6.15 Across the Sea

Television, Movies Games and Books Lost
#1

Or should I just label it “Mommy Issues”? :smiley:

I couldn’t help but think about Ellen and Cavil while watching this episode. The destruction of everything is all because of mommy issues? Man. I am not a happy camper with Lost. (At least with BSG, we actually know the characters involved very well by the time they unleashed that piece of info on us. Here, we don’t even know their names.) I haven’t been for weeks, but I guess if I needed to lower my expectations of the finale even more, this episode certainly did it for me. And what’s with a woman always being the reason for all the bad crap and evil in the world? (Especially in a show where now, the only main female cast member is KATE. I don’t think they planned it that way, and I’m going to come across as a total feminazi, but COME ON.)

Which isn’t to say I hated this episode. I didn’t - as a standalone episode, it was interesting, it gave us a flashback episode to the two demi gods in question, it was well acted and nicely shot, and the three actors were fabulous and made the most of what they could with the material. They certainly have enough screen presence to carry a whole episode, and that’s good.

On the other hand, the supposed answers they gave weren’t really answers - other than a feeble way of saying “because I said so” in the guise of the magic light cave and a “mother” who we know nothing about - how did she get there on the island? Why does she hate people? Why is she killing everyone left and right? etc. In a way, I hope they won’t try to answer any more questions in the finale - I rather just ignore the whole mythology (because I’m done with disappointment in that area) and just concentrate on what will happen with the people we’ve known for 6 years. And if they could do that with the characters I love - Sawyer, Ben, Desmond, etc - I will be ok with Lost. As for the mythology, I rather they spend all the remaining hours of the show on the characters and not waste time on that anymore if we get answers like the ones we got in this episode (and for much of this season).

Though, I have been on Smokey’s side for pretty much the whole season, and I guess in a way this episode solidified this for me. All he wanted was to leave the island! It was really just that simple. He didn’t really care about anything else, he didn’t want any power or magic crap from the island - he just wanted to leave. He wouldn’t even be a killer had his mother not try to kill him for only trying to get across the ocean. Jacob, on the other hand? Kind of a sap of a mommy’s boy. :smiley: Though, I do feel bad for him too. All through his life he knew he wasn’t mother’s favourite son. Then all in one day, his crappy mother force the guardian role on him, then witness said crappy mother to be killed by his brother, then he had to kill his own brother, then no one was left on the island and he’s alone. Then again, he didn’t have to kill his brother without even understanding why Esau killed the mother.

Finally, what’s with the lack of names? It’s just too jarring (especially when we hear “Jacob” many times in the episode), and unless there is an actual point as to why Smokey and Mother don’t have names, I can’t see why they couldn’t spend five minutes to name them - especially for what is essentially a character show like Lost.

And yet, even after I declared my apathy to the mythology, I still have more questions (heh, I’m a hypocrite! :D):

  • What does it mean for Aaron, the only other baby ,other than Jacob and Smokey, we’ve actually witnessed being birthed on the island? Who else is born ON the island that we do know of?

  • Before Esau became Smokey from the magic cave, he was already considered special (who also had a power to talk to dead people). What does it mean for the only two other people who does that on a regular basis - Hurley (who can see and talk to them) and Miles (who can only talk to them) ?

#2

^ Well, Alex and Charlotte were born there but that’s a moo point now. And I guess Miles was born on the Island.

Yeah, Jacob is definitely a mama’s boy. Apparently all the best cowboys have daddy issues and the immortals have mommy issues. I know it was supposed to be innocence or naivete, but it just came across as willful stupidity to never question her. Nothing against Mark Pellegrino 'cause he’s brilliant as Lucifer over on Supernatural. And how exactly does continually bringing people to the Island help in his eternal “protect the golden grotto” mission? Unless it’s him looking for his replacement (with the aid of the Lighthouse?), and also keeping up his game of backgammon with his brother using people’s lives instead of rocks. And we still don’t have a name for the brother/MiB; that’s just annoying.

I keep coming back to the “You found your loophole” convo between Jacob and Esau. I mean, in all the centuries that they’ve been there, Esau never managed to convince anyone else to kill Jacob before Ben took the bait? I’m guessing Rousseau would have been willing after having to kill her husband, her team and losing her kid. And what’s the significance of the ash? How is that, and the pylons, a deterrent to Smokey?

Ow, my brain. I’m actually starting to miss the Dharma Initiative and time-traveling bunnies. It was more interesting than this pseudo-religious craaap.

