SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
* I’d like to get this part out of the way so that I never, ever have to think about it again: I’d imagine that episode is really going to upset the portion of the audience that wants SERIOUS ANSWERS. Of course, the answer to anything supernatural is ultimately “because magic.” But for people to whom this show is a code to be cracked or a puzzle to be solved, any explanation for its various supernatural phenomena that uses phrases like “life, death, rebirth, the source, the heart of the Island” can’t possibly be good enough, because it doesn’t allow you to put the puzzle down, secure in the knowledge that you’ve solved it. Not to get on one of my nerd-culture hobbyhorses again, but to me that’s a way in which the preference for worldbuilding has trumped storytelling. People don’t want ideas, they want rules. Oh well, more’s the pity for them.
* Me? I was a little thrown at first, when the lady from The West Wing showed up in a Jesus Christ Superstar costume and started speaking in American-accented Latin. But once she murdered a woman who’d just given birth, bang, I was right back into it and never left. I think this struck just the right mythic, grandiose, creation-legend tone while still remaining in the show’s usual wheelhouse (rimshot!) of family neuroses, unabashed genre staples, and brutal violence. I really enjoyed it.
* I liked the Lord of the Flies allusions, in part because they called to mind what I thought the show would be about back in the day, with Jack as Ralph and Locke as Jack.
* Titus Welliver, man. He sold it. That cocked-head “it’s not fair!” rage, all the worse because he’s right, it really isn’t fair.
* Fucking magnets; how do they work?
* So the Man in Black really is pure evil, because he’s not a man at all.
* This explains how Jacob can be seen as the good guy despite all his murderous manipulation, and how the MIB can be seen as the bad guy despite not really seeming all that bad compared to Jacob (prior to the last episode, that is) and seeming like he really does legitimately just want to be free of Jacob and the Island–that’s not really him plaintively pleading to be let go, that’s the plea of the dead man he’s wearing.
* Wow, that’s creepy, putting it like that.
* What’s at the heart of the Island? Murder! Violence, always violence on this show. Regardless of how things pan out, I think the creators may have already told us which man they believe is right.
This episode didn’t do it for me. If it had aired a season ago or even a month ago, I think it would have been fine(r), but cutting away from the breakneck awesome of the last couple weeks for such a mundane episode so way in the home stretch was brutal (again, for me; your mileage of course may vary).
I’m not of the mind that every question needs the SERIOUS ANSWERS you mentioned, but I also think if you don’t want to give them, that’s fine, but don’t do a whole episode half-assing it and just layering on more vague mythology when you’re under two weeks out from ending it all. We’ve got enough balls in the air at this point, we don’t need Alison Janney showing up with a backstory that we know we’ll never get to. Why not just kill a week with Ben, Richard and Miles in the jungle and Richard can exposit a bit?
Also, is it really that explicit that Smokey is not Jacob’s brother but a separate entity wearing his body? TJ thought that too, but I’m not so convinced. I figured Jacob’s bro just became disembodied but is still Jacob’s bro rather than a whole new thing. That would certainly make the stuff we’ve already seen with them not being able to kill one another make more sense (and also, how could Jacob really kill his brother when that was against the “rules”?)
So yeah…agree to disagree on this one. The show was really on a hot streak and this was an unfortunate whiff in my mind.
This was a great episode, “SERIOUS ANSWERS” or no. It subverted in completely satisfying and plausible ways so many popular theories about Jacob and MIB, good vs. evil, “Adam” and “Eve,” etc.
As far as which man is “right”, it’s amazing because they’ve completely turned it upside-down, John Locke-style-in-reverse. The idea of Jacob or MiB being “good” or “bad” at this point is absurd, which I like a lot. For all their magic realism, they’re human and both flawed. And the idea that the MiB was possessed by what we previously thought was the MiB is pretty great. Interesting how such pivotal characters as the MiB and John Locke both have similarly unfulfilled goals thanks to the Smoke Monster “claiming” them.
A couple of notes:
Blech. You’re kidding. In this case worldbuilding — nearly six years of THE ISLAND as setting and entity — is storytelling. And this was lame — the usual “I’m not going to answer a direct question with anything useful or pithy” Lost tic was just annoying when a mom is passing along the secrets of protecting the Well at the End of the World to her adopted son.
