“Each one of us was brought here for a reason.” — John Locke
This is the line that inspired the title of this blog, and it’s a line that sums up the central mysteries of LOST: Why were the Lost-ies brought to the Island, and who or what brought them there? Locke says the line, or variations of the line, in more than one episode — most memorably in this scene from the finale of Season 1:
The short scene is like a greatest-hits recap of all the lines that lay out the show’s themes. Man of science versus man of faith. The Island brought us here. This is no ordinary place. It’s destiny. A sacrifice that the Island demanded. Jack: “I don’t believe in destiny.” Locke: “Yes, you do. You just don’t know it yet.”
So the groundwork for all these themes was already set in place in the first season. Now, part-way through Season 5, some of them are finally starting to come to fruition.
3/2/09 Editing to add Late last night (actually in the wee hours of the morning), I turned on the TV to see if there was anything on, besides infomercials, that I might watch for a few minutes before I went to sleep. I flipped through the channels, and there was a rerun of an old episode of LOST! About a minute later, the scene in the clip above, part of this post that I hadn’t yet finished, came on! Spooky! Cue Twilight Zone music.
I ended up watching the rest of the episode — the very end of Season 1. Even though I am writing two LOST blogs, I haven’t rewatched many episodes yet — I only became a hard-core LOST nerd recently, as a result of writing the blogs, rather than the other way around. It was interesting to see that piece of the Season 1 finale now — to see Walt so small, to see Hurley freak out when he saw the numbers inscribed on top of the hatch, to remember how it felt to watch that episode the first time, to remember the almost unbearable suspense of wondering what was inside the hatch.