Fanworks, notes, meta

Christianity plays into LOST from early on in Season 1. Locke talks about miracles, and the scene where Locke sees "the eye of the Island" (actually Smokey) is reminiscent of the Biblical passage where Lucifer disguises himself as an angel of light to fool people.

In White Rabbit, the empty coffin will get neatly book-ended with the one we see in the series finale in the flash sideways.

In Season 1, Rose tells Jack about her faith that Bernard is alive. Later she prays openly with Charlie when he's despondent over Claire's kidnapping. One of Charlie's early flashbacks involves him going to confession, and Christian imagery makes up a big part of his strange experiences in Season 2.

The heroin is stored in Virgin Mary statues ("opium of the people?") and Mr. Eko's story arc is filled with religious conflict and questioning as he becomes the priest he at first pretends to be.

Hugo's experiences are saturated in Catholicism. In Season 1's flashback, he's shown struggling with a problem not particular to Christianity, but definitely part of it: Why do bad things happen to people, particularly good ones? He tries out the "curse" notion on his mother, who smacks him and tells him to forget that nonsense, as "they're Catholics."

Later Hugo prays his way into a solution to the Dharma van problem: his answer comes in the form of Sawyer's beer can, which rolls down the hill & gives him the idea to pop the clutch. Later, Hugo's Catholic life becomes darker, deeper, and more emotionally intense after he collapses under the conflict of "The Lie." But the seeds of his Season 4-5 breakdown over lies, truth, loyalty and right action started long before that.

When he finally does "confess" to his mother, it's in front of a statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on the table, with a painting of the Sacred Heart of Mary over his shoulder.

Season 4 also shows us the church where Jack has his father's memorial service - and how when he lies to Carole about Claire, it's framed by an image of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus & Mary.

Season 5 also introduces us to Eloise Hawking, the custodian of the church where the Lamp Post is housed, as well as that critical conversation between Ben & Jack about "Doubting Thomas," the apostle who wouldn't believe in the resurrection until he could see Jesus's wounds with his own eyes.

Thus there's a long, five-season run-up to Christian imagery in LOST - as well as the wide homage paid to other traditions as well. This culminates in the stained glass window in the series finale, where the major world's religions are represented both there & in the room where the empty coffin lies.

The Tailies seem to me like a funhouse-mirror inversion of the beach camp, with Ana as "Jack;" Libby as "Kate" (i.e. Jack's lieutenant); Eko as "Locke," Bernard as "Hurley," and Cindy as "Claire" (mothering children who were kidnapped, and then kidnapped herself.) They have an "Ethan" in the form of Goodwin. Nathan in a way is their "Sawyer," and it ultimately leads to his death.

The Tailies are everything the beach camp could have devolved into; the "Lord of the Flies" shadow to the society which Jack & co. built.

While "The other 48 Days" is highly compressed, to me it seems as if Ana and Libby have a similar dynamic to Jack & Kate in Season 1. They meet shortly after the crash, and work as a team. Ana seems to respect Libby, and they consult on what to do (like about Nathan.) Like Kate, who delivers Claire's baby, Libby acts as a healer (she cares for Sawyer's wound.) Jack & Kate's interactions are rocky, and so are Ana's and Libby's - Ana even pulls a gun on Libby at one point.

The Tailies have so little, though; their resources are limited to a found knife and the clothes on their backs. It's amazing any of them survive at all. In a sense they're a "damned" society, whereas FSW "salvation" comes from what Jack and co. have built at the beach.

Some which actually appear/are mentioned in-show:

- Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

- The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brian

- The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares

- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie

- The Chronicles of Narnia, by CS Lewis

- Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

- VALIS, by Philip K. Dick

- Watership Down, by Richard Adams

Others not shown/mentioned in-show:

- The Stand, by Stephen King (big influence on LOST)

- The Langoliers, by Stephen King

- Island, by Aldous Huxley

- Jacob's Hands, by Aldous Huxley

- Mount Analogue, by René Daumal

"There are two sides, black and white," Locke says early in Season 1. Unfortunately for Locke, most of what he thought he knew was wrong.

As the series proceeds, we see that ultimately it's not so simple as Jacob being the white game piece and Smokey the black. The "white vs. black" dichotomy is how Mother saw the world, and she imposed it on the twins from the moment of their birth, as we see in "Across the Sea."

Mother is the one who reinforces that thinking in the Boy in Black, when he "accidentally" finds the senet game. Also, Mother sees herself as one of "the good people," compared to the Roman settlers, and passes that on to both the boys.

