HOLY SMOKE

People need to believe. Faced with unanswerable questions, people seek the security of answers that can never be questioned. Unless they find religion, most people seem to feel quite ... lost.

In honor of mankind's perpetual quest to describe God, Lost has explored almost every known religious tradition. From Namaste to Dharma, from heroin filled Virgin Mary's to cautionary tales of Doubting Thomas, from the Pillar of Smoke to Native American sweat lodges, from Aboriginal walkabouts to Casteneda's New Age head trips, from the ouroboros symbol of the alchemists to the hatch logos designed after Taoist bagua, from the Qu'ran to the Bahai Book of Law that Richard tests little John Locke with, the Lost writers are equal opportunity believers. At one time or another, all the spiritual and quasi-spiritual adventures of humanity have gotten a shout out.

All across the vast timespace continuum of human existence, mankind has invented religions. On our magical mystery Island, the indigenous people seem to all have a blindly obedient belief in a religious system that we can call, for now at least, Jacobism. In this religion, Jacob is the Word and the Law. The will of the island is that The Will of The Island be done. And The Will of The Island is only revealed through Jacob. Whoever he is.

Blind faith in an unseen super power. It's hard to see how this became the ultimate answer to the infinite puzzlement of human existence. So, why, then? Why has mankind incessantly created religion?

"Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die." - F. Forrester Church

It's not just pagan religions that were obsessed with death. In the Western world, this very weekend, the return of spring is heralded by ceremonial remembrance of the gruesome crucifixion murder of God's only son. Our curiosity to know what happens on the other side of the great looking glass of Death is killing us. It's clear that whoever designed the septic system for Craphole Island had death on the brain. The interior design of the central Island infrastructure was heavily influenced by the ancient Egyptians, death fetishists extraordinaire.

The Egyptians were history's greatest undertakers. They preserved the vessel of the dead body because they believed the soul would still need it, as a kind of home base, during its travels in the eternal afterlife. Mummification might have even been an old hobby of Ben's. The shelf behind his abandoned desk at the Hydra had a museum curator's feel to it. A stuffed bird, a pinned butterfly, fossilized animal teeth, flasks and beakers and paraphernalia of taxidermy.

He must have felt it very natural then to discover a picture of Anubis carved into the wall of the Monster's basement home. Anubis is the Egyptian God of the Underworld, protector of the dead and escort of lost souls into the eternal afterlife. In this picture, Anubis has stepped outside of his own mythology and appears to be having an existential battle of the gladiators with Old Smoky, who is himself a representative of the longlost mythic figure, Cerberus. The underworld religion of the Others is a kind of Greek-Egyptian Hybrid.

"A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes." - James Feibleman

It's not such a mismatch to find Anubis the jackal and Cerberus the dog sharing the Jacobist mythology. After all, we know from the art hanging on his wall, that Jacob is a dog lover.

And finding all this Egyptian style idolatry here in the tropical South Pacific isn't such a mystery either. The Exit Spot for the Island's Donkey Wheel transport system is located in Tunisia. Maybe a few hieroglyphic tablets fell into a vile vortex on one of those interdimensional time warps. The fantasy world of Lost is large enough for us to explain almost any bit of thematic flotsam or jetsam the writers choose to add to the swirling cultural mix, and hieroglyphics are something Lost fans got used to a long time ago.

Fear of death may explain the Why of religion, but religion does also come with a useful side effect. Religions make up rules for their followers to obey, rules which come in very handy when it comes to maintaining social order and control. The Rules of Jacobism, however, are more than a little difficult to figure out, especially since right and wrong don't seem to have any particular importance.

"When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion." - Abraham Lincoln

The Island, for instance, does not seem inclined to hold Ben accountable for this

or this

or even this.

The Island doesn't seem bothered by any of the assorted psycho-tortures and unprovoked killings Ben has been responsible for. Torture, bondage, patricide - even mass murder - do not appear to be sins of any great magnitude in the Jacobist doctrine.

Perhaps this is because Death isn't all that proud on this Island. The Living and the Dead seem to enjoy an easy coexistence here. It gives new meaning to the phrase that was repeated again in this episode, when a forty something Charles Widmore told young Ben Linus that he'd have to go back to his Dharma buddies. He told Ben that he could live among them but be not of them. Sound familiar?

The hits from that classic Tattoo Episode keep coming. Don't let anyone ever tell you it wasn't a pivotal episode. Ben returned to his people after being reborn in Jacob's Temple, but he was no longer one of them. He crossed over, not from Life to Death, but from Them to Us.

And from that point on, his loyalty to the Island was the only unbreakable law he ever had to try and abide by. Widmore also believes he is doing the Island's Will. It was a little sad, kind of anticlimactic, to see that Widmore left via boring old submarine, instead of some cool new turning of the Dharma Donkey Wheel, but wherever he is, whatever he is doing, I do believe that Widmore also thinks he is always doing what he thinks the Island wants him to do.

