Second Substitute

I've been watching reruns of Lost, season six. As always, rewatching Lost after you know what's going on is an interesting experience. The new mysteries of season six may not be as deep as earlier mysteries, but knowing what Smokey is doing makes a lot of things clearer.

I just watched "The Substitute," the Locke-centric fourth hour. In the altaworld, purgaLocke is married to Helen and loses his job for trying the Walkabout on company time. He meets Hugo who hooks him up with a new job as a teacher (where he meets Ben) and decides to give up trying to walk again. It's a good story, though it's odd to watch realizing it's not "real," but rather Locke trying to work out his problems.

In a later episode Jack meets Bernard, who seems to be awake. However, in this episode, Locke meets Rose and she seems to still be fully part of altaWorld. She brings up her terminal disease (though purgatory presumably wouldn't let her die?), and I guess that's what she's got to work her way through. She better find Bernard soon.

The Island stuff is good, too. Jacob is dead and now Flocke is looking for new recruits. He flies around as Smokey before assuming Locke shape. He asks Richard to join him but even scared out of his wits, Richard won't come along. Locke starts talking about Candidates and Richard doesn't get it, and Locke feels bad that Jacob kept everyone in the dark. (He did tell Ilana about the Candidates, but also said once she she rounds them up to ask Richard what to do next.)

Flocke seems to honestly be bothered by Jacob's management style. In fact, that's what intrigued me most about the show. The main action on the island is Flocke meeting Sawyer and leading him to the Candidate Cave. Along the way, he tells Sawyer a lot of stuff, and it's all true. He claims he has the answer to why Sawyer et al are there, and darned if he doesn't. He explains he used to be a man with regular feelings. True enough. He says he's trapped now. Check. Says he doesn't know if "Kwon" on the wall means Sun or Jin. I don't know if we ever found that out. (Ilana didn't know either.)

His big speech is about how Jacob pulled the strings all along. And he explains to James that he's a Candidate who can replace Jacob, and has three choices: do nothing and see how it works out (and maybe die), accept the job and protect the island (from nothing, Flocke claims), or they can all leave the island. It's true, this is how Flocke sees things.

So he's a pretty honest guy, and much more ready to explain things than Jacob. Of course, he doesn't explain that "leaving the island" means him making sure all the Candidates die, just like he
had Jacob killed.

We also know now when he sees the blonde-haired kid (along with Sawyer--I guess these appearances work for Candidates as well) that it's young Jacob who warns him he can't kill Candidates. Don't tell me what I can't do.

Another story has Ilana finding out the awful truth in the aftermath of Jacob's death. (Though Ben lies about that a bit--the truth will come out later on that.) We discover Ilana knows a lot, but she's still limited in that Jacob, who sent her on this mission, only operates on a need-to-know basis.

On the way back to the Temple, Ilana's gang (Sun, Ben, Lapidus) bury Locke. In his eulogy, Ben apologizes for murdering him. It's the second of three apologies he'll make. The earlier was just as he left Locke's room after killing him, and the third is outside the purgatory church, where Locke forgives him. Surprisingly, this moment works each time.