Across The Sea Recap

May 12

metalman777Lost recap, season 6 No Comments

“Across the Sea” is the 15th episode in Season 6 of Lost and the 118th produced hour of the series as a whole. It aired on May 11, 2010. The history of the relationship between Jacob and The Man in Black is revealed. (Lostpedia.com)

I’ve said it since season 1: The dominant theme of this show is black and white. And when you mix the two, you get grey. I think this episode finally showed us sympathy for the Man in Black, but also for Jacob. Neither one is good, neither is evil.
The kids we saw in the jungle really were the two boys as kids (EVERYONE told me that second one was just an older Jacob when I said it was probably the Boy in Black).
The source of immortality seems to be in the wine that Mom gives to Jacob, the same wine that he gives to Richard Alpert. The same wine bottle that Smokey smashed.
The Man in Black has actually been dead in every scene we’ve seen him in so far… didn’t see THAT coming
Seeing a pregnant woman crawling out of the ocean immediately brought to mind Rousseau, and made me wonder about any possible connections. Just as this woman comes to the island and gives birth, Rousseau comes to the island and does the same. Smokey kills the rest of her team, but she is preserved (though driven mad by the circumstances). The baby goes over to the Others, and is ultimately killed. You’d think Smokey would do anything he could to preserve the one baby who arrived on the island – from across the sea, like him.
Right from the beginning, the distinction between the brothers seems to be that Jacob is content with his lot in life, where the Bruthah in Black is the guy who believes there’s something else out there and longs to see it. He’s the ambitious one
The “So… do you want to play or don’t you, Jacob?” certainly set up the idea of the island as a colossal game between two big players. Later, the “One day you can make up your own game and everyone else will have to follow your rules” was pretty awesome, too. The number of times they showed these two playing a game certainly made our poor Oceanic survivors look like nothing more than pawns.
Brother leaves Mom and Jacob chooses to stay with her. Being on the island seems to always be about choosing sides, whether, in season 1, you stayed with Sayid on the beach or went to the caves with Jack, or followed Jack in season 4 or Locke, or choose to do Jacob’s bidding or the Man in Black’s in season 6… it’s always about sides. Alpert was torn between the two sides when he first came, too. Again, it pulls in the metaphor of this show of black and white, good and evil, and the choices we make on a daily basis to do good or succumb to temptations.
So I remember back when Jack found the bodies in the cave, he said by the state of decomposition the bodies had been dead for 50 or 60 years. Um… either he TOTALLY sucked in autopsy class or the bodies decomposed at such a slow rate because of the healing properties of the island, or because she was ageless. But HE wasn’t ageless, so… (1-9 from Nik At Nite)
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“Across the Sea”‘s pregnant woman is a shipwrecked Latin-speaker named Claudia. We don’t learn very much about her, but there’s plenty to infer based on her name and appearance. “Claudia” is the female version of the name “Claudius”, which is a Roman name. The Romans do indeed speak Latin. I believe her clothes are roughly Roman-style as well, all but confirming Claudia as someone from the time of the Roman civilization.
The Roman civilization existed from about 500 BC to 500 AD, a period of 1,ooo years (the first half of which is known as the Roman Republic and the second half as the Roman Empire). This is obviously a rather large window for the events of “Across the Sea” to have taken place. The reign of Roman Emperor Claudius, however, was briefer: 41 AD to 54 AD. Since the mother-to-be seems to be named after this emperor, this could be taken as a clue to the exact timeframe.
It’s interesting that this Mother – who raises the twins as her own – never gives Jacob’s brother a name. I don’t think it was out of respect for Claudia. All I could come up with is that Mother can’t name him. Names have such significance, after all, for both us as the viewers and for those characters. Maybe anyone other than the birth mother supplying the name goes against the Rules. I found it interesting to recall that Claire didn’t give Aaron a name until several days after he was born, and it wasn’t until he was stolen from her (by another crazy baby-stealing mom, Ms. Danielle Rousseau). Is this Mother the one who was supposed to raise the twins? Or did she supplant the rightful raiser, Claudia, like Kate did to Claire? Suddenly, it seems highly possible that Aaron could be important again.
