Lost - Thinky Thoughts By Proxy

[shipperx]

:
:
Heh.  I have to admit to rather perversely enjoying EW's Lost reviewer because he's just so OTT.  Get a load of the intro to his review for last night's LOST:

It began in the darkest of night, on the shores of a place called Hell. It ended in daylight, in a lush Edenesque patch of The Island, with an ageless enigma standing underneath the kind of massive tree that can only exist in a land of fantasy or myth, trembling with much fear and a glimmer of hope. In between, we got a story that asked questions that we’ve been asking ab aeterno—”since the beginning.” What is good? What is evil? How do we know the difference? Who knows what is truly best for us? Who should we trust? How do we make moral choices amid such ambiguity? Why must we figure this stuff out on our own? Why don’t the gods of the universe play straight with us? How the flaming hell are we supposed to live like this?

{...}  We got the sense that the battle these two angelic/demonic/whatchamacallum entities waged over Alpert’s soul was actually the first phase of M.I.B’s 240 years-in-the-making Smoke-man from Alcatraz escape plan. The episode used a corked bottle of wine as a symbol for Lost cosmology, with The Island playing the role of the stopper that kept something toxic from spilling out and corrupting us all. Of course, that was Jacob’s interpretation. Did you believe him?
 

Complete review here
 

Personally, I'm going to abstain from assigning binary labels of "good" vs. "evil" here until I have decidedly more evidence because I have a rather difficult time assigning the term 'good' to a god-like being that wills humans into a game of "Go" without their consent and without telling them any of the rules.

I'm over with Good Omen's Crowley who suspected that God set the odds against Adam and Eve by placing a tree of knowledge in the center of Eden along with a big neon sign saying "don't touch!"   And I'm not at all convinced that either Jacob or  M.I.B. fit into Alpert's Catholic/Christian philosophy, especially considering he'd been theologically mindfucked by a slave-trading priest.   Beware false gods, false prophets, and immortal quasi-godlike entities that enter into bets or play games with human lives.

And I'm still hoping that the ultimate point of LOST may be that salvation is in fellow men and women not in blind faith, desire for power, or pure acts of id.

Comments

[wildrider.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the thing -- does Jacob actually CARE about the people on "his" island? He doesn't really seem to, although one could then start arguing "free will" and "just because they do things in my name doesn't mean I approve of them" -- but no, I've seen nothing that shows Jacob to be "good" other than we've never witnessed him PERSONALLY doing anything evil, unless you count sort of "kidnapping" people and bringing them to the island, which I suppose he does, although when he needed the Oceanic Six to come back, he talked Hurley into "encouraging" everyone to come back.

I should have saved the episode with all the names written on the wall. I'd love to see which of the other survivors of 815 were candidates (maybe the pilot was one?).