Re: Loved the episode - Edit 1
Before modification by DomA at 13/05/2010 06:01:29 PM
Although this could be an answer to my question below, it raises others. Mother had already been replaced by Jacob (he drank the KoolAid). Why couldn't she have just started aging normally? Or just die?
Because it doesn't seem to work like that. She made Jacob like herself, she didn't pass him her powers.
Was she prevented, like Richard, from suicide? Why did she have to be murdered? Seems like a poor payment for decades, if not eons, of service to the island. Sorry, guardian, despite your faithful service, you must now find someone to kill you as the only way to the great retirement party in the sky.
Well.... I don't think we should see this as a "reward for her services" and I don't think she was "meant" to die. I don't think there's any "reward". Mother basically tricked Jacob into becoming the Guardian, told him he had no choice but to accept the job (which I suspect was less than true). The whole thing suggests atonement/punishment, not a great mission willingly accepted and coming with a reward at the end. The guardian isn't passing the torch to someone else as it should be in the "grand cosmic order", his time done, his reward coming.
The original Guardian (and perhaps the one responsible for the "original sin" re: the monster inside the prison) rather seems to have found a loophole to pass his task, that sounds a lot like a punishment, onto some poor soul (the same routine going on at the hatch by the way... that soldier guy tricking Desmond who tricked Locke who decided to split the job between many people but tried first to shove the responsability on Jack, and so on). Mother didn't kill the two boys' mother because "her time had come", she killed her so she wouldn't ruin her opportunity to get out. I don't think Jacob sacrificed so many innocents from O-815 because "his time had come". Nah... it seems Mother, like Jacob and no doubt all the guardians before them, for all their "wisdom" and their striving to be "good" are just humans, couldn't bear their task anymore and were looking for a way out just as much as Smokey is, if with different ulterior motives. And for the guardian, the way out is to find some other person to replace you, then find a way to get killed.
If there's a reason to all this (maybe there isn't, nothing says the show's God is fair), humans/a human may be responsible for meddling with the Light or unleashing Evil in the first place, out of greed for the light (like Jacob's comitted the sin anew, maybe, though it's more likely some fool entered the Light and started it all), and a human must atone for this by being the eternal guardian to this monster, otherwise the world will end/be in the control of Evil.
Hmmm. And how was Mother able to single-handedly massacre all those people? Perhaps she too had smoky properties?
Perhaps. The guardian has powers, but we don't really know what they are, and in matters of powers, we don't know what's the Light/The Island and what's Jacob. Personally, I'm not fully convinced Smokey "wasn't around" before Jacob threw him MIB. If all Jacob did was give Smokey a body/soul to take a human form (which would be extremely useful to scheme to get released from the Island... Smokey could hardly influence humans much if he couldn't take a permanent form before and live among humans... he might have been restrained to dreams and ghosts), then possibly Smokey was roaming the island already. In Ben's basement at Othertown, there was a way to call/attract Smokey, which he unleashed on Keamy's team. Maybe Mother knew the way to call up/use Smokey and let it do its worst agains the Island's enemies.
I guess it's also possible the guardian has Smokey-like powers too, but that sounds a bit unlikely/confusing at this point.
Smokey seems to be "the essence of evil" (or a manifestation from it anyway), but if so it seems to have been forced to do the Light's bidding in some situations, to follow some rules. Earlier, the writers have described the Smoke Monster as a defense system of the Island. They compared Smokey to Cerberus (a guardian of hell).
We really don't know the whole story yet. We know the origins of MIB and Jacob, and that's about it. Whatever Jacob and MIB have discovered in the 2000 gap about what came before them, the nature and real purpose of the Light and the Island, and whatever has taken place between then and now we still don't know that much about.