nixsight

There was a mysterious statue. Then the mysterious, grumpy dude tells Jacob:

“They come. Fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”

“It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.” Says Jacob, in a blunt contradiction of Battlestar Galactica’s assertion that history and reality are cyclical, the bounder.

Then there’s Locke, looking serious, and telling Benry that “I’m not going to kill Jacob, Ben. You are.” Except it isn’t Locke, it’s whatever is disguised as Locke. Whatever is disguised as Locke, it doesn’t take kindly to people trying to erode BSG’s philosophical foundations.

Course, then Jacob only wants Ben to understand one thing.

“I only want you to understand one thing.” Jacob says. “You have a choice.”

Ben, apparently pissed that after several seasons of being the guy controlling all of the Knowledge, he’s now the last person to know everything, makes the choice to stab Jacob hard in his body. Not-Locke looks on. Jacob takes the opportunity afforded by his dying breath to tell his murderers that:

“They are coming.”

“They are coming.” Is standard story code for “we want to give the audience the impression that something new and amazing and probably at least mildly perilous is on its way, so you’d better keep watching”, but as a side note, it also probably means “we have no idea where we’re going with this, but if we write this now, it’ll force us to come up with at least something new later on”. Writers have to trick themselves into productivity all the time with stuff like this.

Jacob probably isn’t talking about an ice cream van, or Doctor And The Medics, is the one thing we should take from it.

Not-Locke is mean, and obviously figures that coercing Benry into stabbing the living fuck out of Jacob isn’t mean enough, so he kicks Jacob’s corpse into the fire:

Faraday in the past is telling Jack and co some science stuff about pockets of energy and the like. He’s probably about to convince them to do something immensely dangerous and probably stupid, based on a half-arsed theory.

Oh, yeah, there, he did.

Jack, of course, thinks it’s the best idea he has ever heard, because it turns out that Jack isn’t all that smart for a doctor.

“If we can do what Faraday says, our plane never crashes.” Jack says. “Flight 815 lands in Los Angeles.”

This is a pretty good application of logic, considering it’s Jack, but by this point in the series, he’s used up so much of our good faith that it’s difficult not to long for the team to succeed in altering history, only to have Flight 815 crash into a mountain instead, just to see the look on Jack’s face. And it doesn’t matter how clear his understanding of causality, fixing unclear unnatural phenomena by blowing them up is still a pretty odd way of going about things.

Sayid gets shot in the gut. This is exceptionally dramatic and worrying, until you remember that either the lot of them are about to be vapourised by a massive explosion, or none of it will ever have happened anyway. At this point you realise that you’re watching a group of characters you care about on a terribly dangerous mission that is either based on a bad and ultimately fatal hunch or won’t matter anyway, and you find yourself urgently anticipating the final season, around ten minutes before the penultimate one has even finished.

Despite all the risks they have taken and how many of them are probably now mortally wounded because of the arguments Jack has made for this mission, he still pauses at the final moment, looking to Kate for validation, for what seems like ages. In this respect, the characters of Jack and Kate are a gift to the show producers – their self-doubt and tendency toward over-cooking every decision is a boon for anyone trying to build suspense. Typically, it takes Sawyer prompting Jack for him to stand any chance of actually doing anything.

God, Sawyer was good last season.

Then there’s magnets. Ut-oh, Juliet, who’s always going to end up being the one who makes the grown-up, hard decisions, gets dragged down a mine-shaft, and this turns out to be lucky, really, because Jack, whose peculiar reverse-Midas powers have managed to turn even a second chance at life in the real world with Kate to shit, and then also reduced the successful and cheery lives that Sawyer et al had built for themselves to dust, have worked on the bomb that he handled for a couple of minutes before chucking it down the hole, and it fails to go off.

Juliet, battered and broken and luckily within reach of the knackered bomb, applies the tried and tested “hit it with a rock” method to repairing the explosive. It apparently works, as all is engulfed in a brilliant white light, and then we’re up to speed…