Lost

I think Darlton are pretty smart guys and they knew they had serious continuity problems. By making things as ambiguous as possible and painting in extremely broad strokes they hoped that they had created the wiggle room to be able to claim that their story held together.

My guess is that they felt that by naming the “white” character Jacob, they have implied the nature of the “black” character. The most obvious allusion would be to Esau but they weren’t willing to be that explicit in their story.

Also, because Jacob, by either omission or commission, caused or allowed some bad things to happen to people he was not a purely good entity. Everything he did was in service to the Important Magic and was not in service to the benefit of the people he encountered.

So, in part, by not naming the “black” character, the issue becomes less about good and evil per se and more about their relationship to the Important Magic.

Plus, they had already made their money and probably felt screw you if you don’t “get it”.

Wow. I didn’t think it was possible that someone could think this way considering MIB’s name has been driving me crazy the whole season. Then with “Across the Sea” I thought for sure we were going to get the answer and when we didn’t I really thought they were rubbing our noses in it. I thought we were going to get it in the final and it would relate to history in some kinda cool way. Not that I had any idea what that might be: I assumed they had that in their hip pocket. I was disappointed in the fact that they didin’t and in the final in general but I still greatly enjoyed the series and it hardly ruined my life.

The scene where mommy gets bashed with a rock before naming MiB was really just a “forget it already, we’re not going to tell you what his name is!” message from the writers. It seems some people are interpreting it to be the introduction of the mystery name issue and not the end of it. I’m not sure why that is as the character had been established for a long time and this was the end of the series. That moment was clearly an either or moment with respect to MiB’s name and I’m surprised people continued to expect his name after it.

I really see that scene as the end of the debate, the writers telling the audience that his name will never be revealed. It’s the final exposition that the name isn’t relevant thus Chekhov’s gun has been fired and it was loaded with blanks. The fact that they continued to go out of their way not to address him by a name I took as further evidence that we were never going to get it, especially when it was the second to last episode.

One of the things that’s somewhat unique about Lost was that the writers communicated both directly and through the show with their audience. Interviews, podcasts and such were common as were several lines and events in the show that were clearly intended as comments to the fans and not just discussions between the characters. There was an ever present meta dialog going on. I thought that particular aspect of it was interesting and even humourous at times.

For me, once she bashed mom’s head in with a rock, I knew the episode was going to be another helping of misdirection and bullshit.

There are good ways to do this and bad ways to do this, and lamentably most of the ways that people go about doing it are bad, because it should happen a lot less than it does. As much as I love Damon and Carlton for the good things they did for the series, they did suffer from a tendency to write “the wrong way” - specifically, engaging in metatextual conversation with their audience during the presentation of their work, not unlike a stage director standing off to the left and waving around a bunch of cue cards describing what he intended with every piece of presentation. When it works, it fits within the context of the fiction of the story itself. Hurley and Miles are a good example of that - they’re both comic relief characters, and when they have a discussion about whether or not “What happened, happened” mirroring the discussion that you’d see online, it’s believable that those characters would have had that discussion on their own. The metatextual element is hilarious flavor, but not necessary to understanding the events you’re watching.

The bad examples of this, however, take the cake. Samuel’s name is only one instance where the writing room introduced something unambiguously undefined and then went on not to define it. Attempting to interpret the events of the scene in which Jacob is named as being intended to communicate to the audience what they ought to be focused on doesn’t make it any better, because Allison Janey’s actions then only make sense as acts in a script written by a bald man and a dude with a banjo and not within the context of some crazy immortal bitch living on a cork. At best, the writers are flailing hamfistedly to justify the fact that they’re not going to address a thing that they implied at some point would be of significance but had since decided clearly was not, only drawing attention to it and harming the narrative in so doing. At worst, they’re just being jerks. In no case does it qualify as good writing. Even as somebody who thinks that the finally was about as good as they could have done with the material that they had, I can say that’s a fair criticism of that storyline, and really of the series as a whole in retrospect.

So you’re admitting that it was a giant flying fuck you, just that you “got it” before the rest of us (when the show ended). How do you then justify the name-dodging for the rest of the episode and series? What fucking point does it serve?

Your first sentence also makes you out to be a complete asshole. You explain this part of the episode as if that’s exactly how it is, when it’s entirely up to the viewer’s interpretation. Oh, I see, we just didn’t “get it.” But it’s cool man, you trumped us. You totally nailed the answer when none of the rest of us did. If that’s what you think, rock on. But there’s no need to be that guy when you state your opinion.

