"I Hope You're Happy Now, Jacob"--The LOST Season 5 Thread

but is unconvinced*

tawaret is also Set's concubine - i think the EW recap made a pretty good case that Jacob and Nameless could also be Set and Horus.

I still suspect that Locke was supposed to be on the side of Jacob, initally though. Why else would Jacob bother to heal him, bring him to the island and so on (remember the whole arc of season 1 where Locke loses his legs again because the island decides to take them away, leading to Boone's sacrifice?). Similarly Ben had fallen out of the island's favor when he got cancer, though that may have just been part of the island's machinations w/respect to Jack.

However, once Locke met up with Ben and visited Esau at the Cabin, Esau used this loophole - that Locke was destined to be the island's Leader and would hence be the one to be able to meet with Jacob (that seems to be one of the rules) and have him killed... it's still fuzzy.

The themes of free will vs. pretermination are constantly self-conflicting when it comes to Locke. On one hand he seems to desperately want to follow the island and embrace it, worship it and go with his destiny, but for much of his life and his actions he hates the idea that anyone could tell him what to do (even on the island - his fights with Jack early on, outrage when discovering the Swan was "just" a social experiment and not actually important, though it turned out to be both!)

I guess I'm saying, writing off Locke is as an-always chump doesn't feel right, in terms of what this show is going for, I don't buy it that he was just a pawn his whole life. Though if he was, that everyone one of the people Jacob manipulated onto Oceanic 815 was...

haha i'd almost completely forgotten that "don't tell me what i can't do" used to be his catchphrase

i think the loophole is more in reference to Esau being able to kill Jacob with a proxy, since the rule is (much like ben & charles) that they can't kill each other. charles broke the rules by killing ben's daughter as a means of getting around the rule but i don't think that would work with esau/jacob - they're too old to have any kin.

I'm really curious about the degree to which Widmore, Eloise, Ben, and Richard actually understand how the Jacob/Esau thing works. They and the Shadow of the Statue people seem to understand the basic rules of the game, and what the ash circle means, and etc. I wonder what knowledge they aren't privy to, if any. There certainly are a lot of people who have used the vocabulary of "winning" vs. "losing", "good guys" vs. "bad guys". I wonder if those roles are outlined in the Book of Laws?

if you want to know if they know about esau, think of the reactions when locke asks ben about the monster etc...

but then why does ben call it a security system

unless he means it some seriously out-there spiritual "esau is the security system that prevents jacob from being all powerful" or some such

if you want to know if they know about esau, think of the reactions when locke asks ben about the monster etc...

Sure, but Ben is the only one out of the group of Ben, Widmore, and Eloise who we KNOW hadn't met Jacob before, so Widmore and Eloise possibly know more than Ben does.

why does jacob hate visitors so much

esau you mean?

yeah security system suggests he doesn't know much but surely he knows more about the general mythology of the island than we've heard.

though he didn't seem to know that the cabin was esau's, not jacob's.

who broke the magical ring of ash btw?

nah jacob! i mean why does he take so few visitors? why has ben never met him?

i think it's possible that widmore never met jacob either - from that episode where Ben kidnaps Alex, Ben accuses Widmore of wanting to kill Alex for himself and not because it was what Jacob would've wanted.

why are we assuming that the cabin is esau's and not jacob's again?

because we saw Jacob hanging around the foot about 300 years ago (when he caught & cooked the fish)… I think the idea is that the "bad" spirit, Esau (who came a-waltzing out of the jungle) may have been imprisoned in the cabin by the ash

my theories for that are

-cos jacob was never there
-cos the apparition that said "help me" didn't look like jacob
-cos christian was there
-cos the shadow of the statue dudes were seriously freaked out when the ash was broken
-lapidus big cue line like "you sure have a lot of firepower for blah blah blah"
-cos they burned the cabin

I think it's a fairly sure thing but maybe not.

From Lostpedia: According to commentary for "The Man Behind the Curtain" on the Season 3 DVD by producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, the circle of ash is "a bit of a kind of protection or magic or kind of containment. Ben is afraid to touch it. In a certain way, part of the idea here is that Ben has some powers over Jacob, and Jacob has some powers over Ben, and there is a bit of a stasis."

