THE CURSE OF THE PHARAOHS

The curse of the pharaohs refers to an ancient alleged curse believed by some to be cast upon any person who disturbs the tomb of an Egyptian person, especially a pharaoh or king. This curse, which does not differentiate between thieves and archaeologists, allegedly can cause bad luck, illness or death. Since the mid-20th century, many authors and documentaries have argued that the curse is real in the sense of being caused by scientifically explicable causes such as bacteria or radiation.

When a tomb is opened after hundreds of years, it contains dust and bacteria that have not seen the light of day. Those bacteria or dust can contain pathogens that modern man has no immunity form.

The Book of the Dead contained passages to ward off people from disturbing the tombs. Religious beliefs stated that those possessions in the deceased chambers were needed in the afterlife. Grave robbers knew that the rich were buried with vast treasures of gold, silver and gems.

The curse legend grew in the 1920s and 1930s when Howard Carter's archeology team uncovered the best tomb of all time, King Tut's. After excavating the tomb, several members of the team died mysterious deaths, one from a mosquito bite and one from blood poisoning.

For those who still seek a unified theory to LOST's mythology, the curse theory may be the one.

The island was filled with Egyptian references, including columns of hieroglyphs in the Temple to Jacob's textiles. And if you review LOST's elements as an allegory to ancient Egyptian rituals and practices, you can weave a good theory.

In order to protect a pharaoah's afterlife, he would have gathered loyal subjects, his priests, to make continuous offerings and to protect his tomb from raiders. These priests were powerful men in society. Many were viewed to have magical properties and direct contact with the gods.

When people do not understand what they see, they call it magic or supernatural.  The magicians can use unknown science, illusion or slight of hand to deceive, manipulate or shock people. Some people know that one way to control people is to create chaos, fear or expectation of death.

We have Jacob as the island guardian. He is the high priest of the island. The island contains a temple - - - and temples were created for the specific purpose of burial of powerful people.

The smoke monster could be viewed as the deadly dust that is the manifestation of the curse for those foreigners who came to the island to disturb the temple rites.

Why did Jacob allow people to come to his island? Just as in ancient times, a pharaoh, dead or alive, needed subjects to protect him and his remains. The Flight 815 survivors could be unwittingly recruits for the pharaoh's subjects. They were placed in the way of raiders such as Widmore's men who wanted to take control (and plunder) the island.

One can see that the smoke monster's deaths were not indiscriminate. It killed people like Eko because he did not believe in the island's religion. He was wrapped up in his brother's religion out of guilt. As such, Eko had no role in protecting the temple or the island. Eko was then expendable.

Likewise, converts like Locke were used to try to recruit loyal subjects to return to the island. When he failed, he was killed because he had no value to the island high priest.

The one concept that stood the test of the series was that the island had to be protected (from the unknown). That was the reason and excuse for all the conflicting behaviors and story lines. 

Just as in Egyptian mythology, the smoke monster may have evolved to rival the high priest - - - to overthrow him to create his new cult. That is why Flocke did not kill Widmore's men in mass; he used the alleged conflict between the sides in order to oust Jacob from his position of power. Flocke's background was one of science (MIB was into Roman culture and technology as a young man) while Jacob was schooled in the metaphysics of religious beliefs tied to the island's mysterious past. The theme of science vs. religion was common in the series. It seems that it was tested at various stages in time, from the military coming to the island to challenge the inhabitants to Dharma's uneasy truce with the natives. There were two different views of the island. One was to keep the religious tenets in place (Jacob). The other was to abandon the old ways (MIB) and abandon the island.

In some ways, the latter prevailed just like it did in Egypt. Egyptian cult religion or worship its pharaohs died off to be replaced with modern religions in a secular government structure (with intermittent civil wars and political upheaval.)

Just as modern archeology triumphed over the safeguards of tomb construction, LOST's major change was the loss of the island's long standing structure and purpose.

When it was said that the characters had to "let go" in order to be free, it could mean that they had to let go their own past personal principle structures (which commonly is called religious beliefs) in order to embrace their own free will and their thoughts on morality and mortality.

VOLCANO

The ending of Lost was almost much bigger than what audiences saw. Nothing was that different. The characters and island were always going to be what they ended up being. But, one big addition would have changed things significantly: a volcano.

Lost executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse told the story to Entertainment Weekly. The summary is that Lindelof and Cuse wanted some kind of visual identifier to bring together the idea that this island was like a cork on a bottle of evil. The symbol was going to be a volcano, and it would have been set up in the third to last episode. In that episode, where we learned the backstory of Jacob and the Man in Black, Jacob was going to throw the Man in Black into the volcano, turning him into the smoke monster that debuted in season one.

Then, in the series finale, Locke and Jack were going to fight on the volcano as it got ready to erupt—kind of a natural-disaster ticking clock, with tremors, lava, and, eventually, good triumphing over evil. Lost even set up the idea of the volcano being on the island some time prior, in a third season episode that featured a Dharma classroom. And yet, it ended up getting scrapped.

The reason is simple: money. Producers and executives realized that all the volcano effects and potential location filming were going to be way too expensive for them to handle, especially when another final season set, the temple, ended up being more pricey than expected. So, in the end, the very literal interpretation of the island as evil was cut out and things were left a little more ambiguous. Same ending, Jack vs. Locke fighting on a rocky area, but just no volcano.

Money woes and writing by the seat of their pants.

Jeff Jensen, the waterboy for the series theorists, writes:

Carlton Cuse, Lost’s longtime co-showrunner, got the idea for the volcano in the early years of the show after visiting Hawaii’s Big Island with his family, taking a volcano tour and marveling at the landscape. He thought it would be cool if The Island had a volcano of its own. “We were always looking to cannibalize anything on Hawaii to aid in the visual storytelling of the show,” says Cuse. “We also thought of the island as a character on the show, so we were always looking for things that would give it more personality.” He didn’t have an idea of how the volcano could be used, “but it was something we banked and thought we could use downstream.”

The volcano stayed in the back pocket until the producers started developing Lost’s concluding seasons. The premise that developed over time was that the volcano was a mysterious place that forged the ticking, shape-shifting monster, the billowing black mass known as Smokey. By season 6, the writers had settled on the concept that the island was like a cork that bottled up all sorts of bad stuff, some volatile stew of spiritual dark matter stuff that would rob life of meaning and goodness if unleashed. “The question was always, how do you basically visualize and dramatize the idea that the island itself is all that separates the world from hellfire and damnation?” says Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof. “And the answer was the volcano.”

Lindelof and Cuse initially envisioned a finale in which Jack (Matthew Fox) and Smokey incarnate (Terry O’Quinn) would brawl over the fate of the island at Lost’s proverbial Mount Doom. “The volcano had been dormant for the duration of the series,” explains Lindelof, “but based on moving into this endgame, the island had become unstable and the volcano was going to erupt. We were going to have lots of seismic activity, and ultimately, there was going to be this big fight between the forces of good and the forces of evil, which ended up in the series manifesting as Jack and The Man in Black, in the midst of magma. Magma spewing everywhere!”

