The story of Lost
May. 25th, 2010 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pandora_parrotThis is heavy on the Lost spoilers. Do not pass if you have yet to see all of Lost and do not want it spoiled.
This is my interpretation of Lost and what happened in it.
In the beginning was the light, and it was good. We do not know what the light was, where it came from, or how it came to be, but it was there, timeless and omnipresent. It's nature is what we would refer to as "God" by some.
Within and upon the light came to be fashioned the fabric of reality itself: Consciousness. Beings capable of thought, emotion, and progression through time. From their consciousness arose concepts wild and fair. They brought with them time and space and fashioned the universe itself from their minds.
For whatever reason, they decided to co-create an entire universe together, and at the point where they could enter and leave that universe, they created an island. For a long time, they lived in peace, traveling out into the world, creating vast continents and creatures to fill their universe.
In time, though, something went wrong. Perhaps one of the conscious beings decided to destroy this beautiful universe they created. Perhaps there were wars that took place over what should be done with the universe. Whatever happened, the island was set apart from the rest of the universe, and the heart of the light of the universe was disconnected from all beings, save those that were chosen to stand and protect it.
In time, people forgot that they were beings of light and began settlements all over the world. They forgot how to shape reality itself and began to live in it. The light within them dimmed, but never went out. But through it all, the island continued to exist as the point from which all reality flowed.
Thousands of years later, one of the protectors of the island, a woman, realized that her time was running short and she would soon need to find a successor. She saw her chance in a pregnant woman that came to the island one day, and once she had given birth to twins, she killed the woman and took the children as her own.
This is the story of Lost. The story of Jacob and his nameless twin brother.
It appears that there were constant assaults on the island. People coming back to their source, trying to find ways of bending the light to their will, forgetting what the light was in the first place. They employed destructive tools of science in their greedy quest to use the light to become greater than their enemies. It was from these people that the island was to be defended, and Jacob and his brother were to be trained as the defenders.
But in time, Jacob's nameless brother came to learn of the crime committed at their birth, and he turned away from his adoptive mother to join the people of science. Although he believed those people to be cruel and evil, he saw them as a means to an end. A way to finally overcome the rules and laws that his "mother" had placed upon him, most specifically, the rule that he may never leave the island.
In time, their battle reached a flashpoint, and in a moment of passion, the "mother" was killed by the nameless one, and in rage, Jacob through his brother into the heart of the light. The anger and rage of the moment by both parties sundered the nameless one's consciousness from his body, and he became a pillar of black smoke, a monster bent on nothing less then the total destruction of the island and freedom from his captivity upon it.
Their closeness to the light at the heart of existence granted the defenders of the island power to manipulate reality. They could reach out through time and space to other consciousnesses and manipulate them, moving them through various points in their lives to cause various events to occur. Jacob and his brother, to pass the time, decided to use these powers to play a game with one another.
Jacob's brother believed in the evil of people at their hearts and felt that they would always turn to violence, war, and greed. Jacob wagered that there was good in the hearts of humankind and that they would show it even when pressed. So Jacob brought people to the island with the intention of having them show his brother their goodness. He manipulated reality, moving the island and people so that they would intersect.
In time, Jacob summoned a ship called the Black Rock. Upon that ship was a Spaniard by the name of Ricardos. This time, Jacob's brother decided on a new method by which to play their game, and instead of whatever he had done in the past, he asked Ricardos to go and kill Jacob. Without a defender for the island, the nameless one would be able to escape and be free, and this was his ticket out. The ensuing battle between Jacob and Ricardos changed Jacob's heart on the nature of the game. Ricardos convinced Jacob to play a more active role through him, helping people to show their good nature in the game.
Thus, through time, Jacob brought many people to the island, testing them and working with them through Ricardos. This eventually caught the attention of various organizations that would come to the island to try and claim its powers, the most powerful of which was the Hanso Foundation's Dharma Initiative. They dug deep into the island and built stations and sensors to study and manipulate the powers of the island. Not realizing that they were playing with the fabric of reality and consciousness itself, they explained it as quantum effects and such. They created time travel, teleportation, and more. They thought they had found a way to potentially change the world forever, like all of those that had come before them. Jacob and his followers stood against these people in an uneasy truce, always struggling over the boundaries between their activities.
