So through whatever meddling Jacob has done in bringing various groups to the island (not just Oceanic 815, but earlier groups too) has done good for the island, even if Esau doesn’t see it. Remember the opening conversation last season finale:
- Esau: “You keep bringing them here. It always ends the same way.”
- Jacob: “It only ends once. Everything else is just progress.”
I think with this theory, the bit about Juliet setting off the bomb and the whole pocket of energy thing was just “The Incident”, the way it always happened in this timeline (the one where the island is NOT sunk). Which would mean that the actual reality happening now is that the “Incident” – the bomb coupled with the energy pocket – threw our 1977 Losties forward again through time to the present. And Dharma would have recovered from “The Incident” the way that the first orientation video always said – they built the Swan, they enacted the 108 minutes protocol, pushing the button, etc, and life moved on.
Interesting theory. May not be what they are doing, but I like it.
It looks like the Lostpedia boards are referring to Fake Locke as “Flocke.”
I love some of the cleverness surrounding this. “Combination Locke.” Heh.
But why did you think that? My own thinking went the other way, but I didn’t particularly have any reason to think that, either.
To send people running away in fear so that they’d mess up the ash circle?
-Joe
Do we actually know this? Like, if Esau can take other forms, how do we know that Jacob can’t? (i.e., When everybody else saw Jacob off-island, how do we know that the physical form of Jacob that the characters saw was the same physical form we saw? Maybe he is a shape-shifter / projection as well? If we see flashbacks again later this season, knowing what we now think we know, do we know that the same scene won’t now contain a different actor giving the same lines in lieu of “Jacob”?)
But in the theory that Winston Bongo mentioned, this would have been in the original timeline – the one with no crash, and the one that Jacob was preventing by altering it. In that theory, the bomb does not cause the island to be underwater. IF that theory were the case (I’m not saying it is, just that it’s an interesting idea) – then the “original” timeline is:
- island is already underwater in 2004
- Oceanic 815 doesn’t crash, because there’s no island to cause it to happen
- completely uninfluenced in any way by Jack, Sawyer, Kate, etc, etc.
Although where this breaks down for me a bit is the fact that the underwater scene still had the Dharma barracks in it (I think I saw those… did I?). So the island would have had to sink after Dharma, but before 2004 and the Oceanic 815 flight. And it wouldn’t have anything to do with Jack and the bomb, because Jack would never have been there. That would be the alteration made by Jacob to the original “sunken island” timeline.
Damn you—stop killing my elegant theories with your “facts” :mad:
So now that Esau the smoke monster is taking John’s form, should we be calling him…
(wait for it…)
The Locke-ness Monster?
In the alt-timeline, is it meant to be mysterious that Jack knows Desmond from somewhere? Jack and Desmond met in Los Angeles as shown at the beginning of Season 2. Did the time-lines diverge before September 22, 2004, and now that meeting never happened, so the only source of Jack’s feeling is the “real” timeline?
Same here. I strongly got that impression, and firmly believe that’s what she meant.
The only thing is, though…Jack was on both flights. Why emphasize him being from the first one?
EDIT: Just answered my own question. From the perspective of the 2007 island inhabitants, Jack wasn’t on the second flight because he flashed to the past in midair.
Geez, this is hard on an old brain.
Bianculli (the NPR reviewer) thinks that the bomb did work but it resulted in two realities. The alternate scenes aren’t flash-forwards – they’re happening “now” but in an alternate reality. Sepinwall seems to think the same thing – he calls it a “sideways” timeline.
So I come here to see if that’s the consensus, and I can’t tell. Is it the consensus?