Didn’t see this mentioned yet, but did anyone else notice the way Esau killed his mother? He stabbed her w/ that knife before she could say anything to him. The same way others have been instructed to do.
I don’t think it really means anything “magical,” but that after Esau died, Jacob kept the knife and has had people trying to kill the MiB with it in a similar way as a sort of justice for his mother’s murder.
Also, did the woman say “Thank you” right before she died?
Maybe this should be its own thread -
This was a classic Lost episode from the patented Lost Episode Generator
[ul]
[li]Introduce a new major character with special knowledge.[/li][li]Have other characters ask them to explain something, to which they can reply, “It’s complicated.” “You are not ready.” or just respond with silence. (Honestly, how do all of these characters with special knowledge ever learn it if no one ever tells them?)[/li][li]Introduce a new Island Mystery! (Yeah, I’ve lived on this island for years, but I’ve never seen THAT before, huh.) [/li][li]Avoid any meaningful answers.[/li][li]Intersperse Relationship Moments - lots of silent intense eye contact and halting dialog.[/li][li]Introduce a cadre of “Others”, ominous rough-dressed extras always engaged in some industrious activity, who came from god-knows-where.[/li][li]Kill a bunch of people.[/li][/ul]
But you’re wrong. There were no layers of McGuffinHood. They went straight from “What is the ocean” to “A wizard did it”.
Make Mommy Dearest a goddess. I’m fine with that. Have her give Jacob a speech that ends with him having to walk into the light to be blessed by the island. Tell Jacob what he can and can’t do. No, what we get is drinking a magic potion while sitting in a river.
Explain to us how a late middle-aged unarmed woman can take out a village full of people all tough and muscly from digging holes all over the place. Then explain where she rented the dump trucks to fill in the well. All in a single day while Esau was sleeping.
There weren’t any, as evidenced by Jacob killing Esau.
I think this is the one thing that DID make sense this episode. Esau isn’t smokey. Smokey isn’t Esau. Smokey, is the Evil Of Humanity locked in the Well of Souls. Well, he was locked in.
As the Island’s designated guardian (as the candidates are as well), Smokey can’t kill them. He’s the liquid in the bottle and they’re the glass (the island is the cork). He can’t break his own bottle, someone has to do it for him.
-Joe
I would say that it’s because he’s alive and Esau is dead - but dead people can travel off the island too (Charlie visiting Hurley, for instance). good question…
I thought it was Latin.
If we’re talking about the language the crazy lady spoke to the pregnant woman, I think it was indeed latin. Some of the words sound spanish-esque simply because it derives from Latin. Early on the pregnant woman says what sounds like “gracias” for thank you, but the equivelant word in Latin is “gratias”. Otherwise they used definite non-spanish words. When she asked her name, she said (IIRC) nomen, rather than the spanish nombre. Edit: Plus as I understand it you wouldn’t use “nombre” when asking that in spanish, but rather como se llamas.
Within a 30-second span at the wheel construction site, MIB told his mother that he was special and that he didn’t belong there.
His name is obviously Thom Yorke.
I think it’s clear from the Latin that this episode was supposed to be set sometime during the Roman Empire. At first I was skeptical about Roman galleys making it to the Pacific Ocean, until I remembered that the island has probably been moved a bunch of times after the donkey wheel was installed, so this was probably in the Mediterranean. That would also explain why there was an Egyptian-looking statue built on it.
Exactly! I really, really wish (hope?) that they would simply attach this to a pre-existing mythology. It would give us a matrix for understanding without having to explain back and back and back. Mommy Dearest is Hestia, and she’s protecting the Light of Goodness, without which humanity will be utterly depraved and Earth will be a living hell. Then we don’t need to ask who she is, why she has magic powers, how she learned about the importance of the light, etc. Instead of her randomly coming upon a shipwrecked pregnant woman, have her reading signs and portents that foretell her death and the coming of a replacement, so it makes a bit more sense why Jacob and MIB are special and can have powers too.
Marcellus’s briefcase was OK, because no one said, “Above all else, we **must **not let the contents fall into possession of a left-handed Scotsman!” Once you do that, you have to tell us how you know that, what’s so special about a left-handed Scotsman, and what would happen if he got the item.
I didn’t think this episode was that bad. I felt bad for Jacob, his brother and his mother. I also subscribe to the theory that what we later see as the MiB is really the primeval Smoke Monster wearing his first and favorite skin suit, after having been inadvertently released by Jacob. So later Jacob gets to see this non-human thing parading around in his brother’s guise; how horrifying would that be?
I can also get behind Jacob being a bit simple and a mama’s boy, and an unwilling candidate. When offered the wine of duty and immortality by his mother, he almost literally said, “if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”
Why do people keep saying that? We have never been shown nor told explicitly whose idea the purge was.
Not to mention the irksome use of the ubiquitous “whack someone on the head to render them unconscious” technique. Apparently, in TV land, no one gets epidural hematomas.
