Across the Sea

If it only ends once, then how did it begin? That’s what “Across the Sea” attempts to answer. It definitely accomplishes that goal, I will give it that. Was it the most entertaining episode? No. Was it enjoyable to watch all the way through? No. Could they have found less annoying kids to take up 50% of the screen time? Probably. Did I miss Jack, Kate, and the rest of the gang? You betcha. When I saw “MIB/Jacob centric”, I was expecting a fun hour of mythology and Island history, but instead “Across the Sea” was slower and more character-driven. The result was still an important piece of Island history told in a complex way that’s more enjoyable in hindsight than it was from 8-9pm last Tuesday.

There are so many freaking layers to this episode, I’m not going to come close to sorting them out. Themes stacked on top of metaphors on top of allusions sandwiched between meta-references and the result is too big for me to get my mouth around. It’s like Double Down in television form. And I didn’t totally like the Double Down. Just like “Across the Sea”. I’m going to take my best stab at this one and as the rules to this blog state, I must try to focus on the positives. Where do these rules come from? Well, I make them up of course! When it’s your game you can make them up. Ok, enough cuteness. Let’s get to it.

We start off in familiar Lost territory, and by that I mean on an unfamiliar beach in an undisclosed time with people we’ve never seen. A lone pregnant woman washes up on the beach. Hurt, she wanders into the jungle in search of water, only to be discovered by a middle-aged woman with a rather cranky disposition. We find out the pregnant woman’s name is Claudia. Although we don’t learn the other woman’s name, she tells Claudia that she’s alone, that she only arrived on this Island by accident, just like Claudia did. And…actually that’s all we learn about this woman, whom I’ll just call “Mother” from here on out. She refuses to answer any more questions and before we know it, Claudia’s in labor.

From there, we witness the birth of twin boys, twin boys that grow up the be Jacob and the MIB, twin boys that will shape the lives of our beloved Losties, twin boys who will learn everything we’ve ever dreamed of knowing about the Island. Claudia was only ready for one child, and thus only had one name ready, so we’re left not learning the MIB’s name and left to ponder whether he even has one. (I say he does, but we’ll never learn it).

Oh yeah, and Mother bludgeons Claudia to death with a rock.

Hence the moniker the Lost universe has dubbed this woman with. Mother helped Claudia give birth to baby Jacob and baby MIB for what appears to be the sole purpose of stealing the children and raising them as her own. This is the first instance we see of the cyclical nature of the Island in an episode loaded with them. As we see more and more of Mother, it’s revealed that she embodies many of the crisis or reoccurring issues of the Island. She raises Jacob and the MIB to rule over the Island, and not only do her issues creep into her two sons, they also become manifested in all those people caught in the middle of their epic, millennia-long conflict. The Others steal children. Rousseau steals Aaron. The cycle continues.

Flash forward thirteen years. Boy in Black (BIB) stumbles across a wooden box that has washed up on shore. Jacob asks him what he’s found. “It’s a game. You play it,” BIB responds. (Lines like these were what frustrated me with this episode. It made me long for the days of a good “Where’s Vincent?” from Walt.) BIB wants to keep the game a secret from Mother, knowing she’ll take it away. The rebellious side of him is starting to show through. When the BIB asks him if he still wants to play, Jacob answers, “Yes. I want to play.”

Now here’s some symbolism I can sort out. It’s the metaphorical beginning of the war between Jacob and the MIB. Not the literal war, but the war of ideas. Jacob wants to remain obedient to Mother, MIB wants to keeps some of his life to himself. The decisions both make as a result of their respective beliefs will haunt them for a long, long time.

When Jacob gets back home to the caves, Mother asks him where his brother is and what the two of them were doing. Showing that he’s hardly Benjamin Linus (or Fake Locke for that matter), he fails to throw her off the scent with his “staring at the ocean” alibi and eventually spills the beans about the game his brother found. She used some heavy-handed guilt-tripping to get it out of him too. “Do you love me, Jacob?” she asked. Jacob wants more than anything for his mother to love him, so he does what she says and tells her what she wants to know. Obsessive need for the love and approval of a parent, just like Jack and Locke and Ben – check another one off the Island issues checklist.

Mother tracks down the BIB, apparently pleased that he’d found the game. She tells him that he’s special. She tells him that she left the game for him. Where else would it have come from? But where did I come from, he asks. She tells him that he and his brother came from her, and that she came from her mother. She tells him that there’s nothing else but the Island. She tells him that he’ll never have to worry about death.

