The Shape of Things to Come part 3 (a different view)

Games aren't just for kids. Grown men play them too. Even powerful men. Lost doesn't seem to be shaping up to be about a bunch of plane crash survivors after all. Doesn't that all seem like a million years ago? It also seems more and more that those original themes of loss and redemption are less and less significant. Mathematicians have tried to formalize games - how we play them, how we win them - into theories, where choices are analyzed according to models that predict outcome. They've even tried to use game theories to predict how economics and genetics and politics will operate. But it remains a very unreliable field of study. Mainly because the theory relies on determinism, on effect following cause. And it's that very thing that is so often violated. Things don't always go according to plan. What ultimately destroys game theory is irrationality. Including the most irrational behavior of all:



Altruism.
Courage.
Heroism.
Pure heroism, when a man acts against his own self interest for the good of others. Indeed, this is the ultimate fly in the ointment of game theory. Much of game theory is predicated on the belief that organisms will behave in their own self interest. But heroism is the kind of variable that blows those game theories all to hell. It's commonly accepted that the ultimate hero of Lost must be Jack. In fact, even raising any doubts on this topic can create quite a bit of...tension. Yet Jack has been nothing but a chump this season. It took Mr. Med School Genius a whole week to process what dainty Daniel told him the very first day they met! The freighter was never coming to Lost Island in order to rescue these mooks. I know I heard Daniel tell this to Jack in the second episode. Didn't you? Why was Jack listening to his "gut" instead of to the words that came out of the guy's mouth? Was he distracted by his menstrual cramps? Or did he start dipping into the meds a lot earlier than we'd previously suspected? (If you watched some of the previews you should know he has appendicitis.)



So, Jack hasn't been much of a hero this season. But others have. Bernard pulled out some of those mad secret skilz he has. First sharpshooting. Now Morse Code. Hurley's Cowardly Lion has been growing ever less cowardly and more lion. He's taking care of the Chosen One. In the Bible, Aaron is the brother of Moses - whose life was saved from a baby killing monarch when his mom set him afloat in the Nile in a reed basket. Hard to ignore a foreshadow like that one. Hurley's defying the evil alliance of Locke and Ben, who would have hung Sawyer and Claire out to dry. And he's acting against his own self interest when he offers to guide that evil alliance to Jacob's cabin, in order that his friends can get safe. Apparently, the serenity of a week at Othertown Spa has washed away all the Cooper killing anger in Sayer's tortured soul and filled him with the pure spirit of a Knight. When danger strikes, he thinks first of saving poor, doomed Frenchie and her kids.



Then he runs instinctively to scoop up the sleeping Claire. Even the swing sets were watching over Sawyer. The island needs him alive as well and that makes him untouchable (for the moment at least). Sawyer and Hurley obviously never learned about game theory, because the whole self interest thing never reared its ugly head with either of them. Refusing to behave in one's own self interest is the primary fubar of all game theories. So that makes Sawyer and Hurley the irrational forces here, the wild cards. Nothing messes up a formula worse than an irrational force like friendship. There is one group on Lost that can generally be excluded from heroics. "Gentlemen's Clubs" may not have much gentleness in them, but they are full of dicks. Literally.



Women don't get to play The Hero on Lost. They get to be dear little Moms. They get to be helpless victims. And they get to wash their boobies in public and grin madly about how excited they are to go home and face those eight felony counts. But don't be sad. It's not as if women have no important role to play in the world of Lost. They do get to die quite often. In this episode, in the darkest moment they've ever filmed, it was a teenage girl who got to suffer the consequences of the gentlemen's game. Not only did she get a bullet in the head, but she got to hear the only father she's ever known disown her before she took it. Alex joined the long line of shocking female murder victims.



And like most of the others, her death wasn't about her at all. Like Ana's and Libby's deaths were about Michael, and Shannon's and Nadia's deaths are about Sayid, Alex's death was all about Ben, and the ways this tragic rule change affects his primary objective. Which, for all his tears, is not and has never been loving the child he "stole from an insane woman." When children play games, they aren't so much into the objectives. They're more about the fun. Like getting to play Pretend.