TV COLUMN: 'LOST' - SEASON 6, EPISODE 14

"Across the Sea" Is About All the Answers We're Going to Get

By: Josh Moorhead

May 13, 2010

So this is where we go our separate ways. For six years, what everybody has wanted from Lost was answers. “Across the Sea” is about all the answers we’re going to get. Viewer beware: don’t expect more than this. If you thought there wasn’t answers in this episode, I disagree. If you want more, adjust your view. If you can’t, and I suspect many won’t, then this rumbling crack in the earth has now formed a canyon between us. We all had the hunch, when Lost wraps up, that however it does could not satisfy everyone. Maybe you’re one of the every dissatisfied. But I like it much better over here on the other side.

I’m not a Lost apologist. This is not a Kingdom of the Crystal Skull situation. Meaning? “Sure, there were CGI monkeys, and it wasn’t quite as good as the old ones, but it was still Indiana Jones, so still kinda cool.” I’m not making excuses. “Across the Sea” was not Lost lite. It wasn’t “sure” this, “but” that. If you bite down into “Across the Sea,” you will find it is solid gold.

I know plenty of people are p.o.’d. Why? I mean, really? I’m struggling to write this article at the moment because I want to argue the opposition, but I can’t figure out what the opposing argument even is. We didn’t get answers? Really? Nothing happened? Are you sure?

Things we now know:

• Who Adam and Eve are.
• The history of Jacob and his brother.
• Turns out they’re brothers.
• How the smoke monster happened.
• Why the knife has powers.
• Where the donkey wheel came from.

Hm. I feel like I’m forgetting a few. Oh wait, here’s one:

• What the island is.

I repeat. WHAT THE ISLAND IS.

If you wanted a power point presentation of these answers, if you wanted the last half-hour of the series to be a static shot over Jack’s shoulder as he sat at a Dharma computer terminal and read a Wikipedia article titled: “The Island,” then Lost was never, ever for you. If you enjoyed moments, episodes, seasons, or the whole thing until now and this episode somehow ruined it for you, then Lost was destined to never be your bag. If you can’t take the enlightenment, get out of the cave. Or stay in, I guess.

Okay, I’m sorry. I’m grumpy. I slept like three hours last night, and my team, The Cavaliers, are going down in a blaze of…oops, I almost said glory. But where my faith may have been misplaced in my sports, Lost more than made up for it in my entertainment.

There is a conversation I’ve revisited often this year and as recent as last week. Jack asked Locke why he found it so easy to believe. Locke said it had never been easy. Lost‘s answers were never going to be easy…but they could be satisfying. I say they are.

All we really don’t know right now is the significance of the sideways world and who’ll be taking Jacob’s spot as island guardian. I’m sure there will be a few more mythic reveals, but the last two episodes will be resolving more plot than anything. Questions like “What is the island?” after six years, were answered this week.

The island is place that, for my particular bent, is analogous to Eden, or is Lost‘s suffixation of “ish” onto Eden? It’s Eden-ish. That’s the Locke in me. If you’re a Lost fan who likes spending more time in the Dharma Initiative than the Temple, call it the big bang. It is a life source. Somebody’s got to protect this energy, this spirit, the combination of both. That job is one of those great power, great responsibility trade-offs, with its own set of blessings and curses. The plight of Jacob and his bro, as well as the woman that raised them, represent these things.

There is a phrase I’ve revisited often this year that I’m going to revisit again now. Lost is brilliant. I love this concept. If something like Eden still existed in the world today, what would it look like and how would we approach it? It’s easy to take the Genesis tale as some kind of distant myth, disconnected from the less wondrous tangibles of our reality. But what if we were suddenly there, in our sneakers with backpacks, cell phones, golf clubs and cartons of mayonnaise? How would the eternal, the majestic, look if we approached it in our ties and suits and haircuts with our wallets and tiny bottles of liquor in our pockets? How would it affect us? How might we affect it? If we looked it eye to light, how would we change — would we allow ourselves to be?

I love this idea. It gets me not so much giddy about Lost but calmed. Satisfaction kind of sounds like it’s less great than joy, and it’s not that this resolution doesn’t make me happy — it’s that few things are better than the peace of pure satisfaction, and at the moment, that’s how I’m jonesing on Lost.

