My take on this: the existence of a living Jacob/living candidates on the island to replace Jacob keeps MIB on the island. As evidenced by MIB being unable to leave despite Jacob’s death, it seems to me that no specific action by the protector(s) is necessary.
MIB has probably tried and failed many times to escape (including eventually building the frozen donkey wheel) and finally figured out why he was failing, hence his desire to cause the deaths of Jacob and whoever was going to replace him.
I agree with this. OTOH, I think that would be a hilarious ending.
Hurley: Dude. Did you ever *try *to leave the island?
MIB: Um. No. My mum said I wasn’t allowed.
Hurley: But you killed her after you found out she wasn’t your real mom. Isn’t it possible she lied to you about other stuff, too?
MIB: Hmmmm. Lemmee see. ::vanishes::
::Roll credits::
An entertaining hour, but the greater arc of the series is just a pathetic joke at this point. I’ve enjoyed watching plenty of this show, but I would strongly urge future viewers not to bother with it. ditto the “self-indulgent writers want to hit you in the head with a rock” opinions already expressed. Would love to be proven wrong.
When they got to the end with the flashbacks to Season 1, Kate says:“omg where did those skeletons come from?!” Jack says: “bah. you killed a polar bear last week, right? where did THAT come from?!” That interaction just says it all about the series, for me. I couldn’t stop giggling the rest of the night.
I took the pre black-smoke MiB to be a regular human. . The mother wanted him to stay so he could take over for her, but could leave the island if he found how. However he was killed by the smoke monster, apparently, who took his ‘soul’ as its own and dumped his body for Jacob to find it.
It’s the Smoke monster that can’t leave, not Nameless MiB…
I thought the episode was alright. I wasnt surprised we didnt get an answer to the nature of the island. I’m assuming (and hoping) that’s a finale kind of reveal, not for 3 hours to go still.
So this is what I interpreted from the episode, and therefore consider to be decent answers. Remember this is a fantasy-based show, so any answer is going to involve forces that defy explanation or any accepted real-world logic.
Pseudo-mother was charged with protecting the island’s heart. She was granted immortality, and the power to bestow immortality, and could only die at the hand of another. She kept away from the People to make sure she was never in danger of being murdered. For the same reason, and to give her the chance to bring up the twins and choose a successor, she killed Claudia.
She had to choose from the two which would be her successor, and was constantly swapping from one to the other as years passed. After Brother left, she knew that Jacob was the only choice, and had to protect him from all others so he could also maintain his immortality.
Brother wanted off the island, Jacob wanted to stay.
She told them that they were unable to hurt each other, even though that wasn’t true.
She injured but did not kill Brother so that he would retaliate and kill her, finally ending her reign as protector, and beginning Jacob’s.
Jacob got frustrated and sent Brother into the Heart, one of many entrances to it, and woke the Smoke Monster, which had laid dormant for millennia. It is as much a part of the island as the heart, if not one and the same.
Smoke Monster took the form of Brother, finally a well rounded character to portray, and sparred with Jacob for millennia. Smoke Monster comes to believe the same things that Brother did, even believing he is Jacob’s genetic brother, so wants to leave the island, like Brother did, and also believes that he cannot hurt Jacob, because that’s what pseudo-Mother told him.
Jacob knows that Smoke Monster is not his brother, cannot leave the island, and can kill him if he wants, but never tells Smoke Monster that. His job is still to protect the island’s heart, until he finds a successor, preferably before somebody kills him. That didn’t work out, but luckily Hurley and Miles can talk to dead people.
And that’s where we’re at.
^^ An excellent summary for Across The Sea, Guano.
This episode was a lot like all the crackpot theories out there: it explains a lot, but not everything!
Now we know (sort of) why the island is powerful, but what of the numbers? What of the Dharma Initiative? How about the pregnancy problem?
This show is certainly not about the characters, it is about the island and its story.
I DO think that each character has a piece of the island. Maybe a piece of the Glowing Toilet Hole, if you will. Hurley sees the dead, Miles talks to the dead, Jack heals people, Sawyer cons people, Locke is constantly on a search and always getting screwed, etc.
I agree that when a character is inhabited by Smokie or whatever else they come up with, they know that character and they know what they know. But maybe not. If that were so, if I were smokie, I would possess everyone and figure out a way off the damn island paradise. 
Wouldn’t Brother, and thus Smokie, know it was Jacob who kicked Brother’s ass and sent him down the hole and, thus, also know Mommy Dearest lied about not being able to hurt each other?
Maybe. But he died pretty much instantly afterward, so not necessarily.
