Okay, so check it out. I've been thinking about writing up my thoughts and theories on Lost for a couple of weeks now, but it makes me have little wiggles in my tummy. It's one thing to spill my guts about things that have actually happened in my life, but another to go out on a tropical, fictional limb and try to explain my thoughts on everyone's favorite cult TV show. There really isn't anything earth-shattering here, and there certainly are some things I still can't explain. But here goes.
The island is a healing island (this we already know.) Like Claire's and Rose's psychic said, there are some places on our earth that have magical, healing powers. It could be because of the special electromagnetic properties of the island, or it could be that those properties are a result of something larger that also causes the healing. But it doesn't matter. Anyone who comes to the island becomes healed to the point of being immortal.
I don't think there are any true "native" inhabitants of the island. I think over the centuries, the magnetic pull has brought ships off course, crashed planes, etc. and brought people there. I think the "natives" we've seen, led by Richard, crashed there centuries ago (probably on the Black Rock slave ship.) They've been there so long they have become "native" in their own minds. Here's where I go a little out there: I believe Richard and his people are no longer able to die of natural causes. The only way they can die is to be killed. Though the island brand of mortality does have one catch. More on that later.
But I don't think they were the first to crash there. See, I think the island's healing properties are not nearly as strong now as they were centuries or even millenia ago. It's wearing out, so to speak, and we haven't seen the full healing powers the way they used to be. I think Jacob is the island's oldest inhabitant, and like anyone else who has been there for a very long time, he is indestructible by any disease or old age. In fact, I think Jacob has been there so long and form a point when the island was so powerful that he has evolved into something not entirely corporeal. He is of both the natural world and the spirit world. That's why only someone like him, someone who believes in the spirit world and also has one foot in it, can hear or see him. Locke did. Ben never has. He's been faking it and taking advantage of Richard's group's relative naivetee.
I think Richard's group has only a limited grasp of the island's powers. Maybe they believe they've landed in a sort of purgatory, a spiritual halfway house they must endure as punishment for their sins. They've never understood what Jacob and the other island spirits (I think Smokey is another manifestation of someone else who has been there so long he/she is no longer completely bound by the physical world) are, but have been worshipping those presences in a cult-like hope for redemption and escape from what they see as prison. I don't think Richard has really seen Jacob, either, but I think his group have witnessed Jacob's and Smokey's powers and respect and worship them in a fearful, old-testament way.
Enter the Dharma Initiative. Somehow (and I'm not really sure how, yet) they learned of the island's properties. Maybe not the healing, but they somehow figured out something not quite within the bounds of nature was going on there. So they began inhabiting and experimenting there, hoping not so much for a Utopia as for something very 2001: A Space Odyssey-ish. Remeber the monoliths in that movie? Those alien stepping stones on the evolutionary path that made the apes develop reason and made Dave a super-human spiritual being? That's what I think the Dharma people wanted to find. Something that would further the human race by making them...well, not so human. They were pretty close to figuring it out. I think maybe they were the ones to build that 4-toed statue; I've heard the pinky toe is something we will lose in our own evolutionary journey. It's symbolic of the Dharma Initiative searching for something that would take humanity onward. All the zoological experiments, the psychological and metaphysical experiments--it was all to see what the island could do. The Swan hatch and the numbers were meant to keep what they felt was the island's power source contained; maybe they knew the power was starting to fade and needed to be conserved. I see now that the Swan is a symbol of transition--ugly duckling into a beautiful, graceful creature. Harnessing the electromagnetc energy, they thought, would cause the ugly duckling of self-destructive, selfish humanity to turn into a swan of evolutionary brilliance. (I think the electromagnetic energy is a result of the island's power and not a cause, but I digress.)
They were getting so close to seeing the island's true power (immortality through healing, and transcendence through immortality) that Jacob got scared. He didn't want the power used and abused by a selfish world that wouldn't understand the burden of immortality. Enter Ben, himself smart and manipulative. So Ben helped the "natives" off Dharma and built himself up as a prophet of Jacob. And thinks went OK for a while.
But absolute power corrupted Ben absolutely, and Jacob didn't like it. The catch of the island's mortality I mentioned earlier, the inability of anyone on the island to procreate, caused the death of the one person who mattered to Ben, Annie. I think this is the island's way of keeping balance: if everyone was fruitful and multiplied, but was essentially immortal, the island would be overrun. So it keeps order by allowing only women who were carrying before their arrival to have healthy children. Ben became obsessed with this, and Richard's group, so desperate for a path to follow, followed him and began to help him search for a solution to this problem, thinking it might somehow explaing their existence and save them. Ben grew bitter, and overly powerful. This was not what the island wanted. It did not go with the natural order. The island allowed Ben to have a tumor. Or perhaps Jacob willed the island in its weakening state,to fail to heal Ben. Jacob is tired, the island is tired. Many want out. They want to be killed so they can move on toward the light or salvation and eternal rest. (Yeah, I know the island isn't purgatory, and that comment makes it sound like it is; I just think it has become purgatory-like for its oldest inhabitants. It's a metaphor; get over it.)
I also think the island is now allowing people to age (which is why Ben and the newer folks aged on the island, but Richard and group never have.) And a big part of my theory is that not everyone wants to be immortal. (I've read a lot of Anne Rice, and I always sympathized with her vampires who hated their immortality.) Mrs. Klugh wanted to be shot. Mikhail said, "Thank you," when pushed into the fence. But some of these "elders" like Mikhail are having a hard time being killed even by violence. Which is why he came back.
And that's why Jacob said, "Help me." Ben never really saw him, but Locke can. John walks the line between the spiritual and the physical because he has a special commune with the power in the island. The island and its spirits like him. Jacob is tired of immortality, but he knows he will be hard to "kill." But someone like John can send him to his eternal rest. He is the special one so many of them have been looking for. The leader into the "enlightenment" of salvation. (Thus the name, John Locke.) But Ben tried to keep that from everyone to preserve his own power.
I think our flight 815-ers will leave the island, but only after Ben is taken out and only after the island's most powerful inhabitants get what they want: release from immortality. It will be hard to make them see that this is what they've been waiting for. I think the island's powers will be used up and gone by that time, and it will no longer have the pull it used to. It will be yet another island among thousands in the Pacific (or is it the Indian?) and it will be forgotten. But there may be other places like it...the psychic hinted at that. And its powers may only lie dormant, waiting to start its evolutionary influence again...
OK, I know that's all weird. But it's what I've got. For now.
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