Mother: “Here. Drink this.”

• Mother gives Jacob wine from the same bottle that Jacob used to give Richard wine with. Does that mean the wine is responsible for immortality, and not Jacob’s touch? I suppose we’ll find out shortly. After all, someone else has to take the job…or do they?

• Here’s another instance where the show is creating mythology, painting in broad, fable-esque strokes, and where we as an audience realize that we’ve been actively participating in that mythologizing. I’ve been talking about Jacob’s touch as the key to Richard’s immortality, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, it’s the wine that seems to be the key to immortality. To explain the fact that Richard becomes immortal, I took what seemed like a significant fact (and may still turn out to be one, for all I know) and ran with it. Jacob’s “touch” makes no more logical sense than the wine – they’re both arbitrary ways of conveying what matters, which is the immortality. That’s mythology at work, the creation of story where we feel the need for meaning, for understanding.

• Mother telling Jacob that he doesn’t have a choice in assuming his role is one of my favorite elements of the episode. Hearing that, and watching as Jacob accepts that, sets up a stark contrast between Mother’s methods and Jacob’s methods. Unless Jacob’s learned to lie, and has been lying throughout the show, then he’s decided that everyone deserves a choice – perhaps in part because he denied himself one.

Mother: “Now, you and I are the same.”

• That’s all I need from that, ‘til we turn attention back to the main characters. See? Short and sweet.

• Least favorite exchange of the episode:

Jacob: “Storm comin’.”
Mother: “Yes, there is.”

Ugggghhhh.

• Here’s where we come to another of the problems I had with the show when it first aired. How in the heck does Janney’s character singlehandedly slaughter an entire village full of weapon-making, spear-wielding guys? And how does she manage to collapse the well entirely? It’s totally unexplained. There are two potential reasons for this (1) Mother commands the Smoke Monster in a manner similar to how Ben seemed to command it in summoning it to attack Widmore’s goon squad, and used it to wipe out the village and we haven’t been shown this because they’re withholding it for a reason, or (2) they just figured we wouldn’t care about this detail. Except I do care. It’s glaringly nonsensical unless Mother’s invoked something larger and more dangerous than herself and it feels unnecessarily open-ended.

Mother: “Thank you.”

• The role of ageless Island protector seems to take a serious toll on a person. Mother’s words here indicate that death is a release for her. We’ve also seen that Jacob is capable of giving people a serious beat-down (see: Ab Aeterno), and yet he allows Ben to stab him. In part, I think that this is because he truly believes at that point in Lost’s storyline that humanity must choose for itself (and as mentioned this may be motivated, in part, by the fact that he was told he didn’t have a choice in accepting the Island protector role), but after this episode I believe that Jacob wanted to die, to be released, to pass the burden of protectorship on, or end the cycle once and for all after his death.

• I love the choice to show that the Man in Black had trashed Mother’s cave before she returned to it. It’s so petty and human and relatable. She destroyed “his” people, so he goes back and messes up her apartment, because that’s all that’s available to him as an outlet prior to STABBING HER IN THE BACK.

Jacob: “You want to find the light? You want to leave this place, brother? Then go.”

• So. Prometheus.

You know Prometheus. Brought the fire of the gods to mankind. Was chained to a rock to have his liver perpetually, eternally pecked out by ravenous ravens.

As I watched the Man in Black disappear down the “rabbit hole” and into the Light I thought about all of the ghosts on the Island, my “Well of Souls” theory that, surprisingly, turned out to be more-or-less correct, and I thought about Prometheus. We’ve been told that going into the Light is “worse than death.” What’s worse than death, a release from consciousness and life? For my money, it’s being imprisoned and conscious, aware of your own suffering. My guess is that the Man in Black’s “soul”/energy is trapped inside the “heart” of the Island, only able to emerge as Black Smoke – a “corrupted” version of himself, or as the mirrored images of the dead on the Island, who may also be trapped there. It’s the Lostian version of having a raven peck out his liver. The question I have is why releasing him would be a bad idea. Is it because the Man in Black has been “infected” by whatever the Smoke Monster is/represents, and that something is essentially anti-life, the yin to life’s yang? Or is it because the Man in Black is now fused with the Light itself and that Light can’t leave the Island?

Had he not just tried to murder every Castaway I’d have no problem with the MiB leaving the Island. I mean, his real mother was murdered, he was lied to, and when he tried to escape he got beaned in the back of the head with solid rock. This is something else I genuinely like, a lot, about Across the Sea. You understand the motivations of a Smoke Monster. You see the essential honesty in his story, in the fact that he was genuinely wronged, and if you’re like me you sympathize with his desire to get the hell off of that Island after thousands of years spent smokin’ through the jungle. As Chud commenter DaveB put it, you don’t have to want Satan to win in order to sympathize with Milton’s portrait of him.

So, the way I see it: Either the Man in Black has fused (or perhaps been “infected”) with a primal power that’s somehow dangerous to the world or the Man in Black has been essentially replaced by the Smoke, in the same way that the MiB “replaces” dead Locke. Or, Jacob has been lied to, and the Smoke Monster doesn’t need to be chained at all, since it might in fact be an aspect of the Light itself. It’s entirely unclear.

What we’re looking at here, ultimately, is an intimate tragedy. Through Jacob’s actions – his own sin – he unleashed something profoundly terrible, and it’s literally his responsibility. Jacob does what he does out of guilt and penance, atoning for the murder of his brother by preventing the escape of something that is, strictly speaking, no longer exactly his brother. He is the cause of his own suffering, to bring things back on a thematic level. Imagine living forever on an Island where a sinister thing wears your brother’s face and attempts, over and again, to murder you. And imagine knowing on that some level that you deserve it.

