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Spoiler Warning: Read at your own risk. This may reveal upcoming plotlines for the next two seasons of ABC’s “LOST.”
Nerd Alert: Reading this article supposes that you are already very familiar with Lost and may be incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
Please note that I do not participate in any Lost message boards or online communities. I’m sure that aspects of this theory overlap with what others may have put out there already, but this has not been taken from any sources other than the show itself.
John Locke tells Jack Shepard in “There’s No Place Like Home, Part Two” that the place they’ve crashed on is not an island, it’s a place where miracles happen. Locke doesn’t yet understand how right he is: it’s not an island, it’s a ship–a timeship.
A very long time ago, the timeship crashed into the surface of Earth (presumably from Earth, and from the future), and melded into an active volcano. The ship’s crew were killed and the island grew out of the volcano, creating a place that appears to be just a tropical island but has many strange properties, which the Dharma Initiative later categorizes as “casamir effect[s].” The ship is, of course, shielded with a cloaking device (a la Star Trek), and the people who protect it, The Others, are not savages or “hostiles” but actually its new crew.
Also as in Star Trek, the crew has access to teleportation technology. Every time they do this there is audio feedback from the transporter room before and after the jump, which are perceived by the characters and the audience as whispers. It appears that when he was captured by The Others, Walt at least once escaped briefly and got into the teleporter, and went back to night he was captured to warn Shannon not to press the button in the hatch. While they succeeded in recovering Walt, The Others were not certain of when or where he went back to, which is why Ms. Klugh asks Michael if Walt ever appeared in a place he wasn’t supposed to be. (Walt will also enter the room again at some point, to appear to Locke after he is left for dead by Ben in the Dharma mass grave.)
Taking that into account, the ship’s technology is very dangerous, and it becomes very clear why The Others–self-described “good people”–have no problem killing. In the wrong hands, someone using the time machine could alter or even destroy time-space. The Smoke Monster, which Rousseau called a “security system,” has that task as its primary objective: kill anyone who would try to pilot the ship. Namely, that’s Seth Norris, the pilot of Flight 815, who might have been tempted to “fly” the timeship were he ever to find its cockpit; and Mr. Eko, who was hellbent on manning the Dharma stations.
There’s something interesting about the most important characters in Lost: most have killed one of their parents. Jack shamed his father into fatal alcoholism. Kate unwittingly killed her father when trying to save her mother from an abusive boyfriend. Ben gassed his father personally. Susan died under yet-unseen circumstances which may prove to be at Walt’s hands. Remember that this is an initiation rite for becoming an Other: John Locke is not accepted by Ben until he delivers his father’s dead body, technically murdered by Sawyer, whose entire life was shaped by the actions of the same man. This is, presumably, a play on the “grandfather paradox,” which asks if one would still exist were one to go back in time and kill his or her own grandfather. The Others, the crew of a timeship, must exist ‘outside of time’ by becoming free from their own creators, because (as recited in the video in Room 23), “only fools are slave to time and space.” Note that this may be symbolic, a loyalty gesture to Jacob.
The ship itself exists in an outside-of-time state of flux, which is why events on the Kahana freighter happen at different rates, independent of the time passage on the island. The 305/325 bearing refers to a hole in the sheild shell surrounding the island, the only place of entry/exit which will not literally scramble the traveller’s brain by existing in more than one point in time at once.
When Hurley’s imaginary friend Dave materializes on the island, Hurley is prompted to jump off a cliff. While Hurley is an incidental murderer after causing a balcony collapse, he did not kill one of his parents, and it would seem Dave–a manifestation of the island–was benevolent. Killing oneself, it seems, may be an alternative way of joining The Others, prompting the same outside-of-time state. The rules of death on the island may dictate that an individual who kills oneself can be born again in their current body, ‘awakened’ as a member of the timeship’s crew. Thus it would appear when Christian (himself an advocate of euthanasia) appears to Claire, he tells her this, and she kills herself, only to be revived and ready to appear in Jacob’s cabin. It’s by the same token that (obviously) John Locke’s dead body will come back to life when the Oceanic Six and company return to the island in the Season Five finale.
