LOST - 6x09 "Ab Aeterno" - Episode Review
I don’t think it’s too off the mark to see Richard Alpert’s dilemma in “Ab Aeterno” as a sneaky, effective microcosm of both the series’ grand narrative and fans’ increasingly polarized reactions towards it. On one side is Jacob, asking for trust but playing only by his own rules; on the other is The Man in Black, the man without a plan, or an ill thought-out one at best. Caught in the middle is a tired, exhausted man who only wants to believe, but will one day scoff heartily (and hilariously) at such a notion. I know what side I’m with on both sides of the camera, but where do you? Where does Alpert at episode’s end? Does that make him right, but the creators somehow wrong? Or vice versa? What other show demands such questions of it?
For me, “Ab Aeterno” marks the third above average episode in a row and one of the highpoints (so far) of the final season. While the past three weeks have all fallen a bit short on concretely conclusive answers, they’ve remained utterly compelling character stories on their own terms, due to and in spite of their “Flashsideways” structure. As the remaining LOST fandom splits over this very narrative issue, I think it’s important to note that their purpose is twofold: they’re funhouse mirrors (distorted, of course) to such classic Season One character intros such as “Walkabout”, “Confidence Man” and “White Rabbit”, and they’re the answer to whatever the outcome of Season Six will be (remember that Fate/Destiny has always been one of the central themes of the show).
Like “The Other 48 Days” and “Flashes Before Your Eyes” before it, the long awaited Alpert analepsis gleefully shattered the Season Six template, making what was old (the flashback structure) all new again (given this year’s Flashsideways-centric conceit). Since the mysterious, seemingly immortal Richard Alpert wasn’t even introduced until Season Three’s “Not In Portland”, structurally it was impossible to have a Season One / Season Six parallel reality for this character. Narratively speaking, the series compensated by teasing three seasons’ worth of hints and insinuations into a fever pitch of assumptions and educated guesses. By revealing his deceptively simple backstory (an escape from slavery into slavery) in a super-sized, subtitle-heavy, and somehow “traditionally” told episode of S6, “Ab Aeterno” gained an intellectual heft it wouldn’t have had earlier in the series, especially considering his was a tale of endurance over time. And given how much of Richard’s quest was tied into the whole Jacob vs. Easu rivalry as well as the more recent schism between every Island faction both dead and alive, how could it?
Most importantly of all, “Ab Aeterno” told a “character-first” story about a person’s loss of faith and its rediscovery, a.k.a., the cornerstone arc of LOST’s most important players. Far from the game-changing infodump many fans expected (although there was plenty of that in the usual circuitous LOST fashion), “Ab Aeterno” told the simple, yet effective tale of a man who lost everything in the name of love, and yet somehow found hope again. It was a story about a man shipwrecked under horrible conditions, facing seemingly insurmountable odds of survival, and being offered both a devil’s bargain in exchange for his soul as well as an angel’s mercy in trade for his everlasting redemption. It was about a man finding a state of grace. It was LOST at its most heartfelt, maddening, intellectual best.
When Richard asked at the beginning of the episode, “You want to know a secret?”, I could almost hear the creak of millions of couches as fans everywhere leaned forward in anticipation. His secret was this:
One man’s hell is another’s heaven (or vice versa).
Other Notes:
• The show opened with what seemed at first to be a repeat of Iliana’s flashback from “The Incident”. We saw Jacob give her marching order to protect the six candidates, but other eagle-eyed viewers noted that he was wearing gloves, to protect her from being one herself. Curiouser and curiouser.
Also in the next scene, the main characters are all sitting around the campfire, freely swapping information. Once again, criticisms of early seasons focused on the Oceanic survivors’ inability NOT to do that, which its why it's so amusing to see it here.
• I’m waiting to see how the season plays out as a whole to render judgment on this whole Jacob as Easu’s warden, with the Island as prison/paradise. That being said, I think the holes in the narrative are slowly but surely being filled in, and that it was fun to watch both a hot tempered Jacob as well as the original Man In Black (Titus Wellever, fresh from baby-napping l’il Abel over on SONS OF ANARCHY) in action. Since Jacob told Dogan (through Alpert?) the exact same instructions for stabbing his nemesis, one wonders if Jacob and Easu were issued matching kill knives / instructions at one point and told to have at it (only to find that method didn’t quite work)… remember Fake-Locke hands Ben the knife to kill Jacob… was it the same type of dagger?
• Someone over at TWOP pointed out the corpse-eating boars was homage to DEADWOOD (which featured Wellever). I myself got a big Randall Flagg/Lloyd Henried/THE STAND vibe from the scene in which MiB frees a captive Alpert. Plus, all those slave scenes reminded me heartily of AMISTAD (although a friend pointed out that at least these guys had more personal space than the Africans who endured the Middle Passage)
• Can Smokey be himself and a vision at the same time? The “fake Isabella” scene seemed to infer that…
• The Island as Hell / purgatory was an early fan theory, so in bringing it up (almost in jest), it seems that theory can finally be crossed out.
