'Lost' recap: Mirror Image Jack's Sideways life echoes his Island life as he continues to wrestle with his daddy issues

In the season premiere of Lost three weeks ago, Jack Shephard looked at himself in the mirror and saw a small cut on his neck that left him baffled. He wondered: How did that get there? We wondered: What does it mean? In last night's episode, ''Lighthouse,'' Jack's man-in-the-mirror season continued with a series of peculiar looking glass encounters. On the Island, Jack's story began with a shot of the flawed and fallen castaway leader scrutinizing his reflection on the surface of Temple Lake like a seer trying to discern his fate in a scrying pool. It ended with Jack smashing the enchanted glass inside the Lighthouse after peering into it and seeing the haunted manse of his unhappy childhood home. He was left to ponder the implications while gazing out on the ocean; here's hoping his deliberations will include the epiphany that his paranoid conclusions about what he saw inside the Island's derelict divination tower were all wrong. (That's my theory, at least. More on that in a little bit.)

In the Sideways world, Doc Shephard spotted his appendix scar in the mirror and struggled to recall the forgotten/suppressed memory of when the ruptured organ was removed. Again, he wondered: How did that get there? Again we wondered: What does it mean? This story ended with Jack looking into the episode's most unusual and most miraculous of mirrors — the eyes of his son, David. What he saw in them was the very thing his Island self should have recognized in the Lighthouse: an invitation to let go of the past and move into the future.

The Sideways World
The Dead Father Lives!

Dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead.
The Dead Father, Donald Barthelme

''Lighthouse,'' the fifth episode of Lost's sixth season, was the mirror twin to ''White Rabbit,'' the fifth episode of the show's first season. ''White Rabbit'' — which was referenced numerous times in various ways during the hour — was the one where Castaway Jack chased after the now-you-see-him/now-you-don't ghost of his dead father. The subsequent jungle journey led Jack to Christian Shephard's empty coffin, denying him the opportunity he was truly pursuing. And what was that opportunity? Follow the rabbit trail of pain. You don't have what it takes, Christian told Young Jack during a boozy stupor. That one left a mark. Father Shephard was actually trying to teach his son a lesson — that being a hero isn't something you choose to be, but rather something that you just are, and that when you try to be a hero, and you fail, then what you become is a failure, at least in your own eyes, and that's a mighty hard thing to live with, if you can live with it at all. If you've watched all of Lost, then you know the great irony of Christian's harsh wisdom: Jack has pretty much proven his father correct. But did Christian correctly identify Jack's fundamentally flawed nature — or did he nurture it with his problematic brand of parenting? And the debate rages. Yet we must also remember that Jack had wounded his father, too. ''White Rabbit'' flicked at that when Mama Shephard ordered her adult son to go save Christian from his bender down under by telling him that he had no choice in the matter, ''not after what you did.'' We learned exactly what Jack did two seasons later in ''A Tale of Two Cities'': Gripped by the paranoid conviction that Christian was sleeping with his ex-wife Sarah, Jack wound up subverting his alcoholic father's bid to go sober and atone for his past sins. Put another way, Jack returned the slight his father had given him as a child; Jack's faithlessness left Christian convinced that he, too, lacked the right stuff for heroic endeavors. Jack brought all that pain and all that guilt with him to the Island, and so when he thought he saw his dead father beckoning him into the jungle, he gave chase, thinking divine forces that he had never before believed in had given him the opportunity he yearned for, be it consciously or subconsciously: a chance at redemption; a chance at reconciliation; a chance at restoration. But the coffin was empty. His father? Not there. And so Jack's sick soul has festered like an infected appendix on the precipice of bursting and poisoning him with icky toxic pus, and my brain just quit on this paragraph, but I think you get the idea. It's basically what Claire's said: ''If there's one thing that'll kill you around here it's infection.''

Anyway, this is all to say that the Sideways Jack that we got to know in ''Lighthouse'' was a lot like the Castaway Jack we've come to know over the past five season, but also very different, in ways both obvious and not so obvious. (Has there ever been a less helpful sentence ever written than that last one?) We met him as he was washing a hard day's work off himself and talking with his mother about the mystery of Christian's missing coffin. Yep: still missing. Probably in Berlin, according to the airline, but nobody knew for sure. The Widow Shephard was flummoxed. How could someone possibly lose a dead body? The lack of resolution had left her proverbially paralyzed; she needed Jack's help in settling Christian's affairs. (In more ways than one.) It would be wrong to say Jack was unfazed by his father's Lost-in-the-system corpse (he certainly seemed moved by his mother's need), but at the same time I didn't get the sense he was haunted by it, either. Perhaps the wise words of Sideways Locke at the airport back in the premiere had given him some peace. ''They didn't lose your father,'' Locke said. ''They just lost his body.''

But I wonder if the perplexing puzzle of Jack's appendix scar told the real story of Jack's seemingly mature serenity. Eyeballing the blemish, Jack suddenly realized he couldn't recall when the damn thing has been cut out of him. His mother reminded him that it had happened when he was 7 or 8 years old, that he had collapsed at school and his father had wanted to perform the surgery himself but was denied. Now, we all know that the castaway version of Jack had his appendix removed on the Island back in season 4 (more on that episode in a sec), and I think Lost wanted us to once again wonder if these Sideways characters are psychically linked to their Island counterparts or possess their memories somewhere the backs of their fogged-up minds. Consider this: If we assume that Jack is about as old as Sawyer, then that means it's very likely that Sideways Jack had his school collapse/appendix episode the very same year that a certain group of time traveling castaways were blowing up Jughead on the Island. What if Young Jack's collapse was caused by Castaway Jack's mind/soul getting blown into him? What if Young Jack's appendicitis was reflexive a psychosomatic response to the appendix-free Castaway Jack's sudden psychic migration into his mind? What if Castaway Jack's mind/soul has lain dormant within Sideways Jack ever since, but now is starting to stir and take hold? What if Sideways' Jack's appendix confusion and other instances of spotty memory manifested in this episode are symptoms of an identity crisis caused by this trippy-tricky of mental operating systems?

For now, I'm going to say that the answer to every single one of those preceding ''What if...?'' questions is a big fat NO. Instead, I'm going to say that Sideways Jack is a man who's dangerously out of touch with his emotions and with others, because he's a self-absorbed jerk, or because of pain he's been spending most of his life trying to avoid, or both. As ''Lighthouse'' progressed, we learned that Sideways Jack's relationship with his father was also marked by fear and hurt; and so I wonder if a simple explanation for his fuzzy recall of the appendix drama was that he had suppressed the memory. The only psychic entity lurking within Sideway Jack is his own wounded child, and for his entire life, he's kept him heavily tranquilized. His story in ''Lighthouse'' was about choosing to recall and feel childhood pain, about rousing that sleeping, hurting kid... and then letting him go. FUN FACT! Like season 6 Jack, the tragic hero of Greek myth Narcissus also was fond of looking at himself in reflective surfaces. According to Wikipedia, the word ''Narcissus'' is derived from a Greek word meaning... ''sleep'' and ''numbness.'' (Wow. That tangent was both short AND possibly relevant!)

And you thought Michael and Walt weren't on the show anymore...

Nope. They're here — they just look a lot like Sideways Jack and David, whose strained, distant father-son rapport recalled the relational chasm that defined Michael and Walt during the first half of season 1. Backstory? We got little. Should we assume that Jack was married, had a child, then separated or divorced? We could. It was clear that Jack had been a relative non-entity — a veritable ghost — in his son's life for quite some time. Jack had no idea that David had cultivated a prodigious musical talent, although David wanted it that way; apparently, when they lived together as a family, Jack had been a hovering, hyper father, over-invested in his son's success and radiating angst about the boy's potential for failure. It was clear that David loved his father, craved a relationship with his father; but it was also clear that Jack was too risky for him to trust with the person he was becoming. At the same time, when Jack tried to engage with his son via old touchstones — Alice In Wonderland; baseball — David shrank away, the attempt at connection only reminding him of how unconnected they were. ''We see each other once a month,'' David said. ''Can't we just get through it?'' By the way, if Jack's reminiscing about reading Alice In Wonderland to David as a child sounded familiar, it should: we saw him reading the book to Aaron back in... FLASHBACK WHOOSH TO... ''Something Nice Back Home,'' the season 4 episode in which we saw Jack try to play surrogate father to Aaron and good mate to Kate and fail miserably. The reason: Jack's inability to let go of his past baggage. Which is interesting. Sideways Jack seemed to be a guy who couldn't even deal with his past baggage — who hadn't properly claimed it, if you will. The result: The same. Crap and busted relationships. The lesson: If you want something nice back home, then you gotta deal with and dispose of your old useless toxic psychic appendages properly. Okay?! Okay.