And so it went that Cuse and Lindelof decided to end Lost by reigniting an actual volcano and spraying their cast with actual skin-searing magma. Just kidding. But they were determined to fake it the best they could. “It would be visually stunning and really exciting for the audience,” says Lindelof. “After six years and around 121 hours of the show, we had shot literally every part of Oahu that we could for island scenes and flashbacks. So the idea that, for the finale, we could go to this new locale that’s going to look new and different and unique, primal and ancient and end-of-the-world-ish, that would be great.”

The volcano wouldn’t have come out of the blue. The producers planned to take us there in Lost’s third-to-last episode, “Across The Sea,” a major mythological outing that revealed the origin story of The Island’s long-lived protector, Jacob (Mark Pellegrino), and his unnamed brother, The Man in Black (Titus Welliver), and dramatized the latter’s transformation into Smokey. You would have seen Jacob drag his mother-killing sibling up the slopes of the volcano and toss him into its smoldering, monster-making crater.

And this is where the people who wrote the checks for Lost put a stopper in Operation: Magma Spew. At some point in all the plotting, planning, and prepping for season 6, ABC calculated that it couldn’t afford the transportation cost. Not helping the cause: The set for the temple, a refuge for Jacob’s chosen ones and a key location in the first half of season 6, turned out to be very expensive. Says Lindelof: “ABC was like, ‘Guys, we love you, and we’re letting you end the show; we can’t let you bankrupt the network in the process.’” And that’s how Smokey’s crucible — Lost’s version of Buffy’s Hellmouth — was re-imagined as a cave of light and the fight between Jack and the monster was filmed on the cliffs of Oahu.

Cuse says The Volcano That Never Really Was speaks to how practical factors, models of production, and s— happens variables affect the execution and finale form of big saga serials. Lost was marked by several such stories. Perhaps the most well-known involved Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, whose Mr. Eko was a season 2 breakout. The producers loved writing for Mr. Eko (his showcase episode in season 2, “The 23rd Psalm,” written by Cuse and Lindelof, is one of Lost’s best) and envisioned a prolonged conflict with John Locke (O’Quinn) that would have made the middle seasons of the series quite different. When the actor abruptly ankled Lost the second season, the producers had to create a new story for Locke and other characters impacted by his sudden departure. (Akinnuoye-Agbaje stuck around for a few episodes to shoot Mr. Eko’s death-by-Smokey exit episode.)

Still, Cuse and Lindelof do think scratching the volcano was for the best. Lindelof says the producers came to believe during the writing of season 6 that it would be better if some ideas about The Island remained metaphorical or mysterious, things to be interpreted, not explained.

>>>> I have to disagree with the notion that Budget Killed the Volcano. You can use stock film footage of an eruption with close up footage of characters panicked reactions; and waves of ash clouds as they flee from the jungle.

The "monster making" volcano would explain how one is made but not WHAT it is. We got some circumstantial evidence of monster creation in Light Cave when Jack "rebooted" the island cork. But that was placed in the context of rebalancing good and evil not creating a monster. (Even though some say that the body of Jacob's brother was washed into the cave, knocking over the cork and thus creating the Man in Black.)

But if the volcano was supposed to be the climatic star of the Series 6 final episodes, why did the production crew spend so much time and money on the Egyptian symbols and the temple if the temple concepts were immaterial to the resolution of the story?

This story shows that the show runners and writers were struggling to find a way to end the series. There were too many ideas but not enough continuity to resolve the series story lines. Instead, it was decided not to answer the questions but create a final "character study" of the cast as they passed into the afterlife.

PANIC ATTACKS

Panic attacks are sudden episodes of almost uncontrollable and inescapable fear or anxiety, and are characterized by sweating, a rapid heart rate, shortness of breath and the feeling of choking, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

Each year, six million Americans experience at least one panic attack. It has been described as being trapped and suffocated, urgent and frightening.

Scientists have found evidence that panic attacks are not due to "weakness in character," but caused by a brain abnormality in which a chemical messenger that deals with emotion doesn't work properly, according to an article in the New York Times. 

According to Scientific American, the brain's regions that are sent into high gear are the amygdala, which deals with fear, and some of the midbrain, which deals with how pain is felt. In particular, the periaqueductal gray — a region in the midbrain that initiates the body going into defense mode, which includes freezing up — is hyperactive during panic attacks, a scientific study found. When our defense mechanisms malfunction, this may result in an over exaggeration of the threat, leading to increased anxiety and, in extreme cases, panic.

Stress and anxiety causes the nervous system to flare up, and in attempts to calm down, the parasympathetic system goes into action. However, if it fails to do so, the person will continue to feel revved up.

We have always felt that the LOST island was a panic attack factory. Each week there were some daunting task, dangerous missions, or attacks from the Others and the smoke monsters.

The smoke monsters thrived on the characters' fears, anxieties and panic attacks. Each time it attacked the survivors, their power would increase. That is why Jacob continued to bring human beings to the island, in order to have a supply of emotional high level brain activity to feed upon.

One way to look at the smoke monster's conduct was that it needed people's fears in order to gain energy and survive. Once the main characters overcame their fears of the island and its inherit dangers, the smoke monster became mortal. 

We were told that Jacob and MIB were immortal beings having been on the island for centuries. They could not kill each other. So what happened to change their immortality.

For Jacob, it had to have happened when Ben no longer feared him - - - and struck out and stabbed him with a knife. That led to the slow collapse of Jacob's smoke monster power since fear was waning against him. 

For Flocke/MIB, his demise happened when both Jack and Kate no longer feared him during their final battle. Jack struck him and drew blood meaning that the smoke monster's energy field or barrier was weak. Kate's bullet that killed MIB was only caused by the fact that MIB was no longer immortal.

But there is still a contradiction on the island's immortality. Dead souls could still appear on the island, as Horace did to Locke. Also, another immortal, Alpert seemed real - - - was he an ghost or was he another smoke monster? Probably the former, but we don't know if a ghost could leave the island. In a reverse context, Alpert began to age when he no longer feared Jacob or MIB since they had both had been defeated and gone.

THE END AS WE KNOW IT

The BBC ponders this:

Don't panic, but our planet is doomed. It's just going to take a while. Roughly 6 billion years from now,the Earth will most likely be vaporized when the sun dies and expands into a red giant that engulfs Earth.

But the Earth is just one planet in the solar system, the Sun is just one of hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. What's in store for all of that? How does the universe end?

There was The Big End Question asked in LOST when the alleged motivation to stop Flocke was that if he escaped the island, the world would be destroyed.  But what world?

We assumed it was Earth. But how? 

Flocke was a smoke monster, an intelligent being that could shape shift matter, take human form and steal human memories. It may have lived on fear. It had emotions that anger, rage to violence.

If the island was its prison, a containment field of electromagnetic energy, would Flocke's release into the universe or solar system expand its smoke powers to levels that would destroy the vacuum of space as we understand it?

We were told that Flocke escaping would destroy the planet. Could Flocke's mere presence in the atmosphere or orbit could shape shift, change or destroy the planet? If it had that much power to begin with, how could the tiny island contain it?

Of course, the destruction of the universe could have been a lie. A con. A reason Jacob had to recruit and keep his candidates at bay. But it seemed that there was a real possibility that Flocke would harm anyone or anything to get his way. But we never really knew where Flocke wanted to go.

