Okay, this week one link, or in this case status update from my Facebook page.
On Thursday I said, “Watched “Across the Sea” last night. There’s 43 minutes I’ll never get back.”
“Across the Sea,” for those of you living in a cave for the past seven years, is episode 15 of the last season of Lost. Two more and that’s it, we’re off the island for good. I’ve been addicted to the show from the first episode, when Jack staggered around that beautiful beach in the middle of that terrifying plane wreck trying to save everyone.
So I wasn’t just unhappy at the end of “Across the Sea,” I was indignant. I could care LESS about Jacob and MIB, even if their mom is C.J. Cregg (without any memorable dialogue and with one of the worst wigs ever, and what IS it with Lost and bad wigs? Is it their way of pushing the fourth wall, wink, nod, we’re just a TV show, get a life? If so, that works for Ferris Bueller. It didn’t work for Lost.).
Um, yeah, but back to the topic under discussion, “Across the Sea.” I was indignant because this episode seemed so extraneous, and there is so little time left to explain to me what the hell has been going on these past six years. Lost prided itself on right turns out of already dog-legged narratives, and I was right there with them all the way, usually out of breath but what a ride! And then after five years (FIVE YEARS!) of making me care about Jack and Locke and Kate and Sawyer and Hurley and Sun and Jin and Sayeed and the rest, three and a half hours before the ride ends forever, they insist on making me sit through an origins episode with yet another new character.
Are you KIDDING me??
So, yeah. Teensy bit pissed.
And then, in the shower Friday morning, where I get all my best ideas, good thing I have on demand hot water, somehow on the tail end of my own dogleg epiphany about the plot of Kate19 (oh relax, you’ll read all about it in February 2012), I suffered a revelation about “Across the Sea.”
Jacob created Smokey when he beat his brother unconscious and shoved him into the light. The light rejected his brother and released his brother’s true self upon the island. It was the island’s equivalent of the Big Bang.
Smokey was literally Jacob’s creation. Jacob is responsible for his very existence. That’s why he has to stay on the island to contain him, to keep Smokey/MIB/fakeLocke from loosing absolute evil upon the entire world (philosopherLocke again!).
Jacob and Smokey/MIB are locked in the always epic battle of good versus evil, until Smokey finally triumphs and kills him, at least Jacob’s corporeal self. Jacob had to know this was inevitable, which explains why he’s been looking for someone to take his place from the beginning. Good cannot exist without evil, so there is no killing MIB. There is only the eternal struggle to maintain the always precarious balance.
Which brings us full circle back to that very first scene in the very first episode. Jack can’t save them all, but he has to try. Character really is destiny.
So, okay. Maybe that’s 43 minutes I don’t need back after all.