As for the ash

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bosstakesforever
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed May 19, 2010 5:35 pm

As for the ash

Post by bosstakesforever »

Just doing some work and listening to the first part of the podcast here and there's a discussion regarding the ash.
Obviously I'm less than an hour in and maybe Claude and Justin will come to this conclusion as well but I just wanted to offer up a suggestion.

Perhaps the ash is just ash and never had any effect magical or otherwise:

So many of the ritual mechanics of the island have been passed down over thousands of years between humans without any input from Jacob or MiB (other than murder, if that's input) and clearly, neither of them knew the whole story either. It's more than likely that the people in the temple, like ourselves, believed in some complex power circuit involving if/then hierarchies between Dogan, Jacob, their living or dying and the ash as a shield but it's SO much simpler (and reasonable, really) that all that shit is just rumor and speculation about the mechanics ... speculation that MiB ALSO believed. The scene in the statue where what's his name lays down the ash as a barrier while smokey attacks... smokey's reaction to it seemed more like one of precaution about the ash line rather than it physically stopping him... as in "shit, there's that ash again, I never did find out what was up with that but everybody seems to think it'll mess me up.. now is not the time to test my luck...I'll just fuck him with a boulder. Besides, I think it's probably related to that Dogan dude"

The ash was, even back in season 2 or 3, already shown to be meaningless in certain contexts since we saw smokey in the pilot and yet the cabin was, at that time, still "protected" by, as far as we know, an unbroken circle. He wasn't trapped at all. See? I think Claude's point about interpretation (and projection to an extent) is generally correct. Besides, the whole show parrots that theme over and over again. Everyone thought they knew what Jacob wanted. But they were just wrong. Everybody had some crazy theory about what would happen if smokey got off the island but I'm tending to think that nothing would have happened at all. Zilch.

As for Sayid, he just did what smokey told him and presumably smokey explained his (flawed) understanding of how the ash/dogan mechanic worked.

Similarly, we somehow developed the idea that smokey + water = death. It's quite likely he believed the same thing and was genuinely surprised to find himself not damaged by it after Jack pushes him off the dock.
Also, this goes for the zombie/evil thing. The way it functions (excepting only the Rousseau murder situation) may be much simpler or non-magical than we imagine.

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