I don’t know if it was the actors or the dialog, but this whole exchange didn’t work for me. The mood was off. It had no flow. It was like there was some big list of hints that each needed to be mentioned, but those hints were all alluding to something that we knew was a lie. Or a truth we already knew the answer to. We found out earlier that Jacob and the MIB didn’t come from the Island. We know that there’s more to the world but the Island. We know that the MIB didn’t really have to worry about death. This scene was trying to play like typical Lost, but it was dealing with a subject that didn’t need the usual obfuscation and subterfuge. What we got out of this scene was that Mother’s a big fat liar, and I don’t think the tone of the scene fit with what came out of it.

Mother’s claims to the BIB that about the Island were refuted quickly enough. While on a walk in the jungle, he and Jacob heard noises in the distance. Moving toward it to investigate, they discover a group of three men killing a boar. Surprised, they run back to Mother and tell them what they found. When Jacob suggests that these other men looked like them, Mother insists that they were not like them, that these others weren’t there for a reason. (Awkward transition) Now’s she’s let too much slip. The BIB demands to know what the hell she’s talking about when she says “reason”. After a little more complaining, Mother gives in, blindfolds her boys, and sets off on a trek into the jungle to show Jacob and the MIB exactly what makes this Island so damn special.

The boys’ curiosities aren’t placated by Mother’s willingness to show them the heart of the Island. On the way, Jacob asks why she didn’t tell them about these other people and what makes them so dangers. Mother lays out her cynical view of humanity for him – “The same thing that makes all men dangerous. They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt... and it always ends the same.” We’ve sure heard that one before! We’ve used it to define the MIB’s worldview ever since the opening scene of “The Incident”. More on that in a bit.

Do you want to know what makes the Island special? Well ready or not, here it comes. Mother removes the blindfolds from her two boys, and they see a beautiful glowing yellow light emanating from beneath a tunnel. A creek runs in and a waterfall cascades out. She tells them, “a little bit of this very same light is inside of every man” and that it’s their job to protect it. Because if any man were to find it, he would want to take it. And they would always want more. And eventually that light would go out, and if it goes out here, it goes out everywhere. She tells them that she’s been protecting it, but she can’t protect it forever. When they ask who would take up the duty when she’s gone, she responds, “It will have to be one of you.”

At first, I described this monumental reveal as “an answer to a question I wasn’t asking”. I still think that’s true to some extent. I had given up asking, “What is the Island.” But I should have been asking, “Why does the Island need protecting?” My usual, “It’s a special place”, while satisfactory enough for me, doesn’t really explain what would happen if it wasn’t protected and doesn’t set up the necessary urgency for finding a replacement for Jacob. This is the purpose Locke was talking about all those years ago. If that light goes out, that’s it. The lights go out everywhere. Some of this rings similar to what Widmore told Jin in “The Package” – “If that thing masquerading as John Locke ever got off this island, your wife, your daughter, my daughter, everyone we know and love - would simply cease to be.” Does that mean the light from the tunnel now resides in the Smoke Monster? What could the ramifications of that be? Well, the ultimate goal certainly wouldn’t be to kill the Monster, then. It would be more like containment. Or maybe I’ve just watched too much Supernatural lately.

Like Locke said back in “Expose”, things don’t stay buried on this island. Slowly, the BIB began to untangle the web of lies under which the Mother had sheltered her two sons. An Island vision of his real mother, Claudia, a few more encounters with the “other people” and before you know it, the BIB was the MIB and he was living with the turn-of-the-millennium Others.

So Jacob grew up with his Mother, lived a “good” obedient life, even weaving tapestries just like her. On the other side of the Island, the MIB grew up with a group of untrustworthy, selfish brutes. They kept in touch through the years, Jacob inquiring curiously about these other people all while remaining dutiful to Mother. The MIB was concocting his own scheme: he was going to use his people to get off the Island. There’s that cycle again. Everyone wants to leave this Island.

How was he going to pull this off anyway? The same many people (and polar bears) left the Island, the Donkey Wheel! But this was going to be the maiden voyage. But before he could leave, Mother arrived. She told him how much she loved him and she knocked him unconscious and filled in the well that lead to the glowing yellow light.

