What is the Smoke Monster? Applying the Big Bang Theory to Lost

What is Smokey?

One of the burning unanswered mysteries associated with Lost is “What is the Smoke Monster?”  I contend that season six gave us the clues to put the pieces of this puzzle together.  Smokey need not remain an enigma in the minds of Lost fans.

Now we found out in early seasons that the Smoke Monster was some sort of security system for the Island.  We also found out that Jacob created the Smoke Monster when he hurled his brother's beaten body down the waterfall that lead to the cave housing the source.  We found out that the smoke monster could scan people and read their minds.  He also could apparently take the form of dead human bodies that had not been burned, buried, or otherwise appropriately interred.  Although rain did not defeat Smokey, he was somehow bound to the island, and could not cross its waters unless he assumed a human appearance.  When bound to a mortal body, he could partake in mortal activities, but he also had mortal limitations.  However, he could not be slain with traditional weapons such as guns.  Were explaining the Smoke Monster that simple, however, I would not be writing this post.  To truly understand the Smoke Monster, we must go back to what is the island, and what exactly makes it so special.

If you have not read my post entitled “What is the Island”, I suggest you do so before continuing.  In part, it defines “The Source” as the remnants of the energy that created the universe, the very part of the big bang that created our Earth.  The Island is “ground zero” for life as we know it.  The big bang theorizes that several types of energy, matter, and anti-matter collided and created our universe.  The energy that is at the source of life as we know it is made up of exotic matter, light particles, and dark matter. 

Wikipedia has this to say about Dark matter:

During the 1970s and 1980s, various observations showed that there is not sufficient visible matter in the Universe to account for the apparent strength of gravitational forces within and between galaxies. This led to the idea that up to 90% of the matter in the Universe is dark matter that does not emit light or interact with normal baryonic matter. ...The evidence for dark matter comes from its gravitational influence on other matter...

So, in other words, there is this dark stuff that doesn't interact with other stuff, including gravity, in a normal way.  It actually pulls other matter into itself.  Scientists particularly became interested in studying this stuff during the 70s and 80s (or during Dharma times on our island.)  This dark stuff contains another kind of dark juju, called dark energy.

Wikipedia says this about Dark Energy:

Measurements of the redshift–magnitude relation for type Ia supernovae have revealed that the expansion of the Universe has been accelerating since the Universe was about half its present age. To explain this acceleration, general relativity requires that much of the energy in the Universe consists of a component with large negative pressure, dubbed "dark energy"...Since dark energy does not cluster in the usual way it is the best explanation for the "missing" energy density...Negative pressure is a property of vacuum energy, but the exact nature of dark energy remains one of the great mysteries of the Big Bang.

So, expansion and life has a kind of an opposite.  This stuff doesn't look like matter as we expect it to.  It's kind of a dark, hazy, misty mass.  It behaves completely differently than the light stuff, and interacts with the environment in a different way.  Where the light spurs growth, the dark draws collapse.

Modern observations of accelerated expansion imply that more and more of the currently visible Universe will pass beyond our event horizon and out of contact with us. The eventual result is not known. The CDM model of the Universe contains dark energy in the form of a cosmological constant. This theory suggests that only gravitationally bound systems, such as galaxies, would remain together, and they too would be subject to heat death, as the Universe expands and cools. Other explanations of dark energy—so-called phantom energy theories—suggest that ultimately galaxy clusters, stars, planets, atoms, nuclei and matter itself will be torn apart by the ever-increasing expansion in a so-called Big Rip.

So, we're neither sure of how this dark stuff behaves nor cogent about how it interacts with our world.  We have pretty much figured out that its uncontrolled release could cause the end of life as we know it, and possibly, even implosion of the universe.

Let's summarize what we know again and see if it reminds us of anything within the context of Lost.    Many different types of energy were a part of the big bang, parts of it creating land, water, and fish, trees, birds, and eventually, human beings.  Other parts of this energy are dark, repelling all types of light, and acting somewhat like a vacuum, working against the light energy, sucking everything back inside of itself.  It is a hazy, amorphous dark thing.

