Last night’s episode of Lost, “Follow the Leader”, was quite interesting and gave us the usual mix of lots of questions and few answers that we have come to expect from Lost. I’m not going to go into the details of the plot here but instead want to follow up on an odd line of thought that occurred to me while watching.
In the course of this episode, Jack, Sayid, Elle and Richard swim through an underwater tunnel into a series of underground corridors that lead to what looks like a temple where the Others had hidden the hydrogen bomb from earlier in the season. We had previously been told by Elle that this was somewhere under the DHARMA village.
(I must point out here that a 23 year old hydrogen bomb is extremely unlikely to detonate; the radioactive material would have decayed too much in that time. But I’ll accept TV logic an just move on.)
I thought of the tunnel that Ben had concealed in the closet of his home in Dharmaville that also led to an underground tunnel and wondered if the two were the same. After all, it is doubtful that there are two sets of Egyptian-looking corridors in the area. This is the tunnel that Ben uses to call Smokey the Monster, once successfully (last season) and once less so (a few episodes back).
Then another thought came to me. Most of the characters have been bouncing around through time for most of this season. Have we ever seen Smokey the Monster (or even a mention of it) in any scene taking place in the “past”? The DHARMA people don’t seem aware of it; at least they never mentioned it. There never seemed to be a concern over it at any of the DHARMA stations. They only worried about the “Hostiles”.
So then I came to this curious observation. Prior to “The Incident” there was a hydrogen bomb on the Island but apparently no sign of Smokey. After The Incident Smokey the Monster is running around on The Island but there is no indication of a Hydrogen Bomb.
So, a very odd thought but… Is Smokey the Monster Jughead the Bomb?
Years ago author Fred Saberhagen wrote the novel Empire of the East. (Actually a series of short novels, but that’s irrelevant.) Empire of the East was a fantasy novel with a twist. It contained all the usual fantasy trappings, wizards, warriors, magic and the like, but it also had many technological items, mostly as old, decaying items from “the ancients”.
Much of the novel told of the struggle against an evil demon. Toward the end of the novel the truth was revealed. The world of Empire of the East was our world far in the future. It seems that a group of scientists from our near future had discovered something that they thought would end nuclear war; an energy field that would prevent nuclear reactions from occurring. A war breaks out and they activate the device. The device causes the nuclear bombs to not work and, somehow, causes magic to start to work, creating the world of the novel.
But, one very large bomb was caught by the field just as it detonated. The energy of the explosion was somehow transformed and it became the evil demon of the novel.
So, have the writers of Lost ever read Saberhagen? Who knows, but consider this idea. Suppose Jack and company manage to set off the bomb. Suppose they do it just as the workers at the Swan station break into the energy pocket underground. And, suppose the energy release from the Swan and the explosion of the bomb somehow interact. Instead of either one destroying The Island, instead they produce… Smokey the Monster.
Far fetched? Yes. Likely? I doubt it? But still, an interesting idea…