Locke: “Our very own Adam and Eve.”

• I like the revelation of Adam and Eve’s true identities. I don’t love the flashbacks to Locke, Jack and Kate, they feel remedial, and entirely unnecessary. We remember Adam and Eve, and we’ve been waiting for this answer. Don’t smash us over the head with it.

While I love the revelation, and find it exceedingly apt, I can’t and won’t argue that it makes sense realistically. I can rationalize the slow decomposition of the bodies as a result of the Island’s “Light.” I can’t pull that same trick with their still-moldering clothing. Is that a deal breaker for you? If so, you’re entitled to that.

And with that, we’ve reached the ending of this week’s column. Hope it was enjoyed. After that much verbiage I’m not even sure I’m writing in English anymore. According to several reliable sources, this week’s penultimate episode is legitimately good, so those of you who were shaken by this episode to whatever extent (including me) can probably relax a little. I know I have.

Have you emailed me about your interest in picking up a copy of my to-be-self-published book on Lost’s themes, references, allusions and whatnot? If not, why not give it a try? It costs you nothing to do so, and you’ll receive updates, exclusives and other goodies for your trouble.

*****

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• The Man in Black’s story arc here is wonderfully sympathetic, and that’s one of reasons for my liking the idea of slotting it in earlier in the season. It’s good to have this kind of finely-shaded sketch of a man who isn’t “bad” in any real sense shown to us, especially when we’re still unconvinced about both Jacob and the MiB. But we’ve seen that Anti-Locke is willing to kill all of the Castaways for his freedom, and no matter how much I sympathize with the MiB, I’ve come to care for the show’s main characters and the act of murdering a bunch of them means that, sympathetic or not, I now consider the Man in Black to be “evil” if only in the sense that doing whatever it takes to get what you want is evil. I don’t need this ambiguity at this point in time.

• Some folks have complained that the apparent storyline here is “Science and curiosity, bad! Blind faith, good!” I don’t think it’s that simple at all. I won’t argue that the show succeeded in conveying this, but my impression on the second viewing is less that curiosity itself is a bad thing, it’s that this kind of curiosity is a bad thing for the MiB’s health, and potentially for all of mankind. It’s the kind of curiosity, if we choose to believe Mother when she tells us about the whole worse-than-death thing, that lead to the creation of the Hydrogen Bomb. But more than that – more importantly than that – it’s the kind of mythical hubris that always leads to bad endings in stories and legends. It’s the opening of Pandora’s Box, the choice to stare into the Ark of the Covenant. It’s “some thing man was not meant to know.” In fact, after this episode the Pandora comparisons seem even more apt. Back in the column for Ab Aeterno I talked about how Pandora’s Box was originally a Pithos, or jar, with a lid. Like a wine bottle with a cork in it. When Pandora opened the jar, all manner of evil was loosed in the world, but hope stayed in the lid. That evokes the ending of this episode, with Smokey erupting in a dark funnel, leaving Jacob behind.

Mother: “What is that?”
Man in Black: “It’s a wheel…We’re going to make an opening, one much bigger than this one and then, I’m going to attach that wheel to a system we’re building. A system that channels the water and the light. And then I’m going to turn it. And when I do…I’ll finally be able to leave this place.”

• Some folks had some serious problems with this bit of exposition, but I thought Titus Welliver sold the heck out of this nonsense – which it is – and so I was just fine with it. That line doesn’t explain anything about how the whole thing works, at all, but I’ve never wanted to know “how the Wheel works.” I’ve wanted to know why the Wheel beneath the Orchid was built, was important. And now I do – it was built after the design of, or at the instruction of, the Man in Black. Ben and Locke’s exit from the Island was supposed to be MiB’s exit from the Island. Is that his end-game? Once the Candidates have all been killed will he go to the Wheel and leave that way? Or will he choose, as one of Back to the Island’s readers suggested, to go back to the Light instead – conning Jacob’s final Candidate into leading him back to the spring – one he might still be unable to find?

• I also like the implication that this is the first time Mother has ever seen a wheel.

Mother: “How do you know all this? How do you know it will work?”
Man in Black: “I’m special…Mother.”

• When the Man in Black says this, is he indicating that his ghost mom has been instructing him? His he been visited by other apparitions? How else can he know any of this? We need some kind of an answer for this to make “sense” in the larger story, without it being, essentially, a convenient cop-out in terms of disclosing further answers.

Jacob: “What’s down there?”
Mother: “Life, death, rebirth. It’s the source, the heart of the island…Just promise me…No matter what you do, you won’t ever go down there.”
Jacob: “Would I die?”
Mother: “It’d be worse than dying, Jacob….much worse.”

• What this means exactly is up for much debate. But from the evidence of what we see by the episode’s end I think we can start drawing some potential conclusions. More on this further along in the column.

• I think that continuing the theme of Island protectors who don’t seem to truly understand what they’re protecting, or why, is a fascinating one. It brings me back to what I was talking about above with regard to the Island’s “heart” being, potentially, an essentially unknowable thing. You can call something “The Source,” and you can try and wrap your mind around everything that really means, but you’re pushing against a veil that seems to continually recede without fully lifting. As Back to the Island commenter Lon Koontz put it, the Light is a little like the Big Bang, in that you can attempt to explain it, but there will always be a question for the answer you’ve received. Science can probe the beginnings of the universe, and still there’s the question “but what happened before that?” Religion can explore the idea of God, and there’s still the question “but why should we believe in God?” That’s because Ultimate Questions (Free will? Determinism? IS mankind “good”? “evil”?) have no objective answers, and I think the show both recognizes this and is attempting to dramatize it – ambitious, ambitious, ambitious. How well it ultimately does this in this episode is arguable. I’d say “kind of.” But in the context of the series as a whole I continue to love the essential idea of it.

