The Smoke Monster has always been one of the central mysteries of Lost. However, as I have been gathering a lot of information on it, I have made some observations and deductions on what exactly it may be and what its purpose is.
Let’s start with the name. “Cerberus”, the name of our monster, was the title for the three-headed dog of the underworld in Ancient Greece, which guarded the entrance from unwanted intruders. This already starts to sound like Smokey, and I will give you even more proof later that this name is very astute. Anyhow, the backbone of my theory is that Cerberus has three “heads” that enable him to perform different tasks: one head for reconnaissance and gathering information, one head for attacking and guarding, and one head for shape shifting and judgement. When I say heads, however, I do not mean actual heads at all, but different forms of Cerberus which carry out different functions – all of which I’ll describe now.
The first “head”, Smokey’s recon and memory-scanning form, is the Smokey that we’re mostly used to. This is when Smokey is one or more little fast moving wisps of smoke that can quickly disappear into the jungle, which can easily find and stalk people in order to gather information on them so it can judge them or it can predatorily follow them before attacking them. When it does decides to gather information on someone after following them around, like Eko in Season 2 or Kate and Juliet in Season 3, Cerberus can do this by growing larger, into a long black cloud (as seen in the episode “23rd Psalm”), approaching the human in question, and starting to flash what looks like bright light at them, absorbing their memories into itself so it can deem them worthy or unworthy of the island, as seen when Eko’s memories literally “flash” inside the swirls of Smokey’s smoke, and when we see it from Kate and Juliet’s perspective, as Smokey snaps blinding light at ! them as if from a camera (we don’t know whether this is the same thing as what happened to Eko but we can assume it is). Also this means when Locke describes his first view of the monster as “beautiful bright light” this means he could have had his memories being scanned at the time, much like Eko.
This is backed up by a quote from Damon Lindelof: “So, could one assume that when they last faced off [Eko and the monster], that all those flashes that happened in the Monster cloud, that it was sort of "downloading information" that it might want to use at a future date?” This means that Smokey has the ability to judge others because it can scan their memories and therefore know what they did in their whole life, and whether they were good people or not, and can use those memories “at a future date” if it ever needs to convince that person to do something for the island, a subject about which I will talk later.
Finally, if the monster “absorbs” memories from other people, does that mean the monster itself is partly or completely composed of memories? We know that the monster is not made of nano-particles, and is certainly not made of smoke, and we constantly hear it making two different types of sounds – animalistic sounds like stomping and roars, sounds of a jungle, like the one in which it lives, and synthetic sounds, like a taxi cab receipt printer which Rose notices in Season 1, sounds of a city, which only humans who had lived off island would know about, meaning all the sounds that Smokey makes could be a blend of the memories of human Islanders and human off-Islanders it has absorbed. However memories can’t float around, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t look like a swirling cloud of black smoke, meaning there’s probably a lot more to Smokey.
The next “head” of Smokey I have to talk about is the attack and guard form. This is the nice big angry form, the one that kills and maims and destroys. However when it attacks it does so for two separate reasons, hence the “attack” and “guard” differences: firstly for a specific reason, for example to kill someone like Seth Norris the pilot, or Mr. Eko, when it simply wants to harm or murder someone, which it seems to be able to do anywhere on the island, and secondly when it is doing so to guard something, like the Temple as seen in Season 5, when it automatically attacks anyone in the Dark Territory because they are coming towards what it needs to protect at all costs. This form seems more feral, seeming much different to the apparitions that talk to other people, only attacking and roaring like a monster, which conflicts with the idea that the monster is the spirit of the island which guides, warns or judges others, which is made even more confusing by the fa! ct the producers stated that the monster has “different rules for different people”, suggesting it is sentient and almost above human, yet later it is also shown it can be controlled to a certain extent, as when Ben summoned it to attack Keamy’s soldiers.
The final form, the morphing, shape-shifting form, is the one that lead Eko to discover the Pearl and took the form of his brother, amongst some of its other apparitions, the form which seems to lead people to either its goals, the island’s goals or their own goals. The producers have stated it was also the spiders which paralyzed Nikki and Paulo, meaning that it used that form in an almost ironic fashion, and some visions of Walt were it, meaning that the shape-shifting form is usually to guide another, although its motives are always unknown, as it doesn’t seem to be very friendly to anyone, as the one it got closest to and even helped, Eko, it killed (although the way he was killed in the sign of a cross and the way he was seen dreaming himself walking away with his brother meant that maybe it was a reward rather than anything else), seeming to primarily serve the island, or its original inhabitants, due to the hieroglyphics of the Temple it guards and the ones on the! door Ben opened before he controlled it.
