(The Doors, The End)
Holy balls. We still don’t know his f’ing name. I’m just calling him Esau from now on. I know he’s not Esau, but that’s what I’m calling him. At least now we know he’s Jacob’s twin brother. So he might not technically be Esau, but he’s not not Esau. At least I have that much.
Jacob and Esau were born to a woman named Claudia whose ship crashed on The Island by accident, at which point C.J. Cregg found her and bashed her brains in, then raised them as her own. She was the protector. Will we find out how long she has been on The Island, or how she got there? Probably not. But she was the protector, and she knew early on that only one of the twins would take over for her one day. When she took them to the creek with the bright light coming out of it, she said something to the effect of, “one of you will protect The Island.” Not both. Only one. And as she said, “they come, they kill, they destroy, they corrupt, and it always ends the same.” Sounds like Esau was listening.
And she thought it would be Esau, which is interesting, since she also knew early on that Jacob didn’t have the capacity for lying. She left the backgammon game on the beach for Esau to find. She knew he was “special.” Esau loved her, but felt betrayed when he found out there were other people and a whole new world across the sea. Jacob stuck around and spent the next 30 years learning how to weave tapestries. Time well spent.
Esau, wearing black as per usual, spent the next 30 years with his new people trying to learn how to harness the power of The Island by digging to find what was the electromagnetic energy. He’s like the forefather of that black jumpsuit wearing faction of the Dharma Initiative, drilling to find the exact same thing. All he has ever wanted was to get off The Island and go home. And his crazy mother knocked his head into a stone wall then burned all of his people. How did she do that?
I would like to know what she was whispering while pouring the wine for Jacob to drink, before he officially became the protector of The Island. And how did she know that going down into the light would be worse than dying? Did the smoke monster already exist? I kind of thought Esau became him when Jacob threw him down there, but I could be wrong.
Esau didn’t waste any time plunging that dagger into her, but then why did she thank him? Also, and I have to imagine this was another stroke of absolute genius by the writers, but after Esau kills his mother, we get “The End” by The Doors over the preview for next week’s episode. Love it. And he walked on down the hall…
So Esau could see his mom, but Jacob couldn’t. When asked why, she said it was because she was dead. So Esau can see dead people because he’s special, but Jacob can’t. What does that say about Sawyer? Earlier this season, Locke (Esau) saw the ghost of young Jacob, and Richard couldn’t see him, but Sawyer could. What’s that about??
The whole Adam and Eve scene at the end of the episode was pretty damn amazing. I love Jack finding the pouch with the black and white rocks in it, and Locke walking up just then. I wonder, was that actual footage, or was that filmed for tonight’s episode? I’m hoping it was actual footage. That would be genius.
Next week it looks like we’re getting some info about the prevalence of mirrors this season. That should be pretty cool. I don’t know if I will have much time to write after next Tuesday’s episode, and the finale is Sunday (SUNDAY, so don’t miss it!), after which I don’t know if I will have much to say. Either I’m right about the Jack/Locke ending, or I’m wrong. Either way, we’ll know in 12 days, I guess.
If anybody feels like they’re not getting what they came for, I’d suggest going over to EW.com and checking out Doc Jensen’s recaps. He is, and trust me on this, the one you should all be reading. I’m just a guy who is obsessed. He’s also just a guy who is obsessed, but he gets paid for it, so his level of obsession is both more comprehensive and more reliable than mine.
Namaste.
i got the impression the mom said “thank you” because her only way to die was for one of her sons to kill her. and she passed the torch to jacob because she knew her evil son was about to do just that. basically, she went out exactly as anticipated.
but i could be wrong on that, just like i’ve been on everything else.
what’s jacob’s brother’s name (and how many apostrophes can i use in a row)? i think they’re saving this one as a trump card. i’ve changed my answer approximately 17 different times on this one. now i’m going with john – john locke. maybe he came back to the island under the same name he had all along. that’d be pretty cool. ok i’m done ranting, i’ll check some lost sites tomorrow.
So I interpreted the ending a little different I think. “At least now we know he’s Jacob’s twin brother.” I don’t think that’s true. I think we now know the smoke monster isn’t his twin brother. Jacob’s twin brother seems to have died. He laid him next to his mother and the skeleton of him and his mother were found as Adam and Even by Jack and Kate all those years later. Instead the smoke was just released (or something) when Jacob’s brother went down into the hole.
I’m not sure how Jacob’s brother died, since the mom said he can’t die by going down in the hole. Maybe he didn’t die by going in the hole, but he did release the smoke monster, which then killed him and threw his body down river where Jacob found him.
The smoke monster then takes the shape of Jacob’s brother, who’s dead, just like he does the dead Shepard and the dead Locke. So the character we see all the time with Jacob isn’t Jacob’s brother, but the smoke monster in the shape of his brother…
Or are you saying that Jacob’s brother’s body is just his body, and Jacob’s brother ‘soul’ is the smoke monster which, until other dead people arrive, is able to take the shape of his old self?… I don’t know?!