23 Questions About Lost Episode 609 'Ab Aeterno', Answered!

How much did it cost for Mr. Whitfield to purchase Ricardo on behalf of Captain Magnus Hanso?

Let's see...Ricardo has strong hands, perfect teeth, and speaks a little bit of English. The price is one velvet bag of coins.

If you were an officer on a ship full of Spanish slaves that crashed on a mysterious tropical island, would you use those slaves to help you gather food and water, or would you go down into the hold and start stabbing everybody out of fear they'd somehow find the strength to mutiny?

The answer is clear: STAB EVERYBODY. You can't take chances in these situations.

Following the stab-crazy slave massacre of a paranoid officer, and the subsequent Smokey slaughter of everyone else, what could make an already pretty bleak situation even more unpleasant?

A giant wild boar eating the flesh of the recently dead would do the trick.

According to Original Smokey, what's the only way Richard can escape from hell?

By killing the devil.

But can't Richard just beat him at fiddling, or guitar-soloing, or maybe a nice game of chess?

Nope, he was pretty clear on this point. He's got to kill him. He's got to take the Blade of Jacob-Stabbing (not to be confused with the Blade of Smokey-Stabbing that Dogen gave Sayid) and drive it right into his heart before that silver-tongued devil utters a word. Yes, we've seen this bit before. Narrative symmetry!

If Jacob is a godlike being who can whip up storms powerful enough to toss ships into beachside statues, and pull airplanes out of the sky, why does he need to stop Richard with kung-fu? Shouldn't he be able to just wave his hand and halt him?

It's much more satisfying to hand a potential murderer an old-fashioned, personal ass-whupping than to pull some boring god tricks. And afterward he could throw in some light drowning for good measure.

Let's talk wine bottles. How is the wine bottle a metaphor for what's going on with the island?

The wine sloshing around inside is hell. Or malevolence. Or evil. Or darkness. Whatever. It's bad shit, OK? It's the Two Buck Chuck Of Satan. As long as it stays in the bottle, the world won't end. And how does the hellwine stay in the bottle? A cork, silly!

So the island is a cork?

Yes. It's also a kind of weird testing ground for humanity. Or a giant chess board where Jacob moves around human pieces. Or a scale where Jacob and Smokey add and subtract black and white rocks. The island's a lot of things, really. But it's mostly a stopper in the bottle of hellwine that wants to slosh itself all over the universe's pristene linen suit of goodness.

Does that make Jacob the bottle?

He seems more like a guy holding the cork in the bottle with his thumb.

What would a job as Jacob's assistant entail?

The usual stuff. Stepping in for him throughout the centuries, doing global outreach. Getting him phone numbers once in a while, rolling some calls, maybe a little light housekeeping, nothing too crazy.

What's the pay like?

Well, due to the economic situation in 1867 on the island, Jacob can't afford to pay in resurrecting dead wives, or in total absolution so Richard won't go to hell for killing the lazy doctor. But what he can offer is immortality. That's really not a bad deal at all.

Why isn't Hurley freaked out by the appearance of the ghost of Isabella? It seems like every other time he has a visitation from a dead person, it really spooks him.

She's a pretty hot ghost.

Is there any way to get the hellwine out of the bottle, besides by uncorking it?

If you were the kind of malevolent being desperate to unleash evil upon the world and suck the entire island into Hell, you could try smashing the bottle, just like Smokey did after being frustrated by Jacob's annoying goody-goodyness. But we're not sure how that translates into practical terms. It just seemed a pretty badass thing to do after his nemesis gave him a gag gift.

Has anyone on the internet written a love song about Richard Alpert?

Funny you should ask!

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