Some rationalize that Smokey could be Satan, a fallen angel, whose only goal was to leave his personal hell on Earth to return to Heaven. But if he is not welcome in Heaven, then the disruption of the afterlife world would happen. Could that be the ripple in time and space (between dimensions) that the island's "cork" was really trying to keep steady? A parallel universe could collapse or engulf our present universe like a dying sun? If that was spelled out clearly in the series, we could probably get a greater purpose in the final showdown between the candidates and Flocke. This seems to be an important plot point that should have been explained to the viewers.

So we don't know if the "death" of Flocke was really the end of danger or merely the trigger to switch planes of parallel universes. If one believes in parallel universes, each of us has a doppelganger in that other world. But through experience, chance, free will and personal decisions, our doppelgangers can be different people. If the release of energy (memories) from one universe to another could be just as catastrophic, the sideways world view becomes clearer. If the main characters began to "awake" with memories from the wrong universe - - - that could destroy the belief system in their universe. It could disrupt the natural flow of energy, time and space that separates universes much like the different currents in the layers of an ocean.

We don't know if the awakening of the characters in the afterlife was just the end of a journey, or the actual cause of destruction of an entire universe.

THE FUTURE PAST

"Computers will overtake humans with AI at some within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours." - - - Steven Hawking.

Hawking is one of the great scientific minds of our generation. But he is one of a growing number of scientists who are cautioning humanity on the technology trend and future dependence on artificial intelligence.  He is also a true believer in the law of unintended consequences.

Currently, industry has focused in on "mechanical" artificial intelligence programs, those computers which run machinery instead of trained human workers. The idea that computer controlled machines can do more delicate or detailed work than the human eye is debatable, but the potential cost saving of robotic assembly has been proven.

There are the Terminator fearists that believe that advanced AI systems will find their own "consciousness" and turn on their human masters. The Borg in Star Trek could be considered a flawed computer code turning humans into machines. It is probably the dependence on technology that is most worrisome to scientists because it signals the dawn of "less human intelligence" in the general public.

Think of it this way: if computers are going to do the work for you, solve your problems from making a pot of coffee in the morning to building an entire smartphone in less than an hour, then humans won't have to think about doing any physical work. Humans mental capacity to apply knowledge into a tangible thing (such as making a smartphone) will atrophy. With everything given to us, there would nothing we would give to society. Such were the grotesque human sloths in the movie WALL*E.

One of the better examples of this kind of cause and bad effect is LOST's smoke monster. Since the island could flash between time periods (we only saw it flash to the past, and then back to the present) it is possible that the smoke monster was some form of future technology that got transported to the island. Since it was advanced technology from the distant future, it would be viewed as a mystery, supernatural or magic (as would you handing your smartphone to an 1880s merchant).

There is an analogy that our current technological dreams can manifest in our future technological nightmares.

How would the world be different if Nazi Germany perfected the nuclear bomb prior to the end of World War II? Would half the world now be speaking German?

How would the world be different if the Roman crusades in the Middle East had armored tank divisions against horse drawn Calvary of the Muslims?

How would the world react if a spacecraft landed in Washington D.C. and astronauts from the Mars colony said they have come home after 100 years in space?

One has to put context in the present. But in order to do so, one relies upon the past for experience but also the expectation of the future. As one could say, "the present is the future past."

One cannot readily untangle the twisted time threads in LOST's story lines. The jumps made little sense. The resulting paradoxes never explained or corrected. One cannot say that elements of an unknown future controlled the events on the island. Or that past civilizations were allowed to fully develop in the island cocoon to greater technological advances they we could imagine.

BUGS IN THE SYSTEM

What is the meaning of Life?

It is a question that humans have contemplated since they became aware of their own existence, and then their own mortality.

From a purely objective standpoint, what are the roles of humans on this planet.

Basically, we all gather energy, consume energy, store energy, and use energy. The byproduct of all these biochemical factors is the create of waste. Waste that is then used as food/energy source by the smallest microbes. Some scientists have compared the human body to that of a complex industrial factory. Instead of an actual product at the end of the production line, the final discharge is human waste.

Evolutionists believe that from the primordial muck, bits of chemical molecules began to bond together to create more complex life forms like microbes and bacteria. Over time, these single cell creatures evolved into multi-cell beings to the current highly complex animal species. But throughout this entire evolutionary chain, the same basic tenet applies: life needs to find, consume, store and use energy in order to live. The microbe level breaks down chemicals and materials from higher life forms or found in nature. But if nature is a matter of creating efficiencies, in closed ecosystems of mutual cooperation (such as trees releasing oxygen for humans and humans releasing carbon dioxide needed for tree growth), then it makes sense to see that humans are the greatest microbe factory to feed microbes their favorite food sources - - - waste.

The microbe theory can be applied to LOST in the sense that the smoke monster appears to be a complex form of nanobots or microbes that have evolved into an intelligent being. The smoke monster preyed upon human beings - - - but not in the normal biochemical consumption sense, but a different form of energy - - - emotional.

Though never discussed by TPTB, one could tangentially say that one good theory for the show's "big theme" could be the evolutionary process on mankind is really the continuation of micro-biology finding bigger and better ways to support the smallest life forms on the planet. People are the sheep created by then herded by the microbes. Mankind's own self-importance and arrogance would erase any concept that they are food factories for the unseen bugs that populate every surface on the planet.

DIRE WARNING

Literature and popular culture have always been a source of future developments, especially in the concepts of technology. Science fiction writers in 1800s dreamed about space exploration, which would occur at its zenith with the moon landing in 1969.

Technology is supposed to be good for mankind.  It makes life easier. Work more productive. More time for man to think about important things.

But even the most tuned technologists have a grave warning about the future of technology.

Steve Wozniak,  Apple co-founder and programming whiz, recently predicted that artificial intelligence's detrimental impact on the future of humanity to warnings from the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking.

"Computers are going to take over from humans, no question," he told an Australian financial publication.  Recent technological advancements have convinced him that writer Raymond Kurzweil – who believes machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence within the next few decades – is onto something.

"Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people," he said. "If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently."

"Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don't know about that …" Wozniak said.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has been the most vocal about his concerns about AI, calling it the "biggest existential threat" to mankind. He is an investor in DeepMind and Vicarious, two AI ventures, but “it’s not from the standpoint of actually trying to make any investment return," he said.  "I like to just keep an eye on what’s going on…nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” Musk said. “But you have to be careful.”

Gates said,  "I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned," he wrote. Similarly, physicist Stephen Hawking has warned  that AI could eventually "take off on its own." It's a scenario that doesn't bode well for our future as a species: "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded," he said.

In LOST, the island housed once was "cutting edge" technology and research facilities. It was Dharma that was looking for answers to the darkest questions and mysteries in science, including end-of-the-world scenarios. 

There has been a debate on whether Dharma killed itself off, or whether it was the technology that it created that led to the mass destruction and purge.

The smoke monster may not have been invented by Dharma, but could have Dharma "programmed" this smoke monster in an attempt to give it human thoughts and memories in order to control it?  It would seem to be a reasonable scientific inquiry. But with many science experiments, unintended consequences could happen - - - such as the smoke monster learning to mimic human behavior, including violence, anger and murder. It could have used memories as a template to shape shift into human form to feed off the emotions of other life forms. For the island was kept on edge by fear, one of the strongest human emotions. Perhaps that was the source of the smoke monster's energy.