In the early 1970s, time travelers from the future arrived on the island and took their place as members of the initiative. When their estranged friends from the future arrived 3 years later, their actions led to an incredible catastrophe where they blew up a nuclear bomb on the island. This caused the time travelers to return to the future, but also disrupted activity on the island after that.
It further exacerbated the conflict between the scientists and the people of Jacob lead by Ricardos, who now went by the name of Richard. Many years later, a grown up Benjamin Linus, son of a janitor that had been brought to the island, released a toxic gas into their settlements, killing all but a handful of Dharma Initiative members.
One of the few survivors was a strange man that believed the outside to be completely toxic. His job had been to continually press a button every 108 minutes, lest a safety system holding back some of the light of the island be released. He attempted escape and was subsequently killed when a man named Desmond Hume landed on the island and took his place.
Around this time, it appears that Jacob's brother began manipulating the followers of Jacob to do his will. It's unclear about the extent of this, but it certainly seems to be the case. Perhaps this was what made Jacob realize that his death was impending, causing him to manipulate reality so as to bring a new candidates for the defender of the island to him. He selected several dozen candidates and manipulated their lives to put them all on Oceanic Flight 815 in the year 2003, which would be above the island at the exact moment that a Desmond would stop pushing his button, releasing the light of the island in a massive electromagnetic event and causing the plane to crash, stranding all the passengers there.
For several months, they struggled to get off the island. They engaged in constant conflict with the followers of Jacob, now called "The Others" as well as the nameless brother of Jacob, known to them only as a pillar of black smoke.
As potential candidates, these people were immune to harm from Jacob's brother, so the nameless one used images of lost family and friends to manipulate them in ways similar to how Jacob was manipulating them. They worked to sow dissent in the ranks, struggling against each other in a human sized game of chess, trying to get all of the pieces fighting each other and not trusting each other. Jacob's brother was bent on getting everyone else off the island so that he could finally have someone kill Jacob and leave the island defenseless, allowing him to leave.
After many months, a ship came to rescue them, but it was an ex-member of Jacob's followers, a certain Charles Widmore. In the ensuing battle, many people died, and in the end, only 6 people got off the island. To save the island from further attack, Benjamin Linus used the power of the light to disconnect the island from the rest of time and space, causing its inhabitants to move wildly throughout time and space.
John Locke was one of the people left on the island as it skipped wildly through time and space, and he was the one that would eventually reconnect the island to the normal time stream. However, while he did this, Jacob's brother manipulated Locke to think that this was somehow his destiny, placing him in conflict with Benjamin Linus, creating a battle between the two that he could use to his advantage. John Locke did finally restore the island to the normal time stream, but he himself was warped back to 2006 in the middle of a desert. The others on the island found themselves stuck back in 1970, where they became members of the now-destroyed Dharma Initiative.
Back in 2006, Locke met up with the six surviving members of Oceanic Flight 815 and convinced them to go back to the island, as per the instructions of Jacob's brother. But before he himself could join them, he was killed by Benjamin Linus.
The remaining six returned to the island, where half of them were transported back to the 1970s to meet up with the rest of their friends, and the rest of them were stranded once again on the island in 2006. At this time, Jacob's brother took the form of John Locke to eventually kill Jacob. Using Ben's jealous of Locke's relationship to Jacob, Jacob's brother got Ben to travel to the home of Jacob and eventually stab him.
Perhaps this would have allowed the nameless brother to go free at this point, as all of the candidates were trapped back in the 70s, but at this point they all returned to the present, launched forward in time by a nuclear bomb that they blew up near one of the concentrations of light on the island.
This meant that fake Locke was going to have to get the candidates to either leave the island or kill one another, and he tried this several ways. But though Jacob was dead, he was not out for the count. He worked with Hurley, who could see dead people, and others, to eventually get them to come to him and accept their nature as candidates for the defender of the island.
