Whoaa…
Just when you thought you might have it figured out—along comes MIB Begins…
Tuesday’s episode of Lost surely caused furniture to be tossed about as watchers picked themselves off the floor following the jaw-dropping episode…
Here’s an excellent assessment from the Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan…
For six seasons of “Lost,” Mr. Watcher has sat next to me on the couch, and his views and opinions on the show always inform what I write and what I think. Sometimes we disagree (he was a lot more cool with time travel than I was, and we had many discussions in which I might as well have been Hurley and he was a very patient Faraday).
Tonight, I thought I’d let him share a couple of thoughts on the episode, which I predict could well be the most polarizing one of the seasons.
Maybe others were on board with the Ye Olde Island Times episode. Those of us in Casa Watcher were both very disappointed by “Across the Sea,” and we agreed about some of the weaknesses of the episode, though there were some things that bothered me that didn’t faze him much (I’ll get to those later).
But here’s his take on the episode:
“I want to say goodbye to the characters. I could care less where the Man in Black/Smokey came from. They could have cut this down and interspersed it with scenes of the characters we’ve been following for all these seasons. There just wasn’t any substance to the episode. They wasted a really precious hour.”
Ouch. But I have to agree. For a lot of reasons, this was not an episode that goes in the Win column. It was actually seriously disappointing, if not disheartening.
lost abc One of the biggest problems with “Across the Sea” is that it brought up many, many questions that it failed to answer in satisfying and/or compelling ways. There were elements of the mythology that were fleshed out (well, in the case of the Adam and Eve skeletons, it was the opposite). And it filled in the gaps in the history of Jacob and MIB (that’s what I prefer to call the character when Titus Welliver plays him). We got partial answers to some of the questions the episode brought up.
But we also got the weirdness that was the MGC (the Magical Glowy Cave). And when it came to the biggest, most crucial questions, “Across the Sea” fumbled, and thus the hour was very unsatisfying, because those questions inform the very building blocks of the show.
We met the “mother” of MIB and Jacob, and we learned that she hated and feared the outside world. Why? Because people are bad. Why does she think people are bad? We don’t really know, except that she fears that people might try to harness or interfere with the Source of the island’s mysterious powers. Why does she fear that? Why would that be a bad thing?
We don’t know.
We don’t know what the exact powers of the Source are, where they came from, and we don’t know exactly what they can do.
Hence (and this is a very important hence), we don’t know whether her motivations and fears are justified or merely an expression of unfounded paranoia (and boy, the island seems to attract more than its share of freaky, fearful, misanthropic mothers, doesn’t it? Sigh.)
Yes, people came along and tried to harness or use the island after her time. Way after her time. What made her think that people trying to do that in her era would be bad?
We don’t know.
Is the island’s energy bad? We simply don’t know. And I’m not saying it has to be a black and white (ha!) issue. But the fact is, the island has healed people. Why is it so terrible to study or get to know the Source? Why does the Source affect the world? We simply don’t know.
titus welliver lost This is important — the fact that we don’t know whether what she is guarding is a force for good or evil or why she has the fears she has. Hence we can’t know if she was right to kill the twins’ mother, if she was right to lie to her boys, if she was right to attack her own son, if she was right to (presumably) murder an entire village. A few hours before it ends, “Lost” introduces a character whose motivations and priorities only become more muddied over the course of the single episode in which she appears.
The fact is, we didn’t get the kind of context that would allow us to decide whether the things she did to defend the island and the Source were justifiable or not. So, weeks before the show is going to end for good, why introduce her if we aren’t really going to find out anything profound or informative about her or her history with the island and/or humanity?
“Every question I answer will lead to another question,” she told the unfortunate Claudia. Well, yes. One of the most frustrating things about “Across the Sea” is that it brought up many foundational questions about the boys’ mother and just left them hanging. There were hints and allusions, but, in many cases, a lack of real answers. As usual, direct questions got evasive answers.
A lot of what she said was basically the island version of, “Because I said so.”
Then again, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that centuries of island conflict stem, in a fairly reductive and predictable way, from mommy issues. Well, that’s just great. We’ve had so many characters wrestle with daddy issues over the years, but the Big Kahuna? The big problem at the root of the whole cycle of violence and pain? “Mom liked you better!”
Just kill me now.
In all seriousness, here are just a few of the questions I have about dear old island mom and the Source, which presumably will never be answered more robustly than they were here:
Where did she come from? How does she know the people who landed on the island are bad? Why is she so convinced that people in general are bad? Was she a smoke monster herself? Why lie and say only the island exists? Why did she want to die? Had she gone into the Source’s light and felt the pain that was “worse than death? How was Jacob “like [her]” once he drank the wine? What’s the Source? Why can’t it ever be used or harvested?
lost across the sea And last but not least, how did she feed two newborn infants? And how did she keep them from noticing the village on the island for 13 years? Oy. It’s really not a good sign when basic issues of logic are simply ignored.
What we do know is that she passed down — or tried to pass down — her misanthropic beliefs to her sons. MIB, despite rebelling and mixing with the settlers for years, shared her negative view of humanity. Yet Jacob, who loyally stuck by her, wanted to believe people were capable of better, perhaps having grown tired of mom’s narrow worldview.
Whoever she was, whatever she became after she arrived on the island, she planted the seeds of the conflict that sucked in the Lostaways so many years later. The conflict certainly didn’t lack for Biblical elements. Jacob was the Chosen One, while MIB (who still remains nameless, which is pretty frustrating at this point) was the rebellious prodigal son, determined to prove his parent wrong yet turning out much more like that parent than he ever thought he would be.
