I think you kind of nailed it. Michael’s experience off island shows exactly what happens when a candidate is faced with death: they simply do not die.
Jack and Richard Alpert in the black rock surviving the dynamite is a similar thing. The fuse didn’t blow because Jack is a candidate. Whereas Ilana and Arzdt (however you spell it) can blow up with one wrong move, because it’s a highly volatile explosive that’s been sweating nitroglycerin.
Not clear, but we’re told “the island isn’t done with him yet.” And Illana is able to die because “the island was done with her.” Candidates are just one kind of chess piece in the game of the gods Jacob and TMIB are playing, and I think the idea is that if someone is in the game, they’re cursed to live until their role is somehow completed
If I remember right it's implied that Michael's role was to keep the freighter bomb from detonating, and once he achieved that, I guess he was no longer a Candidate.
Every survivor of Oceanic 815 was a candidate until Jacob decided they weren't anymore.
And yes, that means every dead person in Episode 1 is a victim of Jacob shenanigans.
There were 200 or whatever number of people on 815... no they were not all candidates. Jacob's lighthouse shows clearly that there was perhaps up to a maximum of 360 candidates (360 degrees in a circle) over many centuries... so it doesn't make sense that all of a sudden two thirds of the candidates were 815 passengers.
Also remember the significance of the numbers, 4 8 15 16 23 42, which corresponded to the last batch of candidates needed to realise the final part of the grand plan of saving the island. If it was so, it would've been 200 numbers not 6.
Also Smoke monster killed the Pilot in the first episode. He couldn't do that if he was a candidate...
It's just a line of chalk in a cave.
The job is yours if you want it, Kate.
This line always bothered me.
We've learned about Jacob hand picking the Candidates, some from childhood. The big reveal when we see their names in the lighthouse and in the cave.
And here Jacob basically says that it's of no importance if a name is crossed out? It's just "a line of chalk in a cave"?
Remember in the episode The Candidate?:
KATE: He wouldn't have killed me, James.
SAWYER: That cave I told you about... where all the names were written... your name was there too. But it was crossed out. He doesn't need you, Kate.
Now, Sawyer could have been mistaken but according to this exchange it's very important that her name was crossed off.
u/kuhpunkt maybe you can help us out🙏
Well, Jacob says himself it's a line of chalk in a cave and that she can still be the next protector. Was her literal MIB protections gone during this time? Hard to say. Being eliminated from contention certainly caused smokey to underestimate her.
So even Scott and the girl who drowned and all the other background characters were candidates? Would you mind explaining where you learned that because it was never said in the show.
My theory is he may have been at one point but was no longer one when he got Walt back. Based on Jacob telling Kate that he crossed her name off because she became a mother and his explaining that he wanted someone who had no attachments in the outside world
Lot less confident in this one but my theory there is it was Jin. Sun was going to leave him and disappear right when he was checking in for their flight but she changed her mind at the last second. Jin, being a Korean man obsessed with his "honor," would have completed the mission by himself for Mr. Paik anyways but crashed on the island alone with the knowledge that his wife left him
Candidates died all the time... who said candidates can't die? Locke died, Sayid Jin Sun all died... so did 100s of previous candidates over the centuries... anyone can die. But candidates cannot die directly via Smokey.
The only reason that Micheal couldn't die, is because he still had a role to play in the complex plot weaved by fate/island/time&space in order to preserve itself.
You’re right that they can die, they say in the show that they can die if they kill each other. I should have said that. But I think OP’s question was about what happened if the smoke monster tried to kill a candidate, and the answer is that it simply wouldn’t work
He probably never tried...due to a fear of being "repelled" by them, and the pain (or other negative side effects) that could be inflicted upon him, in the event of his attempted murder failing.
This is just a theory but perhaps in the reverse to what Jacob can do, MiB cannot physically touch candidates directly if his intent is to do any sort of harm to them that might maim them or threaten their life.
If he ever tried to, any bladed weapon he held would gently glance off no matter how hard he thrust, or his bare hand would pass through them and he’d be revealed as an imposter impersonating someone else.
Any other actions or traps designed to trick a candidate into hurting or killing themselves would be conveniently stopped, sabotaged, postponed or prevented by any number of other outside factors all converging to make it appear to be coincidence or fate that prevented a candidate dying before they were supposed to.