#3

Wow - it’s really negative in here. I think I’ll sit this one out. :wink:

#4

Didja notice that Esau killed CJ Craig without her talking? This fits the 'stab ‘em before he says anything’ instructions from earlier this season for Smokey.

#5

CJ Craig, that’s great. I miss that show.

#6

I liked this episode in that we finally understand the nature of these two men. We can now stop speculating whether they were demons or angels or ancient gods. I also liked it because I finally got something right: I had been suspecting that they were basically normal human beings who had been transformed by the “exotic matter” under the island. But I never suspected they were brothers. I guess I must have dozed off in Sunday School when they went over Esau.:stuck_out_tongue:

So now we know what Smokey meant when he told someone (Alpert?) Jacob had taken his body. The trip to the golden grotto killed the body and transformed him into a smoke monster. Though he seems to be able to generate a body at will, his own and John Locke’s.

I’d still like to know the timeline. We have Egyptian stuff on the island, though the language at the beginning of the episode was Latin so I assume they were from the Roman Empire. What is the Egyptian connection exactly? Like everyone else probably, I also want to know what that crap is under the island, and why it is so important for all life but if you dive into it you become a smoke monster. And who is the mother?

I want to know why some people born on the island are immortal (Jacob and Smokey) and others are easily killed (Ethan I think). And for a while pregnancy didn’t even work on the island.

I’m starting to get skeptical we’ll get those answers. I will have to live with that, but I really hope the finale doesn’t focus instead on the Kate/Sawyer/Jack triangle because that’s something I just care next to nothing about!

#7

I liked it too. There were a couple of references in there that seemed to imply that the mystery is never ending: “Each question you ask will only lead to further questions”. I wonder if the turtle on the beach is a reference to the Turtles All The Way Down theory.

As to why some people are immortal I don’t think it has to do with where they are born. At one point in the episode the mother said something like “I’ve made sure that neither of you can hurt one another” or something that led me to believe she’d made them immortal (in much the same way that she seemed to be). If she could do that then he could certainly make Richard immortal. That said I do think that people born on the island are somehow special.

Originally I had thought that Jacob was bringing people to the island to convince “his brother” that not everyone is evil and corrupt. After this I think he was trying to convince himself that he hadn’t wasted 2000 years. After all, if EVERYONE is evil and corrupt then why protect the “source of all life”. When Mrs NoName was killed she thanked her son. Why? Could it be that she’d carried the burden for a long LONG time and that the only way she could stop, by the rules, was that she needed someone to kill her? Jacob didn’t seemed frightened or worried when he was stabbed by Ben. In fact, he all but asked for it.

I don’t think Smokey is the brother by the way. He died. After all Dead is Dead. But someone sure has a propensity for looking like dead people and seems to take on a whole lot of their characteristics.

A random quote from a past episode:

“Why do you talk to me as if I were your brother?” - Yemi?

All in all I had a heck of a lot of fun with this episode and I’m looking forward to the finale.

#8

I think the whole thing about bringing people to the island is Jacob’s game. Esau tells him that he can make the rules for HIS game if he wants, a pretty heavy-handed way of implying that everything Jacob has been doing has been his own version of ‘making the rules’.

I continue to side with Smokey, and am looking forward to finding out (if we can) what the deal with the Tawaret statue and how it came to be there.

#9

I’m not feeling as angry or frustrated as others on this episode. But I do think it’s wise to prepare ourselves for unanswered questions during the finale. We had plenty of those with BSG.

I don’t think Esau was considered special because of powers or abilities, I think Mom realized early on that he’d be the one who could release her from her term as guardian. He had a strength that Jacob didn’t.

I’m less interested in what lies beneath the lighted cave and more curious as to how Jacob has managed to travel on and off the island all these years. Obviously someone finished the wheel project Esau started. Is that how he did it?

I also don’t care how Mom got there/why she knows stuff. She used an incantation before she gave Jacob the drink, so I imagine that it’s possible she was chosen by her own people for her role, a role she didn’t want but accepted. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all housed priestesses together.

I don’t think this episode disproves any of the theories that Smokey is the good one. That is still possible, given what he’s seen inside the cave, he may know the real truth.

The show makes my head want to explode, but in a good way.

#10

Just as the episode of 2 weeks ago got me theorizing, so did this one, so here we go again…

Fact: The producers have always said that they’ve designed Lost to be valid through whichever lens you choose to view it; morality/faith or logic/science. The moral view will be inherently subjective (and thus, more interesting), but what could be the scientific backbone that facilitates this moral debate.