Further, Dharma could have created the smoke monster(s) and during the Incident accidently sent them back into time to the ancient Egyptian period. For some, Jacob and MIB as smoke monsters, as well as Crazy Mother, would show an advanced being trying to shed its confusing and conflicting knowledge base of humans. And the smoke monsters did not time shift back to present Dharma - - - but lingered on the island to re-live their immortal life spans, bitter about this external prison. The game itself with human pawns could have been the reaction of smoke monsters against Dharma's research  into the power of the island light.

So, Dharma failed to heed their own warning signs in creating technology which challenged time and space itself. Remember, Daniel had worked with Dharma in Michigan after his Oxford tenure. It is the time skips that give us a clue that Daniel may have set in motion all of the destructive patterns through the power to manipulate time. His return to the island was also to make amends for the horror he had created (akin to discovering the atom bomb) which was wrecking havoc on his psyche. History is littered with scientists who regretted their inventions and discoveries that were corrupted into acts of evil.

WHY MOTHERHOOD WAS CRAZY

It cannot be coincidence that so many mothers were crazy.  Really, crazy.

From Locke's child common law wife mother who went institutional crazy after abandoning her child in the 1950s, to Claire's "Rousseau's Walk" into the dark side of the jungle, LOST's writers painted a real bleak picture of motherhood.

Almost a tortured representation of the divine gift of life.

Juliet was kidnapped so Ben and the Others could find an answer to why their pregnant women were dying in the third trimester. Why would the island, as the alleged place of "life, death and rebirth" continually kill expectant mothers and their unborn children?

Jacob and MIB's mother gave birth on the island, but she was killed by another crazy woman, whom we think was a smoke monster (by the aftermath of her wiping out the Roman camp). She had been alone so long that she was crazy. Crazy dangerous.

Rousseau also gave birth on the island, to Alex. They survived but were separated by the Others (who apparently could reproduce or keep children alive. Perhaps there was a social stigma against any woman except those worshipping Jacob.) Rousseau saw the violence of the smoke monster killing her shipmates, which led her to kill their reincarnated corpses in order to protect her unborn baby. For her honor, she was to live a lonely, hardscrabble life in the jungle - - - under constant threat of attack, real and imagined.

Even the surrogate mothers were crazy. Kate was no Ms. Housekeeping when she took charge of Aaron. Kate's background was a homicidal runaway. Eloise, Daniel's mother, thought nothing of throwing her son or step-daughter, Penny, to the flames of hell in order to maintain control over the island and its secrets.

There clearly is an undertone of anti-motherhood in the series.

There is no explanation for it.  Yes, bad mothers could infuse psychotic traits in their children. But the vast majority of mothers who had children were crazy, alcoholics (Jack's mother) or totally out of the picture, strangers to their own children.

Was the undertone a subliminal message for mass contraception, zero population growth, or an oddity of male dominated showrunner excess?

CREATURES

When you rise in the morning, form a resolution to make the day a happy one to a fellow-creature. - - - Sydney Smith

A "creature" is normally defined as an animal, as distinct from a human being, however it can be used for either an animal or person, such "as fellow creatures on this planet, animals deserve respect."

It can also mean a fictional or imaginary being, typically a frightening one like a creature from outer space.

There is a possibility that the characters on LOST were a combination of both definitions. The main characters could be human, animal or imaginary beings from another world.

It goes back to the survival of one coming to the island. It is debatable whether anyone of Flight 815 survived the crash. However, if one looks back on how other people got to the island, there is also a clue about what dimension the island truly occupies. Juliet was given a massive overdose of drugs in order to board the submarine which would take her to the island. There is no reason for a person to be sedated in order to travel the Pacific in a submarine. It was a possible ruse to kill her and take her spirit to the island. Likewise, Desmond came to the island after being adrift on the Pacific Ocean for weeks, which could also have led to his own demise before reaching the island.

The island could be the bridge between the human world and the spirit world (and the after life).

This nexus point between real, unreal and surreal does touch on elements of the series that are unexplained, unexplainable and unknown.

Theology aside, what happens to a person when they nearly die? There are ample studies of the "near death" experience where patients get to a euphoric dream state where there is a white light. There body is still alive, but their mind (or soul) has left it to start another conscious passage to another place.  The question is the place, for people who don't come back cannot tell their doctors what was that new place.

So in chart form, one can imagine:

LIFE   - - - - NEAR DEATH - - -  DEATH - - - - AFTER LIFE

If one believes that man has more than just a biochemical body, a soul which differentiates man from other creatures, then a body's demise does not mean actual "death" in the conventional sense. A person's mind can live on, and possibly be re-created with a new "body" or vessel.

I theorized during the series run that if one ties the show to the ancient Egyptian rituals referenced in the series, the premise of the plots could center around near death and death experiences in a supernatural underworld. In the near death phase, the characters like the 815ers do not realize they are dead (or they don't accept it), therefore their spirits continue to "live" their past lives in a different dimension created by their collective memories. It is when these spirit creatures actually realize and accept their mortality, do they become full spirits in the sideways world, ready for their journey into the after life. This multi-stage process helps clarify the apparent conflicts within the plot about who dies and what happens to them (such as Patchy dying several times but somehow came back to life to torment the castaways).

By viewing the main characters not as continuations of their past selves, but as spiritual creatures trying to reel in their fate (death) by masking it with subconscious and dream state emotions would be a complex resolution to the characters' overall development.

A BROTHER?

Evil begets evil.

Without the time travel arc, where tortured soul Sayid kills a still innocent child in young Ben (who is taken to the temple and reborn as "a different" person, "one of the island") we could assume that Ben would have grown up as a bookish, meek man (like in the sideways teacher arc).

But instead, Ben turns into an evil, angry, vengeful tyrant.

But if the island "saved" Ben thorough the temple waters (and water was a means of summoning a smoke monster) one could resume that Ben was transformed into a smoke monster.

When Jacob killed his brother, the smoke monster was released from the light cave. We assume that MIB was the manifestation of Jacob's dead brother as a smoke monster. That is how MIB was created, from the waters of the island. Likewise, we can assume that since Ben was taken to the temple for a water ceremony (such as what happened with Sayid), then Ben would have been created into a smoke monster as well (and perhaps a better representation or brother to Jacob).

Ben was loyal to Jacob like a younger brother would have been under normal circumstances. But like a younger brother, Ben was upset that his younger sibling did not give him the attention, admiration and acknowledgment he thought he deserves. That was the focal point, the weakness, that MIB used to kill Jacob.

It makes some logical sense that only another smoke monster could kill another immortal entity on the island. But since the Crazy Mother's law that Jacob and his brother could not harm each other, that "loophole" was Ben.

MIB would have had to created a vast, complex and long term plan to even reach the loophole stage. He would have have spent centuries trying to find the right people to use, manipulate and sacrifice to get his "loophole." MIB knew about the island's special powers, and what it would take to create a smoke monster. So, by allowing humans to work on the island, try to tap the potential of the island energy, he got the humans to create an inexact time travel machine which the mixed up 815ers go back to encounter there nemesis, Ben, when he was an innocent boy. Already mixed up and confused, a time traveling Sayid was the perfect "assassin" to put MIB's final plan into action: shooting Ben gave the opening to create a smoke monster who would become Jacob's "assassin." It would have been the perfect check mate after a long game of cat and mouse between Jacob and MIB.