I don’t think so. There are different reasons for different people. I personally found it frustrating that in what is the final mythological episode, and with not much time to cover mythology in the regular episodes left, that they are introducing new on purpose mysteries. And I don’t mean “it’s turtles all the way down” type of mysteries. They went out of their way not to give MIB’s name. Knowing his name would not just lead to more questions. And what happened to the villagers? Mother couldn’t have killed them all with rocks to the head. Was she another smoky? There was no reason at all not to show her turning into a smoke monster, if she was. There was no reason not to have her tell Jacob the origin of the Protector of the island position. These were all big obvious questions, easily answered, and obviously purposely avoided.
I don’t mind them lying, if it serves the aim of avoiding spoilers or otherwise ruining surprises. But they do seem to be acting somewhat prickish with some of their comments. Especially when they say things like “we feel that ventures to far into we don’t feel the need to explain territory.” WTF? It’s in no way ruining the show for anyone to say “we’re going to address that in a future episode”, “that’s not going to be addressed again but here’s what we were thinking”, or “we want to leave that as a permanent mystery”.
He actually said “I just know”, similar to how he knew the rules for the game. (Although they were clearly playing the game incorrectly, so go figure lol).
To be fair, this show is full of fridge logic. I watched this episode twice, and loved it each time. It was only afterwards, giving it thought, that it started bothering me. And of course, at least 50% of that post-pessimism is due to anticipation. It is still possible, although increasingly unlikely, that the show will address or reveal things that I’m worried they won’t.
And I’m further confused, because they seem so flippant about things, but yet they make a special effort to tie up things like the whispers, room 23, and Shannon’s inhaler, things I considered much lower priority than what I think are important mysteries. So I don’t know what to think.
It’s sort of like dating someone who is difficult to read and doesn’t communicate well. Sometimes you think they are peachy keen for you and sometimes you think they are about to break up with you.
Everyone who has faith in the writers has greatly misplaced their faith. The writers never had any idea what the answers to the mysteries were, and they still don’t. They are wholly uninterested in the underlying reality of the world they created. All they care about is throwing in random weirdness that will captivate the viewers’ imaginations.
The problem with this approach is that they’ve told this story as a mystery. You’re not allowed to set up your mystery with a bunch of questions that you don’t explain. Lost is especially egregious because the explanations don’t even exist.
Most Stephen King fans will happily note that the first 2/3 of his stories are fantastic, but they fall apart in the last 1/3 when he reveals the mystery. But here’s the thing: once you’ve read it, all the mysterious stuff from the first 2/3 is explained by the underlying truth revealed in the last 1/3. Everything makes sense in context, even if that context is stupid. Lost has no underlying context; it’s all stupid all the time. Worse, it was deliberately misleading for no other purpose than to fuck with the viewer.
Here are a couple examples, though let me say I have never watched a single episode twice so I may be misremembering. Correct me if I’m wrong, please.
WHITE SMOKE: Back in the early seasons, Rousseau warns our interpid heroes that the white smoke on the horizon means the others are coming, probably for the kid. So run and hide! Several seasons later, there is no mystery left regarding the others; they have been fully explored and explained. However, there is absolutely nothing in their nature or behavior that explains why they’d light that smoke. Why would Ben order that? It makes no sense at all, based on the Ben we’ve come to know. I sort of half-remember a scene when they lit the signal fire, but I can’t imagine any reasonable answer as to why they would do that. If this is the case, that’s bad storytelling, bad writing.
CRAZY “INFECTION”: Rousseau killed her party because they got infected. Claire just wandered off into the jungle abandoning her kid because she got infected. Sayid gets infected. But other than being stoic for a few days, Sayid showed no evidence of infected craziness. He spared Desmond, then martyred himself so that his friends could live. Yeah, scary infection of craziness. Claire also seems to have gotten better. So what the heck need was there for Rousseau to kill her team? They got down in the dumps for a few weeks? Come on, this was really weak.
The writers have clearly lied to us all along, and are total dicks when called on it. From the linked interview:
This is clearly unadulterated bullshit. They long pointed to Adam & Eve as proof that they never cheated. I long doubted them, saying they could write in whatever retcon they wanted and make it fit so it wouldn’t be proof of anything. But they did me one better and wrote it in such a way that proved they made it up on the fly.
You aren’t allowed to make up a mystery as you go along. Period. A mystery must be understood by the author when they start writing. That way they can drop mysterious yet meaningful clues in the first 2/3 of the story, and then have the payoff of cohesive explanation in the last 1/3. Carlton and Cuse clearly did not do that, and so there is no payoff. That’s a mortal sin in writing a mystery.
I totally agree that answers aren’t the story and answers aren’t even strictly necessary for a good story. But that’s simply not true for mystery. For a mystery, satisfying answers are the most vital element. Character is a big part of any story, but in a mystery, the mystery itself is the biggest element. They didn’t have to write Lost as a mystery, but they chose to do so. They don’t get to just ignore how mysteries work because they feel like it. Well, obviously they can because they did, but the fan backlash because of their choices is well deserved. When you fuck with your fans just for shits and giggles, you deserve scorn.
