IN A GAME OF WAR

Last post we picked "teams" for a battle of island survival.

JACOB'S LIGHT TEAM members:

Jack, Locke, Daniel, Dogen, Iana, Mars, Ana Lucia, Goodwin, Kate, and Danielle.

Field leader(s): Jack, Ana Lucia
Mission specialist(s): Daniel
Survivalists: Danielle
Athletic/Military: Iana, Goodwin, Kate
Intangible: Dogen, Mars

MIB'S DARK TEAM members:

Ben, Sayid, Jin, Sawyer, Mr. Eko, Keamy, Patchy, Ethan, Naomi, Kelvin.

Field leader(s): Ben
Mission specialist(s): Sayid, Ethan
Survivalists: Mr. Eko
Athletic/Military: Jin, Keamy, Patchy, Naomi, Kelvin
Intangible: Sawyer

So, if the series was about a rough and tumble, no rules, winner-take-all survival contest on who would control the island, who would win?

If you were going to write a preview story for an NFL game, a writer would look at the strengths and weaknesses of both teams. How the coaches view strategy. And which teams can exploit another's weakness.

If it was a game of "hide and seek," Team Jacob's Rousseau and Kate would be excellent hiders/seekers. MIB's team has no real stealth operatives except for Naomi. It is interesting that it is female characters who best fit this strategy.

If this was a game of "brutal strength," each team could lock horns in drawn out matches. Jacob's best "fighters" would be Ana Lucia, Goodwin, Iana, Mars and Danielle.  MIB's strongest fighters would be Keamy, Sayid, Patchy, Mr. Eko and Kelvin.

If it was one on one, ranked bouts:

Ana Lucia vs. Keamy.  It would be a brutal prize fight since pound for pound Ana Lucia is a pit bull.

Goodwin vs. Sayid. Also a close contest with Goodwin having the size, but Sayid having extensive combat experience.

Iana vs. Patchy. Again, a closer contest than one would imagine since Iana seems to have the background in hard, unwinnable situations as Jacob's Girl Friday Hunter while Patchy seems to throw himself into danger and miraculously survives.

Mars vs. Mr. Eko. It would seems clear that Mr. Eko's size, strength and meanness in a street fight would take down Agent Mars. If there was some strategy, traps or weapons, Mars could close the gap but Eko still would be the favorite to prevail.

Danielle vs. Kelvin. This match in some ways happened on the island. Both of the them were long term island inhabitants. Danielle kept away from the Others, baited trapped and killed some of them. Kelvin's position in the Others camp is less clear. Was he a hold over from Dharma (unaware of the purge) or a recruited ex-military from Ben's Others? Either way, both combatants have a roundabout tactics to ambush their prey.

That leaves "tactics and strategy," or leadership in game planning. Who has an advantage in that area?

Team Jacob's brain corps consists of Jack, Locke and Daniel. Daniel has the scientific background to potentially exploit the islands' natural energy sources. Locke has the survival-hunting skills to operate the base camp. Jack has the power position to make life and death decisions, but he has no background in war strategy. Locke, having been an avid gamer, is more suited to be a field general.

Team MIB management team consists of Ben, who had been a proven, driven, hard-nose and brutal dictator who also had a keen sense of strategy, manipulation and cruel traps. He is a cold blooded villain. Sawyer is also a person who can "think" a series of actions to get to "a solution," such as conning a woman out of her life savings. Sawyer can iron out the details, and put a plan into motion.

Clearly then, Team MIB has a much stronger leadership team to devise and implement battle strategies in the field.

Then it comes down to the "intangibles," Team Jacob's spiritualist Dogen vs. Team MIB's medical researcher Ethan. Both men have a killer streak in them. When cornered, they will strike like a cobra. Ethan has a much bigger build than Dogen, but he seems to have martial arts in his soul.

So in a game of island war, it would be a very close battle. On most fronts and one-to-one bouts, the teams balance out as a wash. It would be a close contest but Team MIB (Evil) would seem to be the slight favorite to capture the island.

HOW FAR CAN ONE FALL?