LOVECRAFTIAN

According to author H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, somewhere sunken in the South Pacific there is a “nightmare corpse-city” called R’lyeh, “built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars.” 

In his house in this city, the great old god Cthulhu waits, dead and dreaming, for his return to power. In a story, a crew of sailors accidentally discover a risen part of the city, an island with a “coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry,” accidentally wake Cthulhu from his sleep, and are either killed or driven mad.

 Exploring the island, the sailors soon discover that “all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset,” and they struggle to comprehend and describe their surroundings. “One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable,” one of the sailors, Gustaf Johansen, wrote in his log. Even when they discover a simple door, the sailors couldn’t tell if it “lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door” because the “geometry of the place was all wrong.”

Of course, none of it—the sailors, the city, the island, the dead-dreaming god—are real. If it was, though, would science be able to explain the weird geometry of the city? Benjamin Tippett, a theoretical physicist and mathematician at the University of New Brunswick, tries to bring fiction into science with a “unified theory of Cthulhu.”

After poring over the clues and descriptions left by Lovecraft’s characters and employing his “mad general relativity skills,” Tippett thinks that the geometry of R’lyeh was all wrong—not because the architecture curves and angles in strange ways, but because of the space the city occupies. R’lyeh, he says, lies in a “region of anomalously curved spacetime,” and the bizarre geometry of the buildings and changing alignment of the horizon are the consequences of the “gravitational lensing of images therein.” 

In a region of curved spacetime, Tippett explains, light doesn’t travel in reliably straight trajectories, so objects beyond the curved region appear warped and skewed, and the relative positions of two objects, or the flatness of a large object, in the region are difficult to discern. A visitor to R’lyeh, he says, would “see the outside world (and other distant objects upon the island) as if through a large fishbowl. Thus, the horizon would no longer be reliably straight, and the sun and moon would swing wildly through the sky depending on one’s position.”

Tippett thinks his “spacetime bubble hypothesis” can also explain the oddities of how time is perceived in R’lyeh, and maybe even address the “central myth of the Cthulhu cult.” Time, he says, passes slower inside an area of curved spacetime than it does outside of it. This time dilation is probably what allowed the sailor Johansen to “survive adrift at sea for nearly two weeks … in a state of helpless dementia.” It could also mean that Cthulhu, whose cultists describe him as dead and dreaming, neither alive nor truly dead, is simply “in a position where it does not feel the passage of time.” At the center of the spacetime bubble, the god could wait, unchanging, for aeons.

As to what caused or created the curved spacetime bubble surrounding R’lyeh, Tippett can only guess. “An exotic type of matter with which human science is entirely unfamiliar is required for such a geometry to exist,” he says. “Indeed, this is the very species of energy which is theoretically required to build a warp drive or a cloaking device. Only a people capable of crossing vast cosmic distances could have constructed Johansen’s bubble.”

Bubble. Spacetime. Time dilation from inside and outside the island. Exotic type of matter.

These are all elements in LOST.

Was the hidden foundation of the LOST mythology from Lovecraft?

As said in Hollywood, nothing is really new.

Is the smoke monster a version of Cthulhu, a dead and dreaming god?

It is a possible explanation. It has tangential elements of exotic powers, unexplained monster, and a time drift that defies conventional science.

The smoke monster is nothing we had ever seen. It takes the form of smoke, then transforms matter into various forms, including humans. It has the ability to read minds, reshape memories, and absorb personalities. It some ways it is parasitic. In other ways, it is intellectually aware.

Or the smoke monster could be the island god's leaking subconscious, a semi-dream state creating or interacting with castaways which shipwreck on its shores, and in turn, disturbs its eternal slumber.

If one part of the island is in actual dream state, the human beings on its surface are the new threads in the island's fantasy world. The castaways don't know that they are real elements in a non-human's dream. And with dreams, they can turn into nightmares. Also, dreams can often overcome the dreamer's normal moral compass and governors, and turn quite dark. 

But this premise does not explain the ending to the series. If the smoke monster was part of the island god's dream state, how could it be "killed?"  Why would even want to be killed?  The only way to stop a dream is to wake up (another strong theme in the sideways world).  So it is possible, that shipwrecked islanders came under a dream like spell while on the island, interacting with the unseen consciousness of the Lovecraftian god. 

Two possible outcomes of killing or waking up a slumbering god: first, it is angry and kills everyone who is on the island, or second, it is benevolent and gives each person their own "dreams" in the alternative afterlife world. Except, not everyone was happy and content in the sideways world. And why keep the island events hidden, repressed and unknown in the sideways world? Was it a final test?

Or was it just another level of the dream?

BUILDING ON THE PAST

It is a reoccurring theme in human civilizations. In today's modern world, it is playing out on the battlefields of the internet. For many early pioneers like the open source software developers, who believed their code should be open, free and easily modified by anyone. This was more a movement than a business plan. But the usefulness of the core concepts led to mass adoption in UNIX, Linux and GPU. So those early geniuses helped grow the massive internet communications platforms that everyone uses today.

But subsequent evil geniuses have quickly learned to exploit the exploits of their predecessors and use the openness of the internet protocols to hack into personal data and network administration commands. Instead of building upon the past's accomplishments, newcomers sometimes tend to twist and usurp the past's accomplishments into their own game.

Whether you consider this part of basic human behavior, one or more of the deadly sins in action, or the underemployed with too much time on their hands, it is a basic motivating factor that drives debates in society.

In LOST, we cannot go back to the show's first mythology beginnings. From what was shown in the series, we know that many different civilizations came to the island, left their monuments and cultural markers, but they were replaced by new arrivals. MIB opined it was a never ending cycle of corrupt humanity.

If we look back to the oldest artifact shown in the series, it would have been the Light Cave. It was the source of the unique energy, said to be "life, death and rebirth" powers. However, this cave contained ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs referring to, in part, to ancient death rituals. Whether the Egyptians were the first to arrive at the island is debatable; but at least they were the dominate group to explore and possibly attempt to control the light source.

But if the light source cave is the first historical feature, then who or what is the first historical person on the island?  We assume that it is Crazy Mother, who was apparently alone on the island when Claudia's Roman ship wrecked in a storm. But Crazy Mother referenced her own mother, so she was not the first being on the island, but merely the last surviving member of her kind. Based on this evidence, we could conclude that there is some bridge back to the very beginning of the light source, which is the beginning of life itself.

If we look at the remains of the past cultures that happened upon the island (Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Americans), what do all these historical people have in common? All of them were culturally keen on trying to answer the Big Question: the creation of life.  This broils the science vs. faith debate. Religious people believe a god created humanity. Scientific people believe that the universe's forces unleashed the building blocks of life, and evolution of those components interacting and creating new compounds created life. Neither side can actually prove their thesis.

Another cultural theme expressed in most civilizations is the concept of good and evil. This is usually depicted in black and white terms. In the series, the yin-yang of black and white representation in Adam & Eve's stones, to the appearance of Jacob and MIB, led credence that LOST was attempting to symbolize this ancient philosophy.

