(no subject)
So, there I was, last Friday morning, sifting through cat litter like a narcoleptic zombie, and I had an epiphany. A Lost-piphany, if you will.
I had just watched the season finale on Hulu the night before. Not only did I think it rocked on merit alone but there was also a fantastic thunder and lightning storm going on and, with all the bedroom windows open and the tension of the last bits of part 2, it made for awesome tv viewing. Afterwards, I was all wide-eyed and cracked out, like the giant dork I am, but I finally, finally willed myself to sleep.
But then, the next morning, something struck me.
Okay, so granted I think it's fairly obvious that Jacob and his friend/rival/Esau/smoke monster/dude-without-a-name-who's-wearing-a-Locke- suit-now guy are both some kind of supernatural beings. Either something transformative from human (they don't age) or gods, or something. And I also buy into the theory that perhaps the Island is some form of social/human experiment. I mean the dialogue at the beginning of the finale, about how they always come and fight, etc., but that it only ends once and there's progress - all of that is suggestive of an experiment. Also, the whole of the Dharma Initiative reeks of that sort of thing on a microcosmic scale. The whole "it's an experiment" theory has been floating around since at least Season 1 but I saw something kind of cool happening in the season finale.
Having just come off of a semester of "Religious Thinking in Enlightenment Philosophy," I can't help but see philosophical connections everywhere. Descartes, Locke, Hume, Leibniz, Kant.....it's like I see ontological proofs for the existence of God - they're everywhere - and they don't even *know* they've been disproven. The Matrix did it with Descartes, so why not Lost? What else is Jacob but an archetype form of the Leibnizian God, building the "best possible world?" The Leibnizian God, before creating our world, theoretically created a multitude of possible worlds - worlds in which the minutest of details were changed and the consequences analyzed, all in God's mind. Theoretically, there *could* have been a world in which I wore a red shirt today and perhaps even another world in which I did NOT drink tequila shots to excess last night with people who were born when I was in high school. You know, theoretically.
Leibniz believed that, in the end, we have the world that we have - the real world - (which, by definition also has to be the best possible world because God is either incapable of or unwilling to do a half-ass job) because God worked out all of the permutations and possibilities and came up with this. But, just like a math final, God had to "show his work", so all of the possible ("inferior") worlds have a certain amount of reality......in God's mind. From there, Leibniz reduces everything to monads (basic building blocks of reality) which don't actually interact with one another but instead operate on the notion of "pre-established" harmony, or God's giant-interactive-pre-set-domino-mousetrap. There's no Occam's Razor for Leibniz and Leibniz apparently thought it was more important to solve the whole Cartesian mind-body problem than to come up with anything that actually made sense. OK, so maybe that's a tad snarky, but holy shit does ˆThe Monadology" drag on.
So, you have Jacob, who's a god or The God, working out all of the possibilities, trying to create the perfect mouse-trap on the Island, aka his Realm of the Eternal Verities. The *other* dude, I'm not sure. They don't give you much to work with yet - fanboys and girls have to have *something* to do all summer, right? But, what if his character had something of a Kantian nature? After Kant ripped through the ontological and telological (design) proofs for the existence of God, Mendelssohn called Kant "the All-Destroyer," which, in terms of meta-physical street cred, puts Kant somewhere up near all of NWA, including the late, great, Eazy-E. Word to your infinite regress, bitches. But seriously, though, Kant didn't like things like miracles or notions of God's intervention. If it couldn't be proven empirically (in a universal sense) or rationally, then it wasn't as important in the greater scheme of things for Kant. Kant pictured a whole religion without miracles or an active, intervening God, where reason and ethics ruled the day. Kant certainly had issues with Leibniz. And (John) Locke. And (Desmond) Hume. Especially Hume, which might be interesting if, as the writers have let slip, the character of Desmond Hume is integral to the way the whole thing ends. The philosopher Hume first "opened" Kant's eyes, philosophically speaking, and agitated him into writing some of his best work.
Really, I add nothing new to the "they're a bunch of gods messing with time and space as part of a larger experiment or chess game" theory. I guess my Lost-piphany is, more than anything, a testament to how my liberal arts education is clearly money well-spent. Some sort of Asher Rothian ode to how much I Like College, nerd stylee. I may never be fantastically rich, but I guess I'll never be bored.
In other news, I still have 10 cats and the wads of shedded winter fur coats, accumulating on my stairs and in the corners of my house, are epic. I have no choice but to invest in a backpack vacuum (oooh, can I be Peter Venkman?) with a 50 foot power cord.
The fact that I am excited about this makes me weep for my youth.