Jack initially accepted it, but only briefly. Charles Widmore had returned to the island with Desmond Hume, who appeared to have an interesting property of being able to survive encounters with the light itself. All three of them felt Desmond would eventually be a vital pawn in the battle between Jacob and his brother, and Jack decided to bet that Desmond's actions would save the island. They sent him to the very heart of the island where he removed a stone peg from the source of the light, with catastrophic effects. The island itself began to tear itself apart, and it would appear that Jacob's warning was right. This was how one could destroy all of reality: by removing the peg from the light, one was cutting all of reality off from the source. This would eventually cause all of reality to break down as consciousness in this plane of existence ceased to be.
But this had another effect. Without the connection to the light, both Jack and Jacob's brother no longer had their light-given powers of immortality and such. Jack fought and killed Jacob's brother, then returned to the source of the light to restore the peg and restore the light to the world. He died in doing this, but not before appointing one of his companions, Hugo, as the next defender.
It is at this point that the story of Lost ends. We can assume that Hugo went on to become a great protector of the island, with Benjamin Linus as his second in command. The story of Lost was the story of the battle between Jacob and his brother, so once it was over, there was no more story.
There is an epilogue, however.
In this universe, consciousness is the fundamental fabric of reality, taking a page from some new age interpretations of quantum physics. When people die, their bodies die, but their consciousness continues.
Despite becoming protector of the island and gaining the appropriate immortality associated with it, Hugo and Benjamin still would die some day. And in that far distant future, when all of them were dead, their consciousnesses decided to once again meet up. They returned to the timeless light that is the heart of everything, but before they let themselves become one with the light, they chose to come together one last time and remember all that had happened to them. They created a version of the world where Oceanic Flight 815 had never crashed, and they worked together to come back to one another and *remember* what had happened to them. And then, they let go of it. And moved on to the return to the light.
And that was Lost. There was a lot of details that were never explained. Interesting hooks and events that would have made for great science fiction. But in the end, it was a story about consciousness and emotion. It was a story of love. It was a story of people and their interactions. It was a story about a fight between a man and his brother.
Lost was not what I thought it would be, and I *am* disappointed that we will never find out the answers to all of the mysteries that remain on the island. But it ended appropriately, consistent with how it had been since the beginning. :)
This is my interpretation of Lost and what happened in it.
In the beginning was the light, and it was good. We do not know what the light was, where it came from, or how it came to be, but it was there, timeless and omnipresent. It's nature is what we would refer to as "God" by some.
Within and upon the light came to be fashioned the fabric of reality itself: Consciousness. Beings capable of thought, emotion, and progression through time. From their consciousness arose concepts wild and fair. They brought with them time and space and fashioned the universe itself from their minds.
For whatever reason, they decided to co-create an entire universe together, and at the point where they could enter and leave that universe, they created an island. For a long time, they lived in peace, traveling out into the world, creating vast continents and creatures to fill their universe.
In time, though, something went wrong. Perhaps one of the conscious beings decided to destroy this beautiful universe they created. Perhaps there were wars that took place over what should be done with the universe. Whatever happened, the island was set apart from the rest of the universe, and the heart of the light of the universe was disconnected from all beings, save those that were chosen to stand and protect it.
In time, people forgot that they were beings of light and began settlements all over the world. They forgot how to shape reality itself and began to live in it. The light within them dimmed, but never went out. But through it all, the island continued to exist as the point from which all reality flowed.
Thousands of years later, one of the protectors of the island, a woman, realized that her time was running short and she would soon need to find a successor. She saw her chance in a pregnant woman that came to the island one day, and once she had given birth to twins, she killed the woman and took the children as her own.
This is the story of Lost. The story of Jacob and his nameless twin brother.
It appears that there were constant assaults on the island. People coming back to their source, trying to find ways of bending the light to their will, forgetting what the light was in the first place. They employed destructive tools of science in their greedy quest to use the light to become greater than their enemies. It was from these people that the island was to be defended, and Jacob and his brother were to be trained as the defenders.
But in time, Jacob's nameless brother came to learn of the crime committed at their birth, and he turned away from his adoptive mother to join the people of science. Although he believed those people to be cruel and evil, he saw them as a means to an end. A way to finally overcome the rules and laws that his "mother" had placed upon him, most specifically, the rule that he may never leave the island.
