And yeah, some sort of explanation about the weird bird stuff with Walt would be quite welcome in the final season.

Come to think of it: the ones I really liked were in the second half of the season. So I think you’re on to something!

Yeah, the first half of season five underwhelmed me.

It’s the “Jeremy Bentham” problem. The identity of Jeremy Bentham was supposed to be a big, important mystery as presented in S4. We suspect it’s an alias — whenever someone wants to mention his REAL name, there’s always a character there to interrupt them and warn them to never speak that name. So it’s something serious… and then we find out it’s Locke. Wow… so Locke’s visits must have been *incredibly* important.

And then we get to S5 and see the visits themselves. Which… are pretty uninteresting.

Personally speaking, I think the “Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” — the final scene excepted — is the worst ep of S5. Well… the most *disappointing*, anyway. All the mystery about why Locke supposedly gave up his old life and “became” Bentham? Strictly because that was the name on his fake passport from Widmore. Sure, he had to change his name when returning to the “real world” — because as far as anyone else is concerned, John Locke died when Oceanic 815 crashed. But the O6 *refuse* to use the name Locke, and only stick to Bentham, because Locke supposedly insisted on it. (Which you never actually see in his visits to them.)

It’s like the writers forgot about all the threads they left hanging about this from S4. The warnings Walt told Hurley that Locke/Bentham gave him? According to what we see in “Life and Death…”, they never happened. (And speaking of that… the Walt/Locke reunion is hugely underwhelming.) Locke’s visits to the O6 aren’t all that compelling — they lack any specificity about what happened after they left the island. (I WILL say that Locke’s scenes with Abaddon are pretty great, though I wish we knew more about Ab before Ben takes care of him…)

Usually the Lost writers are more skillful, and cover up their tracks and tricks (and holes) with good scripting. But it’s clear from S5 that the ONLY reason “Jeremy Bentham” was made so mysterious in S4 was to make the audience wonder who it could be, before the “shocking” reveal that it’s Locke… because frankly, it wouldn’t have made ANY difference whatsover if they had just come out and called him Locke.

Thus, they each have separate applications (hence the oxymoron of “creation science”), but both are valid and pertinent, and they are complementary to each other, not mutually exclusive.

However, there are people on both sides – more on the side of faith than on the side of science, sadly – who don’t bother with rigorous questioning. People who blindly follow what they’re taught. It’s my contention that Jack is one of these. He appears to be a “man of science” simply because he accepts the conclusions that science brings to the table, and doesn’t bother with the study of the interior world. However, he is not a questioner. He rejects things that he doesn’t already understand, and he clings to the promises that science makes until they are ripped out from under him.

Locke, on the other hand, IS a questioner. He is always seeking answers, or trying to. Hell, he lost the love of his life because he couldn’t stop stalking his father, just to ask him “Why?” He asks questions, and he gets answers… but the viewer and the other Losties tend to reject that, because he’s been asking questions of faith, not questions of science. He’s asking the sort of questions that are answered through meditation, or prayer, or staring into the heart of the smoke monster.

If the definitions we’re going to be using here must equate science with rigorous questioning and faith with blind acceptance, then it’s Locke who’s the “man of science” and Jack who’s the “man of faith.”

mlawski – I take issue with the idea that Faraday is Jack’s replacement. Faraday is the consummate questioner, the Seeker. He is a man of both science AND faith, disparaging neither in his search for understanding. (probably why they named the character for a man with an institute in the UK named after him for the study of, you guessed it!, the connections between science and faith) I was sad when he died, too, because I am firmly convinced that the one thing that would make this world a better place is not widespread peace and understanding, but more hot physicists. Yup. Better place for me, at least.

I think this was brought up in previous comments (perhaps for the S2 recaps?), but the title of the S2 opener, “Man of Science, Man of Faith,” was confirmed by Lindelof on the DVD commentary to strictly refer to Jack, not Jack vs. Locke (as most people, including myself for many years, assumed). In other words, Jack is a man of BOTH science and faith — but it’s a question of what he has faith IN, and how that faith changes over time (both from his flashbacks to pre-island life, to the first few months/TV seasons on the island, to his post-island life).