Having read it several times now, I certainly prefer the idea of Smokey being its own thing posing as MiB ala how it is with Locke as opposed to MiB without a body, but I’m just not able to get around the fact that that means Jacob got around the “can’t kill his brother” loophole without a proxy; he straight-up drowned the dude!
If anything, I HATE how they’re making the answers to things so obvious and hitting us over the head. “Hey guys! Remember when Jack was all shirtless and wet and hot and found those bodies?? GET IT??”
Here’s what I liked about tonight’s episode despite its obstinate refusal to give any kind of tangible facts about the setting or the character’s history: ultiamtely, the Man in Black is a redundancy. “Mother” had a plan the moment she brought the pregnant woman to her cave: raise a successor to take over her job (or her curse really) of protecting the island. Two boys showing up was never a part of the plan. In fact, MiB was so unexpected and unwanted in the grand scheme of things that he doesn’t even get a name.
So between Jacob and MiB, Mother has a son who will do whatever she wants but whom she ultimately wants to protect from her fate because he’s a simple follower, an innocent. On the other hand, she’s got someone she can honestly connect to who understands a part of what it is to be on this Island and know the rest of the world, but she can’t force her fate onto him, and his refusal blows everything apart.
Through all that, I really felt for MiB. He’s a monster ultimately, but at least he tries to do what he wants and be who he wants. Jacob does just as much terrible shit to people, but he does it believing his way is what has to be done. So yeah, I think the writers seem to be identifying with MiB, and I think “Titus” sold this shit out of it. Very satisfying episode in that respect.
Though I agree with Ben that the Smoke Monster isn’t just something that took MiB’s form. That power may have existed in the Island before the brothers came, but at this point I think it’s fair to say the monster really believes he is MiB (his whole speech to Kate about “I had a mother that was crazy”).
My question is whether or not they’re going to convincingly explain why the Smoke Monster escaping is actually bad or whether they’ll just admit that Jacob’s belief is a misguided one brought on by a trust of his “Mother” (i.e. his Fate). If it’s the latter, the show is pushing towards a real tragic end, which I think would be pretty daring all things considered.
*After all this time, the nameless brother ends up being as much Abel as Esau. Is turning away from the Island trading away his birthright? Is his independence of mind the taproot of Jacob’s jealousy?
*So, Jacob can’t kill his brother, but he can do something “worse than death.” Is the smoke monster really something separate and independent of MiB,a cruel parody of the once-living man, or is he MiB reborn, and corrupted, as a ghost, free of the body that he later learns to mimic?
*My fiancee and I made exactly the same joke about the magnetic field.
*Does this change anyone’s ideas about Jacob’s postmortem appearances? Was it Smokey urging Hurley to take Sayid to the Lazarus Pit?
*For that matter, when did this all take place? Before the Egyptians? Are the Egyptians mom’s people?
*Is there not something perverse about Jacob turning his brother into this inhuman monster, and then spending his life as its warden? All of the centuries of manipulation to solve a problem he himself made.
*Crazy idea, but does anyone think that the solution to the MiB problem might just be to give him a name? Maybe that’s why he’s pissed off.
I’m definitely a fan of this episode. And I’m pissed that Titus Welliver didn’t show up sooner on this show. He’s fantastic.
After reading some of the qualms with Jacob being able to kill his brother, I realized, he didn’t kill MiB until his Mother had passed on her power to him. Maybe when they were both still regular and human they couldn’t kill each other, but when Jacob became a god-like entity, he could do whatever he wanted (as is usually the case).
While I would somewhat like for them to come out and say “the light is blah-blah and it means blah-blah-blah” I think it’s really interesting that you’ve now got these two characters blindly following their goals with no real answers themselves, only vague mythology. Rickey pointed out that it’s very reminiscent of Desmond, and then Locke, pushing the button over and over. Sometimes people do shit cause they feel they have to, even if they have no explanation for why.
It also definitely seems to me that the Smoke Monster is partly the MiB and partly demon or spirit or whatever a giant murderous cloud of smoke should be called. I’d really like to see the moment where Jacob sees that the Smoke Monster is MiB.
I also like that all MiB wants to do is go home, but he has no idea what or where home is. He just knows that he doesn’t belong and he should be somewhere else. And I can only imagine that that want is majorly amplified by being turned into a cloud of smoke.