In time, their battle reached a flashpoint, and in a moment of passion, the "mother" was killed by the nameless one, and in rage, Jacob through his brother into the heart of the light. The anger and rage of the moment by both parties sundered the nameless one's consciousness from his body, and he became a pillar of black smoke, a monster bent on nothing less then the total destruction of the island and freedom from his captivity upon it.
Their closeness to the light at the heart of existence granted the defenders of the island power to manipulate reality. They could reach out through time and space to other consciousnesses and manipulate them, moving them through various points in their lives to cause various events to occur. Jacob and his brother, to pass the time, decided to use these powers to play a game with one another.
Jacob's brother believed in the evil of people at their hearts and felt that they would always turn to violence, war, and greed. Jacob wagered that there was good in the hearts of humankind and that they would show it even when pressed. So Jacob brought people to the island with the intention of having them show his brother their goodness. He manipulated reality, moving the island and people so that they would intersect.
In time, Jacob summoned a ship called the Black Rock. Upon that ship was a Spaniard by the name of Ricardos. This time, Jacob's brother decided on a new method by which to play their game, and instead of whatever he had done in the past, he asked Ricardos to go and kill Jacob. Without a defender for the island, the nameless one would be able to escape and be free, and this was his ticket out. The ensuing battle between Jacob and Ricardos changed Jacob's heart on the nature of the game. Ricardos convinced Jacob to play a more active role through him, helping people to show their good nature in the game.
Thus, through time, Jacob brought many people to the island, testing them and working with them through Ricardos. This eventually caught the attention of various organizations that would come to the island to try and claim its powers, the most powerful of which was the Hanso Foundation's Dharma Initiative. They dug deep into the island and built stations and sensors to study and manipulate the powers of the island. Not realizing that they were playing with the fabric of reality and consciousness itself, they explained it as quantum effects and such. They created time travel, teleportation, and more. They thought they had found a way to potentially change the world forever, like all of those that had come before them. Jacob and his followers stood against these people in an uneasy truce, always struggling over the boundaries between their activities.
In the early 1970s, time travelers from the future arrived on the island and took their place as members of the initiative. When their estranged friends from the future arrived 3 years later, their actions led to an incredible catastrophe where they blew up a nuclear bomb on the island. This caused the time travelers to return to the future, but also disrupted activity on the island after that.
It further exacerbated the conflict between the scientists and the people of Jacob lead by Ricardos, who now went by the name of Richard. Many years later, a grown up Benjamin Linus, son of a janitor that had been brought to the island, released a toxic gas into their settlements, killing all but a handful of Dharma Initiative members.
One of the few survivors was a strange man that believed the outside to be completely toxic. His job had been to continually press a button every 108 minutes, lest a safety system holding back some of the light of the island be released. He attempted escape and was subsequently killed when a man named Desmond Hume landed on the island and took his place.
Around this time, it appears that Jacob's brother began manipulating the followers of Jacob to do his will. It's unclear about the extent of this, but it certainly seems to be the case. Perhaps this was what made Jacob realize that his death was impending, causing him to manipulate reality so as to bring a new candidates for the defender of the island to him. He selected several dozen candidates and manipulated their lives to put them all on Oceanic Flight 815 in the year 2003, which would be above the island at the exact moment that a Desmond would stop pushing his button, releasing the light of the island in a massive electromagnetic event and causing the plane to crash, stranding all the passengers there.
For several months, they struggled to get off the island. They engaged in constant conflict with the followers of Jacob, now called "The Others" as well as the nameless brother of Jacob, known to them only as a pillar of black smoke.
As potential candidates, these people were immune to harm from Jacob's brother, so the nameless one used images of lost family and friends to manipulate them in ways similar to how Jacob was manipulating them. They worked to sow dissent in the ranks, struggling against each other in a human sized game of chess, trying to get all of the pieces fighting each other and not trusting each other. Jacob's brother was bent on getting everyone else off the island so that he could finally have someone kill Jacob and leave the island defenseless, allowing him to leave.