To back up these three forms I will show all the times that the monster has appeared and show how these forms tie in with them. To start with, in Season 1 when the monster appears after the plane crashes, this is either the monster in recon form, surveying them and deciding whether they pose a threat to the island or not, or in its attack form to scare them enough into keeping together and not venturing into the jungle so as to protect the secrecy of the Temple or something else, which makes more sense as it provides quite a spectacle, seeming to be large and uprooting trees constantly. The next appearance, when it approaches Locke, is its recon form to scan his memories. Next is the black rock mission, when it tries to drag Locke into what is probably a CV, which is its guard form, as it is trying to prevent them from finding whatever it is protecting, which is probably the Temple as the Black Rock is in the Dark Territory like the Temple. Then in Season 2 it is in its reco! n form so as to scan Eko’s memories, and then in its recon form again in Season 3 when it stalks Eko, before changing into its attack form in order to kill him. In season 3 when it attacks Juliet and Kate it turns from its recon form to attack form, which is shown when three small tendrils of smoke, from its recon form (three as an allusion to the three heads of Cerberus) join together to form the big attack form which charges at them. In Season 4, when summoned it comes in its attack form, in order to attack Keamy’s team, and finally in Season 5 it is in its guard form when it defends the Temple from the Expedition group, dragging Montand into the CV. An important note for the most recent appearance of Smokey is that we probably saw him later – when everyone but Rousseau went down the CV to help out Montand after he asked for help, they were probably all immediately slaughtered, because it was probably never Montand asking for help but the monster who assumed his for! m after killing him and assumed all their forms after killing ! them – hence why Rousseau thought her group had a “sickness” – she did not realise that her group were all dead and she was being accompanied by manifestations of the monster, explaining why Robert, before trying to kill Rousseau and getting killed himself, seemed to know so much about the monster, calling it simply a “security system”. Theory by Alex B
Let’s start with the name. “Cerberus”, the name of our monster, was the title for the three-headed dog of the underworld in Ancient Greece, which guarded the entrance from unwanted intruders. This already starts to sound like Smokey, and I will give you even more proof later that this name is very astute. Anyhow, the backbone of my theory is that Cerberus has three “heads” that enable him to perform different tasks: one head for reconnaissance and gathering information, one head for attacking and guarding, and one head for shape shifting and judgement. When I say heads, however, I do not mean actual heads at all, but different forms of Cerberus which carry out different functions – all of which I’ll describe now.
The first “head”, Smokey’s recon and memory-scanning form, is the Smokey that we’re mostly used to. This is when Smokey is one or more little fast moving wisps of smoke that can quickly disappear into the jungle, which can easily find and stalk people in order to gather information on them so it can judge them or it can predatorily follow them before attacking them. When it does decides to gather information on someone after following them around, like Eko in Season 2 or Kate and Juliet in Season 3, Cerberus can do this by growing larger, into a long black cloud (as seen in the episode “23rd Psalm”), approaching the human in question, and starting to flash what looks like bright light at them, absorbing their memories into itself so it can deem them worthy or unworthy of the island, as seen when Eko’s memories literally “flash” inside the swirls of Smokey’s smoke, and when we see it from Kate and Juliet’s perspective, as Smokey snaps blinding light at ! them as if from a camera (we don’t know whether this is the same thing as what happened to Eko but we can assume it is). Also this means when Locke describes his first view of the monster as “beautiful bright light” this means he could have had his memories being scanned at the time, much like Eko.
This is backed up by a quote from Damon Lindelof: “So, could one assume that when they last faced off [Eko and the monster], that all those flashes that happened in the Monster cloud, that it was sort of "downloading information" that it might want to use at a future date?” This means that Smokey has the ability to judge others because it can scan their memories and therefore know what they did in their whole life, and whether they were good people or not, and can use those memories “at a future date” if it ever needs to convince that person to do something for the island, a subject about which I will talk later.
