It’s a little late in the game for me to start reviewing episodes of Lost on this site with there being only two or three episodes to go, depending on how you cut it. But last night’s episode was such a significant piece of the show’s mythology and worked for me on so many levels, that I felt like I had to jot some notes down here. There be plenty of spoilers in this short post, so don’t read ahead if you haven’t seen it and you’re planning on watching the episode anytime soon.

First off, I really loved this episode — it was much slower and more ponderous than I expected, but it explained plenty. Obviously we now know who Adam and Eve were, but also the genesis of the donkey wheel, where the dagger that killed Jacob came from, who made the wells, how the Orchid well got filled up (in “This Place Is Death”), why Jacob and the Man in Black can’t hurt each other directly (thanks to Alison Janney’s Magic Touch™), etc. My favorite elements of the episode had little to do with these answers, however, and were much more about how a number of images/themes recurred from previous episodes (or, chronologically, how and why they show up after this episode’s events). Here’s a short list of some things I noticed:

• Claudia, pregnant, washing up on the beach = Rousseau and Claire showing up on the island pregnant
• Janney’s manipulating the kids as a replacement to protect the island = Kelvin manipulating Desmond as a replacement to man the hatch
• Jacob, the bratty, petulant, kind of dumb whiner with mommy issues = Jack, the bratty, petulant, kind of dumb whiner with daddy issues
• The Boy in Black’s specialness nurtured by a protector of the island (Janney) = Walt’s specialness nurtured by a protector of the island (Locke)
• The Boy in Black has a mystical conversation with his dead mother that drives him to the others = Ben Linus has a mystical conversation with his dead mother that drives him to the others.

So, there are patterns here… this works for me to glue together many of the disconnected events on the show. For instance, it now seems clear that Ben was manipulated by the Man in Black since he was very, very young, luring him to the others much in the same way that the Boy in Black himself was lured to a group of others two millenia earlier. Jack is an entitled, stupid brat who doesn’t want responsibility perhaps because everyone who gets this island-protecting job is someone who needs that arc of self-discovery, etc.

This, finally, gives the series the kind of synthesis I really wanted without being conscious of it — one of recurring images and themes, not of overt explanations. It’s not that we necessarily needed answers for “what the island is” in anything other than the metaphorical sense described in “Ab Aeterno,” it’s about having something tie together all of the events so that they make some kind of thematic sense. At least for me. I couldn’t care less if we ever get an explanation of exactly how the island turned the Man in Black into a pile of clickety-clackety smoke, nor do I understand why anyone really needs that level of explanation.

Yet, one big unanswered question for me with regards to the island’s mythology is the timing of when a “smoke monster” first appeared on the island. Claudia clearly washed up during Roman times (speaking Latin, her people had a Roman dagger that ended up with the Man in Black). But, many of the relics on the island that we see in the 19th century onward are apparently Egyptian — the Taweret statue, the vents for the smoke monster under the Temple’s wall and the underground wall that the Man in Black yanked a block out of this week. So, there must have been a previous smoke monster that predated Claudia’s arrival, right?

This implies, maybe, that there was a previous smoke monster that has since been dispatched somehow, or that the smoke monster itself is some other entity entirely and not simply a disembodied version of the Man in Black. Like all of the other bodies it’s appropriated over the show (from Christian to Yemi to Alex), the Man in Black might be just another one taken by whatever the smoke monster is. Fascinating development, if it’s true. This episode also continues to open up a whole world of narrative possibilities for spinoff materials — since it looks like we won’t get an explanation of Egyptian-era island, or who Jacob’s adoptive mom was (not to mention the 1800 years or so between the events of “Across the Sea” and “Ab Aeterno”), perhaps this creates new avenues for Lost to live on in some fashion past the end of May.