One of the first plot contentions in LOST was the survival of the passengers in the plane crash. Whether or not the passengers could survive a mid-flight, high altitude, broken apart plane crash set the path of science/reality vs. fiction/fantasy; life or death.

There are exceptions to the rule, but for the most part when a commercial airplane is in distress during flight and crashes in the ocean or on land, there are no survivors. The recent Germanwings and the Malaysian Airlines crashes are evidence that plane crashes are a violent end.  Planes are flying approximately 500 miles an hour during flight.  The momentum of a sudden change in flight path toward the ground, and resulting impact forces creates a deadly end.

The first hurdle in the believability of LOST's story is whether so many passengers could have survived a mid-air plane break-up from approximately 33,000 feet.

There is an example of a flight attendant, Vensa Vulovic, who survived a Serbian plane crash in 1972 after falling 33,000 feet. How she survived is not fully clear. Some scientists think one raises their chances of survival by becoming "wreckage riders," holding on to parts of the plane debris like a glider to lessen the impact forces. But it highly unrealistic to have so many panicked passengers thinking about improvising paragliders while the plane falls a part around them.  Besides, we know that the passengers "landed" on the ground (or ocean) such as Jack in the bamboo field.

In another example, a World War II pilot survived a bail out of his plane at 20,000 feet when he crashed through a glass roof which science believes "spread out the impact" of the crash force to survivable levels. (Mythbusters tried to re-create a similar story where an airman fell toward a building that blew up below him, creating an "air cushion" to lessen his impact. It was not confirmed.)

The facts seem straight forward. 

Terminal velocity is 120 miles per hour. That is the maximum speed an object, like a human body, reaches when in free fall. 

It is not the height that causes fatal injuries, it is the impact.

First, physics  how and where you land is one of the major factors in whether you get up from the ground or go 6 feet further into it. If you can make the time [landing] longer, the force needed to stop you is smaller. Think of punching a wall or a mattress. The wall is rigid and the time of interaction is short so the force is large. People who have survived falls, they’ve managed to increase that time, even if it’s in milliseconds. From one millisecond to three, that’s three times longer, three times less force needed for the same change in momentum. 

Second, survivors who have plummeted into snow, trees, or something that can better absorb your landing than, say, concrete or water, have a better chance of survival. Spreading out the force of impact away from one's body is a key factor in survival.

Third, another factor is slowing the descent. Increasing surface area means more energy is required to push air out of your way, slowing you down. The “flying squirrel” position, body splayed out, is preferred over falling feet or head first. By increasing that drag is the biggest factor in keeping you alive.  This is why a parachute’s large surface area is best to slow descent speed.  

But some scientists state that there are issues even before one hits the ground. If you start your fall from high altitude, the air is thin. You may not have enough oxygen to survive. Further, if one body spins in the fall turbulence, the blood can rush to one's head and will kill you. Also, the friction of the fall could burn skin or beat up internal organs causing hemorrhages.

So it is probable that falling passengers could die during the fall (especially if they had pre-existing health conditions) or upon impact with the ground.

Now, many will remember the scene from the barracks that showed Flight 815 breaking up over the island at an apparent "low" altitude. This is debatable continuity error, because the prior "on board" sequence of events clearly showed no elevation change of the plane from its cruising 30-35,000 feet level when in seconds, the plane broke a part. Perhaps the second scene was used in order to "white wash" or change the perception of the story from the cries that fans who theorized that everyone died in the plane crash and the show was about purgatory.

But from the physical, objective evidence seen in the show's first season, one has to assume in the normal course of events, there would have been no survivors of the plane crash. But LOST is a fictional show, so it is possible to stretch the truth to create a plausible reality. But the writers did not fully explain how so many passengers could have survived a high altitude plane crash. If the writers said that the plane got caught in the island's sci-fi "unique" electromagnetic field that lessened the impact of the free fall, then why did most of the passengers die anyway? And when the writers added the fact that only Jacob could "bring" people to the island, this shows that the island was not a "real" island but some supernatural place in another dimension of time or space (such as purgatory).

