Remember That Time On LOST When: You Realized Richard Alpert Was Fucking Immortal?
[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]
When we first met Dicky Alpert, he was just a smarmy dude representing the false biosciencetechthing firm, Mittelos Bioscience. He was trying to get Juliet to come to the Island and unbreak all the uterus-areas of the women on the Island. No one could get their baby makers working, and it was an understandable source of consternation for the Others. So they sent their right-hand man out to recruit the beautiful, intelligent woman, who unlike The Woman Who Steals Aaron, doesn’t seem to spread for anything with a pulse.
(Though to be fair, both Sawyer, Jack, and Malcolm from Firefly are all fine specimens.)
I fell in love with the dude from the beginning, since he seemed to have the ability to ram buses into meddling ex-husbands, and had a prominent, strong set of eyes. There was a mystery to him, and I dug that. Obviously. If I didn’t dig mysteries, I probably would have thrown my pair of LOST underwear into the local creak a long time ago.
And I thought that was that. A bit player in the overall mythos of the show.
Wrong.
Double wrong.
My boy Dicky Alpert shows up again in the same season, looking like the Prince of Persia. And that’s when I realized there was more to this dude than meets the eye. For starters, the dude was on the Island in 1973. And aside from having shitty hair and dressing like someone from a Phish concert, the dude hasn’t aged.
This is the part where you say, alright, what the fuck is going on.
Alpert is the oldest member of the Others, from all my studies. My studies generally consist of whatever my caffeine-rotted brain can recall, as well as any minimal reading I have done over at Lostpedia. And that makes him intriguing as fuck. What the hell is a timeless, gorgeous man, doing on the Island? Eventually, we find out the answer. He’s working for Jacob.
Say it with me, what the fuck?
HYPERTEXTUAL BRIEF ASIDE:
Here’s another tidbit you may or may not know. Like a lot of characters on the show, Richard Alpert is named after a real dude, though he has changed his name to Ram Dass. He was a Harvard professor who experimented heavily with LSD. Dude seems like the man:
Via Wikipedia:
Alpert accepted a permanent position at Harvard, where he worked with the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service, where he was a therapist. He was also awarded research contracts with Yale and Stanford. However, perhaps most notable was the work he was doing with his close friend and associate, Dr. Timothy Leary.
Having only recently obtained his pilot’s license, Alpert flew his private plane to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Leary first introduced him to teonanácatl, the Magic Mushrooms of Mexico. By the time Alpert made it back to America, Leary had already consulted with Aldous Huxley, who was visiting at M.I.T., and through Huxley and a number of graduate students they were able to get in touch with Sandoz, which had produced a synthetic component of ergot wheat fungus called LSD. Alpert and Leary brought a test batch of both substances back to Harvard, where they conducted the Harvard Psilocybin Project and experimented with LSD relatively privately.
Moving on.
Alpert comes off to me like Jacob’s right-hand man. While there’s always a leader of the Others, who Richard then assists, I can’t help but feel that he ultimately answers only to Jacob. He’s like the guy who makes sure the one “in charge” doesn’t fuck up, because if he does, he’s going to stab him and roll him into the mud.
He’s done quite a variety of things in his days, from trying to recruit Locke as a child, to assisting Eloise Hawking while she ran the show. He’s always been timeless, accrediting that shit to some effect that Jacob has had on him. He answers to Ricardus, and speaks Latin. Ladies, he’s also disease-free, like dogs, and will bring your Mom flowers.
Where does Richard come from though?
I have my guess, probably the same as yours:
The fucking Black Rock!
It’s a blind stab, but at the end of Season Five, we see a ship coming ashore while Jacob and his Nemesis sit along the beach. The natural inclination is to say that shit is the Black Rock, but the idea that Alpert is on the boat is just a guess. It seems that there weren’t any “Others” at the team of the boat’s arrival, since Jacob presents himself out in the open, which he hasn’t done at any other point on the show. Who the fuck knows.
Whatever the case, Alpert is one of my favorite mysteries of the show. It isn’t just that he’s timeless, or where he comes from, but rather his role in the entire play. If he was Jacob’s assistant, why does he stand idly as Jacob is murdered? Does he embrace fate, has he seen the future?
Or perhaps he is Jacob’s second assistant, to replace Jacob’s Nemesis/Smokey when he revolted. There’s a lot of theories bandied about that suggest that Jacob’s Nemesis can’t kill Jacob himself because he is bound in some way to him. Who knows, maybe it is that bond that makes one ageless, and when Smokey was like, fuck this, I quit, Jacob asked Dicky if he wanted in on the whole immortality thing.
Either way, it’s interesting to see what shall become of our boy, now that his BFF has been slain in his Temple of Doom or whatever. Does he answer to Locke/Facob? Or will he side with Ilana, seeing as that she seems to work for Jacob, and he was the only one to provide the correct answer to “What lies in the shadow of the Statue?”
I don’t fucking know! And I love it.