We know Jacobism does have Rules, because we saw Widmore banished and Ben judged for breaking them. But what are the rules of Jacobism? While some religions try and regulate human conduct down to the smallest minutiae, like the 613 Mitzvot of the Torah, banning everything from praying on smooth stones to eating worms found in fallen fruit, Jacobism is modeled after more rudimentary moral codes. Jacob's Island seems to have only Two Commandments. The first is Thou shalt do whatever Jacob tells you. And the second is Thou shalt not kill a kid.

The sanctity of children remains a constant on Lost. Ben was sent to murder the Frenchwoman, but the sound of her helpless infant stopped him in his tracks.

Motherhood as an amulet against death was echoed later in the episode, when the sight of little Charlie Hume froze Ben's finger on the trigger that was all set to kill Penny.

Charlie's appearance was itself a reminder of an earlier time in our story, when Sawyer was unable to complete his intended crime when he discovered a child would be harmed by it.

Perhaps the Island spares children because, in an Island overrun with Afterlife, children are from the Land of Beforelife. Children come just recently from that mysterious place where the life spirit dwells between death and rebirth. Why then would Widmore claim that the Island wanted baby Alex dead? It is interesting to note that just as someone tried to run over Locke's pregnant mom,

after Alex's father Robert had been infected by the Monster, he also tried to kill his unborn daughter.

Did the Island want this one child killed, or was Widmore misreading the Will of the Island? Men may invent the gods that issue them commandments, but that doesn't mean they always understand what the gods they've created are telling them to do. So deciphering Jacob's wishes joins the long list of mysteries that befuddle us on every Lost episode. This one brought the usual harvest of impossible riddles. Why did Ben tell Rousseau to run if she heard a Whisper?

If the Island is a giant toilet, whose God lives in a clogged drain, might that mean that Jack's job of Janitor has more power attached to it than we imagined?

Did the Prop Department recycle Jack's old wig

to try and make the fiftyish Ben look twenty something?

What is in the box that Ana Lucia's clone is so fiercely protecting on the beach?

Is it the weapons of the coming war? Another Jughead? Is it a trap for the Smoke Monster, like the Ghostbusters use before they transport the ghouls to the Containment Grid? In keeping with the religious theme of the episode, is it a kind of Ark of the Covenant, the vessel of some holy relic? The men were affixing bars to the sides and appeared ready to carry it away in similar fashion.

The Mystery of the Third Canoe is just about settled. Who left the Ajira water bottle in the outrigger that Sawyer and Juliet found on the Island during their brief visit to 2007? Sun and Frank took the first one, Ben and John the second. That must mean that Ilana or one of her goons were the ones winged by Juliet's gunshot.

What were we to make of the word clues in this episode? Just as the boats warned us in past weeks that Ben's plot to return to the Island was an ILLUSION,

this week they reminded us (if we needed any reminders) that Ben, however the Island may judge him, is a goddamn SAVAGE.

And what to make of Desmond's boat, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND?

This is the title of the last book that Desmond, great Charles Dickens fan that he is, planned to read before dying. It gave me an ominous feeling to see that he had named his boat after that book. I'm not following the annual finale death spec all that closely, but it made me wonder - could Desmond's time be up? He seemed strong enough beating the crap out of Ben, but why does Ben want Sun to apologize to him? I'm worried for Desmond.

The biggest riddle of the episode, of course, was the actual riddle that Ilana asked a thoroughly bewildered Frank Lapidus. "What lies in the shadow of the statue?"

This was a throwback to the password riddle "What did one snowman say to the other snowman?" asked by Desmond of Locke when the hatch was first discovered. Somehow I don't think the answer to this riddle is going to be as funny as "Smells like carrots". The statue of Anubis is gone for one thing. Is this like the Arthur Conan Doyle story, The Musgrave Ritual, where a shadow's location must be recalculated after the object that created the shadow is long gone?

If so, I'm thinking that it sure looked like The Well was in the shadow of the statue that Sawyer's band of time travelers briefly spotted. The well in which was buried the Dharmachakra Wheel of rumbling, tumbling time travel.

The last mystery in my head watching the episode was a rather mundane one. Where was the power being generated for all the lights that were being switched on in the Ghost Town of Otherville?

I know it's kind of a silly question, but no one's been living in Othertown for years, where are they getting the juice? Does the Island have an infinite power supply? It was eerie to see Ben's house again, with the picture of EmilyAnnieJuliet still hanging on the wall.

The Risk game sat on the table,

untouched since Sawyer and Hurley stopped playing it the day that Keamy's murderers descended on them.

