THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
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"I, your glass,The mirror does not lie. It may play a few tricks here and there, but it cannot hide the truth. The mirror forces us to look at ourselves, all our warts and zits and wrinkles and scars.
Will modestly discover to yourself
That of yourself which you yet know not of."
- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
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It was very odd that OtherJack didn't seem to recognize his own appendectomy scar, the one his Mom told him he'd gotten when he was 7 or 8. Not remembering a 30 year old scar seems downright inexplicable. I suppose it's possible that he only just noticed it after a fresh chest wax.
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So did the scar in the mirror trip Jack's consciousness upside down? Was he having one of those bleedthrough incidents, like he seemed to have on the plane with Desmond?
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One of those weird brain farty feelings where his parallel Jackness was sending a secret coded message to his OtherJackness?
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Mirrors have been used throughout history as a way to send messages.
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When Jacob wanted to signal Jack about the next course correction he needed to take on his Hero's Journey, he sent him to the top of a Lighthouse.
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There Jack and Hurley found the mirrors and firepit that a primitive lighthouse would have used to make a beacon. There was also a dial to position the mirrors, with each degree carefully printed with the name of one of the 360 potential Candidates.
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The same home we saw him visiting in OtherLOST.
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This 108th episode of LOST, happening in the fifth hour of the grand finale season, was a Jackback, just like the fifth hour of the pilot season of LOST. But it wasn't just one Jackback. It was like a kaleidoscope of Jackbackery. Mirrors were more than props. The symmetry of mirrors kept creating little jagged edges of memory, with parallel storylines reflecting onto past storylines in ever more unpredictable patterns.
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In Season One's White Rabbit, Jack chased his father through the jungle.
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In a cave filled with death he found the water of life. He also found his father's casket - empty.
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In Lighthouse, Jack and Hurley rediscover the caves, still lined with rotty skeletons, and the empty grave is still there, still empty. Just the way it was after Jack finished bashing it to pieces.
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Meanwhile, over on OtherLOST, Christian's body is still missing. Jack and his mother have a meeting in Christian's rich leather coated, booklined study, searching for the dead man's Will.
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In White Rabbit, Mama Shephard confronted Jack in that same study.
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She ordered him to Australia to retrieve the body that, ever since, no one has been able to keep track of.
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Christian's verdict was made cloudy by the jabberwocky he added about Jack not being able to fail because he'd be a total failure at failing. He didn't have what it takes to fail - that was the gist of his very helpful lecture to Jack way back when. I think there's a way to see that as a kind of mirror image pep talk. Maybe Doc Shephard was telling Jack that he was doomed to succeed because he didn't have the ability to fail. Could that be it? Did Jack just need to take his father's advice and look at it upside down and backwards in a mirror to see that it was really a form of motivational encouragement?
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As has been the pattern, everything in OtherLOST is just a little bit nicer, a little bit easier, a little bit less mentally ill. OtherJack doesn't seem to have hated his dad at all. His mom is kind and helpful, not shrewish and accusing. She compliments him on not following her down the road to alcoholism.
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It's a faithful mirror image of the life Jack had before, just a little bit prettier and cleaner. There is, however, one big difference. Instead of a surly disapproving father, in OtherLOST, Jack's the proud owner of a surly disapproving son!
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LOST is a story of many themes, but no theme is more central than the great Curse of the Daddy Issue. Father begets Son, who fights - and, on LOST, often kills - the Father, in order to become the man he's meant to be. Jack has always been on the innocent side of that parallel, but in OtherLOST he gets to jump through the glass and try it on the flipside. The Son who resented the Father becomes the Father whose Son thinks he's a pain in the ass.
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The son who is a candidate in a different, but no less heroic, challenge than his father.
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The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. - Psalm 23In the Bible, David was the poor young shepherd that everyone remembers as the barefoot boy who slew the great Goliath with just a bag of rocks and a slingshot. Before he ever got around to that great deed, David was already famous in the royal court because he was a musical prodigy who alone had the talent to calm King Saul's tempers by playing his harp.
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Naturally then this new Shephard - David - is also a musician.
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But he's not just your average high school Gleek. He's Juilliard bound. And OtherJack, it turns out, has become so disconnected from the life of his only kid that he never even knew it!