It would have been much easier to start the series premises with a cruise ship disaster and the survivors floating ashore (such as was the case with Rousseau's ship). But having a questionable survival situation from a plane crash, coupled with an immortal being collecting "candidates" to play a game with a smoke monster tends to put the evidence clearly in the camp that the characters never survived the plane crash. Likewise, such sci-fi elements call into question whether the characters were ever even on a plane to begin with . . .  an open ended premise that we can continue to debate ad nauseaum.

NEGATIVE SMARTS

Here is an odd bobble from the interwebs of social media culled by WIRED:

it seems the more negative in one's comments, the more intelligent the commentator appears to others.

The reason is"hypercriticism." When we hear negative statements, we think they're inherently more intelligent than positive ones. Teresa Amabile, director of research for Harvard Business School, began exploring this back in the 1980s. She took a group of 55 students, roughly half men, half women, and showed them excerpts from two book reviews printed in an issue of The New York Times. The same reviewer wrote both, but Amabile anonymized them and tweaked the language to produce two versions of each—one positive, one negative. Then she asked the students to evaluate the reviewer's intelligence.

The verdict was clear: The students thought the negative author was smarter than the positive one—“by a lot,” Amabile tells me. Most said the nastier critic was “more competent.” Granted, being negative wasn't all upside—they also rated the harsh reviewer as “less warm and more cruel, not as nice,” she says. “But definitely smarter.” Like my mordant tweets, presumably.

This so-called negativity bias works both ways, it seems. Other studies show that when we seek to impress someone with our massive gray matter, we spout sour and negative opinions. In a follow-up experiment, Bryan Gibson, a psychologist at Central Michigan University, took a group of 117 students (about two-thirds female) and had them watch a short movie and write a review that they would then show to a partner. Gibson's team told some of the reviewers to try to make their partner feel warmly toward them; others were told to try to appear smart. You guessed it: Those who were trying to seem brainy went significantly more negative than those trying to be endearing.

Why does this bias exist? No one really knows, though some theorists speculate it's evolutionary. In the ancestral environment, focusing on bad news helped you survive.

Some may say this site has had more negative LOST posts, but not really if you consider there still are posts long after the series has concluded, so that must be a positive.

If LOST was truly a character study, does one pointing out the negatives in a situation appear to be smarter?

The cursory results are mixed.

Jack quickly became the leader because of his positive outlook, demeanor and his known important medical skills.

Locke was more visceral against Jack's positions, pointing out flaws or different ways of doing things. Other castaways did not find Locke "smart," more like crazy in some of his viewpoints.

There is an irony here because when Flocke and Jack are helping Desmond re-set the cork, Jack admits that the real Locke was right about everything associated with the island.

Hurley was always upbeat and positive. He tried to keep his friends happy and entertained. No one called Hurley a genius. At the same time, Sawyer was constantly a negative, counterproductive presence in the camp. Most people knew he had some street smarts, but he never wanted to let anyone in past his personal firewall.

Kate's personality really lacked common sense because she continually compounded her mistakes in the real world as a fugitive. On the island, other women came to her for personal advice. Kate was neither smart or dumb; she was an independent survivor.

Ben was highly critical and negative towards his subordinates. In fact, so vicious that he would have them killed for disobeying him. As a result, people feared his evil genius.

In real life, people will gravitate toward upbeat and happy people. This may be instinctive to share positive emotional bonds with others. Negative people tend to drain the energy from a room and make people uncomfortable. It seems in the social media webs, the exact opposite happens. This touches briefly on the mirror theme: what is seen may be the opposite of reality.

THE PYRAMID OF LOST

One can view LOST as a storied pyramid. The base of this temple would be Season One, which set the fan base into the web of the survivors on the mysterious island. But if we look back, we can generally see that there was a progression of the story plots that decreased in intensity, continuity, explanation and execution to which should have been the peak in Season Six. Some viewers bailed on the show in Seasons 2 and 3 because they felt that the story lines were getting too confusing, too strange and too unbelievable (like the time shifts).  Other viewers kept on watching, merely because they had invested so much time in the series not to continue to its conclusion. Die hard fans kept dissecting the show, and its twists and turns, believing that there was some story gold at the end of jumbled plot lines. So one could argue that from a solid foundation in Season One, LOST regressed in each of the subsequent seasons until it turned into a confusing parallel world view (the sideways existence) with its own unanswered questions.