Now, how an elderly woman could drag a full grown man out of a deep well and then fill in an enormous hole with tons of dirt, I haven’t a clue. And others are better at speculating about such things than I am. I’m of the belief that Mother’s got a bit of smoke monster in her somewhere. It would explain how she slaughtered all of the others in the MIB’s tribe. And it would be a nice fit for the point I’m going to make in a bit about Jacob and the MIB’s relationship to her and the traits of hers that they carry.

Back at the caves, Mother approaches Jacob with a bottle of wine. It’s the same bottle of wine Jacob used in “Ab Aeterno” to explain how the Island acts as a cork to keep evil from spreading. She tells Jacob that he’s the one to protect the Island. She tells him that he doesn’t really have a choice, that it has to be him. Jacob drinks the wine. “Now you and I are the same”, she tells him.

This is the moment that will come to define Jacob’s whole philosophy about Island leadership. He grew up never feeling as if he had choices in his life. His mother always told him what to do. And he did it. And now, at this moment that will permanently tie him to the Island, he was again left without a say in the matter. But the Jacob we know is a believer in free will. “You have a choice,” he tells Ben as he’s threatened with a knife. And he passed that belief onto his followers, the Others. “We are the causes of our own suffering” was one of the images that flashed inside Room 23. Jacob knows this better than anyone. He knows now that he had a choice back then, that he’s caused all the suffering he’s felt since that moment he drank the wine. And he wants to make sure everyone else knows they have a choice as well, especially his candidates. He doesn’t want Jack or Hurley or whoever ends up getting the final nod as protector of the Island to assume the role in the same confining manner he did.

Bitter about how Mother treated him, he rejected her contemptuous philosophy about mankind and instead chose to believe in the good in people. He wanted to prove to Mother – and her philosophical heir, the MIB – that people were good. So he brought people to the Island that he knew would choose to be good. Think back at our 815ers, especially the ones who have died. Charlie, Sayid, Ana Lucia, Daniel – they all died after making a choice to do something good. Charlie choosing to sacrifice himself to secure rescue, Sayid doing the same to give the remaining Losties a little hope of making it out of the sub alive, Ana Lucia refusing to kill Ben, Daniel trying to prevent all the suffering that came from 815 landing on the Island, each had their scale tip to the side of good. Jacob sure knows how to pick ‘em.

I went into “Across the Sea” believing Jacob to be some magnificent, mystical, indubitable good guy. He still is all those things, but this episode did do one thing: it humanized him. Now we know what made Jacob like that and what makes him the embodiment of good on the Island. It’s another question that I wasn’t asking, but it’s nice to know the answer. He doesn’t need all that mystique to be freaking awesome.

So sometime after Jacob drunk the wine, he heads off into the jungle to look for firewood. He returns to find the MIB clutching a bloody knifing, standing over Mother’s dead body. Jacob flips out. He beats the snot out of his brother, drags him to the creek that leads to the glowing light and throws him in. With the classic wail, from out of the tunnel shoots a pillar of black smoke, straight into the air. As the Smoke Monster fades into the jungle, the body of the MIB trickles out of the tunnel. Jacob hauls it back to the caves and, in tears, lays it next to Mother’s body. And there’s your Adam and Eve. “Goodbye, brother,” Jacob says. -boom, LOST-

Mother may have told Jacob he was the one protector of the Island, but that’s not entirely true. The first description we had of the Monster came courtesy of Danielle Rousseau. “It’s a security system,” she called it. What does it protect? “The Island." And that it does. It wipes out everyone who could become a threat to that glowing yellow light. Which, to it (or him), is everyone. These were the two roles Mother had, and she passed one on to each of the boys.

The MIB also was left with Mother’s disdainful view of humanity. Jacob found a way to believe in the good in people, while the MIB saw only the bad. He saw up close how horrible people could be, but was unable to look past it. And you know what they say, once you turn into a smoke monster, you kind of get stuck in your ways. But he never let go of the one thing he wanted most, to leave the Island. And that’s where we’ll pick up this week.

The aftermath of this little tale, a story that felt like a classic myth of some sort, is the story that we’ve seen unfold over the past six seasons. It’s a story of jealousy and deception, but also one of family, one of faith and obedience but also one of courage and hope. Layers upon layers upon layers. I tried to peak under as many as I could here. I have a feeling I’m not done with this one, though. Count on another 3000 words after the rewatch this winter.