Read the rest of this entry »

Spring has sprung! Or something. It’s always weird when the days are nice, but life hasn’t returned to the barren shitland of New England. There’s something odd about walking around and loving the blue skies and warm weather and seeing no leaf or greenery within my purview. Whatever, I’ll take the sunlight, man. Nothing perks up my spirits (and all of humanity’s) like a nice beautiful day outside. It’s almost enough to make me forget the ashen butthole that is winter time.

Can you notice I’m falling less and less in love with snow and frost? It never used to bother me when I was young. Now I hate it with a ferocity usually reserved for dying on boss fights, or the prequels.

Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.

Read the rest of this entry »

After last week’s episode, anything was going to be The Great Comedown. That’s scientific fact. Half the people I’ve come across have considered the Dicky Alpert as Spanish Jesus episode one of the best episodes ever, and I’m in agreement. So yeah, I was expecting this week’s to be a bit of a drag.

Man, was I right.

Let me pose a question to you: What is the only thing more boring than Jin and Sun? Jin and Sun in LAX. Jin and Sun eating up an episode of LOST during its final season. This episode aggravated me to the point where I said “Fuck this” in the middle of some weepy, strained LAX moment and went upstairs to grab a Diet Dew and a string cheese. I was beginning to go insane with anger. I went upstairs from my nerd cave, grabbed the caffeinated bliss, and returned downstairs. Do you know what I missed? Absolutely nothing.

I can’t be the only one who is utterly apathetic towards Jin and Sun’s storyline, can I? I’ve never gave a fuck about them. I wrote about LOST for an entire month, and I never touched on them. And while my disregard for them may be more than most peoples’, I can’t imagine why I should care about them. As my friend Tommy Rock pointed out at the beginning of the season, Sun’s main purpose is to ask questions. Pay attention next time she’s on screen. The writers have used her as a mechanism for shitty exposition since I he dropped this knowledge on me.

How? Why? Blah blah blah.

And Jin? Jin’s a hot Asian dude in a tight white t-shirt.

So no, I don’t care about them on the Island, or in LAX. Sorry! They’re both candidates, but they’ve barely spent time on screen together. I mean, I’m a sucker for a good romance, but even I can’t rouse any emotions over whether or not they’ll wind up together.

But let’s get down into it.

On LAX, Jin and Sun ain’t married. But the dudebro is still working for her father. Sun’s gone from an annoying plot device on the Island to an annoying prissy chick in LAX. The two of them land in LAX under the notion that Jin has to deliver some money to Keamy (who is still awesome) in some sort of deal. Right. This is totally cool. Snore.

Across shitty LAX, Jin and Sun pine for one another. They roll around in bed and say sweet nothings and I resist the desire to barf and scream. Maybe scream while I’m projectile barfing.

At one point hunky Jin rolls out of bed after it is implied that he just got done making the sex. Let me ask you a question? Who puts their boxers on after sex? Usually I’m half-dead, laying there puffing, grasping at life. I’m a pathetic man. But even if I had the ability to move, I wouldn’t put on my dumb boxers. That’s the best way to get the human equivalent of Elmer’s Glue all over   the inside of the boxers. Not buyin’ it, yo! But it’s ABC, so yeah, I understand why. I’m just complaining.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

There are moments on LOST that are so utterly epic, you want to shit your pants. Or do laps around your room. Or perhaps, jump up off your couch after shitting your pants, and do laps around your room. Tonight’s LOST brought all of that funk into my soul. I’m excited at a cellular level. I am tweaking out on pure undiluted awesomeness, not to mention an entire fucking bag of Starburst jellybeans. Oh sweet Christ, if this isn’t one of the best episodes of all time, I don’t know what will be. Buckle the fuck up, there are going to be fanboy fluids flung everywhere. Open your mouth and say a novena.

Where to start? Where the fuck to start? There’s too much enormity! My god damn skull plate is about to break off, spin around the room, before breaking through my ceiling and flying off into the stratosphere.

Let’s get down to the essentials. The storyline for Ab Aeterno is framed through the tale of our boyfriend Richard Alpert, and how he came to be on the Island. While there are ridiculously important developments on some sort of macro level, it’s all tied down through the most beautiful of bindings, the heart strings. I thought it was a dope way to intertwine the two.

