Crossing the Sea of Discontent

I learned after finishing the series that this is a Senet game, Egyptian in origin

The tunnel to the island's "heart"

Mother, Jacob, and "Brother" look inside at the island's light

Brothers play a game

I have realized it is easy to nitpick. To dissect and tear apart any material Cuse and Lindelof present to us onscreen. We kind of can't help ourselves, can we? It's in our nature, I guess. To always want this explained, and that. What about the back story of Janney's *Mother*? What is her own story for ending up on the island and disliking mankind so much? I personally assumed it was because of her own experience. She had seen the worst and wanted her boys to be unspoiled and uncorrupted by man and his ways. So she herself brutally kills their birth mother with a stone, not allowing any holding or bonding whatsoever. And Mother just bashes this girl's head in repeatedly, with the squishy sound of mutilated face and brains reinforcing the savagery of the attack. I couldn't look at her as anything but a killer, to tell you the truth. When she later is responsible for the massacre of Jacob and The Man in Black's mother's people, located as scattered corpses at their camp, this further concludes that whatever happened to her before we ever were introduced to her must have been most cruel and traumatizing. Why else could she kill without regret? Yet she was persistently guarded towards her "sons", wanting them to remain separate from those "across the sea", protectors of the island and its "light source". Mankind would only spoil this light. The Man in Black, prior to when Jacob throws him against a rock and watches as his body goes into the tunnel, sucked into the light, leaving as a black smoke, growling and furious, just wanted to leave. He wasn't Evil Incarnate at that point; Mother made sure she tried whatever she could to halt his progress in developing a transport off the island by use of the light. Her prevention of his leaving, through the use of an attack on him (and later murder of the people he lived on the island with for 30 years, admitting that they were corrupt and flawed human beings he didn't particularly like)--a full head smash into stone wall, while digging an underground tunnel that was accessible to the light--and his later retaliation (stabbing her through with a spear) resulted in his dilemma. Jacob was responsible as was their mad Mother in what The Man in Black would become so he's not altogether to blame for what happens to those who eventually land on the island. Our need for a history of Mother and why she came to be on the island would just further serve as a setback Cuse and Lindelof's completion of their overall series arc. So we are left with Across the Sea as our island back story. How Jacob can visit each of his candidates and get them to the island? That light is mighty peculiar. But again I can nitpick if I so choose and demand further elaboration. Or just take what I get and be content. We have a hard time with that, don't we?

Adam and Eve, actually Mother and Son