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

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Years passed. The boys grew up, though they remained forever young in terms of emotional maturity, as if their Mother's smothering parenting and their adolescent drama had infantilized them and frozen their respective characters in amber. The Boy In Black was now the Man In Black. He spent his days with his people digging holes in the ground, hunting for magnetic energy. Meanwhile, Jacob had grown into a barefooted voyeur who spent his days watching his brother and playing Senet with him in the woods. MIB told his brother there were some very smart, very curious people among his people — men of science with a more sophisticated perspective on Island truths than the fairy tales promulgated by Mother Of Faith. He also told Jacob that his brainy countrymen has some very inventive ideas on how The Island could be harnessed and made to work for them. (We learned that MIB and these men were responsible for designing — but not implementing — the donkey wheel mechanism that could move The Island and open worm holes to Tunisia. ''Across The Sea'' never explained who came along and finished the project. The Dharma Initiative?)

That said, MIB didn't trust his people one bit. He told Jacob that Mother was right about them. ''They're greedy. Manipulative. Untrustworthy. And selfish.'' Why was he living among them then? Because they were a means to an end — that end being escape. (The irony of his own greedy-manipulative-untrustworthy-selfishness went unacknowledged.) MIB again pleaded for Jacob to come with him. Jacob declined. He didn't want to leave Mother. MIB asked him what he intended to do when Mother died. Jacob refused to accept that. ''She's never going to die!'' MIB: ''Jacob! Everything dies!'' This was a provocative exchange, and it made me wonder how much of this conflict is relevant to the castaway drama. Smokey's conspiracy to kill the candidates is also a means to an end. But I wonder if the villain uses Jacob's unhealthy denial of death to rationalize his evil. This could be Smokey's defense: Jacob's touchy-feeling tampering and his idealistic redemption schemes have undermined castaway free will and kept them alive longer than what is right and proper. Seen from this point of view, MIB's assassinations are more like mercy killings and affirmations of the natural order of things. I'm not excusing MIB's actions. But if my assessment of Jacob is correct, I think MIB's critique is valid.

As always, Jacob couldn't tell a lie, so he went home to his graying Mother and told her that Nameless had finally found a way to leave The Island. You could tell neither wanted that to happen — and you could tell Jacob wanted him mommy to make it all better. And so Mother snuck into enemy territory and found her prodigal son in a well, working to install the donkey wheel. Their engagement began tender, then quickly turned bitter. He told Mother he had spent decades searching for that vision of God — er, I mean, Holy Wormhole Cavern that she had shown him when he was a kid. He failed, gave up, and looked for another path to The Island's innermost heart. And with his fire and his iron and his tools and his science, he found one, hidden behind an old stone wall. Was this a valid access point to the ''light under The Island'' — or was it unsanctioned and dangerous short cut? After suffering through the nose bleeds and time travel death of season 5, I would say the latter.

NEXT: A fate worse than death