There is a question of fate vs. free will. Do the characters have a specific fate? And if so, who controls (or controlled) that fate? What if the characters themselves created (or are creating) that fate… then it would be free will, right? Or not…

There is a very unique way of looking at this question with an answer I have never heard suggested before. Problem is, it only becomes clear much later in the show. But it doesn’t hurt to toss around in your head a bit.

As for why I didn’t bring up the very end of the episode with Penny… I just forgot :) Thanks for reminding me.

@Everyone else: Thanks for all the great comments. I’m going to put off answering a lot of your questions until next week’s article.

Kelvin is the same person that taught Sayid how to torture in his flashback from “One of Them”. Also, Kate’s dad (not the real one she blew up, but the one from the army) interrogates Sayid in this episode. This one I’m fairly certain is just another of those connections they like to throw in, like Sawyer and Ana Lucia meeting Jack’s dad or Eko investigating a miracle involving the daughter of the psychic that told Claire to go to L.A.

The second thing I’d like to point out I think is slightly more important and may affect your opinion of the smoke monster from last week’s post. In “The 23rd Psalm” when Mr. Eko is staring down the smoke monster, the camera pans through the smoke and if you look closely at the flashes of light you’ll see moments from Eko’s past inside. So yeah. There you go.

I thought there was something else too but I can’t remember it now…

“And my favorite part: Locke says, “Screw this,” and lets the hatch timer run out. Sure, he seems to have been wrong—some very bad seeming electromagnetic discharge makes the whole island shake and the sky turns purplish white—but the world doesn’t end, either. So score one for Locke?”

It’s clear from the episode that tragedy was averted only by Desmond turning the failsafe key and destroying the Swan station (pieces of the Swan get blown all the way to the beach — the hatch door, etc.), so it must’ve been one helluva force! And by episode’s end Des, Locke and Eko are still missing. So you can’t say Locke SEEMS to have been wrong — he’s most definitely wrong, and pushing the button in fact DID have a purpose and was NOT just a psychological experiment. The only reason the world (or at least, the island) didn’t end is thanks to dear ol’ Des.

And I’m also surprised you didn’t bring up the actual final scene from the season finale: the electromagnetic disturbance Locke caused (and Des fixed) was picked up by a research station far, far away… allowing the island to be located… by a crew working for Penelope Widmore. So that definitively wraps up at least one big theory debated in the first two seasons (are the Oceanic survivors actually dead and in Purgatory/Limbo/whatever, for starters)… since that scene sets up Season 3, I was surprised that didn’t get any mention.

mlawski
i <3 your brain

Do you think the events resulting in Eko’s becoming a priest make his priesthood any less or more legitimate than if he had thought, “Oh, I want to be a priest?” Why did *he* have a sudden change in direction/motivation?

What’s gonna happen to WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALT?

The Lost story could be told in a multitude of ways, but the writers keep choosing the most misleading one — hopefully for a reason.

Sure you do. Locke had built this entire, meaningful experience in to what had been happening to them for all these months. He was a guy in a dead end job who life had f*cked over hard. Now he finds himself in a position of leadership and convinced he’s doing important work. But Locke, with his years of life, is still this broken down, fragile dude with low self-esteem who just saw this whole tower he built around himself come crashing down. And when it comes crashing down, he realizes he’s back to being a guy sitting behind a computer pushing buttons and that it’s not important work. It’s not meaningful. It’s doing someone else’s bidding with the promise it will make your life better. Just like it was before. He feels betrayed and stupid and he overreacts.

If anything, Locke is prone to overreacting. He gave a dude a kidney after knowing him for like six hours. He became immediately convinced that this random hatch was the key to his future. He decides to go on a walkabout while paralyzed. He’s a mark — and when he realized (or thought he realized) he was a mark for himself, he went crazy.