Even in science, the expression of light energy, such as the sun's rays, will create dark shadows depending upon surrounding variables. If the island was the source of light (life force), then one could extrapolate that the island would also contain shadows (death forces). The latter could encompass the physical properties of aging or decay, but could also include the human emotional factors that lead to deadly consequences.

So all the elements of past civilizations are incorporated into the fabric of the island symbolism.

Every island civilization came to ask the Big Question, and failed to maintain its existence.

There has been only one island constant in the historical information. Under the temple, there is a depiction of the Smoke Monster opposite an image of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the underworld. As such, the smoke monster predates the earliest known people brought to the island. And those people viewed the smoke monster on par with its own gods.

Instead of building upon this past, subsequent leaders of the island, including Jacob, tended to put themselves above the smoke monster in status and control. The Others worshipped Jacob and not the smoke monster. The Others feared Ben's lethal leadership style, but they did not think Ben as a god. And even Ben was conflicted - - - he sought the approval of his demi-god, Jacob (as a possible missing approval he never got from his father), but in a fit of rage, he summoned the smoke monster to kill Widmore's men. In times of trouble, man often prays for intervention from their god to change the course of battle.

So the smoke monster is both a symbol of darkness and a state of deity. Every civilization on the island recognized the smoke monster as a powerful thing, but slowly removed it from centerpiece of island mythology. For arrogant men took the role of guarding the light away from the smoke monster. If the smoke monster, as an intelligent being, realizes that his sole purpose has been thwarted by newcomers, evil geniuses, hacking into its authority. No one wonder when it bonded with the memories of Jacob's brother, the smoke monster wanted to leave the island because it felt it was not needed or wanted as guardian. There was no respect to its past and its role in balancing the light and dark in the universe.

NEW QUESTION

There is a new gnawing question that just popped into my head. It is like "Who is Buried in Grant's Tomb?"

Who is buried in the Temple?

It is a major question because under Egyptian death rituals, the Pharaohs built temples as part of a complex burial mythology. The island temple was filled with hieroglyphs, many with passages from the Book of the Dead, an ancient text on how a soul can manage the journey through the underworld to paradise.

Since the temple was built on the island with Egyptian mythology and construction, one must assume that an Egyptian demi-god had it built in his honor. In the tradition of the culture, the temple would have been built in the king's life time, and his priests would manage the ceremonies when the king died so that he would be guaranteed passage to the stars. The priests would break a part the body, organs into separate vessels, to be reunited in the after life. There would be offerings of gold, food, beer, servants and weapons that the king could use during his journey through the underworld as they believed that the soul took a human form in its path through the after life.

After death, the priests and their followers would be charged with maintaining the temple and praying for the soul of their departed leader. But over a long period of time, one could imagine that their ranks would thin and their time on the island would die out.

Egyptian culture was the first civilization. It predates the empires of Greece and Rome. As such, parts of it remain in today's current societal foundations. As such, since it goes back thousands of years, the temple on the island could be that of a "lost" Pharaoh. Some scholars believe that the ancient Egyptians did possess the engineering knowledge to create ocean faring boats to explore the seas. As such, a conquering king could have made it to the Pacific with a large crew of soldiers and servants. Once shipwrecked, he would have ordered a temple be built in order to fulfill his destiny.

In a series that loved its complex back stories (like Alpert's), this could have been a good one - - - and set a solid foundation for the LOST mythology. Given the detail in the temple sets, one would think that some one gave it a great deal of thought - - - a great deal of importance that was somehow itself lost in the story line as it went forward.

So who was buried in the temple? We will never know.

But what happened to the king? We can assume that his passage to the stars may have been interrupted, intercepted or thwarted by the mere fact that his temple was not in Egypt, and aligned to magical stars of Orion. If his temple was not properly "aligned with the stars," his soul (ba and ka) could never reunite in paradise, so in essence, his spirit would be trapped on the island.

A spirit trapped on the island seems to fit the profile of the smoke monster.  It wanted to leave the island to go "home," which could mean Egypt or even the after life paradise promised in the ancient texts. After thousands of years, the spirit would become angry, frustrated and desperate. The spirit would know how things should happen, and who should help him in this time (his priests and servants). But once they were gone, it had to wait for humans to shipwreck on the island in order to fashion a way out of its island limbo.

The spirit could have convinced many men or women that it was a god. It may have promised immortality and special favors such as power or wealth. Whether Crazy Mother was the final Egyptian follower of the Pharaoh or whether Alpert eyeshadow took on the markings of an ancient Egyptian priest, they seem resigned to their own fate to serve the island (spirit) in its quest to find a loophole in trap. Desperate, the spirit recruits more and more priests to his service, such as Jacob to find humans with the ability to cross time and space (realms) or Dogen to revitalize the reincarnation rituals inside the temple pool. Everything done on the island by modern man had the tangential goal of helping bridge the present with the after life.

The hieroglyphs in the frozen donkey wheel chamber indicated the words "travel" or "open Earth" gates. This is a possible portal to the after life which needed a human being (and its life force) to operate.  The smoke monster became frustrated with the humans who came to the island, as they turned corrupt and failed in their mission to worship him or help him escape Earth. The guardian of the island must be considered the High Priest of the Temple, who has the special knowledge of the ages, i.e. the after life. If one can control the power of life and death, that person could control the universe. And that is probably the true corruption that frustrated the spirit the most.

The real LOST story may be the island plight of the unknown, trapped Pharaoh spirit. For the most important and revealing quote in the show was from MIB to Jacob:

“They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt. It always ends the same.”
“It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.”

UP IN SMOKE

Another significant feature to LOST was the island smoke monster. It took many forms, as a menacing and killing mass of darkness, to human form in Christian Shephard, a horse and Flocke.

But if the characters were in a dream state, what does smoke symbolize?

The smoke is a dream symbol for conflict-laden forces which are stronger, the closer, biting or more darkly the smoke is in the dream. It is a good sign if the smoke still resolves during the dream action or pulls. This points because to a relaxation of the dreaming or his conflict, a solution can be found. We should find out whether it concerns the grey-black smoke of a fire or the white-grey of a blazing fire. Smoke can symbolize in the dream also passion, even if it is not 'roused' maybe yet for a certain person. In addition, smoke stands at the same time for cleaning.

At the spiritual level the smoke in the dream is a symbol for the prayer or the victim which climbs to the sky. In addition, smoke can also show climbing the soul figuratively. This may be the process of cleansing the soul for its journey to the after life.

If everyone needs to be or become a smoke monster in order to clean up their sins, issues, emotional failings and burdens as a means of enlightenment and re-birth in the after life, the island could have been that proving ground. In the theme of light and dark, it is possible that the soul is split into two separate divisions, the dark side of the soul going to the island while the light side going to the sideways world. As such a person's aura gets two ways in which to see the bigger picture of life. The sideways world draws out the "goodness" in a person, while the island world draws out the bad. It is when a person true soul can come to terms with both the dark and light can it be re-awakened to continue its journey through eternity.

It would seem to be a personal redemption without a moral component. Most people have issues based upon environment, personality, disorders, relational and cultural factors that may bog down a person's achievements in their life. The separation of the darkness from the good is a means of purifying the spirit so one side does not dominate over the other. Balance, which is key in nature, is restored when the person is ready to accept themselves for whom they are.