Later when Hurley also visited the cabin, a porch structure was visible on the exterior. ("The Beginning of the End")

In 2007, Ilana, Bram, and Frank visit the cabin. Ilana inspects the cabin and finds it empty, declaring that Jacob has not been there for "some time" but that "someone else" has been using it. She then has Bram and the other men burn the cabin. ("The Incident, Parts 1 & 2")

ah makes sense.

how many times is alpert going to push or break down a secret wall to get somewhere?

as many as it takes to find Veronica's closet

And couldn't anyone have just climbed up on the base of the statue and dropped into Jacob's lair through the giant hole in the ceiling?

haha some dude

lol it felt kinda redundant since you already took it there pretty recently but really there can never be too many veronica's closet jokes

ya respect

Why did Ilana and Bram think that Jacob might be at the cabin, though, if he's been in the statue for the last couple hundred years?

there's so little even known about them or why they're there that even speculating seems impossible.

they may have been sent there to kill Esau, but turns out Claire and Christian have been squatting, so they burned it?

re: Claire and Christian -- if they were in fact both in the cabin being possessed by Esau at the same time, does that mean he can manifest as multiple people at once? i.e. he could become a zombie army if he wanted to?

I think what we all need to know is: Was Esau the horse?

He so was. VINDICATED, BITCHES!!!

/need family guy .gif of man unzipping into horse costume and further unzipping to reveal he is a broom

NAMELESS: They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt. Oh, also I drive them crazy by appearing as a smoke monster or their loved ones, and you give them candy bars and buy them lunchboxes.

"Is this the magic box?"

he could become a zombie army if he wanted to?

Jack starring in remake of Army of Darkness = do not want

Gimme some sugar baby ... or not. Maybe I'll just blow you all up in a fit of pique

NAMELESS: They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt.

This is really impossible to refute when you have people going "Let's detonate an H-Bomb because my boyfriend looked at another chick."

The Ilana flashback suggests she'll be a main character in S6 I assume? There are so many unanswered questions about Jacob (like how he can leave the island in the first place) that speculating about how they might know each other seems ridiculous, but she looked pretty fucked up in that hospital bed. Like she'd just been in a fire or something, and yet she turns up on the Ajira flight looking perfectly fine. Seeing as Ilana is Russian maybe they can find a way to work the also indestructible-for-a-bit Mikhail into her backstory. Whatever happens, they'd better not do a Naomi and bump her off two episodes into the next episode.

They've made too much of "the man who will save us all" to make Locke an empty vessel. I just don't see it. Maybe Jacob and Esau are trapped in a time loop and have seen the same thing happen over and over again, have seen the characters several times over, and know that Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, Jin, Sun, Sayid and Hurley are the variables who can break the loop? Faraday clearly wasn't. Maybe Desmond as well - they can probably explain the Libby thing away as another Esau manifestation.

I am a massive loser.

I figure Ilana for an off-Island equivalent of Richard (Ricky Apples) Alpert-- Non-aging human in league with Jacob. Since she was totally mummied-up in Russia I wonder if she was dealing with nuclear materials.

Kate, Sawyer, Jin and Sun all broke 'promises' they made to Jacob, although that may be a red herring.

Not buying this. Kate, maybe, but Sawyer didn't promise anything, did he? Neither did Jin & Sun, really.

Okay, Jacob instructed them to do something, which they didn't do. Fairly understandably seeing as he was just some random dude of no apparent significance appearing out of nowhere.

their wedding vows? xpost

Yeah, I'm not getting why people think Jacob was trying to stop Sawyer from writing the letter. He gave him a pen so he could finish it! Then he left! Do people think Uncle Doug was Jacob or something?

"What ABOUT you, Ben"

Dude was askin to get knifed.

Ha ha he didn't even say "Ben." Dude is cold.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-cirincione/jughead-is-real-the-truth_b_204061.html

- No Ben, what about you?
- Fuck you.
- No Ben, what about you?
- Fuck you.
- Ben, what about you?
- Fuck you.

john ben-der?

However, once Locke met up with Ben and visited Esau at the Cabin, Esau used this loophole - that Locke was destined to be the island's Leader and would hence be the one to be able to meet with Jacob (that seems to be one of the rules) and have him killed... it's still fuzzy.

Locke was being manipulate right from the start of his time on the island though ... you're right that Jacob brought him to the island but if we think the smoke monster is Esau (or his agent) -- Locke looked into the face of the monster in, like, episode 2 and immediately started doing stuff the smoke wanted him to do, right?

time loop stuff gets pretty hard to track when you realize that part of the loop is real Locke and part of it is the doppelganger. i.e. when time first starts skipping it's the "real" Locke who gives Richard the compass and says he should be leader but then in the recent episode it's fake Locke who takes Richard into the jungle to rescue real Locke who's shot in the leg?? yipes

sorry if any of this is a retread, didn't watch the episode till late last night and I can't go back to re-read everything yet

The tone of Jacob's 'What about you?' seemed be melancholic to me rather than 'What about you? You are teh suck, lol'.