LOST: The Confusion Continues…
Finally. I got my LOST fix.
Last night’s episode was a good one. Eko is an intriguing character, and his backstory was one of the better ones. Still, the episode left me with even more questions, like how does a small plane from Nigeria get to the South Pacific? Isn’t Nigeria on the exact opposite side of the world from the South Pacific? Are the scriptures written on Eko’s stick some kind of clue? Were there faces in the smoke, or was that just my imagination? That smoke bugged me. It’s totally screwing up my theory.
Up until last night, my theory has been that the initial group of people on the island and the countdown computer were part of a psychological study being done by the folks at Dharma to see how far people would go if they could be persuaded the countdown clock was real. The bunker and mechanical-sounding monster and the magnetic equipment are as real as they needed to be in order to make the guise believable, but isn’t really capable of destroying the earth. Toss in a polar bear and a few quarantine signs to make the study even more interesting. These social scientists may have been manipulating these people for years as part of their study.
But is the study even still going on? Maybe it was disbanded (and forgotten about) ages ago. Maybe the crazy rich man who funded the whole thing died without anyone knowing about the island.
New thought–could the black smoke have been some kind of security system that somehow senses fear? If a person is not afraid of it, it means they must be one of those who are supposed to be on the island because they know not to be afraid of it. If it doesn’t sense fear, it leaves them alone. Eko and Locke weren’t afraid, so it assumed they belonged there.
What happened to Danielle (the strange French woman) and Desmond (the man who was living in the hatch, punching in the numbers)?
Why was Locke in a wheelchair? What about Jack’s dad, whose body was missing from his coffin? Could the guy Hurley met in the mental institution part of an earlier experiment?
One other thing that’s been bugging me, and maybe I just need to go back and watch it over again, but the black woman, Rose, was seated near Jack, waiting for her husband to return from the restroom when the plane went down. But when her husband (Bernard?) is found, he’s buckled into his airplane seat hanging from a tree. Is this just sloppy writing or something that’ll be explained later? Or maybe it’s just that when things got bumpy in-flight, he grabbed the first available seat and obsessive fans like me are going overboard with their compulsion to obsess on every little detail.
There are so many loose ends I can’t see how they’ll be explained.
January 16th, 2006 at 8:38 am
Hmmm, interesting theory. But that plane did go down and Jack and others surfaced in the water. How would they then be subjects of the Dharma folks? I agree with you about Eko– a wonderful character with one of the more intense backstories. There were faces — or a face — in that smoke-creature. His brother’s spirit trapped in the smoke?
January 16th, 2006 at 10:41 am
That’s just it. I don’t think the Dharma folks-–the ones who started it all-–are even around any more. I think they had their initial study group, people who were thoroughly brainwashed into believing that they had to keep the countdown clock going at all costs, then the study ended and they were abandoned there. The Others could just be those who have crashed on the island and gone sort of crazy. But what about all the bizarre connections between the survivors, like Jack’s dad meeting Sawyer in a bar, or Jack running into Desmond at the stadium?
I just hope the writers aren’t planning a Sixth Sense type of twist, where everyone really died in the crash and this is purgatory.