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Take a minute to think just how much indifference and disinvolvement it would take to not realize your 14 year old son could rip off a Chopin sonata allegro agitato in front of a panel of judges.
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Jack realizes that he was freakishly controlling, trying to see his own reflection in his son, rather than just standing back and respecting him for who he is. He has an epiphany and vows to love David forever. Magically, that fixes everything.
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They go home to live happily ever after and eat pizza and watch Dodger games together. All problems fixed. OtherLOST is almost as neat and tidy as a sitcom.
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Whatever happened in OtherLOST happened so differently that the OtherLosties have all become the kind of people who can solve their own problems. It probably helps that their Other-problems are not nearly as tough. Jack doesn't have to deal with a teenager that's taking drugs or flunking school. Even though Jack has just said no to parenting, the kid seems to be doing fantastic. He does his homework, he plays piano, he wears a tie, he even closes up the cookie bag after he takes his one (!) cookie.
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Reflection, after all, is the phenomenon that concerns us most these days. While LOST is a story that draws from many of the world's great books, the mother of all great LOST books is still this one, written by one of literature's greatest mirror aficionados.
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We know Jack loves this book. It was the one his Dad read to him, the one he read to Aaron back in Something Nice Back Home.
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And in OtherLOST apparently it's the book that represents some lost time in David's childhood, when Jack and he were still a family.
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When Jack arrives at his old home, Number 233 House, he looks under a rabbit to find the key.
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Jack is the character that chased the White Rabbit in Season One. He's the one who went Through the Looking Glass in Season Three. Jack, let's face it, is the Alice of WonderLOST.
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Whenever one travels through the looking glass, the first thing that one notices are all the reversals. Jack reminds David about Alice's kittens, black Kitty and white Snowdrop, who the story turns into the wild and crazy Red and White Queens.
As we would expect in a mirror story like this one, we find other interesting reversals. Kate's number has been found! They decided not to keep us in suspense after all. She is Number 51.
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She doesn't get to have one of the magic lottery numbers, but at least she's not crossed out. And, it's also curious that, of all the numbers in all the sundials in all the interdimensional parallelling universes, she gets assigned to the mirror image of Ford's Number: 15.
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David's audition piece, Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu in C-sharp minor, is the same piece little Daniel Faraday was playing in The Variable before his tender loving mother shot his piano career dead in its tracks.
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I hope they don't plan to carry the reflections out too faithfully, because that would certainly not bode well for David Shephard's prospects in life.
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Jack's philosophical talk with Dogen at the Temple is reflected later in their Other-meeting at the concert auditions.
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At the reading of his Will, we find that some things may have changed, but OtherChristian was still a lousy family man. Even though the OtherShephard family seemed a lot tighter and healthier, Christian still managed to spawn and then abandon an unwanted baby girl on the opposite side of the planet, sometime after 1977, the year of "the incident".
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The Shephard sibling connection always seemed a little contrived to me, but in this episode I finally began to see the family resemblance.
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Both of Christian Shephard's children have been branded.
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Both are surgeons of a sort.
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And now that we've met David, it turns out that both of them are parents!
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And she really, really doesn't take any shit from anyone. To say she's hardcore is putting it mildly.
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You can see why Jin is feeling so nervous around her.
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I don't know if Stephen King's Misery ever played in Korea, but if it did, you know Jin was thinking of this.
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Was she saved in the Temple bathwater, the way Sayid was? Did she get claimed? Is she infected?
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It's obvious the girl has been through an ordeal. She's regressed into a feral idiot, albeit one who still knows how to sterilize her suturing tools.
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But it's not exactly the same. Rousseau was a true hermit. She seemed to speak to no one. Claire, on the other hand, has A Friend.
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Claire, the mother who lost her child, the child who lost her father, is now being led through her final paces by a Monster masquerading as her big ole sugar daddy. It's super creepy.
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He is doing what a dude does in such a situation. Play games in the courtyard and make the best of Temple Camp.
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Like how did the Lighthouse from ancient Alexandria suddenly appear on LOST Island?
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Stargate!
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There needed to be some portal through which the Losties could adventure into a plot generating machine where things like Lighthouses can spring up out of thin air.
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Being able to make superstructures suddenly appear on this tiny Island is the only way this puzzle game can keep moving fast enough to get us to the end by May 23.
