The Island has not LOST track of Michael

Tonight’s episode of LOST (the last new episode until April 24th, when LOST will resume at 10pm) focused on the story of Michael after escaping the island. How exactly he “found rescue” we are not told, but he made it back to the U.S. eventually. He is feeling suicidal – after telling Walt what he had done, Walt didn’t want to talk to him any more. After one unsuccessful suicide attempt, he hears ghostly whispers and sees a nurse who then vanishes. Later he tries to kill himself and is stopped by Tom (aka “Friendly”), who tells Michael he can’t kill himself – the island won’t let him. Michael does try, but the gun doesn’t fire. An interesting side note is that on the game show that is on TV, a contestant answers a question about Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five, about a man unstuck in time. The show is interrupted with the breaking news that Oceanic 815 had been found. Michael goes to the hotel penthouse suite where Tom said he could be found. Tom is apparently one of the Others who can come and go from the island (not all can, apparently). Tom tells Michael that the plane is a phony – Widmore put it there, using bodies purchased or stolen from a cemetery in Thailand. Widmore, Tom says, doesn’t want anyone to find out where the plane really ended up, except for himself. Michael is given this opportunity to redeem himself by saving the other survivors – but to do so, he’ll have to kill everyone on the boat.

Once on the boat, however, he learns that that is not entirely true. Although he had been given a bomb to blow up the boat, instead of exploding after he types in the code 71776 and presses the button marked “Execute”, instead of exploding it pops up a flag that said “NOT YET”. Later, contacted by Ben, Michael is told that there are innocent people on the boat, and so he isn’t to simply kill everyone. That isn’t Ben’s way – he says he won’t kill innocent people, and welcomes Michael to “the good guys”.

Before pushing the button, a ghostly Libby appeared and told Michael not to do it. The island may be on Michael’s side, but isn’t clearly on Ben’s. Why would the island try to stop Michael, when one thinks it would know the bomb isn’t real? Or was this a test, the appearance of Libby being a challenge for Michael to remember the previous occasion when he killed her, an innocent victim?

Lapidus tells Michael that Widmore believes him that the plane is a fake and there may be survivors. We don’t know who to trust yet, if anyone.

At the end of the episode, Sayyid gives Michael away to the captain as a traitor. Alex had gone with Rousseau and Karl to the Temple, marked on a map Ben gave them by a Dharma logo, and said to be a safe refuge. But when they stop briefly on the way, Karl and Rousseau are shot, by whom we do not yet know. Alex puts her hands up and shouts that she is Ben’s daughter.

We now know who all 6 of the Oceanic Six are: Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayyid, Aaron and Sun. Why they will be the ones to leave is unclear. Sayyid revealed Michael as a traitor working for Ben, but later he himself will work for Ben. How will this come about, and when?

I originally wanted to call this post “Michael LOST his moral compass”. But the most interesting thing in the episode was the control the island seems to have even in other parts of the world. The island is seeming less and less like a commodity to be used, and more and more like a god working in the lives of human beings and the unfolding history of the planet. But is that really the island itself, or someone who has harnessed the island’s power?

We frequently think of God anthropomorphically. What might be gained, or LOST, in thinking about God as an island?