The Fates of Juliet, Sayid, Locke, Jacob, Life, the Universe, and Everything

Hope you read my preliminary rambles on the Lost finale. I just watched the entire thing a second time last night -- in addition to all the times I watched the opening scene and the last ten minutes over and over again -- and I'm ready to start breaking it down. First topic of discussion: the pressing matter of who the heck survived the finale.

Juliet:

Kind of dead, but maybe not really sort of. A lot of people are grieving her death, and Elizabeth Mitchell has one of the lead roles in the V pilot, a remake of a 1984 TV series, which is debuting on ABC next fall. But don't throw your phone at your computer just yet: EW.com confirmed yesterday that she's definitely scheduled to appear in an "undisclosed number of episodes next year."

That could mean a one-off cameo or it could mean something bigger; it sounds like the writers know how they want to include her but don't know how big that inclusion is going to turn out to be. Nestor Carbonell (Richard) had one of the leads in the CBS drama Cane that took him out of Lost for a big part of the fourth season, but he's certainly still a pivotal character in Lost.

Doc Jensen's finale follow-up that came out today (complete with a new episode of Totally Lost) surmises that Juliet has indeed created an alternate future by blowing up the H-bomb, one that she'll be alive in -- but without any memory of what has happened. Instead, the only people that will have a memory of the former timeline will be the people whom Jacob touched. That would set up a scene in which Sawyer goes to visit a happy living-her-life alternate-future Juliet, who has no memory of him, even though he retains all his memories of her.

But that's just one of any grand number of reasonable-sounding theories.

Sayid:

Sayid's situation seems to mirror Jin's from last season: he seems pretty dead, but we're all pretty sure he's not. Certainly, no one is mourning him like we're all mourning Juliet, and Naveen Andrews hasn't been booking any pilots for next season. He didn't get anything close to a death scene this finale, which means they'd at least have to bring him back for a few episodes next season, and why drag it out like that? Plus, he was one of the people Jacob touched, which seems like it means Jacob considers him pretty important. He's fine. He better be, anyway.

Locke:

Dead is dead, it turns out. And I actually like that idea: that Locke's story is cruelly over. As Ben said, "Destiny is a fickle bitch."

But then again...it certainly appeared that Jacob had revived Locke by touching him after his daddy threw him out the window. That would mean Locke has been resurrected once for real and once...for fake, by the Second Man. Could he be resurrected again for real? And yet...wouldn't that seem kind of redundant?

I've always gone with the semi-conventional wisdom that Ben was a cosmic accident and Locke was the true future leader of the island. But the finale shoved that idea out the window, or at least smacked it around a bit -- the part about Locke, anyway. Yes, Jacob touched him. But Richard point-blank told Jack that the only reason he kept visiting Locke was because Locke met him in the 1950s.

No, I like the idea instead that Locke -- Locke's skin, anyway, inhabited by the Second Man -- becomes the great villain of the sixth season (and the entire show). The real Locke? Dead.

Jacob:

A lot of people are theorizing that Ben and Impostor Locke were playing straight into Jacob's hands by killing him. I'm not going to go that far: I strongly believe that Jacob didn't want to die, and he didn't want Ben to kill him.

What we saw in that scene, instead, was a man resigned to, and prepared for, his fate. He knew that the Second Man would find his loophole, so he had been working overtime to clutch victory from the jaws of defeat: he sought out Jack, Sayid and everybody so that they could finish his work for him -- which probably includes disposing of the Second Man, and in the process proving Jacob right about the goodness of mankind. Or something.

(A side note: Jacob's visit with Ilana included no touching. In fact, it was a conspicuous detail that Jacob had gloves on in that scene.)

Miles:

Miles never got a Jacob Touch that we saw. So what should we make of his fate? It makes sense to me that Jacob's final line, "they're coming," was his way of telling Impostor Locke that everyone he touched, who were stuck in the past, would be propelled forward to the present. That leaves out Miles. I can't imagine they'd just leave him behind, but his place in the grand scheme is a slight question mark.

Everybody in 1977:

Right before Juliet detonated the bomb, Dr. Pierre Chang got his hand badly smashed up -- which explains why in the orientation videos, one of his arms never moved and seemed fake. So if they bothered explaining that point, it must mean that he doesn't then immediately die in the H-bomb explosion, right?

I'm inclined to believe more and more that the only thing the H-bomb did was propel Jacob's favorite kids back to the future. Because if they really go with an alternate timeline where 815 doesn't crash, that means two things: (1) Producers have to work overtime bringing every single person who died back on the show for at least a simultaneous cameo appearance. That would be awesome, but I don't think they would willingly give themselves that headache. (2) About a billion island loose-ends fail to be followed through: say goodbye to Kate's quest to find Claire, the entire Ajira flight, Ilana, even Jacob's freaking death. It would undercut everything that happened in the finale's 2007 scenes, and it wouldn't make storytelling sense.

That's not to say I couldn't see them doing it temporarily or something. Or creating some kind of bizarro future with only a few small conspicuous changes. Like...we're back at the statue with Richard, Ilana, Sun, and Frank...only now Caesar is there too! In the alternate timeline, Caesar lives! Nice!

Doesn't anybody besides me care about Caesar?

TAGS: 1977, 2007, Deaths, Finale, Jacob, Juliet, Locke, Miles, Pierre Chang, Sayid, Season 5, Time Travel
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