“He told me I have to move the island”.

This episode kicked a lot of ass on so many levels. John Locke has always been my favorite character on the show and we got to see Locke’s life story from the moment of his illegitimate birth to his recovery from being paralyzed.

Alpert (“eye shadow man”) was present at John’s birth and then later shows up out of no where to perform a series of tests for an older, pre-adolescent John. The psychological test (“which of these items is yours) goes well until little John picks up a knife and claims it’s his own. Angry and disappointed, Alpert leaves. What’s going on? Was John supposed to be “special” and “prepared” or “destined” to go to the island? Why hasn’t Alpert aged AT ALL? Is he traveling through time in order to “set things right” or “course-correct the universe”? Later, Abaddon shows up at the hospital where John is recovering from his paralysis and tells him he “show go on an Australian walk-a-bout”.

Who the hell is John Locke and why is he deemed so important? Was John supposed to be Ben at first, but Dharma chose Ben over Locke? If you remember, Ben also was guided to the island only to have him take over and kill Dharma off.

Other weird shit in this episode involved the cargo ship’s doctor walking around on board HOURS after his dead body washed up on the shore of the island. Is the island in the future or is the ship in the past? By the way, Keamy is turning out to be one bad-ass bad buy. The guy does not fuck around. He kills two men (including the ship’s captain) when he doesn’t get his way.

In the end, John visits Jacob’s cabin only to see Christian Shepard and Claire. (Both, in my opinion, are dead). I was happy to see Emilie de Ravin actually acting. She’s much better when she isn’t Mrs. “I must protect my baby and worry a lot”.

In the end, Jacob tells Locke that he has to “move the island”. WTF. Seriously. WTF.

Now, speaking of the island, here is a brilliant comparison to Stanislaw Lem’s brilliant novel (and Andrei Tarkovsky’s critically-adored film), Solaris:

Let’s have a look-see shall we? Solaris tells of a living planet (well, technically, a living “ocean” on a distant planet) which communicates with its human visitors by materially manifesting people from their pasts and forces them to confront their own limitations and foibles in the process. Sound familiar?

That the titular Solaris is an incomprehensibly alien sentience not necessarily advancing the best interests of its visitors as it attempts to communicate with them and understand them (while, in turn, the human scientists try to understand Solaris) also holds sounds a lot like Lost’s Island.

As in Solaris, the Island’s interactions with its human visitors and inhabitants cause insanity and death. Also, as in Solaris, the Island seems pretty indifferent to human suffering. It’s been very willing to select the most traumatic possible “visitor” for those to whom it’s manifested (Jack’s father, Eko’s brother, Ben’s mother, Charlie for Hurley, Libby for Michael), has actively inflicted or allowed to occur various ailments (Ben’s tumor, Jack’s appendicitis, Locke’s legs giving out at inopportune moments) and even “demanding sacrifice” (note that one of those inopportune moments for Locke’s legs was what required Locke to send Boone to explore the Beechcraft, killing him).

None of which is to say that the Island is “evil” any more than Solaris was “evil”…they’re both simply alien and have motivations incomprehensible to and arguably uncaring for humans. Or, to use Ben’s colorful description from “Cabin Fever”, they’re (to human eyes) fickle bitches.

Another interesting aspect of the “revived” dead people in Solaris is that they were all imperfect copies, limited by the fact that they were constructed based on the memories of them held by the living characters rather than on the actual dead person. One could say something is similarly wrong with the Island manifestations we’ve seen speak, but who were never alive on the Island itself–namely Christian and Yemi, the latter of whom had a wrongness that Eko was able to detect upon interacting with him for a comparatively short time. The Island at least got a chance to get to know Charlie, Boone, and Libby before they died.

As usual, I would caution against taking too strong a “one-to-one” correlation. Lost is always, in the end, its own creature even if its genetic code contains DNA from a host of narrative ancestors. But I’ll leave you with this thought: None of the other “mysterious islands” commonly considered antecedents for Lost’s Island–Verne’s The Mysterious Island, the island of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (and the Forbidden PlanetLost’s Island and Solaris are.