Anyone Wanna Talk Lost? (Possible Spoilers)

Ok so I got suckered into this show 😉 you guys were right..it was FANTASTIC. I have yet to see Season 1 so I am probably missing lots but have seen the last two eppys of S1 and all of S2 thus far.

Did anyone else notice the shape of the Dharma Corporation on the sharks after the raft blew up? I think it was the first eppy of S2. Because I saw it and spent alot of time rewinding and pausing on it to make sure!

I love what they are doing for next week's eppy:

they are retracing the first 40 odd days of the tail end survivors
 
That's sneaky with the sharks.

You gotta get your hands on season 1. It's got one of the best pilot episodes of any show ever. Very cinematic. Plus, characters' personalities make more sense with the flashbacks...
 
MentPatient said:
They murdered it.

Man, that ending was great...
They shot the sister...
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Yeah, I forgot they murdered it. Okay, my new question is why the heck was there a polar bear on an island? Much better.

I never really liked that girl, so it's not really affecting me. I just want answers. And how come we haven't seen Jack and Kate in a couple of episodes? They have disappeared.
 
The monster actually went away for a long time during season 1...'til the last couple of eps. It almost seemed like they were gonna abandon the sci-fi aspect completely. They kinda lull you into normalcy, then spring a freakout on you.
 
OK, theory time. :winking03

What if there is no island?

What is this is all some kind of virtual reality, experimental, mind control experiment? What if what's really happening is just a spin on ideas taken from places like the Matrix, Total Recall, or that Red Dwarf episode about the Despair Squid? It's like these guys are really sitting in a virtual reality booth somewhere being fed these ideas directly into their brains.

Would that disappoint you?

Actually it's unlikely, because once you revealed what was really going on, where would you go from there.

What about this though? What if they were on the island, but there was no plane crash? What if everything that happened before the crash was nothing more than a case of supplanted memories, as part of a Skinnerian brain control experiment? If this was the case the truth could be revealed, and they could go from there to something similar to the old British sci-fi series called The Prisoner, where a guy was being imprisoned on an island, and he didn't know why.

It would be interesting, because something like Hurley's magic numbers would in reality be an internal hiccup. His brain would be subliminally making sense within the illusion of numbers used during the brain control technique.
 
I am very curious to see how long they draw out the mystery of what they're doing on the island, since (as N4H points out) the reveal doesn't necessarily mean an end to the show, as long as it isn't a reveal like "it's all VR!" that mandates an end.
Letting the guy who was inside the hatch run away was one of the sillier things the oft-silly lostaways have done, since he obviously had the ability to answer so many of their questions (of course, that's why the writers had to let him run), and I can't wait for him to pop back up. Did the Dharma Initiative create the island as some type of social experiment, like in Philip Jose Farmer's <i>Riverworld</i> novels?

As for The Prisoner, wasn't he imprisoned because he was a secret agent who wanted to leave government service? I have dim memories of that show (mostly of angry attack balloons), but I thought that island was a repository for people who knew too much for the government to risk allowing them out of their control.
 
Hmm. I'm usually very bad with remembering specific, often critical details. Just tend to have hunches, general feelings...

If the flashbacks are fabricated memories, there's something slightly goofy, from a narrative standpoint. Maybe I'm wrong, but think I can recall at least one flashback that didn't seem to be a specific crash victim remembering something. The scene were Walt, his mom and stepdad are in Sydney and that freaky thing starts to happen with the birds striking the window. That didn't seem like Walt remembering, but rather the freaked out stepdad, if anyone. He's not a crash victim.

There is some sort of human Skinnerian experiment though, right? Either the apparently abandoned Dharma project, or something more elaborate, like you suggest, N4H. I hope the psychic, esp stuff really is happening, not just induced hallucinations or something.

I like the idea that JJA is messing around in sort of a metaphorical or spiritual way"”Like, what if this Skinnerian Dharma project actually is abandoned and malfunctioning, but it now acts as a sort of Skinnerian project for God, so to speak. The crash victims, all needing to atone for past behavior, now need to operate like rats in a maze"”avoiding pain, suffering, danger. They actually do that by cooperating, trusting others, taking responsibility, being selfless at times.

