'Lost' recap: A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother

They are not Cain and Abel. They are not Jacob and Esau. At least, not the Jacob and Esau from The Bible. They are not angels or demons, they are not gods or monsters, and they are not incarnations of dead castaways like Juliet and Daniel Faraday. (Seriously! Whoever came up with that last idea was, like, totally stupid or totally high or totally nuts! Somebody shoot that guy before he hurts someone with nutty theories!) No, in the end, Jacob and the Man In Black are revealed to be a pair of brothers who have something in common with a lot of characters on Lost: they got royally screwed by some really crappy parenting.

Meet the mother of all Others — The Other Mother, if you will, and in more ways than one. Nameless, lonely, and more than a little loony (and nicely underplayed by The West Wing's Allison Janney), The Woman Known Only As ''Mother'' was the proto-Rousseau, more fit to raise Claire's fake squirrel baby than two human beings. She was a Wicked Wiccan Witch of the West, an earthy demi-goddess gone gonzo, an old world oracle-priestess gone dangerously loco. A long time ago, across the sea and far away, this nameless wilderness mystic with the hair net tiara — Jacob's immediate predecessor as Island guardian (and/or its previous smoke monster?) — stumbled upon a shipwrecked castaway named Claudia. She took the pregnant beauty to her camp, helped deliver her fraternal twin boys, and then took a rock and bashed in the poor woman's head. (Happy Belated Mother's Day!) She raised the children as her own. She filled their minds with interesting notions about the nature of reality and the nature of man. And through it all, she tended the soil like a patient gardener and worked her loom like a crafty fury of fate. What did she get out of the deal? Companionship. Motherhood. And perhaps... an ending to an eternal obligation? With her dying breath, she thanked the son she loved the most, the one that was most like her, the ''special'' one with the angry spirit — the dreamer; the gamer; the liar; the cynic — for stabbing her in the back and through the heart. Were the boys nothing but an escape plan? Did she raise one to take her job and the other to take her life? Is this the way The Island works?

''Across The Sea'' promised oodles of noodle-cooking Island mythology, and we got just that — which is to say, a yarn that played like myth, albeit with a mean deconstructive streak. You got the sense that the drama that unfolded in this hour left some indelible grooves on the psychography of the living Island, laying track for all future drama to follow. Did the Mother/Jacob/Man In Black drama curse this world like the Biblical fall of man? Did this tragic trio doom future Island visitors to suffer through adaptations of their same sad story? So many shared elements. Shipwrecked castaways. A deadly first encounter with a supernatural Island entity. ''Special'' children and child abduction. Ghosts. Suspicion and conflict with Others. Mystery boxes and games. The war between faith and reason. Betrayal and murder. Does the current iteration of this repeating myth involving Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and the rest of the surviving Oceanic 815 lot represent one more manifestation of the cycle that will continue forever and ever, Amen? Or is the great twist of the entire Lost saga is that everyone, friend or foe — from the castaways to Fake Locke to Dead Jacob — are actually striving toward the same end from different angles: reversing the curse; breaking the chain; cleaning the slate; reboot. We shall see.

NEXT: Coming to hard and fast conclusions