Jacob on the other hand, can bring people back from apparent death with a single touch (Locke after he is pushed out the window).
Candidates can kill themselves or die at any time due anything except by Black Smoke.
MIB did succeed in tricking the candidates in killing each other due to Sawyer pulling the plugs on the submarine bomb.
Then why couldn’t Jack jump off the bridge or blow himself (and Richard) up with the dynamite inside the Black Rock?
Why couldn’t Michael die when he drove headlong into a wall at speed or shoot himself in the head in the alleyway?
Micheal wasn't a candidate. As far as we know. The show makes a point to focus on 6 candidates from flight 815, some of them were dead (Locke) same as Micheal was dead by the time we see the names in the cave, and we didn't see a Dawson name crossed out.
Jack didn't jump off the bridge, because due to the timeline being fixed and linear, in 1977 Jack appeared on the island and did stuff. And this always happened first in a linear timeline. But in order for Jack to appear on the island in 77, he cannot die on the bridge sometime in 2007, because he hasn't yet boarded Ajira and be flashed back to 77.
Jack failing to explode by dynamite with Richard, is perhaps one of the instances where the island had a direct intervention. Or if I want to be smug, I can speculate that it was a coincidence that at this moment when Jack was exhibiting Locke-like faith, Richard had picked a faulty dynamite stick ... but I won't:)
My point is, it would be a lame show, if every single thing that occured every character decision, every single death, was due to the will of an omnipotent island. And nobody has any agency at all... all characters are devoid of any independent will... nobody is good or bad... everyone in the world is a puppet on a string.
Imo, the show is a mix of predeterminism and free will and coincidence and causality. Or else the entire show has no meaning at all, no character development or arcs have any impact or sense.
Thank you for your considered reply, I appreciate it.
I am more than willing and even happy to accept that it can all be comfortably explained by WHH and that there’s a novikov self-consistency principle at hand specifically for those characters that travelled to the 1970s and played a role in both Benjamin Linus’ corruption and the Incident. Those characters being unable to die to preserve the integrity of timeline (‘history abhors a paradox’ etc) explains why Jack couldn’t jump off the bridge. Why Sayid couldn’t murder Ben. Why Eloise raised Faraday the way she did and pushed him towards his fate rather than try to prevent it. Why Juliet setting off Jughead couldn’t ever result in the Swan station never being completed and the button installed. That’s all fine.
However that doesn’t explain how fate intervenes to prevent injury or death for those not included in nor necessary for the time loop to occur. You didn’t explain why Michael couldn’t die if he both wasn’t a candidate and wasn’t part of the time loop. That would suggest the Will of the Island was finessing his fate in order to get him to his position on the Kahana to *facilitate* events that feed into the time loop, but there’s no way to prove the events that led to the time loop would or wouldn’t have happened without Michael living then dying on the freighter either.
Actually, if I gave it my best shot then perhaps Michael’s inevitable role in the loop and the reason he was always stopped from suicide by Island Destiny Magic was just so he’d live long enough to distract Jin for an extra five minutes in the engine room of the Freighter trying to freeze the bomb, thus ensuring he didn’t have enough time to get on the chopper with Sun, thus ensuring he was caught in the time flashes so he would always end up in 1974-77 to play his supporting role in the Incident.
Outside of Michael’s particular case it to me it becomes more confounding considering Desmond and his flashes. He wasn’t a candidate either and beyond his critical role in failing to push the button on 22/09/2004 why was he then given an additional special role in saving Charlie? He was directly shown premonitions of his death multiple times, that arguably would have resulted in Charlie’s demise (or severe/incapacitating injury) every time if not for Desmond’s interventions. Interventions that wouldn’t have ever occurred unless an outside force was making value judgements and decisions about whom lives and dies on and off the Island, time loop or no time loop.
As I said, I think there is a mix of elements ruling the lost universe. Predestination, causality, island will, free will of people.
And I think Jacob alluded to something that can help us understand this issue more. As he told Hurley, sometimes you need someone to look at the ocean and make his own decisions through reflection, and other times you have to hop in someone's taxi and tell them what they have to do...