Did you swoon for Richard before? Yeah, me too. I couldn’t believe how thunderous the clit-boners and butt-crushes were for Dicky. I mean, I know that I love him, but the LOST community seemed centered on this episode tonight with especial fervor. RICHARD, we all screamed, OPEN YOURSELF UP TO US. And he did, oh boy did he did.

Our boy Richard rocks the most touching of archetypes, the lover who wants to be with their deceased wife. Seriously, ladies and gentlemen. If that doesn’t melt your heart, you don’t have one. The episode opens up with Dicky galloping upon his horse to his beloved Isabella. And she’s obviously on her way to rocking the rigor mortis. I don’t know much about the medicines of 1847, but when your wife is barfing blood, she’s probably fucked.

One deep-dicking by the Catholic church later, and Ricardo is on his way to the New World via some serious slave trading bullshit. I mean, how can you imprison this guy? He’s utterly gorgeous! I mean, sequester him in your house and rub him with salves? Try and quiet his disturbed heart? Sure. I can understand that. But slavery?

Before we get overly intellectual and begin to rocket philosophical loads, let’s just be honest. We freaked the fuck out in geek esctascy for a solid five moments. The moment you see the Statue through the Black Rock during the maelstrom, you shit your pants. And then when it’s launched into the air, you begin hyperventilating. And when you realize that the Black Rock is responsible for demolishing said Statue? Geektacular Euphoria.

And before you can clean your pants, Smokey attacks the Black Rock. Dudes getting flung and mashed and mushed into Cream O’ Human. I can’t help it, but every fucking time he attacks, I find it absolutely chilling. Even though his methodology is still the same, even though they’re always the same sounds, it never gets old to me. Richard’s petrified pleadings to God as Smokey hovers near him was amazing.

And then? Then Richard meets himself in the middle of the chess game between the Devil and God. Can we call it that now?

Our boy Richard is freed by the Man in Black, and sent to kill Jacob. The conversation eerily echoes that of the one between Dogen and Sayid earlier in the season; everything from not letting them speak, to the sword given to kill him. If anything, it’s got to be clear that both Smokey and Jacob are master manipulators, and to let either of them talk to you is to allow them to rock out some hardcore guile on your ass.

Smokey’s manipulation of Richard was reminiscent of his manipulation of Ben back at the end of season five. Seriously, this guy has a velvet tongue. What does the Devil do, if not cajole you into biting apples and doing other dumb shit under the guise of some grand reward, or some grand slight you have received?

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that everyone knows my insane, unquenchable dicklust for Richard Alpert. Make no allusions when I state I’m madly in love with him. I know people are aware of this, because I’ve had several friends ask me

DUDE, ARE YOU STOKED FOR RICHARD TOMORROW?

To which I respond, fuck to the yeah.

Tomorrow night is an episode dedicated to Dicky “The Fucking Immortal” Alpert. We’re not worthy, but let us enjoy it anyways.

A friend of mine asked in the comments for yesterday’s LOST recap if I had seen the book Sawyer had in his room or some shit. And while I had seen the book, I didn’t know what the title was. There was a point in the show when I would have hunted that title down, desirous to know what the inference was they were throwing our way.

Now? Now I just don’t care.

This season there’s been something like nineteen book references per episode. Yes, an exaggeration. But it feels like every episode there’s some totally amazing reference they’re throwing at you through a book on someone’s bookshelf, or whatever. It used to be cool because of the sparsity of these references, but they’re just overdone.

When I was thinking about my apathy towards the reference today, I began to think maybe all the references are tongue-in-cheek. The writers from LOST have always been self-aware of how their episodes are analyzed by the fans. The meticulous nature with which we comb every frame of every single installment.

Maybe they’re fucking with us.

I mean yeah sure, the books could be references to themes and devices, no doubt. But maybe the density of the references this season is a wink. Some sort of meta-joke that they’re playing on us and hoping we will all play along. I hope this is the case with not just the books, but also the overt and sledgehammer subtlety references to destiny and fate, and all that sort of bullshit. Either that, or they’re laying it on thick. Thick and hard. Whatever the case, they’re so abundant and so overwhelming, I can’t help but not care and roll my eyes at them now.

(Until I crack because I have to know, and I’m just another complaining fanboy.)

Thwack and kapow! Smokey this week laid down the meanest of pimp hands I had seen in a long god damn time. It was honed to a perfection that only living for hundreds of years can give you. I mean, I’m sure we’ve all imagined giving a pimp hand at some point in our lives. For some reason, the idea of slapping someone across the face just seems enjoyable. It’s probably all the television and violent cartoons we were raised on.

