After watching last night’s Lost, my lingering fear that this series will end in a very unsatisfactory way came rushing back. When all the dust settles, and all the big explanations come down, are we going to be stuck with some kind of New Age spiritualism at the heart of this story? I hope not, since that hardly justifies six seasons of obsession!
Tuesday’s episode, “Across the Sea,” came a little too close to that for me. I half expected Aslan, or Yoda, to suddenly appear in the clearing, explaining a key plot point.
Building an episode this late in the year, this close to the finale, around the origins of Jacob and the Man In Black (MIB), was a very risky move, and one that I don’t think paid off, at least not for me. Couldn’t this storyline have been explained in a flashback during a previous episode? Why bench your entire cast after such an action-packed episode last week?
This was an uneven, overly emotional, rather violent, Oedipal mess of a story, in which the West Wing’s Allison Janney, CJ Cregg, plays a harried, robe-wearing mysterious long-ago island guardian who kills a shipwrecked woman to take possession of her babies, one named Jacob and the other, frustratingly left nameless. Doh!
Along the way, we got some of answers we’ve been clamoring for (below), but the resolutions dropped awkwardly, explaining bits of one mystery, only to unveil a new set of questions.
“Every question I answer will simply lead to another question,” Janney’s nameless mother figure says to Jacob and MIB’s birth mother Claudia. That’s a quote that might as well be the show’s unofficial motto.
Janney, hereafter to be referred to as CJ, sees average people as evil. So even though she (I think) drew Claudia to the island so Jacob and MIB could be candidates to replace her, she tries to keep the boys away from their human brethren, afraid they will be corrupted.
Eventually, we learn that CJ is protecting a hidden light in the island, the source of all that magnetic energy the Dharma people were chasing for so long. CJ says if that light, “the light which shines within all of us a little bit,” is allowed to go out, then it goes out everywhere.
That doesn’t sound good, does it? It also didn’t do much for the storyline! What struck me was how stilted and wooden the acting was during this episode. We have seen so much better through the course of this series!
I’m still frustrated by what we still don’t know:
Where did this light come from, and how did CJ wind up guarding it? (And does Toby know?)
How was she able to decree that Jacob and MIB couldn’t hurt each other?
If she’s that powerful, why did she need to bring another woman to the island to steal her babies?
Why could MIB see their dead mother, but Jacob could not? Claudia was Jacob’s mother too!
CJ handed Jacob a glass of wine during a ceremony entrusting him with guardianship of the island, from the same bottle that Jacob later allowed Richard Alpert to drink from in “Ab Eterno.” Is the wine infused with some sort of “eternal life” serum? Or is the incantation CJ said prior to Jacob drinking the wine somehow a part of this? Will we ever know?
On the bright side, we did get a few answers:
MIB apparently built the big “donkey wheel” which somehow taps into the “secret light/power,” and can move the island. That being said, how did MIB accomplish this, with only rudimentary bronze-age tools? The well in which he and his camp uncovered a shortcut to the “power” was even dug by hand! Somehow devising a machine he could stick into the light to move people and places around seems like quite a stretch to me.
MIB was turned into Smokey when Jacob pushed him into the light/pool. His corporeal body died, but his soul lives on as the Smoke Monster. Admittedly, the birth of Smokey was one of the cooler things I have seen in this series.
It also raised the question of Ben, Sayid, and Claire’s dunking in the temple pool: is the water in that pool connected in a lesser way to the “pool of light and goodness,” which could explain their slowly turning bad from the inside out?
CJ destroys MIB’s dream of leaving the island, burning down the village of the humans he’s spent 30 years living with, in order to push him into killing her, which releases her from guarding the light. But, how did CJ manage to overpower an entire camp of strapping young men?
MIB uses a dagger to kill his “mom,” after which CJ thanks him. This dagger appears later in the series timeline, presumably the one Ben uses to kill Jacob, and which Sayid unsuccessfully uses in an attempt to kill Locke/MIB. Is there a greater significance to this dagger?
“Every question I answer will simply lead to another question.”
Hmmmm. The most important question I am asking now is this: how in the heck can the producers end this show so that it won’t feel like a jarring mix of explosions and Chronicles of Narnia-like magical spirituality?
One more new episode before the two and a half hour finale. My doubt is growing by the minute.
–Brian
As much as I looked forward to football season starting again, I am equally frustrated two games in. One on hand, the woeful Buffalo Bills; on the other, the plucky but tough luck Detroit Lions; and then you have my two unlucky Fantasy Football teams. I’ll save talking about that disaster for another time.
Meanwhile, their 50 year rebuilding project nearly complete, the new-look Lions appeared ready to convince people that times were finally different in Motown….and then franchise QB Matt Stafford went down with (another) shoulder injury in the first half of game one against the Bears. Miraculously, they hung in there, and won the game on a last minute TD grab by Calvin Johnson – until it was called back in a ridiculous ruling that cost them their first road victory in 20 games. Another heartbreaking loss to the Eagles (35-32) in game two proved, at least, they are further ahead than the Bills on offense, but any way you slice it, 0-2 still sucks.
