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Theodore Gray
Lost: Telling Time
Posted by J. Wood, January 26th, 2009
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Filed under: Contributors.
What did one episode say to the other episode?
Smells like a purple sky.
(This was two episodes in one; hang in there.)
The fifth season begins with a double-hander belly-lander, "Because You Left" and "The Lie." The two episodes worked so seamlessly together that it would be easy to think it was one two-hour episode if the credits at the beginning of "The Lie" were missed. Many familiar elements were in place to re-situate the audience: The domestic montage opening sequence, complete with an old record playing and the showering up, reaches back to season two's "Man of Science, Man of Faith." The flashbacks and flashforwards are in place. There are some more copycat characters. Most of the familiar characters are present and accounted for, but there are no major introductions of new characters to make the audience deal with another story arc. Storylines from the end of season four are picked up on without delay. It's as if the narrative's event horizon is finally in view, and the various narrative threads that have been closing in towards each other are now starting to weave together.
But there were some different elements worth noting. There was no opening eye shot; we got the numbers instead. We also got a new kind of flashback, one that isn't character-driven and just for the audience. In moments like when Kate visits Sun in LA, we see a flashback on the freighter while Sun narrates. This is new; it directly acknowledges the audience, rather than expect the audience to figure out which character's perspective we're in. It also does the work of helping the audience-some perhaps just catching up or new-understand some of the background to the current story arcs. Hurley's quick recap to his mother of what actually happened on the island does the same work.
The main island characters have also started living in Desmond's nightmare. As the island becomes unstuck in time, those who were on the island during the event are flashing uncontrollably back and forth in time, as Desmond has done for so long. We learn a few things from these events:
For one, Desmond is a lot more connected to the island than previously known. Why? No idea yet, but he's somehow special, and in some ways that whole storyline is starting to echo not only Locke, but James Cole from the Terry Gilliam film 12 Monkeys. In the film, Cole was chosen to flash back in time because he has a good memory and can bring necessary information from the past to the future. Likewise, both Desmond and Locke are entrusted to remember into the future by Faraday and Richard.
However, in the film Cole complains that the stresses of moving across time are too much for the human brain, and he becomes "mentally divergent." There's no telling if Lost will go down a similar route; it seems the flashes here put a physical stress on people, as witnessed by Charlotte's gushing bloody noses. However, if we look back to the beginning of the season four episode "Confirmed Dead," Faraday has a minor emotional breakdown while watching the news coverage of the (faked) Oceanic Flight 815 recovery.
The flashes also do something interesting for the audience; the structure of narrative events as experienced by the audience now reflects the structure of events on the island. For four seasons we've watched the narrative jump from the island time to flashbacks and flashforwards, and we've had to piece together events in order to make sense of the storyline and locate ourselves in relation to that storyline. This is just what the island characters are forced to do now; piece together out-of-order events to make sense of them, and locate themselves in relation to those events. In this way, the experiences of the watchers and the watched converge through the narrative; either the audience once again becomes a participant in the story, or the characters become participants in the audience experience-the two reflect each other, like mirror twins.
That disjointed and reconstructed experience of narrative time and island time recalls a theme hinted at through references like A Brief History of Time, A Wrinkle in Time, Black Holes & Time Warps, and Minkowski: Wormholes. The freighter Minkowski was a nod to the Polish mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who in 1907 worked out the mathematics for Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity (Minkowski was Einstein's professor). In his calculations, he found that the theory worked if three dimensional Euclidean space was expanded to include time as a fourth dimension. This meant that time wasn't just something we experienced, but that time occupied space like mass-time was part of space, spacetime. This also meant that just as all space is existing at once, so did all time, but just as we experience space in a mediated way — we can't be everywhere at once — we experience time in a mediated way.
A wormhole is a shortcut through spacetime to overcome this limitation, and could theoretically be created by utilizing something called the Casimir effect. Ostensibly, a wormhole could allow us to experience different places in time, just like we can take a plane to experience different places in space. Both Wormholes and the Casimir effect, as well as Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, have already been discussed in the Orchid orientation video and the first, eleventh, and last posts of the fourth season, so we'll save some space here. But we have all the ingredients to make one: Crazy electromagnetic properties? Check. Casimir effect? Check. An enormous source of energy? According to Dr. Marvin Candle in the Orchid, check.
So far, it seems wormholes have been used in two ways: First, both Ben and the polar bear that Charlotte found in the desert were transported across time and space to Tunisia. Second, Desmond and the island inhabitants are being transported through time, but are statically located on the island. We still have a lot to learn about wormholes, but Ms. Hawking's Foucault pendulum may hold a key (more on that later). For now, the one question is which came first, the electromagnetic anomaly or the Casimir effect.
Wormholes also have an analogue in narrative structure; what's a flashforward or a flashback if not a wormhole through narrative time? And like spacetime, narrative time exists all at once, but is experienced in a mediated way; you can't watch every scene in a film, or read every word in a book, at the same time. Narrative has long been returned to by those trying to model a theory of time. One of the more famous attempts is by Paul Ricoeur, who in the 1980's deliberated a theory of time in his three-volume Time and Narrative. And with that we jump down a wormhole about telling and time:
In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur considers how time is experienced by people as a general phenomenon, and explores its function in works by modernist writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, and Laurence Sterne (okay, Sterne isn't a modernist proper, but he was post-modern before there was a modern). Ricoeur eventually gets into the difference between cosmological time (time that's measured; minutes, hours, days) and phenomenological time (time as experienced; past, present, future). Those were often thought to be mutually exclusive, but Ricoeur argues that cosmological time can't be understood unless phenomenological time is already understood; the one needs the other. After all, if I didn't understand that past comes before present, I wouldn't understand that 3:30 AM on January 21 came before 3:30 PM. The phenomenon of time must be grasped before the measurement of time can be taken.
Of course time often feels warped and twisted in our everyday experience; twenty minutes of an insurance seminar will almost always last a lot longer than twenty minutes of sex. As such, Ricoeur suggests narrative is an appropriate model for how we experience time, and I'm going to suggest that the rules of time in Lost and the rules of narrative time reflect each other.
Even though a writer/director can play with narrative order and throw both the audience and the characters anywhere in time, the grammar of a narrative will always orient the audience in the correct temporal direction. In written work, that narrative grammar includes elements like verb tense, the length of scenes, narrator description, dialog, scenes echoing other scenes, and a book's worth of other elements. In film and television, they include audio cues like music changes and visual cues like cuts, the length of a take, setting, and another book's worth of elements. Narrative grammar isn't something we necessarily have to learn; rather, the grammar of narrative exists because our heads are already wired to interpret events in a particular way. We use this innate narrative grammar in concert with our innate understanding of phenomenological time to figure out cosmological time.
From this, we understand that Ben waking up in the desert in Tunisia took place long after Frogurt and his big red shirt were shot up with flaming arrows, even though Ben appeared in Tunisia some five episodes before Frogurt lost his damn mind on the island beach. The audience can be sent through narrative wormholes, just as the characters are tripping through time, and no matter where we end up, we can usually orient ourselves against the overall passage of time.
Something tells me this also has something to do with Daniel Faraday's rules of time: Time is like a street; you can move forward or in reverse, but you can't create a new street. Sawyer wants to take advantage of their flashes to warn Jack and the others away from the boat, but "If we try to do anything different, we will fail, every time. Whatever happened, happened." When Faraday tells Sawyer they can't stop the flashes and Sawyer asks "Then who can?", the shot cuts to a fallen, hapless Locke, and our narrative grammar has come into play again; maybe Locke can stop the flashes.
But we should be careful of believing every suggestion; after the Oceanic Six is found by Penny and they decide they have to lie, Hurley resists, and proclaims to Sayid that someday Sayid will need Hurley's help, and he won't get it. Of course Hurley goes well out of his way to help Sayid. The beer Frank brought up is called Jekyll Island Red Ale; it's a fake beer named after an island off the coast of Georgia, but it also recalls Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson's famous tale of science and dissociative identity, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Hurley wants to be a Hyde, but his Jekyll always wins, quite the opposite of Stevenson's Jekyll.
Faraday's time rules have more implications than just accounting for problematic paradoxes in the plot. For one, since all time is occurring at once as spacetime, that means the past, present and future are all already existent and coordinated. The universe (according to Faraday) is structured in such a way that Sawyer couldn't warn the Oceanic Six not to get on the boat because no matter what time they're in, the Oceanic Six are already getting on the boat. For another, if the Oceanic Six didn't get on the boat, Ben doesn't find Sayid in Tikrit after flashing forward to Tunisia, and our rules of narrative grammar and our understanding of time break. So in a real sense, the rules of time that Lost employs reflect both the way we experience time and the way we understand narrative.
This audience reorientation does take some work, though, as one has to become an active participant in the narrative in order to piece it together, just as the islanders have to actively work to piece together their experience. With its use of elements like the internet and alternate reality games, Lost brings the idea of active participation to a new level, but it's not entirely new. The Godfather was mentioned in "The Lie," but another film seems to prefigure some of Lost's participatory moves.
Orson Welles' circular epic Citizen Kane (1941) broke all kinds of new ground for telling a tale in a visual medium. Welles often noted he was looking for a way to invite the audience to actively participate while watching the film, and he along with screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz introduced a number of narrative grammar elements to accomplish this. For one, the film is built upon an intricate flashback edifice that prefigures something like Lost.
Welles also used highly-structured and geometrically-organized deep focus long shots that allow the audience to decide what was important in the shot at any given time. (Deep focus allows the audience to see everything in the shot clearly; usually, the camera focuses on the foreground, and the rest of the shot is out of focus.) This means that a number of other elements beyond character can be included in a shot as a way to comment on the action and/or the context. A television screen isn't as forgiving for intricate shots. However, in the age of the DVD, DVR and HD, this is less of a problem, and Lost has made great use of our access to technology in order to play with shot composition and invite us to actively participate.
