WORK OUT

If you ever have worked in a shipping/receiving department for a factory or warehouse, you know that it can be quite a tedious job. It is repetitive. It does not challenge workers on an intellectual level. You process boxes, sort them, post them, and ship them out. Hour after hour; day after day; week after week, etc.

So what if this concept is overlaid onto the LOST story?

What if Jacob and his brother (some reports thought he was to be called "Saul") are merely shipping/receiving workers but instead of handling parcels they handle "bad souls?"

There was a constant stream of "visitors" that come to the island. From what we have learned, most of the visitors came to the island for some "special" purpose, but MIB said they lost their way and "corrupted" the system. What system?

If the characters coming to the island were lost souls seeking redemption, the island is the sorting facility to determine whether they should be accepted and move on to heaven or be rejected and destroyed by the island.

The concept would simplify the story lines.

The main characters all came to the island with troubled pasts, infidelities, sins, crimes and personal issues. If the island was to test their inner resolve to see if they could be reclaimed by a higher entity (god), then the taskmasters would be Jacob and MIB.

Jacob and MIB would be devilish minions working in the after life. Their job was to determine whether a person's soul had enough qualities to be saved. In order to make that determination, Jacob and MIB put those souls through a series of tests which mirrored their prior back stories to determine whether those dead souls could change. Change would be the key to salvation.

But after thousands of years, Jacob and MIB got bored with routine soul searching and devised a more elaborate system. Some of it involved cult worship; some of it involved horror and power struggles. Instead of change for salvation, the motivation to release souls to the after life plane was to see if the mere human souls could outsmart, outwit and outplay their superiors (which is very Survivor like). Those who played the game very poorly turned into whispers (trapped spirits). Those who played the game so-so turned into the Others, fodder for the next group of souls. Those who actually defeated Jacob and MIB got their release to the other side.