The Implications of Claire's Demon Baby Doll by Nick

In "Lighthouse", Jin pulls back the veil of Claire's crib and reveals some twisted THING inside. As every prop and line in the show is carefully crafted and included by the writers for a specific purpose, we impulsively reach the conclusion that this thing in the crib was placed there simply the creep the heck out of us. It creeped me out! But then I wondered, WHY did Claire substitute her missing Aaron with such a monstrosity? And WHY does said monstrosity look the particular way that it does? Therein must lie the really tasty clues!

First, why did Claire build such an evil looking thing? Because Claire is bad now. Our once innocent little Claire has been "claimed". She has been subject to the corrupting influence of her dark "friend". And this friend of hers, who appears to us in the form of John Locke at the end of the episode, is the smoke monster. The effect of the smoke monster's dark influence was a corruption of Claire's most precious desire: her missing baby Aaron. In essence, I believe that when Claire filled the vacuum of her missing baby with that thing, she unconsciously built her replacement as a perverted representation of the dark entity that has been influencing her. In other words, that thing in the crib is a crude representation of the true form of the smoke monster!

So let's take a look at this smoke monster doll. Even though it's unpleasant, go and take a CLOSE look at it. It's some skull head on top of a dingy, pelty body, right? But what does it REALLY look like? The body is easy, as we've seen what it obviously represents numerous times before: black smoke. This makes sense when we consider Claire's company for the last 3 years. But the skull head...though macabre in appearance, to me it bears a striking resemblance to the head of the Tawaret statue. Elongated snout, an unsettling toothy grin, and round, piercing eyes...just like the head of the statue!

So now you say, "Yeah right, Nick. That makes absolutely no sense at all." At first I would agree. Tawaret is the Egyptian goddess of fertility (or something like that). In contrast, we've seen the smoke monster as a judge of character (with his interactions with Eko and Ben) and an arbiter of death (with his ability to take on the form and memories of the deceased). If we take the Egyptian route, the smoke monster acts more like Anubis if anything. And to that I say, "yeah, the smoke monster is Anubis, too!"

Or rather, when the Egyptians arrived on the island thousands of years ago, they encountered the entity that is the smoke monster, and they applied their religion to it in order to explain what they saw. When they called on the monster as a moral judge, and when they saw the dead walk again, they saw Anubis - hence, the chamber with his image on the wall under the temple. When they experienced the joys of rampant fertility while living in a fertile land, they saw Tawaret - hence the giant statue. Little did they know they were paying tribute to the same entity! That the smoke monster is a master shape-shifter is very strong evidence that he was both of these deities.

If you're still not convinced, think about when the smoke monster first starting being aggressive towards the island inhabitants, and think about when the inhabitants first started experiencing pregnancy troubles. We never saw the smoke monster in its smokey form before the Incident, and childbirth occurred naturally before that too (Miles was a newborn right before the incident). We know after the Incident that the smoke monster started attacking people (from the French team to the 815ers), and we know the Others have been dealing with their pregnancy failures since then too. That these two changes occurred at nearly the same time can't be coincidence. I'm going to go out on a limb and theorize the Tawaret statue had been standing until the cataclysmic Incident knocked it down, and that was the last straw the smoke monster had for humanity. As a result, he began attacking and judging anyone he could find (often quite violently) and he shut the door on the survival of t! he babies conceived on the island.