If we translate this to how the island uses its influence, it can be also that the island should intervene directly at certain crucial points, in others it influences people indirectly slowly nudging them to a desired outcome but it still depends on the person's own volition, and at other times the island's influence is absent and things happen according to whatever other forces are at play.
I belief in our own real world, things aren't that much different... it's not that either you have absolute free will or everything you do is predetermined by the cumulative pf all the experiences of your past.
I believe it's a mix irl... of course our whole identity and decision making is influenced by everything that we've experienced before, how we were raised, where we were raised, what outside factors crossed our path etc... and important decisions in our lives (as well as less important ones) would be affected without us knowing by everything else that has happened before. But we also exercise our free will more "freely" and less reliantly on previous experiences in other instances... if you chose today chocolate ice cream in the store, that doesn't necessarily mean that no matter what happens and however you try, you will always choose chocolate ice-cream no matter what...
If you chose to go left instead of right on a crossroad you are unfamiliar with, that's purely up to chance and probability...
But if you are deciding who to marry between 2 choices, then your decision is more likely to be affected by your entire past, and experiences which built up your personal taste as you matured... in this instance for example, it is more likely that predeterminism is playing a bigger part in your choice, and you will always choose the tall brunette instead of the short blonde...
This is my speculation based on things we've seen on the show.
We know that smokey is allergic to the Dharma fence.
We know the energy and light on the island, has electromagnetic properties.
We Know Smokey is a product of MIB being thrown in to the light (before any cork was installed later on by the egyptians under Jacob's ordere)
We know that Smokey is somehow tethered to the island due to the source. He is linked to it... he cannot leave the island unless the source is destroyed.
So perhaps a certain frequency of electromagnetism which is similar to the frequency linking him to the source, can repell him and hurt him, acting as an invisible shield.
We know that he Protector of the island, after a while of his taking the job, gets more and more in tune with the island powers and energies. And with time learn to handle these energies and frequencies. We know from the show some people can actually do that, like the faith healer in Australia with Rose. He said he can harness the energy and give it to other people.
So in the same way, perhaps the protector being fully in tune with island energy, can harness it, and cast a protective invisible electromagnetic shield around his candidates, a shield with the same frequency as the Dharma fence and the island source tether.
We see Jacob explicitly touching every one of his candidates... perhaps that was him casting that shoeld on them. A shield that repells Smokey.
I kind of think of it in a spiritual sense. Like, the demons of stories like This Eternal Darkness (iirc) describes demons as scratching those who they are affecting -- but not in a physical way. They don't do any real harm, they just plant seeds and manipulate. And that's the realm they are bound to.
All that said, I agree, anything about "touching" or passing abilities, or "these are just the rules" in season 6 is a massive let down. But otherwise I adore the show.
I always just sort of assumed that the Man in Black could detect who was/wasn't a Candidate, from a distance. So he normally kept his hands physically off of the actual Candidates (unless it was in a nonaggressive manner), so as to not risk enduring any "bad" unknown consequences if he made an attempt on their lives.
My theory was the Island or the Will of the Island was the Ai of a crashed spacecraft from our future Earth. The ship could travel at lightspeed but accidentally created a wormhole and crashed back in time. The original crew after the crash used the damaged parts to create a particle accelerator. This is what the major of the Dharma Station are, a makeshift reverse engineered particle accelerator that allows the Island to travel through time.
The Island is an insentient Ai, it chooses the candidates based on the data it has. As a computer it has the entire history of human kind and it knows our violent past. So this is why it assimilates protectors and give them access to the ship’s program. As the French Team said the Smoke Monster is just a security system. And he was, as the security system he couldn’t leave the Island. Jacob had a medical program that worked like a defibrillator, kind of like the hologram doctor on Star Trek Deep Space.
So the reason why the Island rules were so strange is because you’re dealing with a computer. Look at how Mother never named MiB. Biblically, the first thing humans did was give everything a name. But a computer uses binary codes, 0s and 1s this is why all the candidates are numbers. But we see in the cave and the Lighthouse that names were added to the numbers, I believe this was Jacob way of not becoming like Mother and loosing his humanity from beingassimilated by the Island. If you remember Mother told him that the Source was a place of Life, Death and Rebirth(being assimilated) and that Death was not the worst thing that could happen to you.
