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.
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