I love LOST. It's my favorite show of all time. But this episode makes no sense. I'll share my thoughts as I rewatch....
We open with a Latina woman giving birth to two boys who look nothing like her, nor anything like each other. Additionally, throughout the episode, the boys keep modern haircuts, and their clothes always look brand-new. That sort of thing really takes me out of it.
Early in the episode, the boy-in-black asks his new adoptive Mother what death is, as if he's never seen death before (in finding things to eat). In the very next scene, after all, we see him hunting. So why did he not understand what death is? Again, takes me out. Doesn't make sense.
I'm fine with the whole mythology of the light. Some people find it hokey, but it works for me. It fits my observations of people in real life: in awe of light, its interplay with shadow, and all things that sparkle and glisten and shimmer. We talk about bringing things to light; we talk about God being light; clearly there is something about light that is at the core of human existence, so making it part of the LOST mythology did make sense to me.
But the dialogue is so dumb. For example, when Mother takes adult Jacob back to the cave, they're looking at the light when she says, "Do you remember what I showed you here?" and he says, "The light," as if they aren't looking directly at it in that moment. Huh?
And then in that scene, we suddenly hear her speaking in Latin again. Haven't they actually been speaking in Latin this entire time (even though we are hearing them in English)? Basic storytelling mechanics get self-contradicted here.
And somehow we are supposed to buy that the Man In Black was the son that Mother loved most. It's a core part of Jacob's struggle. And yet we never actually see any indication of it. There's no depiction of any disparity, so Jacob just comes across as a whiny drama queen.
And I'm still trying to make sense of what happened with the Man in Black's well. First we see it having magnetic qualities, but then MiB is able to wield his knife while down inside the well, with no apparent difficulty. Then Mother comes down, rams his head into a wall, carries him up the ladder herself, fills in the well completely, and breaks the stone structures. Um... how? Where did she get superhuman strength, the ability to make her sons immortal, and all her other powers? There has long been a theory that there are two smoke monsters (perhaps one black and one white) because we sometimes observe a smoke monster behaving inconsistently. Is she herself a smoke monster? How else could she cause such superhuman levels of destruction? Somehow she kills an entire village too. It's hard to really get into the drama here, or accept the character motivations, with such gaping holes in the narrative.
The biggest hole, to me, is this: we never actually find out what the smoke monster is. One explanation of what we see in the episode: the black smoke monster is the Man in Black, having been converted to that form by the light. But then how is his body still found? To me an alternate explanation is much more consistent with how the mechanics of the show have worked thus far: the smoke monster already existed (perhaps it was hiding in the cave) and has always had the ability to take on the form of a dead body that's on the island, and now the Man in Black is such a body. The smoke monster isn't the Man in Black; it's just taking his form, like it's taken the forms of other dead characters. We didn't learn anything new about the monster in this episode, at least not for sure, and this episode was supposed to be, in large part, the story of the origin of the monster. Wasn't it? As viewers, we were robbed.
I'm also confused how different ages of Jacob show up on the island, throughout the season. To my recollection, all other on-island appearances of the deceased have shown how old they were when they died.
We get answers to some little questions, but not the biggest ones. Ultimately this episode is practically meaningless and a waste of time.
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