On the Island, there is a golden cave in a stream.  Beautiful golden light emanates from the cave, illuminating the water flowing within.  Mother calls this beautiful light “the source”, and tells us it must be protected.  But Mother also warns not to enter the cave itself, as to do so may result in a fate worse than death.

Later, during “The End”, Desmond and Jack carefully descend into the cave.  At the bottom of the golden waterfall lies a clearing.  In it's center is an Egyptian-looking obelisk, acting as a cork to plug a hole.  When they first enter the cave, we see nothing escaping from the hole.  We do, however, hear the evidence that something lies below, and that sound is eerily similar to what one hears when our friend Old Smokey is approaching.  A well-like structure surrounds the plug, and at this juncture, the golden light mixes with the water and forms a kind of pool.  Around the well, it is dark and dank. 

For some reason, both Jack and Desmond think that “pulling the plug” will solve all of their collective problems.  Instead, when the plug is pulled, the water drains out and the light drains away with it.  As the light begins to recede, the dark matter begins to emerge, taking its place.  The very earth begins to tremor, and the island starts to implode, collapsing in upon itself.  When the plug is replaced, the dark matter is once again contained, the island settles back down, and the light once again mixes with the water and begins emanating out of the cave. 

If we are to believe the Big Bang, a healthy universe depends on the right balance of the various types of matter.  Too much dark energy and we have “the Big Rip.”  If too much dark matter is released, the result is wild temperature fluctuations and a slow implosion of the universe.

At the beginning of time, just after the bang, all types of energy were important to expansion of the universe.  But as life developed, the dark matter began to become a threat to the continuation of life.  As the earthly source of all of this energy, the Island became its nexus.  It became essential to the rest of the world to balance the energy at the source.

At some point,  long before the twins were born, the Egyptian people collided with the Island.  The Egyptians believed that a number of Gods were involved in the creation of our universe.  Without a long, involved discussion of Egyptian creationary beliefs, suffice it to say that they believed the gods and the cosmos were created from chaos, and someday, the cycle would complete and it would all return to chaos.  They had gods associated with dark and gods associated with light.  (As their culture developed, they later became more monotheistic, but it is their earliest religious beliefs with which we are concerned here.)  

At some point, these castaways came upon the cave of light and realized its importance.  They are probably the ones who built the well and developed the plug as an early scientific attempt to keep the matter in balance.  Although they could not pinpoint all of its properties, at some point, a belch of dark matter probably caused an island catastrophe, and so the cork was devised to help prevent future belches.  (The skeletons in the cave indicate some were probably consumed by the dark matter while doing so.)  The light matter was allowed to expand, allowing the planet to do so right along with it, and the dark matter was kept in check.

Flash forward several hundred years to circa 500 BC.  The island moved into the path of a Roman ship, causing its sailors to wash up on the island's shore.  Amongst those castaways was a pregnant woman, who was immediately kidnapped by the current Island Protector, and was promptly killed upon delivering her babies into Mother's awaiting hands.  Mother raises two boys, one whom she dresses in light clothing, and the other who is always dressed in dark colors.  Boy in White is shy, unquestioning, and compulsively loyal to Mother.  Boy in White is satisfied that the Island is all there is, and the three of them are the only people who exist in the world.    Boy in Black is curious.  He wants to expand his horizons.  He knows there must be something else out there, and he wants to know it, to experience it. 

Soon, Boy in Black grows up to be Man in Black, and he finds out not only do other people exist, there are actually other humans living on the island.  He wants to live amongst them, to experience a semi-normal life.  Boy in White, otherwise known as Jacob, is content to stay on the outside, studying these creatures who look like them, but never wanting to be a part of them.  He misses his brother terribly when he goes to join these “others.”  Soon, his brother is telling him there IS something else across the sea, and Brother is going to go see what that is, even if it kills him.