Smokey has officially begun to freak me the fuck out. While I’ve never been on the “This Guy is Sweet, Jacob Is Dick” train, if I had been, I would calmly requested that I be let off at the next stop after this week. I mean, I know that Claire is insane, and she has shitty hair, and she builds baby cribs out of animal skeletons and shit, but if you missed the foreshadow that pimp hand wrought, yeah I don’t know what to tell you.

You want to bring that Jacob is a deceiver heat? Get the fuck out of here. Smokey is just as grand a manipulator as Jacob, and how! I mean, seriously. Jacob presents people with choices, offers them destinations. Smokey gives you the illusion of choice. What MiB spits is tantamount to “I’m not here to tell you what to do. But if you don’t come with me, I’m going to smash you into paste as a billowing cloud of crackling smoke.”

Yeah dude, freedom of choice right there.

Smokey spent this entire episode using the oldest trick in the book: divide and conquer. If you wanted insight into how he’s able to manipulate people with impressive effectiveness, just check out what went down. Smokey takes everyone aside and beguiles them with sugary promises and rhetoric. He’s good man, he’s like, real good. In a revealing conversation with Kate, the dude even lays out how he bent Claire to his will. He gave her someone to hate, and by hating them, she really worked out his objective of throwing down those dickheads who lived in the Temple of Doom.

His methods are awesome, and I say that with no sarcasm.

It’s continuing to all be so Locke versus Hobbes that if you’ve missed it by this point, I don’t know what to tell you. The appeal of MiB versus Smokey at this point isn’t really deciphering their motives, but watching them play out. We get it, yo. Free Will and the belief that humanity will do a solid versus the whole Humanity is a Dung Heap and needs to be controlled. Yep, got it. I got it a season ago. But you know what? I don’t give a fuck, I’m a philosophy geek.

There’s something so alluring about Smokey; but there’s always something so alluring about the darkness. The promises of what ever you want. I’ve seen Star Wars though, I know how this fucking shit ends. You fight Mace Windu in some shitty office apartment, and then you sire a son who kills your crippled ass. I mean, do we really think that Smokey wants to get them off the Island? That he really cares about them? I sure don’t. But I also think there’s really some uncomfortable side to Jacob, the God that Failed.

Poor Sawyer. Even in LAX, he’s haunted by the demons of Anthony Cooper. Sawyer’s a tricky cat to peg on LOST. He always seems one step away from either redemption or full blown moral collapse. As the episode unfolded in the main reality, we saw Sawyer once again walk this tight-rope over the precipice. And as usual, there really was no denouement. I really have no idea which way Sawyer is going to go on the Island, other than apparently back with Freckly McHussy. Oh god dammit, Kate.

I dug how Sawyer is a undercover detective, which means that even in LAX he’s a con man who gets to sleep with tons of women. His monologue explaining the thin line between criminal and cop was interesting, even if it smacked of a thousand cliches.

As a brief aside, last night I realized something. Sawyer has to be a genuinely hunky dude. Why? ‘Cause if he wasn’t, we would totally fixate on his hair. I mean, it’s fucking dumb. It’s all like, flinging around and awkward, and I can’t tell if maybe it’s a mullet, or maybe it’s just oddly coiffed. But it ain’t usual. No sir. I was watching him clunk about the detectives’ offices and I was like, what the fuck? How did I not notice that hair before?

But yeah dude, what are you going to do? I need to know. The world holds its breath. Maybe there will never be any resolution for him, maybe he’ll always be torn by those demons. If LAX a reflection of the consequences of one’s behavior on the Island, it would seem fitting that Sawyer is once again pigeonholed between happiness and totally byronic brooding. You go ahead and seethe, Sawyer. It’s what makes us swoon for you.

Let me ask you something. WHERE THE FUCK IS FARADAY!?

Everyone has fucking shown up in LAX save for my boyfriend. I need to see him. We’ve seen fucking Artz, Charlie’s dumb brother, Boone. What the fuck is this dog shit. Last night we got Charlotte. But no mullet-rocking fucking physicist? Who is so adorable in his quirkiness? Kiss my ass, LAX. I want to put up some fucking Scorpions, sit around with Faraday, and have temporal abnormalities affect my perceptions of reality and give me nosebleeds and crap. It’s hogwash.