Consider all the screen grabs of books, notes, media, and symbols available on the web; a large part of what we understand about the narrative comes from comparing such screen grabs. Just take this shot from "The Lie," which is composed almost like a still life, complete with fruit. Hurley sits contemplating with his hands folded in front of his face, and behind him, in the deep background, is a painting of the Virgin Mary in nearly the same position. Hurley looks like a painting as he sits at the table, and there is a painting behind Hurley in nearly the same position.
Shots like this call upon our use of narrative grammar in order to make the connections to other parts of the narrative; this one recalls both the Catholic symbolism that is found throughout Lost, as well as the way some paintings reflect what's going on in the overall storyline. Other connections include Hurley driving into the trash while helping Sayid, which mirrors the first episode of season four when Hurley ran his bitchin' Camaro into a pile of fruit. When we see Jack sweating through his shirt, we don't have to be told he's sweating out his pill addiction, much as Charlie had to sweat out his heroin addiction on the island. Ben's butcher shop number, 342, was the same as the price of premium at the gas station Hurley went to ($3.42). In the past, we've also seen background characters who looked eerily similar to main characters: in "Because You Left," Eric of the DHARMA Initiative could be Hurley's old friend Johnny, and one of the cops who staked out Hurley's house looked suspiciously like Matthew Abaddon with a goatee. The cop's face was also conveniently obscured in nearly every shot, heightening the effect.
And then there are the jump cuts that make use of our narrative grammar (whether we know we know it or not). In "The Lie," when Miles goes to find food and Juliet says they'll get the water, the cut moves to a shot of Hurley splashing water on the unconscious Sayid's face, linking the two scenes. When Hurley goes to the gas station and gets his "I Love My Shih-Tzu" shirt, Sayid is seen hanging his head in the car with sunglasses on; as Hurley drives out of the gas station, Kate drives in, and hangs her head in a similar way, with sunglasses on. Perhaps the strongest transition comes near the end: when Hurley is arrested, he is forced to his knees, shoved forward, and his hands are bound behind his back; when the the shot cuts, it cuts to Juliet and Sawyer being taken by the soldiers, forced to their knees, and shoved forward with their hands bound behind their backs. Whether we consciously recognize such visual elements or not, they shape the way we experience the narrative and reinforce its net-liked interlinked properties.
Hurley's house offers more than just Catholic symbolism; it provides a couple of other symbolic moments where narrative grammar is once again called into play. One of the more famous visual intersections occurs around the eight-spoked symbol: the station baguas, the frozen donkey wheel/dharmachakra, Juliet's brand on her back, the mark on the tree, in frames of ceilings and windows, and other places. When Hurley first brings Sayid into his house, this symbol can be seen in the wooden framing of the front doors, and looks very similar to the symbol marking the tree on the island.
Later on in the episode, when Ben tries to retrieve Hurley and Hurley runs, Ben stands outside in front of the open doors, and something else can be seen in that symbol.
That symbol is the intersection of two circles, and we've seen it before. In the season four episode "Eggtown," Locke gives Ben a copy of Philip K. Dick's book Valis, with the proviso "You might catch something you missed the second time around." (Hint hint.) The protagonist of the book, Horselover Fat, is shoved into a morass of speculative psycho-mystical-time-traveling-science-fiction headiness; he cannot tell whether he is losing his mind, his mind is being controlled by some other entity, or if he's broken through a barrier to consciousness and is seeing reality for what it is. His break is triggered when he sees a woman wearing a vesica piscis-a Jesus fish-around her neck.
The vesica piscis is associated with Jesus, and indeed fish are swimming all over the New Testament, but the symbol itself predates Christianity by quite a few hundred years. The symbol has been connected to the Greek goddess Aphrodite, the Syrian sea goddess Atargatis, and in ancient Egypt, the fish was often associated with Isis and Horus. (Gerald Massey gets into some of these connections in his book The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ.)
The symbol is also related to Pythagoras, the 5th century BCE Greek mathematical philosopher and Hermetic mystic. Famous for his right-angled triangle theorem (a2+b2=c2), Pythagoras was also a fan of the sacred number 153. The number has all kinds of nutty properties, too many to be enumerated here, but one is that it's a narcissistic number-that is, there are three digits; take each digit and since there are three overall, cube each digit (if there were two digits, square them, etc.); then add up the results of those cubes, and you get 153. So 13+53+33=153. That number is important to the vesica piscis.
Pythagoras taught that everything had a center, and a circle could be drawn around any center point. A single circle with a center was the monad, symbolic of the singularity, god, the number that gives rise to all other numbers. To get from a singularity to many (creation), the monad needed to be reflected-mirrored. When the monad is mirrored, it yields two circles sharing each other's centers, a figure called a dyad. The monad and its twin represent polarities, so if the monad is spirit, its twin is matter. The almond-shaped center of the intersection is a kind of passage through which spirit and matter are unified. This is where the Jesus fish comes in. If you take just the outline of that almond-shaped intersection and a little of the bottom of the respective circles (up to where the center point would cut off the line), you get the famous fish shape.
The width-to-height ratio of the fish symbol is 265:153, and there's the sacred number again. Take that ratio, 265 divided by 153, and you get a very near approximation of the square root of three, which Archimedes would use in developing his calculation of π. That becomes more important when we see Ms. Hawking's pendulum.
But first, there's more (there's always more): The Greek word for fish is ichthys, ΙΧΘΥΣ. This can also be read as a Greek acronym for Iēsous Khristos Theou Huios, Sōtēr, or ‘Jesus Christ God's son savior.' Early Christians used the symbol as an identifier long before the cross became the standard bearer (and doesn't the Greek word Iēsous bear a resemblance to the Egyptian word Isis?). Furthermore, if the Greek letters of the acronym, the ΙΧΘΥΣ, are stacked on top of one another, superimposed, the letters make the eight-spoked symbol. This was often represented with a circle around it (the monad?), and it looks a lot like a dharmachakra.
This may be a bit of a stretch, but when Ms. Hawking is working out her calculations on the chalkboard at the end of "The Lie," she adjusts one of her figures and writes something that looks similar to the Σ of Sōtēr, or savior:
This Pythagorean/Christian connection is also seen in the New Testament, John 21:1-14. In this story, some of Jesus's disciples go fishing, but the fish ain't biting. Jesus is on the shore and asks them what they got, and when they reply "bupkis," Jesus sends them back out. (They of course don't recognize him; the disciples are a little thick.) They toss the net back out and pull in a loaded net of 153 fish; since then, 153 has been known as the measure of the fish.
But compare that story to an earlier one: Pythagoras is walking along a shore, and some fisherman are just getting back with a loaded net. Pythagoras makes a bet with them; if he can guess the number of the fish, the fisherman will have to let the fish go (fish were sacred to Pythagoras). He guesses correctly, amazing everyone, and miraculously none of the fish die before they're returned to the sea.
A few days later, news of Pythagoras' trick had made it all around the town, so people started conglomerating around him, and he proceeds to offer up some ethical teachings. The story doesn't say how many fish were in the net, but many scholars note the similarities with the John story and the protagonists' roles-it's easy to guess there were 153 fish in the net of the Pythagoras story. That conflagration of Greek and Christian mysticism can be seen in moments like Ben reading Valis and in the background of Hurley's house when we see the symbol in the door.
This all leads us up to Ms. Hawking in her hatch-like lair and her pendulum. She uses the pendulum and computer to calculate where the island will appear next. (Does she have to touch metal to ground herself before using that old computer?) The question is, how is she calculating where the island will appear next, and what does that pendulum have to do with it? This brings us through Pythagoras and Archimedes to a more relatively recent physicist, and then up to an even more recent writer.
Léon Foucault was a 19th century French physicist who proved the rotation of the earth with a pendulum. In 1851 he hung a 28 kilogram bob on a wire inside the top of the Pantheon dome in Paris. The pendulum appeared to be at rest, but careful observation showed that it swung eleven degrees every hour, and made a full circle in just over 32 hours. The pendulum was slowly rotating with the rotation of the earth. It turns out if the experiment is done at the north or south poles, the pendulum completes a full circle in one day, while at the equator, it hardly moves at all.
The circle here is the key. Foucault's calculation showed that the pendulum rotated at an angle of -2π sin(ϕ). However, he could not work out the equation that demonstrated the mechanics of the pendulum, and how it demonstrated the rotation of the earth, without π, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter-Archimedes' constant.
In his two-volume book A History of Greek Mathematics (1921), Sir Thomas Heath demonstrates the steps of how Archimedes arrived at π:
"...and the calculation starts from a greater and lesser limit to the value of √3, which Archimedes assumes without remark as known, namely
265/153 < √3 < 1351/750.
How did Archimedes arrive at these particular approximations? No puzzle has exercised more fascination upon writers interested in the history of mathematics."
Heath then uses a healthy number of pages demonstrating how Archimedes arrived at that assumption and then got to π. Note the first part is the assumption is Pythagoras's ratio of the vesica piscis, the measure of the fish.
So we go from Pythagoras and his monad-dyad-vesica piscis to Archimedes and the development of π to Foucault and his calculation used to prove the rotation of the earth. Quick aside: It's interesting to note that Archimedes also discovered the principle of the lever, and with it showed how one could move enormous objects. He's famous for saying "Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth." I wonder if he could move an island.