It’s the Indiana Jones rule. An adventure, a quest, that seems thoroughly of our world, culminates in a wondrous event that reveals what’s just beyond those whips and tanks, what’s just under the sand, what can be embraced, taken on faith or hauled off boxed up into a storehouse for “top men.”

Dr. Jones would be great on the island. He is the man of science and faith: empirical in observation, but he knows when to close his eyes in reverence or when to accept a level of understanding or truth when a full understanding cannot be reached. To quote Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, as the villain approaches an alien artifact in an ancient temple, “Belief, Dr. Jones, is a gift you have yet to receive. My sympathies.” As Indy slowly steps away, he cracks, “Oh, I believe, sister. That’s why I’m down here.” And then the villain blew up in a knowledge brain BBQ while the movie got fried in CGI hysteria and audiences grew disappointed with the aliens reveal.

So before you go ape-dung on Lost about not giving enough answers, do you want that thorough of an explanation? Do you want it to be aliens? Jesus? Ra the sun god? The island to be stationed on the shell of a giant turtle?

To me, the only satisfying conclusion to Lost would be one that balanced explanation and ambiguity on a scale of originality. Done and done. Is my Eden/Indiana interpretation an interpretation? Yes. But you know why that’s great? It leaves you to yours too. But if you cry foul and put Lost in a box on a shelf, you’ve missed the point…as “top” people sometimes do.

As Lost illustrated again Tuesday night, it’s never been about who would win in the argument between the man of science and the man of faith; instead, victory goes to those who reconcile the two.

In some ways, Jacob and his brother were the perfect men for that victory, if they were one. Divided, they fall…although Brother Smoke does farther from the tree.

“Across The Sea” was so damn thick, I’ve watched it twice now and feel as if I’m barely revealing its edges, scraping away at its first layers with a toothbrush in the dirt. There was Bible stuff, literature stuff, Lost stuff, meta-audience stuff — everything Lost has ever been at its best.

Jacob and Anonymous’s Ma struck me of something of an anti-Christ. A lot of stuff she did was like Bizarro World Bible stories. Christ famously asked God the Father to “take this cup from me,” talking of his fate to carry the cross, but he framed that question in the guise of the Father’s will. This woman, whoever she might be exactly, didn’t ask — she did, passing the cup to Jacob — it being wine and all, it seemed like some strange, backwards communion to me. All the weaving and talking of favor amongst brothers was so much Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (for you Broadway-goers and not Bible readers) — it was silly. Joseph’s Dad — Jacob, no less — favored Joseph and made him a cool coat that made his brothers jealous. They eventually tossed him into a pit that he would eventually rise out of, with power over all of them, but a good guy. Smokey’s similar fate left him with a license to ill. Biblical Jacob and his twin brother’s battle for inheritance is also well worn in Lost theorizing — the story of a twin that usurped his brother’s birthright but made good on it while his brother was a darker force. Sound familiar now? I’d elaborate more, but I have before, and this isn’t the OMG!!! GENESIS! Blog.

Do I mean to say that the shinning light in the cave on the island is the Jeudeo-Christian God’s holy timeshare? Heck no. I mean to say that Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are strong enough, smart enough, rounded enough writers to have the mythology of their show be at least, in ways, a shadow of well-known beliefs and ancient tomes. This makes the whole experience, as their reference points always have, deeper, more interesting, more relatable, and more of a message. Lost‘s Biblical remixes aren’t evangelical — they’re moral. Lost is ambiguous enough not to carry a tablet of Ten Commandments down from some South Pacific Zion, but it doesn’t mean that the show’s message doesn’t endorse a moral code at the end of the day. I still believe, ultimately, that Lost‘s story will be one of redemption.

But in the interest of citing sources, Lost didn’t stop at the Old Testament, or the New, for that matter. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, or what you might know by its other name — Your High School 10th Grade English Class, and also another common Lost reference — cannot be ignored. When Lost reveals its own beginning to be about a light in a cave, well, what do you want me to talk about? Jean Paul Sartre? John Cougar Mellencamp? Well sorry, I’ve got to go where Lost leads.