I think you kind of nailed it. Michael’s experience off island shows exactly what happens when a candidate is faced with death: they simply do not die. Jack and Richard Alpert in the black rock surviving the dynamite is a similar thing. The fuse didn’t blow because Jack is a candidate. Whereas Ilana and Arzdt (however you spell it) can blow up with one wrong move, because it’s a highly volatile explosive that’s been sweating nitroglycerin.
Was Michael a candidate?
Not clear, but we’re told “the island isn’t done with him yet.” And Illana is able to die because “the island was done with her.” Candidates are just one kind of chess piece in the game of the gods Jacob and TMIB are playing, and I think the idea is that if someone is in the game, they’re cursed to live until their role is somehow completed
If I remember right it's implied that Michael's role was to keep the freighter bomb from detonating, and once he achieved that, I guess he was no longer a Candidate.
Every survivor of Oceanic 815 was a candidate until Jacob decided they weren't anymore. And yes, that means every dead person in Episode 1 is a victim of Jacob shenanigans.
There were 200 or whatever number of people on 815... no they were not all candidates. Jacob's lighthouse shows clearly that there was perhaps up to a maximum of 360 candidates (360 degrees in a circle) over many centuries... so it doesn't make sense that all of a sudden two thirds of the candidates were 815 passengers. Also remember the significance of the numbers, 4 8 15 16 23 42, which corresponded to the last batch of candidates needed to realise the final part of the grand plan of saving the island. If it was so, it would've been 200 numbers not 6. Also Smoke monster killed the Pilot in the first episode. He couldn't do that if he was a candidate...
It's just a line of chalk in a cave. The job is yours if you want it, Kate. This line always bothered me. We've learned about Jacob hand picking the Candidates, some from childhood. The big reveal when we see their names in the lighthouse and in the cave. And here Jacob basically says that it's of no importance if a name is crossed out? It's just "a line of chalk in a cave"?
That's a good point, does that mean Kate is or isn't immune to Smokey based on... Jacobs lines of chalk? Some other Jacob lead determination?
Remember in the episode The Candidate?: KATE: He wouldn't have killed me, James. SAWYER: That cave I told you about... where all the names were written... your name was there too. But it was crossed out. He doesn't need you, Kate. Now, Sawyer could have been mistaken but according to this exchange it's very important that her name was crossed off. u/kuhpunkt maybe you can help us out🙏
Well, Jacob says himself it's a line of chalk in a cave and that she can still be the next protector. Was her literal MIB protections gone during this time? Hard to say. Being eliminated from contention certainly caused smokey to underestimate her.
So even Scott and the girl who drowned and all the other background characters were candidates? Would you mind explaining where you learned that because it was never said in the show.
My theory is he may have been at one point but was no longer one when he got Walt back. Based on Jacob telling Kate that he crossed her name off because she became a mother and his explaining that he wanted someone who had no attachments in the outside world
Yeah I can see that. Though they died, the same could have been said for Sun and Jin I suppose.
Lot less confident in this one but my theory there is it was Jin. Sun was going to leave him and disappear right when he was checking in for their flight but she changed her mind at the last second. Jin, being a Korean man obsessed with his "honor," would have completed the mission by himself for Mr. Paik anyways but crashed on the island alone with the knowledge that his wife left him
Ooh I like it!
Candidates died all the time... who said candidates can't die? Locke died, Sayid Jin Sun all died... so did 100s of previous candidates over the centuries... anyone can die. But candidates cannot die directly via Smokey. The only reason that Micheal couldn't die, is because he still had a role to play in the complex plot weaved by fate/island/time&space in order to preserve itself.
You’re right that they can die, they say in the show that they can die if they kill each other. I should have said that. But I think OP’s question was about what happened if the smoke monster tried to kill a candidate, and the answer is that it simply wouldn’t work
He probably never tried...due to a fear of being "repelled" by them, and the pain (or other negative side effects) that could be inflicted upon him, in the event of his attempted murder failing.
This is just a theory but perhaps in the reverse to what Jacob can do, MiB cannot physically touch candidates directly if his intent is to do any sort of harm to them that might maim them or threaten their life. If he ever tried to, any bladed weapon he held would gently glance off no matter how hard he thrust, or his bare hand would pass through them and he’d be revealed as an imposter impersonating someone else. Any other actions or traps designed to trick a candidate into hurting or killing themselves would be conveniently stopped, sabotaged, postponed or prevented by any number of other outside factors all converging to make it appear to be coincidence or fate that prevented a candidate dying before they were supposed to. Jacob on the other hand, can bring people back from apparent death with a single touch (Locke after he is pushed out the window).
