6361

Yeah, I got a big incestual vibe as well but it goes with the show’s themes of parental issues.

Looking online, this seems to be the episode that showed how split this show is going to end. Reaction to this episode seems fairly negative despite it probably being ridiculously anticipated.

6362

Amen to that.

6363

The what - third to last hour of Lost? And they managed to answer almost nothing.

6364

WTF ??!!
Undertones of incest, Jacob is an evil momma’s boy and now I’m rooting for the smoke monster. You know who I’m not rooting for, the writers!

Worst writing moment this week goes to this gem.

Island Mom: What’s this?
Man in Black: That’s a wheel. We’re going to open this hole and then attach the wheel to something, which we’ll then turn the wheel capturing the water and light and then I can leave the island.

Me & Island Mom : How the F*#k do you know that?

Man in Black: I’m special.

Seriously?

<sigh> Just two more episodes to suffer through.

6365

3 and a half hours are left.

6366

Undertones of incest

To be fair, the boys were adopted.

But I don’t know what you guys are all complaining about. I’m glad they’re finally showing that Jacob’s a douche and not the good guy he’s been masquerading as. And the man in black’s been getting jerked around his whole life just like everyone else on the island (and the viewers).

And “turtles all the way down” has been the only possible answer for a long time.

6367

I wish he had said that.

6368

Yeah this episode was a bunch of weirdo crap. Definitely not happy with the way they spun everything to do with Jacob and the brother.

— Alan

6369

UnMom Kills Mom. How did she know to kill her (beyond being Q3’s favorite phrase: batshit crazy)? No, don’t tell me why, tell me how?

Mom doesn’t bother to name UnNamed (the Baby in UnBlack). UnMom apparently doesn’t bother to name UnNamed, either.

UnMom renders Jacob and UnNamed incapable of harming each other. Jacob doesn’t believe her and eventually tests the theory. Even after it being proved false, UnNamed doesn’t bother to test the disproved proposition for millenia.

UnMom gives UnNamed a game (UnSpoiler UnAlert: Senet, an Egyptian boardgame), so he can speculate on things coming across the ocean to the island, though she doesn’t want him to think about things existing off the island. Apparently UnNamed is given an UnNamed game as a gift to make up for not being given a name. But at least it is cool parallel symmetry to Locke playing a Named game(Nonspoiler alert: Backgammon, unless you are watching the episodes in reverse order, in which case I just spoiled it for you), maintaining the whole Named-UnNamed thing.

Mom does UnDead appearance, either confirming that UnMom knows what the Golden Light Grotto can do because she offed someone and Mom is really a proto-smoke monster. Or a confirmation that UnDead can appear independent of the smoke monster (hey, it’s an answer, you just don’t know which question is being answered).

Other Survivors magically appear after a decade or so, apparent hell bent on being evil - they are so evil they plot to get off the island. Evil, evil, evil! (see speculation on UnMom UnBeing UnBatshit-crazy - and what’s really bad is that was supposed to be funny but at this point it actually made sense to me).

UnMom does all sorts of things that how she knows to do isn’t explained…

Watcher: Why?
Writer: Because! Hey, I never promised it would be a good answer!

UnMom confesses she killed Mom to Jacob, who remains devoted, even though he is UnLoved. But avenges UnMom when the Loved UnNamed UnLoves UnMom with his UnDull knife. Not being able to make the slightest ounce of sense of it either, UnMom thanks UnNamed - at least the writers were more merciful to her than they are to us.

So UnMom slaughters everyone before they can escape because they were supposed to do something evil and she doesn’t want to be proved wrong, kind of like how she killed Mom for the same (Un-)reason (though somehow she doesn’t seem to realize that she is exactly what she claimed they were - all together now: UnMom UnBeing UnBatshit-crazy). And so UnLocke-to-be UnDoes UnMom by back-stabbing her (you did recognize the Locke-Naomi parallel, right?) , followed by Jacob UnHurting (by definition) UnLocke-to-be, and tossing him into the UnBriar Patch, which does kill him, letting him Jacob the hook.

Well hell, it makes as much sense as most mythology, so I’m down with it! The UnExplainable UnExplained!

6370

Yeah, it was always going to be turtles. That’s everything.

The only problem now (which is a big one) is that it took so many drawn-out, seasons to get to this relatively basic mythology - which seems like it could have been concluded only as recently as the past couple episodes, given the somewhat less comfortable fit of the wine bottle metaphor, and discards so much of the fascinating material they’d accrued in the better episodes. The time travel relevance, the Guiding Purpose of the supposedly-illuminated Others, the influence over the rest of the world, the mind powers, the various other curious effects of the island which did not immediately correlate to the destruction of all life ever.

My issues with the storyline have been less about the unexplained mysteries than that we didn’t even have an idea as to what the fucking bother was really all about - to what end all the veiled motivations actually worked. (The characters themselves clearly had no idea!)

But now we know. It’s a golden fleece in a cave guarded against barbarians by a Sacred Mother and her flawed angels.