It also makes me giddy inside that ‘god’ created the ‘devil’. He’s just as pissy and whiny as the rest of us and his dumbassery resulted in creating evil. Well played newly appointed deity.
I wouldn’t go so far as calling it a great episode–the golden cave toilet and the terrible prying-the-too-small-rock-from-the-wall bit didn’t do it for me, but overall I was satisfied.
I like that the Jacob/MIB origins are complicated by parental issues. Mom loves MIB more either because he’s a free spirit and not docile like Jacob, or because he’s got some of her manipulative and maybe murderous qualities, or both. It’s pretty easy to see why, under her influence, Jacob would become someone who manipulates people and draws them to his mission.
I also like the idea of Jacob essentially creating the MIB and the series being about trying to fix that mistake, which lends weight to the theory that Jack will take his place as warden.
On further reflection, I’m committing to the idea that Smokey IS a corrupted MiB, not just a separate entity taking his form, or released by Jacob’s rage.
*”They didn’t lose your father, they just lost his body.” MiB’s body may be lying there in the water, but MiB is blasting out of the light as a pillar of smoke.
*Mom’s rules still seem to apply: Nemesis still needed Ben to kill Jacob, and Jacob therefore didn’t “kill” his brother. CJ said it herself, the light doesn’t kill you, it’s the fate worse than death.
Ben:
* I understand the complaint about how an episode that doesn’t feature the main cast, let alone throwing shit at them left and right the way the last few episodes did, breaks the breakneck momentum. It didn’t for me, because I really wanted to see a Jacob/MIB flashback episode and that’s what this was, so I was…leaning into it, I guess you would say.
* That said, I think this was anything but “mundane”! But still, I think I know what you mean by that.
* I didn’t think this was half-assing it or layering on more vague mythology or anything like that. At the end of the day, mythology and mysticism are always gonna be half-assed and vague, by virtue of being mythology and mysticism. Like, in terms of the pool that Janney’s character says is the Source, what would she have needed to say that makes it not half-assed and vague? That Dr. Frank N. Furter came down from Transsexual, Transylvania and buried his audiovibratoryphysiomolecular transport device in it? And moreover, I’ve never really understood why sci-fi pseudoscience is seen as a more legit explanation than fantasy magic and mysticism–I don’t even know that this is your complaint, i suspect it isn’t, but after seeing what went down with certain other shows, I know people will be kvetching that this should have a more “realistic” explanation, as though electromagnetism warping people through spacetime is “realistic.” As Cuse and Lindelof always say, the midichlorians are a more realistic explanation for the Force than just “it’s an energy field created by all living things,” but that doesn’t make it better.
* I’m obviously a lot more sympathetic, on a storytelling level, to the complaint that introducing YET ANOTHER mysterious character at the root of the story in explaining the previous two mysterious characters at the root of the story is a frustrating decision. But still, I don’t really buy it. I get that the argument (I assume) is that we should have learned who she is, how she got there, how she found out about the Island’s power, how she became the guardian, who trained her, etc. I do get that. But let’s say we went all the way back to the very first human being who went to the Island. Then what? In exploring who they are and why they got there, do we then go back and meet their parents? Do we need to have some sort of nature-film episode where we see things from the perspective of the Island itself, since even if you see the first person to come there, you still need to learn why things work the way they do? At a certain point you just keep going back and back and back until you either arrive at the big bang or God, or both. I don’t have a problem just saying “Okay, the Island has Force-like powers that connect it to everyone on Earth, and thus for a very long time, people have come there and murdered each other to control it or prevent others from controlling it.” I don’t mind that the show’s creators decided to go as far back as the woman who raised Jacob and the MIB but no further. I can fill in those blanks myself.
Eric:
* I think you’re dead on: Whatever Jacob and the MIB/Monster’s roles right now, they both started as fucked-up people who did some good things and some terrible things–like every other character we’ve met, pretty much! I think that’s the point of this episode: tying the mythology to the sort of character dynamics the show’s been so effective with for the main cast and their antagonists.
* Haha, the rock wall didn’t bother me as much as the Temple did.
Heidi:
* See my reply to Ben for my treatise on why it’s sort of a mug’s game to answer questions that are ultimately theological in nature with straight answers, and see my reply to Eric for why I liked seeing the behavior of our creation-myth cast mirroring that of the characters we’ve spent all these seasons with.