This is precisely how metatext should always be handled. Never expect your audience to delve into metatextual content to understand the main storyline, and never use metatextual content as a band-aid for shoddy storytelling.

Obviously Lost’s writers intentionally failed to give a name to Jacob’s brother as a device to stimulate discussion of the show. It seems to be working.

I guess I don’t accept the idea that by NOT saying something, they have said something. That by not naming this guy, they have obligated themselves to name this guy. That by ignoring something(his name), they have focused attention on it.

That’s crazy. We should be angry the polar bears didn’t get names because the dog got a name, what’s up with that?

That gun thing only works if attention is drawn to the gun. If the gun is just there in the background the deal is off. Why? Because there are any number of props in the background, you think every single one of them gets used later in the story? They’re just props to set the scene.

The name is not the gun, because there was no attention drawn to it since it was never there. How can anyone say they brought attention to something that wasn’t there, something they never provided? What we saw was not a gun hanging on a wall, it was an empty gun rack, but people think because there was a gun rack that means a gun should pop up in the story anyways.

The name didn’t meet the Checkov’s gun requirement until the scene in Across The Sea that I quoted one page ago. The one where Jacob was named, and the other kid VERY OBVIOUSLY wasn’t. That’s where they drew attention to it, and I honestly can’t believe you’re claiming otherwise.

No, people are treating it as the climax of the mystery name issue, not its introduction.

If attention wasn’t drawn to it before Across the Sea, it sure as hell was when this line was uttered by the mother just before she gets brained:

“But I only came up with one name.”

…and then spend the rest of the episode intentionally avoiding naming the other kid. It wasn’t just a flying fuck-you, it was a superman punch of fuck-yous. I’ll ask you this, if mystery wasn’t intended to be built around his namelessness, why did they talk about it in interviews/podcasts all the time? Why did nearly EVERY interview post-MiB appearance ask if we were going to get a name for him? Why, after watching the entire episode of Across the Sea, did Jimmy Kimmel see fit to focus one of his jokes on that aspect: why the hell doesn’t the guy have a name? It’s laughable and he knew it.

edit: damn, Tracy beat me to it.

“Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name…”

miB should have been evil or the devil imprisoned on the island like the old Twilight Zone episode.

As a huge fan of They Live!, I was never bother by nor put much thought into the fact that they hadn’t named the character. I just figured if his name mattered they would tell me. The longer it went without being known, the more I assumed his name was unimportant.

A nameless protagonist whose name is never referenced and who never really deals with anybody who actually knows who he is is different from a conspicuously unnamed antagonist with a named brother who we see in several family scenes.

Also, I have to cut Roddy Piper some slack - he was already at the limit of his abilities without having to learn to respond to another name entirely. Also, where did the appellation “Nada” come from? I ask because I don’t remember the plot of that movie so good, such as it was.

“Nada” is how he is credited in the film, but it is never used in the film. Nada = Nothing in Spanish.

“conspicuously” is your projection onto the story. Up until Across the Sea, there was nothing conspicuous about the name (the character, yes, but not his name) or lack thereof, none of the characters had ever met the man in black except when he was pretending to be someone else and therefore wouldn’t have reason to use his own name, or he was black smoke. Only during Across the Sea did the show make a specific point to avoid his name. Before that the scenes just never warranted name usage.

Both of my brothers have names, but even though I talk to them daily I probably don’t actually say their names more than once a week. I don’t say “Hey Neil, what’s up? How are things going, Neil? Neil, would you like to catch a movie this weekend?” I say that without even using his name.

True we didn’t think about the “name” of the entity before “Across the Sea.” But there was plenty of speculation about what it might be/the nature of it. pretty much the same thing as a name. it’s been obvious for a long time that many people wanted to call it something but just didn’t have enough info. I thought for sure they were steering us towards something and then just didn’t.

Sure, but you already know your brother.

There were plenty of scenes before Across the Sea in which people met MiB for the first time, or realized he wasn’t Locke. It’s a bit incredulous to think that all these meetings ended without anyone asking “What do I call you?” or “No, really, what are you?”

The problem there is that her line makes sense in the context of her having twins unexpectedly.

But you, or others, make that line out to be some kind of arrow pointing out MiB’s lack of a name.

That line does not, and should not, stand out as suggestive of anything other than her expecting only the one kid.

Your first sentence is right.

Your second sentence is right.

Your third sentence is fail.