BY THE WAY? ''Something Nice Back Home'' was also the episode about Castaway Jack's ruptured appendix. Jack's then-love interest, Juliet (they had kissed a few episodes before that), performed the surgery, and if you recall, Jack initially wanted to perform the surgery on himself, and even when Juliet talked him out of it, he still tried to coach her through the process by... watching her in a mirror. He wound up passing out, but before he did he yelled for Kate, which cinched it for Juliet: Jack would never be her man. BURNING QUESTION: Who's David's Mom? Who's the female participant in the creation of this inexplicably conceived Sideways child? Who's this phantom woman that Sideways Jack was once with and now isn't? Wouldn't if be totally ironic and fitting if she was the Sideways iteration of Lost's resident fertility doc/Jack dumpette, better known to us as Juliet? And you wanna know why she wasn't home last night? That's right, kids: Going dutch on coffee with new boyfriend Sawyer. (Your goosebumps? That's right, I did that.)

Five thoughts about four things concerning that scene between Jack and his mother.

1. Jack declined a drink. His mother praised him for it. My thought: This Jack is not his father. He doesn't deal with his angst by drinking it away. Mama Shephard wanted to affirm that. STUPID THEORY I JUST CAME UP WITH THAT I DON'T BELIEVE AT ALL SO WHY AM I EVEN TELLING YOU THIS? The Island World is the place where all these more serene, mature Sideways souls have banished their exorcised demon selves. It's like a landfill for their toxic/unwanted/debilitating emotion. It's like Don DeLillo's Underworld meets the Bizarro episode of Seinfeld. It's like I'm totally tired and I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm on a horse.

2. Mama Shephard couldn't find Christian's will. Then she did. My first thought: This was a metaphor for something. Missing will = Castaway Jack's subverted free will? Castaway Jack's lack of instruction on what he should be doing? Sideways Jack's recovered will? Sideways Jack's newfound clarity of purpose? Still processing. My second thought: That missing will turned out to be pretty easy to find. Jack should do her a favor and recommend her to one of his optometrist friends. And how mean am I? Mocking Mama Shephard for what's probably a grief-induced case of scatterbrainitus. Then again, to quote the flying philosopher Linus: Who cares? She's just an irrelevant Sideways character. Probably going to get negated out of existence when the Anti-Monitor starts snuffing out parallel worlds when Lost goes all Crisis On Infinite Earths in 10 episodes. Call it: The Purge Goes Cosmic. And 83% of you have no clue what I'm talking about right now, do you?)

3. Christian Shephard left something for Claire. My thought: Well, that answered that question. Sideways Dad was an intercontinental horndog, too.

4. Jack confessed that he had been terrified of his father as a child. Margo told Jack that David might feel the same way about him. Jack was shell-shocked — and it totally activated Jack to take action in exactly the same way that Castaway Jack's mom activated him go to Australia and rescue Christian. My thought: The chase was on. Or rather:

White Rabbit Redux

Jack went home. He brought pizza and the hope of bonding time with his son. But David wasn't there. David, in fact, was MIA. Jack freaked. He wondered if his son had pulled a Castaway Jack and escaped Lame Dad Island and fled to the place that for him was truly home. And so he chased after his son, just as he chased after his dead father back in season 1. Jack got in his jeep and drove over there, to a house which I suspect was once his, as well, and let himself in using the key hidden under the ceramic rabbit. Inside this warm and cozy warren, the total opposite of his own austere, minimalist high-rise digs, Jack found the cave of his son's bedroom, filled with mementos of his son's rich, dynamic inner world. An epiphany occurred here, and I think it was this: Look at this boy. MY boy. I've been missing out on this. On who HE is. We remember that in ''White Rabbit,'' Jack failed to find his dead father, but the quest led him the Caves, with its intriguing details and more importantly its life-giving fresh water spring. And what did Jack do? He moved in. Made it his home. ''Lighthouse'' was the same story. Sideways Jack went chasing after a different kind of dead father — himself. And inside the cave of his son's bedroom, the sleeper awakened and began to feel again. Resurrection. When he pressed play on the answering machine and solved the mystery of his son's whereabouts, an audition for the prestigious Williams Conservatory, Jack moved toward him, bolting toward life like Lazarus out of the tomb.

