Lost: Across The Sea

[DukeDevil]

Why can the Dharma Initiative people not have babies but Jacob and MiB could be born and so could Aaron?

So many questions. Not enough answers.

This is like the reverse of Radio Shack.

Conceived off island = can be born on island. Just can't be conceived on island. I'd imagine it has something to do with the time distortion properties of the island or the chaotic nature of the light/fate/whatever you want to call it. So many little things have to go right from one step to the next for a child to develop, perhaps it's that development in utero that is screwed up due to the chaotic nature of the island.

[cf-62]

7) How did Ben know how to get off the island? How did the other Other do it before (when we went to visit Michael)? Why did the island move when Locke turned the wheel? What was the incident about? Why the freaking numbers?

8) Why is the "Island" in control? Is it? So many times people have said, "The island isn't through with you." "The island won't let us die." Why? How? What???

The question about the numbers has been answered, though not in the show (to my knowledge). The back story of the numbers is that they are the main constants in the equation that determines the ultimate End of Days.

The Dharma Initiative was established to try to change the equation, because End of Days is REALLY REALLY soon. That's why they're on the island because the island IS the control for said End Of Days.

That is consistent with Jacob / CJC being Fate, as well as the idea of Fate (the real person mind you) being attached directly with the island informing individuals that "the island is through with you now."

The separation of the black and white yarn, coupled with the weaving, seals the deal for me. Again, while I'm not ecstatic about the episode last night, I thought it did establish 3 critical concepts:

1) Jacob is Fate
2) The Island is in control of all life
3) There's no such thing as "all good" or "all bad."

[OZZIE4DUKE]

The question about the numbers has been answered, though not in the show (to my knowledge). The back story of the numbers is that they are the main constants in the equation that determines the ultimate End of Days.

The Dharma Initiative was established to try to change the equation, because End of Days is REALLY REALLY soon. That's why they're on the island because the island IS the control for said End Of Days.

That is consistent with Jacob / CJC being Fate, as well as the idea of Fate (the real person mind you) being attached directly with the island informing individuals that "the island is through with you now."

The separation of the black and white yarn, coupled with the weaving, seals the deal for me. Again, while I'm not ecstatic about the episode last night, I thought it did establish 3 critical concepts:

1) Jacob is Fate
2) The Island is in control of all life
3) There's no such thing as "all good" or "all bad."

Where did you come up with this stuff? I'm an engineer, not an English major.

[DukeDevil]

I'm going to hold off the rage people seem to be dripping with till the end of the show. I still have a lot of hope that a lot more will be satisfyingly explained.

That being said, I didn't think this episode was that bad. Yes it didn't explain a lot, but I think a lot of people are angry because you were showed so much without enough of a reveal...knowledge blue balls if you will.

Personally, I found the development of Jacob to be most fascinating. Early in the series, he was this key to the whole show. If somehow, someway you could just TALK to Jacob, sit him down or get an episode that just showed us a lot about him, you'd know all the secrets and all would be revealed. He was all knowing and controlled whatever he wanted on the island. Now we see that he has his own problems and may not even understand as much as we thought himself, as his mother died before she passed on her full knowledge to him. It also seems like the only reason MIB couldn't leave the island before was because his "mother" kept hoping he'd come back take the job protecting the light. Not that he couldn't but rather that she needed him to stay, and lied to try and keep him there. Additionally, Jacob's attack is what turned him INTO smokey, and it's smokey that can't be allowed off the island. While MIB is evil, you can see that early on, he just wanted to leave, he felt his destiny was off the island, and his bit of dark nature was grown through the situation to encompass him entirely. Regardless, as several people have said, nobody is purely good/evil in this show. It's an idea that doesn't jive with our TV watching experience, as we like to classify people as one or the other.

Additionally, this episode answered the weirdness I felt about how Jacob so casually treated the people on the island. If you're raised you're whole life to think of yourself as a superior being, and all other people are flawed and inferior...well that combined with centuries (millenia? who knows) of life would probably dull you to those people's troubles.

Someone asked about the statue, my thought was that it was either Jacob, with his immense amount of free time (he made some comment at some point about having tons of time to learn/do stuff) or it's a project built by the people he brought to the island at some point.

[Jarhead]

Where did you come up with this stuff? I'm an engineer, not an English major.

Gee, all this time I've been thinking you were a bumper sticker salesman.(GTHC)

[HaveFunExpectToWin]

Okay, I may have missed it, but did anyone else think that CJ/Allison Janney was Smokey? Clearly she was able to destroy a well and entire village and she could ponly be killed by being stabbed without speaking first. What does this mean? No idea.

