What John did

One of the biggest secrets of the Swan disappeared with it, after Desmond turned the failsafe key and the hatch went sideways. Let's go back to the final, fateful moments of the Swan.

2|23 Live Together, Die Alone. Desmond realised that he was responsible for crashing 815, via the System Failure in the printouts from the Pearl, while Charlie and Eko were locked out behind the closed blast doors. With the end of the countdown approaching, Locke lost his cool. He grabbed the display of the Apple II and smashed it on the ground. Desmond panicked and shouted :"You've killed us. You've killed us all". The rest is history. But what did Locke actually do? He just crashed the display. The Apple II was no Macintosh, or an iMac, where the CPU, RAM and everything are built into a single case with the monitor. The computer remained on the desk, together with its two ancient Floppy drives. It would have been no problem to enter the numbers, and everything would have been fine.

Ἰακώβ

At the beginning of The Incident, we see Jacob working on a tapestry. He headlined his work with ΘΕΟΙ ΤΟΣΑ ΔΟΙΕΝ ΟΣΑ ΦΡΕΣΙ ΣΗΣΙ ΜΕΝΟΙΝΑΣ, (may the gods grant thee all that thy heart desires) quoted from Homers Odissey. The work showed the arrival of Egytian seafarers on the Island. What is Jacobs greco-egyptian influence? Homer lived around 850 BC. The biblical Jacob was the ancestor of the 12 tribes of Israel. He fathered 12 children, with his wives, Leah and Rachel, and their two maids. While the family was hit by a severe famine, Jacob moved them to Egypt, and settled at a place called Goshen. The Istraelites lived there till the Exodus, which happened during the time of Ramesses II, also known as Ozymandias. This would place the Exodus roughly around the year 1242 BC.

Timejump to 300 BC… woosh.

Alexander the Great became ruler of Egypt in 323 BC. He founded Alexandria, but died soon afterwards, still busy with his enormous campaign to conquer the world. But he left his close friend, the macedon general Ptolemy Soter as satrap of Egypt. After some warring with the Diadochi and Syria, and saving Rhodes, he called himself Pharaoh in 304. He founded, among other things, the famous library of Alexandria, and started the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Egypt was ruled by a caste of greeks now. Alexandria was the capital of an hellenistic empire that reached from Syria to Nubia. The Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years, till it ended with sweet Cleopatra. Kings called themselves Ptolemy, queens were always named Cleopatra and Berenice. In the beginning the Ptolemys allowed the Egyptians to follow their gods, and they dressed like the Pharaohs of the older dynasties themselves. But more and more Greeks settled in Egypt, and had a string cultural influence. Egypt was the ruled by a Greek minority, under Greek law, education and culture. But, as always, empires crumble, and this happened with the Greek rulers of Egypt, too. Ptolemy IV was weak and corrupt, and killed his mother. From there it went southwards. Meanwhile the Roman empire was on the rise in Italy. The more or less useless Ptolemys became puppets of Rome, because the senate feared to give rich Egypt as a province to a proconsul. It was easier to control Alexandria from the outside, than to empower a Roman King (Rome was still a pretty democratic republic by then).

This all changed by smart Cleopatra VII getting involved with Julius Caesar, and after his death with Marc Anthony. After Octavians (who later became Augustus and ended the Roman republic for good) victory over Anthony, Cleopatra killed herself and ended the greek reign over Egypt, which finally became a Roman province.

Maybe Jacob arrived with the Egyptian sailors on the Island, maybe they were the first group of candidates for the game. If he is the Jacob depicted in the bible he is as ageless as he made Richard Alpert, later. But his cultural background is clearly influenced by the greek rule of Egypt, between 300 and 30 BC. Why did his cultural taste not change during the ages, so that he still sticks to his greco-egyptian ways in the 1800s, at the arrival of the Black Rock. He is capable of leaving the Island, so he should be able to pick up the pop-culture of the 19th century. Maybe Jacob and Esau time-jump across the ages during their game, after all this is just progress.

The Value of MacCutcheon

…This is a 60 year MacCutcheon, named after Anderson MacCutcheon, esteemed Admiral from the Royal Navy. He retired with more medals than any man before or since – moved to the highlands to see out his remaining years. Admiral MacCutcheon was a great man, Hume. This was his crowning achievement. This swallow is worth more than you could make in a month. To share it with you would be a waste, and a disgrace to the great man who made it. Because you, Hume, will never be a great man.…

