Lost: The Favorite

By Dan Birlew | Posted May 12, 2010 in Television | 1 Comment »

At long last, the secrets of Lost’s Island are revealed… only not so much. After last week’s massacre, we were left hanging for an additional week regarding the questionable fates of several protagonists following the Man in Black’s attempt to kill them all with a C4 bomb in Widmore’s submarine. “Across the Sea” was somewhat like “Ab Aeterno” in that a majority of the episode took place in the ancient past, but it wasn’t a flashback. The episode didn’t start with a “previously on Lost” recap, and there was no reference to present events. We all merely skipped back to the past to learn how this whole mess started.

The entire episode took place in the days of Roman civilization and conversational Latin, which could be anywhere from more than 1000 BC up to 900 AD. But given that the Island would later be visited by Egyptians who would build their calling-card landmarks, such as hieroglyphics,  the Temple, the statue of Taweret, the Smoke Monster’s chamber and more, I’m very tempted to say that the start of the episode took place in 43 BC. I’ll explain why as this summary continues. The scene opens in the ocean waters. A young woman clings to the wreckage of a large sailing vessel. She awakens and looks around to find herself floating just off the coast of the Island. Swimming ashore, she emerges from the water to reveal that she is pregnant… Very pregnant, and suffering a few birthing cramps as she makes her way inland. Finding a running stream, she drinks. While staring into the water, she sees another person reflected in its surface. Speaking in Latin, the woman offers her help. She takes the pregnant survivor to her camp at the familiar Waterfall Cave, where one day the survivors of Flight 815 would camp. There the pregnant woman revealed that she was Claudia, and she immediately began asking questions of her hostess. The woman revealed that she was alone and that she arrived at the Island the same way Claudia did, by accident. As Claudia starts to ask her more questions, the woman calmly says, “Every question I answer will simply lead to another question.” Claudia also mentions that there were other people on her boat, and they might be on the Island. The woman says, “If there are other people on the island, I will find them.” Claudia’s pregnancy cramps immediately worsen, and her hostess realizes it’s time for the birth.

Moments later Claudia is laid back, and the mysterious woman helps her deliver her infant son, whom she names Jacob. Jacob comes out smiling and calm. But Claudia’s labors aren’t over; a twin is on the way. Claudia has no name ready for this second child because she didn’t know she was having twins. The second boy comes out crying and restless. When Claudia asks to see him, the woman apologizes and smashes her head in with a rock.

The next segment picks up thirteen years later. So if we go by my earlier estimate then the year is around 30 BC. Jacob’s Brother, wearing black, walks along a beach on the Island. He finds an ancient Egyptian game board called a Senet, with a drawer containing black and white pieces. Young Jacob approaches, and we can see that it is indeed the very same Mysterious Boy seen by the Man in Black, Sawyer, and Desmond Hume in the present-day. But we’ll get to his 2007 appearances in a moment. For now, Jacob wants to know what his Brother found. Jacob’s Brother explains that it’s a game, and that he “just knows” how to play it. He agrees to play it with Jacob as long as they don’t tell “Mother,” because she might take it away.

A short while later Jacob returns to the Waterfall Cave, where the mysterious woman who acted as Claudia’s midwife and killed her is now the boys’ Mother. She is working on a loom, a hobby that we’ve seen Jacob will take up in later years. She asks Jacob if he loves her, and when he says that he does she says, “Then tell me what happened.” A short while later she approaches Jacob’s Brother on the beach, and he laughs because he knows that Jacob told her about the game. Mother agrees by saying, “Jacob doesn’t know how to lie. Not like you.” When Jacob’s Brother asks what he is like, she replies, “Special.” He asks if he can keep the game and she says “Of course you can, that’s why I left it for you.” She tends to say “of course” a lot. The Brother is surprised that she had anything to do with it, and she asks him rhetorically “where else would it come from?” The Brother thinks that it came “From somewhere else, across the sea.” However, the Mother corrects him by saying, “There is nowhere else, the Island is all that there is.” She then explains that the boys came from her, and that she came from her mother, and that her mother is dead. Brother doesn’t understand what “dead” means, and she explains it’s something he’ll “never have to worry about.”

Another day, the boys are chasing a boar into the jungle. Suddenly they hear a wet stabbing sound, and they find the boar with a spear in it. They hide as men approach, who quickly gut the boar and carry it off. Shocked, the boys return to the Waterfall Cave and tell Mother, who is immediately alarmed and makes sure that the boys weren’t seen. Jacob’s Brother remarks, “They looked like us,” to which she replies, “They’re not like us. They don’t belong here, we’re here for a reason.” When the boys want to know what reason, she mutters, “It’s not time yet.” She leads them out of the cave and along a stream into the jungle, the boys continuing to ask questions about the men throughout the trip. She admits that she knew about the people but didn’t tell the boys because the men are dangerous, and she didn’t want to frighten them. When Jacob asks what makes them dangerous, she replies with a very familiar line, later to be repeated by the Man in Black to Jacob about mankind: “They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt, and it always ends the same.” Mother warns them both that the men will hurt them, and Brother asks if that means they can hurt each other. Mother stops and tells them both “I’ve made it so you can never hurt each other.”