Black-and-white ultimately serve as misdirection in the story. The source of all power, of all magic if you will, is the Island - and the Island is the least black-and-white aspect of the show. It's brown and green and blue: earth and vegetation, water and sky.

Note that when Jack is inaugurated, he's wearing blue (sky.) Hurley wears earth colors (the land.) With Jack and Hurley, the game is over. Everything up to that point has "just been progress."

* * * * * * * *

More thoughts on colors:

Color symbolism in LOST usually isn't part of the "mysteries" (maybe with orange as an exception.) Instead, I'd argue that most of the color "language" is very straightforward, based on common usages in Western art history.

For instance, in Charlie's hallucinations in "Fire+Water," the colors derive directly from the Verrocchio "Baptism of Christ" painting. Thus Hurley is shown in gold-trimmed maroon (actually royal purple) to signify his coming protectorship; Claire is dressed in blue and positioned like one of the angels in the painting. Later, Claire is shown in a lot of light and dark blue; in some scenes she looks just like a Renaissance madonna.

The black and white imagery is very stark, especially in the Pilot. Both Locke and Hurley wear the same shirt (Hurley remarks on it in a deleted scene.) Interestingly, Claire and Libby share a deleted scene where Claire is wearing Libby's light blue shirt. Not sure of the significance, except that by the end of the series, both Locke and Libby are dead, and both Claire and Hurley are wearing earth tones (again, being tied to the Island.)

Kate is often shown in greens and earth tones (changing to a cooler forest green in the final FSW scene of the finale.) She is the hunter, the tracker, the tree climber; more in touch with the Island in an instinctual sense, even though Island "mysteries" don't interest her.

"Bad guys" do seem to wear black: MiB, Ana Lucia, the "dark Sayid" of later seasons. As I mentioned above, I don't think that's a metaphysical expression of the Island's nature, so much as a dichotomy imposed on Jacob and MiB by Mother.

Mother is shown wearing both earth tones and blues together: the protector - like the Avatar in Avatar, the Last Airbender - is the master of all the elements.

Orange is specifically called out: "Love is orange," says Jin's friend in Seoul. I wasn't able to find any Korean culture reference for this. I'd argue that orange does have direct story-specific significance: it seems to be tied to betrayal, loss, and emotional conflict.

Sometimes LOST fans ask, "Why a church in 'The End?'" In my view, by the time viewers reached the series finale, ideally they had come to recognize sacred spaces and their role in the story. The Island was important - but more as a classroom where viewers honed their recognition of the sacred, rather than as a final sacred destination in and of itself.

On-Island sacred spaces include:

the cabin
the foot-statue rooms
the Temple
the Heart of the Island
possibly the beach (because it's safe from Smokey)
the golf course

Off-Island sacred spaces include:

Christian's memorial service church
Eloise's church
The Reyes's home ("The Lie," where Hurley tells his story literally under the eye of Mary)
The church where Kate gets married
The funeral home
St. Sebastian hospital
Santa Rosa hospital
the hospital where Locke recovers

Other off-Island places are the settings of powerful iconic moments, like the record store where Starla prophesizes about Hugo ("If you quit your job ... the whole damn thing will fall apart,") and the psychic's studio ("War is coming.")

Every one of these sacred spaces is like a passageway leading to another, and all of them together point to the church in "The End." All the sacred spaces we experience throughout the show build us up for the final one.

The church in "The End" is full of references to Divinity: not just Christian. Divinity is the terminus to which the entire story points. "Everything That Rises Must Converge" is the title of the book Jacob is reading because its writer, Flannery O'Connor, was giving a hat-tip to Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, who used the phrase to describe what he called "the omega point" - the convergence of humanity with the divine.

This "omega point" is what the Losties come to in the church of "The End."

Discussion of the use of the term "bardo" in the LOST writer's room: interview with Damon Lindelof by Greg Garrett in Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination (link)

Spiritual Travel has these interesting remarks about the sipa bardo:

One environment that is sometimes used to help describe the place of karmic processing is an airport runway at night. The goal of karmic processing is to issue a ticket for a destination. This destination is the new body in which the soul will be reborn.

As with an airline, the ticket's information and processing are invisible until a ticket is issued. The soul in this example waits out on a runway at night with colored lights flashing around it and noises of takeoffs and landings. The winds of flight surround the soul but the soul cannot understand the flashing signals and forces of movement that are represented by colored lights moving in the distance.