Tattle-tale Jacob runs home to Mommy and tells her Brother is going to leave them.  Mother visits Brother, and he tells her he has discovered tunnels of “the source” that traverse the Island like veins.  His cohorts think that if they harness this energy and mix it with water, it may open a way off of the Island.  Knowing all of the secrets of the energy, Mother fears Brother's attempts to leave, knows he may actually have found a way to do so, and panics.  She knows that Jacob needs his brother, that he's probably not strong enough to survive on the island all on his own.  And Mother wants to be able to finally leave the Island herself, even if it means passing on to another existence to do so.  So she takes Jacob back to the cave she showed him as a boy and shares her secret: she is charged with protecting this energy, and now it is time to pass her responsibility on.  She takes some wine that has been mixed with water from a special spring, a spring where all of the creationary matter is concentrated, and takes Jacob through a ritual, symbolically passing her crown to the next generation.  Now, she can let go.  And she does.

Now Jacob and his brother have had an extremely complicated relationship their whole life.  Although Jacob was the first born, Brother had kind of assumed the protective role in the relationship.  He adored Jacob, and would give up his own arm if it meant saving one of Jacob's.  Even when Brother had moved out, he continued to spend a lot of time with Jacob, mentoring him as much as he possibly could.  And he always remained calm.  Even when Jacob lost his temper, Brother never fought back.  This very characteristic would prove to be Brother's downfall in the end.

So Jacob is now the chosen one, and as such, he has the creationary energy concentrated in his veins.  Communing with the light gives its protector much of its power.  Only Mother didn't really fully prepare Jacob for his job, and so he's really not yet aware of what he can do.  Having this creationary energy in ones veins allows one a limited power to create circumstances.  In other words, if the protector wishes something to be so in the shadows of the energy, it becomes that way.  It is a controlled expansion of the exotic light matter.

Jacob is enraged.  Mother is dead by Brother's hand, and Jacob is so angry he's out of control.  Yet Jacob cannot imagine a life without his Brother.  He wishes Brother dead, yet he wishes him to still be here.  Jacob is full of pain and rage and hatred, and he wants Brother to feel the same way.  He starts beating the crap out of Brother, dragging him through the jungle as he smacks him around some more.  Soon they arrive at the cave that houses the source.  Jacob is still wanting his brother dead, yet not wanting to live life without him.  He's wishing that they both were dead, while realizing he must stay alive to fulfill the role he has recently agreed to assume.  Jacob beats his brother until Brother is nearly dead, then angrily thrusts him into the rapids that flow into the cave.

An unconscious Brother gets sucked into the Source cave, head first.  The force of the waters propel him into the center of the well, where he collides with the cork, temporarily knocking it out of its hole, and breaking the tight seal.  As it wobbles, the dark matter comes bursting out the cracks, continuing to emerge until the obelisk stops wobbling.  However, as the pool is not drained, there is water to control the dark matter's release.  As we know, the dark matter loses power when mixed with water; it cannot simply float across it to move past it.  In order to release itself from the cave, it needs a non-liquid conduit.  In this case it has one; the semi-lifeless body of Brother.  The dark matter bonds with the molecules that constitute a human body and then uses those molecules to traverse the water. 

Now because there is a little bit of the light in every man, the dark matter does not immediately cause the human form to implode.  Instead, it collides with that light matter, creating a mini-bang within Brother's body.  As it rises out of the water, it finds it no longer needs its human conduit, so it ejects it and emerges from the cave in its natural form.  We hear the same sounds as we hear at the source as a plume of black haze emerges from the mouth of the cave, and the glow of the light is temporarily overshadowed. 

Unfortunately, the dark matter was a part of a mini-bang as it emerged on to the world.  So what emerged was a new form of life, a life form who's dominant molecules are comprised of more dark matter than light.  In finding its conduit, that dark energy merged with humanity and the smoke monster was born.