It's seems Ms. Hawking isn't using her Foucault pendulum to calculate the rotation of the earth, unless the earth's rotation has something to do with where the island will pop up next. Since a Foucault pendulum has nothing to do with magnetic north or south, the island's exceptional electromagnetic properties would seem to not play a role. But lets work through some of our own assumptions:
- If the island is working with some kind of wormhole;
- and if a wormhole distorts spacetime;
- and the passage of time is in part calculated by the rotation of the earth;
- then perhaps the island flashes alter earth's rotation by giving a second here and taking one there, and those fluctuations show up in the chalking and calculations.
Perhaps.
Of course it doesn't stop there. Many readers, conspiracy theory buffs, and possible Sean Connery fans will also catch that Foucault's Pendulum is also the name of a novel by the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco. The book is structured into sections based on the Kabbala Tree of Life, and opens with a description of Leon Foucault's pendulum and "the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane's dimensions, the triadic beginnings of π, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself." Our ingredients are coming together again.
The plot follows two editors, Belbo, Diotallevi, and their friend Casaubon, who decide to forge a fake book of hidden knowledge by taking scraps of esoteric information and running them through a computer program. The program establishes links between the various stories, thereby revealing The Plan, or the Universal Plot of those who hold the secrets of the universe and use them to retain power over the world. The editors build the hoax in part off a story they heard from a scarred old soldier, Colonel Ardenti, who gave them his own take on the Knights Templar's arrest by the French King Philip IV in the 14th century.
"Suppose the Templars had a plan to conquer the world, and they knew the secret of an immense source of power, a secret whose preservation was worth the sacrifice of the whole Temple quarter in Paris, and of the commanderies scattered throughout the kingdom, also in Spain, Portugal, England, and Italy, the castles in the Holy Land, the monetary wealth-everything."
That secret knowledge, Colonel Ardenti says, was first established by Four Veiled Masters some 25,000 years ago. The pharaoh Ahmose collected the knowledge established the Great White Fraternity to guard the "antediluvian wisdom the Egyptians still retained." The colonel goes on:
"The Great White Fraternity was ultimately responsible for the education of: Hermes Trismegistus (who influenced the Italian Renaissance just as much as he later influenced Princeton gnosis), Homer, the Druids of Gaul, Solomon, Solon, Pythagoras, Plotinus, the Essenes, the Therapeutae, Joseph of Arimathea (who took the Grail to Europe), Alcuin, King Dagobert, Saint Thomas, Bacon, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Jakob Böhme, Debussy, Einstein. (Amparo whispered that he seemed to be missing only Nero, Cambronne, Geronimo, Pancho Villa, and Buster Keaton.)"
And maybe Archimedes and Richard Alpert. As the three develop their hoax, The Plan they devise consists of using maps and a Foucault pendulum to locate the Umbilicus Telluris, or Telluric Navel--the center of the world. From there, the Templars could control the weather, sink islands (like Atlantis), create tsunamis, anything. If the island is a kind of shifting Telluric Navel, maybe Ms. Hawking is taking her cues from The Plan in order to locate it.
However, the more the three work on their fake occult book of the Universal Plot, the more they start to believe they find outside evidence that confirms their fiction-they think they're actually discovering something real. It's a study in interpretation and overinterpretation, which is also the name of a book of essays by Eco. One line from that book says a lot about Foucault's Pendulum, conspiracy theories, and the rabbit hole of Lost theories: "Every time one thinks to have discovered a similarity, it will point to another similarity, in an endless progress. In a universe dominated by the logic of similarity (and cosmic sympathy), the interpreter has the right and the duty to suspect that what one believed to be the meaning of a sign is in fact a sign for a further meaning." Lost both invites such overinterpretation, models it, and frustrates it.
Eco's novel offers another model for Lost in its subversion of fictional limits. When the three find that they are experiencing what their fictional text depicts, the boundaries between fiction and reality are transversed. This is not unlike the characters of Lost working to puzzle together the scraps of information they can get, and how that mirrors the act of the audience forging their own theories and interpretations. It also recalls the island characters piecing together their experience after the flashes, and how that echoes the audience piecing together their experience of the narrative. In all of these cases, the narrative works to suggest that fiction and reality converge.
But what about that Umbilicus Telluris? Suppose that immense source of power Colonel Ardenti speaks of was an energy source; the Knights Templar of Eco's book start to take on a whiff of the DHARMA Initiative and the electromagnetically anomalous island. This raises the question of what the DHARMA Initiative would have done with the energy had they accessed it. One possibility is if they could actually create a wormhole, perhaps they could zip around in time and learn what they needed to do to alter the Valenzetti Equation, and possibly go back before the equation's terrible consequences occur and warn the past.
Of course they don't; that would break Faraday's rules of time. Perhaps they didn't understand those rules, but that raises another question-why was Faraday in the opening flashback of "Because You Left," wearing DHARMA coveralls and carrying a tank in the Orchid station? Was Faraday working with the DHARMA Initiative? He seems a bit young for that, but we are dealing with time travel. He shows Sawyer his journal of everything he learned about the DHARMA Initiative, suggesting he was infiltrating the group. We also know he got to the island on Charles Widmore's dime and boat. Perhaps Faraday learned that you can't create new streets in time by observing the DHARMA Initiative's failed efforts to manipulate the Valenzetti Equation. This is how he knows so much.
Perhaps.
Outside of all this pretzel logic, a Latino mother stands as a voice of common sense. In the season four finale, Hurley's family gives him a welcome home surprise party. Hurley hears whispering when he comes home and thinks someone has broken in, so he grabs a statue of Jesus to defend himself. When he's surprised by the party, his mother Carmen takes the statue and declares "Jesus Christ is not a weapon," a statement with a meaning that seems designed to stretch beyond its immediate context into the realm of maxim. In "The Lie," she confronts Hurley about his being accused of three murders, and manages another maxim: "The news thinks you did this, and if the news does, everyone does." That's interesting to consider in light of Widmore's faked Oceanic 815 recovery, or even how we deal with our own 24-hour manic news cycle.
Who do you think the attorneys are?
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A final Archimedes aside: In 1998 an old and ruined manuscript was auctioned off to an anonymous billionaire for $2 million. It was an old prayer book written down around 1200 CE. However, underneath the prayers was the washed-out text of a thousand-year-old manuscript of Archimedes. The monk had washed the pages clean and wrote over them, making it a palimpsest. The palimpsest showed up in Istanbul in the 1930's and was bought by a French family, thinking it was just a prayer book. In 1971 an Oxford classics professor, Nigel Wilson, found the book in the Cambridge library and recognized a page as part of a missing text of Archimedes. When it was identified as such, the French family sold it at auction, and the anonymous billionaire turned the text over to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for restoration. As the original text is slowly being restored, it shows that Archimedes was far beyond what we previously thought, and had his knowledge been available, it could have advanced civilization much farther much earlier. In a NOVA documentary about the text, Dr. Chris Rorres of the University of Pennsylvania proclaimed "We could have been on Mars today. We could have accomplished al the things that people are predicting for a century from now." It's a Lost and Eco-worthy story of hidden knowledge
Books mentioned in this post
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Great post!
Two random things that bothered me from this episode:
(1) Kate and Aaron visiting Sun at the hotel. She's staying on the 31st floor, and I couldn't figure out why they would mention the floor number if it wasn't one of "the numbers".
(2) Faraday's insistance that he has been studying Dharma for "his entire adult life".
Y'know the numbers had me thinking in this episode as well. I wonder if some random numbers are being thrown out that don't mean as much as we may think they mean (overinterpretation and all that). There's the floor Sun is on, the butcher shop number, the 70 hours, and probably some others.
But we've seen before when some extra books were mentioned or shown, and didn't have as much to do with the plot as people might have thought. That's what Foucault's Pendulum is all about -- seeing connections in every similarity, whether those connections exist or not.
Thanks for a great post, J!
I also couldn't help thinking it's sort of event horizon-y, to say the least, that the Oceanic 6-- as they obviously prepare to head back to the island-- are reverting to their old ways: Jack's sobering up, Kate's running again, Sun's lying again, Sayid's suspicious again, Hurley's a good guy again.
Great to see you back here, J. Blessings to you and your health. And may I say once again, we are not worthy. Awesome post.
I keep wondering about Charlotte's nosebleeds. She does not seem to be traveling through time in the same way that Desmond and other nosebleeders did... and none of the other lostie-survivors are bleeding with headaches.... And though Daniel seems concerned, why doesn't he tell her she needs a constant? And since they're traveling through spacetime together, why can't Dan be her constant? Or why isn't he?
Something going on with Charlotte... maybe it will be expounded upon.
I was struck to the large number of references to Catholicism in "The Lie." By my count in the Reyes' house there were 4 crosses, 1 crucifix, 2 paintings of Mary, possible depictions of the Virgin Mary on the red screen in the living room, the statute of Mary and Jesus on the table, and another statute on the table whose face we never see wearing dark green robes. I also thought it was extremely significant that Mrs. Hawking was making her calculations in basement of a Catholic Church. This got me thinking that maybe the Catholic Church is playing a large role in the search for the island. I believe Mrs. Hawking is working with some segment of the Catholic Church to locate the island. I also think it's possible that at least some portion of the Catholic Church has known about the existence of the island for some time.
This isn't as far fetched as it may sound. The Catholic Church is actually quite involved in scientific research. The Jesuits began building astronomical observatories in the 17th century and were the first western scientists to introduce western astronomy to India and China. According to a recent article in Discover Magazine titled "How to Teach Science to the Pope" the Catholic Church currently operates an observatory in Rome and another branch at the University of Arizona where they study dark matter, quasars, and the expansion of the universe. There is also an independent group of scientists called the Pontifical Academy of Sciences who advise the Catholic Church on scientific matters and their ethical implications. New members are chosen by the current scientific members based on their scientific achievements and high moral standards, regardless of their religious background. (They only want "good" people. This sounds familiar.) Over the years many Nobel laureates have belong to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Stephen Hawking is a current member.