[A-Tex Devil]

Here's an interview with DL/CC. Take it for what it's worth:

Here is the money quote, though, and why doing TV shows like these or trilogies successfully is so difficult (the Matrix and its disappointing conclusion immediately come to mind).


"Whatever your theory was, our presentation of the endgame of the show may disprove your theory, so we're sorry if you don't like the fact that you don't get the Man in Black's name, but you don't get it."

[A-Tex Devil]

This little tidbit from the same article was funny:

You've said many times that when people find out who Adam and Eve are, we'll all realize just how long you've been planning the mythology. Well, I went back and watched the "House of the Rising Sun" scene, and Jack says that the clothing looks like it's 50 years old. Is he just not very good at calculating the rate of decay on fabric?

CC: Jack is not really an expert in carbon dating.

DL: He's not really a forensic anthropologist. We need to bring in Bones.

CC: Or Charlotte. She's an anthropolgist.

DL: The other theory that I would like to throw out there is that Jacob and his mother were just expert craftsmen. They made those clothes on that loom so well, it would appear that they were only 50 years old in decomposition, when in fact it's several thousand.

CC: Or perhaps the fabric is magic. A lot of theories there, Alan.

[JG Nothing]

Here's an interview with DL/CC. Take it for what it's worth:

Here is the money quote, though, and why doing TV shows like these or trilogies successfully is so difficult (the Matrix and its disappointing conclusion immediately come to mind).


"Whatever your theory was, our presentation of the endgame of the show may disprove your theory, so we're sorry if you don't like the fact that you don't get the Man in Black's name, but you don't get it."

If the main problem was that we don't learn MIB's name, then that would be fine. If Cruse and Lindelof think people are disappointed because their theories are being disproved, then C and L are idiots. The issue is their mythology is really disappointing given all the teasers they dropped over the years (e.g. temples, time travel, statues, Egyptian hieroglyphics, magnetic energy, numbers, etc.). If they had really thought this through from the beginning and introduced teasers that actually fit into the mythology, it could have been epic. They still have 3.5 hours to do something, but they have already conceded that many questions will not be answered. I am not optimistic for a satisfying resolution.

[JG Nothing]

This little tidbit from the same article was funny:

Funny as in sad. This just shows they are making a lot of it up as they go along.

[A-Tex Devil]

If the main problem was that we don't learn MIB's name, then that would be fine. If Cruse and Lindelof think people are disappointed because their theories are being disproved, then C and L are idiots. The issue is their mythology is really disappointing given all the teasers they dropped over the years (e.g. temples, time travel, statues, Egyptian hieroglyphics, magnetic energy, numbers, etc.). If they had really thought this through from the beginning and introduced teasers that actually fit into the mythology, it could have been epic. They still have 3.5 hours to do something, but they have already conceded that many questions will not be answered. I am not optimistic for a satisfying resolution.

I'd read the whole article if you haven't -- a lot of what I am reading in this thread exemplifies the first part of that quote. That MIB name thing was just a trite example.

It's clear they never intended to explain the science/reason behind WHY the island could time travel, what the magnetic energy was, etc. etc. Frankly, they shouldn't have. All those wacked out collective thought and fringe science theories would be lost on a majority of the viewers if they ever tried to explain them on the show (remember all those rambling scientific theories about lost that came out a couple of years ago?). I'm not letting them completely off the hook, because I think they dropped the ball with respect to motivations of characters throughout this season. But generally, I don't need to know WHY the island travels through time or WHY it's electromagnetic. It just is.

In my mind, we have come down to this: The island is a special place that was "powered" by the light we just saw in this episode. Allison Janney protected it and likely someone protected it before her. She was meant to pass it down to MIB, who was disillusioned and revolted, and we see how Jacob now becomes "the one".

Unlike prior passings of the torch (which we can imply occurred), something goes horribly wrong here when MIB is engulfed by the light. Now his disembodied presence "his soul" wants off the island, and for some reason, this is not good (maybe we'll find out why, maybe we won't). Smokey entered the light and is now transformed. Did the light go out? I guess we'll find out.

I get why people didn't like last night's show. I do. But anyone that expected all the answers last night were fooling themselves on 2 levels. First, you aren't going to get all the answers, and second, one purpose of last night was to set up what is to come in the last 3 1/2 hours.

DL/CC are right that this show can't just create mysteries and then knock then mechanically knock them out with answers. You do that and you get Flashforward.

[El_Diablo]

Allison Janney protected it and likely someone protected it before her. She was meant to pass it down to MIB, who was disillusioned and revolted, and we see how Jacob now becomes "the one".