Charles Widmore to Desmond Hume, 3|08 Flashes Before Your Eyes

What makes Widmore tick? If we follow the idea that Desmond is the Observer, and the outcome of the game depends on him pushing the button, bringing 815 down and turning the key, Pennys father played a long con to get the Scot where he belonged… on the Island, and into the Swan. What do we know of Charles Widmore? He was on the Island 1954, learning Latin and hanging out in the jungle in army surplus gear. It appears that earlier on he and his buddies, under the guidance of Richard Alpert, killed the US-Army personnel that was supposed to install Jughead and prepare the test. He was 17, so he is born 1937. After the war was ober he was only 8 years old. Maybe Richard recruited him out of his school in the british countryside, offering to lead a cricket team in the southern part of the commonwealth. However, he ended up as the leader of the the happy tent-dwellers we know thanks to Rousseau as the Others™. He was later exiled by Ben for breaking the rules and haven a child with an outsider, his daughter Penny. His other kid is Daniel Faraday. Maybe his parents left him the patent to Velcro, because he built himself a little empire with Widmore Industries. When Desmonds visits him to ask for Pennys hand, Widmore ridicules him, as seen above. Desmond is a theatrical set designer, and had no balls to finish his higher education. He is neither worth the Whiskey, nor the girl. This can be a rich selfmade man who does not want to give his daughter to some loser. But this is LOST. No. Widmore and his former sweetheart, and mother of his son, Ellie Hawking, are Desmonds guides to destiny.

Don' forget how Desmond met Penny, even this was not left to coincidence. It was arranged by Brother Campbell of the Eddington Monastery, and related to another expensive beverage. The Moriah sells for 100 quid a bottle, and just 108 cases a year are made. Widmore sent Penny to pick up his wine in Scotland, and Hawking made sure via Brother Campbell, that they would meet.

The Quantum Mechanics of LOST

Update: Yale scientists observed entaglement in the Macroworld…

Quantum mechanics, and to a certain point LOST, suggests the existence of a world independent of the observer. It is a theory which is excellent in telling us everything about what we observe, but it meets with serious difficulties in telling us what really is going on (and Jack and Kate and John and Ben seldom talk to each other in plain text about their adventures). This is called the measurement problem. It lead to the developement of Collapse Theories. Because measurements have outcomes… Collapse Theories were needed to close the circle in the precise sense defined by Abner Shimony. Shimony developed the CHSH inequality, in reaction to Bell's theorem, to distinguish between the entanglement hypothesis of quantum mechanics and local hidden variable theories. [I came up with the idea that the time difference between the launch and arrival of Daniels payload rocket resulted from the reason that the Island is located in it's own bubble universe, which could be pierced from certain directions. The freighter satphones could only talk to each other, which led to my assumption that they were quantum-entangled. So they were able to talk from one universe to the next. Just wild guesses]. Bell's Theorem is a Local Realistic Theoriy, and as such incompatible with QM. Dozens of experiments performed so far have favored Quantum Mechanics, but not decisively because of the detection loophole or the communication loophole. That is one loophole too many to be a more coincidence.

So what happened after Desmond turned the failsafe key, where did the Swan disappear to (another universe?), and why did it blew off his underwear? My guess is that Desmond is special, as stated by Faraday, because he turned himself into the Observer. That is the reason for his dreamlike encounter with Faradays mother. The whole outcome of the final season can hinge on Desmond, because his brain is collapsing the timelines and fuse it to the final one, with which LOST will end. The question remaining is, what force snatched Jack and company out of Ajira 316 and hurled them back to 1977? The universe, course correcting itself, by providing the means to collapse into the most propable timeline?

Macs and Numbers

Wired has the story about Gene Roddenberrys Mac Plus from 1986, which sported 1 Megabyte of RAM. Those were the days. I bought my first Mac years later, a Quadra 700 in 1992. Apple gave the Mac as gift to Gene. The moment in Star Trek IV, in which Scotty tried to tell the secret of transparent aluminum to a mouse is a timeless classic now. And of course Apple plays a big role role in LOST, too. It was an Apple II, down there in the Swan. And J.J. Abrams is a big Apple fan, too. So it comes as no surprise that Genes Mac had the number F4200NUM0001.

Brainwashed

It's September 16, and part 3 of Mysteries of the Universe is out. The documentation covers brainwashing techniques applied by the Dharma-Initiative, and the reporters talk to a behavioral psychologist who was interviewed by Dharma.

He mentions a coworker, a chemist named Oldham at 2:30 in the video. Oldham ended up on the Island, where he interrogated Sayid in 5|10 He's Our You. The film refers then to the Ludovico brainwashing technique, as known from A Clockwork Orange. Later the topic of Dharma submarines is raised because they aquire submarine fuel. "The only time a sub is used for clandestine purposes is to sneak in and out of contested waters, under the cover of liquid night". Then the speaker explains that subs were used in WW2 to deliver goods into non-industrial areas of the South Pacific, not suitable for larger ships. Then the question is raised if Dharma got their subs from the black market, or if they were stolen.

LOST - Mysteries of the Universe Part 3

Smoke and Mirrors

So what is Smokey, and where does he come from?

Since the very beginning, when he disturbs the beach camp by ripping out trees in the jungle, while hooting, huffing and puffing along, Smokey behaves more as a smart dog, then a man with a plan and a long conned loophole. Last summer a cab started printing a receipt right next to me on 15th Street, and I stopped in my tracks because I thought Judgement Time came for me.

We see Smokey scan people on the Island, most impressive with Eko, and later Ben. He is obviously a mind reader, and he is looking for sins and other human failure in the tortured souls of 815s survivors. He is a manifestation of the flashbacks we see, woosh…

From the mural in the Temple we know he goes back to the time the Egyptians were on the Island, and that he will squeeze out of that grid dispenser, if summoned. Can you imagine 'Esau' behaving like that? I don't.

