S6E9 JUNKYARD TURNSTYLE

I can see the importance of the Egyptian sets being diminished now that we have a clearer picture of the Jacob-MIB dynamic.

Jacob brings people to the island. Before 1867, Jacob left these lost souls to their own accord to deal with any interference by MIB. Jacob only brought invited people to the island. So at some point, he brought in Egyptians, lots of them, who brought with them their belief system to construct the temple and statue. What they did bring with them was a sense of "worship" to more than one god-entity, so that may be why the Egyptian culture lasted a long time on the island: both Jacob and MIB were worshipped by the people. And I suspect that even guardians of good or evil find it pretty cool to be worshipped by lower life forms, say, for several thousand years. But at some point MIB probably got bored with them and wiped them out, or Jacob brought competing souls to drowned out the earlier "native population."

It appears from Jacob and MIB's discussions, that Jacob brings a set of outsiders to the island to determine the question of whether good can prevail over evil. And once those outsiders have run the gauntlet of tests, temptations, corruption and judgment, they are discarded like old junk and replaced with a new set of outsiders to try the experiment over again. But there must have been some change in the "rules" of dealing with outsiders after Richard was given his job. Equal opportunity influence and the requirement of "free will" decisions by each outsider. I think the Dharma cult was brought in to see if technology could beat back evil in the end. That is why they were given decades to build their stations, conduct their experiments, to find enlightenment only to be tested by evil forces such as infertility, hostile enemies and their own power struggles.

The 815 cast is just another group of outsiders running through the hellish turnstyle of the Island.