Also, I can’t help but feel that it’s almost too convenient that everyone is showing up. They’re all concentrated in Los Angeles? It really makes me wonder if this isn’t some bubble reality that all of the people involved on the Island are somehow transported to.

Everyone, save for my boy.

Read the rest of this entry »

EL LINUS struck this week, giving us an hour of the weasel and his nasal voice. I’ve always found Ben to be a tremendous douchebag, and I mean that in a loving way. There has never been anything he wasn’t willing to do in the name of himself, and you have to appreciate that in a guy. Be it letting his daughter get shot, or owning Locke in a seedy hotel room, the dude plays for keeps. He’s a a shitbag you respect because of how far he will go to maintain his tenuous grip on power.

The interesting wrinkle that this week’s episode addressed is what happens to Benjamin Linus when he realizes that he’s been duped, ain’t had no power, and has been a rube for the past twenty or so years? The immediate answer is simple: he stabbed the shit out of Jacob, before his dumb ass was rolled into a fire. But I suppose I’m talking more about the emotional effects.

On the Island, Ben is totally busted as the dude who jabbed Jacob in the belly-guts with a knife. Miles rats him out after doing the creepy twitching thing with Jacob’s ashes and this severely pisses off Ilana. And not in the good way, because I know you’re thinking it may be enjoyable to get spanked by such an authoritative and sultry woman. No sir, she has a gun. So then she’s like, hey, Linus, dig your own grave while we go and eat mangoes and shit. TTYL, d00d.

What a busch league move by Ilana. Hasn’t she been watching this show at all? You leave Ben Linus alone for anything more than nine seconds and he’s going to get out of the situation somehow. He has a remarkable ability to escape certain doom. So while she’s letting him dig his own grave, y himself, with some bamboo shoot or something, good ole Smokey rolls up and chats up Linus.

The biggest revelation this week on LOST was something that no one seems to want to talk about. Smokey is a fucking Jedi! Did you see that shit? He unshackled Benjamin with nothing more than a cute little wink and a hand gesture. Isn’t anyone else amazed by this? I am. I mean, I knew LOST was awesome, but I had no idea that we were dealing with wielders of The Force! Good god damn.

So Smokey and Ben have a heart to heart. It’s all very touching but all I could think about is how Ilana, while she was eating her mango, had no idea that Smokey had approached. I mean, for the past six seasons, every time he went anywhere, Smokey roared and you could hear him from three miles away. Well, if she’s dumb enough to let him be, she may be deaf enough to not hear a rampaging pillar of black smoke. Smokey frees Ben’s ass and once again Ben flees and Ilana is like, “Oh fuck, maybe I should be watching the sociopath and not eating a mango” and chases after him.

The two of them talk, and they get into one of the overriding themes of the show, which is a person’s sense of purpose. Ben has been feeling legitimately ass-crushed since he thought that Jacob had been playing him for a fool. And when he found out he had been betrayed and his entire sense of duty was but a charade, he freaked the fuck out. All of the power he assumed he had, all of his existence was tied up in what he thought was his position as the leader of the Others. When this was dismissed, he wile’d out. Like, woah.

Benjamin isn’t the only one being a self-pitying asshole ever since they learned they weren’t a Unique Snowflake. My boyfriend, the inestimably gorgeous and immortal Richard Alpert, is afflicted with the same sense of Emotitis.

Emotitis is a disease that is fatal to one’s dignity and leaves them without any sense of pride. Where your self-respect once was, you find a puddle of wallowing and lack of self-worth. Many of those suffering from this disease also still use MySpace-esque pictures in their Facebook profile, post status updates that read things like “Gee whiz I can’t ever catch a break :-/” or “UGH today is the WORST”, and they use self-hate as a way to attract members of the sex they wish to copulate with.

So yeah, Dicky Alps is seriously suffering from that.

Ricardo dupes Hurley and Jack the Sexpot to follow him to the Blackrock, where we’re given confirmation of what we already knew: the dude can’t die. Everyone who Jacob touches receives a “Gift”, which explains Dick’s predicament, but is vague enough to create another thousand questions. Like, is everyone immortal? Or what are their gifts? Can Jack shoot lasers out of his asshole? And since he can’t die, he wants Jack to light the fuse of the dynamite he wishes to go kabloom with. What a shitty way to die, right? I mean, couldn’t Richard have found like, a bottle of pills somewhere and had Jack dump them down his throat? Jesus, explosion?