They wrote a mystery, but cheated. I call foul.
Not surprising; Antony and Cleopatra were contemporaries.
I would have been totally fine with 80%, bt it’s clear now that not even 8% of the answers were planned from the start. None of it was. Not one shred of it.
That’s totally missing the point. It’s not the we’re not spoonfed the answers in excruciating detail. (And what an obnoxiously condescending way to frame the position we don’t actually hold.) The problem is that the answers we do get are inconsistent with the questions the show itself raises. All the answers are cheats.
Think about the polar bears. Given what we know about the others, what possible motivation could they have to head off to the north pole to pick up some polar bears? And how would they even manage that, anyway? Polar bears are too fat to get in the sub. There is no explanation that fits the characterization we get later. Which, I might add, we do actually get in excruciating detail.
We know Ben better than just about any character on the show. And nothing about his earlier mysterious behavior from before we knew him makes any sense once we get to know him.
Same with the creepy map on the hatch door. It turns out to make no sense for anyone to have drawn it.
Why didn’t Ben kill Widmore when he snuck into his bedroom that night? The only possible explanation is that Jacob told him he wasn’t allowed to. But now we know that Ben has never heard a word from Jacob. So, uh, wtf?
The problem isn’t that the explanations are insufficient. It’s that they’re inconsistent. Many have rationalized in defense of the writers that the mysteries are unimportant; the characters and journey are their own reward. But you can’t appeal to this because the inconsistent answers have undermined the characters and journey at every turn.
The Polar Bears have nothing to do with the Others. They were part of the Dharma experiments at Hydra Station, and had escaped after Dharma abandoned the islands.
Ben and Widmiore’s stories haven’t resolved yet.
That was drawn by the people at Swan Station who were pushing the button. They’d go out on recces when they weren’t supposed to, only briefly as they still had to come back and push the button, and guessed at where the other Dharma Stations were.
I found this discussion (prior to the agreement to end the show after six seasons) between J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse, and Stephen King to be particularly interesting and relevant to many of the criticisms of the show brought up in this thread, Ellis Dee’s in particular.
Because of the unprecedented degree of difficulty of making a show like this on network TV (which is outlined in the discussion linked above), I’m currently of the opinion that the show runners have done as well as can be reasonably expected.
Which seems just as–if not more–implausible.
I think that’s being kind. J.J. Abrams is doing a much better job at the same task with Fringe.
I think losing Abrams sunk the show. If they’d been able to keep him I think it would have gone much better. Good, even.
Agreed.
And, agreed. Thanks for making the point about how in a mystery, these things are more important than in a standard drama. It’s a good explanation for why this show is irritating me so much right now.
You know, I didn’t even know Abrams was no longer involved.
When did he leave?
ETA to answer my own question: After the first half of season one.
I’m not entirely convinced it would have been wrapped up any more cleanly if JJ were still involved. Look at how upset people were at ‘Cloverfield.’ For months, due to an extensive web marketing campaign, people speculated on the nature and origins of the monster, the connection with shadowy corporations and mysterious sea-algae. Then when the film finally opened, you got…
Big monster stomp on NYC. Monster is nuked from orbit. The End.
I’m just saying JJ is not necessarily your go-to guy for resolving complicated mythologies (full disclosure: i haven’t watched Alias or Fringe and i do hear these do pretty well at the whole mythology thing)
This. 1000 times THIS.
Imagine if you’re reading a mystery. In the beginning of the mystery, the detective says (out of nowhere) that there’s no possible way for the murderer to have been left-handed and the forensics guy agrees, given the nature of the stab wounds. Then imagine if several chapters were spent discussing the sordid backhistory of hostility between the victim and a left-handed suspect. THEN imagine if an angel appeared and presented the detective with a butcher knife saying THIS was the murder weapon–a cursed dagger from ancient times, but only a left-handed man could wield it.
So you get to the last chapter of the book, you’re 2 or 3 pages from the end and it turns out that a right handed woman bludgeoned the murder victim wasn’t murdered at all–he was hit by a micrometeorite…*and none of the red herrings, none of the earlier (now incorrect) detective work, none of the “word-of-god” revelations were ever explained…it would be unsatisfying—a total cheat.
That’s what it feels like is happening here–sure, we’ve got 2 hours and 20 minutes of actual show time left (3.5 hours less commercials) and they can address the red herrings. But I doubt that they will at this point and that’s a shame.
We learned from Kelvin that the map was drawn by Radzinsky. At the time that was just a name, but the writers later made Radzinsky one of the higher-ups in the Dharma initiative–someone who should have known the other Dharma stations like the back of his hand. Thus, a perfect example of what Ellis Dee is talking about.