Dying to Follow the Man in Black (Small Spoiler Alert!)

Hey guys, I’m a new blogger on the site. I go by amenrisky. Check out my blog at aquestionmark.tumblr.com for weekly LOST reviews and other things I find interesting. Alright. Let’s get started.

So we all saw Claire stroll out of the jungle the other day, right? All disheveled and grungy and whatnot. Okay, well last we saw her, she was hanging out in a cabin with her deceased daddy Christian Shephard after following him and abandoning her previously precious son, Aaron. Two years ago we all questioned why this would happen. Two days ago, Dogen gave us our answer: she’s infected.

Claire pulls a Rousseau after her "infection."

What? Surely not the mysterious Sickness we heard so much about as early as Season 1 by way of Danielle Rousseau’s deranged mutterings? Yes, that Sickness. And now Sayid apparently has it, whatever “it” is. What’s more, he was dead first.

Well, here’s the thing. We obviously know that whatever it is, it’s assumedly caused by the Monster. Danielle says this. Dogen implies this. And his claims that people are “changed” when the darkness reaches their heart doesn’t seem to be too far from the truth, considering Claire’s abandonment of Aaron and Danielle’s partner Robert’s attempted murder of his lover. But what I want to know is, what state do people need to be in when they are infected? Living or dead?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Locke. And how, even though the Man in Black is taking his form, his body is still lying on the beach. This implies that the Monster does not reanimate corpses, but rather replicates their forms (after “reading” them first, in order to collect their memories, etc.). So how does this explain the disappearances of both Christian’s and Yemi’s (Eko’s brother) bodies? Christian wasn’t in his coffin (as seen in episode 505, “White Rabbit”) and Yemi’s corpse wasn’t in the beech craft when Eko stumbled back (in episode 305, “The Cost of Living”).

Eko is visited by a "monstrous" Yemi.

The theory was originally that the Monster had taken the form of these characters. I’m still convinced he had taken the form of Yemi. But how does this explain what happened to the bodies? Flashforward to Sayid, lying dead on the Temple floor. Suddenly, he sits up and queries, “What happened?”

And now we hear that he’s infected with this Sickness that Rousseau was concerned enough about to shoot her teammates and lover. But it wasn’t there before he died… interesting. Speculation that Claire actually died in the explosion of her house back in “The Shape of Things to Come” in Season 4 no longer seems so ludicrous to me. When she wakes up she seems a bit off and says she feels “a bit wobbly.” The next night, she abandons her son to follow an apparition of her father.

In the re-airing of “LA X (Part 2)” this past Tuesday, the little hints given at the bottom of the screen confirmed that the broken ring of ash around Jacob’s cabin allowed the Man in Black to take up residence. This supports the theory that Christian is the Man in Black, but what if it allows confederates to also enter, as in infected people? What if Christian is merely an infected body, and this is how he was able to convince Claire to follow him?

Claire: infected, but dead or alive?

Because Jin stopped Rousseau from following her team under the Temple wall, she’s also the only one who didn’t end up infected, or “changed by that thing.” It’s entirely possible that the others were killed under the wall, and emerged with the Sickness within them. Dogen already told us an infected person will not be the person they were before.

It’s obvious that Smoky is building an army—an army of infected. People who have the darkness swirling around in their heart, and who have been claimed by him. And he’s got Claire, and soon he’ll have Sayid. Promos for next week’s episode, “The Substitute,” indicate he’s going for Sawyer next. I’m interested to see how that plays out. On frame looks as if he’s lowering Sawyer down a cliff on a rope ladder, then cuts the rope, having Sawyer fall. Is he trying to kill him in order to infect him? I think it’s possible.

Lines are being drawn now, and we know how. I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes abundantly clear in the next episode, and we finally get a clear picture of the “good guys” and “bad guys.” It’s obvious that our survivors will be split along these lines—some following Jacob, some the Man in Black. I think Smoky’s got Claire, Sayid, and soon Sawyer by this point. In addition to Richard and Ilana, I’m confident Jacob’s got Jack, Kate, and Hurley. After all, the final confrontation is rumored to be a last conflict between Jack and John. I have a feeling, though, that we could be seeing many more characters die in the near future, if this is Smoky’s method of recruitment.

Everybody better watch out.