Jacob looks around and asks where they are, as if he’s never seen this part of the Island before. Mother leads them a little further until they find a small cave where the stream empties. The cave glows and hums with intense power. The boys asks what is in the cave, and Mother replies, “Light. The warmest, brightest light you’ve ever seen or felt. And we must make sure that no one ever finds it.” She continues, saying that men want it “…because a little bit of this very same light is inside of every man. But they always want more.” Brother asks if men can actually take it, to which Mother says, “No, but they would try. And if they tried, they could put it out. And if the light goes out here, it goes out everywhere. And so I’ve protected this place, but I can’t protect it forever.” The boys ask who will protect it if she won’t, and she replies, “It will have to be one of you.”

At another time, the boys are playing the game. Both seem intent, and Brother even seems a little frustrated. Jacob makes a move and Brother tells him he has broken the rules. When Jacob points out that Brother made the rules, Brother replies “One day, you can make up your own game, and everyone else will have to follow your rules.” At that point he sees the ghost of his real mother, Claudia. Excusing himself, Brother follows the ghost into the jungle. When he sees her again he asks why Jacob can’t see her, to which she replies, “Because I’m dead.” Apparently it was a special ability of Brother’s to be able to communicate with the dead, as we see later with Hurley and Miles. Those abilities are enhanced on the Island, where the dead are not allowed to “move on,” and manifest occasionally as The Whispers. Claudia asked Brother to come with her so that she could show him where he came from. She led him across the Island to a small camp of people; the other survivors from Claudia’s vessel, who have been living on the Island ever since. She revealed to Brother that he came from across the sea with her, and that she was his real mother.

Brother returned to camp and tried to woke Jacob quietly. He led Jacob into the jungle, toward the people, revealing to Jacob all that he had learned. But Jacob refused to accept it, and he started beating the crap outta Brother. Their Mother soon intervened, and Brother confronted her about all he’d learned… including the fact that she’d killed Claudia. But Jacob didn’t believe him, and refused to go with him to the people’s camp. But Brother was leaving anyway. In her parting words, Mother told him, “My love, you need to know this; Whatever you have been told, you will never be able to leave this island.” “That’s not true,” Brother replied, “And one day, I can prove it.” Mother took Jacob back to the Waterfall Cave, where she admitted to killing Claudia because she would have taken the boys back to her people, and that those people are very bad and Jacob is very good. “Then why do you love him more than me?” Jacob asks, referring to Brother, who has always been her favorite. She pauses a moment, unable to deny it, but says “I love you in… different ways. Will you stay with me, Jacob?” He says that he will, for a while.

30 years pass. So by my estimate it is now around 1 BC. Brother has been living among the people on the Island for his entire adult life. He is now familiar to us as the Man in Black, as he appeared in the season 5 finale and in “Ab Aeterno” earlier this year. Jacob still lives with Mother, and has taken up working on the loom. He makes an excuse and leaves the Waterfall Cave. He goes to the camp and watches Brother toil with the other men for a while. When Brother spots Jacob, he smiles. The two slip away to play their game. Brother asks about Mother, but when he learns she never speaks of him he says he’s sorry he asked. He asks why Jacob watches them, and Jacob says it’s because he wants to know if Mother is right about people being bad. Brother admits that Mother may be insane, but she’s right about people: they’re greedy, manipulative, and selfish. Jacob wonders why Brother stays with them, and he says, “They’re a means to an end,” and claims that he’s found a way off the Island. When Jacob doesn’t believe him, Brother pulls out the familiar-looking ceremonial dagger we’ve seen in present day and throws it at the nearby well. The metal sticks to the side of the well, which hums with magnetic resonance. Taking back his dagger, Brother explains that smart men among the camp have helped him discover places all over the Island where metal behaves strangely. “When we find one of these sites, we dig. And this time, we found something.” He begs Jacob to come with him, but Jacob becomes scared and refuses.

