THE WHEEL AND HOW IT WORKS by LA

After Across the Sea, I finally get how the frozen donkey wheel works!

The light beneath the island is self-aware. The island is a living, breathing organism.

When MIB planned to install the wheel, he knew why it would be his ticket off the island because:

The Island reacts to danger and threat just as any animal or living creature would. It protects itself.

Once the wheel was installed (perhaps later by MIB or other people who dug up the well), it being attached to the wall between the light and water, was a way of channelling the water INTO the light and therefore the light would react as if being attacked.

Two things then happen:

1. The island moves itself to another electromagnetic hot
spot somewhere on the other side of the earth so it cannot be
found again and avoid any further harm.

2. Transports the person turning the wheel (considered a threat to the welfare of the island) across the sea and the lands, far away, so they can never return, banishing them. Just as a person would be banished back in the B.C. days if considered a threat to the stability or safety of their community.

It had been so long since the wheel was last used that by the time Ben Linus went down there to turn it, the temperature had dropped and the water had frozen over creating a small pocket of intense cold.

This ice caused the wheel to stick when he turned it and made the wheel slip off its axis. It basically started to channel the fast melting water back and forth, making the light/the island go nuts, constantly moving from one place to another at such a fast rate (to protect itself), it ended up transcending space AND time.

MIB knew if he built this system it would transport him off the island, banishing him forever.

The only reason Linus could come back was because he came with Oceanic Six. And the only reason Locke could come back was because he was already dead.

MIB as Christian needed both Ben and Locke off the island for his OPERATION: COPY LOCKE to work, and to create the time flashes that got Locke and Richard to have that infamous comapss conversation.

The wheel is not something the island likes when it gets turned and that is why it moves itself and the perpetrator to places as far away from one another as possible.