Richard is seeking obliteration because he as well as Ben feels betrayed by Jacob. Much like Linus claims, Dicky was told by Jacob that he was part of some enormous plan, and now that Deity-Dude-Guy has been stabbed and rendered ashes, he assumes that it was all a lie.

What a fool! How can you possible begin to conceive of God’s…I mean Jacob’s plan! You self-absorbed fuck!

Jack’s drinking the Destiny Kool Aid though, and he agrees to light the stick of dynamite. After staring out at the ocean and humming that Kings of Leon song from the Grey’s Anatomy commercials, he’s come to accept his totally-specialness in the grand schemes of everything. It’s just like in the Matrix when Cipher is like IF HE IS SPECIAL CAN HE TOTALLY DIE TRINITY?!, Jack knows he’s all Neo shit and the fuse won’t go off. And look at that, he’s fucking right.

Jack’s got some grand role to play in everything, and it seems by displaying that, he cures Dicky of his Fall Out Boy-Blues, though I assume Alpert will continue to wear eyeliner. Can’t win all the battles.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the thing about this season of LOST. A lot of people are worried that the writers don’t have enough time to wrap everything up. I disrespectfully disagree. I think that they have too much fucking time on their hands. And instead of a tightly-knit prolonged orgasm of a season, we’re getting a lot of tip-teasing. Yeah, tip-teasing. There’s a lot of foot-dragging and every episode is backloaded towards the last ten minutes or so. This episode was no different, though I dug the fuck out of it.

Let’s start with the big picture. MiB is clearly being used to some extent, as a doppleganger for the Devil. El Diablo! Repent, or the Smoke Monster will eat you! Or at least, he’ll drag you. He does a lot of dragging. How does he actually kill these people? Just gun them into air, and let gravity do the rest? I’m not hatin’, that’s an awful way to go.

More specifically, last night he reminded me a lot of Milton’s Lucifer from Paradise Lost. Last night, Sayid is given a sword by Dogen and told to go meet MiB in the forest and stab his ass, and he gives him the specific instruction to not let MiB speak to him.

The whole thing wafts of allusions to the snake in the Garden of Eden. Sayid marches through the forest to meet with MiB. He walks through this Eden, because let’s face it, the Island possesses some seriously fucking impressive attributes, and meets up with Smokey. And just like Lucifer, Smokey is a shape-shifter. Naw, not a snake, but an equally impressive black cloud. And just like Lucifer, Smokey’s most powerful quality is his velvet-tongue. Lucifer is all like, yo, dude, eat that fucking apple. But he doesn’t do it by force, he does it by pouring honey into the ears of those around them.

Promising them things.

Just like MiB.

The MiB is arranging some sort of super-squad of douchebags from Oceanic 815 and homeless-looking people. And for all the aspersions he casts on Jacob for being manipulative, he’s just as much. MiB has gone from Sawyer to Sayid to everyone on the Island, and told them of this grand deception that have played a part in – you don’t have to stay here!, your choices were cast for you!, let us all go, now that Jacob is gone!

Throughout the entire time on the Island, he has conspired to kill Jacob. And he has done it all through intermediaries and violence. The fact that he even wears the form of Locke is a testament to his guile and persuasion. His velvet-tongue, his temptations and promises, like the Devil, get people to do his bidding.

Sayid, you can have your babe back!

Claire, you can have your kid back!

Promises, promises, promises.

In LA X, Sayid still wants to bang the hell out of Nadia. Unfortunately, she’s married to his brother. She’s married to him because Sayid was all emo and pushed her away in LA X. And when she’s like, dude, you’re still sweating me, why didn’t you get with this? Our kids would have been way cuter, have you seen my daughter? Her fucking eyebrows look like caterpillars, Sayid has the most disgusting response ever.

Because I don’t…deserve you.

Holy fucking groan! Did he just really say that? Jesus Christ. I turned to my friend Dave, who then barfed onto my crotch. After wiping up the vomit, he asked me, who is writing this? And I told him the Wachowski Brothers. But that was a lie. This season is aggravating, because they’re swinging these mallets instead of making their points. You don’t have to have someone say the words destiny to make your point, nor do you have to make Sayid outright say he doesn’t deserve her?

