Lost: Mommy Issues

I’m afraid that we keep letting our imaginations get the best of us when it comes to this final season of “Lost.”

It happened for many (including me — a little) before “Ab Aeterno.” Before we actually saw Richard Alpert’s origins, we all let our imaginations run wild about how maybe the character was thousands of years old or an Egyptian god or any other manner of craziness. Instead, Richard’s back story rather straight-forwardly revealed how he came to the Island and that he was a measly 175-ish years old.

It DEFINITELY happened going into “Across the Sea”, which promised to unveil the origins of Jacob and the (still infuriatingly unnamed) Man in Black.

We had these two as Yin and Yang, God and the Devil, the personification of good and evil, etc. A part of me dug the notion that they were no different from our beloved castaways — Jacob and MIB have messed up parents…just like us! — but a bigger part of me was disappointed by this outing.

It got off to such a promising start with Latin-speaking and very pregnant castaway Claudia washing up on the Island a VERY long time ago and being brutally murdered by an unnamed MIB (Mom in Black, played by the reliably-excellent Allison Janney). Claudia had just delivered twins. She’d picked out the name Jacob for the one wrapped in the black blanket, but the unexpected second baby went nameless.

If this is the show’s way of telling us that the Man in Black shall remain nameless, I call BS. I understand that Claudia hadn’t picked out a name for him, but Jacob and his unnamed mom must’ve called him SOMETHING throughout all those years. (The lack of name is a little easier to digest with Mom in Black because her boys can just call her “mom.”) I mean, did they just say “Hey you” whenever they needed him? I know I sound like I’m ranting, but this was all extra annoying when you consider that writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse seemed to go out of their way to have someone say Jacob’s name every 20 seconds.

Bad form! This was as annoying as the season 4 finale, “There’s No Place Like Home”, where all the Oceanic 6 referred to dead Locke as “Jeremy Bentham” for no other reason than to keep his identity secret from viewers. (When it was revealed that Bentham = Locke, they went right back to calling him “Locke.) No, I still haven’t let that go.

More than my tedious issues with name-calling aside, my biggest problem with this episode is that the term I would use to describe it is a term I have never, EVER associated with “Lost.” I thought this episode was dumbed-down. (At least, “Ab Aeterno” had an epic love story to carry the day.)

I thought they tried to pack about two-hours worth of story into one. I thought the revelation that the secret of the Island (and the world?) is that it’s home to some sort of cheesy, illuminated Cave of Wonders was pretty disappointing. I thought that having Jacob ALWAYS wearing white and MIB ALWAYS wearing black was over-the-top. (What are they? Animated characters?) I loved that the show took a risk by not featuring any of its regular characters, but it probably wasn’t a good idea to make a couple of child actors carry the first half of the episode. (Especially when Mark Pellegrino and Titus Welliver have been SO good as Jacob and MIB, respectively.)

Oh well, at least we now know that little boy haunting Anti-Locke in the jungle was Jacob.

I know I’m coming off as cranky and probably too harsh, but all I know is that at 9:55 p.m. Eastern Standard time, all I was thinking was, “This is it? Is there going to be some mind-blowing twist in the end? Should I get a jump on DVR’d ‘Glee?’”

Don’t get me wrong, there were some things to like in the hour. We got some of those answers viewers are always hankering for. The story revealed that Mom in Black was the Island’s protector and obsessed with shielding her boys (especially the black kid) from the outside world and other humans. As adults, Jacob stayed with his mom, while the MIB joined a band of humans who stumbled onto the Island’s light source (the original Dharma Initiative?) and MIB’s ticket “home.”

Since the Island Protector job seems to come with knowledge of the future, I wonder if Mom in Black getting killed by her “son” was her plan all along. (She DID whisper, “Thank you” as she died.) I wouldn’t be surprised if her plan all along had been to raise Jacob to be her replacement as Island Protector and raise MIB to kill/liberate her.

But I believe I mentioned answers being given out in this episode. However, in classic “Lost” tradition, these answers lead to even more questions.

We found out who the Adam & Eve skeletons were. They weren’t Sun and Jin or Bernard and Rose (those active imaginations again). It was MIB’s mortal body laid to rest along with his mom’s by Jacob.

The reason this was slightly confusing (to me) is because minutes earlier we’d apparently seen the Man in Black become the Smoke Monster.

After murdering their mom, MIB was thrown by Jacob on the creek leading up the Cave of Wonders and seemingly killed when he hit his head on a rock. His body floated into the cave and out emerged the Smoke Monster. (To a curiously nonplussed reaction from Jacob.) I thought falling into the lighted cave had literally transformed the Man Black into Smokey (Mom in Black had warned strongly against going in there). However, MIB’s mortal corpse had been deposited not too far from Jacob, leading me to assume that the Smoke Monster had somehow been lying in wait in that cave the entire time, waiting for another dead body to drift in so he could impersonate it.

In other words, we learned that MIB was NOT originally the Smoke Monster. Meaning, we still have no idea what the hell that thing is.

The frustration with that scene was a microcosm for my feelings about this overly ambitious, fascinating, yet ultimately disappointing hour of television.

So what’d you think of this episode? Am I being way too hard on this episode? What do you make of MIB killing his “mom” with a knife — the same way Ben killed Jacob? Finally, are you depressed, excited or (gasp!) a little relieved that this whole thing is coming to an end? (I’m actually hearing from a few people that they just want this thing to be over with. Oh oh.)