RANDOM FODDER

 One of the issues in LOST's narrative was the apparent continuity errors. Some were viewed as production issues, others as easter eggs. In a very random exploration, let us discuss a very minor Other named Jason.

Jason was a minor  character who, on numerous occasions, aided Pickett, Ben and Ryan Pryce on various tasks against the 815 captives. He was once termed one of the ten trustworthy minions of Ben. Even though he was in the midst of several missions against the 815 captives, he did seem to be slightly different - - - he appeared to have a conscious.

During Season 3, he was first seen assisting Other named Michael in the Hydra operating room as Ben tried to convince Sawyer that he was in control. Jason told Sawyer to bite down on a stick to manage the pain while he held him down during the operation (which allegedly included planting a mini-bomb in his chest which turned out to be a hoax) and at the time Ben discussed Sawyer's fate at the Hydra Island lookout point.

Jason also assisted Jack at Colleen's funeral.

When Ben in surgery with Jack, Jason tried to convince Pickett, who was assisting, not to leave the operating room to go kill Sawyer. Jason went with Pickett to the cages, but instead of killing Sawyer, Pickett and Jason were beat up by Kate and Sawyer and left in the cages. Once they got out of the cages, they went to the beach to try to capture Kate and Sawyer, but they were unsuccessful.

Jason was one of the men who raided the 815 beach camp. Jason survived the initial ambush explosions to help capture Jin, Sayid and Bernard. As they were lined up on the beach waiting execution by Pryce, Hurley drove the van through the jungle striking the Others. Sayid tripped up Jason to the ground, then broke his neck to kill him.

However, several days after Jason's beach death, he is seen at Richard's camp. Ariston Green, the actor who played Jason, admitted in an interview that he was the person in that scene.

It was probably a production issue where the director needed background members and Green was available. But some would think that the producers and director would have known they killed off a character before this shot - - -  which could lead to viewer confusion.

But one of the oddities of series was the strange "reincarnations" of certain characters on the island. Patchy was the prime example as the mad Russian got killed several times over but seemed to reappear to take revenge on the castaways.

But Jason reincarnation could have been a "reward" for not being purely evil, but just a foot soldier taking orders. That view would give the show at a least a partial moral fiber to the actions and consequences of some actors. If you have some morally positive attributes, you could be saved from final judgment or given a second chance in your island life.

PROS AND CONS

Some people use horoscopes and astrology signs to determine whether they are compatible with other people, especially in relationships. The positive and negatives of each sign are mere generalizations. However, some people are comforted by those general attributes.

Likewise, you can always put together the pros and cons of characters with each other in their potential relationships.

JACK and KATE.

Pros: Both have lost Daddy issues so they have a common focus.

Cons: Jack tries to fix his problems to gain his father's favor, while Kate runs away from her problems.

SAWYER and KATE.

Pros: Both have a reckless, wild and manipulative to criminal mindset.

Cons: Both have a reckless, wild and manipulative to criminal mindset.

SAYID and SHANNON.

Pros: Both feel abandoned by their families but for different reasons.

Cons: He is sentimental while she is too selfish.

LOCKE and HELEN.

Pros: Both longed to have their own family.

Cons: Locke was obsessed with his past to not see a hopeful future with Helen. Helen was too naive and supportive of Locke to tell that he would never change.

HURLEY and LIBBY.

Pros:   Both tend to be introverted followers with an easy sense of humor.

Cons: Both have hidden emotional and psychological scars that block them from opening up to others.

CHARLIE and CLAIRE.

Pros: Youthful spirits that are trying to run away from their personal faults and failures.

Cons: Charlie's addictive personality traits and Claire's psychological paranoia to the pressure of family life.

JIN and SUN.

Pros: They share the same culture but from different parts of the social spectrum. They are both rebellious against their position in life. They share a similar goal.

Cons: Their personal ambitions lead to personality conflicts with other people. Personal goals outweigh relationship goals.

DANIEL and CHARLOTTE.