• The intentional abstraction of the Light and it’s representation as consisting of “life, death, rebirth….the Source” keeps things vague enough so that it’s relatively easy to hook all sorts of beliefs and ideas, religious and philosophical and scientific and otherwise, into the concept. As already mentioned above, this show has an intense interest in myth, in its creation and distortion, in the power of belief to save and to damn, and about the ways in which we mythologize. It’s even invited us to mythologize along with it. I’ve talked a ton about this. Here are a few past examples, with links back to their original sources. I’d incorporate them more artfully into this column, but Friday is swiftly approaching and I’m running out of time. If you’re interested in this aspect of the show, shoot me an email and I’ll keep you up to date on the progress of my book, which will go into more detail on all of this stuff.

First:

“Many of us, when confronted with the mysterious and/or the unexplained, are drawn to explanations that defy or seem to defy rationalism – typically as a result of something that appears to be more ‘magical’ or ‘miraculous’ than it appears.

This impulse, which I’d argue is not so much ‘religious’ as it is ‘mythological’ (though the latter definitely feeds the former) has always been with us and serves to explain, at least in part, the myths and legends of past cultures (see: Gilgamesh) as well as our own present culture (see: The myth of GW Bush as Warrior King/the myth of Obama as Anti-Christ).

As Lost is exploring what ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ mean, within the context of a network TV show, they are littering their fictional landscape with clues, references and allusions to works of myth, legend and storytelling in which this sort of myth-building plays a central part (see: Watership Down). They are further creating myths and mysterious signs of their own, which when followed by the characters on the show tend to lead to unwanted/disastrous conclusions. The best, most recent example of this: Locke’s resurrection, which was not a resurrection or a miracle as we understand it, but which was embraced by characters like Richard as if it was one.

As we’re watching the show we the audience are actively participating in that very act of mythologizing, postulating about the mysteries of the Island with a wide range of imaginative theories. I’ll suggest that we are drawn to explain the unexplained this way not because those answers makes the most ‘sense,’ or because they are the simplest explanations, but because, in part, it’s exciting and stimulating to do so. Lost is commenting, both directly and indirectly, on the impulse to make legends and myths where no obvious answer exists, and it’s doing so both on-screen and in the relationship between show and audience.”

Another example:

“The Beatles are in the process of becoming myths, essentially. And as they’re introduced to new generations through increasingly-abstracted mediums (see: Rock Band Beatles Edition) they’re becoming less and less ‘human,’ and more and more ‘iconic’; stripped to their essentials, traits exaggerated or downplayed, abilities exalted. Tomorrow’s children won’t know The Beatles as people – they’ll know them as simulacrum, as icon, as myth.

What does this have to do with Lost?

It’s my theory that Lost is, in part, operating as a means to comment on myth – how we create it and why we create it. This preoccupation runs through the show on several levels:

First, the show is festooned with references to myth, from ‘Apollo bars’ to Gilgamesh and Enkidu crossword details to statues of ancient Egyptian gods.

Second, the show has created a story arc in which John Locke essentially becomes myth, detailing how that’s achieved and how it affects both Locke and those who interact with him.

Third, the show’s mysteries operate to include the audience in the mythologizing, leaving open-ended questions revolving around characters like Jacob and Richard, around the Dharma Initiative, around ‘the Smoke Monster,’ around the Island itself, and in the process encouraging us, the viewers, to construct our own potential explanations for characters, places and events (The MiB is satan! The castaways are all in literal purgatory!).

It’s what we do, us humans. We mythologize, and often we worship what we’ve mythologized. As the late, great, David Foster Wallace once said: “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.””

And in another instance:

“Since the ending of Season 5 there’s been much theorizing about who, exactly, the Man In Black is. Is he an Adversary for Jacob, ala Satan? He appears that way – in his color-coded outfit and his pessimistic outlook. Season 5’s opening scene is practically a rewrite on the Book of Job, after all. It’s also been suggested that the MiB is a personification of, or allusion to, the Egyptian god Set.

But Lost, as this Rewatch is making clear, has never been content with such a simple one-to-one comparison – it isn’t interested in functioning as a new riff on any one myth. It’s more concerned with the idea of myth, and how people (ie: the audience) construct myth and legend, by using the bits and pieces of information we have at our disposal, and filling in the blanks via our experiences and our influences.”

You get the idea.

ANOTHER PAGE BREAK?? AM I MAD? FIND OUT – AFTER THE PAGE BREAK!

Boy in Black: “Why can’t Jacob see you?”
“Claudia”: “Because I’m dead.”

• This may really be Claudia. I’m okay with that explanation. I thin kits human and relatable to want to know where you come from, and that’s ultimately a question that this episode explores on a lot of levels. We want to know where the Island’s power comes from, where Jacob’s abilities come from, the Boy in Black wants to know where he came from geographically, etc. etc. That curiosity is to be celebrated, not condemned (and I don’t believe that the point of this episode was to condemn the Man in Black’s curiosity, though I think it’s understandable and instructive to know that some folks are saying just that). So, giving the Man in Black that motivation through the genuine love of his dead mother is totally cool by me.

And yet. Somehow the Man in Black learns about how to leave the Island. He learns this because, as he tells his mom, he’s Special. Does that mean that his mother’s been instructing him? If it does, then that means one of two things: (1) being a ghost on the Island gives you insight into how the Island “works,” or (2) this isn’t Claudia. It’s another Entity all together. And that implies that perhaps something else, the Light, or something that exists alongside the Light, wants to be freed. Wants to be used.