That being said, there’s a second reason The Others have no problem killing: in the Lost universe, reincarnation is real, and tangible. The Others aren’t a “new” timeship crew at all–they’re the same people, reborn. With a project of such scope and magnitude as a time machine, the crew must be able to “live” for eons, and thus when mortal bodies die, the soul of each crewmember lives on, ready to come back one day to protect the ship. Killing one’s parent isn’t considered bad when their soul will be reborn. The Dharma Initiative knew this, hence the subtle clue of naming the Orientation video host with a different ‘candle’ theme on each appearance, as candles can be remade and remade many times over with the same wax.
In accordance with the Hinduism The Others subscribe to, souls are not always reborn into human beings, which is why animals come so heavily into play on the island (Kate’s horse, Sayid’s cat, Sawyer’s boar and tree frog, all the way back to the Polar Bear in the pilot). Animals often carry the souls of crew personnel, making the first tussle with the Polar Bear significant; that soul was probably reborn into Aaron. Ana Lucia unknowingly realizes this truth in Season Two when she tells Michael that The Others “[are] smart, and they’re animals,” as does Anthony Cooper, who makes sure Locke isn’t “one of those animal rights nuts” in Season One.
Although the crew’s souls gravitate toward the island, divining goes into locating stray, wildcard souls. The timeship’s crew runs Mittelos Bioscience, a front for such endeavors as reincarnation tests. Richard Alpert monitors John Locke’s life under the assumption that he may be a key missing crew member, and tests as to whether Locke as a Toddler will recognize the island as his own. Former selves become less latent as time goes on, the souls’ true natures becoming emergent as time goes on; Ben, suspecting this, becomes interested in Kate’s love life, as he knows who she ‘belongs’ with, out of Jack and Sawyer (it’s Sawyer).
The final, emergent conflict of the show is that this timeship has been able to locate much of its crew over the centuries, but never its captain. Jacob comes into play here, and there are two likely conclusions as to what he is: the first is that Jacob is in fact not a person, but a program. The navigation software for the timeship, it gives direct orders to who can see and hear “him,” which is in and of itself a reincarnation test. Jacob can see who is and is not “special” (a part of the crew), but in reference to the Bible story, Jacob isn’t completely infallible. At some earlier point, someone (Alpert?) delivered two people to Jacob: Benjamin Linus and Charles Widmore. While Widmore believed himself to be the ‘correct’ choice for captain, Benjamin stole the position by some equivalent of putting animal hyde on his arms, and Jacob gave Benjamin his blessing as leader.
Because Ben was chosen, Widomore had to move the island, and according to “the rules,” never return. But Widmore broke the rules and never gave up getting back. He used the time since to amass a fortune using his knowledge of history, all to locate the island. Recognizing a young Desmond Hume as one of the timeship’s crew, he charted Desmond’s entire life, making sure his daughter Penny would break Desmond’s heart, manipulating him through Ms. Hawking and Brother Campbell, and eventually instructing his associate–a woman named Libby–to give him a sailboat, all to find the island. Note that it is Widmore who even introduces the idea of the world-wide race to Desmond. The collapse of the Swan Station is Desmond’s doing, his thoughts returning to his lost love Penny, finally allowing the island’s coordinates to be found by anyone who happened to be listening, which was not only Penny, but also Widmore himself.
As Widmore’s associate, note that Libby’s actions seem to have consistently worked ‘against’ the island’s motives, under Ben’s command. Libby is there to make sure Mr. Eko boards Flight 815; a possibly-alive Libby appears to dissaude Michael from blowing up the Kahana crew; Libby convinces Hurley not to kill himself and join The Others.
Widmore wants to wipe out The Others, the current crew, to have them reborn under his own command. He instructs Martin Keamy to kill everyone on the island for this purpose, and perhaps to He is responsible for The Others’ fertility problems, somehow sterilzing them via Widmore Industries, which produces, among other things, pregnancy products.
In the foreground of this conflict, The Others are aware of Ben’s deceit, hence their hesitation in following his orders, and Alpert’s rebellion. At some point in the divining process for captain, John Locke gets thrown into the mix, and Alpert goes back in time at several points to track Locke’s life. Currently The Others believe John Locke is their rightful captain, but this too will be found erroneous. The second conclusion as to what Jacob is, is that he is Jack Shepard, from the future the timeship came from, aged beyond time and currently unable to recognize his former self. Jack is, in fact, the ship’s rightful captain, and once it’s revealed that he has four toes, like the collapsed statue dedicated to him, he will take his place.