Jacob returns to the Waterfall Cave and tells Mother that Brother plans to leave. She goes to the people’s camp and joins Brother down in the well. The familiar donkey wheel is disassembled and resting against the nearby wall. Brother admits that he’s spent the last thirty years looking for the waterfall with the beautiful light, but hasn’t been able to find it on his own. Then he realized he might be able to find that light by digging beneath the Island. Mother seems more concerned about the people, and whether they saw this light too. Brother says, “They have some very interesting ideas about what to do with it,” referring to the light. Brother then dislodges a stone from the nearby wall, allowing the light to pour through. When Mother asks about the wheel, he says that he’s going to make a bigger hole in the wall and attach the wheel to a system that channels the water and the light. And then he plans to turn it and leave this place. When she asks how he knows all this, he replies sarcastically that he is “special.” She moves to hug him goodbye, and uses his vulnerability to crack his head on the wall, knocking him out.

Mother returns to the Waterfall Cave and tells Jacob that she said goodbye to his Brother. She takes him to the cave where the light emanates. She tells Jacob that he’s going to protect it now. When Jacob asks what’s down in the cave, she responds, “Life. Death. Rebirth. It’s the Source, the heart of the Island. Promise me, no matter what you do, you won’t ever go down there… It’d be worse than dying, Jacob. Much worse.” She produced a bottle of wine, the same bottle that Jacob would later use to demonstrate the nature of the Island to Richard Alpert, the same bottle the Man in Black would smash in frustration. Incanting a few lines over it, she poured Jacob a cup and gave it to him to drink. She tells him that by drinking it, he accepts the responsibility of protecting this place for as long as he can. Jacob whines that he doesn’t want to, but Mother claims he must because her time is over. But Jacob still doesn’t want to drink because he knows she wanted Brother to be the one, and he’s her second choice. “It was always supposed to be you, Jacob,” Mother replies. “I see that now, and one day you’ll see it too. You don’t really have a choice. Please, take the cup and drink.” When he finally drinks, she finishes by saying, “Now you and I are the same.”

Brother awakens by the well, only it’s been destroyed and completely filled in. Immediately you get the impression that Mother would have to possess superhuman strength and speed or some form of telekinesis to accomplish this. Angered, Brother looks up to see smoke in the distance. He runs back to the mens’ village to find everyone murdered, their straw houses burning. He finds his game among the debris, burnt but still in one piece. He cries in anger. Mother’s wrath is terrible indeed.

Near the Waterfall Cave, Mother senses something and tell Jacob that a storm is coming. She sends him off to get firewood before it rains. She enters the cave alone to find it wrecked, the loom destroyed. She finds the old Egyptian game that she gave to the boys, scorched. She opens it and picks one of the black stones out of the drawer. Brother ambushes her from behind, stabbing her through her center with the dagger. Crying, Brother demands to know why she wouldn’t let him leave. “Because I love you,” she replies, then “Thank you.” She dies almost instantly. Jacob has returned, and drops the firewood at the door. He seizes Brother and beats him unconscious, just as he did when they were children. He drags Brother out of the cave.

The next morning Jacob takes his Brother to the Source and throws him into the stream. Brother hits his head on a rock and is knocked unconscious again. He floats into the Source and is sucked in. A terrible sound rises from the Source, a familiar sound. Soon the Smoke Monsters bursts from the cave, streaming into the air, flying away with terrible clattering noises. Jacob runs in fear. Sometime later he finds Brother’s dead body in another stream. He takes Brother back to the Waterfall Cave, and there lays Mother and Brother side by side. He places with them two pieces from the game, a black stone and a white stone. Flashes back to season one spoon-feed us the knowledge that these two bodies and the stones are later found by the Flight 815 survivors, and that Locke christens them Adam and Eve. He’s not far from the mark at all.

All in all, this was quite a compelling episode depicting the start of the modern age and the induction of the Island’s new protector. The Island, it was revealed, is the home of the Source of all life, death, and rebirth. The Source was protected by Jacob’s and Brother’s Mother, who had no children of her own. Therefore she stole Claudia’s children and raised the boys as hers.

Early in their lives she used her powers, gained from the Source, to make the boys immortal, which also prevented the boys from killing one another. However, the boys are still capable of hurting each other, as we see Jacob unleash his fists on Brother and make him bleed more than once. The Mother immediately singled out Brother as “special,” and favored him. We see John Locke get similar treatment in later years. Ironic then, that the Man in Black takes Locke’s form to enact his endgame.

Jacob, who would later be called “a great man” and “a spiritual leader,” started out as nothing of the kind. He was, in fact, quite a simple person, good-hearted, but forced to rely on his Brother’s uncanny knowledge of the outside world for his own enlightenment. This made him susceptible to greater control by their Mother, whereas Brother’s ability showed him the truth and made him turn his back on their Mother.

Brother then lived among men and told them the nature of the Island, and in turn they showed him the technology necessary to create the machine that would “move the Island.” As we’ve seen in previous episodes, the person who turns the wheel and moves the Island is teleported to Tunisia some time in the future, and cannot return to the Island unless accompanied by Candidates for Jacob’s job. This was obviously how Brother intended to leave the Island, but he was never able to do so.

