Since season three of Lost, Richard Alpert has been an enigma. It has always been clear that he holds a lot of power within the Others and plays a very important role in their society. However, throughout seasons three, four, five, and the majority of this season, details about Richard’s past and purpose on the island has been, like so many other things on this show, shrouded in mystery. Tonight, that all changed.
A lot of the assumptions that we had made about Richard were finally confirmed. Indeed, he came to the island as a slave aboard the Black Rock. Incidentally, it appears that the Black Rock was not the ship that Jacob and Smokey were watching sail toward the island at the beginning of last season’s finale. Presumably, it was some ship that Jacob brought to the island before Richard’s crashed into Hell.
This episode may have been framed as an episode about Alpert, and it certainly was, but I felt like his story ended up being a little pedestrian. It was a standard Lost tale of bad choices, dead loved ones, and a chance at redemption on the island. Not only that, but it was overshadowed by the Jacob/Man in Black information that we got, as sparse as it may have been.
I was fascinated by Jacob’s behavior when first meeting with Alpert. He came off as kind of a jerk, which is a far cry from what we have seen to date. Is this because he wasn’t used to dealing with people? Was he just pissed because a wooden ship was able to completely demolish his statue (talk about some shoddy ancient craftsmanship)? Clearly, Jacob has changed a bit over time. What made this even more interesting was the fact that Smokey seemed to be acting exactly as we have come to expect. Even before he properly met Alpert, he was already setting him up for a grand manipulation, using the visage of his dead wife. Even back in the late 1800s, the Man in Black was still looking for a way off the island. Interesting that he used Richard in the same exact way that Dogen used Sayid to try to kill Locke, right down to the same exact instructions (“don’t let him speak”). These guys like plunging knives into people’s chests.
Jacob reiterated the idea in this episode that the island’s purpose is to keep Smokey at bay, away from the rest of the world. I’m not sure how I feel about this idea. I’m hoping that he was oversimplifying the concept to Richard, because you know what? There’s already a bottle full of evil in this world. What makes Smokey so darned special? I suppose that’s the question that the writers want us to be asking, but I was left a little concerned about the end game after Jacob and Richard’s conversation. I want something deeper than, “it’ll be really bad if he gets off the island.” I’m confident that there is more too it.
At the end of the day, Richard’s station with the Others seemed quite simple: he served as Jacob’s liaison to the people on the island. Obviously, this was an important role, as no one had apparently survived on the island for very long. As we have seen, with Richard’s help, the society of the Others formed. I would have liked to have seen more of Richard’s extended life in this episode. I think it would have been a good opportunity to find out more about the Others and what sort of rules they lived by. I hope that we will get some of that information before all is said and done, but we are quickly running out of time.
Next week, it looks like the attention is going to turn to Jin and Sun. After so long, I hope that we finally get to see them reunited, even if it means Sun travels over to the dark side for a little while.
Clacked by Bob Degon
on Mar 23, 2010 @ 22:28 EST5EDT
Did you catch that it was Magnus Hanso who commissioned the Black Rock?
Yes! That was noted on the blast door map all the way back in season two. Fun to see it confirmed this much later.
https://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Blast_door_map_notations
I dont think that Smokey is the “Evil” that Jacob was talking about. It could be the energy underneath it that was partially released in the Incident or something of the sort which had to be rendered allegorically in explanation to a semi-educated 19th century peasant but not Smokey. He is evil in that he just wants off the island and doesn’t care what happens to the world when the island is left without a protector. At lease this is what I picked up from the episode.
I agree. I think that the island itself is protecting the world from whatever the Swan was containing and what made the island time jump and all that other stuff. That being said WTFocke could be the force keeping that island and if he leaves all the other darkness goes with him. You could say WTFocke leaving could cause an apocalocke by way of the that electromagnetic force destroying the world, sending everyone to Hell.
Poor Ricardo got stuck with the priest who flunked seminary and doesn’t know how to do a proper absolution.
Thanks for pointing that out. That was no real man of the cloth in any way that matters.
I’m having a real hard time not commenting on this considering I’m living in germany and what’s on the front pages here every day…
Thanks for the self restaint Sebastian. It’s a good thing that these things are brought to light and examined and people are punished. It’s a cleansing. Remember abuse is everywhere. Here in the States, if you want to even volunteer in the Catholic Church you have to attend class (es), like Call to Protect. This is a result of our last cleansing.
HA! That’s what I was thinking, too. Priests absolve any ole thing…murder would be an easy one!
I was wondering about letting evil out myself. They hinted at that already, but the world is pretty screwed up as it is and what would the evil do?