I thought this episode was lame, lame, lame, for the same reasons as many others stated. A few weeks ago, the producers said in an interview “the only mystery we feel compelled to explain is the conflict between Jacob and the MiB.” So this episode was when they were supposed to answer the one Big Question they told us they would answer… and they still haven’t really answered it. The episode summary for tonight said that Locke’s true motives would be revealed. Well, we already knew he wanted to go “home” (despite that we now know he was born on the island–another example of retconning IMO.) But fine, he wants to go where his true people came from. Why is this so bad? Why was it considered so bad, even before he turned into a smoke monster? What is Jacob’s primary purpose–protecting the light inside the cave from outsiders, or preventing MiB from leaving? Are we ever going to find this out?
On a side note, not that I’m defending the show’s wishy-washiness on answers, but I wish people would stop with the mocking “it’s complicated.” Where did that get started? Characters on Lost never say that. They say “there’s no time to explain, we have to keep moving” or “you’re just going to have to trust me” or they change the subject, but I cannot recall a single time when anyone ever said “it’s complicated.”
There are like 20 “It’s complicated” in the earlier seasons. They’ve gotten away from it recently.
It’s not quite as bad as “there’s no time to explain! Now let’s silently go on a 4 hour trek across the island!”
This was my biggest beef with the episode. It’s been such a cop out going back how many seasons now.
-“Ask Ben, he’s the leader and knows a lot about the island.”
-“Oh, I actually don’t know anything, you’ll have to talk to Richard.”
-“Let’s ask Richard!”
-“Oh, I actually don’t know anything either, you’ll have to talk to Jacob.”
-“Let’s ask Jacob!”
-“Oh, I actually don’t know anything either, you’ll have to talk to my mother.”
I’m afraid if we had any more than 3 episodes left we’d find out that she doesn’t know much either but got her marching orders from someone else who doesn’t know anything either.
What would have been wrong with making Jacob and Esau the original finders of the magic light? Then Esau could have done experiments with it to attempt to figure out it’s nature while Jacob worshipped and prayed to it to be divinely enlightened about it’s nature.
Instead we have ‘mother’ who unexplainedly knows how to make magic juice for Jacob, can cast a spell on both of them so they can’t kill eachother, and can single handedly wipe out a tribe and fill a hole before nightfall.
No explanation is needed. Walt has been off story for three years. His growth would be natural, as when he appeared in the episode where Locke was killed by Ben.
Wasn’t it also the same dagger than Sayid and Richard are given?
That is possible. I guess she was Roman. There were certain pronouciation that sounded Latino rather than Latin. That’s probably what through me off. I guess the reason I understood a bit more of it was because of my old freshman latin course. Who knew? I thought I erased 1989-1990 memories with all the whiskey I drank in college.
How do we mesh this with Flocke telling people he was once a man? That he has a crazy mother? Does he not only read the memories of people he scans, but also absorb their personalities?
And I like Hampshire’s version better. Of course, that’s the danger of a fanboy type show. You spend years trying to figure it out, and there is a huge chance you’ll like one of your versions better.
It’s quite frustrating, but also quite in keeping with the main faith/science theme of the show. If their idea is that Jacob takes the path of faith, while MIB takes the path of science, then Jacob can’t really be given a concrete explanation of things; he has to take things on faith. I’m not sure it’s great storytelling, but I think it’s consistent in that way.
If it turns out my theory is correct, then I’d figure that the smoke monster never was a conscious entity before it took on the form of Jacob’s brother. Either he figuratively identifies with the brother, or has actually forgotten his (its) own nature and literally thinks (incorrectly) that he’s that person.
ETA: and he could also be lying. He’s trying to connect with people and manipulate them into doing what he wants – it’s better to have some human background story, to that end, isn’t it? So he could be just using what he remembers (the brother’s memories having been absorbed by the smoke monster).
Well, yeah, isn’t it clear that’s happened with the form he’s adopted with Locke? And Locke’s personality (it seems to me) is starting to give him some internal conflicts.
I think I would have enjoyed this episode if it had come earlier in the season, and not when we have three hours left.
It didn’t really answer any questions at all: “I’ve made it so you’ll live forever and you can’t hurt each other.” “Drink this stuff and you’ll be like me.” Instead of “a wizard did it”, it’s “CJ Cregg did it”. I have a hard time imagining how they can bring the main characters’ story to a satisfying conclusion AND really tell us what the island is all about.
I hope they surprise me.
Woa.
Esau is Smokey. Everything we’ve seen of Smokey indicates that he is psychologically continuous with Esau.
“can cast a spell on both of them so they can’t kill each other” But that wasn’t true. Esau was killed by Jacob and then sent into the “light”. If Mom was immortal why could she be killed by Esau?
I like the explanation of the faith vs. science which has been a theme throughout the series. And the whole BSG “it has all happened before and will all happen again” reoccurances of “others” who are left alone for a certain amount of time and then wiped out is at least consistent. Which is more than can be said for the rest of the show. The heck with the answers, where is the consistency?
I’m so confused. But it must be a state in which I am comfortable because I keep exposing myself again and again to the cause of my confusion and frustration.
Eh, maybe Jacob didn’t kill MIB but transformed him, so it doesn’t count. And having the no kill rule still in effect is why smokey can’t just kill Jacob.