Until the lost become the found...

[chani]

Well, now that was a very good episode! And not only because I love Locke and the flash backs were about him...But damnit Desmond is sometimes so hard to understand (while Locke is very easy to my French ears)!

First I've suddenly realized that many characters have "father/parents issue": Locke of course...but also Jack, Sawyer, Sun, Jin, Michael (with him being the father), Walt. This might be an arc to ponder. There might all be like kid-like at the end of the day.

Secondly the Dharma (apart from buddhism isn't an animated character btw?) film reminds me of that advertising film in "Being John Malkovich"...and the polar bears were there again.

I think we got a few clues through the books. The Dharma film was hidden behind the famous Henry James' " The Turn of the Screw" (which was written to be intentionally ambiguous about whether the children were evil or the governess was mad...) and there was a shot on "The Third Policeman" that I didn't know until today. I googled the title and  got a few reviews  saying :

Reading this book is like taking acid, then watching Mony Python perform the works of Albert Einstein wearing English police uniforms.

And also that the book was full of philosophical speculations/theories among them

a mysterious trip to an underground cavern where anything you can imagine can be created...

Hey it fits in Lost! And here's an interesting article about that novel

Mmmm...the more I think about it the more I stick to the idea that Lost is to be understood in a allegorical way. The Island is Wonderland, and our characters are Alice. It's kinda obvious for young Walt who dreamed his polar bears into "reality" but it works for all the characters, the Island providing stuff connected to their past. Besides in the first episode Jack woke up in a similar way as Alice did...and what did he see first? Ok not a rabbit but a dog! And the golf game of season 1 might be a wink to Alice's cricket game. Oh and didn't Kate find a candy bar that just screamed "eat me" in the food room? :- )

The narrative style of the show, with its flash-backs, kind of suggests that we might be in the characters' head btw.

The question is...is it a collective dream taking place within the last second before the crash, a second stretched to days, weeks, months on the Island (J. Luis Borges wrote a short story like that about a man who was about to be shot and a film was made out of it) or is it only one person dreaming the whole thing?

Who's real? Who's not...Could Island!Desmond be anything but a figment of Jack's imagination...Not sure we'll see him again anyway. Desmond played his role for Jack, just like Ethan did for Charlie.

Is it just me or have Lock and Jack had a Scully/Mulder-like conversation about pushing the button and believing?

I liked  the fact Locke was still stuck, taking the first shift just like he used to watch his father's house night after night. He's really a touching character.

PS: Sawyer, Michae and Jin were so naive...I figured out immediately that Ana-Lucia was with the formerly-known-as-Adibisi-guy (I loved to hate him in OZ). But I can't wait for Jin to speak...

 

Comments

[sarahlynnl.livejournal.com]

Is it just me or have Lock and Jack had a Scully/Mulder-like conversation about pushing the button and believing?

They did sound like both of them to me too.

I so love this show.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

Yes, Daddy issues are big with the male characters. I can't see so far that the female characters have anything like that in common.
I wouldn't like it very much, if this was all in one of the characters' heads. I can see the Alice parallels, but it would be a bit of a letdown - all the mysteries just figments of a dying character?

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

I'd prefer it to be not in one head but a projection of all the characters' psyche.

I just hope it isn't a scientist experience, nor a fantastic island (do you remember the series?) nor a they-are-all-dead thig...

But I bet we'll never know for sure.

[candlelightfrot.livejournal.com]

I think what people are not thinking about here is that if the problem is electromagnetic, then the how that caused everyone to be on the island is perhaps thoroughly explained. It obviously has caused navigation problems or something even more severe (more on that later) which drew the ships there. Even the Black Rock would have had a rudimentary compass that might have gone haywire or the electromagnetics that exist on the island may cause some sort of storms that 'bring in' shipping in the area.

But if the film outlining the Dharma Initiative (BTW - Dharma, the path to Enlightenment taught by the Buddha, is in the numbers too! (http://thelostnumbers.blogspot.com/)) out of the University of Michigan (http://www.freep.com/news/statewire/sw122322_20051007.htm) is an accurate story about how the bunker came to be on the island (and where are the other 2?) then I think my postings in Kashy's LJ last May (http://www.livejournal.com/users/kashmanik/82926.html) were very close on to what has happened. Some 'experiment' that went horribly wrong in conjunction with the local geomagnetics, which on a volcanic island is quite probable. The island is volcanic, even though we haven't seen a volcano; but then LOST is filmed on Hawaii.

The numbers came to Hurley through Sam Toomey who heard them at a Naval listening post some 16 years before Hurley used them. Rousseau's team on her vessel heard the same transmission, honed in on it, and were then shipwrecked on the island. They found a radio tower near the Black Rock and quite possibly that is the location of another bunker on the island. Their bunker is known as "Station Three - The Swan." In the story "Siddhartha and the Swan," the young Prince Siddhartha, quarrelling over a wounded swan, helps his cousin to learn about kindness to animals. Kindness to a Swan... read my own LJ -

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

Some sort of collective projection? Yes, that would work for me.
I think it's interesting to see that lots of viewers are worried that it might be all about one character. I think that it is possible to relate everything that's happening to each individual character. There are connections everywhere (just by the six degrees of separation rule) and isn't that how life is for us? It's all about our very own perception of things, our own relationship to the world around us.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

I really hope it isn't a new version of the Bermudes Triangle...or of an experiment, because that wouldn't be very refreshing.

Too many coincidences with all those things that connect the characters to the island and between each others.

I really think that the writers haven't chosen between all the possible explanations/theories (sciences, fantastic, psychology/mental) and will leave it that way.

Its' like that button Jack pushed...what if he hadn't done it? We'll never know.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Yep...Phenomenology of Mind...

[candlelightfrot.livejournal.com]

So, ma maîtresse Chani, you want them to be dead and dreaming?

Or perhaps a sort of Philip Jose Farmeresque Riverworld? Except that it's the Islandworld? In Riverworld the main characters (one of them was Mark Twain) broke into the control station also and found the vortex that held all the souls that were to be reincarnated. So Jack's dad has possibly been re-incarnated and that is what he saw? And if perhaps if they quit pressing the button maybe then all the souls in the electromagnetic vortex will be reincarnated? And the earth would end up overpopulated.... or at least the island.

That would somewhat fit Buddhism, however. The progression of the soul and the loss of desire and attachments to the world, or more correctly to the illusion of this world, and then to come to a state of truth - Nirvana. That path to enlightenment is learned on an individual level through the teachings of the 4 noble truths and the eight-fold path. Some examples of these truths include to 'avoid any evil, to seek the good, and to keep the mind pure.'

But in Bhuddism that means you can be reborn outside of the 'human realm' into certain 'hells,' as animals, and worlds run by jealous gods; but at least you can get out of those situations. So did Walt control the appearance of a soul as a polar bear in the animal realm? Do we go looking for a Tibetan Wheel of Life (http://www.pbs.org/witheyesopen/after_map_tibet.html)?

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

No I don't want them to be dead.

You didn't read my first post well, trésor!

I want the island world to be contained in their last second of life before the crash...like a dimension within another dimension, time within time...

[candlelightfrot.livejournal.com]

Oh.... ok... I kinda like that idea.