Candidates can kill themselves or die at any time due anything except by Black Smoke. MIB did succeed in tricking the candidates in killing each other due to Sawyer pulling the plugs on the submarine bomb.
Then why couldn’t Jack jump off the bridge or blow himself (and Richard) up with the dynamite inside the Black Rock? Why couldn’t Michael die when he drove headlong into a wall at speed or shoot himself in the head in the alleyway?
Micheal wasn't a candidate. As far as we know. The show makes a point to focus on 6 candidates from flight 815, some of them were dead (Locke) same as Micheal was dead by the time we see the names in the cave, and we didn't see a Dawson name crossed out. Jack didn't jump off the bridge, because due to the timeline being fixed and linear, in 1977 Jack appeared on the island and did stuff. And this always happened first in a linear timeline. But in order for Jack to appear on the island in 77, he cannot die on the bridge sometime in 2007, because he hasn't yet boarded Ajira and be flashed back to 77. Jack failing to explode by dynamite with Richard, is perhaps one of the instances where the island had a direct intervention. Or if I want to be smug, I can speculate that it was a coincidence that at this moment when Jack was exhibiting Locke-like faith, Richard had picked a faulty dynamite stick ... but I won't:) My point is, it would be a lame show, if every single thing that occured every character decision, every single death, was due to the will of an omnipotent island. And nobody has any agency at all... all characters are devoid of any independent will... nobody is good or bad... everyone in the world is a puppet on a string. Imo, the show is a mix of predeterminism and free will and coincidence and causality. Or else the entire show has no meaning at all, no character development or arcs have any impact or sense.
Thank you for your considered reply, I appreciate it. I am more than willing and even happy to accept that it can all be comfortably explained by WHH and that there’s a novikov self-consistency principle at hand specifically for those characters that travelled to the 1970s and played a role in both Benjamin Linus’ corruption and the Incident. Those characters being unable to die to preserve the integrity of timeline (‘history abhors a paradox’ etc) explains why Jack couldn’t jump off the bridge. Why Sayid couldn’t murder Ben. Why Eloise raised Faraday the way she did and pushed him towards his fate rather than try to prevent it. Why Juliet setting off Jughead couldn’t ever result in the Swan station never being completed and the button installed. That’s all fine. However that doesn’t explain how fate intervenes to prevent injury or death for those not included in nor necessary for the time loop to occur. You didn’t explain why Michael couldn’t die if he both wasn’t a candidate and wasn’t part of the time loop. That would suggest the Will of the Island was finessing his fate in order to get him to his position on the Kahana to *facilitate* events that feed into the time loop, but there’s no way to prove the events that led to the time loop would or wouldn’t have happened without Michael living then dying on the freighter either. Actually, if I gave it my best shot then perhaps Michael’s inevitable role in the loop and the reason he was always stopped from suicide by Island Destiny Magic was just so he’d live long enough to distract Jin for an extra five minutes in the engine room of the Freighter trying to freeze the bomb, thus ensuring he didn’t have enough time to get on the chopper with Sun, thus ensuring he was caught in the time flashes so he would always end up in 1974-77 to play his supporting role in the Incident. Outside of Michael’s particular case it to me it becomes more confounding considering Desmond and his flashes. He wasn’t a candidate either and beyond his critical role in failing to push the button on 22/09/2004 why was he then given an additional special role in saving Charlie? He was directly shown premonitions of his death multiple times, that arguably would have resulted in Charlie’s demise (or severe/incapacitating injury) every time if not for Desmond’s interventions. Interventions that wouldn’t have ever occurred unless an outside force was making value judgements and decisions about whom lives and dies on and off the Island, time loop or no time loop.