Finally, if the monster “absorbs” memories from other people, does that mean the monster itself is partly or completely composed of memories? We know that the monster is not made of nano-particles, and is certainly not made of smoke, and we constantly hear it making two different types of sounds – animalistic sounds like stomping and roars, sounds of a jungle, like the one in which it lives, and synthetic sounds, like a taxi cab receipt printer which Rose notices in Season 1, sounds of a city, which only humans who had lived off island would know about, meaning all the sounds that Smokey makes could be a blend of the memories of human Islanders and human off-Islanders it has absorbed. However memories can’t float around, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t look like a swirling cloud of black smoke, meaning there’s probably a lot more to Smokey.
The next “head” of Smokey I have to talk about is the attack and guard form. This is the nice big angry form, the one that kills and maims and destroys. However when it attacks it does so for two separate reasons, hence the “attack” and “guard” differences: firstly for a specific reason, for example to kill someone like Seth Norris the pilot, or Mr. Eko, when it simply wants to harm or murder someone, which it seems to be able to do anywhere on the island, and secondly when it is doing so to guard something, like the Temple as seen in Season 5, when it automatically attacks anyone in the Dark Territory because they are coming towards what it needs to protect at all costs. This form seems more feral, seeming much different to the apparitions that talk to other people, only attacking and roaring like a monster, which conflicts with the idea that the monster is the spirit of the island which guides, warns or judges others, which is made even more confusing by the fa! ct the producers stated that the monster has “different rules for different people”, suggesting it is sentient and almost above human, yet later it is also shown it can be controlled to a certain extent, as when Ben summoned it to attack Keamy’s soldiers.
The final form, the morphing, shape-shifting form, is the one that lead Eko to discover the Pearl and took the form of his brother, amongst some of its other apparitions, the form which seems to lead people to either its goals, the island’s goals or their own goals. The producers have stated it was also the spiders which paralyzed Nikki and Paulo, meaning that it used that form in an almost ironic fashion, and some visions of Walt were it, meaning that the shape-shifting form is usually to guide another, although its motives are always unknown, as it doesn’t seem to be very friendly to anyone, as the one it got closest to and even helped, Eko, it killed (although the way he was killed in the sign of a cross and the way he was seen dreaming himself walking away with his brother meant that maybe it was a reward rather than anything else), seeming to primarily serve the island, or its original inhabitants, due to the hieroglyphics of the Temple it guards and the ones on the! door Ben opened before he controlled it.
To back up these three forms I will show all the times that the monster has appeared and show how these forms tie in with them. To start with, in Season 1 when the monster appears after the plane crashes, this is either the monster in recon form, surveying them and deciding whether they pose a threat to the island or not, or in its attack form to scare them enough into keeping together and not venturing into the jungle so as to protect the secrecy of the Temple or something else, which makes more sense as it provides quite a spectacle, seeming to be large and uprooting trees constantly. The next appearance, when it approaches Locke, is its recon form to scan his memories. Next is the black rock mission, when it tries to drag Locke into what is probably a CV, which is its guard form, as it is trying to prevent them from finding whatever it is protecting, which is probably the Temple as the Black Rock is in the Dark Territory like the Temple. Then in Season 2 it is in its reco! n form so as to scan Eko’s memories, and then in its recon form again in Season 3 when it stalks Eko, before changing into its attack form in order to kill him. In season 3 when it attacks Juliet and Kate it turns from its recon form to attack form, which is shown when three small tendrils of smoke, from its recon form (three as an allusion to the three heads of Cerberus) join together to form the big attack form which charges at them. In Season 4, when summoned it comes in its attack form, in order to attack Keamy’s team, and finally in Season 5 it is in its guard form when it defends the Temple from the Expedition group, dragging Montand into the CV. An important note for the most recent appearance of Smokey is that we probably saw him later – when everyone but Rousseau went down the CV to help out Montand after he asked for help, they were probably all immediately slaughtered, because it was probably never Montand asking for help but the monster who assumed his for! m after killing him and assumed all their forms after killing ! them – hence why Rousseau thought her group had a “sickness” – she did not realise that her group were all dead and she was being accompanied by manifestations of the monster, explaining why Robert, before trying to kill Rousseau and getting killed himself, seemed to know so much about the monster, calling it simply a “security system”. Theory by Alex B