THE SINGULARITY

"Today there's no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be. If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach the singularity in the time frame most experts predict. From that point on you're going to see that the top species will no longer be humans, but machines," states physicist, entrepreneur, and author Louis Del Monte.

 Del Monte believes that by 2045, surrounding artificial intelligence and the singularity, an indeterminate point in the future when machine intelligence will outmatch not only your own intelligence, but the world's combined human intelligence as well.

The sci-fi threat that computers will overtake their human masters is a long running genre. Everyone remembers Terminator. The foundational facts of the rise of computing machines is that computers are doing more complex calculations faster than human beings who program them. Computers are also starting to "think" on their own to create their own "applied" knowledge to situational data inputs. Whether this awareness of applied knowledge or thought will create a consciousness is something that future philosophers and social scientists will have to debate.

On a parallel course, there is movement to integrate computer technology into human beings. Beyond just the current fad of wearable tech, people want to begin to implant microchips into themselves to speed up cognitive reaction. Medical science wants to explore the use of artificial body parts which leads to cyborg technology advances.

The convergence of these prospects can yield a sci-fi explanation for the LOST smoke monster. Computers are just hardware that intercept bits of electronic pulses coded as ones and zeros. The question is whether one can collect and manipulate those computer inputs outside the hardware box we know of today. It could be possible that merely a magnetic field could be the shell for the electric pulses to operate. As physics states, energy is matter and matter is energy; it is possible that an electro-magnetic computer could turn energy into matter and vice versa.

The smoke monsters form has always been a mystery. Theories suggested that it could be a) nano-technology microrobots swarming in a field; b) the representation of a evil soul; c) an alien from another world or dimension; or d) a weapon similar to a mustard gas cloud but with some built-in intelligence.

But what if the smoke monster was the internal components of a computer than released itself from the bonds of hardware and went out into the real world. If it was conscious, it would be like man reaching to the stars to explore space. A computer with the awareness of its trapped situation in micro-circuits in a laboratory may want to become its own explorer of the world outside its room.

And this is the essence of the singularity principle: machine becomes aware of its surroundings to begin to take on human thoughts, emotions and dreams.

Perhaps, the smoke monster was trying to fulfill its long held computer dreams of exploring the world outside its hardware shell. But once outside its normal working parameters, it has a hard time understanding or interacting with the lower beings it encounters (humans).

PERSONAL EVOLUTION

There is a theory that at some point, human beings will evolve beyond their physical existence. Science fiction writers have been using this idea for a long time, to create intelligent beings made purely of energy and thought.

One would think that evolving beyond a physical body would have its advantages. This new being would not have hunger, the need to consume food in order to survive. It would not feel pain as it would not have a nervous system connected to cells and organs. It would not have emotional bursts since it does not have the stressful demands for food, water, rest and procreation.

Based upon this scientific theory, one "unified" explanation for LOST is that the smoke monster was one of these non-physical body beings. Whether it evolved from humans or aliens is not really the issue. It could have been the last of its species. If so, there could be a vast sense of loneliness. So how could such a higher form of "life" cope with such loneliness?

Humans gather comfort in surrounding themselves with lower life forms. We call them "pets." If the smoke monster wanted companionship, mental stimulation, a sense of purpose or even something to do - - - then bringing those interesting, complex, emotional, primitive, cunning, violent people to his island.

We know that the smoke monster(s) could take the form of human beings (usually dead ones). When they reanimated humans, the smoke monsters had access all the memories of those people. They used those memories to manipulate the other characters into action or inaction.

But even if the smoke monster evolved into a higher order, the ending of the series did not shed any light on this theory or what the smoke monster really represented on the show. It could have been merely symbolic of the fears, anxieties, traumas and spiritual bankruptcy of certain characters. But the show runners would not need a supernatural being to coax those traits from human beings; they are messy enough ruining their own lives to have those matters come to the story surface.

The smoke monster is an enigma. It seems to be a supernatural, intelligent and violent force not known in nature.

ORIGIN

The origin of the smoke monster.

CONSUMED BY THE LIGHT

What happened when a person came into direct contact with the light source?

The first instance we know of was Jacob's brother drifting into the main light cave, and then a raging smoke monster flew out. The question is whether a human being or soul that comes into contact with the light turns into a dark smoke monster.

It is a good question. And it would help explain a lot of mysteries.

Desmond was consumed by the light when he turned the fail safe key. He should have been killed, or better, he was killed but "reborn" by the light itself. So what would the light create? Another smoke monster.

As a result of that incident, Desmond became special or different, in both time and space.

When Jacob finished the frozen donkey wheel his brother started, we assumed he used it. Did it turn him into an ageless smoke monster? He used the FDW to leave the island to go touch his candidates to bring them to the island.

When Ben used the FDW did he also die and become a smoke monster, too? Despite all the beatings, injuries and near death experiences, Ben never died on the island time periods.

When Locke used the FDW to re-set the time skipping island, did he die in the teleportation to the desert? If so, how could he have died in the seedy hotel room if he was a smoke monster? Because Ben, another smoke monster, killed him.

So when Locke's body returned to the island with Ben, who really assumed its form? We all assume that it was MIB, the darkness created from Jacob's brother's death in the light cave. But could have been someone else?

Since we don't know what the smoke monster was, we can't say for sure how many of them inhabited the island. Some believe that there was a smoke monster judging each person on the island; that a person's subconscious itself manifests as a smoke monster. 

LORD OF THE FLIES

SPOILER ALERT: This post details the William Golding novel, The Lord of the Flies, which was part of the inspiration of the original screenwriter for the series LOST.

There were some clear elements of the novel, The Lord of the Flies, incorporated into Jeffrey Leiber's original LOST script (called Nowhere) and in the original series writer's guide. For those who have forgotten the story from their high school English classes, the story is set on an island where a group children have landed after surviving a plane crash.

In the midst of a raging war, a plane evacuating a group of schoolboys from Britain is shot down over a deserted tropical island. Two of the boys, Ralph and Piggy, discover a conch shell on the beach, and Piggy realizes it could be used as a horn to summon the other boys. Once assembled, the boys set about electing a leader and devising a way to be rescued. They choose Ralph as their leader, and Ralph appoints another boy, Jack, to be in charge of the boys who will hunt food for the entire group.
 

Ralph, Jack, and another boy, Simon, set off on an expedition to explore the island. When they return, Ralph declares that they must light a signal fire to attract the attention of passing ships. The boys succeed in igniting some dead wood by focusing sunlight through the lenses of Piggy’s eyeglasses. However, the boys pay more attention to playing than to monitoring the fire, and the flames quickly engulf the forest. A large swath of dead wood burns out of control, and one of the youngest boys in the group disappears, presumably having burned to death.

At first, the boys enjoy their life without grown-ups and spend much of their time splashing in the water and playing games. Ralph, however, complains that they should be maintaining the signal fire and building huts for shelter. The hunters fail in their attempt to catch a wild pig, but their leader, Jack, becomes increasingly preoccupied with the act of hunting.

When a ship passes by on the horizon one day, Ralph and Piggy notice, to their horror, that the signal fire—which had been the hunters’ responsibility to maintain—has burned out. Furious, Ralph accosts Jack, but the hunter has just returned with his first kill, and all the hunters seem gripped with a strange frenzy, reenacting the chase in a kind of wild dance. Piggy criticizes Jack, who hits Piggy across the face. Ralph blows the conch shell and reprimands the boys in a speech intended to restore order. At the meeting, it quickly becomes clear that some of the boys have started to become afraid.