• Not for the first time, it seems to me that Hurley, not Jack, would make an ideal replacement for Jacob. Nice snap-together of plot/character detail paring up Spanish speaking Isabella and Hurley’s cultural heritage/ghost whisperer skills, btw.
• Aside from Island magic, how did a ship like the Black Rock NOT get torn apart from hitting Tarawet like that? Oh well, now we know why there was only a foot…
Episode Grade: A-
For me, “Ab Aeterno” marks the third above average episode in a row and one of the highpoints (so far) of the final season. While the past three weeks have all fallen a bit short on concretely conclusive answers, they’ve remained utterly compelling character stories on their own terms, due to and in spite of their “Flashsideways” structure. As the remaining LOST fandom splits over this very narrative issue, I think it’s important to note that their purpose is twofold: they’re funhouse mirrors (distorted, of course) to such classic Season One character intros such as “Walkabout”, “Confidence Man” and “White Rabbit”, and they’re the answer to whatever the outcome of Season Six will be (remember that Fate/Destiny has always been one of the central themes of the show).
Like “The Other 48 Days” and “Flashes Before Your Eyes” before it, the long awaited Alpert analepsis gleefully shattered the Season Six template, making what was old (the flashback structure) all new again (given this year’s Flashsideways-centric conceit). Since the mysterious, seemingly immortal Richard Alpert wasn’t even introduced until Season Three’s “Not In Portland”, structurally it was impossible to have a Season One / Season Six parallel reality for this character. Narratively speaking, the series compensated by teasing three seasons’ worth of hints and insinuations into a fever pitch of assumptions and educated guesses. By revealing his deceptively simple backstory (an escape from slavery into slavery) in a super-sized, subtitle-heavy, and somehow “traditionally” told episode of S6, “Ab Aeterno” gained an intellectual heft it wouldn’t have had earlier in the series, especially considering his was a tale of endurance over time. And given how much of Richard’s quest was tied into the whole Jacob vs. Easu rivalry as well as the more recent schism between every Island faction both dead and alive, how could it?
Most importantly of all, “Ab Aeterno” told a “character-first” story about a person’s loss of faith and its rediscovery, a.k.a., the cornerstone arc of LOST’s most important players. Far from the game-changing infodump many fans expected (although there was plenty of that in the usual circuitous LOST fashion), “Ab Aeterno” told the simple, yet effective tale of a man who lost everything in the name of love, and yet somehow found hope again. It was a story about a man shipwrecked under horrible conditions, facing seemingly insurmountable odds of survival, and being offered both a devil’s bargain in exchange for his soul as well as an angel’s mercy in trade for his everlasting redemption. It was about a man finding a state of grace. It was LOST at its most heartfelt, maddening, intellectual best.
When Richard asked at the beginning of the episode, “You want to know a secret?”, I could almost hear the creak of millions of couches as fans everywhere leaned forward in anticipation. His secret was this:
One man’s hell is another’s heaven (or vice versa).
Other Notes:
• The show opened with what seemed at first to be a repeat of Iliana’s flashback from “The Incident”. We saw Jacob give her marching order to protect the six candidates, but other eagle-eyed viewers noted that he was wearing gloves, to protect her from being one herself. Curiouser and curiouser.
Also in the next scene, the main characters are all sitting around the campfire, freely swapping information. Once again, criticisms of early seasons focused on the Oceanic survivors’ inability NOT to do that, which its why it's so amusing to see it here.
• I’m waiting to see how the season plays out as a whole to render judgment on this whole Jacob as Easu’s warden, with the Island as prison/paradise. That being said, I think the holes in the narrative are slowly but surely being filled in, and that it was fun to watch both a hot tempered Jacob as well as the original Man In Black (Titus Wellever, fresh from baby-napping l’il Abel over on SONS OF ANARCHY) in action. Since Jacob told Dogan (through Alpert?) the exact same instructions for stabbing his nemesis, one wonders if Jacob and Easu were issued matching kill knives / instructions at one point and told to have at it (only to find that method didn’t quite work)… remember Fake-Locke hands Ben the knife to kill Jacob… was it the same type of dagger?
• Someone over at TWOP pointed out the corpse-eating boars was homage to DEADWOOD (which featured Wellever). I myself got a big Randall Flagg/Lloyd Henried/THE STAND vibe from the scene in which MiB frees a captive Alpert. Plus, all those slave scenes reminded me heartily of AMISTAD (although a friend pointed out that at least these guys had more personal space than the Africans who endured the Middle Passage)
• Can Smokey be himself and a vision at the same time? The “fake Isabella” scene seemed to infer that…
• The Island as Hell / purgatory was an early fan theory, so in bringing it up (almost in jest), it seems that theory can finally be crossed out.
• Not for the first time, it seems to me that Hurley, not Jack, would make an ideal replacement for Jacob. Nice snap-together of plot/character detail paring up Spanish speaking Isabella and Hurley’s cultural heritage/ghost whisperer skills, btw.
• Aside from Island magic, how did a ship like the Black Rock NOT get torn apart from hitting Tarawet like that? Oh well, now we know why there was only a foot…
Episode Grade: A-