Shaggy:
Oh, no, I totally cut them a break for showing the flashback to the discovery of the skeletons and the rocks in the cave there the way they did. People who aren’t colossal nerds like those of us in this thread simply aren’t going to remember that. Check out Kiel’s mom’s thoughts on the episode for a great example.
http://thecoolkidztable.blogspot.com/2010/05/lynn-phegley-watches-lost-2-down-2-to.html
Kiel:
* Very nice run-down of why the episode connected with me on a human level. Both MIB and Jacob are frustrating and sympathetic, in more or less equal measure.
* Man, I’d love for Jacob to have been wrong about the MIB all along, but his wrongness driving the MIB so crazy that at this point Jacob is actually right about him, through his own misdeeds.
Simon:
* Wow, I never thought that Jacob could be the Smoke Monster in Jacob form. But I think Ilana said that he can’t shape-shift to other people anymore, he’s stuck as Locke or the smoke. My question is how the heck Young Jacob is appearing to everyone. And, of course, whether Walt’s spectral appearances in Season Two and to the gutshot Locke in the Dharma death pit in Season Four (?) will ever be explained.
* It is totally perverse that Jacob made the mess he’s now spent centuries trying to clean up. That’s such a strong concept. Plus, it echoes the accidental murders and subsequent disastrous consequences we saw with Desmond killing Inman and thus causing the plane to crash, and Richard killing the doctor and thus getting him sold off into captivity and marooned on the Island. Resonance!
* I would love for the solution to the MIB to be giving him a name. Straight-up Neverending Story shit.
Sam:
* I wonder if you’re right, that it was okay for Jacob to kill the MIB because he was now the guardian rather than their “mother,” or if Simon’s subsequent comment is right and, as Mother pointed out, you don’t die when you go down into the pool, you get a fate worse than death.
* Really excellent point about how even these demigods are just wounded people stumbling around in the conceptual dark like the rest of us, and certainly like everybody else on the show. The MIB is lost and he wants to go home. Sound familiar? And yes, it’s great that the avatar of Good is responsible for the creation of the avatar of Evil. I’ve never understood why the world’s religions let God off the hook for that, so I’m glad this show didn’t!
Christopher:
* I know you’re kinda being jocular about some of the chintzier effects elements in this episode, but now that you mention it, the images i’m going to remember from this one–with the obvious exception of the Monster erupting from that cavern as Jacob stares in horror–aren’t the mystical things, but, for example, Jacob and Mother sitting on the beach as the sun sets after the Boy in Black leaves, or the Man in Black holding his game box and just getting angrier and angrier in the ruins of his village.
* The great thing about Jacob creating the Monster is that no longer is their great game about two opposing viewpoints making puppets out of everyone–I mean, it’s that, yeah, but it’s also about a guy essentially taking on this massive responsibility out of guilt, and being constantly haunted by the brother he wronged, who only ever wanted to find the home he was robbed of by their mother. It’s not some abstract conflict.
Everyone:
* I assume this’ll be explained in the remaining episodes, but what do you think: What is the MIB/Smoke Monster as we know him now? Is it a pre-existing entity–or an entity unleashed by the passage of the MIB’s body through the pool–that has taken the form of the MIB, just as it subsequently did with Christian and Locke, who frequently looks and and acts like the actual human MIB but is still 100% Monster with its own Monstery goals? Or is it some combination of the MIB’s mind or soul or what have you, but now trapped in this smoke body? Or is it 100% Monster, but it somehow believes it’s the MIB at heart?
* After reading y’all’s thoughts, I’m going to go with option B, as Simon rolls it out in his second comment: It’s the original, human MIB’s mind/soul, funneled into the monster’s form. The reason I’m thinking this is because it/he complained to Richard that Jacob had stolen his body away from him. If this was just the Monster “wearing” the MIB as I said above, that would be a pretty random complaint to lodge–it seems like something it/he would say to a stranger it/he was trying to woo only if it/he were legitimately pissed off about it. Also, now that I think about it, the whole “fate worse than death” thing wouldn’t make much sense if the actual MIB’s mind/soul moved on and this was just a simulacrum. He has to still be around and conscious of himself for it to be worse than death. Right? What say you?
I’m ready to call it: the overarching theme of Lost is the many, many ways in which parents fuck up their children. Maybe I just think that because it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, though.
