[I wrote this years ago, after LOST had wrapped up in its entirety. Major spoilers ahead—if you haven't finished the series, proceed at your own risk!]
Okay, I’m back to clean up Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse’s mess and make LOST’s story add up—
Double Seals and Killing by Proxy
Given the Guardian’s utterly unreliable rule of passing on the title but not the knowledge, Jacob took over in a hurry without even understanding what he was supposed to be guarding. After that, he used his status as Guardian to “extract” the knowledge and skills he needed from the Source, until one day he finally grasped the Source’s power and went from a clueless rookie to a demigod capable of manipulating life.
Meanwhile, once the Man in Black, having rampaged around as black smoke, finally regained his sanity and accepted his new smoky identity, he too began exploring what this entirely new self could do. After recreating a physical body, the first thing on his mind was naturally the “last wish” he had left unfinished in “life”: getting off this lousy island. So the Man in Black dug up the well in the magnetic pocket that Crazy Mother had buried years ago and completed the gear mechanism (which is why, although Crazy Mother destroyed the well at the beginning, the gears look fully installed in Dr. Chang’s cross-section of the bottom when the Dharma people later came to excavate it).
The smoke turned the gears. The sky turned purple, the earth shook, and the island shifted position—but he didn’t leave the island as expected. By then, the Man in Black was smoke, and the seal imposed by the first Guardian had taken effect. Unless Jacob died and the seal was lifted, he could never leave the island.
Later, the Man in Black must have learned from Jacob—or from the Source’s knowledge inside himself—why he couldn’t leave the island, and that killing Jacob was the prerequisite for getting off it.
Naturally, Furious Little Smokey must have tried to kill Jacob at some point, only to fail. That’s when he remembered something Crazy Mother had seemed to toss off casually years earlier: the brothers could not kill each other. That, too, had become a seal. The smoke could neither leave the island nor kill Jacob. His only option was to “kill by proxy.”
Jacob’s Successor Candidates
We know very little about what happened over the next thousand-plus years, but we can infer that the struggle between the two gods, black and white, never stopped. The Man in Black tried every possible way to kill Jacob by proxy, while Jacob, besides guarding against Smokey leaving the island, eventually imitated Crazy Mother and began looking for his own successor. Jacob’s criteria are unclear, but he seemed to favor people who kept goodness in their hearts in the outside world while somehow managing to make a complete mess of their lives. As the one-eyed Mikhail put it, they were “flawed” people. When Mikhail was captured by Locke and the others, he once told Kate, “you’re flawed.” In his view, perhaps only “perfect” people like himself or Locke could become Jacob’s successor. But judging from what Jacob said to Jack and the other candidates at the end, he actually chose people who were precisely flawed and lost. Jacob hoped the island would give them a chance at self-redemption. Whether or not they ultimately became his successor, he wanted them to complete that redemption on the island.
So how did Jacob find candidates like that? With billions of people in the world, why this bunch—Jack, Locke, and the rest—instead of anyone else? Apart from a few with mildly unusual abilities, most of Jack’s group had no especially remarkable talents. Why them?
The Chain of Fate
The show, of course, never explains any of this. Here’s my guess: one of the candidates was chosen at random, and everyone else was connected to that person by fate. In other words, they were all linked by the same red thread of destiny—or, to put it another way, a chain of fate.
If the Source/Jacob’s power is seeing through fate and manipulating it, then that power must transcend time to some extent (which is basically fortune-telling, when you get down to it…). Jacob may simply have wandered around the outside world in disguise, and whenever he found someone suitable as a candidate, he would use this power to see through that person’s path of fate over the next several decades. Then he wouldn’t need to search aimlessly for a second candidate: he could look for the next suitable person along the first candidate’s path of fate. That person’s life would inevitably intersect with many others, and Jacob would follow those intersections to investigate the fates of those other people. Once he found another suitable candidate, he could identify the next one, and so on.
Let’s suppose the first person Jacob ran into was Locke. He would first establish that Locke was a candidate, then trace Locke’s path of fate. He would see that Locke’s father, Sawyer, was an interesting fellow. Following Sawyer’s path, he would discover that James might make a suitable candidate. Following James’s life, he would find that James’s girlfriend would intersect with Kate, and that Kate might also make a suitable candidate. And so on, until the candidate roster was complete.
That’s why, long before Flight 815 crashed, so many people in LOST had already crossed paths. Some may think the connections between the characters were the result of Jacob manipulating fate, but I don’t. Since Jacob followed a policy of noninterference and wanted the people he summoned to make the right choices for themselves, he wouldn’t interfere fatally with their lives before they came to the island. For many candidates, for instance, Jacob’s only intervention was creating an opportunity for them to board Flight 815 together. Only the parts directly related to bringing them to the island were Jacob’s doing; everything before that was each person’s own fate. Those apparent coincidences existed simply because these people were strung together by the same chain of fate.
This theory is pretty far out there, but at least it explains the mystery of how the characters in LOST are connected.
The Lighthouse and Fate Nodes
Whenever Jacob confirmed a candidate, he wrote that candidate’s name on a cave wall. Each candidate had a number. That number may have represented the order in which Jacob discovered them along the chain of fate. If so, Locke may not have been the first person Jacob stumbled upon at all. Locke was the fourth person on the chain of fate to be confirmed as a candidate, followed by Hurley at number eight…
Once he had chosen all the candidates, Jacob carved their names onto the coordinate dial of a lighthouse. When the needle pointed to a candidate’s name, that person’s “fate node” appeared in the mirrors on the dial.
The candidates’ conditions shown in the mirrors were not their current conditions; the mirrors were not a live broadcast. The Source could understand the course of a life and then manipulate it (which is to say, fate), so what appeared in the mirrors was actually the single most important fate node in that candidate’s life. The life that followed would be changed by that node.
For Jack, the most important fate node was the conversation he had with his father, Christian, after he tried to do the right thing as a child and got beaten up by some punks. From then on, Jack could never escape the curse “you don’t have what it takes” and spent his whole life under the shadow of a hero complex (see my earlier review, “LOST S06E05: Three Pairs of Oppositions, Plot Speculation, and an Analysis of Jack’s Character”). So the mirror showed the house where Jack lived as a child—that is, Christian’s home—not the hospital where Jacob later appeared to Jack.
For Sawyer, the fate node was his parents’ deaths, so the mirror showed the church where the funeral took place.
For the married couple Sun and Jin, the fate node was their union, so the mirror showed the place where they held their wedding.
But even after seeing these life nodes, Jacob wouldn’t actually interfere with them (I don’t even think Locke, who was pushed out of a window by his father, was revived by Jacob; that had to do with Locke’s own abilities, which I’ll get to later). Perhaps the mirror was simply a tool Jacob used to peer into the paths of fate, rather like the divination sticks in a fortune-teller’s hands. It merely helped Jacob determine whether someone truly qualified as a candidate. Perhaps after peering into fate through the mirror, some people initially designated as candidates were crossed off because they were never summoned to the island.
Once the candidates were confirmed, Jacob would appear beside them at the appropriate moment and “confirm” their candidate status through physical contact. Candidates he had touched had been “Claimed by Jacob.” As long as they were “Claimed by Jacob,” they were protected by the seal that prevented the brothers from killing each other—even the smoke couldn’t kill them.
Perhaps it wasn’t until roughly two thousand years after becoming the island’s lord that Jacob began using this method to find candidates. Most of the numbers from 1 to 360 on the lighthouse dial correspond to modern people, scattered here and there. And so, just as Crazy Mother had done, many people later came to the island because of inexplicable shipwrecks or plane crashes—mostly through the crash of Flight 815. Jacob was clearly more optimistic than Crazy Mother. He believed that among these ordinary people who might not look like much, some would eventually find their own value and become qualified successors.
The Others
But long before that, over those two thousand years, people had been continually summoned to the island by Jacob, and they weren’t candidates. The reason was that Smokey clearly couldn’t kill candidates, but could kill people summoned to the island in earlier eras, such as the entire crew of the Black Rock. Jacob summoned those people for another purpose: to prove to Smokey, who believed that leaving the island would not change the world, that “evil” wasn’t the only thing in the world. I analyzed this in the previous installment, so I won’t repeat it here.
Maybe the clueless streak Jacob had as a mortal hadn’t quite worn off. While refusing to interfere with those who came to the island, he somehow failed to notice that Smokey was always scheming behind his back. The result was that those people were either toyed with and killed by Smokey, or egged on by Smokey to kill Jacob. Slow-on-the-uptake Jacob didn’t realize this until Richard was coaxed into trying to kill him. Only then did he set about establishing the “Church of Jacob,” which later became the others. Richard was “claimed by Jacob” from then on and given lasting youth, becoming the Church of Jacob’s unshakable millennium-old senior adviser and the intermediary between Jacob and ordinary people.
Besides Jacob and Richard, the Church of Jacob also had a secular leader—the leader. Jacob’s requirements for the leader differed from those for candidates: candidates were judged more by character than ability, while leaders were judged more by ability than character. A candidate needed “a sense of responsibility”; a leader generally needed “talent.” Could this count as Jacob’s subconscious revenge against Smokey?
So Mikhail later misunderstood what Jacob meant. He thought Kate and the others were flawed, while people like himself and Locke were more perfect—and therefore a better fit for Jacob’s requirements. Actually, judging from Mikhail’s absurdly tough vitality, he may genuinely have been one of Jacob’s candidates for leader.
Jacob and Richard developed a program for grooming a leader. It may have inherited Crazy Mom’s policy of “start the revolution by grabbing them as babies”: generally, they selected and raised successors from childhood. Of course, exceptionally gifted adults could also get in through the back door.
The Others must also have been protected by some kind of seal Jacob placed on them, so that, like the later candidates, they could not be harmed by the Smoke. That’s why the 815ers were so easy for the Smoke to attack when they entered the jungle, while The Others could move around in it freely. While Jacob was still alive, the Smoke simply could not hurt The Others.
So, under the protection of this seal, The Others grew powerful on the island, gradually developing into a paramilitary organization responsible for tasks such as defending the smaller island. More often than not, Jacob did not protect the island himself; he relied on The Others.
Like all those successful cults, The Others had a very powerful system for manipulating people’s minds. Many followers never got a chance to meet Jacob in their entire lives, yet revered him like a deity. The clearest example is the flight attendant from 815: after being forced to “join the church” for a very short time, she seemed to turn into a deeply devout believer. Of course, Jacob may also have displayed his divine power in various ways to win over the faithful. And for followers who were not so easy to manipulate, The Others had plenty of other ways to control them—as they did with Juliet. Jacob even had uniforms: whenever they went into action, they had to wear clothes resembling what ancient people wore. Their “uniforms” matched the material and style of the clothes worn by Jacob and his brother, as well as the clothes Jacob later spun beneath the statue. Besides concealing their identities, this probably had some religious symbolism too—just like monks wearing robes.
The Others and the Smoke
Of all those thousand-plus years on the island, from Crazy Mom’s era to the Dharma Initiative’s era, what interests me most is this: what exactly was the relationship between Jacob and the Smoke? Were they completely opposed? Or was the little black thing actually still serving the island’s god, just like the first-generation Smoke did back in the day, summoned by the island’s god?
The Smoke was obviously busy with its own schemes most of the time and did not take orders from Jacob. But does that mean Jacob had absolutely no control over it?—I’m not so sure. Perhaps when certain conditions were met, such as when a particular ritual was about to take place, Jacob was still like the god Anubis in that mural: able to summon the Smoke to serve him. I suspect this because a huge question mark appears later in LOST: how could Ben, the leader of The Others, summon the Smoke?
Ben’s device for summoning the Smoke was in the house where he lived. Even if the device had originally been there—which seems unlikely, since this had once been the Dharma camp, and Dharma would surely have discovered it long ago—The Others and Jacob should never have allowed that to happen. So the device was probably moved there or built after the “purge.” Those trapdoors, secret rooms, and whatnot don’t seem like things Ben could have built perfectly on his own. What’s more, judging from how effortlessly Ben summoned the Smoke both times, he must already have summoned it during The Others’ normal existence. So Ben’s summoning of the Smoke was probably not some secret deal he struck with the Smoke to betray everyone, but a behavior or ritual known to The Others as a whole. That’s also why, at the end of season six, when Ben went back to the secret room with Richard and Miles to get the explosives, Ben muttered, “I used to think I summoned it. I didn’t realize it was summoning me,” and only Miles was startled while Richard showed no reaction at all—the reason being that Richard was also familiar with the procedure for summoning the Smoke.
Summoning Mechanism
So under what special circumstances could The Others summon the Smoke?
Possibly, the summoning mechanism could be triggered only when one particular special situation occurred. That situation corresponds to the most important function the Smoke was originally supposed to perform, as I discussed earlier: judgment. I previously speculated that, because the Smoke could read minds, the island’s people had used it as a tool of judgment from the very beginning. This most important “duty” could not be shaken off even after the Smoke turned evil. Perhaps starting with the ancient Atlanteans, the island’s inhabitants had to follow the moral code laid down by the island’s rulers. That moral code was what Ben called “the rules”! Once someone on the island committed an offense forbidden by “the rules,” the Smoke’s power of punishment was activated.
The Jacob cult later inherited this code as well. Once someone protected by Jacob broke one of the rules, Jacob’s protection disappeared. If the Smoke was summoned at that point, its judgment procedure would decide what punishment the offender deserved. In The Others’ ordinary life, they summoned the Smoke to judge those among them who had violated “the rules.” Only then could they briefly make peace with the Smoke; the summoned Smoke could do nothing bad except pass judgment. That was the Smoke at its most aggrieved.
The rules probably laid down commandments resembling Moses’ Ten Commandments. For example, The Others may have been forbidden from killing one another, making anyone who killed a brother or sister a rule-breaker. Juliet later killed one of her own people to save Kate and Sawyer, and Jack then saw Juliet being judged by a court-like institution. What The Others had to decide at that point was whether to activate the summoning procedure and bring in the Smoke to judge Juliet for her crime. But Ben intervened and Juliet received a lighter sentence. That time, the Smoke was not summoned.
But later, when Ben maliciously tied Juliet and Kate up and dumped them in the jungle, Juliet faced enormous danger. By then she had already become one of Jacob’s outcasts, and the protection on her had been removed, so when she ran into the Smoke, she survived by sheer luck. The first time, the Smoke may not have killed her because it was unable to: she was pressed against Kate, who was a candidate, and the Smoke could not make the kill. The second time, she was saved by the Dharma perimeter wall. That’s why the other TOs could move around the jungle without hindrance, while Juliet was hunted by the Smoke.
Two Summonings
The first time we see Ben summon the Smoke, it is because one of “their own” has committed a crime that violates the rule against harming innocents, activating the judgment mechanism. When Ben watched mercenaries gun down his daughter, his first words, amid the shock, were, “He violated the rules.” “He” obviously meant Widmore. As I will explain later, Widmore was actually still Jacob’s man, so his people also appear to have been subject to judgment. Thus, when Widmore and his men violated the rules, Ben could summon the Smoke to judge the mercenaries who had committed the offense.
Ben’s second attempt to summon the Smoke came after he himself had violated the rules. When he woke up after crashing on 316 Island, the first thing he saw was the “resurrected” fLocke. He explained to fLocke that he had violated the rules, and anyone who violated the rules had to be judged by the Smoke—he had come back to face judgment. Ben was referring to the crime he eventually committed against an innocent: trying to kill Widmore’s granddaughter, and therefore, according to the rules, he had to be judged by the Smoke.
So why would someone as cunning as Ben, having already left the island and perfectly capable of continuing to live free in the outside world without being judged, deliberately walk into the net and come back to face judgment? I think the reason is that Ben may be acting when he deals with anyone, but his love for his daughter is beyond doubt. His remorse over causing his daughter’s death was one reason he returned. Another may have been that he still could not let go of the island and was hoping for a lucky break: if the Smoke let him off, then, having washed away his sins, he could plot his comeback and try to become the island’s leader again.
That is my theory about the relationship among the Smoke, Jacob, and The Others—or, put another way, the island’s “ecosystem.” (The Smoke activating the judgment mechanism—and another important scene, Mr. Eko’s death—will have to wait for later.)
4、8、15、16、23、42
Back to the candidates.
In LOST’s worldview, everyone’s allotted lifespan seems to have a fixed limit (the writers’ result of being influenced by mysterious Eastern culture; see The Book of Changes). The King of Hell says you’ll die at the third watch, and some badasses—Desmond, for example—can keep a person alive until the fifth watch, but in the end, everyone still has to die. The Guardian’s lifespan also seems to have a fixed limit. By around the middle of the twentieth century, Jacob may have sensed that his end was approaching, so he formally began his plan to search for candidates.
Using the fate-chain model I described earlier, Jacob settled on a long list of candidates. On this chain of fate made up of 300-plus people, the candidates numbered 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 were the ones Jacob valued most. The final successor might emerge from among them. After that, Jacob’s job was not only to meet these candidates at the right moments and cement their status as candidates; he also had to activate the power that guided fate at the right time, so that people who would otherwise merely brush past one another on the chain would follow their redirected destinies and come together on the island.
The moment the Guardian changed hands was also the most dangerous moment. The Smoke could very well exploit Jacob’s vulnerability around the transition, wipe out Jacob’s side in one stroke, and leave the island. So Jacob needed other defensive measures too. Interestingly, Jacob also found a strange man on that chain of candidates who seemed to have a special sensitivity to the magnetic field around the Source. That man was the future Desmond, who could later be used as a wildcard in a crisis. And so Desmond entered the game!
The Golden Age of Technology
The period when Jacob began preparing for the handover ritual coincided with the golden age of human technological development. The immense potential unleashed by technological progress was something Jacob’s predecessors had never encountered or even imagined. Technology’s prosperity brought humanity ever closer to realms that had once been accessible only to gods. The power of human technology even threatened the island, this divine realm. In the 1950s, the U.S. military accidentally discovered the island’s existence for reasons unknown, and even worked out how to enter it. The Cold War between East and West had already broken out by then. God knows what a nervous U.S. military would have imagined upon discovering an island at sea that could “turn invisible.”
They might have thought: could this be a secret Soviet weapon? Perhaps, out of some kind of neurotic defensive panic, the U.S. military brought a hydrogen bomb to the island, hoping to solve this terrifying mystery once and for all. But before they could do anything, The Others on the island wiped them out. Before more U.S. troops arrived, The Others moved the island, and the U.S. military lost its trail forever. Given how bizarre everything surrounding this “broken arrow” incident was, the relevant files were probably put into an X-Files-like category and locked away, never to be spoken of again.
Human progress was both a threat and an opportunity for Jacob. Why not borrow a helping hand from science?
And so the Dharma Initiative’s plan was launched!
（To be continued.）
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