What to expect in the final season of Lost

A few episodes into season 2 of the TV series Lost, I wrote a blog post about my theories on the mysteries of the show. Most of them proved to be incorrect. Now that season 5 has concluded, a lot of answers have been provided, although some big mysteries remain. I found this season to be very fulfilling and I have been more and more impressed by the writing as the show progresses. I expect the story of Lost will go down as one o

f the greats in literary history. With one season remaining, perhaps it's time for me to once again propose some theories and guess what we'll see in the final season.

As all well told stories do, the premise of the entire series was foretold in the beginning--in part 2 of the pilot--with dialog between John Locke and Walt [video on YouTube]. Locke is sitting on the beach with a backgammon game as Walt approaches from behind:

Walt: What is it, like checkers?

Locke: Not really. It's a better game than checkers.

...

Locke: Backgammon is the oldest game in the world. Archaeologists found sets when they excavated the ruins of Ancient Mesopotamia. 5000 years old. That's older than Jesus Christ.

Walt: Did they have dice and stuff?

Locke: (nodding) But theirs weren't made of plastic; their dice were made of bones. Two players, two sides. One is light, one is dark. Walt, do you want to know a secret?

There are further references to games. In season 1 episode 2, Locke is playing Risk with a coworker, and his retort after his boss makes fun of him is "I'm just playing a game, Randy." In episode 16, where we first learn about Hurley's numbers, his former friend at the asylum is playing Connect 4 while he repeats the numbers continuosly.

Lost is about two ancient Egyptian men playing a game. Jacob represents good (or light) while his unnamed nemesis (I'll call him Nemesis here) represents bad (or darkness). The final episode opens with the two of them talking on the beach about an approaching ship, Jacob wearing white and Nemesis wearing black:

Nemesis: How did they find the island?

Jacob: You'll have to ask them when they get here.

Nemesis: I don't have to ask...You brought them here. Still trying to prove me wrong, aren't you?

Jacob: You are wrong.

Nemesis: Am I? They come, fight, they destroy, they corrupt--it always ends the same.

Jacob: But it only ends once--anything that happens before that is just progress.

Nemesis: Do you have any idea how badly I want to kill you.

Jacob: Yes.

Nemesis: One of these days, sooner or later, I'm going to find a loophol

e.

Jacob: Well, when you do, I'll be right here.

This leads us to two important questions:

1) What is Jacob trying to prove Nemesis wrong about?

2) What is the loophole?

From the dialog in the scene, my guess is that Jacob is trying to prove that people are fundamentally good while Nemesis contends they are evil. That is the game.

And that is where all the other characters come in. They are the pawns in this ultimate backgammon game. Perhaps the game is all about seeing whether people, over time, end up being honorable or evil. Throughout the course of the series, the characters are moving either toward the white (good) or black (evil) end of the board.

What is the loophole? It seems that Jacob and Nemesis are immortal. It is unknown how they got this way, but it could be their nature as set by the island or by gods (or perhaps they are gods themselves). So the loophole may be a way to get around the immortality so that Nemesis could kill Jacob (or vice versa). At the end of season 5, we see the loophole has been found since Locke coerces Ben into successfully killing Jacob.

And the big question left with us at the conclusion of season 5 is what effect will the detonation of the hydrogen bomb have on the past events?

Here are some things I think we'll learn in the next (final) season of Lost:

Which pawns (characters) are on each side--which have redeemed themselves and which have remained (or become) evil.

The origin of Jacob and Nemesis and how/why they started their game.

Richard Alpert arrives on the Black Rock (probably the same ship we see in the scene mentioned above). He gains agelessness after agreeing to help Jacob.

Nemesis controls (or is) the smoke monster. Jacob and Nemesis can take the form of others who have died (Christian, Claire).

The loophole centered around Ben--he had to be the one to kill Jacob. Nemesis had taken on the form of Locke to lead Ben down that path. It was Nemesis who indirectly caused Locke to leave the island and be killed so that he could inhabit his body on his return on the Al-jira flight. Perhaps the loophole is that Jacob and Nemesis may only be killed by a mortal who was born on the island.

If the detonation of the hydrogen bomb works as Jack and company hope, the season will mainly consist of showing the Losties and how their lives would have played out if they hadn't gone down on Oceanic 815 and encountered the island.

But I suspect, instead, that the detonation will not have that affect--either we'll find out it was the cause of the original "incident" at the swan and things will proceed as we've already seen, or it will have some other consequence that will have ramifications on the island but not off the island or to the normal course of history. It will be responsible for damaging the statue of Taweret (under which Jacob lives), and since that is the goddess protecting pregnancy and childbirth, will begin the problems with pregnancies on the island (and greatly reduce the chance of loophole natives being born on the island).

The electromagnetic pocket at the swan station has an unexpected effect on the hydrogen bomb detonation and everyone survives (except for Juliet) and the hatch will be built so that the events causing Oceanic 815 to crash on the island occur as expected. Episode 1 of the final season will open the same as the first episode of the series: with Jack's eyes opening. We hear screaming the distance. After getting up and running through the jungle, he emerges on the beach, but this time instead of finding the crashed plane, he sees the broken Taweret statue in the aftermath of the bomb explosion.

With Jacob dead at the end of season 5, the Nemesis, as Locke, has seemingly won the great game. But Richard Alpert and the team with Locke's dead body will devise a scheme to avenge Jacob and claim victory in the final episode of the series. This will involve Claire's son Aaron, currently still back in the "real world", since he is the other mortal who was born on the island--he will be the one to kill Nemesis.

Will Jack's group make it back off the island? How will Alpert's team get Aaron back on the island to kill Nemesis?

We have many long months to wait before we have all the answers...