Everything below here is a SPOILER. Consider yourself warned.
So, it’s pretty obvious now that the island is a prison for Locke-Smoke Monster/Esau. We can use some supposition to figure out that Jacob and those who he brought there are the jail-keepers. That leaves us to wonder over the true nature of Smokey and some of the particular properties of the island.
I have some thoughts on the former. I’m still thinking about many of the issues regarding the latter.
On Locke, the first thing I wondered aloud last night was, “Is he the devil?” I sort of don’t mean that literally, but I do mean, is he some force of concentrated evil? See, as the episode played out, and we got hints about it being a prison for Smokey, I started thinking back to my favorite Twilight Zone episode - The Howling Man. In that story, a man comes upon a castle and is taken in by what appear to be monks. During the night, he’s drawn to a cage by a wailing man. The caged man winds up convincing the other man to set him free. Winds up that the caged man is the devil.
They’ve made no attempt to mask the fact that Jacob represented a good force and that Smokey is all bad. Now that we know the island is preventing him from being let loose upon the world, we have to wonder what it is that world is being protected from. The problem here is that our sense of a time frame is a bit askew. The temples are ancient – almost Egyptian. So, we could guess that Jacob/Smokey could have been on the island for thousands of years. However, in the episode where the pirate ship crashes, we get the impression that they were just settling in on the island, so maybe that’s only a couple of hundred years. I was trying to think about what things existed in those time periods that we don’t have now but I’m beginning to change that way of thinking.
What if Smokey isn’t a particular evil incarnate – not the devil or baphomet, etc. – but rather a manifestation of plague or something like that? He does say to Sawyer that he’s “A man, just like you,” but what does that really mean? Could easily be a lie, subterfuge, or a very literal description of his anthropomorphism.
I’m willing to bet that they tie this either directly to, or make some connection with, Pandora’s box. We’ll see.
What’s fun is that while J-mom gets more and more frustrated, I get more excited about how they’re going to resolve everything.
No comments:
Post a Comment