We’ve been arguing that Jacob and MIB represent fate and free will, but maybe they represent Nature Vs. Nurture? With last night’s episode, we see that basically all on-island and off-island events were set in motion by damaged parental relationships.
Also, from the intercutting of the flashback scene at the end, I assumed that Darlton were trying to tell us they want us to call MiB and his distractingly Allison Janney-esque mom “Adam and Eve,” and that’s why they specifically weren’t named.
That makes it sound like they were an item, though. Then again, as a wise man once said, a boy’s best friend is his mother.
I actually loved last night’s episode. Yes it took a break from the “fast paced” current storyline (which personally, I think is dragging on way too long. How can you spread out a “big war is coming” for an entire friggin’ season?), but it actually did answer things. I applaud the writers for flat out saying who Adam and Eve are. I love how MIB and Jacob are brothers, and their mom was brutally murdered. Do I wish we knew where CJ came from and how she became the island’s protector? Sure. Do I think they’ll ever answer that? Hell no.
The big questions I have, though are:
1) How was CJ able to murder everyone and burn their village down so easily?
2) I think Smokey is MIB, just without his body. I never took it to be just some pure evil entity escaping the island’s core.
3) Why did CJ say MIB was “Special”? And how come he could see dead people? (And Jacob couldn’t?)
4) How come MIB was resurrected after CJ killed him? Was that her powers doing it? The island? Or because he’s Special?
5) So we’re to infer that Smokey can’t leave the island while Jacob’s alive. As long as there’s a Protector, he can’t leave. So in current continuity, Jacob is dead. There are a few candidates left, but the official passing of the torch hasn’t happened. So why can’t he just leave? Why’s he need all the Candidates dead?
6) I guess we now know that the little blonde boy that Sawyer was able to see was indeed Jacob. But is that little boy Jacob’s ghost for some reason? Is Jacob pulling a Spock from Star Trek III and slowly re-aging/resurrecting on the Island?
And finally, what of the light itself? The heart of the Island? What happens if that light does go out? Does every human die?
I would sooo love the last scene of the finale to be Jack pondering everything, then unzipping his pants and taking a leak on the Light, putting it out as the camera fades to black.
Sean, I’m very glad you came down from the mountain earlier today to comment. I was hoping you would. 🙂
Now then, my problems with the “answers” provided this episode actually have nothing to do with them being more mystic than scientific; I have no beef with that and it fits fine. It’s more that they were so ill-defined, I think they were better off leaving them be. I don’t think anything was really brought into play last night as far as big picture stuff that we couldn’t have just come up with on our own, connecting the dots as you say. I don’t think we needed to be shown the construction of the donkey wheel or be told that the light if “the source” (or whatever). See, I’m not down over that they didn’t reveal enough (ok, maybe partially), I’m down because I think they spent an hour that could have been devoted to Ben/Richard/Miles or whatever providing answers we didn’t need.
Don’t get me wrong, there was some neat stuff in there, most especially the idea you talked about that Jacob is responsible for Smokey and his existence has been about squaring his guilt. There was also great acting all around. So it wasn’t a total loss, but again, a great acting episode with one or two great revelations is something I would have liked a month and a half ago, not in the third-to-last episode. I almost feel like they ham-fisted in the light and donkey wheel stuff because they were worried they weren’t giving us enough, and I wish they hadn’t.
Ultimately I don’t think I’m gonna change my mind on this episode and don’t really expect to sway anybody on the other side, but I do get the sense we all understand each other.
And if I haven’t made it clear yet, I definitely think Smokey is MiB undergoing “something worse than death,” not a new element just using MiB’s body. I don’t think Jacob could kill MiB.
It was unclear, but it looked like the Light went out in the tunnel after the Smoke Monster came out. I feel like MIB somehow became the Light, or became it’s vessel, or something, when he became the Smoke Monster, and that’s the reason Jacob can’t let him leave the Island. The Light leaving the Island would be like putting it out.
If so, maybe somehow seperating the Light from Smokey would be a way to undo Jacob’s mistake?
Sean and everyone: thanks for the analysis and contemplation. It adds a lot to the enjoyment of the show.
I like the purposefully vague aspects of the episode, such as how ‘Mom” was able to kill the village. We don’t need an explication of her abilities — it’s enough to know that she is not merely human.
