A "what-if" idea I've been toying with...

[Volvagia_slayer]

When it was first revealed that there was a cave wall on the island with the survivors' names scribbled all over it, I totally didn't buy that it was Jacob who had written all those names there. Maybe he did, but I'm still unconvinced. I believed then, as I believe now, that this was the MIB's list. Now I believe it was the MIB's attempt to copy Jacob's list, but back then before we saw the list at the lighthouse, I thought that only the MIB had a list like this ("Jacob's list" merely being the thing that listed the people who were to become Others, which would have been a separate thing than the candidates list).

Since MIB's prime motivation was leaving the island to go home, and I thought that this candidate list only belonged to the MIB (and that Jacob had nothing to do with it/MIB was lying about Jacob's involvement), I began thinking that maybe these people were the key to the MIB going home.

At one time it was theorized that Jacob and the volcano were related. One theory went that Jacob was taken down into the heart of the island under the volcano and experiments were done on him there by DHARMA, but things went wrong, Jacob merged with the island, and his true body was still there under the volcano.

So once I started to believe that MIB had to choose one of the people on the candidate list in order to be able to go home, this led to me believing that perhaps MIB found himself in a situation similar to the above Jacob theory. His body was trapped under the island, and the only way he could escape the island would be to find someone to take his place.

Eventually after the show concluded, I started wondering how I might have gone about trying to improve the show if I had been writing, and there's one thing that I can't decide whether it would be an improvement, a bad decision, or just an okay-decision-that's-really-just-a-bit-too-convoluted.

I was always a little let down that Widmore wanted to return to the island just because he was once the leader of the Others, and he wanted to be leader again. A guy with so much opulence in his life doesn't seem like the kind of guy who wants to give all that up to go live in the jungle again, especially now that he's past the age of being able to do ninja-esque Others-skills.

So one other solution occurred to me. What if the thing about the MIB being stuck under the island and looking for a replacement was true, and Widmore happened to find the MIB and was taken as a replacement? The MIB would have switched his consciousness with Widmore's, thus allowing him to leave the island. But since the MIB slowly takes on the consciousness of the body that he's trapped in (as seen when he's in Locke's form throughout Season 6), I thought perhaps Widmore's consciousness slowly took over the MIB until he no longer remembered that he wasn't actually Widmore, but he still felt some connection to the island. So he would want to find the island again to discover what that connection really was and eventually learn that Widmore was stuck in the MIB's body, trying to get his own body back.

So what do you think? I'm not in love with the idea myself, but I do like the idea of there being something more between Widmore and the MIB (since it makes sense to me that MIB ordered the Purge, and Widmore thought he was getting his orders from Jacob), and I do slightly prefer this idea to Widmore just wanting to come back to the island to be an Other again, but I'm not a huge fan of body-swapping stories in the first place and this scenario wouldn't really fit the whole MIB vs. Jacob storyline so much.

 

[Lost_In_Translation]

As interesting as I find the idea, I think it would fall in the "too convoluted to be true" realm. That being said, I figured Widmore interest in the island had more to do with its healing properties, and perhaps becoming like Richard. I think it would have been more believable for him to want to hold onto life as much as he possibly could -- especially given all that he sacrificed in the name of "the island."

 

[F-Trunks]

I've only read the first paragraph so far so I'll edit with more thoughts....but my only problem with this is Jacob's line to Kate after she asked why her name was crossed off...."it was just a line of chalk in a cave, the job is yours if you want it"

why would he say that if he wasn't the one who did that?

 

[Volvagia_slayer]

I've only read the first paragraph so far so I'll edit with more thoughts....but my only problem with this is Jacob's line to Kate after she asked why her name was crossed off...."it was just a line of chalk in a cave, the job is yours if you want it"

why would he say that if he wasn't the one who did that?

That's a good point, but it could very well be that he said that just because she specifically asked about her name being in the cave. He had crossed off her name at the lighthouse, and someone (Jacob or MIB) also crossed off her name at the cave, but she only knew about her name being in the cave, so she only asked about the cave, and Jacob only responded about her name in the cave since that was what her question was specifically about. There was no reason to explain that her name was crossed off because the MIB was copying his lighthouse list, and he had crossed her name off at the lighthouse, so the MIB crossed it off at the cave, but it was just a carved line in the lighthouse, which meant as little as that line of chalk in the cave... etc. (if that is what happened). He had a limited amount of time, so he was only going to answer what he was asked about rather than going on any clarifying tangents.

 

[F-Trunks]

I dunno, I've just always made my peace with it being Jacob's handy work in the cave. That's what we were told and I saw no reason to believe the writers were trying to throw us for a loop. His thing with numbers and all....same exact numbers that were in the lighthouse by each name. Did the monster know all those numbers enough to replicate it?

and why couldn't the monster just go to the lighthouse if he needed to see the names? I dunno, it just doesn't make sense to me.


isn't it awesome that we can still discuss this though??? lmao