Wikipedia summarizes the LOST seasons as follows:


The first season begins with the aftermath of a plane crash which leaves the surviving passengers of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 on what seems to be a deserted tropical island. Their survival is threatened by a number of mysterious entities, including polar bears, an unseen creature that roams the jungle (the "Smoke Monster"), and the island's malevolent inhabitants known as "The Others". They encounter a French woman named Danielle Rousseau who was shipwrecked on the island 16 years before the main story and is desperate for news of a daughter named Alex. They also find a mysterious metal hatch buried in the ground. While two survivors try to force the hatch open, four others attempt to leave on a raft that they have built. Meanwhile, flashbacks centered on individual survivors detail their lives prior to the plane crash.


The second season follows the growing conflict between the survivors and the Others, and continues the theme of the clash between faith and science, while resolving old mysteries and posing new ones. A power struggle between Jack and John over control of the guns and medicine located in the hatch develops, resolved in "The Long Con" by Sawyer when he gains control of them. New characters are introduced, including the tail-section survivors (the "Tailies") and other island inhabitants. The hatch is revealed to be a research station built by the Dharma Initiative, a scientific research project that involved conducting experiments on the island decades earlier. A man named Desmond Hume had been living in the hatch for three years, pushing a button every 108 minutes to prevent a catastrophic event from occurring. One of the crash survivors betrays the others and the cause of the plane crash is revealed, as the Others capture Jack and several castaways and take them hostage.


In the third season, the crash survivors learn more about the Others and their long history on the mysterious island and the fate of the Dharma Initiative. The leader of the Others, Benjamin Linus, is introduced as well as defections from both sides pave the wave for conflict between the two. Time travel elements also begin to appear in the series, as Desmond is revealed to be "unstuck" in time and seeks this ability to alert his longtime girlfriend Penny to rescue the survivors. The survivors make contact with a rescue team aboard the freighter Kahana. At the end of the season however, the show undergoes a format switch, with flashbacks being abandoned for "flash forwards."


Season four focuses on the survivors dealing with the arrival of people from the freighter, who have been sent to the island to reclaim it from Benjamin. The survivors form an alliance with several members of the freighter, who are revealed to have ties to the island and who realize the secrets of the island must remain hidden from those who seek to abuse them. They eventually convince Benjamin to help them, in "moving" the island backwards through time via a time travel mechanism hidden within the bowels of the island, while six castaways escape back to civilization. While seasons one through three focused on flashbacks alongside the main story, season four continues with the "flash forwards" established in the season three finale and slowly reveal the identity of those who escaped the Island (dubbed "The Oceanic Six" by the media) and their encounters with Benjamin Linus, who informs them of a death of a seventh character, which necessates them returning to the island.


The fifth season follows two timelines. The first takes place on the island where the survivors who were left behind erratically jump forward and backward through time until they are finally stranded with the Dharma Initiative in 1974, while Benajmin Linus and later, John Locke, to the present. The second continues the original timeline, which takes place on the mainland after the Oceanic Six escape, and follows their return to the island on Ajira Airways flight 316 in 2007 (three years after they escaped). Some passengers on the Ajira flight land in 1977 and some remain in 2007,. The ones who in 2007 and the surviving Others unite to a dangerous mission to assassinate Jacob, the island's protector. Those who land in 1977 reunite with the other survivors who have lived for three years with the Dharma Initiative, only to fail to attempt to change past events in order to prevent the Oceanic plane from crashing in the future.


In the sixth and final season, the main storyline follows the survivors, reunited in the present day, as the death of Jacob allows for his brother, the Man in Black, the human alter ego of the Smoke Monster, to take over the island. Having assumed the form of John Locke, the Smoke Monster seeks to escape the island and forces a final war between the forces of good and evil. The final season also features a "flash-sideways" narrative, that follows the lives of the main characters in a setting where Oceanic 815 never crashed though additional changes are revealed as other characters are shown living completely different lives than they did. In the final episodes, a flashback to the distant past shows the origins of the island's power and of the conflict between Jacob and the Man in Black, who are revealed to be twin brothers with Jacob desperate to keep his brother from leaving the island after he is transmogrified by the power of the island and becomes the smoke monster. The Man In Black is killed as one of the survivors becomes the new caretaker of the island, several of the survivors die in the conflict or stay on the island, and the remaining escape the island once and for all. The series finale reveals that the flash-sideways timeline is actually a form of limbo in the afterlife, where some of the survivors and other characters from the island are reunited after having died because their time on the island had been the most important part of their existence. In the end, the survivors are all reunited in a church where they "move on" together.

