A decoy? Would Jacob need the ash ring to protect himself? MiB could do nothing to Jacob, as far as we know.




Yup. I guess this might have been the writers' way to show the ash rings early while deceiving us about the inhabitant, the same way he was deceiving Jacob's followers.



I guess it's either. I must admit I half-remember the circustamces of this. I'll pay attention as I rewatch that episode.



Walt is really mysterious, and I also wonder how much is really important and how much has become a red herring following a change of mind of the writers along the way (not that I remember them saying they had a change of mind about that character or that they wrote him off the show). Will Walt return before the end?


I think it does fit, yes. I'm getting close to those episodes so I might change my mind, but my feeling is that not only Eko had become incorruptible, but with time he may have become more influential on the others than Locke. Those were the two "spiritual" characters, and it's pretty clear from early on which of the two MiB finds more malleable.

Side note: I don't think everything concerning Locke has been MIB's doing (jeez, am I the only one eager to get a real name for that character? They've waited so long I suspect the name will be quite significant). I'm pretty sure Jacob didn't give up on him. Locke had potential to serve well the purposes of both Jacob and MiB and I'm guessing the two of them constantly interferred with him through the seasons.

There's also been many hints that "the game" is one mixing strategy/choices and luck (incidentally, Locke's playing partner early on was always Walt). It's a game at which you can block your adversary, too. I suspect Jacob to have let MiB have his way on purpose a few times, to deceive him.

One big question for me remains "Why did Jacob brought so many new candidates to the Island at the time he did?". Was his time nearly over? Was it his purpose to let himself be killed? How exactly and under which circumstances does the final candidate become the guardian? Is the time around which the guardian change the time MiB stands a chance to try to escape? Did he provoke the issue by killing Jacob, while Jacob himself was expecting it and knew it's through the crisis the new guardian will emerge and foil MiB?



I don't really expect them to screw it up. The season finales have often been the best episodes. My secret hope is that it's as good as the pilot.

I have liked the show well enough since the start, and for the most part I never got annoyed or bored with it, but watching the DVDs again, I'm actually a bit surprised by how good the show was on the whole, how well they balanced and mixed the "human interest" and the show's mythology. There were a few weaker episodes and debatable decisions, but on the whole the quality remained fairly constant. Of course, you could take that story and tell it into a 12-hour mini-series, but I would say Lost is one of the most succesful series in this genre, the subplots and detours they took were most often very interesting and intriguing. Rewatching, I'm a bit surprised how much the show manages to keep my interest despite knowing where all the twists and turns are leading. It's a really well written show, with quite a few episodes that were as well structured and developped as many movies. Perhaps because it's my field of work, but I find that Lost stands way above average for its use of the editorial/writing/directorial bags of tricks - how they managed through editing of giving the impression going to the flashback was like a wave going away, and coming back like a wave crashing on the shore of the island. Paying some attention, I noticed they had styles of editing/writing for each character too. The Jin/Sun episodes often used the trick of starting with one character and returning to the other, and many of their stories were edited in parallels, deceiving us that they were connected until the end (the Panda bear for the baby that turns out not to be Sun's is a classic, but they've done that quite a few times).

I'll miss this show. I'm not a hardcore fan or addicted to it, but I'm sure I'll miss it. I hope the main writer/co-creator (Damon?) comes up with a new show to replace it (I like Fringe well enough, but it's more a substitute to Alias than to Lost).