Or should these all have the episode number in the subject too? I don't know. It looks clunky. But anyway, if you have stumbled into this thread and do not want to know what is going on in season two, you should turn around.
Not that I have anything to say about it yet, as it is hours and hours away. But: speculate like crazy! Have Sawyer, Jin, and Michael stumbled into Others HQ, or something even more sinister? Is one side of the island Lord of the Flies and the other Swiss Family Robinson? What's with the hatch already?
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Anything could have happened! But I think, at the end, it might be that Jack is realizing that maintaining civil order is more important than his own convictions about matters of faith. By giving in and pressing the button he keeps the rift between himself and Locke from growing, at least this week. Jack seemed to be on the verge of abandoning his leadership position again, but I felt like at the end he was remembering his big speech about the need to stay together.
Maybe.
So, anyway, I guess we know lots more about the hatch, and maybe the island, but it's all awfully vague. Apparently the island was weird before the Dharma Initiative got there (as per their stated effort to study the magnetic anomaly down there), and they constructed a sort of hippy science commune, and then things went wrong. I assume there are least two other stations, like Desmond's, on the island, since this one was number three. Perhaps one of those is the location of the numbers transmission, and later Rousseau's. And also, perhaps, controls the "security system." On the other hand, I'm beginning to think that there isn't any one group that knows everything about the island. What they ought to do now is try and find that hole Locke was being pulled down, and see what's inside it. Well, assuming they're willing to take the risk of being torn limb from limb by black smoke.
re usw: pretentious Gravity's Rainbow reference.
Speaking of books, for what it's worth, the two we see are The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, and The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien. I hear that the second, at least, is an important clue, but I've never read either book. From a review:
quote:In The Third Policeman, our hero and narrator, a nameless young man with a wooden leg, assists in a money-motivated killing, and, after trying to retrieve the stashed goods some time later, passes into a strange otherness -- a place that superficially resembles the Irish countryside, but which casually disobeys the normal laws of How Things Work. He encounters a small building of impermanent and shifting geometry which turns out to be the local barracks -- it is here that he meets the policemen.
Oh, and I guess we also have a rough timeline. The film claims the Dharma Initiative was begun in 1970, if I heard right, and the film was dated 1980. I would suppose that the film was made shortly after whatever went wrong.
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Pushing the button gives them at least 108 more minutes to figure out what the countdown is for. You did figure out that 108 is the sum of that string of numbers, right?
That film was next to useless. All it says is that because of an incident, they have to push a button. I'd need a little more to go on, even if I was a volunteer in their program. I thought I saw something that said this was number 3 of 6?
Speculation: The others that have captured Michael, Sawyer and Jin are not the same "Others" that kidnapped Walt, killed Steve(?), and took the crazy French chick's baby. This group is made up of the survivors from the aft portion of the airplane. I base this on the fact that the Latino girl is working with them, and we know she was sitting in the back. Also, when they were dragging our people away from the beach in the nets, the clothing on some of them looked too new, and I think the woman was wearing part of some sort of business suit. And it was obvious that they didn't have guns and were scrounging, while the ones that kidnapped Walt were armed pretty well.
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The Dharma Initiative! It has a name! Deeply meaningful and junk!
I don't know if all the people in Ana Lucia's group are tail survivors, but I'd say they aren't connected to Ethan Rom, no.
What if the "magnetic research" stuff was a cover, and the real plan of those mysterious 1970s scientists was to get people down the hatch and then spring the "we've had a problem, you two have to press this button every 108 minutes"?
I'm not convinced that Ethan Rom, the Others who Rousseau claims took her child, and the boat-going folk who took Walt, are from the same group. And what about those mysterious whispers? Rousseau claimed that those were the Others, as I recall. Perhaps she never actually saw anyone take Alex, and the child just vanished? Or "they took Alex" is code for "I went crazy go nuts and something bad happened."
The hatch is station #3. The film was part 3 of 6, as B.J. mentions. So I guess perhaps there are six such stations altogether?
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I'm with Jack on the computer thing. Surely they could automate such a procedure rather than have two people share the duty of simply entering a command every 108 minutes.
-------------------- Picard: Mr. Crusher, what's our maximum speed this week? Wesley: [checking manual] Uh, 9.4, sir. Picard: Very good. Take us to Warp 9.8 then. Wesley: Aye, sir. Warp 9.2 it is.
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It seems plain to me that this station 3 is a social experiment gone awry. Aside from references to B.F. Skinner et al in the 'Orientation' film, it just smacks of a manufactured situation. The intentional vagueness of the language of the film is straight out of those behavioral studies from the 70s like the Stanford Prison Experiment. I mean besides taking some time getting produced (thereby more or less negating the apparent emergency situation), the unreality of needing a human to repeatedly enter the same numerical code into a computer should be obvious. I wonder whether the innoculations Desmond has been giving himself might not have been playing tricks with his thinking as well.
But then there's some weirdness with the magnetic anomoly, certainly.
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Well, I would imagine that the polar bears, as well as the shark, were part of another experiment, and that if they had taken a good look at the bear they would have seen yet another station logo tattooed on its hide. (Or they would have if the whole Dharma Initiative thing had been thought up at the time.) Something weird had to have been done to them to get them to survive in a tropical climate.
So what can't the Dharma Initiative explain? Hurley's backstory shows that the numbers apparently have power all over the planet, which seems a little beyond the scope of some hippie researchers, but look at those other projects listed. If, say, "remote viewing" turns out to be real in the Lost universe, then I guess all bets are off.
(An interesting theory I read on another website: Perhaps the reason why Desmond and his predecessors had to type in the numbers by hand every 108 minutes was to ensure they were always thinking about them, and the experiment was actually attempting to generate some sort of psychic energy thing surrounding the numbers.)
Then you've got Walt's apparently magic powers.
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