The LOST Finale

Here's my take on the LOST finale, which I've seen twice now. I'm pretty sure I don't know what's going on, but this is my best shot at it. This is adapted from an email I sent to some friends.

Juliet is the variable. Or, at least in this iteration, she's the important variable. (Or maybe Sawyer. I'll explain).

In the past, things played out just like that. Shootout, nuclear core, standoff, core gets dropped down, it lands in mud, fails to detonate, things gets magnetic, etc.

In the past, the magnetic pocket pulled the metal nuke core down into the mud, and permanently attached it to the magnetic stuff. The Dharma folks, realizing that they couldn't drill anymore, left it there, poured concrete over it to keep the radiation in, and built the Swan there to study the anomaly. Radzinski lives there and works there, Kelvin comes, Radzinski kills himself, Desmond comes, Desmond kills Kelvin, blah blah, blah blah.

This time, though, Juliet succeeds in detonating the bomb. Why this time and not other times? Maybe it's because the Oceanic Six left the island, allowing Sawyer to have a relationship with Juliet without Kate around, allowing them to form a bond, so that when the time came for Juliet to get sucked down the hole, he was there to somehow alter her course down by holding on to her, causing her to land differently. Or something. Anyway, their relationship made things different. The bomb goes off, and somehow (who knows) that changes everything. Maybe it just resets things. Maybe it ends things. Maybe they flash to 2007. Maybe they all wake up washed up on the Hydra island. I don't really know. But something is now different from the way it happened so many times before.

That's the science side of things.

As far as I can tell, both Jacob and his dark nemesis dude are humans or divinities from the past. There are strands of information from Greek, Latin, and Egyptian contexts. The Others speak Latin (Richard's name is apparently Ricardus, and he answered Ilana's question in Latin last night: "the one who saves us all"). Jacob's tapestry is in Greek (it's a quotation from Odysseus in the Odyssey; I recognized the script, but it's a different form of Greek than what I know). And Egyptian heiroglyphs are everywhere.

(Yes, I like knowing two of the three dead languages they are using).

I think Jacob and the other dude have been trapped on that island for a very, very long time...since, say, a couple hundred years BCE.

OR...and here's my mythological explanation...they're a form of these dudes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugolino (Skip down to the Literary Afterlife section.)I've always thought the purgatory theories would play out in the end, and the whole episode I couldn't stop thinking about Dante's Inferno. Maybe these two are consigned to this island as their hell, to gnaw each others' skulls for eternity, until someone finds a way out? And maybe one of them just did.