Jack arrived at the audition. He followed the sign directing ''the candidates'' to the auditorium. Inside, Father Jack bore witness to his piano prodigy son exercising his awesome gift. It took his breath away. It was all very end-of-Billy Elliot. Jack swelled with pride, with joy, with selfless happiness for his son — with life. The piece: ''Fantasia Impromptu in C-sharp minor'' by Chopin. Last season on Lost, another child prodigy played the same number for us. I am referring to Master Daniel Faraday in ''The Variable.'' We remember his fate: how his mother cut him off his from art; how she redirected his brilliance toward physics in a doomed bid to save him from her future bullet; how she drove him and rode him and smothered him. He died, anyway. A failure, anyway. I felt Lost was offering a belated toast to the late Faraday in Sideways Jack's surprising cross with Sideways Dogen, whose son was also auditioning for Williams. ''They are too young to have this kind of pressure,'' Dogen said. ''It's hard to watch and be unable to help.'' Rest In Peace, Daniel. Sorry your Mom sucked. (I look forward to getting Island Dogen's backstory and seeing how much of it ironically synchs with this small peek into his Sideways world.)

Afterward, Jack the Born Again Father engaged his son and connected with him. How? By allowing himself to feel the pain of his frayed relationship with his father — and then redeeming that painful past by applying what he could learn from it. David shared that he felt the weight of his father's expectations and fears upon him — exactly what Jack felt about his father. And so he told him: ''When I was your age, my father didn't want to see me fail, either. He said: I didn't have what it takes. I spent my whole life carrying that around with me. I don't want you to feel that way. In my eyes, you can never fail. I just want to be part of your life.'' I was moved by Jack bid at reaching out to his son — and I was struck that his words included some extraordinary grace for his father. To me, it sounded like Jack understood his father loved him, even if he had a clumsy way of showing it, and that he himself bore some responsibility for choosing to believe in his dead father's judgment. Regardless, what I heard and saw in that scene was the forgiveness and catharsis that the Jacks of both Lost worlds have been chasing after for five seasons. Sideways Jack had finally gotten his, and walked into the future of his life finally liberated from the shackles of his past. As for Castaway Jack, the road is stranger, and longer still...

This Island Earth
Number 23, Heal Thyself!

''“You must become your father, but in a paler, weaker version of him. ...Fatherhood can be, if not conquered, at least ''turned down'' in this generation — by the combined efforts of all of us together.'' — From section 23 of ''A Manual For Sons,'' included within The Dead Father

For Sideways Jack, the formidable responsibility of fatherhood and formidable fear of fatherhood were certainly things to be conquered, and we were left to hope that redemption and restoration will come from the effort. But for Castaway Jack, aka Candidate Number 23, fatherhood was definitely something to be turned down. Of domestic bliss, Jack told Hurley, ''I guess I wasn't cut out for it.'' He also told him this: ''I would make a terrible dad.'' But we were left to wonder if he was seeing the matter clearly. And by ''the matter,'' I mean himself. His perspective on his own bad self was obstructed, and as usual, it was the psychic haze of his past — his father issues; his busted relationships; his failure as a leader, fixer, savior — that got in the way. Perhaps he'd feel differently about his paternal ability with more enlightenment.

There was much I enjoyed about Jack and Hurley's journey into mystery, their ''old school'' trek through the jungle, en route ''to something we don't understand.'' I'd love to give a big chunky paragraph praising Hurley for getting the story off to a strong, appealing start with his hijinks and hilarious line readings at the Temple, which went a long way toward de-Hydra-fying that polarizing place — but we're running long and late, and the gleaming mysteries of the Lighthouse beckon. Hurley was tasked by the ghost of Jacob (also full of good-natured humor) to get to the episode's titular landmark and set it ablaze in order to help bring a mysterious someone to the Island. But first, the Dude had to light a fire under Jack's butt and get him to come, too. That was part of the deal — perhaps the most important part of the deal, based on what we learned by episode's end. Hurley succeeded to motivate Jack to more by uttering the magic words given to him by smirky, all-knowing Jacob: ''You have what it takes.'' Jack did that eye flutter thing that he always does when he's profoundly flustered and rose to his feet full of piss and yearning. Take me to your Jacob. Take me now. It didn't need to be said what it was — or rather who it was — that Jack also hoped to find at Hurley's mystery meeting place. But in case you find me totally obtuse, I'll spell it out: I'm sure Jack was hoping for a rendezvous with dead papa — the long-delayed fulfillment of his failed ''White Rabbit'' hunt.

