“One day you can make up your own game, and everyone will have to follow your rules.” – A young Not Locke/Smoke Monster, to Jacob
An origin episode of all origin episodes.
On what other show can we have an episode deep into a sixth and final season featuring a flashback of two relatively minor and late appearing characters in the grand scheme of the story, which carries so much impact and intrigue and weight. Unlike last week’s “The Candidate,” “Across the Sea” is an exquisite blend of adventure and mystery and suspense. I could easily watch a show that featured the adventures of a pre-Oceanic 815 Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) and his estranged brother, just as I’d love to see more of The Others circa Ben Linus’ heyday or even The Dharma Initiative circa the Summer of Love (maybe Jefferson Airplane is taken, blindfolded, to the island to entertain the hippie troops?).
In the interests of time, let’s go bullet point to cover what went down across the sea.
- Yet another shipwreck on the beach. We now know the Jacob has historically lured people to the island for purposes having to do with either his bemusement or intellectual curiosity about the human condition as he stands guard over the “cork” on the bottleneck protecting some form of evil (whom we now recognize as Not Lock or the Smoke Monster) from being unleashed upon the world at large. We meet Claudia, who seems to be of an ancient time, pregnant and stranded on a mysterious island. A woman of similar garb and language appears and offers to aid her. She (played by the always compelling Allison Janney) tells Claudia that she arrived on the island “the same way as you did, by accident.”
- The baby arrives… guess there wasn’t the issue with childbirth then that was the case with The Others circa Ben Linus’ leadership. And the baby is to be named Jacob! So the wheel doth turn.
- And there’s a second child, a twin brother! And then the woman says she’s sorry and kills Claudia with a rock. Welcome to Lost. Nice to meet you.
- “It’s a game. You play it.” We see the boys now as adolescents. The unnamed brown-haired brother found a game that “he just knows how to play,” but doesn’t want to tell “mother.”
- Mom, it seems, knows exactly what’s going on. She tells the boy that Jacob doesn’t know how to lie, that “he’s not like you.” “You’re special.” Mom tells him that the game – that seemingly washed up on the beach – was a gift from her. “There is nowhere else” but the island, mom explains. There is no across the sea. “Then where did we come from?” the boy asks. Mom lies, and then further elaborates by basically telling the boy that he’s immortal. Not exactly Little House on the Island Prairie, eh?
- The boys stumble across hunters on the island while chasing a boar. “We saw people,” they tell mother, stunned. “They don’t belong here,” mother tells them. “We are here for a reason.” Mom further explains that people are on “another part of the island” and that the same thing always happens; they come to the island, they are corrupted, and that people hurt each other. But mom “made it” so that the boys can’t hurt each other. If nothing else we see where Jacob learned his life philosophy from.
- Mom takes the boys, now blindfolded, to a mysterious cave where there’s a golden light emanating from the entrance. She explains that it’s the reason they are there, and that they must guard it all costs. “A little bit of this same light is inside every man… but they always want more.” A little big Lord of the Rings-esque. Mom is protecting this place, “but I can’t protect it forever.” Mom explains that one day one of the boys will have to protect it (and why not both?), and the brown-haired boy gets a certain gleam in his eyes.
- “One day you can make up your own game, and everyone will have to follow your rules.” – the brown-haired boy
- Like Hurley after him, the brown-haired boy can see dead people. In this case it’s his real mom! She leads him to a village that has been created by those who were shipwrecked, original Losties, as it were.
- His (real) dead mom blows the boy’s mind, telling him that both these people as well as himself come from “across the sea.” And if that’s not enough: “she’s not your mother. I am.”
- We see the split between the brothers take place. The brown-haired boy wants to join “his people” and leave the island. Jacob refuses to go along. Distraught (fake) mom tells the boy that no matter what he has been told, he will never be able to leave the island, to return across the sea from whence he came. </li>
- Great job with the casting of young Jacob: he looks a lot like Mark Pellegrino.
- The tools and clothing that Fake Mom uses are reminiscent of Native Americans.
- “They’re greedy, manipulative, untrustworthy, selfish.” The brown-haired boy is now all grown up, his hair is graying. He’s been living amongst “his people” for 30 years and reports to Jacob that his people are as bad as Fake Mom had warned. Jacob says they don’t seem so bad, but his brother admonishes that is because he watches them from “on high.”
- The brown-haired boy, who will eventually become Not Locke, has discovered that metal “behaves strangely” at certain places on the island, and that he and some of the men (presumably the less selfish ones of the village) he killed Real Mom, saying that she couldn’t have him turn into one of them. Fake Mom says that she loves her fake sons “in different ways.” Jacob agrees to stay with mom. “For a while.”
- “I am so sorry.” That’s what you don’t want to hear from Fake Mom. After embracing her estranged son, she smashes his head against a wall. Sonny boy has created the “wheel” we see in later episodes that allows people to transport themselves to the mainland, or at least to some location in Africa or the Middle East.
- Fake Mom makes Jacob the protector of the “source, the heart of the island.” He drinks of her bottle of wine (which we see Jacob drinking from later… can’t recall who she shares it with, if anyone?), and she tells him that they are now the same.
- All of pre-Smokey’s across the sea companions are murdered. He is most unpleased. He then proceeds to murder Fake Mom, stabbing her in the back literally. Oddly, she thanks him.
- “Don’t worry brother, I’m not going to kill you,” Jacob says after beating him to a pulp. Instead, it’s into the cave with him, and out pops the Smoke Monster!
- Interesting that it’s set up that even the “immortal” or supernatural forces we’ve come to understand exist on the island over time only have a cursory knowledge of the nature of the island and the forces that govern it.
- “Goodbye, brother, goodbye,” Jacob says. But of course we know that’s not true.
- We “flash forward” to an early episode of Lost where Locke talks about “our very own Adam and Eve.” Indeed.
From Around the Web: Lost, “Across the Sea”
- MTV: The episode garnered some mixed reactions around the Internet, with a variety of celebrities chiming in to give their impressions on Twitter. “Human Giant” creator Paul Scheer was reminded of a classic moment from TV’s past. “Tonight’s LOST reminded me of the 3rd to last ‘Cosby Show.’ Esp. with the light cave and that scene where Mrs Huxtable kills Theo.” Everyone remembers that little chestnut, right?
- Cultural Learnings: I don’t think “Across the Sea” is by any means perfect, but I think it did a most admirable job at crafting a story which crystallizes the show’s journey thus far, worrying less about the big picture and more about establishing where the individual portraits the show has created fit into the mysteries of the island (which may remain unsolved).
Some stats and info about Lost, “Across the Sea”
TV SHOW – Lost
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 6, Episode 15
AIRED ON – May 11th, 2010
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – ABC/Hulu
GENRE – Drama, Adventure Shows, Science Fiction
CREATED BY – J.J. Abrams, Jeffrey Lieber, Damon Lindelof
CAST – Jorge Garcia, Josh Holloway, Junjin Kim, Evangeline Lilly, Terry O’Quinn, Naveen Andrews, Matthew Fox, Daniel Dae Kim, Emilie de Ravin, Michael Emerson, Henry Ian Cusick, Dominic Monaghan, Harold Perineau, Ken Leung, Elizabth Mitchell, Nestor Carbonell, Jeff Fahey
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.