Maybe some members of the Catholic Church discovered the island sometime during their far flung missionary work. They could have shipwrecked on the island or maybe learned of its existence from some of their Pacific Island converts. Or maybe Jesuit scientists noticed anomalies in the area of the island and have been studying and researching it since then. Many of the early Jesuits were Portuguese and there have been a number of Portuguese speakers on Lost. (The Ajira Airways logo also resembles the Jesuit seal, both contain a circle surrounded by flames). Maybe Mrs. Hawking is a scientist working with the Catholic Church to try to prevent whatever it is that will kill "every single one of us," as she tells Desmond in "Flashes Before Your Eyes."
From the photo on Brother Campbell's desk we know he is acquainted with Mrs. Hawking, who prevented Desmond from marrying Penny. Maybe this group working to save the world identified Desmond as very special years ago and knew that he must get to the island. He couldn't marry Ruth or Penny and still complete his important task. So they prevented both marriages. Desmond's story of why he left Ruth shortly before their wedding has always seemed strange to me.He tells her that he was drunk and wondering whether they should marry when he woke up on a sidewalk with Brother Campbell standing over him. He then joined the monastery. Maybe Brother Campbell knocked Desmond out by slipping something into his drink or shooting him with a tranquilizer dart, so that he would leave Ruth, join the monastery, and be able to do his very special work later. If Ben is working with the Catholic Church, it could explain why they are so interested in determining whether the survivors are "good people" and it would also explain why Ben thinks that he and his group are "the good guys."
Sorry for the long post, but I'd love to hear if anyone else thinks the Catholic Church may be involved in the search for the island.
Fascinating read -- your posts are more appreciated than ever!
Great catch and background on the symbols. That said, would love to hear your thoughts on the symbols seen on the floor behind Mrs. Hawking in this screencap...
http://getlostpodcast.iimmgg.com/image/25545df8f7acd9d0679ebc663e9b55ae
Between your literary take and my pal psychedelic relic's science/pseudo-science take, the depths of Lost amaze and astound me.
31 is the sum of the two middle numbers of The Numbers. Or it's just the top floor of a hotel elevator they could film in.
Oh, and interesting analysis, J. And my best wishes for your health.
To me, at least 50% of the fun of watching Lost is reading recaps, and realizing connections I didn't make while watching the episode. And 99% of the recaps' fun comes from your posts, Mr. Wood. I've been a regular reader since your posts were published on DarkUFO's blog (and when was that? Season 3?), and they never cease to amaze me.
I shall drop by with more meaningful comments in future posts, but I just had to say now that I am glad you're back and that I have only the best wishes to your health.
Still Life painting is all about Time - the decay of the fruit that serves as a memento mori - and I couldn't help but notice that it is dust that causes Candle's Willie Nelson record to skip (more decay). On the "Shotgun Willie" album is a song called "Devil in a Sleepin' Bag" which always conjures the image of Randall Flagg out on the road for me but I'm reminded of the very next album of his which is even more of a concept album -"Phases and Stages". It's a circular album with the "Phases and stages, circles and cycles" theme running throughout and two very Lostian songs - "Pretend I Never Happened" and "It's Not Supposed To Be That Way".
Those visual narrative links J. mentioned are similiar to those in Altman's aptly-named "Short Cuts".
Daniel seems to be taking on the role of another doctor - Jack - in relation to Sawyer, although as a physicist not a "real" one. He is like the Norman Bates corrupted mirror image of Sam Loomis - the symbolic hero.
Back to Flagg (a "Dark Tower" character as well): he attracts misfits drawn to destruction, so I wonder "Is Richard Alpert Randall Flagg?" And even more importantly, "Damn, Eco really nails it on my overinterpretation."
J. Wood, I am so glad your back to do the intellectual heavy lifting. I wish you well. Appreciated the reference to Sterne -- an all time fave.
In the butcher shop, ben asks jill how gabriel and jeffrey are doing. The lawyers, perhaps?
Any ideas on what the shiny gold instrument Daniel Faraday used to make his calculations about the island. It looked kind of ancient. Like mother like son?
Enenra -- nice post.
I'm never sure which I like better, the show LOST or your reviews. I do know the depth of your analysis provides me a justification for the crazy interest I have in LOST. I wish you all the best in your battle with MS. I have a question about whether you have considered the namesake of the Eddington Monastery, where Desmond and Penny met, and where Brother Campbell is seen photographed with Mrs. Hawkings, is important to the story line. Specifically, Eddington Scotland is a fictional place used by the LOST writers to call attention to the famous British physicist /cosmologist Sir Arthur Eddington who is known, et al, for his work on a cosmical constant (Desmond met his constant Penny at Eddington) , numerology (the numbers and Valenzetti (sic) equation, and treatises on the “philosophical harmony between scientific investigation and religious mysticism (man of Science/Man of Faith). Brother Campbell may well be a reference to astrophysicist William Wallace Campbell, who along with Eddington, performed several experiments confirming Einsteins theory of relativity and curved space time. Moreover, Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates are written down in Farrady’s notebook and are central to the understanding of black holes and wormholes upon which there is much speculation on its relation to time travel in LOST.
Eddington is also known for his “Arrow of Time” theory, and last nights episodes were replete with arrow references: arrow station video, flaming arrows, arrow signs during Hurley’s drive away from the safehouse, et al. Desmond David Hume was kicked out of Eddington’s monastery just like his namesake philosopher David Hume would have been kicked out of Eddington’s office for offering a contrary cosmological view to Eddington’s causal arrow of time. Other monastical references abound including the garb worn by Mrs. Hawking when she meets with Ben, the Monk like attire worn by Others at the funeral for Colleen—Picketts wife, and Jack and Desmond saying on different occasions “see you in anotha life brotha.”
I have no clue what direction LOST is going this season, but I do think there is more to Eddington Monastery and the Arrow station than meets the eye. Perhaps the theories of Eddington can provide a roadmap of how the writers are going to handle the time travel theme.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Eddington
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time
Thirteen is an unlucky number and generally isn't included in buildings. The 13th floor is given the number 14. Well, Sun looks like she's up to no good despite making peace with Kate. So, the 31 could be a reverse ominous symbol foreshadowing Sun's intentions. Does anyone else get the vibe Sun is EVIL now!?
Note that Robert Heinlein, the author of “Stranger in a Strange Land”, developed some characters whose “Time Corps” job was to preserve the “correct” Timelines - of which there were several. Their symbol was the ouroboros. Somewhere in “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls”, Heinlein describes entire worlds, complete with “fictional” characters that were actually “brought to life” through the imagination of their authors (including William Rice Burroughs.). Heinlein’s Good Guy Time Corps have an enemy (The Beast) - who’s trying to alter the timeline.
Brilliant post. Wonderful to have you back. I am really intrigued by your reference to Umberto Eco's work. (Mayhaps our Mr. Eko's nomenclature is an homage.) I'll need to read the work but I love idea that the island may be a floating Telluric Navel or at least perhaps Hawking, et al may believe it is such. Really interesting points you raise.
There was an episode where in the "real world," Flight 815 was found at the bottom of
the ocean with all of the passengers, dead. So my question is, how come no one in the
"real world" has questioned how, if it was previously announced that everyone on
Flight 815 was found dead at the bottom of an ocean, 6 people survived?
I can't remember the total # of passengers, but let's say there were 300 total. If
they found 300 at the bottom of the ocean, well, where does the Oceanic 6 come in?
Shouldn't they have only found 296 dead passengers?
How will the show explain this? Or have they already and I missed it.
Why would Charlotte mention her mother? Could it be someone we know? We see Faraday on the island in the 70's therefore could he know her mother? Could she be related to Faraday?
Thanks for the excellent analysis
Glad someone else thought one of those "cops" looked a lot like Matthew Abaddon. I strongly suspect we'll soon learn the people taking Hurley away were not cops at all.
A couple things that got my interest from the recap/preview show that ran before the season premier ... they were very careful to say that Sun thinks Jin is dead, not that he is. Could be a hint, or could just be a clever way to toy with all the viewers who really don't want him to be dead.
They also showed again, and even mentioned, the four-toed statue, the mystery of which has been haunting me for years now. None of what we know about the history of people on the island seems to fit with the building of a statute like that. It's always suggested to me there's a lot more to learn about the history of the island itself.
Oh and one final thing as it relates to time travel:
Locke kills three (?) Dharma people to save Juliet and Sawyer. If the past cannot be altered then that means Locke was meant to travel back through time and kill those people. What significance does their death have?
I wonder if other Dharmas find their dead comrades and have no rational conclusion other than to blame the "hostiles." Or are the other residents of the island even know to Dharma as "hostiles" prior to the killing? Could Locke be responsible for the conflict that ultimately leads to Ben's takeover of the island?
Thanks for another fine post. We'll go into tomorrow night's episode armed with new understanding.
The small statue on the table in the shot of Hurley might be St. Jude, Saint of the Impossible, and in legend, a cousin of Jesus. The repeated use of crucifixes and Sacred Heart images (even in the scene between Jack and Claire's mother last season)suggest to me that the characters are undergoing Passions of their own and suffering for some salvific purpose. The Marian image behind Hurley is the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a title emphasizing her pure love parallel to the Sacred Heart of Jesus symbolizing faithful love.
On a lighter note, notice that Jack is now using Sawyer's favorite cuss word but Sawyer was instantly ready to yield to save Juliet, unlike the first attack by the Others, in which he hesitated about saving Kate.