I’m fine either way. But I sort of hope it’s the latter. Because that leaves room to explain apparitions like Claudia and Christian in a very cool, very spooky fashion: as potential Island avatars. Lost has always been about repetition, the cyclical nature of life, of outcomes, of impulses, of everything. It makes sense in a certain, utterly Peyoted out way then that just as Sawyer cons his fellow castaways, just as the Man in Black cons them on another level, that the Island itself might have agency. Might desire the same freedom that the Castaways and the MiB have desired. And maybe, ultimately, the release of the Island is a good thing. Maybe it’s what enables the triggering of another world, in which the Castaways can have a second chance without the Island, free of all outside influence and capable, for better and for worse, of choosing their own paths in a universe that no longer guides them. Maybe it’s the ultimate turning of the “failsafe key,” releasing the trapped souls who reside there.

Or maybe not. Maybe it’s the unleashing of total Hell. It all depends on how things shake out.

Boy in Black: “There’s nothing across the sea.”
Claudia: “There are many things across the sea…You come from across the sea, too.”

• Ladies and Gentlemen, Proto-Dharma.

One of the things I like about this episode is the idea that all of the various groups who’ve built structures on the Island have done so to try and exploit what lies at the center of it. I like what that says, potentially, about places like the old temple walls. I like that this allows those places to retain a sense of the unknown and of mystery, a sense of undisclosed history, while giving us enough to construct meaning. Yet more myth-building, really.

Mother: “My love, you need to know this. Whatever you have been told, you will never be able to leave this island.”

• Again: Who tells the Man in Black all of this? Is it Claudia, hoping for the release of her “soul”? Is it the Island, hoping for it’s own release and freedom? The difficulty determining this at this point in the narrative can be looked at, after the fact, as sloppy, but only if the eventual answer we receive doesn’t adequately address this stuff in the general, thematic sense, while hopefully leaving the CGI as far behind as possible (or, at the very least, finding a way to make whatever special effects are headed our way compelling, not cringe-inducing). 

• Its shots like this one that in turn frustrate me about the look of some of the rest of the episode. This is a wonderful shot and it has the same “cinematic” scope that Ab Aeterno had. Why can’t we get that same “widescreen” sensibility throughout – especially when we’re at The Source?

Jacob: “Am I good, Mother?”
Claudia: “Yes, of course you are.”

• This exchange calls back for me Lost’s interest in “good” people. The people who self-identify as “good” on this show seldom are good in the conventional, black and white sense. Ben and the Others refer to themselves as “good” throughout the show, and yet they go traipsing around tying people to pillars and demanding blood sacrifice, they kidnap children from their families, seemingly to raise them in the “way of Jacob,” they brainwash their dissidents, use women to further a man’s deep-seated mommy issues, and carry out the occasional genocide.

Jacob is told he’s good – but he has no point of reference for what that actually means save for the teachings of a homicidal mom who thinks that all of mankind is bad. That’s really interesting to me, because Jacob doesn’t take away the same lessons from his mother that the Man in Black does. He holds a quiet faith in humanity’s ability to know right from wrong. By the end of this episode, he’s still childlike, having been raised in the wild, in a cave, with two other people – one of them another child – as his entire world.

The Adam parallels for both children are right there, if we want to see and appreciate them. They aren’t one-to-one parallels either, because this isn’t an Eden tale any more than it’s a tale of Shambala. It’s an Ur myth just like all of this is – the kind of universally-potentially-relevant template that might have inspired any number of world religions, from the Egyptian myths of Apep/Set and Horus/Osiris to the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau to the Eden myth and etc and et al and so on.

And I like that we see Jacob here at his beginnings, simple and yeah, a little slow, and naïve for certain, and prone to flashes of rage, and utterly human – in no real way definably “good” except in his willingness to obey his Mother and to tell the truth. I like how that contrasts with the Jacob we saw in Ab Aeterno, like a teenager, confident of humanity’s ability to win his game, clueless at the prospect that the Man in Black might be “cheating” and involving himself in matters, and how we see Jacob evolve through the introduction of Richard, who offers Jacob insight into the human codition that Jacob, alone and removed and self-exiled, does not have. Jacob in Season 5 seems to know something that gives him a calm and beneficent demeanor – a wise weariness – and through this progression we get the sense that any wisdom he may have at this point isn’t innate, or god/Island-gifted, but self-earned. We only get flashes of this in the show, and yet it’s enough to sketch for me someone that’s human enough to relate to, even if that isn’t nearly the same kind or strength of connection that I feel toward the show’s main characters.

Is Jacob ever “good”? Only insofar as he believes he’s doing a good thing. Is he doing a good thing by protecting the Island? We don’t know. We have to rely on interpreting the reactions of the show’s characters to all of this. We have to decide as an audience if Jacob is “right” to keep Smokey on the Island by listening to what people like Jack and Sawyer have to say about those things. I love that. I love that this so readily and organically reflects the choices of belief we make each and every day. Even more than this, I love that this isn’t simple “fanwank” on my part. This kind of stuff is verifiably intentional. Lindelof and Cuse’s interview with Alan Sepinwall at Hitfix discusses the Island protector’s cyclical need to commit mass genocide, a recurrence that’s present and able to be worked out through this episode’s events, but it’s nice to hear them confirm that, and to hear them talk about their awareness of that level of the show.

Some folks seem profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of Jacob having a potentially “good” cause, but inarguably-horrific means of serving that cause. The boards here are stuffed with arguments about this. Speaking for myself, I think the idea of Jacob sending the Dharma Initiative to their collective death for the sake of a “Greater Good” and of the Island protector needing to engage in genocide to fulfill his function makes for thorny, uncomfortable, interesting questions and problems – it leads to all kinds of philosophical debates about free will, necessity, ethics, and the meaning of “good” and “evil.” That this was seemingly intentional makes me feel respect for the ambition of this show. 