That’s motivation we can actually understand - has a human purpose and a clear consequence. You don’t need a scientific explanation for mysterious anomalies to create a narrative - just a comprehensible cause-and-effect, and an idea of how individual character’s motivations tie into that.

If they’d been portioning out this background from, eh, Season Three (for real, cause-effect-style, not Bene Gesserit Missionaria Protectiva) they could’ve still knocked out a bunch of nonsense episodes, but we’d at least have had an idea all that time where it was going and the stakes involved. They still could have misdirected with ancillary mysteries and hidden motivations - just so long as we understood the Why.

6371

As for how it plays out - I think it would be best to see it go Promethean. A philosophical struggle between an ascendant child who wants to see light brought to all mankind, and a god-parent who would smother her children rather than let them be exposed to the dangers of the world.

6372

I was not pleased with this episode. Why is this bitch telling Jacob and Mr. “You’re so special we forgot to name you” that humans are evil when she keeps bashing people with a rock?

It’s the same feeling you got in season 2 when the Others kept acting all holier than thou while killing 815 survivors. (Which I assume is intentional since they were lead by Jacob who was lead by psycho mom.)

6373

I figured this had to be some recognizeable story from ancient texts or a tale told through the ages, and you’re saying they made this junk up and it doesn’t mean squat?

6374

It’s not an either-or situation. The story they told on last night’s Lost didn’t come from any one specific place, but it had elements of classic mythologies and (especially) Biblical tales. It was clearly meant to feel like an old tale. I’m not sure why you think that makes it worthless.

6375

Apparently I am the only one who felt at least a little entertained and intrigued by the episode.

Maybe I am reading too much into it, but here’s what I pulled from the episode.

  1. In a very early episode, J.J. Abrams said something about the story being about Pandora’s Box. What we learned last night was that Jacob screwed up and opened the box. When The Woman told him that to go in the cave was a cause a fate worse than death, she didnt just mean it for him, but for everybody. Jacob, in his anger, misread what she said, and tried to punish his brother by throwing him in there, and instead released the manifestation of the evil thats in all men. Smokey isnt his brother any more than Smokey is Locke. I guess you could say that Jacob has been scrambling ever since to contain that evil, and that evil has wanted a way off the island.

  2. If what was in the cave (Smokey) also has a small piece in the souls of all mankind, we now know why Smokey was able to do that “mind-reading” type of analysis on Eko.

  3. We know that moving the island is a side effect of the wheel. We saw the main effect of the wheel when both Ben and Locke used it and were transported off the island. Obviously, Smokey is bound by other rules to the island, and cant use the wheel, but The Brother obviously could have.

AV Club had a good point in their review of the episode that the point of the whole episode was “origin stories are just as complicated as the current stories”. You can interpret The Woman as good or evil, The Brother as good or evil, Jacob as good or evil. I think the only thing we know for sure as bad is Smokey, but thats even up in the air.

Anyway, thats some of the things I pulled. I guess I am just bothered by the ambiguity less than others… I agree that they could have made this whole thing a lot clearer, and that in my stuff above I could be reading a lot into what isnt there…

6376

The events are reminiscent of the story of Jacob and Esau, along with a number of other mythological tales (Cain and Abel also come to mind), but it’s not directly lifted from anything.

I’m not really dissatisfied with the episode because I wasn’t expecting most of the questions other people seem to be frustrated with to get answered. Johnny Cash’s name, if we ever get one, will be revealed in the finale. What the light is will probably be revealed when somebody has to go adopt it. How much of Cash is him and how much is the unnamed evil will probably be revealed later. It’s clear that Allison Janey was magic (one person couldn’t have filled up that well and killed those people without superpowers in the implied timeframe). It’s not clear how Jacob was able to leave The Cork when Titus Welliver was not - that’s probably something that will be answered in the last three and change hours, because we’re going to end up with a new Jacob and he’s going to need to know the rules.

As an episode of television, I thought it was well done. It’s a traditional mythic story. Things I am wondering now:

  1. Why was The Giraffe’s time done when she presumably massacred all the people who were digging a magic well but not when she brained Claudia to death with a rock?

  2. In most of the stories that this is kind of like from legend, one brother is loved more than the other one and the unloved brother gets jealous and does something bad. This situation appears to be reversed.

  3. The Smoking Man is the spitting image of his fake mother in quite a lot of ways - he’s a good liar, a manipulator, and he has a low opinion of humans. Jacob has other qualities - he’s dedicated to his duty. It would seem that each of the boys took half of their mother.

6377

This episode should have been in season 3, not near the end of season 6.

6378

I’m fine with accepting the mystery in Lost. What annoyed me with the epsiode is that it was boring as well as frustrating. An hour long “exposition” that leaves you with more questions? I’d rather watch Saywer call people goofy nicknames for an hour and lose at ping-pong.

6379

What a pile of horseshit.

6380

removed for being a day late and a dollar short.