We know that, whatever has transpired since the day the Island moved, not a soul has moved to reinhabit Dharma's old yellow digs. Time has frozen since the fateful day that the Island's Will (or Charles Widmore's will, depending on how you're reading all this) was carried out against poor, innocent Alex.

"All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays." ~Cathy Ladman

Now Ben has to crawl through the Island's wormholes down into the dungeon of judgment to finally pay for what happened that day.

The only murder that Ben needs to repent is one he didn't actually commit. In the death of Alex, Ben's sin was one of omission, not commission. But Ben's failure to obey the Island was the only high crime he needed to repent for. Once our grown up Harry Potter had found his way to the Chamber of Secrets, the ritualistic judgment began.

There was a Wizard of Oz feel about the whole thing, from the big blowhard bitching Ben out

to the visitation of old regrets.

It's enough to make you wonder if one of these days, our own Toto-Vincent is going to run around and pull back the curtain on this Jacob charlatan once and for all.

Ben wasn't the first man on the Island to have his life pass before him in a puff of smoke. Watch this gif slowly, and you'll see exactly what I mean.

When the Monster looked into Eko's soul, it came to a quite different conclusion than it did when it searched Ben's. Why? Maybe there is a clue in the ancient Egyptian ceremony known as the Weighing of the Heart. As seen here, Anubis weighed the heart of the deceased against the feather of Ma'at, which represented the concept of truth, order and balance.

If the heart was found blameless, quite literally lighter than a feather, then it was returned to the mummy, so that the soul could make use of it in its further Adventures in the Underworld. A failed test meant the heart was eaten instead by the gluttonous Ammit, the goddess of divine retribution. A heavy heart meant the soul ceased to exist, the worst fate an Egyptian could possibly imagine. In this mythology, if I've got it straight, the goal of every lost soul was to reunite the Ka, or universal life source,

with the Ba, or individual personality,

in order to exist eternally as the transfigured immortal spirit of the Akh.

I'm just guessing here that Richard is one such triumphantly undead. There has to be some explanation for his perpetual youth. Clearly he is special. The only other person on the Island who may be able to compete with him in beatific luminosity may just be this guy.

Afterlife is looking good on Locke. Getting killed seems to have done wonders for his self esteem.

He may be putting on a dead man's shoes, but by tapping them three times, he was reminding us that, as Dorothy of Kansas was told, there's noplace like home.

John Locke has definitely come home. When Ben returned to his office at the Hydra, like a fired employee sheepishly cleaning out his old desk, John confidently sat himself down in the old boss's chair and put his feet up.

It was most entertaining to watch Ben sputtering with frustrated indignation. Gradually it dawned on him that although he may have killed John Locke, he had permanently lost the upper hand in their ongoing battle of wills.

While Ben was still able to skillfully run his cat and mouse game on clueless redshirts like Cesar, John's feigned naivete had Ben completely off balance.

It seemed obvious that John knew Ben Lyin'-to-us was lyin' when he said he'd known about the Island's power to resurrect the dead.

Locke seemed to have supreme confidence in his newfound "knowing" of the Island's Will. He knew where the Monster lived when Ben did not. In fact, when Ben summoned the Monster, and warned Sun that the thing to come was beyond his control, it was no accident that the thing that came through the bushes, from the exact place we'd once seen the Monster emerge, was the very handsome and jaunty John Locke himself.

So, is John the Monster now? Is he God? Not sure about that, but post-dead Locke is a decidedly higher order of being than pre-dead Locke. John the Resurrected reminds me most of Gandalf the White. He's exactly the same, only now he's about ten times more magnificent.

He seemed to know that Ben would be forgiven if he would only confess his sins to the beast. Even after being strangled to death by the little weasel in his no tell hotel room, all that beatific John Locke wanted from Ben Linus was an Apology. I must say, Jacobism seems like the most lenient religion ever. Murder, torture, cruelty and deviance of every kind all pass without penalty. The only sin is failure to submit to the Will of the Island. And even then, if you're really really sorry, the Island forgives you. Like Anubis, once the heart has been weighed and found feathery, the Island lets the doomed soul live...so long as they repent.

Ben emerged from the wormholes of judgment , sworn to follow his new leader. John has found his first sworn apostle.


"Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny." ~George Santayana

What happens in the Temple? We still don't know. This week we went under the Temple. We still have not gotten into it.

We're still a preposition short of full disclosure. The suspense continues to build. I really don't want to lay any extra added pressure on our intrepid Lost creators, but I have to say: the longer we wait, the more we travel, the more we all really need for this secret, once we learn it, to knock our socks off.

"Then said he to me, 'Fear not, fear not, little one, and make not your face sad. If you have come to me, it is God who has let you live. For it is He who has brought you to this isle of the blest, where nothing is lacking, and which is filled with all good things. " - The Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor