Upstanding John Both on and off the island, John Locke’s adult life had been marked by an uneasy relationship with his own legs. Before the crash, he’d been in a wheelchair, unable to walk. Embarrassingly for him, he’d had to be carried to his seat on the plane. Worse, the only reason he was on that particular plane in the first place was because he was rejected from going on an Australian walkabout, “a journey of spiritual renewal, where one draws strength from the earth, becomes inseparable from it”, as he enigmatically described it to his superior, who was in fact his inferior. Why was he rejected? Because he couldn’t walk. And how could a man who couldn’t walk go walkabout? Such was the logic of the idiots who stood between John and his destiny. In actual fact, the only thing that really stood between destiny and John was his own legs. Who said Americans have no sense of irony? (Well, lots of people – but with John Locke, as usual, the normal rules don’t apply).



John, as we’ve already established, was the only person to survive the plane crash in a better physical and spiritual condition than he was in beforehand. He may well be the only person in history to achieve this. It wasn’t very long after his fellow survivors began to realise they weren’t going to be rescued any time soon, that John realised he really didn’t want to be rescued anyway. Now that he could use his legs again, he was really starting to his enjoy his morning killing rampages in the jungle. Every now and again, he’d find something mysterious among the coconuts, mango trees and polar bear carcasses; like a strange hatch buried in the ground with no obvious way of getting inside, or a packet of coffee. It was also because of his legs that John came across more of his inferiors – his fellow survivors. These people John couldn’t really have much respect for, and spent most of his time with them telling bewildering, cryptic stories about Michelangelo and psychic dogs; or meditating on the symbolism he saw in a simple game of backgammon; or hitting them over the head, drugging them, and tying them to trees. John did all these things for their own good. None of them would ever have been possible, to be sure, if it weren’t for John’s legs.



Locke John-Locke Lost

Labels: killing, legs, mystery, other people, polar bears, the hatch, the island

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