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The Myst comparison works on a couple of levels. I made a guess last week that what we may be watching is a time transcending battle between two brothers trapped on an enchanted Island, dually cursed by the murder of their father, trying to escape by teaching a Stranger to decode the hidden Island secrets. It's as good an explanation as any for the way Jacob was pulling Jack and Hurley's strings throughout this episode.
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First he guides Hugo through an ego boosting encounter with Dogen.
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"Why don't you go back to the Courtyard?"
Following Jacob's cues, Hurley manages to pwn the Zen master at his own game. Jacob is so skilled a puppeteer that his dolls never even feel him pulling their strings.
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Next Jacob feeds Hurley the line that Jack needs to hear. Unlike his mean old Earth Daddy who told Jack he didn't have what it takes, Jack's Heavenly Father has the opposite opinion of him. Being told he does have what it takes works like magic on Jack, and he and his Sancho Panza set out to find some windmills. Or to do whatever Jacob's invisible puppet strings are pulling on them to do.
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Whoever's controlling him, Jack's Hero's Journey seems to be right on track. He's pretty much wrapped up the whole Kate thing, or to be more specific about it, he's resisted the Lure of the Temptress.
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"The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond the woman, surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond." - Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
I guess it's easier to resist the Temptress when she's lost all interest in tempting you. A few stray fans seem not to have noticed this, but Kate isn't Jack's adoring little girlfriend anymore. In any case, it's all obvious to Jack.
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Kate has a story of her own. Finally. About damn time.
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Having moved beyond the Temptress, the hero's journey next proceeds to the inescapable task of Atonement with the Father. And really, when you come right down to it, what else has Jack's story ever been about?
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Hurley had instructions on his arm ... which, no, you can't read even if you hold a mirror up to it. (Not that I tried or anything.)
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- Francois Rabelais
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When Jack smashes the lighthouse mirrors, it is the rebellious act of a defiant son. He may be a recovering control freak, but he still can't tolerate being controlled by someone else.
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Afterwards, his heavenly Father watches over Jack as he hikes up to a cliffside to meditate on this new travail he's being made to endure.
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Or maybe he's just posing to be the next great Island monument.
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While Jack sits and contemplates the great burden of being Someone Very Important in the Battle of the Island Gods, Hurley and Jacob do a postgame wrapup. Hurley at one point in the episode refers to Jacob as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and it fits him well.
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"Strike me down and I shall become more powerful than you can imagine..."
Jacob may be "dead", but it has only caused him to step up his game. What that game is remains a mystery, and whether or not Jacob is the Good Guy in this game is more in doubt than ever. He's a manipulative, scheming bastard, that much is clear. But at least his recruits aren't putting axes into people's guts. At least not yet.
![](http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w78/fishbiscuit_photos/Lighthouse/normal_lighthouse736.jpg)
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The episode leaves Jack perched on the mountaintop, searching the horizon for his Destiny Ship. Maybe he's wondering why he broke the Lighthouse that could have signalled his position. Maybe he just doesn't want to come down because he feels stupid for smashing the thing that might have fixed him. Because, uh, seriously, why did he do that?
![](http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w78/fishbiscuit_photos/Lighthouse/normal_lighthouse470.jpg)
Jacob doesn't seem disturbed that Jack broke his cool machine. He's still babbling about this big important Someone who is Coming, which is a phrase that Jacob may have used one time too many. I'm trying hard to be intrigued about who is coming, and why Jack breaking the beacon is going to help the Island to be found ... but my curiosity is weakening. Koans tire me. Jacob is like a zazen who never tries to teach his pupil anything, only gives him the chance to work it all out for himself.
![](http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w78/fishbiscuit_photos/Lighthouse/normal_lighthouse003.jpg)
Jacob is employing the time honored techniques of Buddhism, to seek the Mirrorlike Wisdom of pure Enlightenment by never actively seeking it. Whatever his destiny is, Jack is going to have to figure it out on his own. Especially now that he broke the mirrors.
![](http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w78/fishbiscuit_photos/Lighthouse/normal_lighthouse002.jpg)
"If you really want to know who I am,
you will have to be absolutely empty as I am.
Then two mirrors will be facing each other,
and only emptiness will be mirrored." - Osho