Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!
In the aftermath of the Lost series finale I’ve been reading comments online suggesting we shouldn’t be focused on something as silly as the plot. After all, this was a character-based show! Frankly I don’t believe the two have to be mutually exclusive. I tuned in largely for the mysterious plot. That it had great characters, acting, music, direction, etc. were just wonderful bonuses.
In general Lost did a fantastic job in developing characters. Like Battlestar Galactica, Lost was full of flawed heroes. Kate and Sawyer were murderers, Charlie was a drug abuser, Sayid was a torturer, etc. Unlike BSG, however, Lost’s main characters had a tender side. They did a great job of making these “lost” characters people for whom you had great sympathy and even empathy for.
There was one character though that was woefully underdeveloped: the smoke monster. Let’s call him Smokey from here on out. We first found out that Smokey was once a human at the end of last season or the beginning of this one. (At this point I really can’t remember.) At no point did they give him a name. I felt sure that they were just waiting to spring his name on us because to do so too early would reveal something important about him. Wrong. We later learn that he is the brother of Jacob (another poorly developed character, but at least he had a name). We see Jacob’s mother give him (Jacob) a name, but before she can name his brother, the woman that raised the two boys murdered her. So let me get this straight: this murderous woman who raised and obviously cared for these two boys never bothered to give him a name? In what way is that not ludicrous?
They also made a point of always associating Smokey with the color black. Obviously his smoke cloud form is black, but I’m not convinced the writers knew he was a human until pretty late in the series. In his pre-Locke human form he always wears black. Even the clothing he was wrapped in as a baby and that he wore growing up was black. On the other hand, Jacob is always shown as wearing white. I was also really hoping the writers weren’t just equating white with good and black with bad. I really hoped they would have some trick up their sleeve. Maybe it would turn out that Jacob was really the bad one and Smokey was good. Wrong. In the end they wrote him as a cartoonish bad guy who (in pre-Locke form) always dressed in black and doesn’t even have a name.
Ultimately he was a tragic figure. The writers must have assumed we’d believe him to be bad because we know that the smoke monster has killed many people, and continued doing so even while masquerading as Locke and telling people he was the good guy. And yet in reality all the main characters in the show had to go on (as far as his motivations) was Jacob’s word that he was evil.
In the episode that showed his origin, can you really see him as anything but a tragic figure? He discovers that his real mother was murdered by the woman that raised him, and that the other people on the island are really his people. His only desire is to be with his people and leave the island to see what else is out there after years of having the woman that raised him tell him that there is nothing out there. Wouldn’t you want to leave too? And then the woman that murdered his mother murders every single one of his people (other than Jacob) on the island. I’m not condoning his act of stabbing the murderer in the back, but you can see where he’s coming from there.
Meanwhile, Jacob, the supposed good guy takes over from the woman who murdered all of his people, including his mother. He makes it his mission in life to guard the island simply because a mass-murderer tells him to when neither he nor the audience have any reason to even understand what the island is or why it needs protection. All we ever get are vague statements about the world ending without the island. So while Smokey’s motivations up to that point make perfect sense, Jacob’s never do.
Unless I’m remembering this incorrectly, at one point Jacob says that Smokey is the embodiment of all evil and the world would be filled with blackness if he ever got off of the island? Huh? When did we ever see the evidence of this? Why does everyone Jacob tells believe this? The murders I guess? What has he done to earn anyone’s trust? A dark interpretation is definitely that Jacob’s the bad guy in the series.
It also bugged me the way Smokey died. He’s been trapped on that island for possibly millennia, and all he’s ever wanted to do was escape. After Kate shoots him (which was pretty awesome), all he says is, “You can’t stop it,” or something like that. I mean, props to the writers for going with the Khan death scene, but I would have expected that character to be a little more distraught about being killed so close to achieving his goal.
