Previously on Lost: Ageless mystery man Richard Alpert visits five-year-old orphan John Locke (original, not Smokey) in his foster home. Richard gasses the Dharma Initiative. Richard convinces Juliet to take a fun submarine ride to the island with him. Richard suddenly emerges from some dense flora in the jungle, then disappears back into it just as quickly. Richard experiences acute existential angst after his god is killed. A distraught Richard unsuccessfully attempts suicide through Jack.
Please chain yourself to a wall in the hold of the Black Rock and prepare yourself for a bumpy ride across an ocean of new questions, with your journey abruptly ending in a shipwreck of uncomfortable answers shaken loose by an impact with a four-toed statue.
Who is Richardus?
Oh good, we're going to start out slow. Richardus is Richard. And also Ricardo. Over the centuries he really didn't get too ambitious with the name-changes. Why not stick with what works?
Does Richardus know what to do next, now that all the castaways not conscripted into Smokey's Army of Darkness are just hanging out on the beach, awaiting a plan to be presented to them?
Richardus is going through some very personal stuff right now, OK? He has no idea what to do next because Jacob is a big fat liar who went and died on everybody just went they needed him the most! Who does that after making his Guyliner Friday immortal so they can spend eternity hanging out and getting into adventures? Not a nice god who lures people to his magical island so that they can perform little experiments to prove the inherent goodness of the human soul, that's who.
Is everyone dead?
See, again, Richard's working through his own issues of abandonment by telling everyone at the beach camp that they're dead. They're not dead. They might be soon if Smokey has his way with them, but not quite yet.
Hold on, is everyone in HELL?
No! But that was really adorable when Richard screamed that at everybody, given that's the first theory everyone formulated about the show about three episodes into season one.
So who was Richard, before all this Jacob craziness came into his life?
Richard was Ricardo, a handsome, but poor, man living in the Canary Islands in 1867, with his hot, terminally ill wife Isabella and a very fast horse he could ride to and fro between the estate of a very rich, but very lazy, doctor who refuses to treat Ricardo's sick wife because it's raining outside, and also because Ricardo can't afford his expensive medicine on a meager peasant income. So an angry Ricardo gives Doctor Lazy a good shove, which, as such impulsive actions usually do on television but rarely in real life, results in an instant, fatal head trauma. Our Ricardo is now a (mostly accidental) murderer. He takes the medicine, rushes out past the servant who obviously wasn't treated well enough to bother attempting to apprehend the man who just killed his boss, and rides his very fast horse back to Isabella.
She's going to be dead when he gets there with the medicine, isn't she?
Of course she is. This must end in tragedy for everyone.
If the journey between the doctor's house and Ricardo's place is half a day's journey, how could Ricardo leave his wife when it was dark out, arrive at the doctor's when it was still dark out, and return home, still in the dark?
It feels like the sun should have come up at some point. But nighttime races against the clock atop a mighty steed seem so much more dramatic than ones in daylight, you know?
Was all the rushing back and forth to try and save Isabella, only to return, find her dead after the terrible ordeal he went through, and then get arrested for his trouble, a little English Patient-y?
It's a little English Patient-y. Or Tenerife Patient-y, as the case may be. Perhaps Cuse and Lindelof are big Ralph Fiennes fans?
Are jailhouse priests allowed to withhold absolution for murder because the prisoner's execution is happening too quickly to allow time for his penance?
This seems suspect theologically, but we imagine that Canary Islands jailhouse Catholic clergy circa 1867 were operating under their own sketchy rules. We'll let it slide.
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!