Also, while fake-mom’s non-answer to real-mom’s question was annoying in the moment, it was, as Sean points out, very true: if this person’spast is fully explained, does it not just raise questions about a previous person? How far back do you go? Fake-mom’s answer was Darlton clearly saying they will tell us the ‘origin’ of smokey and Jacob, but the brothers did not come from nothing, and what came before them will remain untold.
I do think the show erred a bit in that here and elsewhere we all question the key revealation of the episode:
Is the smoke monster actually Jacob’s brother, his disembodied soul?
Or did the monster exist in some way already, and MIB’s form is merely the first human aspect it’s worn?
It can easily be interpreted either way from what we saw on screen in this and past episodes, but I think the first is far more powerful, and so what i chose to believe:
By trying to kill his own brother but instead committing him to a fate worse than death, turning him into a disembodied creature of rage and little else — Jacob created the monster.
Sean:
Yeah, kinda jocular, that’s me. It’s just that the show is often so beautiful, the corny stuff stands out more. To be fair, I don’t know how you could make the light-cave more effective. It did the job. It’s interesting that MIB sought the cave for years and couldn’t find it, when it doesn’t seem like it would be very hard. I mean, clearly he wasn’t MEANT to find it, but then, does that go against him being special? And is Jacob still NOT special by Mom’s standards, or did he become special when he agreed to take her place and drink the wine? Did he ever take his own dip in the cave, leading to his being able to resurrect himself or appear as a ghostly young version of himself now? I think I’m with you that we don’t need to keep going any further back and it may be better if we don’t get more clarification/answers to these new, slightly better informed versions of the same old questions at this point. I’m all for getting back to the war, some sort of resolution, and exiting with some mysteries and ambiguities intact.
Oh, and when Jacob was crying to his mom about not being #1 Son, he reminded me of Ben. We take what we can get.
>>>I like the purposefully vague aspects of the episode, such as how ‘Mom” was able to kill the village. We don’t need an explication of her abilities — it’s enough to know that she is not merely human.
I call that poor writing. For most of the episode we see a tired, bedraggled woman with a Lady MacBeth-like scheme for her loved ones. Who passes along herpower with something as prosaic as a tot of cabernet. But when it’s CONVENIENT for storytelling, she becomes an all powerful earth mother who can destroy a village with…what? A hair net?
Obviously from the POSITIVE reactions to this episode, it did work for a lot of people. But I found it a misfire of a concept that could have been incredible.
I think it helps if, like me, you’re naturally terrified of Alison Janney.
Sean,
I can definitely understand WHY they put in that flashback, but for a show that doesn’t normally hit us over the head with answers, to finally be so obvious just made me cringe a little. I felt the same way when we saw Michael explain the voices on the island.
Heidi,
I don’t think that scene was meant to show us the power of his mother as much as we were supposed to really feel for MIB in the wake of his mother’s disaster. We see the smoke and the destruction of his village through his eyes for the first time and really feel his frustration and despair.
I’m with Heidi, it just felt sloppy and hazy and purposefully vague, and as for that latter that’s something you can toss at Lost from Day 1 and has never been a problem too much for me but here, combined with the sloppiness, it just didn’t sit right. I haven’t got a problem with the introduction of a magical glow cave as the show’s MacGuffin, I’ve never expected the myriad mysteries of the Island’s mystical nature to ever make any sense at all anyway. I was just criminally BORED for the majority of this episode, and never felt drawn into anything that was going on on-screen, save a couple of instances. I just didn’t care. Get me back to the characters I give a hoot about already, this claptrap felt beside the point.
I really like the fact that you never learn these relatively important character’s names – it helps give the series that sense that this is a never-ending conflict that goes back centuries and repeats itself over and over. This wasn’t even the start of the story, but it’s the same old cycle of death and betrayal.
As far as the timeline goes, this whole Young Jacob thing must be somewhere in the middle, right? Judging by the language, it must have been Roman times, but there was definitely Egyptian involvement at some point, which must have come before this. And they knew what the smoke monster looked like, so were they the ones that imprisoned him in the glowing toilet bowl?
I hope they don’t explain this side of thing in too much detail, a bit of vagueness goes a long way for Lost. But I always like the idea that all this has happened before, and will happen again, until somebody has the will to break the cycle….
Andrew:
* Wow, that’s a lot of big questions!
