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 p. 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, ??T?S. This can also be read as a Greek acronym for Iesous Khristos Theou Huios, Soter, 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 Iesous bear a resemblance to the Egyptian word Isis?). Furthermore, if the Greek letters of the acronym, the ??T?S, 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 S of Soter, 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 -2p sin(?). 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 p, 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 p:
"...and the calculation starts from a greater and lesser limit to the value of v3, which Archimedes assumes without remark as known, namely265/153 < v3 < 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 p. 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 p 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 p, 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