The Prisoner is freaky, even by wacky 1960's TV standards, heh.
 
Hmm interesting theory goldenboy. My friend believes that the survivors are all in Purgatory (the Island), perhaps atoning as you said for past behaviour?

This weeks episode looks phenomenal.
 
I like Goldenboy's twist the best so far. That would be novel like crazy.

On the Prisoner, I've only seen a couple of episodes in re-runs, but the main guy seems pretty confused about what's really going on.

I have read a little about it though. As I heard it the idea The Prisoner was a continutation of McGoohan's Secret Agent Man, was something that was suggested outside the script.
 
...Just pondering again...I know almost every drama has subtext these days, right? I'm still thinking maybe JJA is trying to tackle the largest of large ideas. He's naming characters "Locke" and "Rousseau" fer chrissakes. Obviously, he's dealing with very intimate, human stories here. But in addition, maybe he's using this island to explore our modern culture.

Maybe the island is sort of a microcosm of Western civilization. You've got man, nature, and God. Those are sort of the main preoccupations of the West's science and philosophy since, forever. Man's science ironically ends up moving humanity away from both nature and spiritual concerns: sitting comfortably in modern cities, you can be miles away from green grass, trees"”discovering rational explanations for everything. Yet, there's still a longing for God, nature"”some sense of transcendence, harmony that the modern secular West can't provide.

So, the crash victims are thrust back into nature. Back to basics. The supernatural, transcendent (God?) seems like it might be there. Man's science is there. And fellow humans, who aren't very nice at all. All mixed up in a dark murky muck. Scary. It's like Adam and Eve, not expelled from the Garden, but going back to the Garden after they've trashed it. Mucked it up with sin: pride, selfishness, hubris, etc...

It seems like the paranormal component of the Dharma project could be something like a psychic amplifier. Whatever angst or obsessions is within the characters becomes a psychic projection on the island. Or even willed into physical existence. Jack sees his dad. Walt creates angry polar bears he was reading about. Sawyer is attacked by an angry boar that could be his dad. Kate recreates the horse that "saved" her. Interestingly, Sawyer and Kate's "hallucinations" seem to have given them an opportunity to face their demons, begin to accept what they've done.

And the missing filmstrip section they recover. "Don't use the computer to communicate, or we could have another...incident." Like the forbidden fruit or something. Humans are curious. Must find out what's in the hatch, what this project is, etc.


But, to complicate things just a little, Dharma isn't Western, it's Buddhist/Hindu:

"The Dharma is a key concept in Buddhism and Hinduism. In English there are generally two distinct (but connected) meanings. The first is that The Dharma (when capitalized) simply means the collective teachings of The Buddha. In this respect, you might think of the Dharma as simply menaing "The Teachings."

The second meaning is usually associated with the lowercase dharma, and translates as "the way things are." This may seem overly vague, until you understand that the word "dharma" has been used to imply "the laws of nature" or "that which sustains the universe." Sometimes it is synonomys with the English word nature."

"The dharma is touched upon at length in The Bhagavadgita (The Song of God), a section of the epic poem The Mahabharata. In it, Krishna explains the meaning of righteousness in sustaining the world order. It is implied that everyone has a path that they must follow in order to uphold righteousness and lead to their individual salvation. Krishna stated that of the three paths that lead to salvation - yoga and ascetic practices, bhakti or devotion, and Dharma or wholesome activities according to your role - it was the latter that was most effective because it contribute to both the individual and the world as a whole, while the two former practices only helped the individual.

Those familiar with Buddhism know that the dharma was the main focus of His meditations. These were the main characteristics of the dharma:

1) Namely, that it was infinite and spanned both the material (mundane) and spiritual (supra-mundane) worlds.

2) The dharma could be thought of as the mental "sense." That is to say, while the eye has sight and the ear has sound and the nose has smell, the mind has dharma.

3) The dharma was the carrier of goodness and wholesomeness, and thus the word dharma could be used to imply a good sense, while the word adharma would imply a bad sense.

4) Dharma was a person's duty, those acts which were fit to be carried out according to their responsibilities.

5) Dharma is a permanent universal truth, including the laws of nature and the nature of laws.


http://www.siamese-dream.com/reference/dharma.html
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