Resentment is what drives these two men, along with jealousy, frustration and sibling rivalry, and despite the passage of centuries, their conflicts are still going strong. At some point, I just wanted to tell Jacob and MIB to get over themselves. Perhaps the island conflict will be settled when they can finally work through all their issues.
But at this point, not even a round-the-clock team of ace shrinks could repair this relationship, it would seem. Mom’s guilt trips, lies and paranoia did a number on both boys and the choices they made as a result were catastrophic.
Not exactly something to celebrate with mom over a glass of uncorked wine.
Now, on to the things that bothered me more than Mr. Watcher.
Every week I look at Metacritic’s roundup of “Lost” reviews from a variety of critics and bloggers, and every week, I notice that I’m usually one of perhaps two female writers in that roundup. There are a lot of other smart women writing about “Lost” who aren’t on Metacritic’s list, but it strikes me that, as a TV critic, I’m bringing something different and somewhat unusual to the table — I’m a lady (I’ll say it for you — that’s no lady, that’s Mo Ryan!).
So, what follows might be an issue for you, or it might not. If it doesn’t ring true for you, whether you’re male or female, I get it. But I have to be clear about just why this episode was such a profound letdown for me.
abc lost I know, I know, I’ve complained all season about the fact that the women’s storylines have been consistently weak and relatively unimportant, especially contrasted with the epic, important and even cataclysmic journeys of the male characters. But this episode just made things worse.
“Lost” started out in Season 1 as an ethnically diverse show with a lot of potentially intriguing male and female characters. Now it is, to a large degree, a story about the epic, heroic or anti-heroic journeys of a bunch of white men. Non-white or female characters — with a few exceptions — just aren’t in the foreground of the main narrative most of the time. Given that, when the show began, I thought that “Lost” was going to be different in that regard, it’s disappointing.
This season has had some strengths, but the stories for women aren’t among them. And we finally got a female character who was tied into an epic, mythologically important story line — and it’s all about how her bitterness, misanthropy and evasions launched centuries of bloodshed. Fabulous.
After watching “Across the Sea” twice, it sure seemed to me that if it hadn’t been for “Eve’s” mistakes, perhaps the garden of Eden and the Source wouldn’t have been ruined or endangered, and perhaps her sons wouldn’t have gone to war. She tempted them with the knowledge of the Cave of Mystical Glowy Secrets, and an endless battle for supremacy began.
As I said, we don’t even know if she was well-intentioned or not, though it’s clear that she didn’t want her sons to suffer. But the fact is, a woman is at the heart of what first went wrong on the island. After years of putting up with lame Kate episodes, loony or smothering mothers and the killing off of great female characters like Juliet, the reward we get for our patience is … this? To say it was demoralizing is putting it mildly.
At least now we know for sure that “Lost” isn’t just the Island of Bad Dads — in fact, maybe the series of terrible fathers are looking better in contrast to the twins’ Mom.
I guess this is how “Lost” celebrates Mother’s Day. Maybe candy would be better next time.
At least there is something amusing about “Lost’s” female trouble (and let me be clear, not every lady-related thing on “Lost” has been a disappointment. I just had higher hopes for the show, hopes that Season 6 is most certainly not fulfilling in this regard).
But I must note the one thing I consistently find amusing about “Lost” — the number of caves, tunnels, wells, towers and mystical crevices we’ve seen over the years. So the mother guards the Mystical Glowy Cave, which is full of secrets and pleasures and pains that the boys should not touch. Paging Dr. Freud!
But we should spend a second on the Mystical Glowy Cave (MGC). The appearance of that was… well, very weird. On a scale of one to 10, it was about a 20 on the “What the heck?” scale, if you ask me. I think the show took one of the hardest right turns it’s ever taken toward the mystical and fantastical with depiction of that cave, which, honestly, looked like something out of a movie you’d catch on Syfy.
As executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have said many times, providing answers can be inherently less interesting than exploring questions. And this was one of those times the answer was just … odd. The MGC not only looked odd, it didn’t really tell us much that we didn’t already know. We knew the island had a massive source of energy and tapping into it could be dangerous. So we finally got to see the Source of all that energy or mystical hoo-hah, and all I kept thinking was that Aslan or Gandalf was going to turn up any minute.
And when Jacob hit MIB in the head with a rock and sent him into the Mystical Cave that Boys Are Not Supposed to Explore, all I kept thinking was, “This is the worst flume ride ever!”
To conclude, I’ll just concede that it’s hard to draw the line with a show like “Lost” — Cuse and Lindelof have said that they certainly don’t want to emulate the “Star Wars” prequels and answer so many questions that the central mysteries of the story are de-mystified in a demoralizing way. But fans want answers, and some want more than others. It’s a hard line to walk, and people will always disagree about whether they explained too much or too little.
But “Across the Sea” brought up some questions I didn’t have before and it failed to answer them in a way that made up for the fact that it was depriving me of more Desmond, more Penny, more Sawyer, more Locke, more of the characters the show has made me love over the course of the past six years. There’s a fair amount that I learned that I didn’t really need to know, there were a few answers I wasn’t all that curious to get and now I have more questions about certain things than I did before. It just didn’t work for me (and I recommend you read this post by James Poniewozik, who writes really well about why he didn’t find this episode particularly necessary or dramatically interesting).
OK, I should probably stop writing before I turn off the two remaining readers with all my bellyaching. So my short Hail of Bullets will include a few more questions — maybe you figured all this stuff out, because I sure didn’t:
