With the Series Finale just two episodes away, we make the deepest withdrawal from the Department of Backstory that we ever have, and get some intriguing answers about the show’s central mythology, along with some new questions.

First, I’ll admit it: Jacob and the Man in Black being brothers is probably the most obvious thing ever, and I totally did not see it coming at all.  They say the best kind of plot twist is one where you look back afterwards and think, “Yeah, I should have known that all along.”  Or maybe I’m just slow.

The addition of Mother to the Lost core mythology provides some interesting questions.  Who is she?  Where did she come from?  Is she some kind of supernatural being?  Was she the Smoke Monster before the Man in Black inherited that mantle (how did she destroy the entire village, eh)?  What’s the deal with “the Source” and what does it mean that it got nuked into oblivion in the flash-sideways timeline?  Despite coming in late in the game, these are all fundamental questions for the show on the whole, and I’m betting that the majority of them will be answered before the end, actually.

There are some interesting parallels between the relationship between Jacob and Mother and the relationship between Ben and Jacob.  There’s a certain petulance in both cases, a kind of despair at the, “Why do you need me to do this and why don’t I get a say in it?” that they share in common.  That casts the rules—and the very nature—of Jacob’s game further down the line into question.

Also, after the previous episode pretty much definitively vilified the Man in Black for us, this one portrays him much more sympathetically.  Granted, this is the Man in Black when he was, well, a man, and before his own ambitions and ends turned him into whatever he is now, so maybe that’s okay.  I just hope we get a name for him at some point.  For some reason, that’s one of the big things I really want to get closure on (that, and who did Juliet shoot on the boat back when peeps were time-skipping?).

All in all, I think that this episode added a lot of texture to the conflict between Jacob and the Man in Black, and it did a lot to humanize both of them.  It’s comforting to know that they were both born human, even if they were raised in really awkward circumstances by a woman who didn’t even let them know that there existed people beyond the three of them.  That’s gotta mess someone up.

In the end, the game does come down to what happens between Jacob and the Man in Black, and what Widmore can do to foul things up while the Oceanic survivors (including Frank) get their last licks in.

I predict awesomeness.