Allow me to copy and paste:

“Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

The Allegory is related to Plato’s Theory of Forms,[1] wherein Plato asserts that “Forms” (or “Ideas“), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. Only knowledge of the Forms constitutes real knowledge.[2] In addition, the allegory of the cave is an attempt to explain the philosopher’s place in society.”

Everybody give it up for our guest Wikipedia! Don’t forget its new entry on the conclusion of Lost drops on the interwebs in two weeks! We’ll all be rushing to pick that one up, Wiki. Thanks for stopping by. Now for my next guest: my conclusions!

Basically, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the Theory of Forms should have come with Lost Spoiler Alert! tags on them. The P man has got down, what I’m trying to say. In “Across the Sea,” Lost dared us to step out of the cave — to stop primitive drawings of what we thought might be happening on this show and confront its realities. But I guess now I’m catching onto your argument. You could say “Across the Sea” itself was a shadowy cave drawing, giving us a hazy, all too vague explanation of the show’s reality. But I say nay. “Plato asserts that ‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas,’ and not the material world to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. Only knowledge of the Forms constitutes real knowledge.” And thus we embrace Lost for its wonder, or relegate it to shelves in a box out of frustration. Lost is not at at all about what exactly that light in the cave is. It’s about what it means. And for the record, I’d contest we know exactly what it is anyway. C’est la vie, as the French might parle.

Damon Lindelof himself braced us for this conclusion when he invited the poet John Keats to a place he probably doesn’t hang out at very often — Twitter. Citing the theory of “negative capability,” which Lindelof himself said he was still trying to understand as it was just passed off to him, I think he wanted us to read this:

“Keats believed that great people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved. Keats, as a Romantic, believed that the truths found in the imagination access holy authority. Such authority cannot otherwise be understood, and thus he writes of “uncertainties.” This “being in uncertaint[y]” is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence.”

To which I say boom. As in “that’s the ticket!” Generally speaking anyway.

And Lost, as it’s been telling us lately, is also very much about letting go, or at least seeing beyond…about forgoing the tangible for the transcendent. These folks, with their issues, crash and only find meaning and knowledge as they further accept the importance of those things over the things they once thought so important. Just as the sideways folk are realizing they’re coming up short of some truth just beyond their awareness. The very structure of Lost has followed this track, leading us from a season one, where we wondered where Shannon’s inhaler was, to a place where we’re talking about how Lost‘s version of Genesis might be spotted in a theoretical-theological-philosophical line-up.

Lost also expertly used itself as reference this week. “Bad Twin” is the name of a kind of fake novel “written” by a character on Lost. This character, who was only on screen for a millisecond, died in the pilot. But his manuscript of his novel was Sawyer’s reading material way back when. And when the book was published, making it “real” (Lost is so crazy sometimes), the book could serve as a good hint to us. First of all, “Bad Twin” = Smokey. Second, the stories about inheritances and the identities and motivations of the good and bad twins, it should have just been called “Across the Sea.” Finally, in the plot, it’s revealed a PI investigating the Bad Twin was only hired because they expected and wanted him to fail. Call that John Locke.

Now I see your second argument. This is where the show matters! Those names! Those people we didn’t get in this episode really at all! Well, you say character, I say mythology; let’s blow the whole thing off. No? I don’t think so either. I don’t think Lost can be relegated to “meh” status, and I don’t think Lost is doing that to our main characters. Like I said, expect the next two episodes to be heavily plot- and character-driven, which makes this episode all the more necessary to frame our character’s struggle and to answer the questions that soon there’ll be no time left to address. Circling back now, be wary for wanting more than we got, though. As crazy lady island told her first murder victim at the beginning of the episode: “Every question you ask me will only lead to more questions.”

Take these things for what they’re worth. The island is something of a battery casing for all of existence. This casing has physical and scientific properties, but also mystic ones. Removal of the battery would either completely wipe out or significantly de-juice life itself. This is a place in need of protection, much like the flaming sword that resides outside Eden. In this case, the gardener of Lost island has unique abilities but also a form of immortality. But like Eden, this is a sacred place corrupted by both the people and fallen angels that inhabit it. Jacob, his brother, and their faux-Ma are the fallen angels — the persons that come across their path — the people.

