Lost and the Man in Black, Explained

Spoiler alert: Spoilers follow for all six seasons of LostIt’s time to go back. At long last, Lost has returned to Netflix just in time for its 20th anniversary, and summer is the perfect time for fans and newcomers to binge all six seasons. Much like how The Sopranos legitimized cable television, Lost legitimized the network drama, setting up compelling mysteries from the very first episode and fostering an era of online discussion and theorizing. Over a decade after the show ended, people are still intensely polarized over whether said mysteries were resolved satisfyingly, but there’s no denying that it kept audiences hooked every week.

Lost’s single most perplexing mystery was raised in the show’s debut episode, as the crash survivors quickly realize they aren’t alone on the Island. After the plane’s pilot gets brutally killed, it becomes obvious that a mysterious monster lurks in the woods, finally appearing in full in the first season finale as a cloud of black smoke. This creature only makes brief reappearances in the subsequent years before finally taking center stage in the final season, as a figure known as the Man in Black.

Who Was the Man in Black in Lost?

Lost

Release Date

September 22, 2004

Seasons

6

The Man in Black’s backstory isn’t fully revealed until the show’s third-to-last episode, the hugely divisive “Across the Sea”. Taking place hundreds of years before the series begins, a pregnant woman, Claudia, washes onto the Island. An unnamed woman living on the Island, only known as “Mother”, helps Claudia give birth to twin sons before brutally killing her and raising the newborns as her own.

As the children reach their teenage years, Mother takes them to a cave by the stream, with a heavenly light emanating from the entrance. She refers to this as “the Heart of the Island” and tells them they’ll one day take her place as its caretaker. Simultaneously, Claudia’s former shipmates arrive at the Island, and the younger son (who would later become the Man in Black) learns about the deceitful circumstances of his birth. Angry at Mother’s betrayal and learning an entire world exists outside the place where he was born, he leaves to join Claudia’s crew.

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Over the next 30 years, the Man in Black becomes obsessed with leaving the Island behind. With his help, the ship’s crew constructs a wheel at the bottom of a well, intended to harness the place’s electromagnetic properties and transport anyone off the Island. Mother is horrified at this discovery, anointing her older son, Jacob, as the Island’s protector before destroying the well and killing the ship’s crew.

Infuriated, the Man in Black kills Mother, and Jacob, having witnessed the altercation, vengefully tosses his brother into the stream, leading into the cave of light. As the Man in Black reaches the Heart of the Island, his corporeal form dies, and his spirit is reborn as a cloud of black smoke, with the ability to take the form of anyone who previously died on the Island (which proves key to one of the show’s most surprising twists). Over the next couple of centuries, Jacob consolidates his power as Protector, becoming an almost mythical figure to the Island’s inhabitants, but unbeknownst to him, his brother plots his revenge.

How Does The Man in Black Carry Out His Plans?

While the Man in Black intends to kill Jacob, Mother had previously used her magical powers to prevent him from directly harming his brother. As a result, he spends the next few centuries looking for a “loophole,” hoping to manipulate another individual into carrying out his murderous desires. His first candidate arrives in 1867 when a slave ship, the Black Rock, crashes on the Island. One of the captives, Ricardo (later named Richard Alpert), falls victim to the Man in Black’s manipulations, but Jacob quickly outmaneuvers him and eventually enlists Alpert as one of his closest allies.

Even though the specifics of why are left open to interpretation, the basic rule is that as long as Jacob or any of his possible successors are alive, the Man in Black will never be allowed to leave the Island. However, his manipulations finally bear fruit in 2007, when the Oceanic Six return to the Island, and the monster takes particular interest in Benjamin Linus. Well aware of Linus’s long-standing envy of the recently deceased John Locke, the Man in Black takes the form of Locke. Linus becomes convinced that his rival has risen from the grave with the Island’s help, leaving him easy to manipulate into killing Jacob.

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It isn’t until the deed is already done that Linus realizes that Locke has been dead the entire time and that the man he was talking to was, in fact, the smoke monster. With the key figure who could keep him on the Island finally disposed of, the Man in Black plots to kill the surviving candidates to succeed Jacob and ensure his escape. Thus, the endgame for Jack Shepard and the remaining survivors turns into stopping the monster at all costs, as his escape would mean “the end of everything good” (again, the specifics are left to interpretation).

In the series finale, Jack (now anointed the new protector) works with Desmond Hume to lure the monster into a trap. The Man in Black brings Desmond into the Heart of the Island (as he’s resistant to its electromagnetism) so that he can destroy the place before making his escape. But as the Island starts to crumble, the Man in Black discovers with horror that this has rendered him mortal and unable to shift into his smoke form. Jack is thus able to kill him once and for all before restoring the Heart at the cost of his own life.

The Man in Black Brought Biblical Dimensions to Lost

Obviously, the biggest asset the Man in Black brought to Lost was how his presence took the story of a group of plane crash survivors fighting to return home and elevated it into a mythic clash between good and evil. Much has already been written about the Biblical parallels the show’s final season in particular emphasized, but the Man in Black most closely resembles Satan from Paradise Lost.

Much like that poem’s tragic hero, Lost’s villain has effectively fallen from grace and is cast through circumstances of the world’s embodiment of evil, leaving him intent on unleashing his darkness upon the rest of the world. As a result, Lost’s endgame is less about resolving the Island’s many mysteries, and more about balancing the world’s eternal struggle between light and darkness. Lost is now streaming on Netflix.