Charles:
* Not sure what to make of the Light going on or off or whatever. I’m just realizing now that the loose-stone ray of light is sort of a visual callback to the light coming on in the Hatch way back in Season One.
Paul:
* I’ve definitely converted to Team That’s Really His Brother And Not Just a Monster.
Christopher:
* Yeah, the MIB’s story is very similar to Ben’s. And in terms of the show’s sense of morality, I think you’re seeing something similar at play in both cases. The MIB is technically right to be angry: His so-called mother murdered his actual mother, lied to him throughout his young life, kept him on the Island, assaulted him, ruined his chance of escape, and wiped out his village; then his brother condemned him to un-death as the Smoke Monster. I’d be angry too. But none of this excuses the trail of bodies he’s left in his wake ever since. So too with Ben: He’s right to say that he and his crew of murderers were “the good guys” in the sense that they weren’t out to exploit the Island and hoped to protect it from more rapacious interests. But that’s no justification for all the crap they’ve pulled.
Heidi:
* I don’t see why “tired bedraggled Lady Macbeth Alison Janney” and “all-powerful mass-murdering Alison Janney” are at all mutually exclusive. Look at any seventh- or eighth-year President for an example of someone who both looks haggard and wields incredible power. Indeed, the former quality flows from the latter.
Shaggy:
* I feel you, dawg, I feel you. You might also want to keep in mind, however, that the image of shirtless wet Jack isn’t imprinted on everyone’s memory as much as it is on yours. 😉
* Agreed on the takeaway from that massacre scene. Wait, is it possible the Monster killed everyone at Mother’s behest? Wait wait, could Mom have been the Monster all along?
Jason:
* We probably are just gonna disagree about whether the writing here vis a vis the mythology elements was sloppy or vague, but as for it being boring, don’t the performances or the imagery help at all?
Bob:
* I’m fine with not having proper names for these people. There’s a whole Man with No Name trilogy, after all. (Though I’m sure someone will point out he has a name of some kind that I’m unaware of.)
* I’m actually curious as to where this falls on the timeline relative to the statue and all the other Egyptian mishegoss. If it took place afterwards, you’d think they’d make a point of having a big Statue reveal. Good point on the hieroglyphics indicating the Egyptians were aware of the Monster–so either they were there after all this went down with Jacob’s family, or the Monster had been out and about prior to the MIB’s body floating down into the pool.
I still haven’t finished everything up top, so i’ll throw this out with the caveat that somebody probably beat me to it. Was Allison Janey’s character an incarnation of the smoke monster, too?
Maybe she told Jacob he was the guardian, but MIB is the real guardian (as the Smoke monster has been referred to in the past.
I mean, otherwise how could she fill up the well and kill the villagers? Heck, how could she drag MIB up that ladder and out of the well? Also consider that she was killed in the exact same way that Dogen said Fake Locke could be killed – with the same frigging knife. She even said “Thank you.” Thanks for what? Becoming the new guardian and freeing me from being a weird smoky evil stepmom, so I can go appear on the West Wing?
About the timeline – I would say going by real mom’s clothing, and speaking in Latin, that tonight’s episode was during the early part of the Roman republic. That would mean that the statue, temple, etc could have been built later by the Egyptians, but during the later days of Ptolemy, during the later period of the Roman Empire. (AD)
But that’s just me talking out of my ass.
COOP:
Haha, yeah, the notion that Mom may have been the Monster herself occurred to me randomly in the response just above yours, appended to some other point. I think all the reasons you cite support that.
If namedropping Ptolemy qualifies as talking out of your ass, that’s some ass you’ve got there, buddy.
Mom as a Smokey incarnation makes sense! So did she do everything to MIB to insure he would kill/free her from that title? Was the birth of twins something unexpected only because now she would have to choose which one to curse this with? I think we’re onto something…
Sean, I think the image of a shirtless wet Jack is probably more imprinted on Sarah’s brain than mine, actually. Just sayin’!
I’m with COOP – I think there were some pretty strong hints that Mom was a monster too. The dead village looked more or less like it would after a smoke attack, and when she told Jacob to never never ever go down into the cave because it would be worse than death, that didn’t sound like something she had just heard about.
