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'Lost' recap: Uncorked
''Ab Aeterno'' puts the spotlight on Richard Alpert, and gives us more insight into Jacob and the Man In Black
By Jeff Jensen | Mar 24, 2010 Jeff Jensen
Jeff Jensen, an EW senior writer, has been despondent since the cancellation of ''Twin Peaks''Share Comments (1634) Add your comment
Image credit: Mario Perez/ABCSALVATION? THAT'LL COST YOU The MIB offered to set Richard free... or so he said. All AboutLost
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It began in the darkest of night, on the shores of a place Richard Alpert called Hell. It ended in Easter daylight, in a lush Eden, with the ageless enigma trembling with much fear and a glimmer of hope. In between, we got a story that asked questions that we've been asking ab aeterno — since the beginning. What is good? What is evil? How do we know the difference? Who knows what is truly best for us? Who should we trust? How do we make moral choices amid such ambiguity? Why must we figure this stuff out on our own? Why don't the gods of the universe play straight with us? How the flaming hell are we supposed to live like this?

''Ab Aeterno'' — the story of two great and powerful and angry gentlemen and a third who wasn't quite sure who or what he was anymore — was miles away from Two and a Half Men. It was a heavy, heady hour of TV suffused with Biblical subtext, scribbled with subtitles, and stuffed with answers for the show's Island mythology, albeit in a fabulist form requiring careful interpretation and a clarification or two. Or more. In addition to getting a story that revealed how Richard Alpert got to The Island, we got a story that revealed more of the historical relationship between Jacob and the Man In Black. Indeed, we got the sense that the battle these two angels/demons/whatchamacallums waged over Alpert's soul was actually the first phase of Man In Black's 140-years-in-the-making Smoke-man from Alcatraz escape plan. The episode used a corked, half-empty jug of wine as a metaphor for The Island as a never-to-be-opened holding container for hell and assorted analogous concepts: malevolence, evil, darkness, more. Jacob said all those words were functional words to characterize the archetype embodied by the Man In Black. (No doubt Smokey's own interpretation of Jacob's symbols would have been be more charitable and ''glass half full.'')

Wine was one of several religious symbols of the Catholic-Christian stripe that ''Ab Aeterno'' employed and subverted. I was reminded of the cryptic Last Supper images that ABC released prior to the season, particularly the one in which the castaways were seen serving and sipping the wine at Fake Locke's Passover table. Jacob might say, ''They're drinking poison!'' Smokey's interpretation? Judging from the way he smashed the bottle/metaphor to bits, maybe he'd say ''They're drinking spirits. I mean, their souls. I'm pouring out and returning their souls to them. Get it? Wine = Spirits = Souls? No? Oh, screw this symbology s--t! It's just a damn bottle of wine!''

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