Discuss: EW’s “Jacob, reveal thyself”

This week’s Doc Jensen EW.com story about LOST, “Jacob, reveal thyself”, and as usual it’s great reading. A few points:

In the premiere, we had Hurley telling Jack, ”I should have gone with you” instead of Locke — not only begging the implicit question ”Why?” but also ”How would have things been different?”

I’d add: I think Hurley found out something that he’d be happier not knowing…

Perhaps Jacob will give us a few more hints tonight. I suspect he knows SOMETHING of altered realities. In this creepy entity, whose only line to date has been, ”Help me,” I sense a trapped soul who has had something stripped from him, and I don’t mean his body. I wonder if here, on an Island that seems to stand at the crossroads of All Possible Worlds, what/who we see trapped here inside this otherworldly outhouse is a man who never really was. In other words: Could Jacob be the version of Charles Widmore that somehow, some way got flushed out of existence? Maybe

I doubt that Charles is Jacob. I think the whole “The island is mine” rant that Widmore went on is that he considers it “his”, because he pumped money into it back in the Dharma days.

I’ve said “the cross roads between worlds” theory before. I think it’s more likely that Jacob is somehow stuck between worlds, not corporeal, but still able to communicate.

There is a prevalent fan theory that Alpert is an electromagnetically energized long-lived survivor of the Black Rock, the slave ship beached in the middle of the Island. I’m willing to accept that Alpert would be several centuries old — IF he was actually, technically alive. Yep: I think this Tricky Dick is dead — or at least as dead as, say, Christian Shepherd. Judging from the way we saw Grandpa McBoozy cradling Aaron last week, these Island ghosts are more materially substantial than the typical ethereal entity, although clearly Alpert is a higher caste of specter than Christian, at least for the (relative) moment.

Bingo. I said that Richard Alpert might be dead too earlier this week.

And this particular point:

Lost season 4’s most conspicuous literary reference, C.S. Lewis. In The Great Divorce, Lewis offers a parable for life on earth by presenting a vision of Heaven in which the newly departed MUST leave their earthly baggage behind if they wish to enter paradise — or, decoded, to grow spiritually. They are helped in this endeavor by ghosts who’ve preceded them in death, though initially, these ”shining beings” come off as tough-love antagonists. ”Others,” if you will.

That beats around the bush a bit. It could be that the island is not only a crossroads between worlds, but THE crossroad between the worlds, where judgements (by The Smoke Monster?) are made where people end up in the afterlife. Some of those people are held to correct things that are happening on the island (Yemi, Horace, etc), all part of the grand plan to correct things the way they “should” be and make those course corrections.

Read the article, and tell me what you think!