Maybe Jacob is the bad one. ;)
I’m amazed that the writers could put together a story that at once is emotionally compelling (at least it was for me – this is the longest consecutive time we’ve spent in flashback in a while) and gives us vital information to an established mythology. I was really impressed with Nestor Carbonell’s performance as his younger self in this episode, really believed his desperation. It didn’t quite grab me as much as the Ben Linus show (he’s back to his snide ways, btw), but it was close. Seems like Hurley can definitely see dead people. Is it just me, or are the writers taking a lot of their cues (“New Otherton”, “Man in Black”, etc.) from the fan community? Not that that’s a bad thing…
As for Jacob, I’m pretty sure he reacted so angrily to Ricardo because this was apparently the first time anyone had tried to kill him. And yes, he might have been pissed about the statue. I’m surprised that’s what broke the thing – I thought it’d be a bit more dramatic, considering all the allusions to that statue being what allowed women to give birth on the island that I’d read. I liked the parallel conversation that the Man in Black had with Ricardo to the one Dogen had with Sayid. And I eagerly lapped up this exchange (transcribed by yours truly):
Ricardo: Are you the Devil?
Jacob: (muses for a while) …No.
R: Then who are you?
J: My name is Jacob. I’m the one who brought your ship to this island.
R: You brought it here? Why?
J: Think of this wine as what you keep calling “hell”. There’s many other names for it, too – malevolence, evil, darkness – and here it is, swirling around in the bottle, unable to get out, because if it did, it would spread. The cork is this island. And it’s the only thing keeping the darkness where it belongs. That man who sent you to kill me believes that everyone is corruptible because it’s in their very nature to sin. I bring people here to prove him wrong, and when they get here, their past doesn’t matter.
R: Before you brought my ship, there were others?
J: Yes. Many.
R: What happened to them?
J: They’re all dead.
R: But if you brought them here, why didn’t you help them?
J: Because I wanted them to help themselves. To know the difference between right and wrong without me having to tell them. It’s all meaningless if I have to force them to do anything. Why should I have to step in?
R: If you don’t, he will!
J: (pause) Do you want a job?
R: A job? Doing what?
J: Well, if I don’t want to step in, maybe you can do it for me. You can be my… my representative, an intermediary between me and the people I bring to the island.
Jacob used to be a lot more forthcoming, huh? I guess once he had Richard, he didn’t want to talk to anyone anymore. So my understanding is that everyone who has been brought to the island is meant to be a story of redemption – if something doesn’t kill them first. (This probably excludes the freighter folks besides Michael, and Widmore – people who sought out the island willfully.) They were hand-picked by Jacob, and the ones who met Smokey and lived (Locke, Eko, somebody else…?) did so because the Man in Black thought he might be able to use them to kill Jacob in order to escape the island, which is what he seems to spend most of his time thinking about. I guess he saw something in Captain Norris (the pilot) and the unrepentant Eko that he didn’t like – maybe only a person seeking redemption can kill Jacob? I don’t know if Ben would qualify when he did the deed. We still don’t know exactly the nature of the Man in Black’s “corruption”, or who exactly it affected (beyond the French team, that much was obvious when Bernard inexplicably tried to kill Rousseau), but all of this is fairly substantial. You can tell I enjoyed it.
I liked it too, even though… ok how do I not express this sounding like a complete ass… everything I was told was what I expected. Well one thing I didn’t was Richard really being a slave, I just didn’t want that to be true even though it had been made clear a very long time ago and re-iterated a couple of times.
I mean I could start to doubt what has being said right now but I won’t. I believe everything that Jacob said and therefor I know am finally proven right that this is NOT purgatory and NOT hell. Finally. After 2.5 years. I still remember the discussion when Smokey killed Mr. Eko and how vehemently I argued against this.
Yeah great I’m really unable not to come across like a know-it-all…
It was an interesting theory for the first couple seasons, but I think the show debunked it a while ago in the Hurley episode “Dave”. (Was it Smokey in the guise of Dave, or was Dave a real dead guy that Hurley was seeing, or was Hurley just losing it for a while? That still isn’t clear to me.) Dave tried to get Hurley to off himself because the island was just his hallucination; this is kind of the same idea as the island being hell, or purgatory, or any other non-physical place. It doesn’t make sense if, as we’ve seen, people can die, people can show up, people can leave and go interact with the rest of the world for years. It’s a good trick to pull on behalf of the Man in Black, especially on people who don’t have the information to know better or who have become slightly unhinged (like Richard most recently, though his wife’s ghost probably pushes him back into sanity)… but it stopped being viable in the third season or so.
Richard being a slave originally I kind of expected (with the chains comment), but it surprised me that Richard was a murderer (in a sense) and that it happened so recently. With all Richard’s talk about “longer than you can imagine”, I expected him to be closer to 500 years old, not ~170. (What the heck was with the “New World” talk? Was it really called that in the 1860s? I thought that was more of a pre-1700s phrase.)
By the way guys, how do I get an avatar with my posts? I don’t see any registration options for the site.
You can go to gravatar.com and register there and associate an avatar with an e-mail address, then make sure that you use the same e-mail when submitting a comment here.
Thank you. (-: