On the smoke monster and other elements of ‘Lost’

Having finally watched ‘Lost’ after putting it off for some reason or other for the past eight years, there is a sense of melancholy in the air. Few shows have made me feel this way: ‘Friends’ undoubtedly tops the list with the ‘X-Files’, ‘Seinfeld’, ‘The IT Crowd’ and ‘Mad Men’ following at its heels. So I do not take it lightly when I say this was a really great show, with incredible depth and openness, that manages to execute masterfully the enormously difficult task of striking a balance between leaving interpretations open to viewers and offering closure. The beauty of the somewhat open narrative in ‘Lost’ is that, like fine wine, it unravels itself to possibilities the longer it sits on your tongue.

The stage for ‘Lost’ is set up quite firmly. Deep, deep down, the show is about the fight between good and evil. On a slightly higher level it is about our characters fighting either their own demons (at times) or an external evil (more often). On the surface it is about the fight between Jacob and the people who choose (or just happen) to follow him and those who side with the smoke monster (often unknowingly).

The characters in ‘Lost’ make up its strongest elements. They are deep and believable and easy to connect with even if the viewer has never gone through the same things as them. And they are all flawed—something Jacob clarifies boldly to the candidates remaining in the penultimate episode. Over the course of the show you end up siding both with and against, and both loving and hating, every single character at some point—some more than others, but that is understandable. For instance, Jin starts off unpleasantly but grows into a wonderful person; Michael has the opposite arch; Sawyer, Sayid, Jack, Kate and Charlie are all likeable and unpleasant at various points throughout the show. This uncertainty as to whom to support—with the constant background knowledge that we definitely support the survivors of Oceanic 815 as a group—does a lot to keep viewers on their toes.

Speaking of the survivors of Oceanic 815, it is important to get out of our way the weak theory that the characters are dead throughout the show, that they all died during the crash. While the whole idea of everyone being dead is teased at various points through the show, and especially so towards the end, it is quite simply a red herring. It cannot be said if that was always the plan: I suspect the show writers started with that idea but abandoned it—and played on it—once it became a popular theory among viewers because going by that would no longer offer viewers any suspense.

Equally important, and something that helps make the show feel like it is grounded in reality despite its supernatural and sci-fi elements, is the balanced writing that ensures there is no grandoise hero across the entire tale. It is never the story of one man leading others or of the conflicts of one character. Everyone plays an important part and it cannot be stressed enough how much this sort of writing has done to ensure the show does not become two-dimensional. Every character has their own strengths and what they add to the show. Some are obviously more important than others but nobody is written like a supremo.

What is the smoke monster after all?

With all that out of the way we ought to turn our attention to the smoke monster. ‘Lost’ shies away from answering any questions concretely about the smoke monster. It does tell us an origin story but in a way that it answers hardly any questions. The earliest tale we have of the island, long before the Dharma initiative, is that of the unnamed woman known only as the Mother. Although, for obvious reasons, the show only reveals this towards the end, it helps to see the events that took place on the island in chronological order. Needless to say this is only possible until the days before the Dharma built The Swan station (or ‘the Hatch’ as the survivors called it).

It is safe to assume that the monster was an non-physical entity representing evil that lived since time immemorial. It is represented as a darkness which, I think, is not really smoke as we know it but certainly resembles it, which is what prompts everyone who sees it to refer to it as such. The light at the centre of the island represents the good. This too existed since time immemorial as a sort of natural balance. The heart of the island is then where the evil is held in check by the good. That is to say, at the heart of the island is a lot of light that overbears the darkness and keeps it imprisoned underground. All this, of course, is my theory and makes sense to me; none of this is explicitly explained in the show.

Now when the Mother killed Claudia and decided to bring up her two boys herself she had a simple reason: on the one hand she did not want newcomers to the island so Claudia had to go; but the boys, who would grow up on the island under the Mother’s protection and guidance, could in some way be expected to nurture a love for the island and a responsibility to protect. One of them would eventually take over from the Mother. The Mother was the protector of the island; it was her responsibility to ensure that nobody disturbed the cave (the light) so the evil could be kept in check. She chose to do it by disallowing outsiders on the island altogether which, for a sole protector, was probably the best solution.

What the Mother did not expect was that when one of the boys—the one not named Jacob—came across outsiders on the island he would realise that there was in fact a world beyond the island and that would make him want to leave the island for good. Jacob naïvely saw the island as his home. At this point, the unnamed kid is in the right. The Mother, having lied to him about there being nothing beyond the sea, despite having had her own reasons, is clearly in the wrong. Jacob is simply a dumb kid.

When the boy in black runs away to join the outsiders, he ends up spending decades with them and learns that, despite their curiosity and good intentions in general, they are individually full of deceit, lies, manipulation and, generally speaking, darkness. It is at this point that the two beliefs between Jacob and his brother are born, with the former believing that, despite their flaws, humans are noble, and the latter believing that humans are simply pathetically evil.

When the Mother attacks the Man in Black and kills the outsiders to prevent them from finding a way off the island and, in turn, to prevent others from finding a way to the island, the Man in Black kills the Mother. This is the firmest establishment of his evil ways. At this point it is also worth wondering why the Mother killed the others now when she had let them live all these years. Perhaps it was never them by themselves but only under the guidance of the Man in Black that they were planning to leave the island. If so, the Mother was somewhat cornered into what she did but the question as to whether the outsiders had to die—as with any murder—will remain hanging.

Once Jacob, having accepted the role of the protector of the island, finds out the evil that is the Man in Black, he tosses him vengefully into the cave at the heart of the island. This is where the whole idea of the smoke monster just pops up out of seemingly nowhere in the show. However, if one were to go by the theory I outlined above, it is not hard to see why tossing the Man in Black into the cave would have tipped the scales in favour of darkness and therefore released the smoke monster with which the Man in Black has now become one. Perhaps this was the ‘fate worse than death’ that the Mother told Jacob about.

The smoke monster is probably an abstract representation of evil, or the belief that we are all inherently evil. This is as opposed to Jacob’s belief that we are all inherently good. These two simple world views are vastly different and it is easy to see how they can shape two completely opposing entities such as Jacob and the smoke monster. The only inconsistency that might appear, and that too only at first glance, is that of the Mother who seems to believe in the inherent evil of the outsiders. However, it is not hard to accept this when we realise she made Jacob leader of the island only when she had lost the Boy in Black and was left with no other choice. The Boy in Black was, in fact, her first choice to lead the island, but the mantle ended up going to Jacob who inadvertantly released the smoke monster.

There are theories out there that the Mother orchestrated the whole thing, including subliminally coaxing Jacob to toss the Man in Black into the heart of the island to make him one with, and release, the smoke monster. But that seems far too complex of a plot to not hit a snag at some point, not to mention it relies almost entirely on the Mother being able to predict Jacob’s angry actions to a T. By Occam’s razor the explanation detailed above makes far more sense than this popular theory.

On time travel and tying temporal knots

Piecing together the temporal strands in ‘Lost’ is not something I want to do. The show takes it so far that, while believable and somewhat convincing, the knots it ties in time are an absolutely fun ride I would not want to miss—certainly not miss out because I am busy tying things up.

Is any of it possible, though? Or, to better frame that question, is any of it allowed by physics? To be honest, there is no beating around the bush: the scientific community does not think it is possible yet. That means we proceed knowing that we are not speaking exactly scientifically, yet with the express intention of keeping all our explanations as grounded in reality as possible.

According to physics—particularly according to general relativity—moving through time would be possible if certain spacetime geometries could be realised; one of these is what we call a CTC or a closed timelike curve in which an entity can loop in time and return to its own past (hence the closed curve). The obvious problem with this, as with most scientific ventures into time travel, is that it break causality which is something non-negotiable for us. Think of the famous, somewhat gory grandfather paradox which asks, what will happen to you—that is to say, will you exist—if you go back in time and kill your own grandfather?

We have not quite been able to answer this from a scientific perspective, and although ‘Lost’ toys with it rather boldly, it does its own thing with it, which we must accept if we were to proceed towards discussing an explanation for all this.

There is a recurring phrase uttered by a handful of characters in the show which seems to be unassuming but, in earnest, is a pretty important mental note viewers need to make if they do not want to misinterpret the whole show. The phrase is, ‘Whatever happened, happened.’ Jack says this, Faraday says this, there is even a Season 5 episode by this title. This is important because most people assume that the characters on the island have been dead throughout the show. But, like show writer Damon Lindelof himself said in an interview, everything we saw on the show happened in our life, in real life—everything except the flash sideways of Season 6, which is where the time travel explanation comes in.

The first thing to remeber when discussing the time travel elements of the show is what the physicist Daniel Faraday says to Sawyer, Juliet and Miles: ‘we cannot ever create a new street’. Combine this with the ‘Whatever happened, happened’ idea and we have the show’s cardinal time travel rule: when our characters time travel to their own past they cannot do anything there which changes their future and creates a branch in time. So contrary to what the flash sideways red herring tricks viewers into believing there is no timeline in which the Oceanic 815 did not crash on the island. Part of this red herring occurs because of when the show portrayed it: the flash sideways starts when the characters blow up the Swan station while it is under construction in 1977 which tricks us into believing that there is now a timeline in which the Oceanic 815 did not crash and that things went according to Jack’s plan.

However, if we double back on our reasoning we quickly realise that the flash sideways starting when it did was exclusively a directorial decision. It had nothing integral to do with the story. Think of the flash sideways as you like: it could be purgatory, it could be the afterlife, it could be a temporary parallel strand in time, it could be whatever you want, just not a branch in our current timeline, which brings us to a key aspect of our explanation: if this is not a branch and the past cannot be changed, how do we explain the explosion—the ‘incident’—that Jack and group cause in 1977? Once again, by Occam’s razor, if the ‘Lost’ rules of time travel prevent changing the past that means they never changed the past: they never exploded any bomb. Juliet claiming otherwise to Sawyer later in the show was simply her, like everyone else, including us viewers, being mistaken about what happened.

Recall that Eloise Hawking, long before all this, had told Desmond that the universe had a way of course correcting itself. The fact that Jack and company created the conditions to explode the nuclear bomb and break causality simply means the ‘universe’ (or the island if you will) prevented this breakage of causality and course corrected by simply sending Jack and the group back to the present. The bomb never exploded, the Swan station was built, the Oceanic 815 did crash, and everything that happened from that point on—Jack becoming the protector of the island, Kate killing off the smoke monster, Jack restoring the light and making Hugo the protector of the island—all of that, as Damon Lindelof said, happened. Jack closing his eyes at the end of the show, the last ever thing to happen in our reality, did happen and Jack’s worldline was left unharmed despite all the time travel because whatever happened, happened.

Other observations

Desmond is a great character—in my opinion, he is one of the best in the series along with Ben and Locke—and his role is central to the series finale. The time loop that seemingly only Eloise and Charles Widmore knew of, having lived through their son’s death and yet having had to send him back to his death just to course correct the timeline (this was another fuzzy bit), could be ended only if they had someone with them who could withstand the severe electromagnetic radiation at the heart of the island. When Desmond turned his fail-safe key at the hatch intending to prevent a disaster, did it actually set off the bomb that was designed keep the radiation in check?

The most important question of all is perhaps more simple: why Desmond? What is so special about Desmond Hume, who is neither a survivor nor one of Jacob’s candidates, that gives him the ability to withstand electromagnetic radiations? The answer can likely be found inside the Hatch. First, having spent a long time typing in the sequence 4–8–15–16–23–42 and releasing controlled spurts of radiation while inside the hatch, his body probably simply built up resistance against the radiation; second, the explosion following his use of the fail-safe key also—somewhat like in a clichéd tale of a superhero—gave him the ability to withstand huge doses of radiation. (I feel I should state here that although now clichéd, the accidental superhero tale used in ‘Lost’ came two years before the first Iron Man film kickstarted the summer superhero blockbuster trend, so in all likelihood what ‘Lost’ did was novel.)

The series finale is great for its open-ended narrative; one that masterfully pulls viewers in and forces them to question things they watch on the show. One suech question for me, and one that I have not seen asked too often, is whether the church where everyone meets in the afterlife is the same church that Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s character built in Season 2 (at least in spirit)? I like to think so and there is nothing to oppose this line of reasoning: the church on the island is not completed to perfection as far as viewers know so this could indeed be what it would have looked like had it been fully constructed. Plus, it is not really a church as much as a generic place of worship (the theist’s afterlife if you will) as the stained glass behind Christian and Jack Shepherd shows the Islamic star and crescent, the Jewish Star of David, the Hindu Om, the Christian cross, the Buddhist Dharma Chakra, and the Yin/Yang of Taoism.

Also, Mr Eko missing from the finale was a bit harsh, in my opinion. While some others were missing too (Richard, Miles, Frank Lapidus, Ana Lucia (although she did appear elsewhere in the afterlife if I recall correctly), Daniel, Charlotte, Zoe, poor old Arzt, and even Nikki and Paulo.) The Widmores would probably have found it awkward to be present there, so would Ilana to some extent. But to think Mr Eko’s character, who was all about strength and support on the island, could not make it in the end solely because of Adwale being averse to living in Hawaii is a bit dissatisfying.

All said and done, though, ‘Lost’ is lovely because of how poetically fulfilled it leaves you. There could be emotions involved but the end—the very end—ties the show up so well you are actually left feeling happy. This wonderful show that began with an extreme close up on Jack’s eye as it opens, draws curtains with an extreme close up on Jack’s eye as it closes. And the unsung hero of the show, to me, will always be the Labrador, Vincent, who spent his time on the island entertaining himself with his humans’ shenanigans.