Lost · Mythology · The Man in Black

In the first hour of Lost, something in the trees pulls the pilot out of the cockpit of Oceanic 815 and throws his torn body into the canopy. The survivors hear it before they see it: a mechanical rumble, a sound like the inside of a printing press, branches snapping in patterns that no animal makes. For five seasons it is a riddle. In the sixth season it has a name, a face, a mother, and a brother. It has a reason for everything it has ever done. Its only goal is to leave the Island. Everything that happens on the show is, in retrospect, the story of the Island stopping it.

The Man in Black, in the form he last wore.

Origin: a brother, a mother, a fall

The Smoke Monster is a person. This is the single fact the show withholds the longest and discloses the most quietly. In Across the Sea (6.15), Lost stops moving forward and goes two thousand years back to a Roman shipwreck on the Island's coast. A pregnant woman named Claudia gives birth to twin boys. The midwife, an unnamed guardian who has been on the Island longer than anyone can remember, takes the boys and kills their mother with a rock. She names the first child Jacob. The second child, dark-haired, is never given a name. He will spend the rest of his existence being called The Boy, Brother, The Man in Black, Esau (by the fans), and, eventually, the Monster.

The brothers grow up under the false mother. She shows them, eventually, the cave at the centre of the Island, a place of impossible golden light. "Every man has a little bit of this same light inside him," she tells them. "But they always want more. They can't have it. But they'll try." Years later, the Man in Black, having learned that his real mother was murdered, helps the Romans of a nearby settlement build a stone wheel that will let him channel the light and leave the Island. The false mother smashes the well, kills the settlers, and burns it all. In retribution, the Man in Black murders her. In retribution for that, Jacob beats his brother senseless, drags him to the mouth of the light cave, and throws him in.

What comes out is not a person. It is a column of black smoke. The Man in Black's body washes up downstream, and Jacob, weeping, lays it in a hollow next to their false mother. Centuries later, men from the freighter Kahana will find the same two skeletons in the same hollow and call them, in a moment of accidental theology, Adam and Eve.

"What about you?"
"What about me?"
"Don't you want to leave?"
"No, brother. I want to kill you." Jacob and the Man in Black, "The Incident", Season 5, Episode 16

The Smoke Monster, then, is not a primordial evil. It is a man who was murdered by his older brother in a fit of grief, whose body and soul were torn apart at the boundary of the Island's life force, and whose surviving consciousness is now bound to whatever was left over: the smoke, the rage, and the desire to leave the place where it died.

The Cerberus: what DHARMA called it

By the time the survivors of Oceanic 815 wash ashore in 2004, the Smoke Monster has been the Island's resident horror for two millennia. It has assumed the form of dead settlers, dead Egyptians (the four-toed statue is its old neighbourhood), and dead members of every group the Island has ever pulled in. The DHARMA Initiative, when they arrived in the 1970s, did not know what it was. They drew a sonar fence around their compound to keep it out, and in the lost orientation film for the unnamed sixth station they called it, with academic dryness, the Cerberus System.

The word is grimly accurate. Cerberus, in Greek myth, is the dog that guards the underworld and stops the dead from leaving. By the show's internal logic, the Smoke Monster is a thing that should have crossed over and didn't. It is a piece of a dead man stuck at the door. The Island is the door.

The judgement forms

What makes the Smoke Monster more than a horror-movie monster, and what made Lost more than a survival show, is the specific way it kills. It does not eat. It does not feed. It scans. It makes itself the shape of someone the target loved, or wronged, or failed, and then it asks them, in some sense, to account for that. The kills are theological.

The Cost of Living, Season 3. Eko meets his brother for the last time.

The pattern is one the show is very precise about: the Monster wears the face of someone the target has wronged, and offers them the option to admit it. Eko refused. Ben submitted. Jack, the man who could not save his father, eventually walked his own version of that road by drinking from the stream and offering to take Jacob's place. The Monster is, among other things, a very specific kind of mirror.

The yin and the yang of the brothers

The relationship between Jacob and the Man in Black is the engine that drives the entire mythology of Lost. They are two halves of the same cosmic ledger, neither functional alone, each unable to murder the other directly because of a rule their false mother imposed when they were boys.

