Last night, we got the Lost episode we had been waiting for – and it provided… just a couple of answers, and a ton more questions. Well, consider yourself SPOILER WARNED and let’s get down to it, shall we?

• Jacob and Man in Black -still not named for some annoying reason – are brothers, fraternal twin mothers.  And their adoptive mother killed their birth mother by bashing her head in right after they were born.  So first Claudia, then Rousseau, and then Claire, all came to the Island pregnant, gave birth, and then had their babies taken from them.  Home births don’t sound so bad now, do they?
• Seriously, why didn’t we get names for MiB and his and Jacob’s “Mother?”  Can their names be THAT significant that we STILL can’t find out that they are, even with such precious little time left on the show?  Clearly Mother had been imbued with some kind of mystical powers, right?  She, like our buddy Richard Alpert, didn’t appear to age a day while her sons grew from babies to teenagers to men.  And there must have been something in that wine she made Jacob drink.  And she “made it” so that the two would never be able to hurt each other.  Except she might have screwed the pooch on that one, as Jacob did sorta-kinda-from a certain point of view kill his twin when he pushed him into the Light Tunnel.  I mean, clearly he lives on as the Smoke Monster, but he did kill his human self.  Does that mean that Jacob, MiB, and Mother were all somewhat supernatural, in that they could live for a really long time without aging, but not immortal, as a dagger in the chest would still kill them?
• Mother’s view of men is the same as MiB’s: “They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt.”   Also interesting is that she told Jacob he didn’t have a choice to become the Island protector, but Jacob’s whole motto is “You do have a choice.”  Interesting…
• So, let’s look at the questions that were answered: MiB and Mother are Adam and Eve.  This despite the fact that Jack estimated the bodies were about 40-50 years old based on their decomposition.  Well, maybe bodies just decompose in weird ways on the Island or something.   But the cutaways to Jack and Kate finding the bodies was completely gratuitous, forced, and unnecessary.  We got it, thanks!  We also found out that the boy who has been haunting MiB is in fact young Jacob.  So why is it that everyone (except Richard) can see young ghost Jacob, but no one (except Richard) ever saw the real Jacob when he was alive?  We also saw MiB starting to build the donkey wheel, but we didn’t get much of an explanation as to how it would work, nor do we know who finished it after Mother sabotaged his first efforts.
• Now onto the questions  NOT answered by this episode, many of which really bugged me.  First and foremost, I was hoping to get a better sense of THE RULES that Jacob and MiB play by, and all we learned was that they can’t kill each other directly, which we already knew.  But also pretty big is the question of how is MiB now pure evil, that must be contained on the Island?  WHY can’t he be allowed to leave?  Because he absorbed the Light’s powers?  Could he have left before that moment?  If so, why didn’t Mother just let him go?  If she only needed one replacement, and Jacob wanted to stay and MiB wanted to leave, why not just let him go?  Because he’s “special?”  How so?  What does that mean?  Why could he see his dead real Mom and Jacob couldn’t?  In regards to Jacob’s analogy to Richard about the Island being a cork to contain evil, is the Light itself the evil, or is it MiB now that he’s absorbed it’s energies?
• Before last night’s episode, something had been bugging me: When the Oceanic 6 were trying to get back to the Island, Ben and Eloise Hawking told Jack they had to bring Locke’s body back to the Island.  I know believe that Ben was just spouting gobbledy-gook – that he really had no deep understanding of the Island, Jacob, MiB, etc.  But Eloise seems to know A LOT.  About everything.  Even in different timelines.  So shouldn’t she know that the MiB could use Locke’s form if they brought his body back to the Island?  Shouldn’t she have said, “Whoa, hey there Jackie boy, what ever you do, DO NOT bring any corpses to that Island – they can be used against you by an evil supernatural force!”  My working theory is that she – and perhaps her ex Charles Widmore – are in cahoots with MiB.  To what end?  Well, if Widmore does in fact want to exploit the Island, to use the Light in the cave for all sorts of evil purposes, and MiB wants to leave, then they both have a vested interest in killing Jacob and all of his candidates.  Perhaps their whole feud is a ruse?

It was nice to get some backstory about the Island and its key players, but the episode still felt somewhat frustrating by the way it answered a few questions but continued to throw even more questions at us.  There’s only three and a half hours left in the show, dammit!  Still, I can’t help but feeling that I will like this episode more when I rewatch it later, after the series wraps up.  Maybe it will make more sense in the context of what is still to come.  Despite being somewhat disappointed by last night’s episode, I remain confident that Lost will still end on an incredibly high note.