Across the Sea

Across the Sea
Season	6
Episode number	15
Airdate(s)	May 11, 2010
Flashback	Jacob The Man in Black
Writer	Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof
Director	Tucker Gates
Guests	Kenton Duty as Jacob (age 13) Allison Janney as Woman Lela Loren as Claudia Mark Pellegrino as Jacob Titus Welliver as The Man in Black
Co-stars	Ryan Bradford as The Man In Black (age 13) Ivo Nandi as oldest hunter
Transcript	Across the Sea transcript

"Across the Sea" is the 15th episode in Season 6 of Lost and the 118th produced hour of the series as a whole. It aired on May 11, 2010. The history of the relationship between Jacob and The Man in Black is revealed.

Synopsis

Claudia is in the ocean clinging to the remains of a ship. She eventually comes ashore and after collapsing, wakes up on the Island. The beach is strewn with wreckage from a shipwreck. Heavily pregnant, she makes her way inland and begins to drink from a stream. As she drinks she is startled to see Mother standing nearby. Mother greets her and takes her back to her camp. While there, Claudia asks questions about where they are but Mother is evasive. Claudia soon goes into labor delivering a boy whom she names Jacob. Then another boy is born. When Claudia asks to see the second boy, Mother kills her with a rock.

Thirteen years later, a young Man in Black is walking on the beach when he finds a game. He shows it to Jacob and offers to play with him, but only if Jacob doesn't tell their mother, whom he believes will take the game away from them. But Jacob cannot hide the truth and immediately tells Mother, who nevertheless seems to approve of the young Man in Black's ability to be deceitful, which Jacob lacks. Mother herself is deceitful. She had told them that the Island was all there was of the world, and that they three were the only people in it. When the boys later see three men hunting, they demand an explanation from Mother. She admits that there are other people, evil people, living on the other side of the Island but that the boys must never reveal themselves to them. Mother takes the boys to see a glowing cave which a stream enters into but tells them they must not enter it. She tells them that if people find out about the light from the cave they will want to possess it and will even kill for it. But she tells them she has made it so the two boys cannot hurt each other.

Some time after, the boys are playing Senet when the dead Claudia appears to the young Man in Black. Jacob cannot see her - because she is dead, she explains to the young Man in Black. She asks him to accompany her as she has something to show him on the other side of the Island. On the way there, she tells him that he and Jacob are her sons and that the woman they call Mother had murdered her. She shows her son where the other people on the Island live, a village containing several huts. She tells him that they are the survivors of a shipwreck which occurred 13 years ago, the day before the young Man in Black was born.

The young Man in Black wakes Jacob up at night and urges him to come with him to join the people in the village. As they leave, he tries to explain to Jacob what he knows and why they have to leave. Jacob argues and Mother awakens. The young Man in Black confronts her with what he knows about Claudia and her death and Mother admits the truth of it. Nevertheless Jacob decides to remain with the woman he has known as Mother.

Thirty years later, The Man in Black reveals to Jacob that he has found a way off of the Island. When Jacob tells Mother this, she goes to see the Man in Black, who shows her he has found a way to dig into the light that exists beneath parts of the Island, although in 30 years of trying he has never been able to find the cave Mother had once shown him and Jacob. He has constructed a large wheel and he plans to dig a large hole into the light and use it and water to construct a mechanism to allow him to leave the Island, because he doesn't belong there. Mother knocks him out and burns his new village down, killing everyone but the Man in Black. Mother returns to Jacob and takes him up to but not inside the glowing cave she had once shown him and his brother. She pours him some wine from a flask and makes him drink it, which makes him her successor. He is angered at being made her successor only by default, as she had always favored his brother. She admits she was wrong and that it should have been him all along. She reminds him that one day he will have to choose his own successor.

When The Man in Black wakes up, he returns to Mother's camp and kills her by stabbing her in the heart. When Jacob returns and sees what his brother has done, he attacks him and overpowers him. As he is carrying his brother through the jungle, the Man in Black reminds him that Jacob cannot kill him. Jacob replies that he has no intention of killing him. He brings him back to the glowing cave and after knocking him out, places him in the stream which carries his body inside the cave.

Very soon afterward a fast-moving cloud of smoke emerges from the cave mouth. The cave no longer seems to emit the unearthly glow it once did. As Jacob later drinks from the stream, he sees his brother's human body. He carries it back to Mother's camp and eventually lays the two to rest together, along with a pouch containing a black and a white stone.

Centuries later, Jack Shephard and Kate Austen discover the two corpses laying side-by-side in the cave, as well as the two stones. John Locke dubs the pair "our very own Adam and Eve."

Trivia

• When the Man in Black is born, his mother does not name him, saying "I only chose one name." It does not appear that his "mother" ever named him either, as both she and Jacob always refer to him with personal pronouns.

Production notes

• Naveen Andrews (Sayid), Nestor Carbonell (Richard), Henry Ian Cusick (Desmond), Emilie de Ravin (Claire), Michael Emerson (Ben), Jeff Fahey (Frank), Jorge Garcia (Hurley), Josh Holloway (Sawyer), Daniel Dae Kim (Jin), Yunjin Kim (Sun), Ken Leung (Miles) and Zuleikha Robinson (Ilana) do not appear in this episode.
  • Matthew Fox (Jack), Evangeline Lilly (Kate) and Terry O'Quinn (Locke) only appear in archive footage.
    • No main cast members appear in original footage.

Bloopers and continuity errors

• When the young Man In Black is talking to his mother about the game he found on the beach, someone can be seen reflected in his eye.
• When the Man in Black is throwing sticks for the Senet game with Jacob, the sticks shift position throughout the shots.
• When the skeletons were first discovered in "House of the Rising Sun" (which this episode shows us in flashback) they were separated and not lying side-by-side, as we see Jacob placing the bodies in this episode. (This continuity error is also present in "Lighthouse".)

Recurring themes

Storyline analysis

• The Man in Black murders his "mother". (Crimes)
• Jacob assumes the role of protector of the source after drinking the wine from his "mother". (Leadership)

Cultural references

• Senet: The Man in Black finds a Senet board and pieces on the beach and claims to know how to play without ever having played it before. Senet may be the oldest board game in the world. Senet boards were often placed in the grave alongside other useful objects for the dangerous journey through the afterlife. (Games)

Literary techniques

• The other people on the Island were killed off in order to stop their knowledge of the source from spreading. (Redshirts)

Episode Connections

Episode References

• Jack, Locke, and Kate find the Man in Black and his mother in the caves and dub them "Adam and Eve". ("House of the Rising Sun")
• Jacob drinks from the bottle of wine. ("Ab Aeterno")

Episode Allusions

• Mother says, "They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt. It always ends the same. ("The Incident, Part 1")
• The construction of the wheel is shown. ("There's No Place Like Home, Part 3")

Unanswered questions

Unanswered questions
Do not answer the questions here. Keep the questions open-ended and neutral: do not suggest an answer. More details...

For fan theories about these unanswered questions, see: Across the Sea/Theories

External links

• ABC Medianet schedule
• ABC Press Release