Candidacy Blues, Freedom Passes & Stuff by LOUISE ANNE LEE

Let’s talk about candidacy.

There are 360 candidates or thereabouts, and Jacob brought every one of them to the Island and we’ve got Richard Alpert servant of said Jacob.

Now we know the names of two of the Army soldiers JONES & CUNNINGHAM, they are crossed out, but they were candidates at some point i.e. before they died. Yet we know Richard, who works for Jacob, was instrumental in killing all the army men, so here we have it that Richard oversees the killing of at least two of Jacob’s candidates.

Then I think back to Widmore ordering the murder of another candidate ROUSSEAU and Richard didn’t do anything about it, it was Ben who nipped that one in the bud.

We have example of candidates killing candidates e.g. REYES killed PRYCE, PACE killed GOODSPEED SAWYER killed FRIENDLY, & also some ambiguous ones e.g. KWON killed PICKETT, and also BURKE killed PICKETT etc and of course there are more.
So being a candidate seems to be a much better deal for some rather than others, for example MONTAND didn’t seem to get much of a chance to even enter the contest!

The name TROUPE was number 90, and if it is the author of Bad Twin, then he had even less chance than MONTAND! So what I am saying is, whether it’s the MIB killing you or a Jet engine, it seems Jacob has very little control over who gets what when, or how they get it.

If I had been zipping through time, hither and zither via my magic lighthouse mirror, after having a right good gander at all my candidates for goodness knows how many years or eons, I’d be a bit peeved if some of them ended up as brown bread before they had even thrown their destiny dice.

Perhaps that is why there are so many candidates, coz you know that a purge could be right around the corner. Perhaps not, but while I mention it, was every single Dharma Initiative member a candidate or not?

Anyway, this seems to me to place Jacob more in the realms of a gambler than some omnipotent deity. I don’t see him as an orchestrator or events which he for-sees, especially not when he speaks to Hurley with a distinct tone of concern:

“What are you doing here Hugo?”

Err...HELLO!!! What’s he doing there? YOU frakking SENT him there Dude!

“I told you to bring Jack with you.”

This moment clarified for me that Jacob DOESN’T know what’s going to happen next; I can just see it now... GODS DIARY OF ALMIGHTY COMMANDMENTS...Friday...MUST REMIND ALBERT ABOUT THE MILK. Hah, I do not think so; don’t you think he even seemed a little impatient with Hugo?

Also the way he smiled, wryly, when he realised the only way for Hurley to bring Jack was to mentally STAB Jack by saying five words which up until that exact moment in Jack’s life, were the antithesis of Jack’s reality and existence.

“You have what it takes”

Oh right! NOW he has what it takes! Right! Well that’s alright then isn’t it! He's only been in one and a half plane crashes, a helicopter crash, been kidnapped, imprisoned, beaten, had to watch the woman he loves shagging the Island hunk on video, nearly fell off a cliff,time travelled into employment as a Janitor (and not the temple type either!)and oh yeah he's on frigging call 24/7.

Some of you might say “Well it’s all part of the test”. I say...was getting sucked into that jet engine also part of the test?

Old Dogen was right:

“Jacob drives a hard bargain”

I’m sure Gary Troup(e) would agree if he’d had the chance. But let’s consider Dogen for a moment, he agreed a deal with Jacob whereby he could NEVER see his boy again. EVER.
But hang on,

“It only ends once and anything before that is just progress”

Tell that to Dogen or his reincarnated orphan.

The MIB, it at least appears, could well have struck the opposite deal, so what sort of sales spiel did Jacob give Dogen? If I was Dogen, I’d have said:

“Look here Jacob, I don’t mind being your Hong-Kong-Phooey kick-ass janitor for eternity like, but at the end of eternity I want a paltry... fifty years say? so I can see my boy grow up”
But no, he agrees a deal which guarantees he’ll never see his boy again.

Dogen reckons he got promoted at the bank, I’m taking a wild stab in the dark here, a bit like what Lennon got, that Dogen was not in the negotiations department.

So I’m trying to boil this down here that until proved differently on the show, there seems to exist the proposition that you CAN get your loved ones back. Maybe it’s Pet Cemetery (Stephen King), maybe it aint, but Jacob sure aint handing out dimension tickets whereas MIB is akin to a ticket-tout.
The MIB said he was trapped so long he forgot what freedom is, yet now he’s handing out freedom passes left right and centre.

Now we don’t know the MIB’s true intentions yet, whereas on the other hand we know that Jacob is more than happy to spin his dice and watch as you die by getting shot, drowned, blown up, crushed, killed by the Locke-ness monster, run over with a van, gassed, buried alive, time-tripping cerebral haematoma, being strangled, head cracked open on a rock, and on and on and on, not forgetting Jacob’s favourite... dying coz you are pregnant, a two-for-one Jacob bonus.

So I realise now I actually prefer Ben to Jacob, at least Ben has shown some sorrow, and before anyone say it, I don't think that Jacob, turning up while Locke has just hit the deck and saying to him "I'm sorry this happened to you" counts as sorrow.

Jacob should have just fronted up and told the truth:

"Hey there John! you'll be paralysed for 4 years your ruthless father will con you & steal your kidney leading to the love of your life leaving you because of your obcessions, then you'll suffer a plane crash, groups of people trying to kill you, the death of a young man who climbs into a plane for you, getting shot in the leg by a dead surgeon, pressing a button or the hatch explodes and then when you don't press it...it will explode or implode anyway, falling down a dirty old well and snapping your re-healed leg very painfully, time travel followed by a lonely spell in the desert, a chauffeur driven trip which ends up in murder and a car-crash with you swiftly back in hospital where your old friend will pour more scorn on you and remind you how pathetic you really are, then abandonment by the rest of your old crew, followed by strangulation just when you decide NOT to commit suicide by hanging. But don't worry coz everything will be ok! oh and yeah, I'm really sorry!"

In fact, I think Locke has been the only one to get an apology from Jacob! All the other candidates should consider themselves lucky i reckon.
Actually now i read that all back to myself, maybe thats what MIB meant when he said:

"and you have no idea what I've had to go through to be here"

he probably meant being John Locke for a few months and getting an apology from Jacob was NOT easy.

OK Jacob rant over, is it me or are we seeing a similar thing with Sayid’s bullet wound changing places like with young Ben? I only noticed today, when you see the previously on Lost bit in the incident he clearly gets shot in his lower right abdomen and in what Kate does when he is getting tortured you can clearly see it’s on his left side.
Also who do you think betrayed the MIB?

Also I typed in the following to online dictionary just to see what it said:
Incarnate – in human form
Reincarnate –put back into human flesh
Evil reincarnate – evil put back into human flesh

interesting eh?

And finally, is it possible that Richard Alpert died on the Black Rock? And similar to Dogen was made an offer. Perhaps this explains why he never ages because in essence he is dead.
“I’m this way because of Jacob”

I think Jacob made a deal with Richard, incarnated him i.e. we see him in human form, and perhaps the deal was to RE-Incarnate him i.e. give him back his flesh which WOULD age.

Either way he must have had better bargaining skills than Dogen and rather than being stuck in a old temple, has freedom to roam the island and also enjoys time travel as essentially he’s like 200 years old or whatever and he gets to go to the 200’s and stuff.

But he doesn’t seem to know much about the candidates, or well of anything really. Perhaps he should have gone with the MIB when he first had the chance hundreds of years ago. Maybe he will and that’s why he’s on the ‘dark-side’ in that last-Supper picture. Then again maybe not.

Namaste.