Across the Sea

Tonight's installment of Lost left me rather divided.

On the one hand, it seemed like a very necessary chapter to tell for the full picture of Lost to be completed. On the other, it felt a bit like an unwanted disruption to the momentum from last week's episode that raised the stakes for our characters more than ever before. An entire hour where none of the main characters appear, save in a brief clip lifted from season one? When there are only two episodes to go after this one? What's up with that?

On the one hand, there was some fine acting in the episode. It was particularly welcome to see Allison Janney, great in general and superb on The West Wing for so many years. On the other hand, the episode seemed so steeped in a sense of abstract myth that the emotion of it didn't seem real, didn't really connect.

On the one hand, we got some big answers and revelations about Jacob and the Man in Black. We learned they're twin brothers. We learned (in a vague sense, at least) why the two aren't/weren't able to kill one another directly. We saw how M.I.B. came to be the Smoke Monster. We saw the creation of the "frozen donkey wheel" from the end of season four. We finally learned the identities of the two skeletons in the cave from season one.

On the other hand, some rather key issues were not addressed. How did the strange moral contest between Jacob and Smokey come to be? What exactly keeps Smokey imprisoned on the Island, and why can Jacob apparently come and go as he pleases? What about Smokey leaving the Island would spell the end of the world, as Jacob has told us?

As I mentioned, I found the episode a bit lacking in genuine emotion, and a bit too preoccupied with presenting the "creation myth of Lost" (as it were). Two brothers, pitted against one another for an impossibly long time. It just seems so far removed from the more accessible personal dramas of the Oceanic survivors as we've seen them for six years.

But there was one thread in the episode that did catch my interest. And it goes back to what a marvelous actor Allison Janney is, because it was her character. She was the ageless custodian of the Island before Jacob, and her story is a particularly telling one, if you really think about it. It seems to me that she always knew what she was doing. The nameless brother always really was her favorite, and that's why she groomed him his whole life for the more merciful assignment -- to murder her so that she could finally be free of her charge. For the son she liked less, she gave the real curse -- eternal life, stuck guarding the Island. She wanted out, and to do this, she had to arrange for two things: her successor, and her own death. She never banked on the favorite son to gain an eternal existence too.

All this sheds a different light on Jacob in the modern time frame. Until now, it has seemed that the Man in Black was searching for a loophole that would allow him to kill Jacob, and finally -- after who knows how long -- got the drop on him. But now that we've seen the story of the twins' adopted mother, a different scenario seems more likely. Like his mother before him, Jacob just got sick of the job. To be free of it, he had to undertake the same two tasks: arrange his successor, and then arrange his own death. It seems perhaps he was only too happy to die through the loophole his brother found.

I guess it goes to show you just how much I thought this episode was "too mythological" when I found the most accessible and interesting part of it to be the plight of a man trying to escape the curse of eternal life. I mean, not a bad episode, by any stretch. And as I said at first, almost certainly necessary to complete the story of Lost. But honestly, it was probably Lost's weakest episode of this season.