Here are some random, speculative thoughts about this week's episode of "Lost". I welcome comments that you might have about your take on what's going on. We didn't learn much about Michael's motivations. He let Henry escape. It would seem that he is therefore working in collaboration with the Others, but maybe not, and if he is, it's not clear whether he's doing so willingly. He's not somebody who is glad about his murders. But he's got either his own plan or a mission from the Others, and he's going to see it through.
The real story this week concerns Locke and Eko, who with Rose (and maybe Sun) compose the Faith Faction, the minority that is most in tune with the idea that no matter how things appear, the Island is a good place and that it is good that they are there.
The Rational Faction, led by Jack, still thinks that theirs is a normal story of wreckage and survival. This island has monsters, apparitions, preposterous coincidences, inhabitants who leave no footprints on the beach. Survivors who before the crash were sick, impotent, and crippled are cured. But there's a rational explanation for all of that (if only they had more facts), so they choose not to think about these anomalies too much. They continue in their horizontal thinking to behave as if everything is normal, and most of the life on the island is normal, at least normal enough so that one doesn't always have to be thinking about what doesn't make any sense.
Because clearly they are in a place that operates according to the laws different from the Newtonian world from which they came--there is another level of lawfulness in operation there. And from the viewer's perspective, it's clear (or should be) that the Rational Faction is in a weaker position to understand what's really going on--they don't have the mental or spiritual tools for it. And it's also clear that they are most at risk of being manipulated because their behavior and reactions are so predictable. You ring the bell, and the dogs come running.
Now the main question is whether the rules of the Island are set up by a benevolent or malevolent intelligence. That's Locke's crisis. At first he believed it was benevolent, but since the Henry incident he's lost faith in that idea. If there is a higher intelligence operating on the island, he's become convinced that it's either malevolent or is just playing games with the survivors. He's become convinced that their situation is like that of those who report having been abducted by aliens who conduct experiments on them for their own research.
So this is Locke's karmic bind. He's the guy who wants to believe in the "good father" and finds out that believing such things just leads to losing a kidney. And so the pattern repeats now on the island. He wanted to believe in the goodness of the island, but now it looks to him as if the Dharma project is a cruel experiment designed by an intelligence as malevolent as his father. They are no more than rats in a maze, and if it's true, then Jack is right--they should fight the island; they should defy it, refuse to cooperate.
Jack may not understand what he's up against--he's playing in a chess game that he thinks is checkers, but it doesn't matter. Winning isn't the issue; refusing to submit is. Shaking your fist at God is the archetypal act here. The defiance about which Camus wrote so eloquently is the only option in which the survivors can maintain their freedom and dignity in a game that is rigged from the beginning. But then again, maybe defiance is the pathetically predictable behavior the Intelligence expects from his rats, and was hoping for something more interesting.
And that's what was so poignant about the discovery of the new hatch in this week's episode. For a moment Locke (and the viewers, too) had his hope renewed that the island was about something more than this cruel experiment, but he (and we) was disappointed. In the new hatch he just found more evidence to confirm his loss of faith. And if it weren't for Eko, the viewing audience would have to concur.
Eko's storyline keeps open other possibilities. We know that his dead brother, Yemi, is a noble character, a priest who represents the vertical dimension of grace, which is the dimension of spiritual freedom about which I've been writing recently. The vertical dimension opens up possiblities for people to act in ways that are not predictable in a Pavlovian sense.
And so the shaman/priest Eko gests this message in dreamtime from his brother in the vertical dimension that says Locke has lost his way. Ana Lucia, now dead and as such another messenger from the vertical dimension, comes to Eko in a dream, and tells him that Locke needs his help. So Eko as the unshakable principal in the Faith Faction has the job to shore up Locke's weakening Faith in the goodness of the island. He tells Locke that his punching in the numbers is important work.
And the viewers, including me, are left asking, "Punching numbers? Are you sure about that?" Well maybe it's not about the numbers, it's about keeping the Faith no matter what. Punching those numbers is like the repetition of a mantra, an act of prayer, like the repetition of Ave Marias in the rosary--seems tedious and stupid, but it might just be what's keeping the world from self-destructing. I don't know--just a thought.