And then he immediately "lets" someone go into the cavern, betraying his only real duty. Stupid Jacob.

However...his duty is to prevent anyone from taking the unobtainium light off the island, so at least that explains why he now feels the need to keep the monster there forever.

[JulesInLA]

<tongue in cheek> Scene: Jack, Kate and Hurley are seated together. Flocke walks up and sits down with them. Screen cuts to black. Cue music: "Don't Stop Believeing" by Journey.</tongue in cheek>

<Sarcasm> Question: On or off the island? </sarcasm>

[Lord Ash]

<tongue in cheek> Scene: Jack, Kate and Hurley are seated together. Flocke walks up and sits down with them. Screen cuts to black. Cue music: "Don't Stop Believeing" by Journey.</tongue in cheek>

<Sarcasm> Question: On or off the island? </sarcasm>

That final moment of the Sopranos has haunted me for a long, long time, and I've been worrying about a similar legacy-cheapening ending for Lost.

[Faustus]

More and more I'm feeling like King Arthur in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" as they approach Camelot where he stops and says, "On second thought, let us not go there, for it is a silly place."

[johnb]

When you're disillusioned, it meant you were illusioned in the first place.

And I was illusioned.

I grew up reading sci fi, and one of the absolute cardinal rules of good sci fi was to add a few magical/scientific bits and pieces and then see how humans would then live. The Lost people continue to add more and more junk to a system that could easily have been simpler and more elegant and more character driven, but instead they've orchestrated bizarro pseudoscience and forced absolutely massive character shifts in almost every character--such massive shifts that they became almost cartoonish. I've loved the show, but much of it came down to the fact that I very much liked a half dozen or more of the characters (Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hugo, Locke, Mr Eko, Ben, a couple others) and would have watched them walk down the beach, chase boars, and flirt with each other.

Like everyone else, I'll watch but will be hard pressed to think of the creators as anything beyond lucky mediocrities.

[JasonEvans]

Like everyone else, I'll watch but will be hard pressed to think of the creators as anything beyond lucky mediocrities.

I really, really, really want to know what JJ Abrams thinks of this season. I doubt he would be honest because of his ongoing relationship (Star Wars movies) with Damon Lindelhoff, but I would love to know his opinion of the end game.

As an aside Carlton Cuse is a no-talent hack who totally lucked into an ongoing role on Damon and JJ's show. Prior to Lost, Cuse had overseen several very forgettable shows including Nash Bridges.

--Jason "sigh... so sad" Evans

[JasonEvans]

Conceived off island = can be born on island. Just can't be conceived on island. I'd imagine it has something to do with the time distortion properties of the island or the chaotic nature of the light/fate/whatever you want to call it. So many little things have to go right from one step to the next for a child to develop, perhaps it's that development in utero that is screwed up due to the chaotic nature of the island.

I think the pregnancy problems were a relatively new phenomenon. Wasn't Miles born on the Island? I recall the Dharma folks in the 1970s talking about wanting to deliver babies off-Island, but it was not a necessity.

-Jason "pregnancy, a long forgotten mystery" Evans

[Jarhead]

Now that I think about it, I can't help but wonder how you all handled shows such as Star Trek. How did you feel about Scotty beaming up Captain Kirk? Was it necessary to give a scientific answer as to how that happened. Or how about warp speed? Then there was Gilligan's Island where how those people had so much contact with the others who were not stranded with them, and couldn't get rescued by them? What about 24, and its habit of doing a 2 day job in just 60 minutes minus a bunch of commercials.

What about all of those Law and Order Shows that end suddenly, and we have to guess at the ending? I'm going to watch the next 3½ hours of Lost, and if I have any questions, I'll just wait until Bostondevil gives us an explanation. Maybe they'll annotate the DVDs of the whole six years.

Lost is fiction. They don't have to explain everything. You can assume anything you want, and nobody cares if you assumed incorrectly. I think they have explained too much already. I don't care who controls smokie. Let me know when Burn Notice starts up again.

[OZZIE4DUKE]

Now that I think about it, I can't help but wonder how you all handled shows such as Star Trek. How did you feel about Scotty beaming up Captain Kirk? Was it necessary to give a scientific answer as to how that happened. Or how about warp speed? Then there was Gilligan's Island where how those people had so much contact with the others who were not stranded with them, and couldn't get rescued by them? What about 24, and its habit of doing a 2 day job in just 60 minutes minus a bunch of commercials.

Here's a book for you, Jarhead
http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Star-T.../dp/0060977108

My question about Gilligan's Island is why did Thurston Howell III and his wife have so many clothes for a 3 hour tour, and where on the boat did they store all their luggage? Maybe that's why they got lost...