Remembering the mythological drama’s strangest episode ever.
A couple dead guys died again.
Heroes returned with murder in their eyes.
Credit: Mario Perez/Walt Disney Television via Getty Images
On May 4, 2010, a single submarine explosion killed three beloved characters.
It is the most controversial hour from one of the most controversial seasons in TV history.
Across the Sea is totally unique, obviously misconceived, and endlessly fascinating.
Mario Perez/Walt Disney Television via Getty Images
Shes costumed for Ancient Times, with a pregnant belly wrapped inside a lipstick-red toga.
She meets an ethereal local (Janney) with a double-dagger glare.
They both speak subtitled Latin, before the language phase-shifts into English.
Mario Perez/Walt Disney Television via Getty Images
Claudia goes into labor immediately;Lostwas that kind of show.
She names her first son Jacob.
Before she has time to name the second, the ethereal woman slams a rock into her face.
The camera moves toward the crying babies, one swaddled in black, the other in white.
ABC still had standards, so the scene cuts before any blood spraypaints their cheeks.
The sound effects tell the story:Smash,smash,smash.
Young Jacob comes off like a sap, even a tad simple.
The other kid is dreamier, adventurous, smirkish.
Mother warns them from interacting with The Islands other inhabitants.
“What makes them dangerous?”
“The same thing that makes all men dangerous,” Mother says.
“They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt.”
“A little bit of this light is inside of every man,” she says.
“If the light goes out here, it goes out everywhere.”
Was there a budget problem?
Everyones dressed for community Bible theater.
The dialogue sounds like dueling liturgies.
Janney, one of TVs most charming stars, exudes blinkless monotone.
This was, I think, the first popular TV show where a villain admitted to using a metaphor.
“Across the Sea” brazenly scrapes all the meta away.
There are no subplots, no sense anyone has any history.
We learn just enough about Mother to know well never learn anything about Mother.
Even the thematics are akimbo.Lostwas all about emotionally distant dads.
Here, the men are boys, even when they grow up.
The matriarchs might kill each other, but theyre still matriarchs, dominating their sons entirely.
Television wasnt so obvious with political points back then, though, so any subtext is subliminal.
There is love without lust.
The characters are literally color-coded.
All moral motivation constructs along a simple binary: Will you stay or go?
The specter of Claudia appears to the dark-haired child.
She never stops smiling: Was death an antidepressant, or is she planning vengeance?
(Jacob cant see her; Jacob cant doanything,man.)
She reveals the maternal switcheroo.
“It was all a lie!”
the boy in black tells Jacob.
Blondie cant handle the truth, and beats his brother bloody.
The dreamer goes prodigal, promising to flee across the sea.
Jacob stays with Mother: A very forgiving son, or the worlds first documented case of Stockholm syndrome.
Some context might help.
“Across the Sea” is their origin story.
from the writers for anything unexplained.
A couple weeks later, the series finale would turn frantic zealots into raging apostates.
It was easy, for jilted lovers, to blame the glowing cave of important importance.
The fan rage has died down, or found new targets.
And yet, its impossible to recapture the feeling ofLosts miraculous original run.
The best episodes ofLostwould simply become that weeks whole pop culture, deconstructed on an internet of friends.
Sorry, kids, you had to be there.
Now Pelligrino is Jacob, and Welliver is the Man in Black.
Jacob watches The Islands humans from far away.
“They dont seem so bad to me,” he says, always serene, or just absent.
The Man in Black isnt some distant watcher.
Hes reporting from the front lines of the human condition.
“Ive lived among them for 30 years,” he tells Jacob.
“Theyre greedy, untrustworthy, manipulative, and selfish.”
Welliver is incredible, incredible, incredible.
His previousLostappearances were quietly malevolent: You could tell the big note wasSimmer More.
Hes more desperate to escape than anyone on Oceanic Flight 815.
The scripts not always there.
(God, to be inthatancient architect planning session!)
Ive walked this island from end to end, not once coming close to finding it.
But then I began to think.
What if the light underneath the island… what if I could get to it from someplace else?
Figuring out how to reach it took a very long time.
Welliver makes you believe the sudden-onset cosmology.
Pelligrino has less to work with.
He might honestly just be confused by Jacob, like the rest of us.
And his nonchalance pushes your sympathies further toward Welliver.
Who, shockingly, only share one proper scene with Janney.
The scene’s a comet, though, and theWest Wingstar finally has real emotions to play.
When Mother visits the Man in Black, Janney’s trembling delivery suggests fear, and sorrow.
They reconcile, hug and then Mother bashes his head against a rock.
(That wasLosts final season: So many heads, so many rocks!)
Things are moving quickly now.
The Man in Black discovers his escape well decimated beyond repair.
Somehow, the whole human village has been destroyed, too.
How did Mother do all that?
He stabs her before she can explain.
Dying, she says: “Thank you.”
body float into the sunlit terror cavern.
Black Smoke emerges: The Man in Black, Monstrified.
And then the Man in Blacks body randomly appears downstream: Not dead, yet so dead.
Jacob puts his mother and brother side-by-side in the cave that was their home.
A clip from season 1 recalls their discovery by theLostaways.
(Or maybe he’s picking up on something?
If this aired a few years later on HBO, the incest wouldnt be implicit.)
In the past, Jacob says “Goodbye” to the man he killed.
Does Jacob even understand what hes done to the only person who never lied to him?
The name “Jacob” conjures the early Hebrew patriarch, who stole a blessing intended for his brother.
Certainly, its clear that Mother really wanted her non-idiot dark-haired boy to take over the family business.
Any battling brothers conjure Cain and Abel, andthatsa complicated connection.
Cain killed his brother out of spite.
To me, the obvious-yet-obscure haziness of interpretation is the ultimate unfathomable terror of Across the Sea.
It turns out that the beginning of this whole elaborate tale is its own impossible web of confusion.
How can something be too on-the-nose and too abstract at once?
For his complete lack of sins, he is punished with an infinity of ruination.
Would that have been preferable?
Ten years later, “Across the Sea” offers another route for interpretation.
Is this whatLostwould have looked like if it never had to end?
But what a sheer last-minute burst of imagination, what an anthology unto itself!
You have to respect the sudden insistence thatLostcould be something utterly different from everythingLosthad ever been.
Unexpectedly, the opposite is true: It was prophetic in the worst way.
Lostwas mostly about people who didn’t understand what was happening to them.
They didnt know where they were, or who to trust.
They wanted to get home, and then they wanted to get away from home.
Oh, youd hear dialogue about saving the world from mad hermits or devious malefactors.
But only in “Across the Sea” does the mission statement turns planetary.
“If the light goes out here, it goes out everywhere,” says Mother.
(Here again, an incoherence that is both infuriating and tantalizing: How does she know this information?
Why would she care if the world she spurns ended?)
All of which only heightens the elemental power of “Across the Sea.”
The light is a lie.
The Heart of The Island is a shadow.
The time is now:
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