Recap / Lost S06E15 "Across the Sea"

Season 6, Episode 15:

Across the Sea

"This is the reason you're here."

Written by Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof.

Directed by Tucker Gates.

Boy in Black: It's beautiful...
Mother: Yes it is. And that's why they want it. Because a little bit of this very same light is inside of every man. But they always want more.
Jacob: Can they take it?
Mother: No. But they would try. And if they tried they could put it out. And if the light goes out here... it goes out everywhere.

The history of Jacob and the Man in Black is revealed.

---

Tropes in this episode include:

• Actor Allusion: Mother, played by Allison Janney, most famous for playing Claudia Jean "CJ" Cregg on The West Wing, tells Claudia that she has a lovely name.
• Ambiguous Situation: There are some unconfirmed hints that Mother is also a Smoke Monster, most notably the fact that she tells Jacob that going into the light would be A Fate Worse Than Death and that she is somehow able to slaughter the Man in Black's entire camp and fill in his well by herself. However, this raises the question of how the Man in Black is able to kill her at all.
• Apologetic Attacker: Mother apologizes to Claudia before bashing her head in with a rock.
• Bad Liar: Unlike the Boy in Black, Jacob is completely incapable of lying to Mother.
• Cain and Abel: Jacob and the Man in Black are revealed to be brothers.
• Call-Forward:
  • Mother describes the people who come to the Island the same way the Man in Black does in "The Incident".
    Mother: They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt... and it always ends the same.
  • When Jacob and the Boy in Black argue over the rules of the senet game the latter found, the Boy tells Jacob that one day he can make up his own game and everyone will have to play by his rules.
  • The scene where the Man in Black throws a knife and it gets stuck to a well, demonstrating the well's magnetism, resembles how Eko threw Charlie's belt across the room to demonstrate the electromagnetism in the Swan in "Live Together, Die Alone".
  • The Man in Black builds a prototype version of the frozen donkey wheel.
  • Jacob buries Mother's body and the Man in Black's original body at the caves, where they are found and dubbed "Adam and Eve" by the survivors thousands of years later.
• The Chooser of the One: Mother, as the Island's protector, has the power to choose her successor, and raises Jacob and the Man in Black in the hopes of choosing whoever is more worthy when they grow up. Ultimately, she is forced to choose Jacob by default when the Man in Black turns on her and makes clear that he has no intention of staying on the Island, and Jacob is less than pleased to be her second choice.
• The Chosen Zero: Jacob is not Mother's first choice to replace her as the protector of the Island, but she is forced to choose him, and essentially bullies him into accepting, after she slaughters the Man in Black's people.
  Mother: It has to be you, Jacob.
  Jacob: No, it doesn't. You wanted it to be him. But now I'm all you have.
  Mother: It was always supposed to be you, Jacob. I see that now. And one day, you'll see it, too; but, until then...you don't really have a choice.
• Continuity Drift: In "House of the Rising Sun", Jack estimated that the skeletons of "Adam and Eve" were around 50 years old. This episode reveals they are a lot older.
• Cosmic Keystone: It's revealed that one of these is at the centre of the Island, in the form of a cave filled with a bright light which Mother describes as the source of life, death, and rebirth. Protecting this light is the true purpose of the Island's protector.
• Create Your Own Villain: Jacob turns his own brother into his Arch-Enemy by throwing him into the Heart of the Island and turning him into the Smoke Monster.
• A Day in the Limelight: The episode covers the backstory of Jacob and the Man in Black.
• Dead Person Conversation: The Man in Black, unlike Jacob, is "special" enough to see dead people, and so has a conversation with Claudia.
• Eldritch Transformation: This episode confirms that the Man in Black Was Once a Man, and shows how he becomes the Smoke Monster when Jacob throws him into the Heart of the Island.
• Hypocrite: The Man in Black dismisses his people as "greedy, manipulative, untrustworthy, and selfish", while openly admitting that he's using them as a means to an end to escape the Island.
• In the Back: The Man in Black kills Mother by stabbing her in the back.
• Irony: The Man in Black, who abandons Mother to join the other people on the Island, ends up agreeing with her assessment of them as inherently bad, while Jacob, who stays with her, disagrees and sees the good in them.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Mother shuts down viewers hoping for an easy answer to all of the show's mysteries.
  "Every question I answer will simply lead to another question."
• Mandatory Line: Jack, Kate, and Locke are the only members of the main cast to appear, and even then, it is via recycled footage of them discovering "Adam and Eve" in Season 1.
• A Minor Kidroduction: Jacob and the Man in Black are shown growing up together as children.
• Momma's Boy: Jacob is very devoted to Mother, and comes across as very childish in his attachment to her well into adulthood.
• Never Given a Name: Claudia wasn't expecting twins, and so only provides one name, Jacob, for her two sons. Mother declines to give the child who would later become the Man in Black a name.
• Origins Episode: This episode depicts the origin of Jacob and the Man in Black, and therefore the origin of the central conflict of the entire series.
• The Reveal: The mysterious boy the Man in Black has been seeing in the jungle throughout the season is a young Jacob.
• Revenge Before Reason: Despite the Man in Black's protests that Mother murdered his entire village, Jacob throws him into the Heart of the Island, intending to inflict a Fate Worse than Death on him and turning him into the Smoke Monster.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Claudia and Mother both only appear in this episode, but are essentially responsible for the entirety of the events of the series, having respectively given birth to and raised the two Chessmasters who have orchestrated everything.
• Start of Darkness: The episode details how the Man in Black went from an innocent child to a young man with sympathetic goals to the Eldritch Abomination he is in the present.
• Translation Convention: The first few lines of dialogue are in Latin, before switching to English for the rest of the episode, implying that everyone is speaking Latin and the translation is merely for the benefit of the audience.
• The Unfavorite: Mother quite blatantly favors the Boy in Black over Jacob, seeing him as a more worthy heir to her role as Island protector due to his clever and manipulative nature, next to the naive and honest Jacob.
  Jacob: Am I good, Mother?
  Mother: Yes, of course you are.
  Jacob: Then, why do you love him more than me?
  Mother: I love you in—in different ways.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: It's clear that Mother has grown weary of her long and lonely life, and once she has passed on her role as the Island's protector to Jacob, she actually thanks the Man in Black for killing her.

---