What lost is actually about by Jeremy

Lost's main theme is Iteration and Escape. The former is subtlety hinted on Rousseau's transmission and the latter is at first inspection obvious but it can actually be somewhat deeper. Iteration has to do with history repeating itself, literally. As we have seen the island is capable of time travel or, to say it a different way, able to function independently from time.

What I believe that is time, for man, has played out already. The die has been cast and his story has been played out to its logical ending...man has destroyed himself. Now the Island and its two inhabitants Smokey/MIB and Jacob are all thats left and are able to move through time and space along that timeline however as Daniel Faraday explains, "What happened, happened" and are unable to change the past.

Jacob remains optimistic and resolute and hopes to somehow save humanity from its seemingly inevitable doom. MIB/Smokey has grown weary of his immortality and watching the same event over and again and wishes to travel "home", wherever that may be. However since Jacob is in charge of the Island he decides where it goes and Smokey/MIB is simply along for the ride. MIB?Smokey's only hope is to kill Jacob to gain control of the Island but the island will not allow him to.

After countless amounts of unchanging iterations of time something different happens. Oceanic Flight 815 crash lands on the island. Jacob realizes that someone on that flight has to be "special" that caused the change in the timeline and sets his group of "others" to find them. They thought they found it with Walt but his special turned out to be not what they were looking for.

Then Locke allowed the timer to lapse without inputing the code and yet another event happened that was not in the iteration. So Jacobs attention turned to Locke again believing that he must be the special one. Locke however turned out not to be so special and sent off the island to gather the others who had escaped believing that one of them must be the special one.

However it was Daniel Faraday that realized who the special one was. It was of course Desmond who brought down Oceanic 815, it was Desmond who turned the key and released the pent up energy at the Swan station. Desmond has created a new time line that now no one can predict which is shown in Eloise's statement "For the first time I have no idea whats going to happen."

Ironically Faraday is the Universe's chance to fix the timeline and he figures out that if he places the hydrogen bomb at the moment of the incident at the Swan the time will revert back where flight 815 lands at LAX and everything plays back out to man's final destruction. Jacob obviously doesn't want this and MIB/Smokey doesn't care he just wants Jacob dead so he can be done will all of it.