Lost is nearing the end. Last week they promised, PROMISED, us some answers. The Man in Black’s motivations would be revealed, the promos told us.
So what did we get? Answers that spawned more questions. Incomplete answers to questions we never asked. A new character with unexplained motives and backstory used to fill in the motives and backstory of old characters.
Jacob was a dimwitted wuss before he became, well, Jacob. The Man in Black was a good guy, or at least a neutral guy by any measure, right up until the time his murderous liar of a fake mother beat him over the head and stole his dream away from him. Dare I even ask why his dead real mother appeared to him and not to Jacob? Was it his dead real mother, or was it the smoke monster disguised as his dead real mother?
Somewhere along the way, I just stopped caring. Looking back, I think it was when the castaways who wanted to destroy the plane gave up on their plan because Hurley blew up the dynamite. Really, they couldn’t smash all the instruments with a rock? Wouldn’t that have achieved the same goal? The TSA thinks I could render an airplane un-airworthy with a pair of tweezers, so I think a dozen people with GUNS, KNIVES, and ROCKS could probably get the job done without hauling 200-year-old dangerously unstable dynamite across the island.
But I digress. Two episodes until the finale. I was hoping against all hope that the Man in Black’s flashback episode was going to be the one, the episode that pulled me back in, that filled in the blanks and made me believe that the writers had this thing under control.
Instead, we get the answer to a minor question from Season One that was so minor I had forgotten about it. We now know that Adam and Eve are really the Man in Black and his fake mother. Big whoop.
Trying to find a brighter note, I guess we do now that the Man in Black isn’t really the Man in Black, but the smoke monster playing the Man in Black. That’s something, I suppose.
I think you missed part of the point here…
There is no such thing as the “smoke monster” prior to Jacob throwing his brother (The Man in Black) into The Source. That’s what “mother” meant when she said that going in there would make you “worse than dead” and what The Man in Black meant when he said that Jacob had taken away his body.
The Man in Black became the smoke monster, so before this there was no smoke monster to impersonate his “dead real mother.” His dead real mother appeared to him and not Jacob because he had the ability to commune with the dead and to “know” things. This is why the smoke monster has these powers as well.
Anyway, it is obvious that I like the show a lot more than you, so I won’t try to belabor my points here. I will point out, however, that it’s much more fun to just sit back and enjoy the show than try to pick it apart so that you can write a blog post about it the next day that includes such phrases as “But I digress” and other critic favorites.