'Lost': The man (in black) with the plan, Part 4

We're in the final stretch of this week-long look at how The Man in Black's plan stretches across the entire history of "Lost." Today: Cabin Christian! Aaron! Corpses! Oh my! Exciting stuff. I'm as excited as Simon Pegg aboard the Enterprise.

Let's start off with a moment I think needs some recontextualizing: the appearance of Walt above the mass grave just before Locke shoots himself. Given that Walt didn't say something to the affect of, "So, you got my message, eh?" when Locke visited him in New York City, let's rule out that figure above the grave as Walt himself. So, that familiar figure was either a product of Jacob or The Man in Black.

I'm going with the latter, even though healing seems to be Jacob's area. There's nothing to suggest The Man in Black can't heal; in fact, I'd love it if the two were mirrors of each other in terms of power, each possessing the same skill set that they employ in different manners. The primary reason I'm leaning towards The Man in Black is that Locke's survival puts a damper on an already disheartened Ben. Unable to hear Jacob, unable to save his people, unable to prevent Widmore's crew from landing on the Island, he sits silently in the Barracks, bound and bloodied.

As soon as Ben realizes that Locke is lost (pun intended), he tries to stick the psychological knife into the man who would usurp him, trying to break Locke's will as the two of them plus Hurley look for the cabin in the aftermath of Keamy's attack on the Barracks. But just how did they know where to look? Through Locke's vision of Horace Goodspeed, itself clearly a lie designed to convince Locke he was communing with the Island, a lie as much (if not more) to further turn the screws on Ben. "I used to have dreams," he forlornly tells Locke.

By the time they reach the cabin, Ben is too scared to go inside it. The Man in Black staged the attack inside the cabin in "The Man Behind the Curtain" in order to deploy an emissary with silver hair and a silver tongue: a figure I call Cabin Christian. He looks like Jack's dad, talks like Jack's dad, and on some basic level IS Jack's dad. But he's the side of Christian that took to drink, that fled the country after having his medical license revoked, and was too weak to call his son from a payphone in an Australian bar. All things weak in Christian Shephard are now under the power of the puppeteer, The Man in Black.

Had Ben not been afraid to go into the cabin, this part of the plan simply wouldn't have worked. Had Ben's spirit not been utterly broken, this part of the plan simply wouldn't have worked. The Man in Black needed Locke, and Locke alone, to enter that cabin to get the message to move the Island. Moving the Island is a concept that Ben would be familiar with, but would have distrusted had he heard it coming from Cabin Christian's lips.

Note also that Cabin Christian makes sure that Locke keeps quite about the other person in the cabin as well: Cabin Claire. Separating Claire from Aaron was a central part of The Man in Black's plan, for reasons Season 6 will hopefully make clear. But Cabin Christian's "kidnapping" of Claire was part of his multi-pronged long con, to be sure. That kidnapping paid off a five-year prophecy from a normally fake fortune teller named Richard Malkin who warned that should Claire not raise Aaron, terrible things would happen. And terrible things indeed have happened ever since.

But back to the aftermath of the second cabin meeting. Locke gives Ben the news. Cabin Christian leaves the orders vague in order that Ben might leave first, leaving Locke alone in a time-flashing world. Why? So The Man in Black could insert himself into the timeline at a specific point in order to let the whole "John Locke Must Die" mantra permeate through the psyches of not only Locke, but Ben and Richard as well. Cabin Christian confirms Richard's statement to Locke in "This Place is Death," but we know now that the start of this message came from The Man in Black inside Locke's body. Nosebleeds much? You betcha.

By the time Locke finishes the turn of the donkey wheel that Ben started, Aaron, Ben, and Locke are all off the Island. Now, The Man in Black counts on a few things, first of which is that Ben would do everything in his power to get back to the Island. Stung by both the death of Alex and the rejection of Jacob, Ben made it his mission to return to the place he felt was stolen from him. Secondly, having put the thought of death into Locke's head, The Man in Black set the stage for the horrific scene in which Ben kills Locke in a ratty L.A. hotel room. Thirdly, and this is the biggest conjecture of them all, he convinced Eloise Hawking that restaging the Oceanic 815 crash could save her son's life.

The latter is a stretch at best, but I've wracked my brains trying to figure out who would come up with the restaging idea. It's completely and utterly bizarre, leaving mathematics and physics behind in favor of, essentially, magic. Now, there's the famous saying from Arthur C. Clarke that states, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." But a pendulum and an early 80's computer are not sufficiently advanced, in my books. Which means that someone put the idea in Eloise's head.

We know that at some point after "The Incident," Eloise left the Island. It's unclear whether she was banished or chose to try and free her son from his fate. But starting from the time he was a child, she pushed her son to essentially be smarter than the time loop in which he was unwittingly trapped, keeping him in the dark about his potential demise in hopes he would develop the equations necessary to free himself. We don't know why she made this choice for Daniel any more than we know why she determined that recreating the Oceanic 815 crash would send people back to the Island. Is it impossible that both ideas came from the same man? A man in...black?

Rather than try to squeeze the answer into this entry, I think it best to save it for early next week, when I'll wrap up this particular series good and proper. Sound good? Good.

Ryan also posts every 108 minutes over at Boob Tube Dude. He invites you to join the hundreds already in Zap2It's Guide to Lost Facebook group. He also encourages you to subscribe to the Zap2It's Guide to Lost Twitter feed