Once the processing of karma is complete, a (usually) small set of tickets are issued and it is here where the soul has a limited choice of options as to where it will be reborn. The last thought of the person at death may influence the choice made here. If the soul does not choose, a choice will be made for the soul. When the final ticket is issued, the soul takes flight symbolically boarding a vehicle which rides on the karmic winds to a specific destination or rebirth. Once the person is in their new life, the karma of impulse takes over to influence their actions in that new life. (link)

This analogy reminds me of the whole Oceanic Airlines trope as it's used in the LOST flash-sideways (FSW.) Because the FSW consists mostly of Jack's bardo passage, the FSW opens with Jack staring out the window at white, featureless clouds.

One suggestion that the characters have already passed through the bardo of death. Some, though, like Rose seem to have "woken up" before the FSW starts. These awakened ones have recognized their death state; seen the clear light and accepted it. (Jack is staring at white clouds, but absently.)

The "bardo of becoming" starts when Oceanic 815 lands in LAX. Interestingly, the episode's name isn't "LAX," but "LA X," as in "LA Unknown."

Most LOST fans consider the FSW to be the experience of the major cast in the afterlife, based on Christian's remarks in "The End" that this was a place "you all made together to find each other." The question remains whether the other characters are Jack's karmic projections left over from his life (which is what bardo illusions *are*) or whether they are actually the various characters each experiencing karmic projection together.

There's also the issue of exoteric vs. esoteric understandings of the story. Most viewers call the FSW "purgatory" because culturally that is what we in America are most familiar with. The imagery in the FSW is so complicated, so deliberate, so involved with depicting stages and conflicts that I can't help think that it's referring to the Bardo Thodol, syncretized with purgatorial elements.

Just pulling together some random threads that might get stitched into something, or might not.

From this June 24, 2010 meta by James Schellenberg in Strange Horizons:

The sideways flashes are not an alternate timeline at all, but a limbo/bardo situation, where all the characters, now dead, have been accumulating, long after all the other events of the show. ... Apart from the flash sideways, I was 100% behind the notion that Hurley would become the next guardian of the island and do a far better job of it.

Again, this gets undercut by the flash sideways, because as is stated rather baldly, the most important part of these people's lives were the times of suffering under the mad god's rule. I like the idea of the evolution in the guardianship of the island, but it's treated glancingly. (link)

Sometimes you read or hear something, and your head explodes with insight. "The mad god's rule" says it all.

What the FSW is saying is that what Jacob did, what MiB did, was *more important, more significant* than any attempt to clean up and live decently afterwards. It's like a massive reward for bad behavior.

This also ties in with the Bardo Thodol, and what the sipa bardo is: it's basically created by *karmic illusions,* the kind that result from an inability to let go of your former life and karmic experiences, especially the bad ones. Or alternately it can be a deliberate extended dream state, full of wish fulfillment (until the nightmares start and the god of death appears.)

In essence the FSW says that your karmic illusions are just fine, thanks, and invites you to wallow in them.

So, back to the Others @ the Temple. In late 2004, they've retreated to the Temple, where they are safe from Widmore's thugs. Those at the Barracks are killed.

They live either at the Temple, or at the old Pala camp, or perhaps in the forest, until the return of the Ajira 316 people.

Note that in this time Richard is with them - *but Ben is not.* Ben is living in our world, playing games with Widmore, getting Sayid to kill people for him, etc.

It's when they return to their roots that their healing begins: their recovery from the twin cults of Jacob and Ben. They may seem "cultlike" under Dogen, but it's under Dogen's leadership that they can combat their principal adversaries: Samael and his amanuensis, Claire, who is picking them off whenever she gets a chance.

( More LOST meta about the Others )

From Islands of the Gods in Hawaiian Sacred traditions: (bold sections relate to LOST)


"According to ancient tradition, more than two dozen cloud islands inhabited by gods and others of the spirit realm floated high above the world of mortals. ... they could only be seen by chosen individuals ...

"Called ao akua, they were profoundly sacred, for they were the private domains of all-powerful, supernatural beings who controlled the ancient universe. ...

"Cloud islands were said to occasionally approach a coastline ... where the akua, gods, of these spirit lands would make contact with mortals - appearing to a faithful worshiper in a dream, providing help in times of distress, or ushering a worthy descendant to the ao akua to enjoy a bountiful, carefree and timeless existence in the company of gods.

(snip)

"There was a spring named KawaiolaaKane, whose magical powers restored health and youth, as well as life, to those who properly honored Kane.

(snip)

"[These islands] were protected from trespassers - the unescorted and the uninvited - by an austere guardian who took the form of a helpless old woman. Her appearance was deceptive, for she was merciless and quick in dealing death blows to intruders who tried to swim to the island or beach their canoes there.

(snip)

"Cloud islands could float ... [and become] permanently fastened to land. Thus Maui granted humans the gift of an extraordinary oasis that was once created by, and solely for, the gods..."