After many months, a ship came to rescue them, but it was an ex-member of Jacob's followers, a certain Charles Widmore. In the ensuing battle, many people died, and in the end, only 6 people got off the island. To save the island from further attack, Benjamin Linus used the power of the light to disconnect the island from the rest of time and space, causing its inhabitants to move wildly throughout time and space.
John Locke was one of the people left on the island as it skipped wildly through time and space, and he was the one that would eventually reconnect the island to the normal time stream. However, while he did this, Jacob's brother manipulated Locke to think that this was somehow his destiny, placing him in conflict with Benjamin Linus, creating a battle between the two that he could use to his advantage. John Locke did finally restore the island to the normal time stream, but he himself was warped back to 2006 in the middle of a desert. The others on the island found themselves stuck back in 1970, where they became members of the now-destroyed Dharma Initiative.
Back in 2006, Locke met up with the six surviving members of Oceanic Flight 815 and convinced them to go back to the island, as per the instructions of Jacob's brother. But before he himself could join them, he was killed by Benjamin Linus.
The remaining six returned to the island, where half of them were transported back to the 1970s to meet up with the rest of their friends, and the rest of them were stranded once again on the island in 2006. At this time, Jacob's brother took the form of John Locke to eventually kill Jacob. Using Ben's jealous of Locke's relationship to Jacob, Jacob's brother got Ben to travel to the home of Jacob and eventually stab him.
Perhaps this would have allowed the nameless brother to go free at this point, as all of the candidates were trapped back in the 70s, but at this point they all returned to the present, launched forward in time by a nuclear bomb that they blew up near one of the concentrations of light on the island.
This meant that fake Locke was going to have to get the candidates to either leave the island or kill one another, and he tried this several ways. But though Jacob was dead, he was not out for the count. He worked with Hurley, who could see dead people, and others, to eventually get them to come to him and accept their nature as candidates for the defender of the island.
Jack initially accepted it, but only briefly. Charles Widmore had returned to the island with Desmond Hume, who appeared to have an interesting property of being able to survive encounters with the light itself. All three of them felt Desmond would eventually be a vital pawn in the battle between Jacob and his brother, and Jack decided to bet that Desmond's actions would save the island. They sent him to the very heart of the island where he removed a stone peg from the source of the light, with catastrophic effects. The island itself began to tear itself apart, and it would appear that Jacob's warning was right. This was how one could destroy all of reality: by removing the peg from the light, one was cutting all of reality off from the source. This would eventually cause all of reality to break down as consciousness in this plane of existence ceased to be.
But this had another effect. Without the connection to the light, both Jack and Jacob's brother no longer had their light-given powers of immortality and such. Jack fought and killed Jacob's brother, then returned to the source of the light to restore the peg and restore the light to the world. He died in doing this, but not before appointing one of his companions, Hugo, as the next defender.
It is at this point that the story of Lost ends. We can assume that Hugo went on to become a great protector of the island, with Benjamin Linus as his second in command. The story of Lost was the story of the battle between Jacob and his brother, so once it was over, there was no more story.
There is an epilogue, however.
In this universe, consciousness is the fundamental fabric of reality, taking a page from some new age interpretations of quantum physics. When people die, their bodies die, but their consciousness continues.
Despite becoming protector of the island and gaining the appropriate immortality associated with it, Hugo and Benjamin still would die some day. And in that far distant future, when all of them were dead, their consciousnesses decided to once again meet up. They returned to the timeless light that is the heart of everything, but before they let themselves become one with the light, they chose to come together one last time and remember all that had happened to them. They created a version of the world where Oceanic Flight 815 had never crashed, and they worked together to come back to one another and *remember* what had happened to them. And then, they let go of it. And moved on to the return to the light.
And that was Lost. There was a lot of details that were never explained. Interesting hooks and events that would have made for great science fiction. But in the end, it was a story about consciousness and emotion. It was a story of love. It was a story of people and their interactions. It was a story about a fight between a man and his brother.
Lost was not what I thought it would be, and I *am* disappointed that we will never find out the answers to all of the mysteries that remain on the island. But it ended appropriately, consistent with how it had been since the beginning. :)
