Lost Review: The Stream That Leads to More Questions

“Every question I answer will simply lead to another question. You should rest. Just be grateful you’re alive.”

This line from this week’s episode of Lost best summarizes what the whole night brought. While we got to learn the back story of Jacob and the Man in Black whom we should just call Esau for Biblical reference sake, a lot of questions still remain unanswered and will probably remain so with only three episodes left to the entire series.

It began with a pregnant woman being shipwrecked on the island. She’s walking painfully through the jungle when she comes across a stream and meets a mysterious woman played by Allison Janney. They speak Latin to each other and Janney’s character helps the pregnant woman back to her cave. They start communicating in English though so us viewers who didn’t study Latin in high school can understand what’s going. The pregnant woman introduces herself as Claudia but Janney’s character refrains from giving her name (let’s call her Rebecca though since this episode takes a very Biblical turn).

Claudia goes into labor and Rebecca delivers her baby whom the mother calls Jacob. But she’s not done yet and bears another son, a twin who remains unnamed (it’s Esau!). As Claudia asks to see her other child, Rebecca suddenly has that crazy look on her face and uses a rock to bash the woman’s head. Some years later, Jacob and Esau are young boys playing on the beach. Already we clearly are shown who is light and dark, Jacob being blond wearing tan colored clothes and Esau who is brunet and wearing darker shades. The boys were raised by Rebecca as her own and they are completely unaware of other people or that there is anything beyond the island.

Esau has found a game on the beach and asks his brother to play a game with him. We already see their personalities with Jacob being very “good” being unable to lie to his mother while Esau/MIB is a lot more curious. Rebecca tells her other son that he is special compared to Jacob. She takes them to the “source”; basically a stream leading to an underground cave where light is coming out. Rebecca explains that she’s guarding it and that the light is something that everyone has a little bit of inside them. One day she says one of them will take her place.

Soon after while the brothers are hunting a warthog, they accidentally come across other people on the island. They remain hidden but are thoroughly shaken from the experience because they had no idea there were any others out there. After they rush back to their mother to say what had happened, she gets the crazy look again telling them that those people aren’t like them and that they should stay away at all costs. Those people were evil!

Next up Claudia the ghost appears to her son Esau and she doesn’t explain why Jacob can’t see her. She does tell him though that Rebecca isn’t their real mother and is in fact the person who murdered her. Claudia takes him to a village on the other side of the island and tells him that he’s one of them and that they all came from some place else. Esau makes a plan to leave the cave to go live with the other people and wants his brother to go with him. In his anger at Jacob’s unwillingness to leave, Esau tells him that Rebecca isn’t even their real mother and that she had murdered her. Jacob goes into a rage, tackles and then beats him to a bloody pulp. Rebecca comes outside and demands to know what’s going on. Jacob the tattletale tells her that Esau is leaving. Esau is pissed off that Rebecca lied to them and that he knows the truth, that they didn’t belong there.

It’s about thirty years later and the brothers are now men. Jacob remained with Rebecca while Esau went to live with the others. Jacob still visits his brother regularly and they continue to play the game with the white and black pieces. They converse and Jacob tells Esau that he comes because he’s curious if what Rebecca had told them about the others is true. His brother confirms this, that they are selfish and manipulative, but that he remains with them because they are a means to an end, meaning they were his ticket off the island. Esau shows him that they’ve built wells in different locations where metal behaves strangely. Jacob returns to the cave where Rebecca (who hasn’t physically aged) asks him where he’s been. The brother who cannot lie ends up telling his mother everything and she goes off to confront Esau. She gets that crazy look again and you know something bad is going to happen. Rebecca knocks him out against the well wall after he tells her that they’ve figured out a way to harness the light to get off the island. While he’s unconscious she manages to kill all the others and cover up the wells. She then takes Jacob back to the source and tells him that he must take her place now. Jacob is whining that she didn’t actually want him to be guardian and that he knows she intended Esau to replace her. Reluctantly though he agrees to drink the liquid that Rebecca seems to have cast a spell on and now they are the same. On their way back, she tells Jacob to get some more firewood before it rains and she returns to the cave alone.

She must have known what was coming because Esau finds her there and kills her in his maddened anger. Before she passes, Rebecca says thank you. I hope she felt guilty for the mass murder she just committed and wanted to die, but it might be that she had lived for so long already she was just ready to end this life. Since she doesn’t age, she probably needed someone else to do it for her. When Jacob finds them he repeats his younger self and begins pounding on Esau’s face. He takes his brother to the source and then knocks him out and lets his body float down stream into the light. Next thing we know, the light goes out and the smoke monster is released. Having just realized that he royally screwed up, Jacob tries to follow the smoke and finds Esau’s dead body. He buries his brother and mother in the cave with the white and black pieces from the game they had played over the years.

Rebecca kept insisting and reminding the brothers that she made it so that they can’t hurt each other. So we’re not actually sure if Jacob killed his brother by sending his body down to the light source. In fact, we don’t know if the smoke monster even is Esau or did the light source just absorb the negative mojo and became the smoke monster? Another question is, how did Rebecca kill all those people? I found it interesting that Esau and her seemed so similar: both nameless, both brown-haired, and both killed people.

What was great about this episode was that we saw another side to MIB and he’s not so bad after all. He just seemed to be a victim of Rebecca’s plans and just wanted to control his own life and destiny.

So my overall verdict is undecided. It was good to learn Jacob and MIB’s background as twin brothers but now we know that the island has been there even longer than they have and who knows when and how Rebecca got there. I think the writers are trying to tell us that we just have to accept that there are no answers to some things and we just need to be satisfied with it. Okay I’ll stop asking questions…not!

For another opinion on this episode, read What Was That? We are Never Going to Tell You. by Liz Cooper.

Season 6, Episode 15: Across the Sea (original air date May 11, 2010)

For more on Lost, click here.

Tuesdays, 9/8c on ABC

Photographs courtesy of ABC and Mario Perez.