smartgrrrl's guide to stuff

Here’s the thing about origin stories: they’re never going to fully satisfy one’s need to know everything. Origins — true beginnings — simply don’t exist. There’s always something that came before, always the question “How?” looping back, over and over, until finally you get to a shrug and the unknowable.

The Mother says as much to Jacob and He Who Has Yet to Be Smokey: You came from me, I came from my mother, she came from hers, and so on and so on. Every question I answer will lead to another question. [Audience: Gee, ya think?]

But . . . she’s NOT their biological mother. She’s LYING to them. From the beginning, she’s lying to them. How do we know that anything she says to them is the truth? She could be making all of it up. And really — we don’t know how she came to the island and we don’t know how long she’s been there, but isn’t it possible that these were stories she told herself to make sense of her life, stuck on this place without any chance of getting off? I mean, wouldn’t you? If you knew you were going to be there for the rest of your life, wouldn’t you make up a story to make your fate seem a little less helpless, a little more noble, a little more Grand? I’m not helpless, I am protecting the world!

I may be alone in this, but I love that the Man in Black has no name. That he is, ultimately, Unknowable. And since the Mother is also unnamed, I’m starting to wonder whether the Man in Black is actually the Mother’s true successor. What if the Mother was, in fact, the First Smoke Monster? And she was playing the brothers against each other from the very beginning, immediately after they were born? She wanted Boy Smokey to find the game. SHE took Claudia’s form and led him to the truth. And — the Man in Black kills her before she has a chance to say anything to him (this has been mentioned before — Dogen tells Sayid he has to strike Fake Locke before he has the chance to speak, or the opportunity is lost). And maybe, in setting Jacob up as the island’s protector, she’s ensured that this game between light and dark will continue for an extremely long time. Centuries, even. Also: at one point she tells the boys the same exact thing that the Man in Black says to Jacob in the finale of Season 5: “They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”

It was clear, wasn’t it, that what we watched unfold last night took place a long, long time ago? Way before the statue. (See, now I wanna know who built the statue, and whether it was to Jacob’s own specifications. Is Tawaret supposed to be some homage to his two mothers?) Claudia and The Mother speak to each other in Latin, at least I think it’s Latin. It makes sense that it would be Latin, since we know that’s the language of the Others — Jacob’s people.

And speaking of the Others, here’s another theory: Smokey brought the DHARMA Initiative to the island. I don’t know how, but it was established that he’s attracted to the people who know things, who can manipulate the island’s special properties, and help him get off the island. Help him rebuild the donkey wheel. And then it would make sense that Jacob’s people would want the DHARMA folks annihilated, just as that first group of villagers was.

What I don’t get: So — the Man in Black is actually dead. I do like the implication now that that scene at the beginning of the Season 5 finale was a conversation between Jacob and a ghost. But I don’t understand why he’s still trying to get off the island. What’s the point? Just to prove that he can? How is it possible that Jacob can leave, after the Mother told him he couldn’t, not ever?

What I did not like — what I actually hate with a passion, now that I’ve had some time to think about it — was the WHOLLY UNNECESSARY flash to Jack and Kate and Locke in the caves, discovering “Adam and Eve.” C’mon. I know it was a long time ago, but still. Did you think we would not recognize the caves? The game pieces? That we would not remember that Lindelof and Cuse promised we’d find out who those people were? And the cuts back and forth from “House of the Rising Sun” looked sloppy (one minute Jack’s shirtless, the next his shirt is on, because the cuts were made from different moments in the original episode) and completely detracted from the emotional moment wherein Jacob says goodbye to his family, and you can still see on his face, “Mom always did like you best.” If I’d been in charge of this, I might’ve agreed to a fade from that scene to those from “House of the Rising Sun,” just in case people out there weren’t seeing the connection, but the back and forth did not work for me at all. Still — when Jack and Kate find the corpses in the cave, Jack says that the decomp is what you’d expect after 20-30 years, and now we know that he’s missing a few zeros at the end of those numbers.

I am sure that this episode will be polarizing. I bet a lot of you just HATED it, just as a lot of you totally dug it. I totally dug it, even though I think it was flawed. I liked that it keeps the question of morality and good/evil afloat, because this is something the show has always done. I liked that it showed us who Jacob and the Man in Black were as people, before they became these . . . well, deities. I liked that it implied certain answers to long-standing questions. I loved the explanation for how the Man in Black became the Smoke Monster (really, out of all the questions, that one’s pretty key). I LOVED Allison Janney and thought she did a wonderful job as the prototype for all the crazy moms that followed (and honestly, when a show has Allison Janney on it, how bad can it be?).

But I’m not entirely sure that all this backstory needed a separate episode, though I will admit that I am impressed by how bold a move that was, and ultimately there might be a good reason for taking this sharp left turn with only three and a half hours of storytelling left. In its execution, however, this episode leaves a lot to be desired. In moving from character drama to myth, much of the dialogue became clunky and heavy, and all the people on Twitter that made references to the Star Wars prequels aren’t half wrong. It’s especially hard to avoid them when the light at the center of the island is referred to as “The Force.” I mean, REALLY?

There’s a lot that I haven’t mentioned, but I’m at 1200 words here and it’s time to move on to the rest of my day. So what did you think, and what questions do you have?

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