Understanding "Across the Sea"

I was disappointed. Very disappointed.

Being the Lost junkie that I am, I had been anticipating last week’s episode, “Across the Sea,” for weeks, ever since I had heard that it was going to be different, weird, and, most intriguingly, not featuring any of the series regulars. I became a bit more skeptical as the season progressed with few answers being given (besides “Ab Aeterno” plus a few other unsatisfying answers like the whispers and Jack’s dad), but I was still looking forward to what I hoped would be a groundbreaking episode of the show.

What I got was a poorly conceived, poorly acted, trite and unnecessary hour thrown into Lost’s final moments – the moments when the show needs most of all to be on its A game. Many of the answers we received were hokey or not explained well, many were things we never needed answers to and a few even created inconsistencies.

Worst of all, however, was the episode’s absolutely terrible ability to stand by itself. I’ve read tons and tons of analysis about this episode, as I do after every episode, and I’ve thought a lot about it myself, again, same as every time; the difference with this episode is that this continued analysis was not optional – in order to make heads or tails of the show’s central concepts, a long puzzling needed to take place.

I’m not saying I want Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse to walk me through everything. I don’t, and they usually wouldn’t oblige me even if I wanted them to (the out of place flashback to the Adam and Eve skeletons notwithstanding). But one of their mantras has always been “The show should stand on its own.” I have never felt like it did that less than last Tuesday.

Nevertheless, I have puzzled, and these scrawlings are my observations. As usual, I will try to keep them short, and, as usual, I will probably fail. However, if you’re still trying to get a bead on what exactly “Across the Sea” was all about, read on. Maybe you and I can figure this one out together.

Did we need this?
Before the episode came out, I was excited for what Lost fanboys usually refer to as a “mythological download,” but after it was over I didn’t really feel like I needed to know what we found out. Essentially, the central Jacob/Man in Black myth was enough for me; the “cork in the bottle” analogy essentially explained to me everything I needed to know about the conflict of these two ageless titans: Jacob is a good guy trying to keep the embodiment of evil from destroying earth.

Granted, this is just my opinion, but for those of you who wanted more, what difference did these revelations make to you? OK, you found out how Jacob became the guardian. We now don’t know how Mother became a guardian, or how the whole guardian thing got started in the first place.

We now know that Jacob and MIB were brothers, separated by some weird longing to leave the island. I suppose this was intended to give their struggle more emotional impact, and maybe it would have if the child actors weren’t so typical child actor and if the adult versions of these two characters weren’t forced to wade through such mucky dialogue. This, too, raises more questions: how did the other islanders get there, for example? Why and how did MIB’s real mom appear as a ghost (side note: has anyone else noticed how lazy the writers are getting with the whole ghost conceit?)?

The biggest question raised because of the twins’ backstory, however, is why it was and is so bad that the Man in Black wanted off the island. My guess is that, at that time, it either wasn’t (in which case Mother was delusional or looking for her replacement or both), or it had something to do with the light at the island’s core (don’t worry, I’ll be getting to that).

This raises the even more important question of why it’s bad that Smokey is let off now. I mean, he’s obviously one bad dude, ready and willing to wipe out anyone who gets in his way, but what would actually happen if he gets off the island? Would he really wipe out existence, or would he simply say, “Hmm, this is nice. I don’t know what Mom was so worried about”? This raises some fundamental questions about what the smoke monster is, which hopefully will be answered in the final three and a half hours. At the rate the show is letting the ends dangle, however, I’m not so sure. If it isn’t answered, it calls into question the entire purpose of, well, really the entire show. There are a lot of ways I would not be comfortable with the series ending; one of them would be a resolution in which Smokey is just some dude who wants to get off the island. It seems a paltry thing to lose lives over.

Screw the cave. Seriously, screw that thing.
This was, again, something I didn’t need to know. The island is special, it has seemingly magic or electromagnetic properties, whatever. This is not something in and of itself that needs to be explained, it is just an explanation given for why the island does crazy stuff, similar to when a Star Trek ship starts to shake and Scotty calls Kirk and says, “Captain! The [jargon] is [jargoning] with the [jargonajigger]!” We don’t need to know what the jargon is. We just need to know that Khan is going to get messed up.

