tv show: Season 5 of LOST
Season 5 of LOST returned with a bang. From the moment that Dr. Marvin Candle aka Pierre Chang woke up to tackle a “problem” at the infamous Orchid Station to the final scene with a hooded Mrs Hawking (!!), the energy rarely let up. I have no doubt in my mind that this will be a season for the fans, this will be a season with some incredible answers to our favorite questions.
But I’m not writing today to recap the episodes. Erika Olsen does a far better job of that than me on her blog, Long Live Locke. I’m writing today, because for as long as I can remember games such as chess and backgammon have appeared in various episodes of LOST. Considering how the characters have now been moved on and off the island, across continents, and through time… it’s easy to think of every person in LOST as a pawn in a intricate game.
But what I want to know is who is king and who is the one playing the game? Who is “the One” or the Neo in the LOST realm? Some people are good or bad, but at least one person is very special. There are five likely candidates:
Desmond Hume (lostpedia)
Desmond is my favorite candidate to be “the one”, and it’s only been recently that he has been put in the running. It’s not just because he is a sexy Scotsman with the best love story out of the LOST characters. When Desmond turned the fail-safe key to “save the world” and began slipping through time, he became something much more. First, he woke up naked in the forest with a new ability to “see into the future”. But next we learn that he really did go back in time, where Mrs. Hawking tells him he must go to that island or “every single one of us is dead”.
I’d count that as a pretty big check on the Desmond as The Chosen One list. He has to be on the island. And it seems like a lot of strange acts of fate… the monastery finding and then firing him, Libby lending him her boat, even Widmore’s continual belittling of his courage… were all carefully executed game moves to push Desmond into that boat and down into that hatch. And now we have Daniel Faraday knocking on Desmond’s hatch door, telling him that he is “uniquely and miraculously special” and the rules of time travel do not apply to him.
Time travel is a complex subject on LOST, but as far as we know nobody has the ability to alter the past or the future… except maybe Desmond Hume. And what about the fact that Desmond is the top candidate for being that mysterious eye Hurley had peering at him out of Jacob’s cabin. Is Desmond also Jacob? Is Desmond one of the Hanso clan? After all we know little about his early past.
If the series ends with Desmond as The Chosen One, we are going to have an amazing story about time travel and about “the end of the world”, and about how love endures against all odds.
John Locke (lostpedia)
John Locke is probably the next strongest candidate to be the “Chosen One”. He has played a key role on the island… he was the one from the very beginning who could find the wild boar and could build strange vision tents where he put goop on his head and all the sudden was talking to Mr. Eko and Boone from the dead. He also seems to know when it’s going to rain, and when it will stop. He heals from bullet wounds and life-long paralysis.
He also survived undeniable odds in his pre-island life as well. He was born way early after a car crash, he lived after falling many stories out of a window and after loosing his kidney to a con man. Ben and Richard seem to think he is a pretty important guy. Richards visits began with him as a child, testing him with various dalai lama style tests to see if he was “ready”. He never was, and maybe still isn’t.
Locke has seen Jacob (whoever that is), as well as Horace and taller ghost Walt. He’s supposed to be the new leader of the Others. By all accounts, the series has put him in the role of The Chosen One, but time and time again he doesn’t seem to know what’s going on… he’s put up to tests and fails… he relies heavily on other people to tell him what to do next.
I hope that Locke is not The Chosen One, because I fear then that LOST will end as a tale about faith and sacrifice, about destiny and spiritual communion with the island… and that just doesn’t sound as cool to me as time travel and love.
Walt Lloyd (lostpedia)
You might have forgotten about Walt, who had a whole episode dedicated to him called: Special. Apparently, Walt can manipulate things with his mind… he can make birds crash into windows and die. He really freaks the Others out, which is a sign of something. And let’s remember all those times he appeared in visions to Shannon and Locke. Walt seems to be able to appear on the island like so many others, even though he is not dead or part of the spiritual realm (i.e. Christian Shepard, Boone, Eko).
That storyline practically died in Season 2, so I think we are safe from that. But, it does beg the question… if EVERYONE has to come back to the island in Season 5 for things to become normal again, does that include Walt?
Richard Alpert (lostpedia)
Ahhhh Richard. I just included him on here because I think he’s pretty cool. He seems to be all-knowing of what is going on, always calm, always patient. I would put him in the category of “game player” like Mrs Hawkings rather than a game piece. He doesn’t seem to age, he knows the past present and future. Who is Richard? And who were The Hostiles before the Dharma purge? Has he always been on the island? Richard is shrouded in mystery, and has gotten much more screen time than our other mystery characters. I’d expect he’s going to come to be incredibly important over the next two seasons.
Aaron Littleton (lostpedia)
Little turniphead might seem like a stretch, but let’s not forget the episode Raised by Another. Claire was forewarned that it was incredibly important that baby Aaron not be raised by anyone else. Magically the pen for her to sign away Aaron to adoptive parents stops working. And then the psychic all but forces her onto the plane that would eventually crash on the Island. As far as we know, Aaron was the first baby to be born on that island for a very long time. Has he broken the curse?
But maybe Aaron isn’t the Chosen One of this generation… maybe he is the chosen one of the next one. Maybe he will be playing with little Ji Yeon someday in the barracks.
Other Characters
Other characters have been tossed around in this category as well, but I think we can rule then out. Ben is obviously someone of great manipulative power, but he seems to devious to be the great leader. We have Jack, who has been the leader of the survivors since the plane crash. Daniel seems like a pretty interesting guy, who we now see has been traveling back in early Dharma time to the Orchid station and was possibly the man behind the camera in the secret Marvin Candle video. Hurley’s name was even through out there after he became the last person to see Jacob’s Cabin.
Everybody
But here is an even better theory to me… Maybe everybody is The Chosen Ones. Everybody is a pawn moving in a larger game and thus everyone was meant to be on that island, even our new arrivals. Abbadon stressed how important it was that Charlotte, Miles, and Daniel be the team members under Naomi and that they get to the island. Charlotte is supposedly returning to her birth place. Miles might be the son of Marvin Candle. And Daniel at this point is obviously playing a key role not only on the island, but through out time.
That’s all I’ve got, until next week. Happy LOST theorizing!!
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