Regarding last week’s episode of Lost, which carries us into the LAST REGULAR HOUR-LONG PRE-FINALE EPISODE tonight (*fans self*): I don’t even know. My mind was blown. To PIECES, it was blown. So, yeah. I’m not the person to come to if you’re looking for theories. Theories, I do not have them.
Questions, however, I have. Also some statements of confusion and assertions of opinion, etc:
1.) Why are all the Internets all het up about that episode sucking? It DID NOT SUCK. Sure, it was confusing at times, and yes, it did raise a lot of questions at a time when we really want more answers, but COME ON. This is Lost, people. If you’re not confused, you’re watching it wrong. Why should that change now?
2.) That said, I don’t think that most of the questions raised by that episode – who is Mother? where did she come from? why does she hate people? why does she steal babies? – need answers. I mean, really, can’t we just say this: 1) the protector of the Island, and an enigma, 2) somewhere before Time, or from some other mother whose head got bashed in by some other guardian, 3) because “they come, they do bad things, it’s always the same’ etc., 3) she just does, because, seriously, have you not been watching this show? ALL THE BABIES GET STOLEN. Because the Islands wimmins cannot has the babies themselves. So the other babies get stolen. That’s just what happens.
3.) This, however, IS a good question: was Mother herself a Smoke Monster, or is the Man in Black the first and only?
4.) And whaddup with the Other Mother, who kept appearing as a ghost? MiB has been implying to the Losties that he and only he appears as ghosts, but that clearly wasn’t him appearing to his pre-monster self, so. Obviously there’s some ghostly business going on on the Island that has nothing to do with him. SPOOKY.
5.) I’ve been saying all along that Jacob is kind of a douche. Now we know that he started out as a whiney mama’s boy, which explains a lot.
6.) So, the Other Mother spoke Latin, which means, maybe, that her people were ancient Roman? Here’s a thought that I had (when I said that I had no theories, I lied): are she and her lost twins meant to remind us of the Vestal virgin, Rhea Silvia, who did the nasty with the god, Mars, and her famous twins Romulus and Remus (you know, the ones who were raised by wolves, founded Rome, etc). There’s obviously no direct correlation – Jacob and the Boy in Black weren’t raised by a she-wolf (unless you take Mother’s crazy as sort of lupine) and their real mother was named Claudia and they didn’t go on to found Rome – but maybe there’s a nod there that we should be paying attention to. The goddess Vesta (the goddess of the mother of Romulus and Remus) was the goddess of the hearth – of the heart-light of the world, literally and figuratively. Ovid had it that Vesta was the Earth herself, and that she held the sacred fire of life at her core; Rome was understood to be one all-encompassing sacrificial Vestal ground, upon which offerings to Vesta were delivered by fire in the form of – WAIT FOR IT – smoke. And Vesta – nod to the obvious here – was a virgin, unable to bear her own children. I don’t know: Vesta – Mother/Earth, Rome – Island, twins – twins?
I think that I just blew my own mind.
About Her Bad Mother
okay so on 3) re: smoke monster:
I think there’s another possibility. What if MiB is NOT the smoke monster, but just the person he’s been appearing as to Jacob? We know that he can only take the form of dead people (a la, “the first” from buffy) – so it doesn’t seem obvious to me that MiB became the smoke monster. Could it be that mother has been the guardian of smokey all that time – i.e. he was already there – and then we just see him at the end coming out of the cave like that? We do see both smokey AND the body of the MiB – so that seems to indicate that the other twin died, not that he became the smoke monster.
Also – I saw it hypothesized elsewhere that the whole “claudia appearing to kid MiB” thing was actually the smoke monster – and that it was the smoke monster who killed all those people and filled in the well. and he did all that to manipulate MiB into killing his “mother”, the guardian, to set himself free. Unfortunately, for smokey, Jacob had already become protector, and for some reason smokey can’t kill the guardian – so he sets off figuring out how to manipulate someone into kiling Jacob.
I sort of really like that theory :)