On the Island, Sayid succumbs to the succor of MiB’s sayings. He sets about killing Dogen and Lennon, which somehow, and I have no idea how, allows for Smokey to infiltrate the Temple of Doom. Really, a random Japanese guy who was a business man was the only thing keeping them out of there? I have to tip my cap to the writers for their handling of Sayid, because I didn’t see it coming. I always assumed that Sayid would be a virtuous dude. Apparently he’s destined to cause misery. OMFG.

The other miserable moment in this episode came when Dogen was telling Sayid about his life. Listen, writers. It’s the final season. We’ve never met this guy before. All he’s been since he was introduced is some contrived mysterious guy, whose entire personality is centered around floating half-baked sentences around to conjure up mystic bullshit. We don’t care about his kid, his dumb baseball, or that he’s an alcoholic.

And furthermore, we’re not going to care when Dogen dies! We barely know the guy! And not only that, what we do know of him, sucks! Thank God he’s fucking dead.

And what exactly was the purpose of the Temple? Does anyone know? It was clumsily introduced at the beginning of the season, and then what? They just sat there for five episodes, everyone in it dies, and now they’re leaving it. Pointless. A waste of time.

On LA X, Sayid once again kills Keamy. Jesus Christ, how creepy is Keamy? And the question about Free Will versus Choice is again raised. It’s erroneous to think that the shit poppin’ off on LA X is destiny. Hurley, Jack, and Locke are all living much nicer livers; albeit quiet and boring and mundane and a waste of my time. But Sayid? Sayid is back to killing again. Keamy, again. Some lives have changed, some are the same.

A strong theory is that LA X is some sort of dreamworld or reality conjured up by Jacob or MiB that gives the people of the Island the life they deserved. Coming at the beginning of this season, the writers kept dropping the word consequence. Consequence. Consequence, consequence, consequence. So perhaps Sayid is being punished in LA X for the fact that he just laid the boom down on everyone in the main reality.

Who knows?

It’s interesting though.

The last ten minutes of the episode were insane, and had me screaming at the top of my lungs. If you watch the show with me, you know I’m not not kidding. MiB busts into the Temple, and starts droppin’ heads. But even more bad ass? Ilana, Ben, and Lapidus roll up! When they showed up, I was like, OH FUCK, THE JUSTICE LEAGUE IS HERE! Lapidus is obviously Superman, Ilana being the Amazonian beauty   she is stands in for Wonder Woman, and Ben is Batman. Just like our boy Wayne, he’s got a million ways out of everything. They were like a supergroup ready to lay the smack down on Smokey. Or at least save whoever wanted to come with them.

Some shit is up with Ilana, and I’m glad they’re not done with her character. When Jacob visited her in The Incident, he spoke to her as though she knew who he was, so she’s got some inside knowledge. Maybe she subscribes to Deities Weekly, and has been writing scholarly articles or some shit. I have no idea. She’s special.

At the end of the episode, the battle lines are drawn. MiB has conjured himself up a legitimate fucking posse. And they roll out in slow-motion, which every single posse should do at one point. I’m not certain where they’re going, but they are rocking out en masse, and they intend on leaving the Island. MiB has promised them all riches and excess freedom. Save for the fact that he’s done it down the barrel of a gun. Come with me and be free, or die. On the other side? There’s Jacob and his crew! Save for uh, the fact that Jacob is dead.

The obvious confrontation is between the philosophies of Jacob and MiB. Do either of them really offer Free Will? I’m not really sure. MiB has propelled people through Force, which fits nicely into people’s comparisons to him with Hobbes. And yeah, Smokey sure looks like a Leviathan, doesn’t he? And Jacob presents with them choices or opportunities. Like our philosopher Locke, not the crippled one, he believes in the human spirit. He doesn’t offer a direct hand, and it is his distanced approach that MiB has exploited as lack of caring, disregard, apathy, cruelness.

In the end, maybe they’re both just exploiting everyone on the Island in some deistic chess match. They are all pieces in a debate over the virtues of humanity. Is Jacob really offering free choice, if he goes to visit these people? Or, as MiB says, does that affect their entire lives, leading them there? And conversely, MiB isn’t offering anyone freedom or choice. In fact, he’s exploiting the very faults he enumerates in the Incident, their greed, their destruction, their consumption, to achieve his release. Who the fuck knows.

This was really long, I’m sorry. I’ll see you next week.