True. It must have seemed like a good idea for Dharma to invent it as a security system. Part of it scans you to make sure if you are an enemy or not. That is until the malfunction. GASP!
Kind of like our governments structure of checks and balances. I like that idea.
LOVE IT. Smokey always probes his victims and then comes back with a final judgement. And the three headed cerberus is similar to the three branches of goverment.
I'm liking this way of thinking. Smokey is a self-dispatched, independent security system with a decision-making structure and a system of checks-and-balances, and somewhere along the line something happened that caused one of those "checks" to shut down.
Kind of like the classic sci-fi mad robot scenario, where it has a piece of code that tells it not to harm humans, but somehow that gets erased and the carnage begins.
As far as the Smoke itself goes, I think Puff floated a good theory about collecting metallic particles or something like that? When Smokey appeared at the fence, it seemed like something solid came bursting out of the ground, and then "it" collected the black smoke around it. As Puff said, the lack of a concentration of metallic elements at the beach may explain why the Losties are safe there.
The actual "hard" component of Smokey would have to be small, I think, because of the way the smoke flowed when it hit the fence. If you watch it, those smoke streams got kind of small, so whatever was hidden inside it would have to be smaller than that.
