LOST: Who will be in charge now?

Spoilers ahead! Don’t read this if you haven’t seen the Lost Season 4 finale!

Something’s been bothering me since the season ended.

The show has established that the island won’t let people die before it’s done with them. Michael couldn’t commit suicide when it tried because it had another job for him. At the very end of Michael’s life, the island sent a message, “You can go now, Michael”, and boom the boat exploded. I still have questions about whether Michael actually DID want to go right then and there, but that’s another topic.

Then we have Widmore and Ben, who appear not to be able to kill each other. I think we can agree it’s the island keeping each of them safe too, rather than some pact the two have. I think it’s interesting that Ben is very willing to personally put himself into harm’s way. He has the kind of confidence that tells me he knows he can’t be killed. Now, that’s not to say he won’t get hurt from time to time. Look at everything that’s happened to him: Beat up, shot with an arrow, beat up some more – you get the idea. It’s just that he has the island on his side.

Anyway, having the island on your side is a pretty good thing, at least while it likes you.

So, I have to ask, why didn’t think work for John Locke? He’s the new “chosen” leader of The Others, right? What in the heck happened? The island gets a leader and the leader dies? Wasn’t there a “You can’t die” part of John’s contract with the island too?

Perhaps there was, at the beginning. Falling out of favor with the island can lead to big problems. Just look at Ben and his tumor. Why did he end up getting that? Did he fall out of favor with the island? What could he have done to fall out of favor? Maybe it’s because of the way he’d been treating people. Or maybe the island decided that a new leader would better serve the “mission”: John Locke.

It’s not unlikely that John suffered the same fate as Ben. Everything was working just fine at first, but something happened (to be revealed in Season 5, most likely) that made John fall out of favor with the island; by the time we see Locke in the coffin, could the new leader have already been chosen? Let’s look at that in a minute…
Another possibility is that in order to allow John Locke to serve the island, he had to die. If he really were in tune with the island as it appeared, dying would just be a transition to a new (and perhaps more important) job for the island. The Others sure seem to be able to pop up in the strangest places at the right time. Maybe Locke will be able to do this as well, and this will be part of his new mission.

Combine these two ideas (a new leader has been chosen, and Locke had to die to serve the island), and we might be on to something. Who would be the best advocate for the island? Someone that came to the island and just blindly accepted everything that was happening, or someone that was skeptical at first, but then grew to realize how important the island was?

Someone that was blindly faithful to the island would be too vulnerable to outside influences which made it appear that the island wanted things a certain way.

I think you’d really need someone who didn’t believe what was happening at first, but finally came to believe in the island after the evidence was laid out. That leader would always keep a skeptical eye on things, and probably think more clearly in situations that required it.

I think it’s pretty clear that the island really wants Jack back there to run things. Locke was just too willing to accept what he thought the island was telling him, and I think that’ll end up being the reason he dies. Not because he didn’t listen, but because he did – just to the wrong people.