Interesting. Care to elaborate?
Wait, Indy is going to show up? Maybe the light was the Ark.
I don’t know what I think of this episode. I’ll watch it again tomorrow with the wife though.
Preferably with an 8 painted on its fur.
Yeah, even Pellegrino looked bored at having to play such an insipid Jacob.
And Esau (fuck you show, if you’re not going to name him we’ll give him the logical mythical name) is eeeeeevil because he wants to get off the island, away from the woman who raised him with lies and murdered his real Mom, and see his ancestral lands and the rest of the freakin’ world? And is bright and inventive enough to find out how to do it only to get attempted-murdered for it? And kills the woman who killed everyone in the village he’d lived in for thirty years?
That’s quite a morally twisted little supposition. Then again, this show also tells me I’m supposed to root for Kate.
If Ben actually pulls a rabbit out of his ass in the finale I’ll laugh and give the show an enthusiastic thumbs up. 
Man, I miss my Ben. Richard and Miles too, but especially Ben.
I liked Jacob, I really did. I thought the actor did a fantastic job in earlier episodes dealing with Esau, Ben, Hurley, and others. He seemed a wise figure fully in control of his situation, even with Ben. That fit the show’s mythology. I don’t buy that the Jacob we saw tonight is the same character.
I hated that. I want to believe that Jacob is good and that Smokey is a real threat to humanity. But right now… It looks like Jacob lucked into his position through ridiculous naivete and Esau had to die because he was inquisitive. I really don’t like that supposition.
And FTR, I love the West Wing and Janney was completely wasted in this episode.
I’ve said before, and stood by my position, that Jacob and Smokie are angels.
I still stand by that in the sense that they are the moderating forces between good and evil with the intent of a superior being trying to protect humans from finding the driving force that makes them human and the god, or gods, insignificant.
Smokie going down the golden hole killed his corporeal being, but opened his eyes to the truth. That doesn’t make him good or bad, but it does make him aware.
Lost has been building a mythology. This is not a new mythology, but I’m kind of of liking the way it’s going and I’m looking forward to how it is reconciled.
Yes, watching this show without personal demands and expectations before each episode is extremely gratifying. I’ll be surprised, but quick to agree if the series ends unsatisfying, But I found this episode engaging, well written, acted and paced, and totally entertaining television. Most of the people objecting to everything that happens have been doing so for the last 4 seasons. It seems so absurd to me to stick with a show for 6 years and then so confidently declare that what it is doing in its penultimate and antepenultimate episodes is wrong, with so many unknown variables remaining. So absurd, that it gives me pleasure when I particularly enjoy an epsiode for exactly the sames reasons that they hate it.
What a bunch of bullshit.
I suppose Jacob, in a way, did steal “Esau’s” birthright by saying she had wanted Esau to be the caretaker, but then drank his mother’s Flavor-Aid™ anyway after she convinced him to.
I’m kind of stymied by this episode. My first reaction was, “what is this cryptic juju they’re going on about?!” It seemed more like a completely different show, other than the fact we’ve known about Jacob and “Esau”, and the Island’s mysterious energy. But rather than getting a glimpse of how the pieces fit together, I feel this was more like a “midichlorian” explanation. Or not even. Just… yeh, it’s magic or something.
I’m hoping this episode will come to light in hindsight once the finale airs. If not…* GRRRR.*
I think a lot of folks in this thread are so focused on the technical answers that they have missed the rather obvious allegory here, one that has been hinted at throughout the series.
Jacob and the MiB represent the two reactions of the human condition regarding ‘divine providence’–and I use that term for the ineffable idea of a higher power that rises to the surface when a person confronts the unknown, regardless of whether or not God is involved. Primitive man was confronted with a wide range of phenomena he would consider inexplicable, which implies he had a greater capacity for understanding and accomodating this reaction. As our intellect evolved, more and more phenomena yielded to science, and that primitive sense of the world changed. But there are still (and probably always will be) profound mysteries just exceeding our grasp–be they the origins of the universe or the source of a beautiful light around the bend of a cave. Primitive man was wise enough to avoid testing divinity–who wants to chance pissing off the gods?–but modern man finds the potential advantages too enticing to avoid risky temptation. Or you can turn this around: Primitive man’s fear of shadows left him with a dreary, wothless existence, while modern man’s courage to stare into the abyss have wrought wonders.
MiB represents man’s inquisitive self, which doesn’t react well to the arbitrary imposition of dicta from on high. How else can you make sense of MiB’s explanation of the wheel–forges after 30 years of searching for “another way” to get to a light he saw naturally in childhood: “We’re going to make an opening–one much bigger than this one. And them I’m going to attach that wheel to a system we’re building, a system that channels the water, and the light. And then I’m going to turn it. And when I do, I’ll finally be able to leave this place.” (“leave this place” = throw off the last vestige of primitive man; yes, he really “doesn’t belong here”).
