LOST / 3x20, "The Man Behind the Curtain"

"Helllllp... Me...."

And so goes our first meeting with Jacob (aka "HIM"). In case you didn't see him, it wasn't a Psycho-esque delusion of Ben, Jacob was most definitely there.

Now who could he be? At first glance, the forehead looks distinctly like Terry O'Quinn's except according to Lostpedia, he was being played here by one of the show's prop masters. I am willing to go out on a very, very long limb and say that they deliberately picked a dude to play Jacob who looked like O'Quinn, just so they could eventually reveal that Jacob is indeed Locke.

How can that be? Well, if all the theorizing about lost time is correct, then perhaps Locke is somehow caught in time, and everyone is going through a time loop, but only Locke is standing still in that particular place for some reason. Notice in the above pictures Jacob's hair is as long and his clothes as tattered as Richard Alpert's when we meet him in Ben's flashback. Richard doesn't look like he's aged a bit. Perhaps this similarity is not coincidental and there's a hint here that what seems to have caused Alpert's agelessness is also affecting Jacob.

Or... Richard Alpert is Jacob. (cough.) But that would just be lame, yes?

*While the episode was full of little bits of show mythology, the one that stood out for me was the subtle way they explained why Ben (and thus the Others) are so obsessed with kidnapping pregnant women. If I'm reading the episode correctly, Ben believes he may have brought a curse to the Island that causes all pregnant women to die at around seven months, just as his own mother did. This was in no small part because his father kept blaming him for his mother's death and their misery ever since. Ben told the Others he was born on the Island to deflect any hint he brought this "curse" with him, while also making him look special as supposedly the last on-Island birth.

Meanwhile, the girl who grew close to him seems to have disappeared from his life later, the crude doll she made for him the only reminder of her presence in young Ben's life. What happened to her? Did she perhaps die in childbirth, too? Was this what finally snapped Ben and turned him into a mass murderer?

This is just another case of the writers taking a seemingly bizarre mystery and resolving it not just by answering a question, but illuminating a character's dark past. Really, instead of sympathizing with Ben, it made him seem even more like a monster, not because he's evil, but because he's beyond notions of good and evil. He acts purely out of self-preseveration, with lies being the truth if it suits that purpose.

His special relationship with Jacob was all he had left to hold onto. And with the coming of Locke, with Locke hearing what even Ben couldn't hear, that relationship was threatened, and so, too, Ben's place within the Others and more importantly his view of himself.

*Smokey = Whispers? It sounded like whispering around Ben as he approached the sonic fence and spoke to his mother. It's now widely assumed that Ben's mom was the Monster. Is Smokey also the cause of the whispers then, too? Indeed the Monster may be the closest thing to a grand unifying theory of Lost, explaining everything from Dave to Christian Shepherd to the Whispers.

*Actually, there's also a theory out there that Jacob is the Monster and that the circle of ash or gunpowder is the smoke we see when it is out and about. So when it reenters that zone the ash just falls away and rejoins the circle while he retakes his seat. Or... not.

*Did someone say "Volcano"? Well... you know they never bring anything up without it coming back later. Island go boom?