The Theories: Goods vs. Evil (light and dark; island as purgatory)

Goods vs. Evil is on everyone’s mind as the last time we saw Lost a seemingly benevolent, God-like figure had just been killed by a seemingly malevolent, Satan-like figure as an end to their seemingly century-spanning battle for the souls of mankind. The show hit us over the head with the lights versus dark theme for the a couple early episodes and then it mostly disappeared until Jacob walked out of the jungle and watched the Black Rock arrive over a fishy breakfast only to be told by a man in black: I want to kill you.[1] It now seems nearly irrefutable that the events of the last five seasons have been guided by a battle between Jacob and Jacob’s his nemesis, who most people are reasonably calling Esau. Frankly, the whole: what if I told Jacob and Esau made a bet makes me think of a hackneyed screenplay probably staring Keanu Reeves.

Let’s take a step back. Locke’s speech to Walt about backgammon is a pretty big anvil: “There are two players. One side is light, and one side is dark.”[2] Adam & Evil, the two corpses found at the caves by the survivors, have stones in their pockets: one white and one black.[3] There are scores of other black and white pairings through out the show. The occurrences are listed over at Lostpedia, but for my money none are as obvious, or as heavy-handed, as those from the first season. By the middle of the first season though we have met all the main characters and none of them, despite past or future mistakes, are evil. Where is the dark at that point? The Others are soon introduced as the castaway’s counterpoints, but they are primal and animalistic more than evil, at least at first.

At the risk of inciting groans, I have to talk about the island as purgatory. We cannot contemplate a God versus Satan chessboard and then refuse to consider that board as a potential purgatory. Even if no one wants to call if purgatory, substance prevails over form.
The island as purgatory was the first wide spread Lost theory and the first explicitly refuted by the show’s creators. Several of the show’s inherent characteristics point that way. A group of people wake up after a life-ending event with some memory gaps, isolated in a very primal place, and then spend their time remembering regrets from their pre-island lives. Then they start dying off, some right after achieving closure. Purgatory, or any other afterlife based island, also answers a question asked by the survivors themselves: how did they all survive such a horrific plane crash? Sayid questioned it during the first few days on the island.[4] Locke also argues that it could not been just luckily that they all survived a major plane crash.[5] That’s the answer then: they didn’t. The question of their initial survival nags throughout the series. Christian Shepherd tells Sawyer they’re all in hell even before they board 815.[6] Anthony Cooper again tells Sawyer they’re in hell when he wakes up on the island following a car crash.[7] Finally, post-island, Hurley tells Jack that his living with Kate is must be Heaven.[8] The writers are probably just teasing us with half hearted attempts to keep the purgatory theory on life-support, but alive or dead, the theory is on their minds.

My personal objection is that purgatory requires the survivors all to be sinners and I do not think there is enough evidence for that. A show of hands for those who think a dead Hurley wouldn’t deserve Heaven? Putting aside heaven and hell and assuming the Jacob and Esau are having their battle on the mortal plane, why did these particular people get pulled into it? We are back asking the same question: where they chosen because they had sins to atone for? And how did Jacob and Esau draft their rosters?

[1] “The Incident”
[2] “The Pilot”
[3] “Housing of the Rising Sun”
[4] “The Moth”
[5] “Exodus”
[6] “Outlaws”
[7] “The Brig”
[8] “Something Nice Back Home”