In a landmark episode of Lost last night, many answers were revealed in the Richard-centric episode.
Perhaps the most important is what we learned about the true meaning of what the island represents.
“Think of this wine as what you keep calling hell,” Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) tells Richard Alpert, holding the wine bottle. “There’s many other names for it too–malevalence, evil, darkness, and here it is, swirling around in the bottle unable to get out because if it did, it would spread. The cork is this island. And it’s the only thing keeping the darkness where it belongs.”
This means that it isn’t really what the island is, but rather its purpose. It stops Evil (the Man in Black) from spreading out into the rest of the world. Initial signs of this came with Hurley’s numbers, which came from the island (overheard by military personnel stationed in the Pacific) and wreaked all kinds of havoc on Hurley’s loved ones in the real world. That represented what could happen if Evil was to leak out, only on a smalls scale.
This means that the characters that we love are there to stop Evil. “That man who sent you to kill me believes that everyone is corruptible because it’s in their very nature to sin,” Jacob explains. “I bring people here to prove him wrong and when they get here, their past doesn’t matter. I want them to help themselves to know the difference between right and wrong without me having to tell them. It’s all meaningless if I have to force them to do anything.”
Translation? The Island is purgatory and that the Jack and company are not dead, but are being given a second chance to redeem themselves because their past lives don’t matter.
Credit: E! Online
