Well.

That was… quite something, wasn’t it?

I know there’s been some grumbling that it’s not exactly in good faith to abandon all of the main characters for an entire episode so close to the end of the series, but at this point, I would totally love to watch an entire season of Richard Alpert hanging out as the puppet-masters’ majordomo for a century and a half. Nestor Campbell was really great last night, which certainly helped sell the episode, but it was also a relief after all the incessant flash-back/forward/sideways to watch a fairly linear plotline that explains a lot of the show’s craziness. The episode also did something incredibly satisfying that the show hasn’t done much at all since its first seasons – we watch a character’s over-the-top, inexplicable behavior for a while on the island, and then we get a lovely, fully-sketched backstory that provides a persuasive way to interpret all the stuff we already knew about him. There have also been a few comments that the show spent too long on Richard moldering inside the Black Rock, but for me, that entire sequence was one big “it makes so much sense now” moment. A deeply religious guy who believes he’s a murderer but that he cannot be forgiven is going to accept that he deserves to be tortured pretty easily. That same guy is then going to leap at the opportunity to spend eternity trying to atone for his sins by proving humanity’s ultimate goodness. When he then discovers that his eternity of service has actually been in the name of a demigod who has no strategy or game plan… you end up with Richard, going mad, trying desperately to kill himself in the Black Rock. It really hangs together quite nicely, and does so without the repetition of explanation we’ve gotten for characters like Kate and Jack. (“Jack’s drunk. Again. Wow, his father really damaged him, didn’t he? Now we finally understand why he’s so screwed up! Again!”)

While “Ab Aeterno” did a great job of building an effective backstory for Richard, the biggest implications are to do with Jacob and the Man in Black, who continues to go frustratingly unnamed. (“A friend?! Really?!!” shouted the person sitting next to me on the couch.) It’s obviously time to drop my concerns about whether or not this show is science fiction, because “Ab Aeterno” answered that pretty definitively. No. Maybe humans have been using science fictiony type accoutrements to try to understand the island, but at its core, Lost is a medieval morality play. Figures representing opposing moral forces attempt to sway mankind one way or the other, and insignificant individuals just get caught in the crossfire. I do still have some hope that the Jacob = sugar and spice and everything nice, Man in Black = snakes and snails and puppy dog tails dynamic will still prove to be reductive, or at the very least, will eventually be reversed. They’ve both killed too many people to come away from it with a cheerful allegiance either way, so maybe Sawyer has the best idea of the bunch – just get the heck out of there, and let the demigods duke it out for themselves.

As a further result of the island-is-the-cork-that-keeps-the-evil-genie-in-the-bottle revelation, Lost has also solidified the type of show it’s going to be at the end, and the sorts of questions we should be asking. “How?” is no longer a question Lost is going to spend a lot of time answering – “Ab Aeterno” had some nice confirmations of lower-level how questions, like how the statue was destroyed, and how the Black Rock ended up in the middle of the island, but as I said, these are mostly secondary concerns. The big question is now (and, I suppose, has always been) “Why?” We’re not going to get any specific explanations for how Jacob brought the plane down, or how the numbers really work, or how the island keeps women from conceiving or how Hurley talks to dead people. It’s a morality play – it doesn’t matter how anything happens. It’s why you make certain choices, and why you are the person you choose to be.

Maybe this is still going be pretty disappointing for fans who are largely interested in the how sorts of questions. But I think in retrospect, it will look more and more like Lost has been doing this stuff all along, and that in fact, its entire narrative flash-everywhichways technique has been building those why questions into the structure of the show from the beginning. (See above, re: Jack’s father screwed him up pretty badly. “Now we finally understand why…”) Sure, it hasn’t been smooth sailing the whole way, and there are lots of big questions that will feel seriously unsettled if they don’t get answers. Why that whole time travel business, for instance? (Speaking of which, if anyone has possible answers to that… yeah. I really do not know.) Perhaps in looking closely at the entire show’s run, it’ll feel like there were way too many misdirects and side stories, and that the show was disingenuous in creating certain expectations about what it would become. But at least for now, I feel pretty pleased that we have this framework in place for the end of the series, and a bit of a road map for what’s to come.

PS. Please, please enjoy Kate Beaton’s Lost comics. (This one is my favorite. Also this one. And this one.) They’re the best thing to happen to Lost commentary since Lostipedia, or Maureen Ryan’s theory that Lost is now actually Buffy the Vampire Slayer.