You go back… Jack…. do it again. Imprint Theory by Dishyvaeda

After Flight 815 crashes, some of Jack’s actions suggest that he is already familiar with the island, and that he senses how some situations will play out.

Not in a “What’s happening today, let’s look at my secret timetable…Yep…there it is, John finds a hatch” kind of way. Neither was anything revealed to him in a daily team meeting with one of the island’s apparitions, except when Christian led him to the caves.

Jack did not receive Desmond type flashes of the future, but instead had déjà vu prompts from the backstage of the mind, to guide him in a crisis.

You probably know of the deleted scene from the opening of Series 1 episode 1, when undead Christian tells Vincent to “Go wake my son, he has work to do.” He is of course already awake when Vincent reaches him. Jack carefully stands up through the pain, finds the chaser in his pocket. No matter how loud I turn up the volume for this scene, there is no sound yet of sea or crashed aircraft chaos that would indicate to Jack which way he should set off.

At this point maybe it is assumed he followed Vincent, or was guided by the white shoe in the tree in the distance. But set off Jack does, at speed. No hesitation. A near straight line sprint through the thick jungle until he reaches the beach. Still no sound as Jack looks to the right. It is only when he starts to turn to the left that we hear the sounds of carnage for the first time.

So I believe that Series 6 will show how Jack, and some of the other main characters of the show, all have subconscious memories of the island.

After Flight 815 crashes, Jack knows where to run. When the survivors on the beach hear the monster for the first time, Jack seems unfazed. In fact there is a scene soon after that where Jack is looking inland from the beach, but his fixed facial expression is one of inward concentration. As if he already knows what the monster is, and is waiting for another memory to surface, to help him decide what to do next.

When the monster later chased Jack, Kate and Charlie from the aircraft cabin, Jack knew how to escape it. While Kate fled in terror, Jack freed the trapped Charlie, and then later claimed “I just dove into some bushes.” He just seemed too confident that the monster was not after him. Watch it again if you don’t believe me. Is Jack remaining calm because good leadership requires him to? Is it understated acting, or are his subconscious memories of the island telling him he is not in danger?

Other Lost characters seem to have these déjà vu moments. When Locke, Mikhail, Kate and Sayid were walking from the destroyed Flame hatch to the Dharma Barracks, Mikhail is heard to say “Why, the John Locke I knew was……..” The sentence is unfinished but he clearly has a subconscious memory of Locke, perhaps from another island timeline. One of the many Lost loose ends that we hope will be explained eventually.

Charlotte Lewis had spent most of her life dedicated to finding the island of her childhood. On her return to the island she was already able to understand and speak Korean. Was learning Korean an essential part of her studies when off island, or an instinctive choice of subject, driven by a buried memory of Jin in Dharma times?

Daniel Faraday cried at the news of 815 being found in the Sundra Trench, with no survivors. As if he had an affinity with the people on the plane before he had ever met them as survivors on the island. And the reason for that affinity may have been his mother’s knowledge of Flight 815’s time travelling survivors (Jack, Kate and Sayid) in 1977. This knowledge may have been somehow genetically imprinted into Daniel’s subconscious, before he was born.

During the auction of the journal of the Black Rock’s first mate in ‘The Constant’ episode, the auctioneer mentioned that the journal had been found with other artefacts in Madagascar. This could mean that some of the Black Rock’s crew escaped the island with the journal and artefacts, and sold them at their first port of call.

However if the Black Rock did not find the island accidentally, but was brought there ‘for a reason’, then presumably these crew members were not meant to escape. I wonder if the escaped crew suffered similar torments to the Oceanic 6 after leaving the island. Perhaps they were haunted by the island for the rest of their lives. Maybe their individual experiences of the island became genetically imprinted in the subconscious minds of their descendants. Descendants who include Jack, some of the Flight 815 survivors, and many of the Others.

Indeed it may have been Jacob who was responsible for awakening the genetically imprinted knowledge of the island which they already possessed. During Series 5 finale he achieved this by either touching, or passing some object to them during their pasts. Notice that the majority of the people visited by Jacob in this way were on Flight 815, and survived the crash almost unscathed.

Jack does not of course have enough subconscious memory to guide him through every crisis. The need to get Kate rescued, and to rescue or protect the rest of Flight 815’s survivors, was more important than any instinct telling him he should stay on the island. But once off the island, he could not settle into normal life. Bentham’s death, the ‘lying’ to protect those left behind, and the realisation he was destined to go back, all began to eat away at him.

These all contributed to the break up of his live-in relationship with Kate. It seems that Jack is not destined for an easy passage through life. If he survives the Swan incident, he still has island and father issues to resolve, before pursuing Kate again.

Jack has so far arrived on the island twice, in 2004 and 1977. Presumably we will see him wake up in that forest again in 2007.

“Then you love a little wild one, and it brings you only sorrow,
All the time you know she’s smilin’, you’ll be on your knees tomorrow,
“You go back…..Jack……Do it again…. Wheel turnin’ ‘round and ‘round.”
(Steely Dan)

A Happy New Year to all lovers of Lost.