Bad Mom and Bad Twins’ first mistake was their mis-appraisal of people. “They come, they corrupt, they fight, they destroy.” I paraphrase. Jacob is a flawed dude, quick to anger, and jealousy, it seems, in his younger days, and also too quick to accept as his brother is too quick to deny. But Smokey’s stubbornness has lead him to a dark place where he sees people as only “a means to an end,” where he is dismissive of the island’s inherent specialness. It seems obvious, in his “mom’s” uttering of “thank you” at her murder, that she conned him, tragically, to this place…so that she could die. But Smokey didn’t learn from his tragedy — he committed the same duping on John Locke — a man who was also frustrated in faith and convinced of his specialness, not privy to being told what he could and couldn’t do. Smokey was wise to see the potential of people’s knowledge and their thirst for it, which Jacob can appreciate — but Jacob is also wagering on their hearts.

Jacob has learned from the tragedies and lies of his immortal youth mistakes. Like not being given a choice. Like being lied to, manipulated. Like being divided, the qualities across him and his bad twin and their shortcomings. Like a selfishness that wishes to skirt an important calling. That’s his brother. Over centuries, Jacob decided to trust man in a cooperative effort to protect the island and hopefully find one person who could rectify all the mistakes he, his brother, and their anti-Christ matriarch have made. This is, of course, not easy because man is flawed. But too flawed to learn from their ways? Too of themselves to change, to adapt, to reconcile beliefs and experiences?

And now what I’ve meant to be a simple snow globe of shaken-up truth has avalanched. Check it: the island is special. It bestows special abilities on some, amplifies abilities in others. We will never know where this specialness came from or how exactly it operates (though we could end up knowing a bit more than we do at this exact moment)? But guess what! We don’t know what the hell 97% of the material that makes up the universe is, which we call “dark matter.” We don’t know where all the chemical goobidley-gook that constituted the Big Bang constituted itself from. And I don’t see angry postings on astronomy message boards telling scientists that the last century of research sucked because there wasn’t any answers. I don’t care if you identify the term Dharma first as a zen thing or the name of a fictional scientific initiative, or one-half of a popular ’90s sitcom. Eventually, almost all things must be taken on some degree of faith. At some point, intellectual posits are paired with the conviction of belief.

Make no mistake. Smokey’s fake mom screwed up her omniscient abilities royally. Like I said: Anti-Christ. And Smokey may have not been totally wrong in charging her with doing the things he did because she “never told him” the answers. But his wanting to run away from it all was a mistake — a mistake that led him to an evil place. Lost is asking us not to make the same mistake as an audience.

But again, I don’t know why I’m playing defense right now. I think we got the answers this week, and they made sense to me…and I liked them. And I’m sure there’ll be a few more. If you’re not down with island mysticism, though, I’d contend there’ll always be something more than natural about the place. You can take comfort in this famous Arthur C. Clarke quote: “Any sufficiently advanced form of technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I actually loved that about this episode. I loved Smokey saying, “There are places on this island where metal behaves strangely.” As an audience, we’re all, “Dude, it’s called magnetism, and it happens on my fridge, like, 24/7!” But imagine how trippy it’d be if you didn’t know what it was. How magical. Lost is explaining itself to us only as far as we can understand. And I like that because it’s in line with the show’s point about faith (and science), but it’s not to say the properties of the smoke monster are something that couldn’t be explained. But again, is that what you really want anyway? The analogy of the cave says you’re tracing the wrong shapes.

Ending Lost this way shouldn’t have to dis-clude anyone. This episode works for you and it answered questions, even if you don’t realize that yet. Don’t leave the party just before the cake is served. Besides, it wouldn’t be as much fun without you here. Seriously, let’s just stay for, like, another two episodes. And then, if you want to leave, well, I guess you can. But I’m staying. Besides, I hear they’re keeping something totally awesome in that cave over there. And regardless, personally? Well, I’ve had the time of my life.