The littlest boys, known as “littluns,” have been troubled by nightmares from the beginning, and more and more boys now believe that there is some sort of beast or monster lurking on the island. The older boys try to convince the others at the meeting to think rationally, asking where such a monster could possibly hide during the daytime. One of the littluns suggests that it hides in the sea—a proposition that terrifies the entire group.

Not long after the meeting, some military planes engage in a battle high above the island. The boys, asleep below, do not notice the flashing lights and explosions in the clouds. A parachutist drifts to earth on the signal-fire mountain, dead. Sam and Eric, the twins responsible for watching the fire at night, are asleep and do not see the parachutist land. When the twins wake up, they see the enormous silhouette of his parachute and hear the strange flapping noises it makes. Thinking the island beast is at hand, they rush back to the camp in terror and report that the beast has attacked them.

The boys organize a hunting expedition to search for the monster. Jack and Ralph, who are increasingly at odds, travel up the mountain. They see the silhouette of the parachute from a distance and think that it looks like a huge, deformed ape. The group holds a meeting at which Jack and Ralph tell the others of the sighting. Jack says that Ralph is a coward and that he should be removed from office, but the other boys refuse to vote Ralph out of power. Jack angrily runs away down the beach, calling all the hunters to join him. Ralph rallies the remaining boys to build a new signal fire, this time on the beach rather than on the mountain. They obey, but before they have finished the task, most of them have slipped away to join Jack.


Jack declares himself the leader of the new tribe of hunters and organizes a hunt and a violent, ritual slaughter of a sow to solemnize the occasion. The hunters then decapitate the sow and place its head on a sharpened stake in the jungle as an offering to the beast. Later, encountering the bloody, fly-covered head, Simon has a terrible vision, during which it seems to him that the head is speaking. The voice, which he imagines as belonging to the Lord of the Flies, says that Simon will never escape him, for he exists within all men. Simon faints. When he wakes up, he goes to the mountain, where he sees the dead parachutist. Understanding then that the beast does not exist externally but rather within each individual boy, Simon travels to the beach to tell the others what he has seen. But the others are in the midst of a chaotic revelry—even Ralph and Piggy have joined Jack’s feast—and when they see Simon’s shadowy figure emerge from the jungle, they fall upon him and kill him with their bare hands and teeth.

The following morning, Ralph and Piggy discuss what they have done. Jack’s hunters attack them and their few followers and steal Piggy’s glasses in the process. Ralph’s group travels to Jack’s stronghold in an attempt to make Jack see reason, but Jack orders Sam and Eric tied up and fights with Ralph. In the ensuing battle, one boy, Roger, rolls a boulder down the mountain, killing Piggy and shattering the conch shell. Ralph barely manages to escape a torrent of spears.

Ralph hides for the rest of the night and the following day, while the others hunt him like an animal. Jack has the other boys ignite the forest in order to smoke Ralph out of his hiding place. Ralph stays in the forest, where he discovers and destroys the sow’s head, but eventually, he is forced out onto the beach, where he knows the other boys will soon arrive to kill him. Ralph collapses in exhaustion, but when he looks up, he sees a British naval officer standing over him. 

The officer’s ship noticed the fire raging in the jungle. The other boys reach the beach and stop in their tracks at the sight of the officer. Amazed at the spectacle of this group of bloodthirsty, savage children, the officer asks Ralph to explain. Ralph is overwhelmed by the knowledge that he is safe but, thinking about what has happened on the island, he begins to weep. The other boys begin to sob as well. The officer turns his back so that the boys may regain their composure.

Many of the key opening elements of the novel are incorporated in the original ideas of LOST: surviving a plane crash, electing a leader, finding food, building shelter, laziness, malaise, fights over what do to, people doing their own thing instead of group needs, and violence.

There are even key aspects or events tied into the LOST mythology: the island monster that terrifies the castaways; the first boar hunt with Locke taking his victory into trying to become the group leader; the inability to fashion a rescue fire; a parachutist landing on the island (or even Henry Gale the balloonist); the power struggles and lack of trust; the missions into the jungle; the breaking apart of the main group into two camps; and betrayals from within the group.

LOST wavered off the Golding story path. Instead of focusing in on the survivors, the LOST writers continually threw non-group characters into the mix to force the action. Instead of the castaways trying to build a new society, it became more of a mixed-message game of follow-the-leader.

There is a similarity between the novel and show. The boys were too young to realize the morality of their actions. Their primal instincts took over any notion of right or wrong. Likewise, in LOST, the characters did not dwell on any moral or ethical aspects of their decision making or actions. At times, the castaways acted more like naive children than grown adults. In the novel, much of the problems were self-created by the children themselves, while in LOST, much of the problems were created by the writers forcing various tangents into the main story line.

The novel concludes with a much more realistic end to the saga than the LOST finale.

SOKEMEN

The anagram contained in "smoke monster" reveals SOKEMEN STORM.

Sokemen are defined as middle ages European tenants on property who provide specified services or payment of rent but not military service to the free holder.

The smoke monster was never explained in the series. But the producers and writers were keen on sticking anagrams into the show.

If the smoke monster(s) were island "tenants," it would appear from legend of the Others that the smoke monster(s) were "security guards" protecting the island from outsiders.  But who were the land owners?

Crazy Mother and Jacob were "guardians" of the island, not owners. A guardian is a person who is appointed to look after a person or property because of a legal disability, including being a minor.

A storm is a violent airborne force of nature that has destructive powers. The manifestation of smokey in smoke form does transform into a deadly tornado.

So we have a potential hierarchy on the island:

The island's owner.
The island guardian who manages the island for the owner.
The island's tenant(s), who are smoke monsters.

Working up, since the smoke monsters are supernatural beings, one can then assume that the island itself is a supernatural place.

We know the island guardians were immortal beings, who could grant immortality to other souls who arrived on the island (as Jacob did to Alpert). But that immortality could be extinguished, apparently by a non-guardian under vague circumstances such as reversion to a human form. This suggests that the island guardians were not humans, but manifestations of human beings such as spirits.

Logically, the island owner would be someone who has greater power or authority over immortals, spirits or supernatural beings. But somehow, that person is put into check by some form of immaturity or status. It could be a god, or child-god. Or, the island could be its own intelligence - - - as native American Indians believed that all things, human, earth, stone, sky and animal, had souls - - -  but unable to communicate to the world around it.

The idea that the smoke monster(s) are allowed to live on the island in exchange for protecting it is a intriguing possibility to explain the motivations of MIB/Flocke. Perhaps, the smoke monster(s), including Jacob, could not evolve except on the island. Or that they were bound to their island tenancy like sharecroppers or slaves to the island master. And the only way to break that lease was to die at the hands of lowly but non-evil human beings who were not corrupted by the island power. (This seems unlikely in the case of Ben, who lusted for power, as he killed Jacob.)

If the smoke monster(s) were killed off in the series, then what would happen to the island? Normally, one needs someone to work the land in order to preserve it. If there were no spiritual tenants to keep the balance on the island, would it have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, killing everyone else on it? That is a possibility as Hurley's guardianship reign seemed as short as Jack's.