Along the way, Jack tried to pick up some baggage: Kate. But Hurley said No, that Jack had to come to Jacob alone. It made sense: Kate is now part of the painful past that Jack has to learn to let go of, part and parcel of the Something (Allegedly) Nice Back Home dream/nightmare that he has to grieve and detach from. All this was okay with Kate, who had her own quest: finding Claire. ''I hope you find what you're looking for,'' Kate said, and left her former lover to his white rabbit hunt. Fittingly, the next stop on the trip was his old home, the Caves, the Edenesque patch that Ghost Father helped him discover, complete with cryptic black and white rocks and the Adam and Eve skeletons. Hurley went meta, winking at a fave fan theory. ''I totally forgot these were in here,'' Hurley said, already making cackle with knowing laughter. After all, we haven't forgotten they were there, have we? He continued: ''What if we time-traveled again to dinosaur times and we died and got buried here? What if these skeletons are us?'' He could be right. And I'm sticking with the theory that Adam and Eve are Rose and Bernard. But I also had to wonder, in an episode full of mirrors and the threat of impending war, if Hurley's caveman yarn was a wink at ''Through A Glass, Darkly,'' a poem written by Gen. George S. Patton that expressed his belief in reincarnation by tracking his many incarnations, from caveman days to WWII days, while also struggling to glean the divine purpose behind his forever and ever of past and future lives.

So as through a glass, and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names, but always me.

And I see not in my blindness
What the objects were I wrought,
But as God rules o'er our bickerings
It was through His will I fought.

So forever in the future,
Shall I battle as of yore,
Dying to be born a fighter,
But to die again, once more.

Or maybe Hurley was just being funny. Jack, meanwhile, was getting deadly serious. His trip to the Caves got him reminiscing about his father — and, I think, excited by the prospect of an imminent reunion. At the very least, there was the promise of revelation of purpose, and that appealed to him as strongly as it did to Sawyer last week when the Locke-ness Monster enticed the con man to Jacob's cave by vowing to answer the question: Why are you on this Island?

At last, they came to the Lighthouse, another in the Island's series of ancient-looking stone structures. Hurley's crack archaeological analysis: It was clearly built before electricity. Jack was baffled. How come they had never noticed this thing before? Hurley's loaded response: ''I guess we weren't looking for it.'' I might refine and narrow Hurley's response even further. I very much got the sense that the Lighthouse may have existed solely for the benefit of one person: Jack Shephard. And my guess is that he never had eyes to see it before because he was not yet the kind of man to admit the following: ''I was broken.'' There was more to the statement, but let's just begin with that phrase, an extraordinary admission of humility from a once-proud man of science who spent years arguing for the strength and supremacy of his own agency. But Jack's full statement was: ''I came back here because I was broken, and I was stupid enough to think this place could fix me.'' Jacob would later suggest to Hurley that Jack couldn't be more wrong, but the good news was that Jack had grown enough in his journey to summon a magical beacon, one that could to light the way to the his journey's homestretch. Literally.

At the top of the Lighthouse, Jack and Hurley found a series of mirrors and a giant dial stenciled with names around its perimeter. Each name had a number. All the names were crossed out — except for Number 23 (Shephard), and Number 16 (Jarrah), and presumably the other castaways associated with the Numbers. Jack was perplexed and troubled. He expected to find Jacob, or his father, or both waiting for him. Instead, he found more mystery — another empty coffin. Hurley thought — or hoped — that he could summon Jacob by cranking on a chain and turning the dial to its 108 setting. (Though I didn't see it, the Web consensus seems to be that the name attached to this number was ''Wallace.'') But before the contraption could reach 108, Jack saw something in the mirrors — images of buildings that shouldn't be there. He then got a scary thought: What would he see if he turned the dial to his number, 23. He pushed Hurley out of the way and changed the ''channel'' and there on the ''screen'' was a live shot of his childhood home. Jack then came to some conclusions. He concluded that the Lighthouse was a mystical surveillance device. He concluded that Jacob had used it to spy on him all his life. He concluded that Jacob wanted something from him, and he angrily demanded that Hurley summon Jacob ASAP to explain himself. Hurley explained that it didn't work that way, that Jacob was a ghost — a sometimes there, sometimes not non-entity. Which is how Jack also experienced his ''white rabbit'' ghost father. Which is how David Shephard experienced Sideways Jack — at least until their cathartic reconciliation. Worlds within worlds of pain collided within Jack, who expressed his rage over yet another profound experience with absent fathers and missing instruction by picking up an amber spyglass and trashing the joint — an agonizing howl directed at both father and Island all-father, both full of outrage and questions. Where are you? What are you? Why won't you show yourself? Why won't you tell me what to do? Do you even exist? FUN FACT! The Amber Spyglass is the third in Phillip Pullman's acclaimed fantasy trilogy that functions as Narnia for atheists, brimming with angry rebellion against a distant god. Parallel universes, the story of Adam and Eve, the death of god, fallen angels, and the liberation of hell are essential elements.

