A Guide To The Season 5 Finale Of Lost - The Globe And Mail

Episode: The Incident, Parts 1 & 2

Original air date: May 13, 2009

"Two players. Two sides. One is light. One is dark."

And with those words spoken by John Locke in Lost's pilot episode, the season 5 finale begins with two players, two sides. One, [Jacob]is dressed all in white, eating a white fish, wearing white rope sandals, and sitting on a white beach. The other [the Man in Black]is clothed in a black shirt, dark gray pants, and black sandals, and has salt-and-pepper hair. The conversation between them is mysterious, revealing a long and complicated history between the two men, much like the similarly intriguing conversation between Widmore and Ben at the end of "The Shape of Things to Come." ...

...Since his return [to the island] Locke has been a newly confident person. Rather than guessing or hoping he's making the right decision, he's one hundred percent sure he's correct. ... He orders Richard to take him to Jacob. He tells Ben point-blank that he's seen through him. He knows that Richard is powerless to say no to him. He knows once and for all that he really is the Chosen One. He strides into the base of Jacob's statue with one mission in mind, and hands Ben the knife, ordering him to kill Jacob. No longer is John Locke asking questions, or waffling at a crucial moment, or allowing others to make the decisions for him. John Locke is no longer a failure, and the transformation is remarkable.

Until . . . we find out that's not John Locke. Locke is dead, a body in a metal crate, and the man who just strode into the base of the statue appears to be the Man in Black, looking like Locke. Jacob recognizes him immediately. What exactly happens at the end? We'll have to wait for season 6 to know definitively, but if only the Chosen One can enter Jacob's inner sanctum, and the Man in Black cannot kill Jacob, it appears that both Locke and Ben have been manipulated all their lives for this one moment: the Man in Black's loophole was to get Locke to die so he could inhabit his body, and to do that he needed Ben on board. He needed Ben to spend a life beholden to Jacob, where he would do things at the Man in Black's bidding, thinking he was working for Jacob but really working for the wrong side. Ben killed Locke, got the body back to the island, and in the end, he kills Jacob. All his life Ben thought he was one of the good guys, but he might have just been a pawn for one of the bad ones.

The Man in Black was the unexpected feature of this episode. He's never been seen or mentioned before, at least not as a man. But there's a strong suggestion that if Jacob is aligned with the beach, the sun, and the water, that the Man in Black is the jungle, darkness, and the smoke monster. Now that it appears Locke is the Man in Black, we recall that in [the episode]"Dead Is Dead," when Ben came face to face with Smokey, Locke disappeared. He could also be the one manipulating the dead - just as he's currently inhabiting John Locke's body, perhaps he was the one who appeared to others as Christian, Yemi, or Alex (notice Locke wasn't around when Alex confronted Ben, either, and yet Alex is the one who tells Ben to do exactly as Locke, or the man who looks just like him, says). Perhaps the Man in Black tries on the various bodies to see which one will be the key into the statue. He tried Yemi. He tried Christian. And now he's tried Locke, and it worked, like a key fitting into a . . . well, you know.

.... It would seem the loophole that the Man in Black needed was for a body to die off the island, and somehow crash-land back on it as a corpse (like Christian, Yemi, and Locke all did). But why was John Locke's body the one he needed? What was wrong with the other ones? Is it because they didn't know someone on the island who was tied to Jacob, the way Locke knew Ben? Perhaps the Man in Black cannot physically kill Jacob, and needed a proxy, like Ben.

So is that it for John Locke? Is he really dead? Did he die by Ben's hand, feeling like a loser and a failure, just as he did his entire life before he went to the island? Was he nothing more than a pawn in the Man in Black's game? Locke has been an integral character on the show, the one who, from the first season, has seemed more important than anyone else. Maybe his importance was nothing more than just getting to where he needed to be. But I think there may be something more to John Locke. .... He was the one who believed the island was bigger and more important than all of them. He really was the Chosen One, the one who was able to walk into Jacob's sanctuary when no one else could. He told Jack three years earlier that Jack would believe in destiny one day, and he was right. So for his life to really end once and for all in a seedy hotel seems wrong.

But not everyone gets a happy ending, and maybe John was one of the unfortunate ones. Or maybe the island has a different kind of reincarnation. The traditional sense of reincarnation is when one spirit moves to different bodies over different lifetimes. In the case of Locke, one body has housed two spirits. To everyone else's eyes, this is still John Locke. The philosopher John Locke believed that everyone was born a blank slate. Locke has been reborn, but he's certainly not a blank slate. Is it possible the John Locke we all know and love - despite his flaws - might really return?

...And what happened at the end of the episode? Juliet clearly didn't kill everyone, or we won't have much of a season 6. It's unlikely that they'll remove everyone's memories and give them all a do-over, because the characters have evolved too much to erase everything that has happened over the last five seasons. And it would undermine everything the writers have taught us about time travel not affecting the future. Perhaps some memories will be lost, but the people who were touched by Jacob will retain theirs. Or maybe the bomb won't kill them or reverse anything that has happened in their lives, but instead will simply return them to the island in 2007, where they will arrive just in time to see Not-Locke emerging from the statue. Perhaps they are the ones who are "coming," as Jacob warned. Notice how, for the first time in the show's history, the show ended with the black letters of the show title over a white screen, rather than vice versa. Could this be an indication that evil was eradicated, and the future of the island is a white-filled hope? Or could it be indicating the opposite?

Material excerpted from Finding Lost: Season 5 - The Unofficial Guide by Nikki Stafford. © 2009 by Nikki Stafford. All rights reserved. Published by ECW Press.