If you haven't seen the 4th season finale of 'Lost' yet, what the bleep is the matter with you? Oh well.... then you better just quit this blog post now as I'm going to discuss the big reveal of the episode.
So there's your spoiler alert, Mama.
In the finale of season three, Jack visited a funeral home where some unknown person lay in the coffin. And it turned out he was the only one who showed up for the funeral; not even the man's son had come to it. Based on high-def freeze-frame technology, we were able to figure out from a newspaper clipping that the man in the box was one "Jeremy Bentham", not a name we heard before on the show. (But he is a famous philosopher whose biography gave many 'Lost' clue hunters enough information to make a guess about the body's identity.) From that clipping we knew he had a son, and that he was originally from New York and that he had committed suicide.
Because of the neighborhood where the funeral home was located, and because this "Bentham" had a son, I figured it had to be Michael Dawson who really lay in that coffin. (And good riddance to him, I said at the time.) Well, an hour into this year's finale, that theory got blowed up real good. (And still I said good riddance.)
Instead, it turned out to be John Locke in the box. And Sayid suggested that it might not have been suicide.
So the man of the box company, who once worked at a "box store", who was obsessed with Ben's magic box, who refused to be boxed in ("Don't tell me what I can't do!"), was finally in the box himself.
Along with his new name, Locke must have created a whole new background for himself which now included a son. I'm thinking that we'll learn that in his off-island life he has taken Walt, Michael's son, under his wing; perhaps on the island as well. And that's who is considered his son.
While filming this sequence, the producers had two other cast members climb into the box, just in case spoiler spies were at work. And on Friday morning's edition of 'Good Morning, America', they showed those two alternate endings. In the first one, we see that it's Sawyer/James Ford who was in the coffin, while it's Desmond Hume in repose for the second one.
"I tend to think they always intended to use Locke in the coffin and only filmed the other two so if anyone leaked the story, all they could say was it was one of the three in the coffin." - Tom Ucko
My Iddiot friend is right. To have given either of the other two Losties credence as the corpse, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse would have had to map out two other paths along which the fifth and sixth season would have developed. If it had been Sawyer, we'd eventually learn how he escaped the island and who might have killed him (if it really wasn't suicide). With Desmond, we'd be waiting to learn if he was killed by his love Penny's father, Charles Widmore, or by Ben Linus whose intended target would have been Penny Widmore.
The use of "Jeremy Bentham" by either man wouldn't have been a sticking point; both of them would have needed an alias once they returned to the outside world. I'm sure we'll learn that Desmond does have one now. However, this notion that either one of them had a son, and one old enough by 2007/8 to decide not to attend his funeral doesn't work for Sawyer or Desmond. I think the idea of a mentor/ward relationship between Locke and Walt works better for that aspect, especially since we saw one forming between them back in the first season of the series.
Still.....
'Good Morning, America' did broadcast those scenes. So they do exist in the TV Universe, even if they were cast-off bits of trivia shown on a morning news/info program. However, they're not in the main Toobworld. They belong to two different dimensions.
I don't have any particular alternates to Earth Prime-Time in mind to host either one of them, like the Evil Mirror Universe or 'The West Wing' dimension or the world of TV Show Remakes. All I can say is that we can rule out the Tooniverse, land of TV cartoons, and Skitlandia, the sketch comedy dimension.
BCnU!
Toby OB
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