LOST Thoughts – S5 E16 & 17

Here are my thoughts on the fifth season finale of Lost, “The Incident”:

1. We finally found out the identity of Jacob!  It turns out he’s not Christian or elderly future Jack or even Alpert playing Wizard of Oz.  He’s…some random dude we’ve never seen before.  Given all of the ghostly implications leading up to this, when the opening scene led off with a shot of homemade pottery in a dimly-lit room, I started wondering if Jacob was going to end up being Patrick Swayze.
2. Even though we’ve never seen Jacob before, it turns out just about everyone this side of Nikki and Paulo has – though they certainly didn’t realize it at the time.  Jacob materialized just in time to play their guardian angel so often, the only thing he was missing was Victor French as a sidekick.
3. The shocking part of little girl Kate’s convenience store heist wasn’t that she shoplifted a lunch box, it’s that it was a NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK lunch box.  She seems like she would have been more of a Poison or Skid Row fan.
4. It was nice to see Rose, Bernard and Vincent safe and sound and quietly enjoying retirement.  Didn’t it kind of look like Bernard used the blueprints from Jacob’s cabin to build their love shack?
5. OK, so Ben’s Dad shot Sayid to avenge Sayid’s shooting of Ben, which Sayid did to prevent Ben from gassing his Dad.  Circle of life, indeed.
6. Nobody is better at driving those VW microbuses in rescue situations than Hurley.  The Fat and The Furious.
7. There were so many satifying moments throughout the season finale, but perhaps none provided more instant gratification than seeing Phil get impaled by rebar.  If only Radzinsky could have suffered a similarly gruesome fate…
8. Speaking of gruesome fates, it doesn’t get much worse than Jacob being stabbed in the heart and kicked into a fire.  Nothing sets off Ben quite like being deemed insignificant, except maybe seeing the girl he kidnapped and forced to be his daughter get executed right before his very eyes.  That also made him a little cranky.
9. So, back when the smoke monster brought forth dead Alex to demand that faux daddy Ben follow all of Locke’s instructions OR ELSE, was she doing so knowing that Jacob’s nemesis would later assume the form of Locke in order to have Jacob killed?  In other words, is the smoke monster on Team Jacob, or Team Other Guy With A Rope For A Belt?
10. Now that Jughead (or at least the plutonium-filled thermos extracted from within) has been detonated, what lies ahead for the final season?  Will Oceanic Flight 815 land at LAX without incident, leaving the passengers to go on with their lives having never met?  Will the island now be inhabited entirely by radioactive zombies?  Will Miles and Chang play catch in the backyard?  We only have to wait NINE MONTHS to find out!  Can somebody please turn ABC’s frozen donkey wheel so we can zap forward to 2010?!?