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On last night’s excellent season finale of Lost, an unseen and previously unnamed character named Jeremy Bentham haunts the Oceanic Six and urges them to return to the island. It’s this same Jeremy Bentham who is in the casket that Jack visited in the finale of season 3. The final reveal of this season, of course, is that Jeremy Bentham is a pseudonym taken by an all-too-well known figure on the show. But Jeremy Bentham was actually a real person in the real world of real life.
He was a philosopher and social reformer who was influenced by John Locke. His life’s work centered on a political code of Utilitarianism, the founding principle of which was that the best laws are those which create the most happiness for the most people. There’s lots of stuff on his wikipedia page, including this quote:
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think…
So pain is Jacob and pleasure is not being in a wheelchair. It is all starting to make sense. Also, in accordance with his will, Bentham’s body remains displayed in a “wooden cabinet” at University College London. SOUND FAMILIAR?
Bentham’s “Auto-Icon” has a wax head, though, because his head was too badly damaged for preservation. WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO LOCKE’S HEAD?
Another theory behind the name’s significance is that Bentham proposed a concept that would eventually become Foucault’s Panopticon, which is a prison in which prisoners can never tell whether or not they are being surveilled. They operate is if they are, thereby imposing their own mental imprisonment. Which is interesting, but still doesn’t explain why the island has a pirate ship steering wheel in the cave basement behind the magic microwave.
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Bentham was also a proponent of gay rights and Jack had a beard last night. Coincidence?
when i did a semester at UCL they were always making such a big deal about how they had the corpse of jeremy bentham hanging in the law school and i was all, ‘umm…whatever, when is this gonna be relevant to something i watch on tv.’ i wish i would have paid more attention/taken pictures now.
culturally relevant!
Is it weird that Lost never fails to bring out the dormant college student in all of us? Bravo, Gabe. Bravo, Lost. Bravo, us.
Do any of these esoteric name droppings (droppings, lol) actually ever come to mean anything significant to the story?
so following this logic…. maybe next season someone called Rawls will turn up, and ghost of rousseau will haunt everyone as they don veils of ignorance and sign the social contract so that everybody gets to enjoy the island equally … or maybe the writers will pick a different ball out of their enormous bag of random pointless lost storylines …
I’ve watched a grand total of 15 seconds of Lost. It was during the episode where the gigantic fat guy was running down the beach in slow motion.
I figured I’d pretty much seen it all at that point…
Dude, you are missing so much.
This movie “LOST” was totally made me kinda lost after i watch this. My mind just keep wondering, WHY, WHAT, N WHO? What is actually the point of this movie? Just can’t figure it out. Many blank… hard to figure it out…