Though a Richard episode, the very first scene shows Jacob coming to a hospital in Russia, where he visits a severely injured and heavily bandaged Ilana. He tells her in Russian that she is needed again to guard the Island and the six he has selected as candidates to replace him. She must go to the Island and contact "Ricardus."
In the camp of Team Jacob, the castaways are sitting around a fire on the beach, a familiar scene from earlier seasons. Richard is despairing and comparing the Island to hell. Jack hears Hurley speaking Spanish to an unseen person, and asks if he's talking to Jacob. He says no, and that he hasn't spoken to the Man from the Foot lately.
Richard leaves the campsite, his faith broken and his mind bitter. And with this, the start of the first pure flashback episode since Season 3.
In his previous life, in 1867, he was Ricardo, a resident of Tenerife, a Spanish territory in the Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa, near Morocco. He most likely a small farmer or a hand at a local plantation, as he mentions at one point that he "worked the fields."
Ricardo comes riding rapidly to his humble home on a horse, where he goes to his wife, Isabella. She is very ill, with high fever, and is coughing up blood. He tells her he will get a doctor, and she give him the cross from around her neck, in case he needs another item of value for payment.
Ricardo rides half the night in a downpour to the house of a prosperous, arrogant doctor, whom he pleads to treat his wife. The physician is busy having dinner and is upset that Ricardo is dripping all over his carpet -- he sends his butler to go get some towels to clean the floor. The doctor says he doesn't want to go out in the rain for half a day to Ricardo's house, but he might sell him some medicine instead.
Ricardo gives the doc all of his money, which elicits "Is that all you got?" from him. Ricardo adds in his wife's cross and chain. The doctor looks at it and says, "This is worthless!" and casts it to the floor. Enraged, Ricardo scuffles with the physician and knocks him into his dining room table, which fatally cracks his skull. Ricardo takes the bottle of medicine and flees to his home.
When he gets there, Isabella is dead, and the authorities are right behind him. Ricardo is imprisoned. A priest, Father Suarez, has come to give him absolution notices he is reading an English Bible, and Ricardo says he has been teaching himself the language. Ricardo makes his confession to the priest, admitting that he killed the doctor. Amazingly, Father Suarez tells him there is no absolution for murder, despite Ricardo's protests that it was an accident. The only solution is penance, but since he will be hanged the next day, there is no time, and next stop, Hades.
Ricardo is on his way to the gallows, when a British sea captain, Jonas Whitfield, stops the guards. He asks Ricardo if he'd like to go to the New World. He inspects Ricardo much like one would a horse, looking at his hands and body and prying open his mouth to see his teeth. Whitfield asks if Ricardo speaks English, he hesitates in answering, and he almost gets dragged to his execution before bluring out that he can speak the language. He is informed that now he will be a guest of Magnus Hanso, owner of a ship known as the Black Rock, bearing a home port marking of Portsmouth, one of England's busiest ports. (1)
Ricardo ends up in chains a number of his countrymen on the Black Rock. (2)
During a massive storm, the chained men look out the ship's portholes. With a flash of lightning, the man next to Ricardo says he sees "el diablo," which is actually the statue of Tawaret -- Egyptian goddess of birth and fertility -- on the coast of the Island. The Black Rock somehow has been drawn all the way over to the South Pacific (?!). This is the first view of the full statue from the front for viewers. Through the electromagnetic forces in the Island and Jacob's will, the ship goes zipping toward the statue, shears Tawaret right off at her ankles and heads inland. Somehow, wood beats stone, as a sailing ship took out a solid rock statue and lands in the center of the Island, mostly intact!
Ricardo wakes up the next morning to voices topside, as the crew members assess the damage. A British voice says, "We're in the middle of a bloody island!"
Captain Whitfield comes below, where the convicts cry out to be released. Instead of undoing their chains, he begins to run them through with his sword. The prisoners, including Ricardo, beg louder and more desperately, but the captain just keeps slaying. When he gets to Ricardo, he asks Whitfield why he is doing it. He says there is no food, fresh water or anything, and more than likely the convicts would kill the crew if they were freed. Ricardo emphatically says no, he would not kill anyone, he just wants to be be freed.
Just as Whitfield is about to to skewer Ricardo, a familiar howl and clanking rings through the air. Smokey makes quick work of the crew up on the deck, and their blood drips down on the captain, who wonders what the hell is happening. As he looks at the blood on his hand, Smokey grabs him up and out of the hold. After dispatching the captain, the creature comes down again and stops to inspect Ricardo, much as he did Mr. Eko in Season 2. He zips away, leaving Ricardo alone among corpses.
Over the next few days, Ricardo is shown trying to loosen his chains with a nail he has laboriously pried out of the ship's floor.
Ricardo looks up at a glimpse of white and is shocked to see his wife Isabella in the hold. After a tearful, intense reunion, She tells him that they are both dead, and they are together again, but in hell. She warns him that the Devil is afoot. There is a roar, and now Isabella is grabbed and spirited away by Smokey.
A wild boar gets into the hold, and in a grossly implied moment, seems to be chewing on one of the bodies (pigs are omnivores and at times scavengers). Ricardo yells at the board and scares it away, and his precious nail is thrown out of reach.
The Man in Black, the version played by Titus Welliver in the Season 5 finale, shows up with the keys to the ship shackles, which he said he found in one of the officer's pockets. He offers Ricardo a drink of water and unlocks him after Ricardo promises to do anything that he asks. "It's nice to see you out of those chains," he says, much as Smokey-Locke did a few episodes back.
Up on the beach, Ricardo hungrily munches meat from a roast boar, possibly the same one from the Black Rock. He says he thinks he is in hell. MIB agrees, and he says that the Devil lives across the Island and needs to be killed. in order for both of them to escape. He gives Ricardo a dagger and tells him to stub the Devil the very first moment he sees him and not to have any conversation. Another parallel of when Dogen sent Sayid with the knife to go kill Smokey-Locke.
