Ab Aeterno

I am finally catching up with the final season of Lost –the whole flash sideways. But episode 9, Ab Aeterno-Latin for ‘since the beginning of time’ looked most promising and is easily the best episode this season-the final season.

Ab Aeterno, is also one episode which didn’t have the flash sideways which is seen by many fans as a useless contrivance but I still have faith in the writers (I liked Sawyer’s flash sideways in Recon) .Mostly the end pieces are set in place only we need to know how and when exactly the timelines split and if they will bleed in and merge eventually. And when it all ends, we will know why the flash sideways were needed.

That’s the most beautiful part about all this .We are still clueless and curious.

We still don’t exactly know what happened in 1977 and what exactly did a dying Juliet mean when she was about to say ‘it worked’ before she died in the arms of Sawyer.

We need to visit the Dharma days, at least one last time, to know for sure what exactly ‘The Incident’ did to them and what was the purpose of the Swan with a button to be pushed every 108 minutes. Was it the huge electromagnetic exotic material release that caused the time jump or if indeed it was the detonation of Jughead or was it both happening simultaneously?

One episode should be there to explain the cause and effects of ‘The Incident’.
And it would be lovely to go back to the coolest time period on the island.

Coming back to Ab Aeterno, at 47 minutes running time, I was just engrossed at the proceedings and the revelations.

Ab Aeterno has given a lot of answers; as also given the credence and stamp of approval to the assumptions that the Lost community has lived with over the years. It answers in a mind boggling way drawing analogy and choosing metaphors and that is a welcome change from the tradition of answering the questions by posing more questions.

People have long speculated the hell and purgatory theory and this episode has shoved that theory to the bins.

We have the whole and extensive backstory of the island’s longest and ageless resident -Richard, except for the two warring forces since eternity in Jacob and The Man in Black.
It was kind of obvious that the they would figure in the Richard flashback .However the whole Canary Island and Isabella angle showed how and what made Richard make the choices he did.

I can stick my hand out and say that Ab Aeterno is the best Lost episode yet .Better than the Pilot, Through the Looking Glass and perhaps The Constant too. And probably can only be topped by the hugely anticipated episode 15 –Across the sea.

Richard’s flashback starts in 1867, with the shot of him riding a horse back to his ailing wife Isabella in their home in Tenerife, Canary Islands. With Isabella coughing blood, Richard goes back again to summon a doctor who refuses to come back to treat her and tells that the money he is offering for the medicine is just not enough. A desperate Richard falls into plead mode but somehow ends up accidentally knocking the doctor dead on the table edge. Richard ends up losing Isabella and in prison for his murder, for which the crooked priest wouldn’t absolve him of his sin.

However a ray of hope appears as the priest strikes a deal with Capt. Whitfield and sells Richard as a slave for Magnus Hanso’s expedition to the new world in the Black Rock. And the Black Rock gets caught in a huge sea storm ends up on the island breaking the Tawaret statue and landing shipwrecked a mile inside the beach. That was a nice ploy, answering 3 questions at once.

The Man in Black approaches Richard and convinces him he is in hell that Jacob is the devil and he has to kill him if he ever wishes to be with is wife again. Nice manipulation; after having killed the whole crew on The Black Rock in his smoke monster personification.



Richard sets about to kill Jacob but instead gets the living daylights kicked of him by Jacob. This is also the first time that The Man in Black has tried to kill Jacob. That was an interesting tit-bit. Jacob realises that Richard has been fed details by his nemesis and dunks him in sea water to shake his belief that he is not dead and not in hell.
That was quite in your face baptism, mind you.

And when Richard is receptive to him now, we hear the fantastic explanation of what exactly the island is. Quietly looking at the bottle of wine in his hand ,he says
“ Think of this wine as what you keep calling hell. There are many other names for it too: malevolence, evil, darkness. And here it is, swirling around in the bottle, unable to get out because if it did, it would spread. The cork is this island and it's the only thing keeping the darkness where it belongs.”

Jacob tells Richard that he can’t bring his wife back, can’t absolve him of his sins but does grant him to be immortal in exchange of being the representative and intermediary between Jacob and the people he brings to the island and that’s how Richard is ageless.

However for me the last scene between The Man in Black and Jacob was just – super spectacular.Acted so brilliantly by Titus Welliver and Mark Pellegrino respectively. You could see the frustration of being kept on the island so long on Welliver’s face and Jacob’s faith in what he is doing on Pellegrino’s. Having said that, Nestor Carbonell as Richard gave his absolutely finest performance till date.

And finally, brilliant use of genie in the bottle metaphor.
Jacob gives the same bottle of wine, something for him to pass the time,
The Man in Black raises the bottle of wine, tries to uncork it, and when he can’t, turns it upside down, he smashes the bottle against the log, he is sitting on, splashing wine everywhere.
Just terrific!