Titus Welliver, of New Haven, Connecticut, did a great job delivering us with the ultimate Bad Guy on Lost, leaving the impression that he will follow only his own call. We know from The Incident that Esau is a shapeshifter. Maybe it is just an illusion, like a Jedi mind trick, maybe he copied John Lockes body down to the last cell, but I don't believe that Master and Servant share the same ability. Smokey is Esaus big bad dog, but he is not smart or self-motivated enough to appear as Walt, Christian, or even a horse.

After Eko met Smokey the first time, in the The 23rd Psalm, where he stoood his ground, I believe that the the dog did not kill him because his Master, Esau, had sent him to find a fitting sleeve for the loophole. Later, in 3|05 The Cost of Living, after Esau confronted Eko again as his dead brother Yemi, asking him to confess his sins, Eko stood his ground, again. "I ask for no forgiveness, Father, for I have not sinned. I have only done what I needed to do to survive." Esau realised in that instant that he will never use Eko as his sleeve, proven by his angry reply "You speak to me as if I were your brother!". This marks the first time that Esaus mask of total manipulation slips. The same anger swings in "Do you have any idea how badly I wanna kill you?" on the beach with Jacob. Esau is done with Eko, and decides to go for John Locke. He leads Eko back into the jungle, where his dog finally kills the not longer needed Nigerian.

Another example that Smokey and Esau are two different entities appears in 3|15 Left Behind. Juliet and Kate hide behind the Sonic Fence, while Smokey crashed madly into that barrier. Ever tried to teach an very old dog a new trick? Especially a dog that is around since Cleopatra.

No, Smokey is stupid enough to be stopped by a fence that Dharma erected in the 1970s. Why should Esau do such a thing? But my main argument remains that Esau proved by incorporating John Locke that he is the only shapeshifter on the Island. It would make no sense, storytelling wise, to give Smokey and his Master the same abilities.

Update: Okay, I was wrong. Esau is Smokey. Sorry you had to see me like this!

Darkrooms and Policemen

I had a friend in Dublin once, I used to call him Dr. Zorg.

He was in the irish film business, and a total movie buff.

He gave me The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien for christmas once.

I stored that book in my darkroom. That room was in the basement, and it was a former fallout shelter. It was like down in the Swan hatch.

And I had an Apple II in there, too. With monitor and two disk drives.

Imagine the impact Man of Science, Man of Faith had on me…

No accent

Locke preparing Backgammon on the beach, and a blueshirt walking twice behind Walts back.

Sloppy editing, or two Timelines collapsing?

Link

Outriggers

In The Little Prince, 504, the time-jumping Sawyer, Locke, Juliet, Miles, Charlotte, and Daniel, having lost their Zodiac, use on of the outriggers from the beach to go to the Orchid. They were chased and shot at by unknown people in the other outrigger. Juliet returned fire, apparently hitting one of the pursuers. Before second outrigger could get any closer, they time-flashed again.

I still wonder if we will revisit that moment in season 6, and who will catch Juliets bullet…

It only ends once

Fellow blogger briguyx suggested over at jopinionated that I should blog about Lost, and I thought, why not. While shooting for the final season already started on Hawaii, and LA X a mere 130 days away, this is the perfect time to get going.

On Doc Arzt is a story about the Seattle Bumbershoot Panel of Carlton Cuse, Adam Horowitz, Eddy Kitsis, and Doc Jensen. Carlton told the story again how the gang travelled to Maine, visiting Stephen King, and how they watched Descent together. He compared the planned end of Lost next year with the way TV-Shows usually end like a Pony-Express horse, they drop out from underneath you. The interesting part is, they reused the Comicon films, and Cuse said definite clues were embedded in them. Which is good news for Kates father, he is a healthy plumber in this timeline. So LA X will really show Oceanic 815 landing safely in California, the day: September 22. 2004. Kate will be in custody, though, for killing her fathers apprentice. The question is, when will their knowledge kick in? If the explosion of Jugheads core was able to change The Incident, and the plane was not ripped apart in midair over the bookclub-meeting with burned muffins, did they receive their memories that moment when Jacob touched them in Timeline A? I don't think so. because then they would be totally asynchronus. My best guess is the moment when Desmond turned the failsafe key. But wait, no Swan, no 108 Minutes, no key. Hmm. There is this big spoiler at Darkufo, which I managed to avoid. So maybe the land safe in LA, and remember nothing at first. And then it comes to them as a flash, in the middle of the night. We'll see.

What about Ben?

Yep, what about him. What happened to young Ben in the Temple after Richard carried him in there? If the Temple works as a doorway between Timelines, okay, unlikely, was it possible that Richard replaced the wounded boy with a kid from a parallel universe, in which Sayid missed vital organs? In any case, Ben would grow up without knowledge from further stages of the loop. It seems that the only way to carry your memories with you is Jacobs touch.

Well, Ben touched Jacob.