OILER ALERT: This blog discusses the events of the most recently aired episode of LOST. If you are not caught up on the show and do not wish to have any surprises spoiled, do not read any further. (This paragraph is here as filler to make sure nothing revealing shows up in the summary of this blog entry on Facebook.)
Across the Sea: OK, so this episode was apparently hated by a lot of fans. I liked it. I don't think it was all that it could have been - it was a bit slow to get going, and despite the huge mythology download, the ancient characters involved still had annoying habit of speaking cryptically. Really? Three episodes to the end, and we still have mothers speaking in riddles to their own children? We did get a good amount of "answers" toward the end of the episode, and I was satisfied with those even though I know there's no way everyone could be totally satisfied with the way such long-standing mysteries were answered when they had probably cooked up something more astounding in their own minds. But for LOST playing on its own terms, this was pretty solid. Very daring that they took an entire episode out featuring none of the main cast (except in re-used footage from Season 1, which was honestly unnecessary - we got that those were the skeletons we'd been wondering about all this time), and I sort of liked how they teased the audience by saying that a mystery such as "What is the Man in Black's real name?" was unanswerable - he was never given a name to begin with. As contrived as it was for characters to never refer to him by name, it was also kind of fun. Jacob and MIB's mother - also unnamed - uttered a line that likely represents how the writers feel at this point. "Every question I answer will only lead to more questions." Hey, that's what happens when you develop an intricate enough mythology that fans are thirsty to know the origins of everything. Sure, it must be frustrating for the writers, when they're concentrating on answering the big questions and some of us are still obsessing over minutia. But they should be thankful. Most other series that attempt such big stories find fans lost in the details and getting bored with it. LOST got some of that, but it also got more dedicated fans trying to unravel the web of mysteries than any other show in recent memory that I can think of. Also, they could have been more careful not to write so much open-ended stuff earlier in the series. I know, they didn't know how long the show would last and needed to keep their options open. But I don't think it would have been as "didactic" as they seem to think to clean some of that stuff up with a few stray lines of dialogue so that we could dismiss it and move on.
But I should address the episode first, and the struggle to write the end of the series after that. We learned a lot from this episode. Neither Jacob nor the Man in Black were the first people on the island. They were twin brothers, born to a mother who shipwrecked on the island along with a civilization that sought to exploit its magnetic properties. A woman was guarding this island and its source of healing, and killed the mother as soon as the babies were born, raising them as her own children. How long had this nameless guardian been there? Hard to say. She herself could have been taken under a previous island guardian's wing under similar circumstances, for all we know. Anyway, these two boys grew up and rivalry formed. Boy in Black wanted to leave the island. Jacob and Mommy Dearest didn't want him to leave. So he made a deal with the civilization that had taken root on the island, and through their exploration, they invented the Frozen Donkey Wheel. (Almost. Someone must have rebuilt it after Mommy Dearest sabotaged the project.) Who were these people? They spoke Latin. I guess that explains why The Others all learned Latin (it didn't come from Richard, though it likely helped that he knew it already as well). They were smart enough 2,000 years ago to invent stuff that would likely still baffle us today. That actually sounds familiar.
So, as these things always play out on LOST, family members got jealous and killed one another. First MIB killed Mommy Dearest. Then Jacob grew enraged and tossed MIB's ass into the freakin' fountain of youth. Whatever that gold light was, it seems to have sucked MIB's essence right out of his body, leaving it limp and lifeless. The man is now the Smoke Monster. He apparently chose to continue taking the form that was most familiar to him, which I'm guessing he was able to do because MIB's body was still out in the open. Then Jacob went and buried it in the caves, alongside their mother - they became "Adam and Eve". One interesting question is whether this act of burying MIB's body meant that the Smoke Monster could take no other form apart from that and the Black Smoke until the grave was disturbed. But then, it was MIB acting as Christian who led Jack to the caves (supposedly), so the chronology doesn't quite work there. It bugs me slightly that knowing the origin of the smoke monster just leads us to ask about the origin of the golden light and why it turned a man's soul into a cloud of smoke. But at least we can finally lay the question "What is the monster?" to rest.
Just as an aside, isn't it interesting that certain characters have killed their parents on LOST? MIB killing his mother started the trend, apparently. But thinking back, Locke was an accessory to his father's murder (with Sawyer carrying out the deed as revenge for Anthony Cooper killing the Fords). Ben killed his own father as the first act in his genocide that wiped out the DHARMA Initiative. And just because I like to blame Jack for stuff, Christian essentially ended up drinking himself to death because Jack ratted him out. I guess some incidents just can't help but repeat themselves. (Then again, being put in the awful position of killing family members is a tried-and-true TV trope. It's happened a few times on Heroes as well.)
So now we're leading into the finale, with this coming week's episode promising to tell us What They Died For (it better have been worth it!), and the almost certain likelihood that we'll end the series with the big mythological plot points wrapped up, but a lot of threads left dangling. I've generally been willing to give LOST the benefit of the doubt over the years, with my frustration stemming more from underuse of good characters than with the eons it typically takes to answer a question. But a recent interview with Damon & Carlton raised my ire a bit, when certain loose ends were being asked about such as the other canoe from which some mysterious people were shooting at the time-traveling Losties that season. They basically said they didn't have room to go in and close that loop by showing us the other half of it, that it was too contrived to direct all of the right characters to that specific spot so that they could explain it. Wow, really? Everybody shuttling to and from Hydra in canoes, and there's no way to squeeze that in? I'm willing to let go of a lot of stuff from the early seasons, but they were supposed to have had a definite endgame since the end of Season 3. There's no excuse for writing something intriguing like that and then going, "Whoops, we ran out of episodes in which to address this." Maybe it doesn't seem like a big deal to fans just watching for the big picture. But part of the fun of this show is knowing what questions to ask, and when they show us something that bizarre and baffling ad the consequence of a time travel story, we can't help but expect that to come around and get paid off in grand ironic fashion. Not answering a question like that doesn't ruin the whole series, but it does mean we were barking up the wrong tree looking for a lot of clues. And that's kind of uncool.
Vicks!
I can't wait! Episode tonight, then another on Sunday! 
