Lost: Season 6, Episode 15 "Across the Sea" Review

 "Every question I answer will simply lead to another question."

-Mother

"Across the Sea" is entirely a flashback episode.  It begins several thousand years before the crash of Oceanic 815.  The heavily pregnant Claudia (Lela Loren) survives a shipwreck and washes up on the Island.  She is found by a woman, who is only known as Mother (Allison Janney), who helps her give birth to twin boys.  Claudia only had one named picked out, Jacob (Mark Pellegrino), while the other is not given a name, but is the Man in Black (Titus Welliver).  Mother than murders Claudia.

Mother raises the boys as her own.  She tells them there is nothing else besides the Island and when the boys discover other people on the Island, she warns them that they are evil and should be avoided.  She blindfolds them and takes them to the Heart of the Island, a cave of light and water.  She explains she is the protector of the Island and that, one day, one of the brothers will need to take her place. 

The Man in Black is visited by the spirit of Claudia, who tells him the truth about who he is and where he is from.  Enraged, the Man in Black decides to leave Mother and join the other people on the Island.  He tries to convince Jacob to leave as well, but he stays with Mother.

30 years later, Jacob and the Man in Black still meet up and the Man in Black reveals he has found a way to leave the Island.  Jacob reports this to Mother, who visits the Man in Black.  He is planning on using a mechanism involving a donkey wheel to harness the energy of the Island, which will transport him off the Island.  Mother knocks him out before filling the well they dug with rocks and murdering all of the other people on the Island.

Mother takes Jacob to the Heart of the Island and makes him the protector of the Island, which makes him immortal.  Later, the Man in Black kills Mother.  Enraged, Jacob drags the Man in Black to the Heart of the Island and throws him into the cave, which they were told not to enter.  The smoke monster emerges.  Jacob later finds his brother's physical body and lays him and Mother to rest in the caves, where they would later be found by survivors of Oceanic 815.

What Works:

The most important job this episode had was to makes us understand the characters of Jacob and the Man in Black.  On that front, the episode succeeds.  The Man in Black is by far the most sympathetic character of the episode.  Everything he says and does makes sense.  Even though he just killed some of our favorite characters in the previous episode, we do feel bad for him and his motivations make a lot more sense.

Jacob isn't nearly as likable, but this episode does make us understand the character better.  He's just a momma's boy at heart and we see him as a flawed and human character, as opposed to how he's been presented for the rest of the series.  That will makes his candidate system make a lot more sense.  He's looking for someone like him; someone with flaws.  

Finally, one thing I love about this episode is how Mother somehow totally fills in the well that the Man in Black dug and murders all of his people in one day.  The episode never tells us how she did it and it's left up to our imagination.  That's way more exciting to ponder than anything else that gets revealed in this episode.  We don't need all of the answers.

What Sucks:

That leads to the big problems of the episode.  We get lots of reveals about the Island and why it needs to be protected and how the rules for the protectors work, except all of these reveals are only partial reveals and half-baked ones at that.  None of what Mother tells us is satisfying in the least and none of her answers tell the full story.  I would rather get no answers on this stuff than what we get.  Either tell us or don't.  Both are fine as long as we like the characters we are on the journey with.  All of this just feels forced.

There is a lot of exposition and clunky dialogue to go with these answers.  None of the actors are really up to the task of making this work.  A lot of the episode is spent with kid actors playing Jacob and the Man in Black, neither of whom do a great job, but I don't necessarily think it's their fault.  Allison Janney is a fantastic actress, but even she can't pull this off.  It doesn't help that I think she was miscast, but there probably aren't many actors who could have played this role successfully.

I recently heard a suggestion that this episode works a lot better if you watch it before the rest of season 6.  I believe that.  You get the Man in Black's motivation and backstory much earlier on, before he starts killing fan-favorite characters, and it sets up the epic struggle between the two brothers.  Having it this close to the end of the series was a bad call.

Finally, the reveal that the Man in Black and Mother are the skeletons in the caves doesn't make any sense.  In "The House of the Rising Sun," Jack (Matthew Fox) said the skeletons had probably been there 40-50 years.  Now they're trying to tell us it's closer to 2000?  Bulls**t.  This doesn't work and it doesn't make sense.  If the answers you're giving us don't make sense, just don't reveal it.  We didn't need to know who the skeletons were.  It doesn't matter.  That's the problem with the episode.  We get half-baked answers where we shouldn't have gotten any if the writers couldn't make it work.

Platinum Polar Bear:

The Platinum Polar Bear goes to the most competent character of the episode.  For "Across the Sea," this award goes to Mother for stopping the Man in Black from leaving the Island and for finding her successor in Jacob.  This is Mother's 1st time winning this award, which ties her for 20th place with Boone, Libby, Bernard, Alex, Richard, Tom, Eloise, and Jacob.

Verdict:

"Across the Sea" is a disappointing episode, for sure.  It gets the development of both the Man in Black and Jacob right, but the questions it does answer are clunky, don't make sense, and are unsatisfying.  Next time, I'll try watching it before the rest of season 6 to see if that helps.

 6/10: Okay