People seem irritated in Jacob’s complicity in the deaths on the Island, I say that’s very much the point. Despite Jacob’s evident humanity in tonight’s episode, he’s clearly served as the Island’s god-figure, and God, no matter the religion, is one complicated Ineffable Entity. The Qur’an stacks promises of hellfire and damnation literally right alongside promises that God is all merciful and compassionate. The Bible places God’s appointed protagonists in harms’ way, over and over and over again, shows God tormenting a faithful man just to see if he can break him. The prototypical image of God as a white-bearded referee in the sky with a prayer line is not the image of God that one gets when you actually read those books, or explore virtually any religion. The God or gods of most religions tends to be schizophrenic, especially the Old Testament, Old World, Ancient People sort of gods. They contain good and evil, chaos and order, mischief and benevolence. That this should also be true of both the Island’s “mythical” figures is both apt and supercool. It also continues the arguably-Gnostic undercurrent of this episode and this series as a whole.

Jacob: “They don’t seem so bad to me…”
Man in Black: “That’s easy for you to say. Looking down on us from above.”

• Much too on the nose for me. But hey, if anyone out there doesn’t get it, they do now. Jacob has functioned in this narrative as a god-figure. This episode more-or-less takes that away in the literal sense, assuring us that Jacob began as a very human, human being, but on a thematic level that comparison is still very valid.

• Jacob sees something “good” in the Man in Black’s people, but he perceives it from “above” them. He “walks among them but is not of them.” You can take this negatively, as the MiB does, and claim that a hopeful view for humanity is only possible by removing yourself from the fray of daily life. Or you can argue that this kind of distance also evokes the notion of Buddhist detachment. Commence bickering. 

• Other aspects of the episode that I enjoy: the sense that these brothers actually do love one another, actually do care for one another at this point in their story and the performance of Titus Welliver throughout, who grounds his stuff in a way that Janney doesn’t, quite.

Man in Black: “There are very smart men among us. Men who are curious about how things work. Together we have discovered places all over this island where metal behaves strangely. When we find one of these sites, we dig.”

• Dharma. The various structures on the Island. The Temple, with the carvings of Smokey. Can we assume that all of these projects to dig into the earth of the Island were spearheaded by the Man in Black in one way or another?

After all, why would the Ancients have chiseled the image of the Smoke Monster into the stones beneath the Temple and built what appears to be a place of worship unless they worshipped the Smoke Monster and/or were inspired by him to dig into the earth and arrive back at the Light that he’d attempted to access. Even if Mother possesses the power of the Smoke Monster prior to her death (very debatable) she wouldn’t have allowed Others on the Island to dig down into it the way that we’ve seen. So that leads me to believe that the Man in Black guided those people. Why was the Dharma purge ordered? Presumably because Hanso’s group got too close to the Heart of the Island.

• This scene and this episode in general also offers us a chance to reexamine those who’ve been brought to the Island and to consider just how that’s happened. Stay with me here:

We’re told that each of us possesses a piece of the Light. We see that Mother and Jacob take on supernatural-seeming aspects in the service of protecting it and that the MiB has been exposed directly to the Source. In this scene we’re shown the image of Man in Black’s knife flinging itself against the side of the well due to the strength of the Island’s magnetism. This magnetism may mirror how Jacob/the Island “draws” people to it.

Where am I going with this? In the past I’ve suggested that the Castaways may be the literal descendants of Jacob. Myth and religion are chockablock with stories of “divine” lineage, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Candidates represent the end of one of those superlong Bible passages where soandso begat soandso begat soandso. All people have this Light in them, according to Mother. It makes a certain amount of sense then (haha!) that any people directly descended from Jacob, who’s become the guardian of that Light, would have something distinctive about them that would draw them to him, and to the Island. Using myth to define it we could say that it’s the result of the Light within the Castaways being connected to the Light of Jacob and the Island in a stronger way than others. Using science to define it, we could say that the Light behaves electromagnetically, and that the Light inside of the Castaways causes them to be pulled to the Island in the same arcing, inexorable sense as the knife blade.

We’re assuming that Jacob has been actively guiding people to the Island, but the image of the magnetized knife makes me think it’s possible we’re wrong. It may be that it’s whatever Jacob is intrinsically that draws the castaways to the Island. It may be that it’s what’s inside each person that’s responsible for the drawing of the Castaways, continuing Lost’s preoccupation with the struggle for self-determination in a seemingly Deterministic setting. It may be that, as the Island’s guardian and a beneficiary of its power, Jacob has essentially become a walking electromagnet, and that his descendants are essentially polarized in the opposite way, pulling the two together.

This basic concept of scientific attraction explains how such a thing could conceivably be possible, and it contains any number of mythic elements. It’s also potentially, totally wrong.

• Chud member “Diva” pointed out to me that, while the Man in Black’s knife goes flying to the well with substantial force when he throws it, none of the other metallic objects in the well seem affected by the electromagnetism at all. She’s right, that’s a pretty obvious plot hole. But I’m cool with this one. My suspension of disbelief can handle the disparity.

KEEP GOING! YOU’RE ALMOST ACROSS THE SEA!

Boy in Black: “So… do you want to play or don’t you, Jacob?
Jacob: “Yes. I want to play.”

• As has been pointed out thousands upon thousands of times by now the game that Jacob and the MiB play is similar/identical to a game called Senet, aka The Oldest Game in the World. Older even than Backgammon. That’s older than Jesus Christ. You can see a depiction of the game board here. I say similar/identical to, because there’s no consensus on how the game should be played – a very nifty subtextual comment on the seemingly-arbitrary Rules of the Island. Want to know more?