In the aftermath, Jack took a seat on the cliff to stew in his confusion and anger. Meanwhile, Hurley and Jacob debriefed. Jacob seemed to suggest that contrary to Hurley's panic (and armful of inky instructions), everything had gone according to plan. Jack was supposed to look in the magic mirrors. Jack was supposed to see what he saw. And maybe most importantly, Jack was supposed to have the response that he had, even at the expense of his magical mirror, mirrors on the Lighthouse walls. The purpose, I think, was to correct Jack of one misconception: He was not stupid to believe that the Island holds redemptive purpose for him. It does. Jack just needs to keep his eyes open and look for it. He also needs to do one thing more, and I think it's the thing that Lighthouse mirrors were designed to show him. Hurley and Jack got it wrong. The Lighthouse doesn't cast light outward. It casts light inward, and reveals the state of your heart. For Jack Shephard, his heart is still locked up in his childhood home, his father's house, his past, and he won't be free and realized until he leaves all of it behind. Besides, I'm pretty sure it's a prerequisite for the job Jacob wants Jack to take: replacing him as Island protector. Yep: I'm thinking Jack is right at the top of Jacob's list of candidates. So hurry up and fix thyself, Number 23 — because you're going to be the new Number 1.

QUICK HITS:

If Jacob is such a good guy, how come he never tells the truth?
The episode was filled with conversations about truth telling. It began with Jack and Dogen praising each other for their mutual honesty. Claire demanded total honesty from Justin the Other as well as Jin, who told the truth about Aaron, then lied about telling the truth to save his life. The episode ended with Hurley scolding Jacob for not playing straight with him. Interesting: the Lockeness Monster professes to be the straight-shooter of the two Island deities, and after this episode, we have no reason to doubt him; the revelation of the Lighthouse didn't contradict anything UnLocke told and showed Sawyer last week in the cave. Meanwhile, Jacob has resorted to lies, puzzles, and possibly supernatural coercion to get people to do what he wants them to do. And yet, I STILL find myself thinking that Jacob is the good guy and Lockeness is the bad guy in their feud. What do you think?

How come you haven't said anything about Claire?
What's there to say? I thought she was compelling and scary and well played by Emilie de Ravin even if the girl swings an axe like... well, like a girl. But she also left me with so many questions, I really don't know where to begin to summarize, except by rattling them off. I want to know of she's really ''infected.'' I want to know about her Rousseau makeover and if she's self-aware of her Rousseauness. I want to know all about the creepy faux baby with the skull head in the crib. (Genius.) I want to know the story behind her Temple torture. I want to know the story behind how she got shot in the leg and see how she stitched herself up. I want to know what happened between her and her father and why her father is no longer around. I want to know when she met Fake Locke, how they became friends, and how he convinced her he wasn't really John Locke without freaking her out. I want to know if she's just lost track of time or if Fake Locke worked some magic on her to keep her ignorant of three years missing time. But most urgently, I want to know if she and Lockeness are going to let Jin live — or if Sun is about to become a widow.

Don't you think there's so much more to say about the Lighthouse?
I do. We could spend much time analyzing all the names around the dial. We could wonder if the looking glasses really are remote viewing devices, or windows into parallel worlds, or (my theory) magic mirrors that conjure metaphorical representations of the heart state of the Numbered candidates who gaze into the glass. (Though part of me likes that parallel worlds idea and wants to theorize that Jacob is capable of synthesizing various parallel worlds to create one timeline that represents the Best of All Possible Worlds.) I could go on and on, but my time is up, and I've gone very long, and besides: There's always room for elaboration on Twitter

and on next week's Doc Jensen column. Thanks for your patience with the late posting today, folks.

Until next week: Namaste!

Namaste!

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