THE GREAT THING

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe. — Anatole France

What was the great event, the great accomplishment, that made the end the LOST saga worth while?

In Season 6, the only conclusion presented was the fact that Jacob and his followers defeated the MIB who sought to leave the Island. No one viewing the pilot episode could have imagined that would be the key climatic event that would end the series. For those who believe that the series went back to the beginning to focus in on the main characters to finish their journey, the Jacob-MIB tangent doe nothing to resolve the deep emotional scars, fears, phobias and anti-social behavior deep within the main characters back stories.

To accomplish a "great" thing, one needs:
1. Action
2. A dream
3. A plan
4. A belief.

How does Jack's apparent victory over Flocke meet those requirements?

Jack fought MIB but he had no plan. Jack was a non-believer in faith, fate or spiritual aspects of life. He led his life in reality, in science, through the lens of a highly trained spinal surgeon. He had no use for politics, cliches, focus groups or public relations.

There are several key unanswered or poorly explained elements to the end.

Jacob is immortal. He has lived on the island for a thousand years. He can grant the gift of immortality. MIB calls him the devil. So how can a mere mortal like Ben kill him? And once he is "killed," he still wanders around the island interacting to various people, including the remaining candidates. 

MIB as the smoke monster is also apparently immortal. The smoke monster is depicted on ancient hieroglyphs in the Temple. It is termed a Cerberus, a security system, and pure evil. It can transform its shape to take the appearance of dead people like Locke, with all his faults and memories.

One must make several long assumptions to try to figure out how an immortal being becomes mortal.
The alleged dislodged frozen donkey wheel made the island time skip. It's core life force was in jeopardy. As a result, Jacob could be killed but not at the hands of his "brother," in the form of MIB, but at the hands of a human. The problem with this logic is that Jacob's brother died so the reincarnated smoke monster image of his brother was not bound by Crazy's Mother's rule that Jacob and his brother could not harm each other. Jacob broke that rule already. For that sin, he was left to a lonely existence.

To somehow make MIB into a mortal Flocke, Desmond and Jack had to "reset" the stone cap in the light cave, a place where intense electromagnetic energy would tear a human a part. Now, Desmond allegedly survived the Hatch explosion-implosion to become an electromagneto superhero. But Jack only took a job title of guardian without any special transformation. Again, there are no rules that grant such powers. The "reboot" of the Light Cave source somehow "trapped" MIB in Flocke's body (not Locke's actual human body because those remains were buried; MIB transformed matter to create Flocke). If one can transform matter, why would putting a stone back on a light source change or eliminate that power?

Even if one goes backward from Season 6, this Jacob-brother dynamic goes past the plane crash to the early beginnings of the island itself, even before Jacob and his brother as children came to this place.

This place, the island, is also a debatable unknown. It seems real, with plants, animals, people, machinery, temples, beaches, food, water and human beings. But even vivid dreams can seem absolutely real to the dreamer.

One aspect of the Jacob-MIB relationship was the fact that young Jacob appeared before Flocke during the final back and forth with Widmore's men. Young or ghost Jacob had appeared before in the series, usually warning someone that they could not kill. This young ghost Jacob also appeared at the same time as ghost grown-up Jacob after Ben killed him in the statue. It is odd that dead Jacob would appear at two different ages around the same climatic time.

Or is it?

We have viewed the series through the eyes of adults. We used our personal experience, knowledge, education, research and common sense to try to figure out the island happenings and events. Some of us were disturbed by how TPTB handled and mistreated (or misused) children during the series. But that may be the point. The series would be different if it was viewed through the eyes of a child.

It now occurs to me that the end was an end as the beginning was just that, a new start. The ghost spirits of young Jacob and his young brother never grew up. They stayed children harbored away in a spiritual place we saw as an island. When MIB tells Jacob it is he who "brings" people to the island, it is a metaphor for the imagination of Jacob to create his own "stories" and "adventures" with his mind. The lighthouse is merely a window to the world of the living, just like a television set to a shut-in. There Jacob can spy on actual humans to get a blueprint for how people act, react and behave. There is no moral judgment just observation. That is why there is no moral tone or lesson in LOST. As a lonely unsupervised child spirit, Jacob would have no cause to know the difference between right and wrong.

So a child spirit begins a new adventure story to play against MIB, or his imagined brother. He "brings" people to the island by creating characters and placing them in a situation where they come to the island. Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sawyer, Claire , Charlie, Desmond . . .  they are all figments of Jacob's imagination. The interactive game of characters is just like MIB creates forms out of its matter; Jacob can do the same as he shifted from various states. We have the island more as a holodeck than a real place. We have programmed characters running through story lines created by a child. This is not black or white. It is not a game. It is an adventure like cowboys and Indians, capture the flag, or combat. Children at play. Jacob and his brother at play.

The concept that the entire LOST story is the telling of a tale made up by a child is probably the closest thing we can get to a unified theory. Nothing matters because nothing was real. The characters happy ending was a child's creation for his favorite action figures. They never died because they never lived on the island. It explains why certain family members of the characters who had strong bonds with them were not in the church. It also shows the imprint of loneliness that Jacob had in himself. It is probably Jacob's personality that keeps his brother from leaving the island playground because Jacob does not want to move on. As a child, who did not have a sibling or friend whine that he did not want to play the current game anymore. Kids get bored and want to move on to do something else. Some kids do not, and want to continue playing with or without their friends. In his fantasy world, he is the king and creator. He is the master of his universe. What ever he can imagine, he can make. He lives in the land of illusion with endless adventure stories that he can capture and rerun. 

The great thing Jacob accomplished was to create his own self-sustaining fantasy world.
To accomplish a "great" thing, Jacob needed a plan (the lighthouse to see into the human world to gather observations about people), a belief (that putting various people together in his fantasy world could create vast amounts of entertaining situations and events), action (in the devious plot twists he would throw at his characters) all within the confines of his own child-like dreams.