According to Egyptian belief, the game itself was a talisman meant for the journey of the dead to the Underworld (hey there now). According to that Wikipedia page, the Egyptians were big Determinists, students of the “Whatever Happened, Happened” school of hard knocks. But Senet includes an element of luck, or chance, or, if you’d like, free will, and this aspect of the game apparently lead the Egyptian people to regard a successful player of the game as having been given protection by the gods (hmmm).

• Let’s talk Rules, since I just brought them up.

Do you think this is all we’re getting? That whoever’s in charge can do what they want on the Island, from moving cabins around to making fertility issues to preventing people from dying? To set what are essentially arbitrary rules as they see fit? Is that going to drive you crazy? I’m good with it, actually, since the show potentially told us that three seasons ago, with Ben’s remark about the Island as “Magic Box.” Just don’t throw another CGI-marred, on-the-nose Hole in the Ground, and I’ll get behind the idea. And speaking of Ben and the rules…

Ben: “He changed the rules.”

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse gave an interview where they stated that they wouldn’t be directly commenting on the “rules” between Ben and Widmore, but that you can infer those rules from what we’re learning in the end game of the show. Based on what we learned this week, can we consider that it wasn’t Widmore who changed the rules? That it was instead Jacob? We know that something on the Island, whether it’s the position Jacob occupies or some residue from the Light or whatever, allowed Mother to keep her boys from killing one another. Could Jacob have granted that kind of protection to Ben’s Alex at one point? And could he have decided to start turning Ben’s heart against him by allowing her to die when she did, setting in motion the death that he may have been hoping for?

Can we take this thinking further, and wonder whether there ARE any rules to the Widmore/Linus conflict, or whether Ben’s simply let his self-appointed role as Special Leader go straight to his head – assuming that his daughter would be protected by Jacob because that’s what happens when you serve your “God” faithfully?

• These folks love their looms, don’t they? Maybe meaningless, maybe meaningful: Mother’s weave has no discernable story, no pictures, just sameness. Jacob’s Season 5 tapestry depicted what now seems like a potential history of the Island, and what looks like a depiction of the act of elevation. You can choose to view this as a representation of how they’ve spent their respective times as Island guardian, or you can choose to say that’s ridiculous. What I like is that, no matter your opinion, you can have that conversation because the question itself is not ridiculous within the context of the themes of the show.

• What does Mother really want with these children? They’re her Candidates – one of whom will inherit a position similar to that of Desmond’s in the Swan Station. She clearly cares about these children, but she’s also clearly grooming them to assume her role. While I think Alison Janney flits in and out of being convincing during her moments of Island Expositionizing, I think she does a great job with the creepy, homicidal, manipulative aspects of the character and in fostering a mixture of maternal warmth and untrustworthiness.

• Mother’s use of Jacob and the Man in Black as her Candidates, knowingly sacrificing their lives (there’s that word again) for a cause that she believes in but which her children do not truly understand sets up an effective mirror to the saga of Daniel Faraday and Eloise Hawking.

Mother: “Jacob doesn’t know how to lie. He’s not like you.”
Boy in Black: “Why? What am I like?”
Mother: “You’re… special.”

• Can we assume that those who see the dead on the Island are the Special ones at this point? Hurley, Sawyer, Ben, assumedly Walt, the Man in Black? Do you want/need more than this? I’m of two minds. I want to know why Walt is important to Lost’s storyline, and I suspect that to get that information we need to understand why some people can see and communicate with ghosts and others can’t. At the same time, I don’t want that information delivered in a manner that makes me groan.

Boy in Black: “What’s dead?”
Mother: “Something you will never have to worry about.”

• It’s increasingly clear through the episode that Man in Black was Mother’s choice to protect the Island. What’s unclear is whether she intended him to someday venture into the Light and become a Smoke Monster (something that, based on her one-woman killing spree, she may have already done herself) or take the oath that Jacob takes. I like that ambiguity as well.

• Jacob and MiB’s romp through the jungle on a boar hunt recalls William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a tale of the descent into savagery made by a group of “civilized” schoolchildren.

• Jacob and his brother’s first sighting of the Other Island inhabitants mirrors Jin and the tailees’ sighting of them back in Season 2, crouched behind the foliage, watching their faceless bodies dressed in primitive, intimidating clothing.

• Y’know, they’re not going to win any Emmys, but I don’t have any problem with the kids who play Jacob and the MiB. They’re natural enough. I think I appreciate their work overall more than I do Alison Janney’s.

• The kid playing Jacob really does look eerily like him. How stoked were the show’s casting people when they saw him?

Jacob: “What makes them dangerous?”
Mother: “The same thing that makes all men dangerous. They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt… and it always ends the same.”

• Mother’s words here provide us with the context for the Man in Black’s comment to Jacob, talking on the beach in the Season 5 finale. It’s an echo between mother and son, and it highlights for me again one of the things I really dig about this episode – the way that Mother is portrayed in such a morally ambiguous fashion. She’s a mass-murderer and a baby-stealer with a very dark view of mankind.

What’s personally interesting to me about this is that Mother will claim that the Light they need to protect exists in every person, which would imply to me that the Light is a “good” thing, and that, therefore, each person has the capacity for “good,” to do what’s “right” – something that’s emerged as Jacob’s defining philosophical trait, despite the intentionally muddy waters of his own personal morality. Yet, despite the fact that Mother knows this to be true about the Light and humanity, she has absolutely no faith in them. Either the Light is not a “good” force then, and instead represents human “sin” (a possibility that I’d find enormously cool, personally, for reasons I’ll elaborate on below), which shores up Mother’s negative opinion, or Mother is willfully blind to the “truth” about humanity’s potential for goodness due, likely, to her own experiences. Either way, that’s complex enough to be really interesting to me one a pure character level.