WRECKAGE

Here is an early cast still for LOST showing the main characters with the beach wreckage.

Of all the cast members shown, only one, Walt, was stated to be alive off the island (since we don't know if Ajira plane made it home).

There are debates whether any of the characters survived a mid-air plane break up. There are theories about whether the characters were cloned, saved by angels, teleported to a supernatural place, souls in purgatory, or experimental lab rats in a mental maze.

Whatever the true purpose of the characters, this photograph is a metaphor for each character (and the collective group's) standing in the wreckage of their own personal lives. How could they have survived a plane crash when each of them barely survived in their own lives? All of them were broken, physically and/or emotionally. All there futures were suspect and dark to foreboding. In one way or another, they had all messed up something important in their lives. It was an irreversible action that has no second chance, except in death (as in Jack's reunion with his father in the sideways church). There was little hope of cleaning up the wreckage of their personal lives back home. They all were doomed to some form of misery. And misery loves company.

The wreckage, misery, loss of direction, drifting away from responsibility or change is what is the common thread amongst the main characters. The were all lost to the fates that troubled their personal lives. The only happiness they would truly find was in their after life reunion, which is a sad commentary on life itself.

FIVE ITEMS

If you crash landed on a tropical island, what five items would you want to have with you?

It is almost a universal question for hikers, explorers, adverturers, campers and in LOST, survivalists.

My five items are fairly straight forward.

1. A large knife. Growing up in the 1960s-1970s, America was, in retrospect, in the end phase of its knife culture. My father and his father always carried pocket knives. It was a basic tool. In the scouts, we learned early on how to handle a knife. A knife is a versatile tool. It can be used for cutting, sharpening and digging tough terrain. It can also be used as a defensive weapon.

2. A compass. If one is lost in unfamiliar place, it would be helpful to have a compass to get one's bearings, especially if there is a tropical canopy which could confuse the direction of sunlight. A compass is a navigation tool. It is also a psychological boost to a lost individual because it gives factual information to a person in a time of high stress or crisis.

3. A copy of the U.S. Army's Survival Manual. The book's description sells the importance of such a resource: Army Survival Manual is the finest single source for self-reliance for all extreme circumstances. A must for anyone who wants to know how to survive in primitive conditions. The book is very straightforward with many pictures and user-friendly illustrations, written in easy to understand language. This is just some of the survival information that this book provides: All-climates: arctic, tropics, temperate forest, savannah or desert. All-terrain survival tactics. The Will to Survive. Identify poisonous snakes, as well as edible and non-edible plants. Survival Medicine. Wilderness medicine. Techniques on first aid. Survival in the hottest or coldest of climates. Survival Planning. Make polluted water potable. How to find water. Ways to trap and collection techniques of water. Covers navigation and compass use. Find direction using the sun and stars. Weapons and Tools. Recognizing signs of land when lost at sea.

4. A first aid kit. One of the most important aspects of survival is one's health. Water is a key necessity. Also, the ability to limit open wounds or cuts because infection could zap one of strength and kill you. A complete first aid kit gives a person the ability to protect against small scrapes and bruises turning into a major medical emergency.

5. A fire starter kit. A flintlock (which is a piece of metal and flint, struck together to create a spark to ignite kindling) is another frontier camper tool which many people are now unfamiliar. One of the most important things for survival is building a fire. Nights even in tropical areas could plunge. Dampness from torrent rains could soak clothing and shelter so the need to be dry to avoid rot and disease is apparent. Otherwise, one would need a good supply of matches in order to start fires.

