Life After "The Incident"

Following my first viewing of "The Incident" back in May, I was very torn. On the one hand, I was completely blown away by the opening scene between Jacob and the MIB (even watching it with Ceddy, Al and Stefan again right after it ended), thoroughly titillated by the Jacob flashbacks, and shocked by the revelation that Locke's really dead. On the other hand, I was annoyed by the motives and capricious attitudes of Jack, Kate, and Juliet, upset about the lack of Des, and frustrated that we were left hanging about the impact of the bomb's detonation.

And at first, the negatives overshadowed the positives in my evaluation of the episode. I couldn't get over the fact that Jack was willing to possibly kill everyone on the Island just for another crack at Kate. He was in full-blown Locke mode, and I was not liking that one bit. I just was hoping he had a stronger motive for taking such a huge risk, like "we need to save all the people who died" or something similarly heroic. Instead, his motives were purely selfish. Add in Kate and Juliet spur-of-the-moment flip-flopping, and the characters came across as silly. The ending was just as bad. Season 5 revolved around the question "can the past be changed?", and I felt like that question needed to be answered in the finale for the season to feel complete.

But last week when I watched "The Incident", I was able to put some those imperfections into a better perspective. Jack's motivations make sense for how his character has developed over the past couple seasons. He's much more maniacal, and his willingness to justify the means with oftentimes self-serving ends has become much more pronounced. Maybe that will affect my feelings and attachment to the character going forward, but at least it didn't cheapen the episode for me anymore. And Kate siding with Jack made plenty of sense; she really has always been with him. Juliet pulling the whole, "I saw the look you gave Kate" still gets under my skin, but having one insane character instead of three is much more bearable.

Sawyer's clearly the only rational one of the bunch. He's just trying to preserve the comfortable life he's settled into with Juliet, and his bewilderment with the decisions of Jack, Kate and Juliet feel the most realistic. As seems to be the trend over the past few seasons, Sawyer's the one with his head on straight, the one thinking clearly, and the one concerned with, to borrow a political phrase "kitchen table" issues, if you will. He tells Jack straight up, "I don't speak destiny". And that's what I love about him and what makes him so relatable. Sawyer's a character who could exist on any show, whereas the other alpha males, Jack and Locke, really could only exist on Lost. That's not a bad thing, but it makes it easier to put yourself in Sawyer's shoes. So I just try to align myself with him when watching those scenes and live vicariously through him as he beats the shit out of Jack.

Becoming more at ease with those parts of "The Incident" has allowed the stronger aspects stand out even more. I mean, it's a freaking Jacob episode! You tell me three years ago that we're going to have a two-hour, Jacob-centric episode and I wouldn't have been able to sleep for weeks! I can't stop using exclamation points! I just love the idea that Jacob has been following around our Losties from the time they were children. It just seems so perfect. Of course these people are special. Of course they have been chosen. A huge mystery like Jacob has enormous potential for letdown, that it would be damn near impossible for any actual answer to rival the feeling of wonderment that accompanies a classic "magic box" mystery (If you don't know what I'm talking about with this "magic box" business, click here - http://darkufo.blogspot.com/2008/01/jj-abrams-mystery-box.html). But it totally fucking did. And that makes me all the more hopeful for season 6 and the dozens of magic boxes that we have yet to open.

So I have come half-circle on "The Incident". It definitely falls within my top 15 episodes of the series, probably even top 10. And I can forgive Damon and Carlton for cutting us off as the bomb explodes (even if I'm still a bit bitter about the fade-to-white rather than the traditional black background, white letters. Hey, I'm a very traditionalist Lost fan), because it has given us 8 months of wild speculation about resets, time loops, "They're coming", and other tasty questions, That's half the fun of the show. So here's some wild speculation for you-

If I have to pick between reset or not, I think there will be a reset. I am not necessarily happy about this - though I trust that the writers won't fuck it up - but I think that they're not likely to make Jack look like a total moron by killing everyone on the Island, especially when the other "hero" - Locke - already met a sad, pathetic ending. And I support this. Both of them can't end up as failures. There will be some sort of caveat, maybe that the people touched by Jacob - Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, Jin, Sun, Sayid and Hurley - will all somehow retain their memories from the life we've seen them live over the past five seasons. No way they're wiped clean, tabula rasa-style. That would probably cause a riot, and I'd be leading the charge. But somehow, this reset will allow Jacob to thwart the MIB's plot that resulted in the Magnificent Man's death, saving Locke from his current deceased fate and allowing the Island to return to its rightful state of balance between light and dark.

But honestly I think it will be something we do not see coming. Like, at all. Something totally out of left field. And that's how I like it. Some combination of time travel, resets and alternate time lines perhaps? Who knows. And if you do, don't tell me. I want to be surprised.

Going forward with this blog, I will probably be writing about "big picture" stuff more than observations on episodes since, again, my rewatch has met its natural, if tragic, end. As Ben likes to say, " I have some ideas", and I'll be working on those during this last month of the hiatus. Definitely something that puts the themes of Lost into the perspective of our current cultural climate, a few more character writeups - Locke and Des have been inexplicably absent from most of my posts - and a season six "wish list" that I have already been working on for a couple weeks. I'm very excited about it. Until next time...