The new numbers may be a tease or we may be starting to get a new set of numbers to match the new situation of the Island. If the original ones are treated as coordinates on a map, they give a location in the South Seas or off the coast of West Africa, depending on whether latitude or longitude is placed first.
"though Daniel seems concerned, why doesn't he tell [Charlotte] she needs a constant? And since they're traveling through spacetime together, why can't Dan be her constant? Or why isn't he?"
I think that's precisely because they are travelling together: he is not constant but moving along; you need some firm anchor in the Present for a constant.
As for not telling her, maybe he does not want to worry her until he can no longer hide it from her; I suppose he hopes to find some way to put an end to the time shifts rapidly, before it's too late for Charlotte (and then he would not need to to tell her, or it would no longer be so alarming-- though she might resent not having been told).
in regards to the catholic themes rippling through lost i think it's also becoming more obvious that Hurley is being placed in a Jesus like role within the show. narratively it seems similar to the portrayal of a conflicted jesus in "The Last Temptation of Christ" as he struggles to assert his own morality. visually he's looking more and more like an obese jesus (at least how the west likes to imagine jesus looking). my bet is that he will in fact martyr himself to save all involved before the series is over.
Wow J, thank you very much for this thoughtful post. I’m an admirer of Ecco´s work and I was wondering for quite some time if you would mention it. I´ll re-read this post later and make some notes for the episode and the next to come.
Thanks again for taking time to share all this with us despite the health issues you have been experiencing, wish you all the best.
"They also showed again, and even mentioned, the four-toed statue, the mystery of which has been haunting me for years now. None of what we know about the history of people on the island seems to fit with the building of a statute like that. It's always suggested to me there's a lot more to learn about the history of the island itself." Matthew, I have always explained the four toed statue to myself by something my friend told me. She told me she read that our fifth toe is not needed and that we will one day evolved out of it. To me, the four toed statue was telling me that not only are objects from the past on the island (Black Rock), but also objects from the future (four toed statue). Giving me a clue early on that the island dips into all time. A very simple explaination of what people have explained in depth with math and science. I read and love your writing J., but I have not even a pinkys worth of your knowledge.
I'm sorry to say this, you are probably very intelligent and very good at analysing Lost, but what are you on about? pardon my stupidity...
Regarding Sun being on the 31st floor:
I think, and it's only my interpretation, that the significance is not the number itself. The parallel I noticed (right away) was Aaron wanting to "push the button." Then Kate repeating that phrase again and again after he does it. Alluding to Desmond/Kelvin/Locke/Eko pushing the button? Just a coincidence? Knowing LOST, I doubt it...
Brad, nice catch re Aaron "pushing the button"! I completely glazed over that.
Would love to know J and other's thoughts on similarities between dead-Christian being on the plane w/ the O6 (on 815) and coming to life(?) after crashing on the island, just as now, dead-Locke has to return w/ the O6 to the island (and will most likely come to life again??).
I also continue to see what seem to be two sides working on Locke (i.e. Eddie tells Locke he's a farmer, when Locke insists he's a hunter, but Eko tells Locke he's a hunter; Richard annoyed that young Locke chose the knife but Abaddon tells him to go on a walkabout w/ his "wits and a knife"). That said, if Hurley is to be the "saviour" (or will it be Desmond?), will Locke end up being a Judas? I've wondered this since the first episode of Lost!
I'm sure I miss 90% of what your posts are trying to say, but I do feel a better person for having read them. Thank you for sharing your time, thought and intellect. It's truly inspiring.
J,
Excellent read and it lead me to reading alot more about Archimedes. My conclusion to these first episodes is that Ms. Hawking is Faraday's mother and she used him to spy/study on the Dharhma. Desmond will soon find that out when he eventually goes to Oxford. Remember the photo of Ms. Hawking w/ the monk @ Oxford? Thanks for continuing to elevate your writing and theories. I wish you a healthy recovery.
Good call with the Catholic speculation. It does seem to be very important, though before this season maybe it wouldn't have. But J. did mention the Knights of the Templar, and now we're speculating on Catholic and Jesuit involvement, and some sort of secret knowledge of the island and its powers.... very interesting. Thanks for posting it; sorry I don't have anything to add, being protestant. ;)
Thank you J. Brilliant as always.
Sosolost. I have a detailed theory relating to Christian and Locke being dead....and un-dead. Give it a read: http://theoriesonlost.blogspot.com/2008/05/dead-and-un-dead-look-at-christianyemi.html?showComment=1211061540000
Wow, I can actually point out a mistake you may have made! You refer to Emberto Eco and fans of Sean Connery. Were you mistakenly thinking of Connery in the movie of another of Eco's book "Name of the Rose"? Hah! Got you! (I'm just being silly and pointing out an insignificant movie "mistake" because your post is so brilliant and I could not begin to challenge you regarding your knowledge of literature, science, and religion. thanks.)
Glad to see you bringing up Sterne. Speaking of wacky causation and jumbled time-lines, did you ever read Melvyn New's essay describing Proust's influence on Sterne?
Hey J! YEAHHHHH! The episode isn't over til I read your thoughts. So glad the Philip K. Dick has stuck around with you too since his first introduction.
Hey, for now, I'm just going to leave a little thought. Because Faraday's first moment in this episode under the Orchid Station got me so excited and ready. In a way with the narrative, we are being told, "Oh boy, they are there! Our Losties are now at the start of all of this in time, and something big is going to go down...but first you need to catch up!"
But my thought goes to Faraday and his journal. When we first see "If anything happens, Desmond will be my constant" in his journal. He seemed rather bemused by it at the time, looking off into the distance, smiling, pondering. So what if that was the first time Faraday read that?
What if the book is from Faraday's future? Given to Faraday by older Faraday with instructions to only read it as you go, so you don't know too much before it happens. Is he standing on his own shoulders?
Hey, great recap!
Btw, talking of the icythys symbol. I just found this pic of Daniel Faraday writing on the blackboard and guess what symbol is at the top left of the blackboard? : http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-pGkeGjJTvs/SX9j1IrNaQI/AAAAAAAAHRI/m8t1ZT_KnpE/s1600-h/danielchalkboard.jpg
Anyway, I just wanted to let you know also, that Horselover Fat's 'awakening' or whatever you want to call it, is autobiographical, in that Dick also had an epiphany while seeing the Christian 'fish' symbol on a girl's neck, while all doped up on methadone, I think it was.
Has it been established that months on the island would be just a few days in the real world? Or was it the other way around? If island time moves faster then has Ben been aging in dog years? Lets for example say Miles (hypothetically) was born before Ben in island world, left and aged in the world, while Ben, born in the real world aged in the island world; would Ben be older?
Does everyone think that Candle's baby (and/or wife) died in the purge?
In any case, thanks for the post J...have you ever thought about starting your own university?
I went and checked out Eco's Foucault's Pendulum from the library after reading about it on The Fuselage (and I thank you for a far more succinct synopsis than offered there - unfortunately, I could only get like 4 pages into it before I gave up because it's a very hard -- and REALLY long -- read) -- anyway, right there next to it on the shelf is another of Eco's books - get this - "The Island of the Day Before" - also like 500 pages - the inside flap of which says, "After a violent storm in the South Pacific (the year is 1643), Roberto della Griva finds himself shipwrecked--on a ship. Swept from the Amaryllis, he has managed to pull himself aboard the Daphne, anchored in the bay of a beautiful island. The ship is fully provisioned, he discovers, but the crew is missing. As Roberto explores the different cabinets in the hold, he remembers chapters from his youth: [lists a few]... that meaningless chess move... in which he lost his father and his illusions; the Aristotelian metaphor-machine of Padre Emanuele." It goes on to say, "In this fascinating, lyrical tale, Umberto Eco tells of an international race to establish the Punto Fijo; of a young dreamer searching for love and meaning; and of a most amazing old Jesuit who, with his clocks and maps, has plumbed the secrets of longitudes, he four moons of Jupiter, and the Flood."
Cool, yes? Or is this one more connection that seems a connection but isn't?
Thanks again, J., for treating Lost like literature. I wish you the best in your health battle. Namaste.
I think Faraday is not explaining the nosebleeds to Charlotte because of his rule - "Time is like a street; you can move forward or in reverse, but you can't create a new street." It's possible he has already seen the outcome of Charlotte's nosebleeds if he has in fact been "unstuck" in time before. (His statement about his lifelong study of the Dharma initiative and the beginning scenes of this season's opener point to previous time travel for Faraday.)
Matthew - I love your idea that Locke's shooting the 3 Dharmas might have started the fight between them and the Hostiles. No new "time streets" were made!
Lisa - I love your theory about the 4-toed statue. That statue has been bothering me too, but I always attributed it to the past vs. the future. Very interesting indeed!
J - I feel smarter just by knowing you exist. Thanks for yet another mindbender.
Here's my hypothesis for all to chew on...your feedback is greatly appreciated!
Ben and Widmore are united in a quest for SURVIVAL, but divided by their interpretations of the word.
Ben, Hawking, Alpert, and Locke are attempting a “course correction” by sending the Oceanic 6 back to the Island. Somehow the Oceanic 6 (and/or Desmond) were powerful enough to disrupt the predestined cycle of time, which has thrown the Island off balance. If the “record continues to skip”, Ben and company fear it will leave a scratch or “create a new street” that will result in the end of time (cyclical), or the destruction of existence as a whole.
Widmore (and, out of vengeance, Sun) may attempt to stop the Oceanic 6 from returning to the Island, or Widmore may use Sun to get him and/or his people to the Island to pick up where the Dharma Initiative left off…trying to defy the Valenzetti equation. Widmore and company want the "record to skip" in order to create a new course that prevents the destruction of mankind. What Widmore and friends don't realize is that if time is cyclical, death need not be feared because you always exist in some form - past, present, and future.