Theory:

  1. Weird energy source = quantum space travel power source, warps space/time, from crashed or exploratory space vehicle

  2. Smoke monster = alien life form or Nano probe; occupant of space vehicle. Symbiotic (or sym-robotic) parasite needs a host. The combined mass of the particulate matter (nanobots?) of smoke when compressed could easily fit inside a human body.

Arguments for:

Island’s magic light/power source/time travel switch/teleportation device somehow related to smoke monster

Jacob’s fake mom somehow smote a whole village. We’ve seen smokey do this too. Was she a smokey host prior to The Man In Black? Wouldn’t a semi-enslaved symbiotic eternity be “worse than death”? Maybe when you’re a host, you can’t choose to kill yourself, but can be killed, freeing the host and leaving smokey looking for another, like a hermit crab searching for a new shell.

We know smokey can probe people’s minds. As a simbiant, not only would the alien learn what it’s host knows, but the human host might learn what the alien knows, thus answering the riddle of how people are “just knowing” things they shouldn’t be able to know.

Would this alien smokey, if set free on the mainland, cause a ton of trouble? It would at least possess people. The rest depends on it’s original intent.

Even if true, I wouldn’t expect the producers to ever offer up this “backstory”, knowing that a magic trick is only magic when you don’t know how the trick is done.

As an aside: Mysterious (possessed?) disappearing turtle that watches Jacob is to Past, as mysterious (possessed?) dog Vincent that watches Walt is to Present.

#11

Good call. I think it’s likely since Hawking and “A Brief History of Time” have been inserted into the show.

I like this too. Crazy mom must have became or summoned the smoke to kill the other others and she always seemed to know where the boys were and what they were doing.

The writers have said that the reveal of Adam and Eve would prove that they knew where they were going from the beginning. I saw no evidence of that in this episode, but there was something there in the periphery that suggests that they had at least had an idea: Bad Twin

#12

Wow, I really like your theory, especially the part that Mom was released and Smokey went back into the cave.

#13

I really enjoyed this episode. You can sort of look at it as the Jacob flashback episode, or as close as we are ever going to get to one.

I think the most important part of the episode was the magical light in the cave, (called “The Source” on Lostpedia.
Lets compaire this to Battlestar for a sec. (spoilers for BSG coming up)

In Battlestar, we heard all about the Lords of Kobol and The One True God, but never directly saw them. Like this episode of Lost, Battlestar also had an “info dump” episode near the end of its final season. However in Battlestar, they never quite made it to the point where they said “THIS is the magic/aliens/gods!” that have been driving things. Its implied in the finale, but never shown or explained at all.

In this weeks Lost they finally pointed at a big bright magical light and said “THIS IS IT!” Here is your sci-fi/magic explaination. And it needs to be there. Because without it, we would be stuck guessing as to what special properites the Island has that sets the rest of the story in motion.

Hope that made sense, not sure it did reading it agian. Hope you all get the idea anyway. :slight_smile:

#14

The more I think about the corpses in the cave, the less wild I am about that aspect. They have clothes and bits of flesh on them. This seems like a stretch for bodies that have been in a tropical environment for 10 years, much less 2,000.

I put on my robe and skeptical hat.

#15

Who knew LOST was the sequel or prequel for ‘Pulp Fiction’? Marcellus Wallace must have stolen the Source from the Island.

I liked this episode since it got away from the main cast and focused on the past happenings that occurred on the Island, similar to ‘Ab Aeterno’. I like that the Island history goes back further than just say the Dharma Initiative discovery. The Island is special and mysterious. It should stay that way. I’m fine without an explanation.

I can totally understand any uproar since “bright light in the ground” is totally a cheap parlor trick, not to mention posing more questions than answers. I cracked up during the Adam and Eve reveal, jokingly stating, “Nice ret-con.” During the frak party DP corrected me saying,

That was the joke. The writers were showing the audience that they had a “plan” from the beginning. I doubt very much it was what we saw in this latest episode.

There are plenty of questions but I think the major one is, “What is this all about? What’s gong on?” I think the title of the next episode, “What They Died For?” should offer some explanation to those questions. Then the finale can be a “wrap it up” moment.

Sure BSG had many unanswered questions but the main purpose of the show was finding a home. They did that and it was satisfying. I can’t really say what LOST is about. It’s main focus has been about opposing factions and polar viewpoints. It’s goal? shrugs To confuse the frak outta us. Mission Accomplished.

#16

Ha!

It’s goal? shrugs To confuse the frak outta us. Mission Accomplished.

but are we happy?..oh yeah we happy.