The day we got to learn more about Jacob and the Man in Black has been a long time coming, but was this the right time and the right way to do it? Fans that we are, we try to gleam something of note from it all.

Robert

One thing’s for sure—the people that make this show have quite the brass pair. There have been plenty of moments throughout this series that made me think that a line had been crossed, but none like what I experienced with “Across the Sea.” The moment when we discover that Jacob and the Man in Black are actually brothers, even the moment when we find out what happened to their real mother, didn’t prepare me for the reveal of The Light. It crossed my mind for a split-second that I’d been duped. Frankly, the whole conceit of “a mysterious light that is the heart of the island and possesses the key to life or some such thing” is almost too pie-in-the-sky for me; it just seemed to come out of far left field. And yet, thinking about it afterward, I suppose it’s a reasonable explanation for what the DHARMA Initiative ended up calling an electromagnetic anomaly. I say if you can buy one then you should be able to buy the other.

Otherwise, I was happy to get some context for who Jacob and the Man in Black are and why they’re doing what they’re doing to our Losties–even though it might have been nice to have gotten it sooner. I’m just hoping that it’ll pay off in the final hours of the show. But more than that, I came away from this episode appreciating it for all the things it made me consider. I’ve seen reactions all season about how this show doesn’t answer anything but it finally dawned on me this week when we never learned the Man in Black’s name–something I totally expected would be revealed–that LOST as a television series isn’t about what you get out of it. It’s about what you put into it. You want to know the Man in Black’s name? Pick one. I think that open-ended-ness is meant to encourage the viewer to use some imagination and fill in the blanks where they see fit.

For example, when Locke first saw the smoke monster in Season 1, he described what he saw as a “beautiful bright light”, and in most religion, Satan (AKA the Lucifer or the Morning Star) is, in fact, sometimes referred to as the bearer of light. So could it be that our bad guy the Man in Black, after going into the heart of the island, came out as Satan and ages later showed his true nature to Locke? I’d say maybe so. (Actually, I’ll have a lot more to say on this soon.) You might feel differently, and it’s possible that neither of us would be spot-on.

Also, after seeing how this all played out ages ago, I finally see the parallel to the struggle between God, Satan and Job front and center. It’s not necessarily a direct translation of it, but all of the important pieces are there. Think of the island as of God, the Man in Black as Satan and each of the Losties as a take on Job. Everyone that has come to the island has been confronted with their sins and transgressions and been forced to come to terms with why their fortunes have taken a turn for the worse.

And yet, the show never seems to take a definite moral stance and allows room for judgment by the viewers. It all speaks to larger themes of LOST and if nothing else, I think “Across the Sea” was important to help us understand this as we head into the finale next week.

Scott

There seem to be a lot of angry LOST fans out there today. This surprises me a little. All anyone’s wanted this season is answers, answers, answers and there were certainly a lot of answers in “Across The Sea”. Except, we didn’t really get any answers at all, we got stuff happening without any explanation of the how or why. After spending the whole season building up “Across The Sea” as the episode that answers all, we got what we always get with LOST: murky, cryptic question-raising that deliberately frustrates us with the empty promise of answers later. Except, there’s no more later. We’re five-sixths of the way through the final season. The show will end up running 118 1/2 hours and 115 of them have aired. Do you feel satisfied yet?

Worse still, Darlton employed some surprising smugness towards the show’s devoted fans that, at least to me, crossed the line between good-natured ribbing and outright mockery. They know we’re expecting a lot from this episode and confound those expectations right out of the gate with a bitchy one-two punch (“Every question you ask will be answered with another question” and “I only had one name”). That’s not playful, that’s being an asshole. I have been eminently patient with LOST and have had unshakable faith that there was some sort of method to the madness, but there were too many glaring missteps in this episode for me to overlook, the first of which is the placement of the episode in the season as a whole. After building up an incredible amount of tension in recent weeks, the action grinds completely to a halt to explain some backstory from thousands of years ago. Wouldn’t this episode work a lot better as the season premiere, dovetailing nicely with the Jacob threads introduced in the season five finale? Even if you’re able to overlook the issue of who Alison Janney’s character was, why she knew what she knew, how she got there, why she’s so prone to lying and deception, and so on, shouldn’t Jacob be a little more inquisitive as to what exactly his mission as island caretaker is before he devotes all of eternity to doing it? Does she, and later Jacob, have some kind of magical power that would enable her to fill in a well and kill an entire village full of burly dudes overnight? And seriously, the Man In Black has no name? Really? Even after living with a group of people for 30 years, you have absolutely no handle. Well if Darlton won’t give him a name, I will. I’m calling him Timmy from now on.