"Everywhere you look," Dale says, "there are these terrifically finely adjusted constants that have to be just what they are, or there wouldn't be a world we could recognize, and there's no intrinsic reason for those constants to be what they are except to say God made them that way."
John Updike "Roger's Version" (a novel about finding God through a computer).
Excellent post.
A minor editing detail: where you say "that conflagration of Greek and Christian mysticism" perhaps "conflation" is meant.
My mind is spinning... Foucault's Pendule is one of my all time favourite novels and the job you did with this review is just wonderfull. You got straight to the point!
I love the statue theory..what the hell are humans going to involve into? Interesting thing to explore I suppose.
Trouble though, has anyone actually time traveled past whatever their frame of the present is? Has anyone really been to the future? If not, why not?
Two things from these episodes struck me as more than passing strange. First, how would Miles Straum know that Widmore had been looking for the island for 20 years, and is this significant?
Secondly, when Faraday asked Sawyer if anyone was missing (because they needed to follow Juliet to something man-made before the next flash), he mentioned Locke. Um, Claire? Strange to me that she seems to be gone AND forgotten...
Wasn't there a comment made awhile back that it would be interesting to see if Juilet loses a hand based on some such mythology? Does anyone remember the details of this? It seemed an odd thing for the (possibly) Widemore army man "Jones" to say as proof of his intent to get info.
Side note: been watching episodes of "The Prisoner" (1960s version) on amctv.com. Nice companion to "Lost".
Perhaps the best post I have read anywhere on these episodes. Thank you, J.
Two things bothered me about these shows that I haven't heard mentioned: We know that in later Island time there is a Frogurt who did not appear ever to be a "crispy critter" from flaming arrows. If we go on the premise that no new "streams" can be created, how is this consistent? Likewise, the same applies to Charlotte and her nosebleeds. If in later Island time she is OK, off-island, and comes back via Widmore's boat, then one would think Daniel would not in fact be worried at all about her state and survival.
This may open the possibility that Daniel does indeed find the correct headings to somehow get her off the island to "save" her. But wouldn't he know that in this time frame where the Island is "skipping"?
Thanks to everyone for your comments and enhancing my appreciation of LOST. My favorite TV show EVER!
I'm glad I wasn't the only one to flash onto "Foucault's Pendulum" when I saw Ms Hawking's in "The Lie." As DTinSF points out in a previous comment, yes the next novel by Eco is titled "The Island Of The Day Before." Without dealing another overinterpretation, yes this a novel about a man who is mysteriously shipwreck near a South Sea Island but there are other echoes of "Lost" in it. For one thing the protagonist believes that everything that has happened to him has been the fault of his evil twin! The 'evil twin' conceit shows up in the fake-Lost novel, "Bad Twin," but also through the numerous references such as the white and black backgammon tiles to the yin-yang lines of the Dharma symbol. While it has been awhile since I last read "The Island Of The Day Before" I do remember that it was a challenging read because it dealt with theories of time, hence the title. The ship crashed near an Island on the international dateline, so the protagonist was philosophically confused about whether he was exisiting in the present, past or the future - this might seem odd to modern day readers but this book was set in the 1700 when concepts like this were as daring as our notions of wormholes. I remember that the protagonist was trying to determine longitude through rather psychic methods. If memory serves me correctly I believe he had two rabbits one back in Greenwich, England and the other onboard the ship and there was an unhealed wound that linked the two so he could tell what time it was. While this might be an instance of overinterpretation, I do believe there are echoes here that might be worth investigating. It certainly makes me want to go back and reread each book.
Matthew: Locke kills three Dharma people? When? At the end of The Lie we see him stab *one* guy in a soldier's outfit. We have no idea if we are even in the period when Dharma was on the island when this flash occurs. Not everyone is a uniform works for Dharma. Looks like an army outfit to me.
I doubt if the pattern on the door to Hurley's house is symbolic of anything. It's just the door on the house they for shooting. The house that they usually use for Hurley's was not available so they came up with this one on short notice. Sometimes a door is just a door. :)
Enenra: As for the number of Catholic references in Hurley's house, that is what you would expect to find in the house of someone who had the religious and ethnic background of Hurley. And who had bad taste. Chalk that up to decorating. You can't count the number of crosses. The fact that Hurley's mother is Catholic is one instance of Catholicism not many.
"but I'd love to hear if anyone else thinks the Catholic Church may be involved in the search for the island."
No, that would be too derivative of several recent best sellers. There are just as many references to other religions in the show, you just won't find them in Hurley's house. I think some of the people involved in the off island activities are hiding in the shadow of the Catholic Church. Was the order of monks Desmond belonged too any real order of a Christian church or was it a cover for Ben and friends?
I was surprised to see that Ben had lit a candle in the church while waiting. Covering all his basis was he? And for Ms. Hawking to be laying what looked like an altar cloth while she talked to him.
Whatever she is Ms. Hawking is employed in that church. I love how at the start of the scene we see a monkish figure at work at an old computer and writing on an old fashioned chalk board (how I hated those!). Another carefully composed scene for the camera. Then the figure climbs up back into the light and we see it is just Ms. Hawking with a shawl around her head. Not what we thought at all. But the scene harkens back to Desmond in the monastery way back in season 3 and I think is meant to remind us of Ms Hawking's acquaintance with Brother Campbell.
The Foucault pendulum in the church basement measures the earth's rotation and the equations on Ms. Hawking's board are probability equations.
New episode in just 8 hours!
i think miles was the baby crying in the crib at the beginning. the leader of dharma, his son. just an idea...
Okay, it's just after 9:00 and most people are probably already watching the next episode. I just finished screening Touch of Evil to 130 undergrads, and wanted to get a few responses out before the next post.
James B: I need to check back into Arthur Eddington. I don't know off-hand if he was mentioned in these pages before, but I've come across his name (more on that in the response to Giospurs). He built on Karl Schwarszchild's work, and I'm still finding out about this, but a particular kind of wormhole is named for Schwarszchild. Those are the kind that are supposed to allow you to transverse space, but the problem is they'd close as soon as they're made. That got Kip Thorne thinking about some substance that would hold the throat of the wormhole open -- an exotic substance with negative gravity. That's a great find, James B.
The Others: In the season four episode "Confirmed Dead," it was presumed that all on board Oceanic 815 were dead because the plane was so deep and recovery impossible. (And didn't we get a good underwater remote camera shot of the body of the pilot?) But there was no evidence they were dead.
Olivier: On Faraday being Charlotte's constant -- that sounds pretty reasonable. Just as long as Faraday remembers it.
leviathan1: Way back in the season two episode "Fire + Water," Hurley was seen as Jesus in Charlie's dream.
sosolost: The hunter/farmer theme is interesting. That's the basis for the Cain and Abel story (and there's a great reading of that story as an allegory for the rise of agricultural society against hunter-gatherer society). It's also a basis for the Gilgamesh and Enkidu story -- except Gilgamesh doesn't kill Enkidu. We've already seen Gilgamesh in the crossword clue, and Juliet's mark (mark of a murderer -- Cain's mark). What's interesting is the two types are being conflated in Locke.
cpt: Yeah, when I wrote Connery down, I was thinking of my friend Jim, who loved Connery as 007. We saw The Name of the Rose when we were younger, and then went straight for the book. That led him into Eco, and the last Eco book I saw him read was Foucault's Pendulum. If it weren't for Showtime, he might never had read it.
Phutatorius: I haven't read New's essay, but it's now sitting on my desktop. Anachronistic influence also sounds a little like Flann O'Brien's idea in 'At Swim-Two-Birds,' where fictional characters live alongside their writer, and don't have any free will except when the writer is asleep (so they work to keep him drunk and asleep). O'Brien wrote James Joyce as a character influenced by him in one of his later books.
Brian: So let me get this straight -- Faraday's book of notes was given to him by his future self?
Giospurs: That symbol Faraday has on the chalk board, the α, that's an alpha, and it's used to represent a constant in mathematics. However, I don't know if the letter is related at all to the symbol. As for PKD and his real-life divergence, Robert Crumb did a great little comic on that; it's a available on the web if you google for it. It's a fascinating story; PKD is the difference between someone who knows some powerful entity isn't speaking to him and someone who thinks god has told him he's the next messiah. PKD just always remained interested but skeptical.
RandomCrackPotLostTheories: I'm still wondering how Candle's baby came to term on the island.
DTinSF: The first chapter of Foucault's Pendulum is tough going, but it lightens after that and turns into a more of a conspiracy mystery. I'm actually going through the audiobook now and trying to read along (eyes permitting -- kind of retraining myself to read). It works well that way. You can think of that dense beginning as a kind of overture laying out all kinds of themes that will be toyed with throughout the book. The Island of the Day Before also points back to major themes in The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum; it seems too close to Lost to ignore, but I'm always cautious with that -- if there's some direct evidence someone sees (beyond just thematic parallels), let's hear it.
Montand's Arm: Riffing on your course correction, idea: A scratch in a record makes it skip. That scratch also creates a kind of "new street", a short-cut around the groove -- a wormole of a kind. I'm not sure time can be retroactively changed; it introduces certain paradoxes that the parallel universe theory in physics is now addressing, but I'm no expert. (It's one of a few tings I just can't get enough of in general -- same with neanderthals.)
pat: yep, I meant conflation. I got it right in this comment.
LostAddict: I'm not sure where Frogurt is shown in the future, but we also don't really know what part of time they flashed to when he's flame bait. Do we? That's probably worth plotting out, when they flashed to.
Maureen: The one thing I know about sets, be it TV or film, is that nothing on a set is accidental. That house most likely isn't even real. But if we look back in Lost, there are constantly things in the background that are meaningful, like some of the other paintings. Given that we've seen that 8-spoked symbol I don't know how many times (I have a collection of screen grabs), I'm going to hedge and claim that if they're showing any 8-spoked symbols at this point, especially ones that point back to books they've shown, it's probably on purpose.
confused: question? If you're new to this board, we're looking at the books, writers, philosophers, films, symbols, myths, etc. used in Lost, and discussing how it might relate to this labyrinth of a narrative. If you're not new, then what am I on about?
Ok, after watching tonight's episode, I have added more fuel to my "record scratch" theory explained in the last post.
Note: If you haven't seen the 1/28 episode, then here's your warning...SPOILER ALERT!
Tonight we learned that Charles Widmore was once an Other on the Island when the Others were led by Richard Alpert (circa 1954). From his actions in tonight’s episode, it appears that while he was an Other Widmore disagreed with Alpert’s decisions. Widmore may have broken from the Others because he lost faith in Alpert’s leadership. Widmore could have demanded explanations for Alpert’s actions, which Alpert would be unable to provide other than to reassure Widmore to “have faith”. Even if Alpert told Widmore about Jacob, Widmore might not have been able to see Jacob for himself. This loss of faith could have driven Widmore to pursue scientific explanations for the Island’s powers, leading him down the path toward funding the Dharma Initiative and Faraday’s research.
P.S. Stacy - I was wondering the same thing about Miles, especially since he can "see dead people" and that talent seems to be reserved for past and present Island inhabitants.
Quickly-
Charlotte is in desperate need of her constant, but fortunately, this is not her first time on the island (C.S. Lewis and the return to Narnia in "Prince Caspian"). I think her constant is there/was there/will be there at some point in time, and I think it likely Daniel will figure out who it is and how to reunite them, which may be a challenge with the time shift. The more time shifts the further Charlotte deteriorates, so Daniel will have to quickly identify any pattern in the shifts. That's more likely than getting Charlotte off the island.
The attorneys want to remove Aaron from Kate to prevent the O6 from returning to the island, and therefore have been sent by Widmore.
Another post about tonight's episode...
I just have to get my "other 'Other' Woman" speculation off my chest, so here goes (thank you for humoring me):
Daniel Faraday appears to recognize one of the Others (circa 1954) – a female who bears a striking resemblance to Theresa Spencer, a woman lying in a hospital bed seemingly incapacitated. Theresa’s medical care is being paid for by Widmore, yet Widmore also funded Faraday’s research which is said to be to blame for Theresa’s condition. If the Other woman is Theresa Spencer, Faraday may have been trying to use his scientific discoveries to help her return to the Island when his efforts backfired and she became injured.
Another interesting point about this bedridden woman is that her name is Theresa. Remember Locke’s dream of Boone repeating “Theresa falls up the stairs, Theresa falls down the stairs”? Coincidence? Maybe it is just a red herring. If you recall, Boone later tells Locke that Theresa was the name of his childhood nanny who he believed he caused to fall to her death in his family home.
The Other woman Faraday recognizes also looks a lot like Juliet. There was a painting in Ben’s house on the Island that also resembled Juliet…or was the painting of this Other woman? It was suggested by a fellow blogger that the painting in Ben’s house was not of Juliet, but of Annie – Ben’s childhood love/friend. If this Other woman is Ben’s love, how would Faraday recognize her…unless he had been studying Ben’s life as part of his freighter mission. Another complication would be the age difference. Annie and Ben are both shown as children before the Purge, which likely took place in the 1970’s, as that is approximately the time when Ben arrives on the Island with his father. Island time does move at a different rate, and Richard Alpert never ages...so anything is possible (which any LOST fan knows only too well), but this theory seems rather unlikely. Maybe the Other woman is Annie’s mom? Who knows. Again, it seems like we’d be grasping at straws.
Another explanation for Faraday’s “Other woman” déjà vu might be that the woman is actually HIS mother. If both Widmore and this Other woman were on the Island together in 1954, they could have had a relationship. We know Widmore left the Island at some point. Maybe he left with the woman because she was pregnant and he didn’t want her to die (providing this Island side effect was known at the time). She would have had to give birth to Daniel off-Island. If so, she is likely still off-Island and around the same age as Widmore…and therefore might be Ms. Hawking? It would make sense, as Widmore tells Desmond that Faraday’s mother is in L.A. and we know Ms. Hawking is helping Ben, who is in L.A. trying to round up the Oceanic 6.
What are your thoughts, peeps?
Welp, the new episode was tonight. Seems to confirm most of this VALIS stuff. All the others are speaking Latin. "Language of the enlightened"
St. Augustine saw significance in the number 153 that may not have any relevance to Lost, but here goes:
So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three of them; and although there were so many, the net was not torn. (Jn 21:11)
Why did St. John record the exact number? St. Augustine rightly observed its significance. 153 is the triangular of 17. That means that if you add all the numbers decreasing from 17, you get 153. That is to say, 17 + 16 + 15 + 14 +13 + 12 + 10 + ... + 1 = 153.
What is the significance of the number 17? The number was a sign. St. John has a special love for the number 17. The 12 extra baskets of bread from the five barley loaves adds up to 17. (St. Augustine said that it represented the gifts of the Old and New Covenant - the Ten Commandments and the Sevenfold Spirit.)
Seventeen is also the age at which Joseph was sold into Egyptian slavery (Gen 37:2) and the Patriarch lived in Egypt for seventeen years (Gen 47:28). The Book of Acts lists seventeen nations present for Pentecost (Acts 2:7-11). Seventeen seems to be number of the nations, just as seventy also serves as the number of the nations (cf. Gen 10).
10 x 7 = 70
10 + 7 = 17
Peter's catch of 153 seems to indicate the superabundance of the ingathering of the nations. A sort of "wink wink" for the reader who is in the know.
153 also is a "magic number." Not only is it the triangular of 17, the Pythagoreans believed the number to be unique. 153 is the sum of the cubes of its own digits (1x1x1 + 5x5x5 + 3x3x3 = 153).
Nothing to do with your always-brilliant analysis of LOST. It's about your MS diagnosis. It's a long shot, but perhaps you should have your doctor test you for Lyme Disease. Lyme Disease can present the same symptoms as MS and other diseases. The author Amy Tan struggled with what was diagnosed as fibromyalgia, schizophrenia, etc., and it all turned out to be the result of Lyme Disease. Not all victims of Lyme Disease present with the bulls-eye skin mark. She is an advocate of more testing for Lyme Disease as a result of being victimized by the medical profession for many years.
Well, after last nights ep, I'm not so sure of my Faraday's notebook was given to past Faraday by future Faraday. I like the theory tho. Not sure I want to give up on it quite yet.
But some items in this show are, I dunno, Island-Born? I don't know if there is a term for an item that is created due to time-paradoxes, but for instance, the compass. Where did it come from? 2008ish Richard gave it to 2008ish Lock to give to 1954ish Richard, who showed it to oh 1959ish Lock-as-a-kid, Lock lets Richard down (by choosing knife) Richard keeps the compass, and---loop back to Richard gives it to Lock in 2008ish.
The compass has no start.
Great post, as usual. I always look forward to your insights and interpretations. You connect a lot of dots for me--some that I saw, most that I didn't.
"Jesus Christ is not a weapon." But, perhaps He can be a solution. I'll be praying for your continued health, and a cure for this disease.
Montand's Arm: I think Ellie (from the 1/28 episode) is Eloise Hawking, aka Ms. Hawking, and is Faraday's mom. Faraday seemed to recognize her. Maybe he didn't know his mom had ever been on the island, so didn't think it was her. Or, he did know, and did recognize her as his mom, but couldn't tell her who he was. He obviously didn't want to tell her that he was from the future, but let it slip out anyway.
Another comment, but this is related to LOST. The Others are speaking Latin because the original inhabitants of the island or first outsiders to find the island were Roman. The Romans were out there conquering the world, including an island called Great Britain. I believe we'll find a Roman connection in more than Latin, a "dead" language. Ah.
Roy Batty: "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." Blade Runner
One final thought -- could Farraday be Charlotte's father? There are a lot of plotlines revolving around bad fathers versus good fathers.
I just can't stay away. There's a possible source for the name Spencer coming up in the 3rd episode, Jughead (Theresa and Abigail Spencer).
Herbert Spencer was an English sociologist who coined the phrase survival of the fittest.
http://www.todayinsci.com/S/Spencer_Herbert/SpencerHerbert-Quotations.htm
LostAddict - in Frogurt's case, my friend pointed out to me that if I time traveled back to say the 50's and was killed, I'd still be born in the 60's (dating myself there). So no present day event has been altered. (That reminded me of Star Trek IV when Kirk had to sell his Benjamin Franklin glasses in 1980's San Francisco, he wasn't worried cause he knew he would get them back again in the future.) Anyway, I thought that meant Frogurt wouldn't really die and could live to be an old man, but my friend assures me that Frogurt will not live much past the turn of the donkey wheel, cause at that point he's now been killed in the past, and you can't change past events. My brain hurts.
Oh, btw, to J, even though I comprehend none of the higher mathmathics and genius level concepts, it's a great read and wonderfully thought provoking. Thank you for your insight, and those of your commenters too.
"LOST" is an E.L.E. KISS OFF
Wow, what a great blog. But if the "LOST" writers were half as smart as the script analysts one finds in these "LOST" blogs, the series wouldn't have lasted this long because Frankly the average audience would be totally lost by now.
K.I.S.S. and Tell: To help US understand "LOST", consider the time pressure that JJ and the gang were under to develop the series; ABC gave them less than two months to come up with the storyline.
K.I.S.S. Keep it simple, stupid. JJ said he learned his lesson with "Alias" and has tried to avoid convoluted story arcs. Also, consider JJ's style of homage/derivative screenwriting, such as MI-3 and ARMAGEDDON. Think of "LOST" as "DEEP IMPACT FROM INSIDE", an E.L.E.
E.L.E.: At this point we know from Dr. Chang that the island's power comes from a very dangerous energy source deep below the Orchid. Then Sexy "Elle" shows Daniel Faraday the ultimate story changer: there is a "LOST" H-bomb, "Jughead", that apparently is now "safely" contained deep in the earth or covered with concrete. (which reminds me of "lost" h-bomb off the coast of Georgia, which reminds me of the crossbones on the label of the Jekyll Island (which is off the Georgia coast) beer that Frank Lapidus was drinking on the Searcher.)
The worst (suit)case scenario: If something were to trigger "Jughead", then the dangerous energy source could be released, which could possibly cause an event that could cause a mass extiction of man...and Jacob. Suppose that something was a suitcase fusion nuke that was smuggled by terrorists on flight 815 and it was ticking. Then it makes sense for the OC-6 to get back to the island or they will all be "LOST".
I'm going to add my "WOW" to your comment section after reading your post! I loved it...love the history of all the signs and symbols we see all the time in LOST. Thanks for doing all that work, it makes LOST that much more fun (if that can be possible!)
If Mrs. Hawking is "Eloise," does that make Brother Campbell Abelard? Then Daniel would be their son Astrolabe. (Honest, folks, the medieval Heloise and Abelard had a son named Astrolabe.)
I lean towards Charlotte being Daniel's daughter rather than romantic interest.
But why would the US Army "forget" dead soldiers and a lost H-bomb? Has that part of the past been changed?
I know this has to have been mentioned before, but can someone explain the different time points? In season two, I am assuming that the Button was there to keep it stuck in time, or in a time that they knew. The plane crashed when desmond didn't press the button, so I assume that is one time travel, and then the Light at the end of the season when he hits the failsafe key. Why didn't they keep jumping around after that happened? Thoughts?
Did someone in the 1/28 episode say the other 'Other' woman's name? How did I miss that? My nose is bleeding...
Extraordinary analysis as always. It's a always a treat to come to Powells.com and get your take on each episode.
Food for thought on the MS diagnosis -- studies are showing more and more the effects that food sensitivities can have on our bodies. Foods can cause problems over time that affect individuals differently. Wheat, milk, sugar, and corn are common culprits. Anything you crave is a likely candidate. There are stories of people who have eliminated various foods such as corn in all forms from their diet and gone into remission from RA and other diseases. The ELISA test or the Cell Reactive Test can be taken to pinpoint your problems foods or an elimination diet for 3 or so weeks to see if symptoms improve. Aspertame is something you would want to eliminate for sure as it can cause MS like symptoms. If interested I'm sure you can find many books with more information. Best wishes on your journey.
For the record, I didn't write the discussion of the 153 fish above. It comes from .
As long as the donkey wheel is stationary, the Island doesn't move in time, but once it's turned, There Are Consequences.
Love the blog/all the theories/all the comments....
Question: Will all of your entries be posted on Monday's regardless of when you turn them in for publication? I've been clicking over like 15 times a day waiting for the latest one to appear but with no luck.
Hi folks,
My take on Widmore:
At some point in the 1950s, Widmore was appointed leader of the Others by Jacob/Richard, or Puffing Billy for that matter. He reigned over the island for years until the Purge, when, for some reason the island had to be moved, and I'm guessing Widmore was the one who had to move it (that's the reason he can't go back to the island"). That's also the reason he said "the island was mine, Benjamin. Everything you have you took it from me."
I think there is a lot more to be read into the fact that the others speak Latin, a dead language. I'm buying into that "language of the enlightenment" explanation.
I also would like to see the flashes from the past inhabitants' perspective: Locke, Daniel, Charlotte, etc...just vanished int thin air right in front of their eyes??
A thought on Latin: also a "Catholic" language, is it not?
I meant "I'm NOT buying into that language of the enlightenment explanation". One more thing about the Catholic symbolism (this one in Jughead): Latin is the official language of the Papacy and the mass was said in Latin until the "changes" of the Vatican Council II in 1962. I don't know about the Catholic Church being involved in the search of the island, but could it be that the first leaders of the Others was an excommunicated priest?
Quick thought - I think Desmond may have to end up returning to the island so that he can fix the problem he caused - i.e. Kept saving Charlie until Charlie lived long enough to undo the communications block thus allowing the freighter to get to the island and cause the island to be "visible".
No, I have no idea how he'll work himself into the skipping time fray the island (or just those on the island) are experiencing.
I'm looking forward to how mrs. Hawking is going to react when she sees him. She and ben are working hard to get the O6 back but they've not mentioned Desmond at all (and, as mentioned above, their leaving the island and crashing onto the island for that matter can be attribute to Desmond).
J, I look forward to reading your posts almost as much as I look forward to watching each new episode. While I may not always completely grasp everything you "are on about", your analysis and the comments posted here add so much to my understanding and enjoyment of the show. My best wishes for you and your health.
Now a random observation from the second episode, "The Lie". When Hurley is racing through the streets with an unconcious Sayid and "sees" Ana Lucia, her parting words to him (right before "Oh, yeah, Libby says hi") are "Stay away from the cops. DO NOT get arrested." Does anyone think this might be some type of warning from The Island? That by turning himself in to the police at the end of the episode rather than going with Ben, Hurley has made the wrong cosmic chess move?
Latin may be a dead language but it is making a comeback (circle) in Catholic Mass, colleges, et al, so it fits in with the zeitgeist to which "Lost" is aware of.
Et alii = "and others" Just sayin'.
If Candle knew about the energy source and that it shouldn't be disturbed, why were people drilling so close to it? It bothered me that he seemed so angry -- when the workers were presumably just doing as they had been told (and it seemed like Candle was in charge) ... BTW - did they have the technology to get an image of the donkey wheel back then??
Three episodes into season Five -- can it get any better?!?!? There is so much going on -- and still all of these other levels and references tucked in.
Thanks J and everyone!!
J - possible that "the numbers" correlation has been thrown out of whack, until all are returned to the island to resolve such problems?
i'm supposed to be doing homework but have just discovered your blog and i have to say i'm hooked! it's exactly the kind of in-depth analysis i've been looking for. i am impressed at thorough and far-reaching it is. no matter how astute i am when watching a particular episode, i always miss something (more than i thought, apparently). thank you so much for this. you have a new and dedicated reader. and i wish you good health hope you are on the mend!
Just a quick note; the piece for Jughead has been in the pipeline all weekend. It's a headbanger; it's big. So I tried to do something to make it easily readable/manageable:
I broke the piece up into sections. There is a table of contents at the beginning with links down to the sections. You can read either the entire thing or pick whatever section you like; if it works, each section should read fine on its own, but they all work together as well.
But here are some of the topics: Utopia and its relation to Lost, a nosedive into what I called "The Overinterpreation Station" that tries to make sense of the Locke hunter/farmer problem and its mythic precursors, utopian responses like dystopian and heterotopian novels and their relation to Lost, and then a move into some of the narrative elements, including some problems with the compass, and who knew what when.
My DVR canceled all my scheduled recordings last week, so I didn't see the episode until later Thursday. That probably gave me too much time to think about it, hence the length. I'll try to respond to some of the comments here later today.
A couple of other quick things: The reason I got into Thomas More's Utopia in the next post is because More wrote it in Latin, and he encoded a lot of name games into the text. The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke also wrote some in Latin, and thought it should be a mandatory part of higher education.
Also, in the enhanced version of "The Lie," Ms. Hawking is referred to as Eloise Hawking. Eloise was Faraday's rat's name, and may very well be Ellie on the island -- which is why Faraday can't stop looking at her.
"Storylines from the end of season four are picked up on without delay. It's as if the narrative's event horizon is finally in view, and the various narrative threads that have been closing in towards each other are now starting to weave together."
I was so grateful for that!
"We also got a new kind of flashback, one that isn't character-driven and just for the audience."
This I do not enjoy! Feels like filler.
Though I thought Hurley's Mother's reaction was heart warming.
"James Cole from the Terry Gilliam film 12 Monkeys. In the film, Cole was chosen to flash back in time because he has a good memory and can bring necessary information from the past to the future"
I totally thought the same thing. A grossly underestimated film, 12 Monkeys.
"This is just what the island characters are forced to do now; piece together out-of-order events to make sense of them, and locate themselves in relation to those events."
Well put!
Whoa - fantastic explanation of space-time and the Casimir affect --- I think I might almost understand.
"For one, since all time is occurring at once as spacetime, that means the past, present and future are all already existent and coordinated."
I hate this! Doesn't it negate free choice/welf determination? I've read this is exactly where the series is headed but...it feels like a cruel trick.
"He's famous for saying "Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth." I wonder if he could move an island."
Fascinating!
"Who do you think the attorneys are?"
I'm sure it doesn't count now (I'm late reading your posts!) but I was sure they were Ben's. What better way to send Kate to a refuge like...the Island?
I'm watching in NZ and am a few episodes behind, so I skipped most of the comments that dealt with episodes after The Lie. This comment relates to that episode: one of the reasons I love Lost, with all its layers, is its humour and gags. I loved hearing Cheap Trick's "Dream Police" playing in the store Hurley entered after his encounter with Ana Lucia.
"Well, I can't tell lies, cause they're listening to me.
And when I fall asleep, bet they're spying on me tonight, tonight.
Cause they're waiting for me.
They're looking for me.
Every single night they're driving me insane.
Those men inside my brain."