Sean: “the loose-stone ray of light is sort of a visual callback to the light coming on in the Hatch way back in Season One”… yeah, kind of (and I love the double reversal there, although I’m sure they didn’t plan it: the light from the hatch was all spooky and mystical, but later we found out it was just Desmond fucking around with a spotlight, but this still is the kind of place where magic light comes out of the ground) but it’s also a callback to the first time we saw that wheel, the thing the MIB was building. When Ben went down there to move the island, there was light spilling out of the wall. Except in Ben’s time it was freezing cold down there.
That would be very interesting if Mother was in fact a monster of the mystical nature. However, with two eps to go, do we think we’ll learn the score on that explicitly or is it just another thing left to our interpretation?
I hope they explain NOTHING and we basically get an entire season of the last 10 minutes of Sopranos.
@Bob: I love the namelessness of Mother and Brother acting as a shorthand for the mythic, cyclical nature of the story. And, as you point out, it works to make the vagueness of the story an asset rather than a liability. There are no definitive answers, there’s only what the people here before told us. Ben’s faith in Jacob, Jacob’s faith in his mother, and his mother’s faith in whoever came before her.
If Lost is about anything, its about our ability (or inability) to escape our past. We can state the problem a number of ways– as a question of how parents mold their children, as a question of free will vs. destiny, or of obedience vs. independence, or reason vs. faith. “Across the Sea” seems to suggest an antifoundational approach– there’s no final discoverable truth of the island, there’s just the stories and the traditions.
It feels to me like the answer has to be squaring the circle, and somehow answering “Both!” to any such false dichotomy. To stop looking for answers or reasons or final validation, and simply to try not to hurt or kill anyone else.
I don’t mind a Sopranos finish, as long as we don’t have to hear that fucking Journey song again, because fucking Journey fucking sucks.
Any way you want it, Coop.
Anyone still reading this thread a week later?
Gotta say it, I LOVED the end of the Sopranos, but don’t want that for LOST. Not sure why….
I was a little flat on this ep at first, but now having read this, I’m dying to watch it again! Thanks all! GREAT Analysis.
It had never occurred to me that MiB was not the monster; I took it as the cave transformed him into the smoke. It seems the body is not needed, and decomposes, but he’s unstuck from it and has become the smoke monster.
Very interesting idea that mom was the monster previously… I think that must be true because it explains her power to kill the entire village and fill in the well. (Unless she got Jacob to kill them all off camera…)
When she dies and says “thank you” that totally gave me chills… how fucking long has she been there? Maybe SHE just wants to go home.
And smoke man, wake up: You’ve been on this island for centuries… what home are you going back to? It’s just a location, what possible connection could you have to it? Though, we can’t expect his half-formed thoughts and wants from pre-pubescence to add up over multiple lifetimes of near solitary confinement with his brother that he totally has a beef with.
Speaking of which, I guess we finally know what the book “Bad Twin” was named after… whatever.
I too found the flashback in the cave ham-fisted, but I guess there are non-nerd watchers who need a hint now and then. But the writers are inconsistent with these clues, so many other times a quicky flashback like that would have helped even me.
I thought the stone in the wall was already loose and had been put back because it was too bright. Just me, I guess. I also thought mom had killed Smokebrother in that scene, and not just knocked him out.
@Sean: Wellaver’s scene holding the game box in the smoldering village as the camera pans around him and he freaks out will haunt me too. SO GREAT!
I dunno. I can’t point out exactly what more I wanted but I felt there wasn’t enough. Also my experience of watching the ep was marred by bad internet servers not buffering correctly, so ugh.
The idea they are brothers seems obvious now, but it totally hadn’t occurred to me until the birth scene. Who else was born on the island? IDEA: Maybe AAron was IMPORTANT (remember that?) because he’s Jacob reincarnated. (prolly not)
random aside: Great casting of the young boys for looking exactly like the older actors (Jacob more than badtwin/smokeadam, but still)
Let’s just agree to call him “Bob” Maybe he escapes the island and then kills Laura Palmer?
Oh, yeah, I completely forgot about that first-season tie-in book thing… was it supposed to have been written by one of the Oceanic 815 deadies?
Lostpedia entry:
http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Bad_twin
BTW, don’t start looking at the LOSTpedia unless you really need to kill some time.
COOP: Yeah, Bad Twin was the latest soon-to-be-bestseller by the guy who got sucked into the jet engine in the first minute of the series. Hurley found the manuscript later and was getting into it, but never got to read the ending. God only knows why I know these facts.