Goofus and Gallant Land on an Island

Since we only have three and a half hours left -- and that doesn't account for V commercials, which would be great if they only showed Elizabeth Mitchell -- I was really hoping tonight's episode answered a lot of questions. In fact, I wanted it to answer enough questions so that we may arrive next week, ready for death and resolutions and expectant of the other huge batch of explanations that have to account for the sideways world.

In other words, unless the answers are related to the sideways world, I am not sure that, after tonight, we'll have any more time for explanations from things that happened in the past five seasons. So, unless they answered those questions in this episode, they would always remain questions, and there would always be someone in a bar complaining about how they remained questions.

So today we kind of got half of that. We learned, kind of, where Jacob and Smokey came from, what their deal was. We got a tenuous idea of what their rules are. We should, I suppose, be satisfied that the explanation for why the Island is the way it is hinges basically on "It's Magic."

But we did not learn how and when the two brothers decided that playing people against each other would make for good wagering. We didn't learn how long they've been there, and how many times this conflict has played itself out. We didn't learn why and how the Others are the Others -- unless they are the descendants of the survivors of the crazy mother rampage, but she didn't seem sloppy enough to leave survivors -- and what their deal is, and, most importantly, we don't know what Jacob's motivation is, which is kind of the reason everyone is on the Island.

So there's still a lot to wrap up within the next two episodes. In light of that, I guess it makes sense that the writers killed off half the cast last week.

Nevertheless, the Jacob-Smokey origin story was fairly interesting. And now I'm never complaining about my mother again not complaining about my mother for the next couple of hours.

Hi, Mom!

Who else was shocked to learn that C.J. Gregg, like press secretaries are wont to do, lost her mind when she left the Bartlett administration and sequestered herself on a desert Island, where she waited for a foreign woman to shipwreck so she could steal her babies.

And lo and behold! In a move that probably cost the Other Mother her midwife of the year prize, she delivered Jacob and another baby she could not be bothered to name and promptly dispatched with the original recipe mother. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

We then cut to Goofus and Gallant, who have been raised by the Other Mother and spend their days playing board games. Which board game, you ask? The make-up-the-rules-as-you-go predecessor of Cups! Somewhere, Chandler and Joey rolled over in their grave.

Oh, and good luck in the real world when you try the "make up your own game and everyone will have to follow your own rules" approach. And everyone wonders why home-schooled kids are so weird.

And then we finally find out what this whole show is about. The reason the Island is special. The reason Jacob is the guardian. The reason everybody is killing everybody else to control the Island. Are we ready for it?

There it is, just upstream. Glowing in gold. Could it be? Is the answer to all of this the cradle of life?

Almost.

I never thought I'd say it, but the key to Lost is the HOT TUB TIME MACHINE.

But apparently, nobody can go swim in it because that would dissever the soul from the body, and who wants that, really?

The ghost of the original recipe mother spills the beans to a young Smokey, who runs away from home. And when Jacob gets the same information? He does nothing, choosing to stay with nurture over nature.

Did anyone else get a feeling that Jacob was kind of, to put it nicely, dim? He was definitely the Goofus. I mean, the fact that he's a mama's boy speaks for itself -- no man that age should live with his mother. Especially when his mother is an overbearing proto-hippie who wanted to insulate her children from everything else in the world. We're talking major issues here.

And while now we have a clear motivation for Smokey, we still don't quite know what drives Jacob. Like I said, he seemed kind of dim. He spent eighty percent of this episode slack-jawed, following either Smokey or his mother or his rage blackouts. He looked like he had NO IDEA what he was doing. Nothing he did seemed to have rhyme or reason. In fact, it seems that his only motivation -- the reason everyone is on the Island -- is that Jacob wants to see if people are good or bad.

After this episode, I don't know that Smokey is the bad guy. Yes, he does bad things, but at least he has a reason to do it. And that reason might not be terrific, but at least it makes some kind of sense. Meanwhile, Jacob exhibits all the motivation of a bored ten-year old who puts mice in a cage just to see what happens.

The stuff about the lights and magnetism didn't quite work for me. Like I said, it would have been nice to see when all of this happened. That way, we would know if that world understands how magnets work. The alternative is that they're in the Insane Clown Posse.

I would have loved to understand how the well-spring of life, electromagnetism, and donkey wheels all interacted with each other to send Smokey off the Island. There's no good explanation, and the absence of hot women on tonight's show leaves me without my usual fallback position, which is to analyze that, so I don't quite know what to do now.

And then we get a family sat to end all family spats. Smokey wants to leave his mother, so she knocks him out. Then she goes and kills all of Smokey's friends. Jacob drinks his wine and seals his fate. Then Smokey wakes up, finds out all his buddies are dead, so he goes back and kills his mom. Jacob walks in on this, beats the living tar out of Smokey, carries him off into the jungle, knocks him unconscious, throws him face-down into a lake, and lets the current carry Smokey away into the hot tub time machine that will sever his soul from his body.

No wonder the Smoke Monster was born screaming. I would too.

And now we know who Adam and Eve were. Smokey's physical form is gone, and now he's a supernatural being. So I think that Jacob immediately regretted throwing him into the hot tub time machine. On the other hand, Jacob seemed to be similarly immortal, with one caveat -- Jacob can be killed by Ben Linus, whereas Smokey can be stabbed and shot without consequence. Uh oh.

So now we know where this show came from, even if we're kind of fuzzy on the stakes. This thing is going to be over in ten days, people. Maybe ten days will be enough to forget how similar last night's episode of Lost was to this: