The feeling is that his name is not really important and that now they keep from revealing it because they know everyone wants to know.
But that episode threw me quite a bit.
Who was that woman? More and more, I am feeling that the island is Eden. Remember that she said that the island was the source. It was life, death... rebirth. Is this where all of creation began? Is she... Mother Nature? How long had she been there?
Okay, she kills their mother to supposedly keep the boys from their people because people are bad. Clearly, she was tiring of watching/guarding the island. She wanted to be replaced. She thought it would be…well, we'll call him Esau. However, it turned out that Jacob was the understanding/loyal one. Esau wanted off the island to see the world and return to where he came from.
Soon, the ghost of his real mother comes to see him and only him. For some reason not given, Jacob cannot see her. She tells Esau the truth which begins his desire to want to leave the island. He finds the light and wants to build the wheel to leave the island. He thinks that the wheel will allow him to leave the island. While true, no explanation is given as to how he knows this. Just him saying, "I'm special" doesn't cut it.
So his fake mother covers up the hole and kills all of Esau and Jacob's people from the shipwreck. She did this because they too saw the light. This is a problem because she believes they will try to take the light and could accidently extinguish it.
Understood. Man would bring about the demise of all life in trying to possess the light.
So Esau kills her in anger. Jacob beats him and takes him to the cave. He tells him if he wants to leave, then fine – leave. As he pushes him down into the water, Esau hits his head. Either this killed him or knocked him unconscious. Again, no explanation is given. Suddenly, the smoke monster flies from the cave.
Questions:
Is that Esau? Did Esau change into this new being or did he simply free the beast? Their fake mother told Jacob never to go down into the cave.
“Would I die?” – Jacob
“It would be worse than dying, Jacob, much worse.”
What did she mean? Is it that going into the cave would free the creature? Or did she mean that a person would be changed/become a creature?
The easy answer is that it is Esau and that he simply changed into this creature.
But I have problems with that.
In the episode, I didn’t find him evil. I found him likeable.
He simply wanted to know the truth.
He simply wanted to be with his people.
He simply wanted to get off the island.
None of this is unreasonable. If there was a liar and a seemingly bad (and maybe crazy) person, well, it was the fake mother. She lied. She committed murder.
If the smoke monster is simply Esau in some sort of twisted, cursed, ghost-like form, I am going to have a problem with that. I prefer the idea that Esau died and that Jacob accidently freed the creature (possibly Satan) when he sent Esau’s body into the cave in a moment of anger.
I like that idea much better.
Obviously, any fan of the show would think me nuts. They would refer to all of the episodes in which these two have appeared and say that it is clearly Esau with Jacob. But my idea is that the smoke monster appears to Jacob in the form of his brother as a way to torment Jacob, to annoy him, to force him to always remember what he did to his brother in that moment of anger.
Even a melding, a combination of Esau and the smoke monster becoming one being is better than making the smoke monster simply Esau. And again, my reasoning is that he came across well in this episode. I admired his persistence, his determination. I sympathized with his plight. To simply make him the bad guy doesn’t work for me.
Also, if this is the case, I ask…what is the point?
Let me explain.
If his fake mother made him this angry, made him become what he became, then all this could have been prevented if she never interfered in the first place. Claudia would have found her people, had her two sons and made a life for herself on the island with the possibility of escape or rescue at some point in the future.
But this woman brought about all of this with her behavior, her murder of Claudia.
See what I’m getting at?
But if you do it the way I’m suggesting, then the need to keep this thing on the island is paramount and nothing can allow it to escape. Killing would be acceptable in the bigger picture scenario (the need to protect all life everywhere). But the way it is now, both she and Jacob seem to be the cause of its creation if it is indeed Esau in some new form.
Therefore, I am ambivalent about how this is playing out at the moment.