Again, even if you disagree, this is unquestionably one of the worst explanations in the history of explaining things. When Mother finally settles on a definition of the light in the cave, she says this:

“Life, death, rebirth; it’s the source, the heart of the island.”

OK, first of all, Alison Janey, go back to playing Juno’s mom. It suits you a lot better. Second of all, this is a definition so vague, so ill-defined, that it makes Obi-Wan Kenobi’s explanation of the Force sound like a doctoral thesis.

Based on that piece of dialogue and a few other tidbits, I think it’s safe to say that the cave contains some sort of Force-like substance, a Gaia sort of energy, a lifeforce that turns the wheel of the world. Thanks for that, guys, I guess. I don’t really know what that has to do with anything that has happened on the show up til now, other than the creation of the smoke monster and the donkey wheel.

And, now that we mention it, how about those two things? This is yet another case where the vague definitions of what the light actually is comes into play. This unnecessary revelation brings up the question of why light + MIB = smoke monster, and the much more annoying question of how and why MIB and his buddies thought the light could send them off the island. Obviously, none of them had ever been down there, or several smoke monsters would be roaming around. When Mother asked MIB about his logic, he simply responded with a petulant “Because I’m special!” – an obvious and unnecessary allusion to Locke when we actually wanted a real answer.

Again, to make sense of this, I will make an educated guess and say that some prior experiences with small slices of light caused the men to believe this, but we’ll likely never know.

A missed opportunity
Granted, I did say this was an episode that we didn’t need, and I stand by that, but yet another query comes to mind: if you, Damon and Carlton, decided that the series needed this ancient backstory, why didn’t you spend the time answering questions that have come up on the show rather than giving us this tired sibling rivalry crap?

I’ll give you the Adam and Eve tie up. It was nice of you to clear that up, even though the season one flashback was a bit much. But the questions about Jacob’s origin that have loomed the largest over the show itself remain unanswered. What’s up with the cabin? The ash? Probably most notably absent from the episode, what’s going on with all of the Egyptian imagery? I know you said you didn’t want to show the construction of the four toed statue, and that’s fine, but couldn’t you at least explain it at all? What about the hieroglyphics at the end of the hatch countdown? The only recognition of these elements was the Senet game MIB finds on the beach, and it merely served to jog our memories of past issues not yet accounted for.

Finally, the audacity
All right, guys (yes, this is still directed at Lindelof and Cuse), I understand it’s your show, but really? Really? Are you going to throw such condescending nonsense as “Every question I ask will only lead to another question” in our faces at this stage of the game?

I know you have said from the beginning that Lost is primarily about the characters, but your marketing, and indeed the way you have framed the entire show, tells anyone with half a brain that, in addition to the characters, the show is also about something else. It’s about polar bears and smoke monsters. It’s about teleporting children and hatches with old videos in them and a pile of notebooks heaped in the jungle.

I’ve said it so many times before, but I’ll say it again: Lost is a show that comes, inherently, with a promise of payoff – a guarantee that, yes, we’re going to explain this to you. To not give us that payoff is nothing less than profoundly disrespectful, and to speak so triflingly in both the show and interviews of fans who want this isn’t fair. We don’t need to know all the answers. We just need to know enough so that when (if) we rewatch the show, we can look at the narrative as a whole and say, “Ohhhh, so that’s what that means!” You have not given us this.

Before season six began, I wrote a list of Lost’s best and worst episodes of all time, including in the introduction to the “best” list an innocuous sentence: “Hopefully Season Six can carve out a few places here, too.” Thus, far, with two episodes to go, it has carved out one spot: the excellent Richard-centric “Ab Aeterno.”

The rest of the season has been hit and miss, with every good episode (“Dr. Linus”) seemingly balanced out by a bad one (“What Kate Does”). With this outing, however, I think we can notch a new entry in the “worst” column.

It’s hard to make 121 ½ hours of television. I don’t contest that. But this hour could have – should have – been better.