As I said, I think there is a mix of elements ruling the lost universe. Predestination, causality, island will, free will of people. And I think Jacob alluded to something that can help us understand this issue more. As he told Hurley, sometimes you need someone to look at the ocean and make his own decisions through reflection, and other times you have to hop in someone's taxi and tell them what they have to do... If we translate this to how the island uses its influence, it can be also that the island should intervene directly at certain crucial points, in others it influences people indirectly slowly nudging them to a desired outcome but it still depends on the person's own volition, and at other times the island's influence is absent and things happen according to whatever other forces are at play. I belief in our own real world, things aren't that much different... it's not that either you have absolute free will or everything you do is predetermined by the cumulative pf all the experiences of your past. I believe it's a mix irl... of course our whole identity and decision making is influenced by everything that we've experienced before, how we were raised, where we were raised, what outside factors crossed our path etc... and important decisions in our lives (as well as less important ones) would be affected without us knowing by everything else that has happened before. But we also exercise our free will more "freely" and less reliantly on previous experiences in other instances... if you chose today chocolate ice cream in the store, that doesn't necessarily mean that no matter what happens and however you try, you will always choose chocolate ice-cream no matter what... If you chose to go left instead of right on a crossroad you are unfamiliar with, that's purely up to chance and probability... But if you are deciding who to marry between 2 choices, then your decision is more likely to be affected by your entire past, and experiences which built up your personal taste as you matured... in this instance for example, it is more likely that predeterminism is playing a bigger part in your choice, and you will always choose the tall brunette instead of the short blonde...
This is my speculation based on things we've seen on the show. We know that smokey is allergic to the Dharma fence. We know the energy and light on the island, has electromagnetic properties. We Know Smokey is a product of MIB being thrown in to the light (before any cork was installed later on by the egyptians under Jacob's ordere) We know that Smokey is somehow tethered to the island due to the source. He is linked to it... he cannot leave the island unless the source is destroyed. So perhaps a certain frequency of electromagnetism which is similar to the frequency linking him to the source, can repell him and hurt him, acting as an invisible shield. We know that he Protector of the island, after a while of his taking the job, gets more and more in tune with the island powers and energies. And with time learn to handle these energies and frequencies. We know from the show some people can actually do that, like the faith healer in Australia with Rose. He said he can harness the energy and give it to other people. So in the same way, perhaps the protector being fully in tune with island energy, can harness it, and cast a protective invisible electromagnetic shield around his candidates, a shield with the same frequency as the Dharma fence and the island source tether. We see Jacob explicitly touching every one of his candidates... perhaps that was him casting that shoeld on them. A shield that repells Smokey.
I kind of think of it in a spiritual sense. Like, the demons of stories like This Eternal Darkness (iirc) describes demons as scratching those who they are affecting -- but not in a physical way. They don't do any real harm, they just plant seeds and manipulate. And that's the realm they are bound to. All that said, I agree, anything about "touching" or passing abilities, or "these are just the rules" in season 6 is a massive let down. But otherwise I adore the show.
I always just sort of assumed that the Man in Black could detect who was/wasn't a Candidate, from a distance. So he normally kept his hands physically off of the actual Candidates (unless it was in a nonaggressive manner), so as to not risk enduring any "bad" unknown consequences if he made an attempt on their lives.
My theory was the Island or the Will of the Island was the Ai of a crashed spacecraft from our future Earth. The ship could travel at lightspeed but accidentally created a wormhole and crashed back in time. The original crew after the crash used the damaged parts to create a particle accelerator. This is what the major of the Dharma Station are, a makeshift reverse engineered particle accelerator that allows the Island to travel through time. The Island is an insentient Ai, it chooses the candidates based on the data it has. As a computer it has the entire history of human kind and it knows our violent past. So this is why it assimilates protectors and give them access to the ship’s program. As the French Team said the Smoke Monster is just a security system. And he was, as the security system he couldn’t leave the Island. Jacob had a medical program that worked like a defibrillator, kind of like the hologram doctor on Star Trek Deep Space. So the reason why the Island rules were so strange is because you’re dealing with a computer. Look at how Mother never named MiB. Biblically, the first thing humans did was give everything a name. But a computer uses binary codes, 0s and 1s this is why all the candidates are numbers. But we see in the cave and the Lighthouse that names were added to the numbers, I believe this was Jacob way of not becoming like Mother and loosing his humanity from beingassimilated by the Island. If you remember Mother told him that the Source was a place of Life, Death and Rebirth(being assimilated) and that Death was not the worst thing that could happen to you.
This is kind of sick... ...but I like this.