LOST Revisited- Introduction

Some Introductions Before We Begin

The following project will only be of concern to people who have watched the complete series of Lost. If you have not finished the show and plan on doing so, please turn around, because there will be MAJOR SPOILERS for the entire series from this point onward.

LAST CHANCE TO TURN AROUND!

You’re still here? Good! That likely means you have watched all of Lost and are ready to go on the journey once again, this time armed with the knowledge of how the show turns out and what exactly is going on with that island. In this series, I will be rewatching every episode and trying to see how much of the information we receive fits in with what we ultimately learn about the mythology.

I should say up front that Lost is my favorite show of all time. It’s not perfect, and I certainly wouldn’t label it the best show of all time from a technical standpoint but it’s been the most addictive and fun. So this is not an attempt to deconstruct the show for purposes of hate – on the contrary, I am predicting that most of the content will hold up, or, at the very least, be ambiguous enough to construct a reasonable answer.

For each post (usually 2 episodes, I imagine), I will give the main bullet points of the plot summary, give my personal review of the episode, point out anything that relates to the mythology of the show (including contradictions or seemingly unanswered questions), and then rank the episode compared to the ones that came before. Simple enough. The mythology I will be paying attention to in particular as we make our way through includes Jacob and the Man in Black, the candidates, DHARMA, the numbers, the Others, and the whispers. Using what we now know about these phenomena, we will attempt to put their actions in the early seasons into the proper context. I’m less concerned about HOW something happens (such as HOW Jacob and MIB can be immortal or HOW the island moves through space and time), but rather WHY they happen and how it benefits the person performing the action.  

Here are a few frameworks I’ll be working with throughout:

The Candidates- At some point after meeting Richard, Jacob started looking for someone to succeed him as protector and came up with a list of 360 names, all represented in the Lighthouse. He would bring these people to the island (the earliest ones seem to be from the military in the 1950s but there are many unknown names on the list so it could easily have started earlier) to see how they act. He is specifically looking for someone who is flawed and broken, someone that would benefit from the island and want to protect it. Those who wanted to get back home (such as Kate, who had become mother to Aaron), were ruled out as candidates, though not incapable of becoming protector if they really wanted to. Jacob assigned them all a number to keep track. MIB became aware of who the candidates were and tried to cross off as many names as he could. Given that he was not allowed to kill them directly, he would often engage in schemes to get them to kill each other. This will be brought up each time the monster appears in an episode.

The Numbers/Valenzetti Equation/DHARMA Initiative- This is how I’m choosing to read it. The Valenzetti Equation is a complicated equation that supposedly predicts when humanity will end. The theorem consistently arrives at the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42, and allegedly we could stop the extinction if we get just one of the numbers to change. Because it is a fictional equation, we don’t really know what it looks like, but presumably it involves inputting things like the growth of human population, intensity of conflict, development of weaponry, depletion of natural resources, amount of space for habitation and agriculture, etc. Basically it inputs how we are interacting with the world and each other, and predicts how far into the future we will get before we cannot sustain ourselves anymore. The DHARMA Initiative realized the island’s uniqueness made it a good place to conduct experiments, so they set up shop and began constructing stations for research into things like zoology, health care, toxic gases, space-time research, psychology, electromagnetism, among others. If they could find a breakthrough in one of these fields, then one of the numbers could be changed, and thus they could alter Doomsday. Now to connect it with Jacob: over the course of the series, the list of candidates is whittled down to number 4 (Locke), 8 (Hurley), 15 (Sawyer), 16 (Sayid), 23 (Jack), 42 (Kwon- either Sun or Jin, or perhaps both). These characters represent the equation numbers, although probably not literally. So what constitutes “changing the number”? Become the island’s new protector – in this case, Jack, followed soon after by Hurley. By becoming the new protector, Jack helps destroy MIB and re-cork the source. MIB does not reach civilization and cause mayhem, nor does the volcano cause a natural disaster. Doomsday is prevented. Now, I think this may just be a clever metaphor. I don’t think the equation literally referred to these people, and more research would have to be done to save humanity in the Lost universe, but the two ideas complement each other and the conflict on the island serves as a microcosm of humanity’s conflicts with each other.

The Others- The Others officially started when Jacob made Richard immortal in 1867, and between 1867 and the 1950s we know next to nothing about what happened. The purpose of the Others seems to change depending on who is in charge, but we know they try to defend the island from MIB and any hostile visitors. They also perform tasks for Jacob but the exact nature will have to be figured out in this series. Are they the society that Jacob wants to prove is “good”, or are they the ones observing and reporting on the “good” society, getting involved only when the island is threatened or, in the case of the pregnancy issue, they are trying to solve one of their own problems? “The New Man in Charge” confirms that the electro-magnetism causes problems with the early stages of pregnancy, and once Jughead blew up in 1977, the island was contaminated, making on-island pregnancy fatal in the 2^nd trimester.  Whenever an interaction with the Others occurs, I will try to determine what their goal is, and if any of it supports or conflicts with Jacob’s ultimate endgame.

Whispers- In season 6, a dead Michael confirms to Hurley that the whispers are dead people who have not crossed over. In addition, there were numerous visions or dreams across the series, some of which may be dead people, some of which may be MIB, or some that were just dreams with no outside connection. I’ll try and determine which are which.

So those are some things to think about on our journey. Next time: we meet our heroes, and Charlie asks the big question.