Here’s the thing this episode proved: Neither Jacob nor Esau/MiB have any power over the island. Neither of them is its master; they are as baffled by mystery as all the other castaways. It is only their primitive vs. modern reaction to it that sets them apart–a contrast paralleled in the Jack/Locke split between “man of science, man of faith”. And as many commentors have noted, this interpretation makes Esau a much more sympathetic character (since we’re closer to the modern worldview), and Jacob (devoted as he is to an unquestioned worldview) something of a stooge.
Don’t get me wrong–I have had problems with quite a large part of this season (I still don’t completely understand the relevance of the “flash sideways”, and still think they owe us a better explanation of Flocke’s motives), but for me the episode crystallized a theme that has run thru the series since the beginning, and did it relatively well.
Well personally I don’t base my enjoyment of a show on how others perceive it, even in a schadenfreude perspective as tempting as it may be. But I will say this… You have a point.
For myself I’ve felt that others have laid down unrealistic expectations. Even very early on I knew that certain mysteries were going to be deemed superfluous and I accepted that. But Jacob and Smokey became central to the show, they formed the backbone of it’s mythology, and that’s all I, personally, wanted addressed in some definitive fashion. I felt that pretty much everything else had been answered sufficiently. Richard and the Others, Dharma, the pregnancy issues, the cabin, time travel, the significance of the numbers, travel to and from the island…explanations were laid out and I accepted them. Few of them were spelled out explicitly, but I never expected that.
But this was about the origins of Jacob and Smokey and the nature of the island, these are the only mysteries left that still matter. Instead of giving us something meaningful they pulled their usual stunt and moved the goal posts once again. This was the one episode I didn’t expect them to do that in. At this point there isn’t anyone still watching the show who’s not going to tune into the bitter end. Who or what did they think they were going to hook with this? In another thread I said the only mystery I care about anymore is concerning the truth of Jacob and Smokey and why they’re on island. We still really don’t know the answer to that question. At this point, as I said in that thread, I don’t think we’re going to see an answer at all. They’re there because of the ‘light’ in the cave. What is it? Is is a pocket of electromagnetism as we’ve seen hinted at for five years now? is it something more? What is Smokey and why does someone need to ‘bottle’ him on the island? Who was ‘Mom’, and why was she there? Why was she looking for a replacement? Why were the others 'evil? Who were they?
Is the entire show built on a macguffin? Are we not supposed to care about the islands nature? Only that it’s ‘important’? And our losties were candidates to replace Jacob based simply on the premise that the ‘bad things’ can’t leave it? Honestly if the show weren’t ending next week I might have more patience with it. But this is the end! Why are they still shoveling more questions our way?
Breathing deeply… The show still has the equivalent of three episodes to go and they could still pull this off, I admit that. But this was a seriously wasted opportunity.
The fact that they turned Jacob into a wussy man child may have pissed me off more than anything. They should have left his past alone rather than doing something like this to him.
Has anyone posted any translations yet?
Incidentally, the two stones could well be the Urim and Thummim.
I’m getting to the point that Spider Robinson got some decades ago along about the fourth or fifth Dune book when he said something to the effect that he’d been following this story for a lot of years, and at the end there better be a pretty damn big rabbit come out of a pretty damn big hat.
Yes, I’ll watch it to the bitter end, but sheesh!
I really thought they were going to pull some weird Jesus-y thing when MIB said “he’d lived among them for 30 years” to see what the people were like, and that his true name would be some big reveal. Guess we’ll never know what it was anyway.
This whole episode was like it was leading up to something that never came. All it did was raise more questions. Who’s Crazy Mom lady and where did she come from? What’s the deal with the bright light? (My first thought upon seeing it was “Hey, it’s the Heart of the TARDIS!” Aha, now that would explain all the time travel!)
I really hope the last two episodes at least give some kind of explanation, and it’s not simply “It’s a magical Island because it’s magic. It needs to be protected because it’s magic. The way it works is through magic! The end!”
Heh.
“His name is Jacob.”
“There’s another baby!”
“His name…is Smoke Monster!”
So this feeble old woman, near death, hauled a grown man’s body up a rickety ladder and out of a cavern, then went around the village systematically wiping out the population (with more rock to the head attacks no doubt), destroyed the giant wheel, burned the village to the ground and managed to fill in the cavern with about 10 dump truck loads of dirt, all before MIB woke up?
After seeing that, I fully expected her to turn into the Smoke Monster.
A couple things: The thing in the cave is a larger version owhat was in Marsalis Wallace’s briefcase.
Esau can’t leave the island because he is not Esau. What he is is bound to the island due to its very nature. It can only leave its containment under a certain set of circumstances and his substance doesn’t play well with the world at large. Think matter/antimatter.
Aside from protecting the Magic Lightbulb , Jacob feels a need to hold back Smokey because he created/released him in the first place.
It wouldn’t surprise me if at least part of one of these factors into the “complications.”
I thinking the light in the hole is the same thing as the light in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. We’re lucky we got as much explanation as we did for the light that lies at the heart of MacGuffin Island.
Stop it. Please. For your own sanity’s sake.
Here’s the problem: everything involved in the journey (characters, mainly) is a slave to the mystery. The characters rarely act rationally, nor even consistently with the way they acted before. The only thing holding this poorly written show together is the mystery and the apparently misguided belief that those mysteries will be solved.