In revenge for her actions, Brother is able to kill Mother even though she is immortal by stabbing her through the chest with his dagger, by ambushing her before she has a chance to speak. This method of killing an immortal is later imparted to Richard Alpert by the Man in Black, who says to stab Jacob with the dagger before he has a chance to speak. It appears that the dagger stayed with Jacob until he gave it to Dogan the Temple master, who then gives it to Sayid and asks him to kill the Man in Black.

Jacob takes revenge on Brother in his simple manner, by first pummeling him unconscious out of frustration and then throwing him in to the Source. When Brother’s body comes in contact with the Source, it separates his soul from his body, creating the Smoke Monster. Thus it is revealed that Jacob created the Smoke Monster, and then spends the rest of his life preventing it from leaving the Island. By his final words, it’s clear that Jacob thinks of his Brother as being dead. Thus to him, the Smoke Monster is merely “a friend, who tired of my company.” However, the Smoke Monster retains all the same memories and beliefs that Brother had, including the motivation to leave the Island. So it’s possible that the Smoke Monster is Brother’s corrupted soul. While Jacob’s Mother tried to prevent people from finding the Source, even murdering people when necessary, Jacob actually brings people to the Island in order to prove to the Smoke Monster that he’s wrong about people being greedy and manipulative. However, for many centuries he simply brings people to the Island and doesn’t interfere, which allows the Smoke Monster to step in. It’s conceivable that if the year is 1 BC that a large number of Egyptians will come to the Island and at the Smoke Monster’s advice build the Temple, the Smoke Monster chamber, the Summoning Chamber, and finish the donkey wheel well that Brother was attempting to build. That’s why you see hieroglyphics in all those locations. But in every instance they fight, they corrupt, and it always ends the same. Being a kind of simple guy, Jacob requires the influence of an outsider, Richard Alpert, telling him that he’s doing it wrong in order to change his rules.

We see many of the “rules” that Jacob and the Man in Black play by were established by the Mother, who was following the rules established by her mother, and so forth, back to the beginning of time. The idea of the Island as a magical place is nothing new in the series, it was established early in the first season by the first appearances of the Smoke Monster as well as Locke’s statements stemming from him suddenly regaining the ability to walk. This made John want to stay on the Island and not be rescued. Another character, Rose, believed that she was cured of her cancer as long as she remained on the Island, and had no intention of leaving. While the show has veered near quantum physics with time travel and the like, one thing has remained constant throughout: the Island is a Source of good old-fashioned fantasy Magic, which keeps the Earth rotating and gives us all life. It is perhaps the last Source of Magic in the world, and it must be protected from greed. Otherwise that Magic could be accidentally depleted, and then the entire world would become dark and lifeless.

Thus it’s not a far leap to understand that the Man in Black plans to leave the Island using the Source, but to do so Jacob must be dead. Jacob made the Smoke Monster, and so he gets to set the rules. And because Jacob began looking for Candidates to replace him following the Smoke Monster’s first attempt on his life, then the Smoke Monster cannot leave as long as those Candidates are around. The Candidates cannot kill themselves or each other, and as Jacob told the Smoke Monster he can’t kil them either. But he can obviously trick the Candidates into killing themselves. Or can he? In spite of the explosion onboard the sub we may yet see Jin pop his head out of water. I kinda believe that Sayid is dead, since he joined with the Man in Black and probably isn’t a Candidate anymore.

Once the Candidates are all dead, the Smoke Monster can leave the Island using the Source. But several people including Charles Widmore, Eloise Hawking, and Richard’s dead wife Isabella all believe that if the Smoke Monster uses the Source again, it will deplete it, thus extinguishing all light and life on the planet. While the Smoke Monster tries to carry out his plan he continues using his innate ability to see the dead, including his brother Jacob, who reminds him of the rules he must follow. Jacob appears to the Smoke Monster as a young boy, and he can be seen by other Candidates too. An older boy was recently seen by Locke and Desmond in the woods, and he may be Jacob in older form. If Jacob’s spirit is indeed “growing,” then we may see him in ghost form as an adult yet again when it is time for the Candidate to drink from Jacob’s cup and agree to take responsibility for the Island. However, that doesn’t seem likely since a preview from the upcoming episode shows the blonde kid from “The Substitute” claiming to be Jacob.

Meanwhile, next week’s episode, “What They Died For,” plans to pick up where we left off both in the Island universe in 2007 and in the Sideways universe in 2004. Perhaps we’ll finally get some resolution on what the Sideways universe actually is, what it means, and how it affects the Island universe:

Tags: Lost