• Mother blindfolds her boys when she takes them to the secret of the Island. I can’t help feeling that this has less to do with physically obscuring the location than it is about metaphysically limiting the people who are able to find it. The secret of the Island is a hole that visibly glows with golden light. At night, that golden Light comes poking out of the earth in bright, distinct beams. No one has seen this while wandering the jungle at night? Over 30 years? Yeaaaaaaah….I’m not buying that. So, I’m assuming that the Light can only be located by the Island’s protector, in an echo of the way in which only Hurley could lead Locke and Ben to “Jacob’s” cabin, or the way that Hurley leads Jack to the Lighthouse, which Jack remarks they haven’t seen because maybe “they weren’t looking.” Hmmm…Does this mean Hurley is the new Jacob? Color me satisfied if so, but I doubt it. Still, I think that’s what we’re looking at here – it’s accessible only through the guardian, who’s perhaps “drawn” to it in the same way that the Castaways may be drawn to the guardian and to the Island. Much more on this below.

Anyway, the point is that I’m guessing the blindfolding was meant to suggest that only one of the boys was meant to know where the Light was, and that once you’ve been lead there by the guardian and know how to get there, you can find your way back.

Mother: “I’ve made it so you can never hurt each other.”

• What’s with that claim anyway? Why can’t they hurt each other? I assume “hurt” actually means “kill,” since we see Jacob knock the snot out of his lil bro twice. Two reasonable (ha!) options that I can see: the guardian position on the Island (or more accurately maybe, the abilities given to a guardian) allows the guardian to manipulate energy/electromagnetism/Quantum-whatever and keep them from releasing their “souls” by one another’s hand. The other explanation? Mother hasn’t done anything to either of them, and is conning them. She can’t keep them from hurting one another – we watch Jacob bloody his nameless brother. I like option 1 better, surprisingly, essentially because I can’t imagine the Man in Black at least trying to hurt Jacob himself if only for what he’s become.

Mother: “[A] little bit of this very same light is inside of every man. But they always want more.”
Jacob: “Can they take it?”
Mother: “No. But they would try. And if they tried they could put it out. And if the light goes out here… it goes out everywhere.”

• The “Light” that Jacob and his Mother are self-tasked with protecting is wonderfully abstract as an idea. Had Janney mom’s explanation not been delivered with a stilted, unconvincing quality, and had they not gone, once again, for TERRIBLE CGI, I think I’d have found this aspect of the episode eminently satisfying precisely because it further answers one of our oldest questions about the energy at the Swan Station and the nature of the Island and yet remains elusive in just what it actually MEANS. I like that combination. What I like less is Janney-mom’s wobbly exposition meant to describe said-light. On the one hand, I really like how they’re continuing to keep the “heart” of the Island a mystery while revealing its basics. On the other hand, I think the way that they handled the exposition was clumsy, and difficult to defend.

That said, I do think that there’s another way to look at this exposition-dump to make it feel less painfully New Agey, clunky and on-the-nose: it’s another instance where a character actively mythologizes the unknown using the tools at their disposal, something that’s a theme of the show in general on multiple levels. In essence, Mother doesn’t REALLY know what the light is, or if she does, she’s reducing that knowledge to its simplest level of complexity for the benefit of her children. She’s telling them, in essence, the “myth” of the Light.” And in that sense, this approach works for me in theory, if not in execution.

I talked about Lost’s interest in myth-creation extensively during my rewatch of the show. Lost’s preoccupation with myth, and more specifically how we as people create that myth, is at this point a firmly established theme. I like that theme. I’ll link you to the past columns where I’ve discussed it before a little further down. I believe that it was an intentional decision on the part of the writers to make the Island’s “heart” abstract, and I admire that intent enormously. But as we discussed during our lively drinking session Wednesday night, I wish that they’d chosen slightly different words for Janney to speak in that moment. And most of us wished that she’d managed to deliver the words that were given to her with the same weirdly-credible matter-of-factness that Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson regularly display. Terry O’Quinn can take a potentially-hilarious-for-all-the-wrong-reasons line like “If you had any idea what this place really was, you wouldn’t be putting chicken in your refrigerator” and make it, somehow, a stirring condemnation of a “decadent” lifestyle. Alison Janney is a phenomenally talented performer, but she didn’t pull it off for me the way I’d have liked. The scene veers a little goofy for me not because the idea is goofy (love the idea, and will spend much of your time talking about it), but because the typically-middling CGI and the delivery make the idea seem goofier than it could, or should. That got better the second time around, but it’s still not my favorite thing ever. I’ll be taking this awkward expression of an interesting idea the same way that I took the idea of “Garbanzo” on Twin Peaks. I love the idea, but still cannot believe that Lynch chose creamed corn as the means to convey it. Creamed. Corn.