But none of that holds a candle to the show’s possible jump-the-shark event, a scene we may look back on as the moment when LOST crossed from the sublime to the ridiculous… the donkey wheel. Boy did I feel sorry for Titus Welliver, the incredible actor playing Timmy who once delivered David Milch’s golden dialogue on the late, great Deadwood. Let me get this straight. You’ve found this unexplained, important light source that’s magnetic. There are “smart men among you” in your village. So you decide to dig into the ground, insert a donkey wheel that will manipulate the light and water, and somehow that will teleport you off the island? And you know all this because you “just know”. Because you’re “special”. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a gigantic plot hole covered up with sloppy, sloppy writing. I know this is the ancient version of the hatch, but the writing and introduction of this element of the story was so mishandled and strange that I was taken completely out of the show.

I get what Darlton are going for with this cryptic writing and labyrinthine mythology. They want us in the state of mind of the characters, ordinary people who stumbled across something extraordinary. They don’t fully know or understand what’s going on, so we don’t either. They’ve also said that the idea of laying it all out there is terrible because it would be like the Architect scene in The Matrix Reloaded, a boring and obvious way of laying out the secrets behind something big and confusing. But it doesn’t have to be that way. For example, in the donkey wheel scene Alison Janney’s character could’ve said to Timmy, “This is wrong! You’re special! You can [insert abilities here]. You’re supposed to be [insert what his destiny is]. If you keep doing this, you’ll [insert stakes here]!” Normal people don’t talk like that, but they also don’t speak in the cryptic non-sequiturs LOST’s writers are ever so fond of. Which would you rather have, LOST fans?

There are things I liked about this episode. The outlines of the action felt like a Bible story, and I like the idea that Jacob and his mother are imperfect, sometimes murderous beings who nonetheless appear to be the good guys. I’m a little fuzzy on what exactly happened there at the end when Jacob threw Timmy into the water and down the…. whatever, but I’m a little intrigued by the theory that Timmy is dead and Jacob’s wrath unleashed whatever evil creature was down there which is now taking Timmy’s form, in other words, that Jacob has spent thousands of years protecting the world from his own angry mistake. That being said, we’re another episode closer to the end and I’ve never had less faith in the show.

Chris

Clearly, just looking at my Twitter and Facebook feeds, many people loved this episode. So I’m gonna go against the popular tide. I didn’t love it—not for where this ended up in the run of the series. Placed where it was in the run of Season 6 I thought it unnecessarily diverted attention from where I wanted it to be—in the ‘present,’ on-island. This would’ve been a nice side-story to run between Seasons 5 and 6 but since we have just 3.5 hours of show left, I felt it was just a distraction. While I like the mythology side of LOST and have been interested in the Jacob/Flocke story, that’s not where I wanted to be right now. And that’s kind of how I feel about “Ab Aeterno” as well on second thought. Just as I think they spent a little too much time futzing around with The Temple, I feel like we’re taking detours here in Season 6 that just aren’t all that interesting to me.

Now, that said…it sure solidified the direction of this season (also something I wish had come earlier) and the end-game. A lot of ground was covered here that frankly had to be before the final-final chapter, like the origins of Smokey, the bodies in the caves, the back-story of Jacob and (did they mention what his name was?) Smokey, the building of the donkey wheel. And in true LOST fashion this episode opened up plenty more question threads I’m sure will never see solved. But hey, that’s LOST huh?

Where the story’s kind of losing me this season is in how many things we just have to “believe” about this show. Like the mystical light that emanates out of some hole you could search for for years and never find. Where did Allison Janney’s character come from? Why’d she kill Claudia? Obviously she’s in tune with the island but what’s all that about? How much did she know about other people being on the island? Why didn’t she kill them before they corrupted ‘her’ son?

I guess where I’m coming from with this episode is that I’m much more interested in the mythology when it is more closely intertwined with the personality conflicts of the characters we’ve been following for 6 years rather than people we’ve barely met and completely new characters. Not saying that this episode doesn’t have its place, but with 3.5 hours left to go…come on!

Tensions are high, but maybe that’s the mindset that’s required going into the final leg of the LOST saga. Which side of the coin are you on?

Chris Johnston talks about video games old and new at Player One Podcast.