Brother was not yet dead when he knocked that cork off of its base.  As such, whatever combination of that original energy that made him human was still inside of him when the dark matter amalgamated.  That humanity melded with the dark matter, giving the dark matter some form of consciousness.  And the matter was lucky enough to fuse with an intelligent, intuitive, protective human being.  As such, the dark matter inherited these characteristics as he evolved.  In the same way the Boy in Black thrived intellectually despite his meager resources, Smokey educated himself.  Much of this education came through trial and error.  For instance, he remembered a human body as being his original conduit into the outside world.  He figured if it worked once, it might work again.  He found his original conduit and enveloped himself around it; lo and behold, he could occupy and use that human form.  Then the island's travels brought a new group of people to its shores.  Smokey tried occupying one of those bodies, but it just didn't work.  If he occupied a live body, the light and the dark repelled each other, and the result was a mini-rip.  He learned he could use that repellent action, instead, to put out that little bit of light in every man. 

Did Jacob create Smokey?  In a way, he did.  It was the entirety of the circumstances that allowed the Smoke Monster to be born.  The protector was at the source, wishing for contradictory things to simultaneously occur: Jacob wanted Brother dead, but he also did not want to live without him.  That desire was a big part of the circumstances that allowed the mini-bang to occur.  Brother's protectiveness toward Jacob passed on to the Smoke Monster along with his animus, making it so that this new being wanted to protect Jacob at all costs.  Since Jacob's role was protecting the Island, it became the smoke monster's role by extension.  Yet as Dark Matter, its instinctive purpose was to balance the expansion caused by the light matter and exotic matter, and when a point of maximum expansion was reached, to start steering things in the opposite way.  So along with protection, it was responsible for resource control, for population control, and for ensuring the world did not grow too big for its own good.

Now because the dark matter did not have an organic consciousness, it retained that of the man with whom it melded, the man with the intellectual curiosity.  As the years passed, and the Island collided with various castaways, Smokey began to study these people.  And he began to learn from them.  Jacob, being Jacob, continued to be a voyeur, hoping for knowledge through osmosis, while Smokey continued to interact with these people, literally scanning their consciousnesses for what they could reveal.  Smokey basically despised people, jealous he was no longer one of them, yet seeing their value to the big picture.  And as the centuries passed, so did the knowledge base of all these people who collided with the Island.  Unlike his own original family, people had relatively short life spans, and that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.  They lived their lives and died, having adventures along the way, while he just had day in, day out of the same thing.  They seemed to think the world had unlimited resources, and did not seem to think that some chaotic ball of energetic goo was the be all and end all of life.  Perhaps Jacob had dedicated his life to a meaningless purpose, one that was invented by the demented mind of an old Mother and never really needed doing to begin with?  Perhaps the world was grown up enough now that the energies could balance themselves.  And if they couldn't?  Perhaps it was time to let the dark matter leak out, to allow the cosmos to reach its maximum expansion, and then begin to implode?  After all, all other life that he had observed had a natural lifespan.  They were born, grew up as much as they could, and then they died.  Shouldn't he and Jacob be afforded the same opportunity?

It only ends once; anything before that is just progress.

Then, the 20th Century arrived.  People were coming to the island with some really wacky things.  Science was heavily focused on studying different types of energy.  They were experimenting with using this energy to destroy other parts of the world.  They even brought one of those strange energy bombs to their island, and even named it Jughead.  If the rest of the planet was so concerned with destroying parts of itself, why should they reign in the forces that might accomplish that for them?  What would happen if they just left the island on its own to run its own course? 