These five items are in the practical elements for survival. However, each person may have a different understanding of their own skill level or strategy for survival. Some may wish to have a sat-phone, or a flare gun to signal help. Some may wish to have rope in order to lash wood together for a better shelter. No matter the items, one needs a standard of common sense in order to survive.

Some considered Alpert's "test" to young John Locke a survival test.


In 1961 or 1962, Alpert came to Locke's foster home under the guise of evaluating a gifted child for his future education. Alpert presented a five-year-old Locke with a test involving six items. Alpert placed a compass on a table with five other items, asking Locke to identify which "already belong to him." 

The items were a brass compass, a baseball glove, an  old book whose cover bore the title, "Book of Laws"  which Eko will tell Locke a story about the "Book of Law", i.e., the Old Testament, a vile of sand, a knife and  A comic book, Mystery Tales, issue 40 from April 1956 (right before Locke's birth), bearing the subtitle, "What was the secret of the mysterious 'HIDDEN LAND!'"

A time-traveling Locke had previously given Richard a compass, a compass that Richard would return him to Locke years later, in 2007. Locke crashed on the island with a collection of hunting knives.

A young child may have taken the baseball glove or comic book. But Young John debated selecting a container of granules and the compass before settling upon a knife.

Disappointed, Richard collected the items and left, leaving a dejected Locke with his angry mother.

If Alpert's test was a survival test, then Locke in my estimation would have passed because a knife is a good tool. If Alpert's test was learn about Locke's true self, then the knife as a weapon could have been considered evil. But it also could have been symbolic to defend the island (though the vile of sand would have been a closer representation or connection to the island proper). Likewise, the bible could have represented being "good."  The baseball glove and the comic book as being childish. And the compass representative of being able to find one's own way in the world (something Locke clearly did not do in his own life).

ONCE IN A LIFETIME

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough. — Mae West

 It does appear that in the original writer's guide, there was no mention that the island's location was some fore hell, cosmic limbo or the underworld. However, it never said that it was not. It was all cloaked in the vague title of being mysterious.

There was also no mention that everyone died in the plane crash. The presumption is that the main characters we saw in the pilot episode survived the crash. We saw people who died as a result of the crash, or died shortly thereafter due to their injuries. And this suspension of belief that people could survive a high altitude midsection separation plane crash was clearly what the network executives wanted when they said they wanted a "real life" version of Survivor. 

So, in some literary aspects, the main characters did get a "second" life . . . a means to change their prior lives as they tried to rebuild a new life on the island. This could have been the keystone to the entire series: new lives by building a new community.

A more convoluted character survival story emerged in the show. It was more about individual character reactions than a group dynamic to solving problems. Flashbacks took precedence over the fundamental daily survival issues mentioned in the guide.

In fact, several characters had more than one life on the island. Patchy seemed to have been killed multiple times. Sayid was reincarnated at the temple. Flocke was stabbed and did not die. Jacob, Alpert and MIB were immortal beings. Physical ghosts wandered the jungles. Whispers were trapped souls of spirits. Those elements shaded gray the actual black and white concept of either life or death in survival terms.

If survival was going to be the cornerstone theme of the series, the LOST lost its way at some point in Season 1 after the original story ideas dried up or were discarded by the writers. Instead of the survivors banding together to fight common issues like food, shelter, safety and security, it splintered into smaller groups and alliances which acted independently of a common cause. The background characters quickly turned into a malaise of unimportant plot point fodder such as red shirt deaths, picked off one by one when the danger meter ran low.

As LOST progressed, it had very little to do with "how" you lived your new island life. Bad people like Ben were not punished (by not going to the sideways world heaven). Even good people like Helen and Walt were missing in the end.

LOST could have been a once in a lifetime show. However, since its conclusion, its staying power in American culture continues to wane. When people mention LOST today, there is a negative connotation to it - - - based upon the final season. At comic culture conventions, people are not clamoring about in LOST costumes - - - like other high profile franchises like Star Wars or Star Trek which had their classic high runs more than 30 years ago. LOST itself does not appear to have its own "second" life renewal like those star franchises. It seems like the LOST universe is collapsing upon itself in its own black hole. Which is a shame because some fans rode the LOST bandwagon as the time of their lives.