Jacob, who serves as the protector of the Island, represents order, life, and the continuation of the world through his candidates. The Man in Black is a nihilist, driven by a belief that humans are corrupt and doomed to repeat cycles of violence and destruction. This philosophical difference is what drives him to become the Smoke Monster in the first place. It is also what keeps him there. The Island, in Jacob's framing, is a chance for people to prove the Man in Black wrong about them. The Man in Black, scanning each new arrival and finding the same betrayals over and over, considers each of them more evidence that he is right.

"It always ends the same." The Man in Black, "The Incident", Season 5, Episode 16

This is the line the show is built around. Jacob's response, three minutes later, is "It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress." Whether one believes Jacob or his brother is, in Lost, the entire moral question. Damon Lindelof, who would carry exactly this argument forward into his next show, has talked about how the brothers were always conceived as a single character split in two. A character study of Lindelof as a writer follows that obsession across his career.

The loophole

The reason the show needs an entire candidate framework, and the reason the Monster's plan takes two thousand years to come to fruition, is a rule. The Man in Black cannot kill his brother directly. He can, however, find someone who can. This is what the show calls the loophole, named for the first time in the closing seconds of The Incident.

John Locke is the loophole's instrument, in two stages. In the first stage, while Locke is still alive, the Monster wears the form of Christian Shephard and tells him that the way to save the Island is to leave it and bring the Oceanic Six back. This trip ends with Locke being strangled in a Los Angeles motel room by Benjamin Linus in The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham (5.07). In the second stage, Locke's body is flown back to the Island on Ajira 316, and the Monster, freed by Locke's actual death to wear his actual face, walks off the beach in his sweater and says hello to Ben.

By the time Ben drives a knife into Jacob in the foot of the statue, he believes he is acting on Jacob's old orders, on Locke's resurrection, and on his own long-buried grievance about being passed over. He is, in fact, acting on the Monster's design. Locke was the bait. Ben was the hand. Jacob's last word, before the fire takes him, is "they're coming." He means the candidates. He means it has already been arranged.

The cork

The Man in Black's plan collapses in the last hour of the show on a piece of geography most viewers had forgotten existed: the cave of golden light from Across the Sea, the Source, the heart of the Island. In The End, Desmond Hume climbs down into it and pulls the stone cork at the centre of the light. The light goes out. The Island begins to crack. And the Monster, for the first time in two thousand years, can be hurt. He can also, finally, be killed.

The two-thousand-year-old prisoner, in flight on a cliff.

The fight that follows happens on the same cliff where, two thousand years earlier, Jacob had thrown his brother into the light. Jack Shephard, bleeding from a stab wound the Monster gave him, charges. Kate Austen, who has been a wanted fugitive since season one, fires the bullet that kills the most powerful being on the Island. She fires it into the back of John Locke's borrowed body. The Monster falls off the cliff. The Island shudders. Jack restores the cork. The light comes back on.

This is the bleak elegance of how the show closes the loop. The thing that made the Monster a monster was the cave of light. The thing that unmade him as a monster was the same cave, unplugged. The job that took two thousand years to engineer, killing the Monster, ends with a bullet, fired by a woman who never knew the brothers existed, into the back of a corpse that never belonged to him in the first place.

What the Smoke Monster was for

The Smoke Monster, on rewatch, is one of the most carefully constructed metaphors in modern serial television. It is a man who was unable to grieve his mother and was punished by his brother for the inability. It is a sentence that the cosmos refused to commute, kept ambulatory for centuries past the point where the original person had any right to still be there. It is the Island's argument against itself. It is the show's way of saying that the dead, given enough power, become tyrants.

Lindelof would carry this exact question forward into The Leftovers. A reading of the ending of The Leftovers sits alongside this article as a sister piece, because the same writer is asking the same question twice: what do you do, in a universe that refuses to explain its own mechanics, with grief that has nowhere to go.

For Eko, the answer was to refuse. For Ben, the answer was to submit. For Locke, the answer was to believe. For Jack, the answer was to volunteer. Only one of those answers cost the Monster his life.

Further reading and watching

If you want to rewatch the moment the Smoke Monster finally has a face and a name, the complete series is the only way to do it properly, because Across the Sea rewards every false start that came before it. The companion essays on this site cover the rest of the puzzle: the final episode explained in full, what the numbers were and who Jacob's candidates were, a character study of Damon Lindelof as a writer, and a reading of the ending of The Leftovers, his next act.

Filed under · Lost · Mythology · The Man in Black