Next, another group of scientists landed, bringing with them a whole strange community of people.  These people were also interested in energy, but only energy of specific types.  They brought something called the Valenzetti Equation with them,  saying it was a scientific formula to predict the end of the world.  They came to the island to study the unique electromagnetic properties and its pockets of exotic matter.  Somehow, harnessing the energy contained only on the island might be able to stave off the end of the world predicted by the equation.  Jacob's job seemed even more unnecessary in light of that information.  The end of the world was coming, and it was not that far away.  Could protecting the island really change anything?  Could they really do anything these scientists couldn't do?

These scientists brought with them rudimentary information on dark matter.  Smokey absorbed all of the knowledge about the dark matter, the light matter, and the exotic matter as he could.  In doing so, he began to figure out his own origins.  Since he was created from small bits of the dark matter, maybe colliding with tons of it would set his soul free.  Maybe a huge force of negative pressure would release his humanity from the smoke, reverse the amalgamation that happened in the cave.  Maybe he could uncluster the bond and set himself free from the smoke.  But before he could do that, he needed to be released from Jacob's “wish”.

So he used all of his Smokey powers to manipulate the island dwellers into following his lead.  Convinced that the island did not need a protector, and convinced that Jacob would always believe that it did, he saw only one choice: eliminate Jacob.  Then, all he needed to do was manipulate someone into pulling that plug, releasing the pent up dark matter.  Hopefully, there would be one big blast, and that blast would act like a magnet, drawing the dark matter away from the consciousness, and releasing its hold over his consciousness.  Hopefully, the vacuum pressure would suck that smoke right out of his consciousness.

And then either one of two things would happen.  After the initial blast, the different types of matter would regain homeostasis, things would balance back out, and his consciousness would be left inside its human form, free to finally see what else is out there.  Alternatively, the blast of energy would begin the big rip, and would accelerate the implosion of the universe.  Should that occur, it would all end, and he'd be free to move on, like he'd seen Mother and countless other people do.

In sum, the Smoke Monster is the product of fusion between a human consciousness and a blast of dark matter, causing a mini-bang and producing a new form of life.  As opposed to humans as we know them, a Smoke Monster is comprised of more dark matter than light, and as such, a smoke monster interacts differently with gravity than a human.  To eliminate a Smoke Monster, one must release a blast of dark matter in close proximity to the monster, so that it's vacuum pressure and inclinations to want to collapse on to itself suck the dark matter out of the consciousness.  Natural disasters will occur as the dark matter expands into the cosmos, but such are the casualties associated with war. 

Why didn't Jack or Desmond emerge as smoke when they went into the cave?  Simply because a different set of circumstances existed.  Neither Jack nor Desmond were semi-conscious or nearly dead when they entered the cave, nor was any protector wishing them into that state.  Furthermore, removing the plug completely, rather than wobbling it in its hole, allowed the pool to drain, so that there was nothing preventing the direct expansion of the dark matter.   In other words, there is no need for a human conduit when no water is present.  Also, Jack directly plugged the hole, and the water slowly refilled the well.  The water is key to prominence of the light. 

Now was this Smoke Monster the first Smoke Monster?  Hard to say.  It is highly likely that an earlier smoke monster was created when somebody fell into the hole, and hence, the original idea for the cork.    Or the cork may only have become necessary after the universe started reaching the limits of its expansion.  Or, it may be archetypal memories of an earlier form that gave our smoke monster the basis for his own extinction.  Only one thing is for sure: uncontrolled release of the Dark Matter seems to be a bad thing, and quite probably the basis of “The Incident.”

Before the finale aired, I wrote a piece contending that the smoke monster symbolically represented “hubris”. (http://theoriesonlost.blogspot.com/2010/05/light-and-smokey-represent-hubris-by.html)  I think conceptually, this still applies.  However, hubris is only an answer for folks looking for a literary allusion.  For folks wanting more “scientific” answers, the Smoke Monster is the mating of human consciousness with dark matter.  Smokey is neither good nor evil, but rather represents a negative force, and one of which modern science hardly has a concept.  We know exotic energy created life as we know it, and we fear opposing energy will lead to its ultimate destruction.