Ricardo heads to the beach, where pieces of Tawaret are scattered on the beach and in the ocean. As he approaches Jacob's house, someone ambushes him and beats the crap out of him. Not surprisingly, it is Jacob, who lividly demands to know who sent him. Ricardo mentions MIB and asks if Jacob is the Devil, which he denies. Ricardo says he is dead and in hell. Jacob drags him to the ocean and starts to drown him. Drawing the sputtering man out of water, Jacob says, "Do you still think you're dead?" Ricardo no longer thinks so.
Jacob says that they really need to have a talk.
Jacob shows Ricardo a corked bottle of wine, saying it represents the Island, and the wine is MIB and the "darkness" he represents. His job, and anyone who succeeds him, is to keep Jacob from leaving and taking his evil with him. (3) He has also been bringing people to the Island to prove that man's basic nature is still good, despite MIB's assertions that people are fundamentally evil.
Jacob says he also brings people to the Island as he searches for a substitute for himself. He does not help them, as they must "help themselves," and they have free will. There is the old saying, "God helps those who help themselves," and many Christian denominations teach that God has given people free will.
Ricardo does not want to be the substitute, so Jacob says he instead can be his representative to any people who come to the Island, so that Jacob does not have to speak to them directly. A kind of oracle or prophet? Ricardo agrees to the job, if Jacob could bring Isabella back. "I can't do that," Jacob says. "Then, I want to live forever," Ricardo says.
"Now, that I can do," Jacob says, and lays his hand on Ricardo's shoulder for a very long time. He also gives Jacob gives Ricardo a gift to take to MIB, a white rock.
Ricardo returns to MIB, who says, "You talked to him, didn't you?" He acknowledges that he did and gives the rock to MIB. He tells Ricardo that if he ever wants to come back to his side, the "offer still stands." He gives Ricardo his wife's cross, saying he dropped it on the beach. After MIB leaves, Ricardo buries his wife's cross in the sand and mourns for his loss.
In 2007, Ricardo, now Richard, digs up the cross and looks at it. He shouts out to Smokey that he is ready to come back. "You said the offer still stands, right?" he cries out. The offer still stands!" He says this repeatedly, his voice echoing into the air, but Smokey does not appear.
Hurley approaches Richard, who is upset that he was followed. Hurley asks him why he buried his wife's cross. "How did you know that?" Richard demands.
Hurley reveals he has been talking to Isabella -- this was the spirit to whom he was speaking at the beginning of the show. Isabella appears next to Richard, visible only to Hurley and the viewers at home. Hurley relays her message, which is not to blame himself for her death, and that she still loves him. She says she was taken by MIB, and he must not be allowed to leave the Island at any cost.
Richard's eyes mist up, and he puts his wife's cross around his neck. He seems to have become again a man of faith, no longer willing to serve the darkness on the other side of the Island.
Back in 1867, Jacob approaches the Man in Black as he sits on a ridge and looks over a valley. MIB promises to kill Jacob and anyone who succeeds him. Jacob gives MIB the bottle of wine as a gift and rubs it in a bit that he failed again to stop him. After Jacob leaves, MIB smashes the bottle on the rocks, a symbol of his strong desire to shatter the bonds of the Island and leave the place.
Some thoughts and questions:
--How was Ilana injured?
--What other incidents occurred to bring other people to the Island, and how did the communities of the Others grow?
--When the castaways were time jumping in Season 5 and landed into a time period where they saw the intact statue, how close to 1867 was this?
--How exactly did a wooden sailing ship shatter a rock statue with almost no damage?
--A couple recappers I read suggested that Isabella was really another form of Smokey, such as when he took the form of Mr. Eko's brother, Yemi, or as Alex to Ben Linus. However, I think Isabella was herself, a ghost that had followed the Black Rock to the Island, as Hurley was able to talk to her at the end of the episode and reunite her briefly with her Ricardo.
--What are Jacob and MIB exactly? Jacob says MIB is dangerous and carries with him a "darkness" that must not leave the Island, and yet there already are darkness and evil out in the world, prime examples being the merciless enslavement of Ricardo and the others, and the priest's refusal to absolve Ricardo. Jacob and MIB are not so much God and Satan, but more like the Greek gods, who all messed with people's lives, even to the point of causing death or injury.
(1) This ties in with the Island's early mythology. Magnus Hanso is more than likely the grandfather or great-grandfather of DHARMA Initiative founder Alvar Hanso. In Season episode "The Constant," Charles Widmore also bid to win the log from the Black Rock, and the Hanso connection was mentioned there.
(2) There were close ties in trade between South America and Tenerife. Slavery was still legal as of 1867 in a handful of the South American nations, including Brazil and Cuba, and so it was possible Ricardo and the others might have been bound for one of those countries. The African slave trade had been banned in the earlier part of the 19th century, including importation of new slaves. More than likely the Black Rock was a smuggling vessel, bringing in both goods and people, and Ricardo and the others would have been secretly sold in a country where one could still have slaves.
(3) The trapping of Smokey on the Island is reminiscent of the original Twilight Zone episode, "The Howling Man," which aired in the show's second season. An American is telling an unseen person a story. He was traveling through the Alps just after World War I. During a storm, he begs to take shelter in a castle, and at first the monks living there will not let him stay, but then relent. There the man discovers another in rags and imprisoned in a room whose door is blocked off by a "staff of truth." The head monk tells the American that the man in the room is none other than the Devil himself, and all pleas to release him are to be ignored. The American does not listen, he release the man, who turns out to really be Satan. It is implied that this mistake caused World War II, Korea and the arrival of nuclear bombs.
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