free will vs. fate by Julian

tonight's epsiode had a lot of garden of eden/cain and abel stuff going on. we've talked a lot about fate and free will and i'm thinking maybe that what the island and jacob are guarding people from is their own free will. at the beginning of the episode jacob's "foster" mom tells his real mom to stop asking questions because they'll only lead to more questions. and jacobs twin brother is full of questions, as are the others on the island who he goes to live with. maybe part of the point is that given free will people will always have more questions and eventually they will want the answer to everything about life, which is not necessarily what they should be looking for. a sort of ignorance is bliss type deal where the more answers they get the more cynical and greedy they become. this would also be an interesting theme because the people who watch the show are always wanting more answers about what's going on, so the theme would resonate in their experience watching the show.

on the other hand, watching tonight's last episode you kind of get the feeling that the man in black is the more respectable of the brothers because he's not so naive. so maybe somehow asking a lot of questions will prove virtuous, but by the way locke has acted since he's become inhabited by the man in black it seems like the message is that the thirst for answers and ever-increasing knowledge is a bad thing. there's an obvious contrast between science (the man in black and the others discovering the electromagnetic field and then literally inventing the wheel to try and conduct the light to get them off the island) and then religion (jacob who has faith in his mother without asking too many questions about why things are how they are)

it's interesting that the mother preferred the man in black to jacob, and jacob is well aware of her preference. im not sure what to make of that, but it reminded me of right before ben stabbed jacob and ben asked "what about me?" and jacob said "what about you?"

maybe it's that with pure free will and no faith people will inevitably kill one another in search of answers, and so there needs to be some kind of barricade between people and the answers to the big questions. jacob would be the barricade and his brother the one trying to break it down.