• Like I said – CGI Hole? Not a fan. I like the idea here – a natural, untouched place on the Island that is essentially an abstract concept made slightly less abstract – but they really couldn’t have picked a less appealing visual representation of that idea as far as I’m concerned. Two of the people who joined me for drinks and a chat about this episode mentioned that they’d have preferred it had they shown us nothing at all when Mother took them to see the Source. Either just the reaction of the children to a Light, without seeing the source of it (since Light is all we see anyway), or no Light at all. Let the Island itself be the Source, and let that be the secret. Frankly, I like both of those options better than what was dramatized in the episode, but I like the basic idea we’re given, and I like how ultimately interpretable it could end up being. I like how that idea fits with what Lost has been saying (to me anyway, but I’ve been off those meds for….gosh, I don’t even remember anymore) about Ultimate Questions. I find value in it. I like how it makes for a strikingly Gnostic outlook (at this point anyway, ‘til we discover that the Light is, like, a an Ancient Egyptian spaceship or something – what’s Doc Jensen saying?), and a movingly existential one. If this is the only explanation we get for what lies inside the Island – if Desmond goes down there and sees a big yellow ball of light, and nothing else (because he’s going down there – you know it and I know it) I’m very, very good with that. Because that feels right to me. All we really need to know is that the Island is the Source, as Janney says. That’s it. It lives in each of us. Done. That’s what this show has been saying all along. And I can prove it, at least as far as my interpretation of this thing goes. Back in September of ’09, muddling through the first half of the show, in one of my Too Much Information columns, I wrote the following:

“The Island is the Source. It is the well-spring of Creation. It is good and evil, black and white, ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ progress and entropy. Like Solaris, like the Gnostic conception of God, it cannot be understood, it can only be encountered.”

That column was devoted to Gnosticism and Manichaeism – two entwined belief systems that I’d suggested could have importance to Lost’s themes. Tonight’s episode strengthened the thematic ties in some fascinating ways. I’m in no way saying that the stuff that follows is all intentional. What I am saying is that I believe this narrative has been intentionally constructed in such a way as to make drawing these sorts of comparisons possible.

To understand one of the ways in which Lost functions as an “Ur myth” let’s look at how Gnostic beliefs fit together with the mythology of the Island. Under a Gnostic conception of the universe, a “true, transcendent God” exists beyond everything. Everything in the universe emanates from this “true” God, one called “The Unknown Father” (pertinent to Lost? Arguably so) and all of humanity contains a “divine spark” (think the Light that exists in every person, and about The Conference of the Birds, the poem that I wrote about in the column for Lighthouse). In other words, we’re all a part of God. Everything is. But there’s Trouble in Paradise. Think of the “true” Gnostic God as the Island. Think of the ocean, and the world around it, as a series of reflections, extending outward from it like outward ripples in the water or a like a web, a vast, web-like tapestry of potential Oceanic connectedness. The Island sits in the middle of everything like, as one of the folks at drinks pointed out, the Dark Tower. The Dark Tower of King’s novels performs essentially the same function as the Gnostic “true” God. It sits in the center, and everything revolves around it, emanating from and and yet somehow also existing inside of it. I’ve talked about Lost’s debt to King’s Tower books before, and this is arguably a major piece of evidence for that claim, but the notion of a central fulcrum, an origin point that, like the Nietzsche book, is “Beyond Good and Evil,” isn’t an idea that Stephen King invented. It’s an ancient notion.

All Gnostic myths refer to Aeons, deity-types who aren’t the “true” God, but who exist on a different level than you and I. In Gnostic belief, the Aeons and the “true” God make up the “realm of Fullness” where divinity operates freely (think, the Island). Mirroring the Fullness is our own existential state, a state of comparable “emptiness.”

Perhaps the most well-known Aeon is Sophia, who’s name means “wisdom,” and who “emanated” (think, gave cosmic birth to) a “flawed consciousness,” called The Demiurge, a false god who preys on the ignorance and weaknesses of mankind because it believes mankind is fundamentally flawed (sound familiar? Calling Mother Sophia would fit both Lost’s ironic naming tradition – see Anthony Cooper – and the fact that she “creates” the flawed “god” that is the Smoke Monster through her terrible, terrible parenting style and he refusal to give her children the answers that they arguably deserved – an aspect of the show that smarter people than I have pointed out reflects the ways in which we as an audience are frustrated by the willfull refusal of the show to Just. Answer. The question. Already.). Under Gnostic belief, human nature is divided between the darkness of the Demiurge and the light of the true God – a divine spark that is a portion of the true God (so, basically every cast member – including Jacob and the MiB – none of whom are really conventionally, simplistically “good” or “bad”). Material attachments are considered anchors of enslavement under Gnosticism, an outlook with obvious parallels in many world religions and with relevance to the ways in which the Castaways have been attempting to leave behind the pain of their past lives to start again (see: the continual return of Charlie’s heroin). Bringing Lost’s interest in reincarnation into the mix, Gnostic belief involves the release of the “spark” at death, and holds that if the soul has not undergone substantial work toward Gnosis (“knowledge”), then the spark will be thrown back to be reborn into the suffering of the physical world again (Hums “Catch a Falling Star”).

Gnostic salvation includes the idea that every person has the potential for Gnosis, and for salvation brought about through and of themselves. Physician Jack Shephard, heal thyself in other words. Yet, Gnostics also believe that true awareness – Oceanic awareness if you will – must be brought about by certain “Messengers” (think Desmond, Quantum Leaping around, reminding people of their sideways memories).

I could go on, and will, in Back to the Island: The Book. The point is that we’re able to see a number of world myths and religions reflected in the “mirror” of the Island. Gnosticism seems particularly relevant in this episode, with a removed “true” source that’s (for now) inexplicable, and emanations of that “true” God which act on a level above that of the rest of humanity who possess fragments of a Light that connects them to the Source of being.

Of course, it’s also possible that the Light is the Demiurge itself – that the Light and the Island function as the “false god,” keeping people fixated on fighting over it and protecting it in order to distract them from moving past it and finding their true connection to the world at large and their fellow man. Again, ambiguous, and either way this aspect rolls I’m onboard for it.

Whew.

Boy in Black: “You can’t do that, Jacob.”
Jacob: “Why not?”
Boy in Black: “Because it’s against the rules.”

• Notice what Jacob’s done when the Man in Black calls him out on breaking “the rules” – he moves one of his pieces sideways. He couldn’t do that when