Thirteen-year-old Jacob, as it turns out, is indeed the same person as the child who had appeared to Flocke several times this season. What’s not clear is why Jacob can appear as both his child-aged self and his adult self (to Hurley) in 2007, despite being dead. Also, why does child-aged Jacob seem so wise and knowledgeable about the rules in 2007, when he’s certainly the duller of the two brothers in 50 AD, or whenever?
The Boy in Black is the more intelligent, crafty, enterprising, and curious of the two. From the beginning, he puts less trust in Mother, worrying that she’ll take away the board game he finds in the sand. The game, by the way, is called Senet, and comes from ancient Egypt, maybe as far back as 3000 BC, and was often buried in tombs with the dead as its luck element was believed to demonstrate that certain people were protected by the gods. The game board that BIB finds could signal that the Egyptians came to the island well before Claudia’s people, or that a group of Egyptians crashed there during the twins’ childhoods.
Do you think the wheel that was presumably buried in the well was the Wheel? Obviously, MIB didn’t actually get to finish the project. It would seem to me that he simply dug another hole and installed a different wheel during the centuries between then and now.
Here’s my take on what happened: entering the spring caused the light inside MIB (there’s some in every person, according to Mother) to go out. When the light goes out inside a person, that person turns into a disembodied cloud of smoke, thus the Smoke Monster. If the monster escapes to the outside world, everyone’s light will go out, and all people will turn into Smoke Monsters. This is why stopping MIB is so important now.
This would also shed some light on why Desmond is so important. It should be pretty obvious that the glowing light and the pockets of electromagnetic energy are one in the same. Desmond may be the only person who can enter the spring of light without becoming a Smoke Monster
For the record, its not entirely clear that the Smoke Monster really is the Man in Black. It could be a separate entity that has just taken on his appearance, like it later would for Christian, Yemi, Locke, etc. Not only does it steal these people’s forms, but their personalities as well. I don’t really believe this theory, though, since then we would need a separate explanation for the Smoke Monster’s origins beyond what we just saw, and there isn’t enough of Lost left for that.
Interestingly enough, Mother is the originator of “kill every person who comes to the island”. Protecting the island comes first, human beings second. Jacob doesn’t exactly object to this, as he will always put the island first, letting anyone else be killed along the way. He seems to be against directly killing people himself, though, hoping that they will choose to serve him. The Man in Black, however, will eventually take Mother’s route of killing most everyone who comes to the island as soon as they arrive (the Black Rock crew, the French team). The Others will also fill this role, which is sort of weird, as the Others claim to be Jacob’s people. Both the Smoke Monster and the Others go around killing bunches of people, but they are somehow opposed forces? I’m tempted to believe that the Others were unwittingly taking orders from MIB for a very long time. This would seem to be verified by the fact that Ben thought the man in the cabin was Jacob, when it was almost definitely MIB. (10-19 from Robz888 at Darkufo)
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So to me this means that Smokey was born because Jacob tampered with the Glorious Light Cave, and then Smokey was able to take the MIB’s form — and memories — because he was not properly buried. But Smokey is Smokey, and the MIB is dead. So that guy who was sitting with Jacob at the end of Season Five? That’s not really the MIB, it was Smokey in the MIB’s form. But apparently the writers believe that Smokey and the MIB’s goal (to get off of the Island) is one and the same, and so I guess we can just kind of substitute Smokey for the MIB, and vice versa. It actually raises more questions than it answers, but I’m too tired to think about it anymore. I accept it. Not really sure why Jack only thought the bodies had been there like 40 or 50 years, either. OK, I gotta let this go. (from Long Live Locke)
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I’m beginning to see what “Locke”‘s plan is. In the last episode we learned that he didn’t want to leave the Island, or at least that wasn’t what he’s been trying to do. He wants to kill the Candidates. Once all the Candidates are gone there will be no one left to protect the Light. Then he can destroy the Light and in turn kill everyone everywhere. That’s about as evil as it can get. (from Not Confused Just Lost)
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