INSPIRATION

Strange is the world
Why should men receive life in this world?
Men's lives are as meaningless
As the lives of insects
The terrible folly
Of such suffering
A man lives but As briefly as a flower
Destined all too soon
To decay into the stink of flesh
Humanity strives
All its days
To sear its own flesh
In the flames of base desire
Exposing itself
To Fate's Five Calamities
Heaping karma upon karma
All that awaits Man At the end Of his travails
Is the stench of rotting flesh
That will yet blossom into flower
Its foul odor rendered
Into sweet perfume
Oh, fascinating
The life of Man
Oh, fascinating

These are the lyrics from the old woman’s song (sung by evil forest spirit) in the movie Throne of Blood by famed Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa. The movie was on TCM after LOST. The Macbethian movie is about two soldiers who turn back an overpowering enemy. On their way to be rewarded by their king, they travel through a mysterious forest of fog and spider web trails. They veer on horseback through trails and past mounds of dead soldier skeletons. They get lost until they stumble upon an old woman in a wood branch cage, spinning yarn on a hand wheel. This is a evil spirit who foretells their future: one would rise to be the king, and the other's son would rise to be the king of the castle after his friend's reign. As a result of the prophecy, the one soldier who would be king begins to believe its truth so as to affect his own actions and decisions, including murdering the current king. Paranoid that the other soldier would tell the prophecy and take away his control of his throne, he sets out to murder his old friend, who dies to haunt him as a ghost, but his friend's son (the future king) survives to join forces with the kingdom's enemies. The new king is now trapped in his castle fortress surrounded by cowards. He goes back into the forest to find the evil spirit who tells him he will never be defeated in battle until the forest trees rise up and attack him. Impossible, he boasts, to his troops, as he awaits the final battle in his castle, a stronghold that has never been defeated by any army. In the early morning fog, his troops go mad as they see the trees begin approaching the castle. Unaware that it is the enemy troops using trees as camouflage, they panic and kill the new king so as to spare their own lives. Thereby, the spirit's prophecy becomes a self-fulfilling reality.

Kurosawa was considered as a great Japanese director, on par with the John Fords and Howard Hawkes in America. His film, The Hidden Fortress, was an inspiration for the Star Wars films. One technique he used was to tell the story from the perspective of the film's lowliest characters. And this may be where TPTB found their inspiration and story telling framework.

We have led to believe that for the first five seasons that the 815 survivors were the main characters on the show, from the beach campers, to the Tailies, through the Dharma folks and now the Others, but it appears that all are red shirts as the final climax is about to be revealed to us.

If one considers the flashbacks, flashforwards, Island time or even the dreaded flash sideways arcs, no one has a great or profound life. Some may have some meaning, but in the cosmic microscope of a god-like being, mankind is like a colony of insects. Disposal organic matter with a limited life cycle that ends in compost.

All of our characters have the the same fate self-fulling prophecies. Jacob's "gift" to the candidates did not change their personal fates. Fate's Five Calamities could be killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and intoxication. One word derivative of "fate" is "fatality," another is "fatalism." Fate implies no choice, and ends fatally, with a death. Fate is an outcome determined by an outside agency acting upon a person or entity; but with destiny the entity is willfully participating in achieving an outcome that is directly related to itself.

Fate and destiny can be distinguished. Modern usage defines fate as a power or agency that predetermines and orders the course of events. Fate defines events as ordered or "inevitable". Fate is used in regard to the finality of events as they have worked themselves out; and that same sense of finality, projected into the future to become the inevitability of events as they will work themselves out, is Destiny. In classical and European mythology, there are three goddesses dispensing fate, the "Fates" they determine the events of the world through the mystic spinning of threads that represent individual human destinies.

Jacob was thread bending on the Island, weaving his tapestry. He takes the form of an evil spirit, controlling people's lives and pushing them toward the path of doomed fates. MIB can also be a malevolent spirit in this supernatural place co-existing with mankind. MIB is made of the same bolt of cloth, so to speak, making deals for the souls of his recruits, and promising them anything in the world. One could imagine that there is a higher power over Jacob and MIB who could try to put this humpty dumpty world back together again. Or not.

Any advanced technological entity could be considered god-like to lesser developed entities. If Jacob and MIB are god like beings towards humans. In ancient myths, only superior gods could harm inferior gods, and any god could harm mere mortals. But humans could not kill gods. So why are humans even needed in this island world? Are humans a god's play thing, a guinea pig, a lab rat, a court jester of complex emotional strings?

In the old woman's song above, the end of man is death and its foul stench that turns into perfume. The origin of the word "perfume" has an obsolete old Italian meaning "to smoke through." In death, one can create a smoke monster?

When Flocke is taking his recruits towards the Hydra station in his plan to leave the Island, there is a question why would he need to go there? The Ajira plane wreck is there along with about two dozen passengers. One would think that a supernatural being does not need an airplane to leave the island (considering he may have been able to teleport anyplace on earth like Jacob was known to do). Maybe he needs to feast on the human souls there - - - to gain enough strength in numbers to transform into his full, final form (cue music for Evil Incarnate).