When word got out earlier this season that Lost would devote a whole episode to ageless Richard Alpert, it was natural to think that we'd get a travelogue of island mythology: "Here he is meeting Jacob. Here's the day the Others arrived. Here they are building the temple."
But rather than giving us a decades-long story of how "Ricardo" became "Ricardus" and how "Ricardus" became "Richard," "Ab Aeterno" took a much bolder approach.
The episode basically unfolded as one long, unbroken flashback, asking us to follow and sympathize with a character we've barely gotten to know. A good chunk of the story took place before Richard even got to the island, and once he arrived, it played out over the course of days, not years. And rather than answering a lot of smaller questions, it addressed a big one, possibly the biggest and oldest mystery Lost has.
After a brief flashback showing Jacob visiting Ilana in a Russian hospital, the story begins with Ilana, Jack, Hurley, Lapidus, Miles, Ben and Richard on the beach. They're discussing the whole idea of Jacob's candidates, and how none of them know what it means. Jack asks Richard for his input, and Richard responds with a sick sounding little laugh, telling Jack that he and his friends have no idea what the island really is, where they are.
"We're in hell," he tells them, then heads off into the jungle, explaining that it's time to start "listening to someone else."
It's hard to stress enough how great Carbonell was in this episode. That "Is he wearing eyeliner?" look paid off for him this week, giving him the haunted quality he needed to convey as a man who's spent years as a prisoner, first of the state, then of the island, finally of his own fear of damnation.
And after years of seeing him as a quasi-mystical character, it was great to get a flashback episode that focused solely on his humanity: the husband who wanted to save his wife, the man of faith -- 137 years before Locke arrived on the island -- who was sure he met the devil.
To hear Jacob tell it, he and the Man in Black do sound an awful lot like God and Satan in the book of Job, making wagers over how humanity will react in horrible situations. He brings them to the island, allows them to choose right or wrong. MIB tempts them, believing that all people can be corrupted.
The episode gives us the sense that MIB isn't tempting people just to prove a point. Rather, he's trying to find someone who'll kill Jacob, so he can leave the island. In "Ab Aeterno," we see a shorter, unsuccessful version of the events that played out last season between Ben and Fake-Locke. Richard's failure to kill Jacob leads to one of the most important conversations in Lost history, as Jacob picks up a wine bottle, and explains what the island is.
Think of the wine as hell, or evil, or malevolence, he says. The island is the cork in the bottle, keeping hell from spilling out.
There's been concern among Lost watchers ever since Jacob and the Man in Black and their game were introduced last year, worries that the show would come down to a simple battle between good and evil.
On one hand, this wouldn't be that surprising, given that the showrunners have always pointed to Stephen King's The Stand -- a book that's clearly about G V. E, and even features a villain who appears in other King books as "The Man in Black" -- as one of their bibles.
There's really nothing wrong with everything boiling down to a good against evil battle, as long as there's some nuance at work. And I can understand fan frustration over the idea of Jacob and the Man in Black -- two characters who didn't appear on screen until the end of the next-to-last season -- are so central to the story.
But I don't think it's that simple. First of all, the show has always been about the ideas Jacob talked about last night: free will, and the notion that your old life doesn't matter. We've seen characters choose to do good -- Charlie -- as well as ones who never quite escaped their past sins (Eko).
Secondly, even though it's becoming more and more clear that the MIB has devil-like qualities, I'm still not sold on the notion of Jacob as being "good."
I mean, if the MIB needs a proxy to kill Jacob and get off the island, why keep bringing people there? It seems like Jacob has allowed a lot of people to suffer and die in his attempt to prove a point.
It's not a point the MIB agrees with. Even Richard, after 140 years, turned his back on Jacob and tried desperately, at the end, to take MIB up on his offer. It was only the last minute intervention of Hurley, using his ghost whispering abilities to send a message from Isabella, that saves the day. It seems like the episode will end on a bittersweet moment, as Richard is able to say goodbye to his wife, and in a way, give her a proper burial.
But she has other plans. Speaking through Hurley, she gives her husband a warning: Stop the Man in Black. If he leaves, we all go to hell.
Other thoughts/questions:
- Earlier, I'd written that the ending of this episode really didn't work for me. But reading this post by Noel Murray made me rethink my position; maybe the Man In Black smashing the bottle was an act of horrible foreshadowing.
- In the prison scene, the shot we see of Alpert's Bible is opened to Luke, chapter 4, a section that deals with the devil offering a series of temptations to Jesus. Fairly significant, considering how the Man in Black operates.
- Note that the rules the Man in Black gives to Richard (Don't let him talk, just stab him in the chest) are the same Dogen gave Sayid a few weeks ago. I'm guessing these guys can talk someone into or out of anything.
- With Richard and Isabella, Lost offers up yet another love story more compelling than Jack-Kate-Sawyer.
- Although I said earlier that the episode didn't offer up a lot of answers, it did manage to give us two fairly significant ones in one shot: the Black Rock wound up on the middle of the island due to a tidal wave. In the process, it knocked over the statue.
- Watching Richard's journey, I couldn't help but think of the "Tales of the Black Freighter" story that runs through Watchmen, and deals with a lot of the same elements: a shipwreck, a dead wife, the notion of damnation.
- Next week: the spotlight is on Jin and Sun. With luck, we'll see them reunited, or at the very least, find out how Jin wound up in the back of that restaurant.
Tom Coombe
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