Pros: An analytical and practical mind tend to work well together as a team.

Cons: Daniel's sheltered life with his dominant mother makes it difficult for him to communicate, while Charlotte's personal drive stifles other people around her.

As in real life, the LOST characters' relationships had their strong points and their weaknesses. In the eight relationships noted above, five failed. One was a dubious affair and the other two bonded apparently in the after life.

WONDERLAND

What would it be like to be caught between worlds?

The world of the living and the world of the dead.

The world of the living and an other world of a distant alien planet.

Both are plausible explanations of the island in LOST. It is true because of the lack of concrete canon to support the sci-fi story lines with actual physics.

Peppered throughout the discussions of the island are scientific concepts like "portals," "worm holes," time travel experimentation, psychological conditioning, and unique electromagnetic properties. But to suspend belief in a science basis for the island, what do we have to consider?

An island that cannot be seen or mapped from the sky is not an island. It is something else.
An island that can move and disappear is not an island. It has to be something else.

But since Eloise Hawking could calculate its apparent location (with some assumptions), the island's movement must follow a pattern. Nature follows patterns. So does the Earth's electromagnetic grid. The island could be moving to intersection points along with Earth's electromagnetic grid. This makes the island a ship and not an island.

Electromagnetism and bending of light are principles in research for stealth technologies. To make things appear invisible, magicians use mirrors and distraction (such as a pretty assistant) to make the illusion complete. Mirrors, distractions and illusions were all story points in LOST.

What is the purpose of an island moving along an electromagnetic grid? It could be "recharging" itself from specific deep core entry points. It may need a certain amount of energy or flow to "contain" its own power system (which malfunctioned several times to create time skips and purple skies).

Some viewers believed the island was a space-time portal. The teleportation of Locke and Ben to Tunisia was proof of it (in a small scale). The capture of Flight 815 from the sky could be another example as well as all the ship wrecks. It could also explain the "immortality" of Jacob since he controlled the island and thus controlled time itself. One could equate Jacob to that of being a Time Lord.

No one has really thought about the island as being a TARDIS like device piloted by aliens. But in a UFO observatory conspiracy theory, an island would be a good cover to house a base to spy on human beings. A remote island would be a great place to bring humans to do experiments on. You don't need to be gray aliens to poke humans; as shape shifting beings you can create yourself in the image of your laboratory animals.

Jacob and the Man in Black did admit that bringing humans to the island was part of their grand game. An experiment on how humans react to the island conditions, with MIB lamenting that humans always screwed up in the end. MIB was so frustrated with it that he wanted to go "home." But Jacob would not let him - - - basically making him/it a prisoner on the island. So MIB used the corrupt humans in order to rebel against Jacob, to seize control of the island ship to leave Earth.

It does sound like a Dr. Who story line: who controls the TARDIS can control the universe. As Widmore desired control of the island, there were others like Ben who tried to protect it from becoming a weapon of power. But Ben was corrupted by that same power when he purged Dharma.

Therefore, we have the literary means of the island being the center piece between two worlds. The debate is what is the other world?  Is it the religious connotation of the after life (as adored by the temple and the Egyptian mythology)? Or it is a sci-fi based drama based upon the Faraday notebook and Dharma stations?

In either situation, it puts our castaways not as lost survivors of a transportation disaster, but human guinea pigs in a science fiction fantasy world.

A BAD MAIN THEME

There is one bad theme that ran throughout the LOST story lines.

Bad parents.

The affect of parents' treatment of their child had a dramatic effect on how that character was as an adult.

Jack's father never gave him the praise or encouragement Jack needed in order to complete his socialization process. As a result, Jack was not capable of having strong relationships with other people. His displeasure for his father's treatment of him was transferred onto other people he cared about when he was an adult.

Sayid was pushed into being a man as a child. He had to kill the chicken when his older brother could not do it. Sayid was trapped into following authoritative directions. He lost his own free will to serve his superiors (his father, his army commander). As a result, he did things he did not want to do (torture people) and to give up any dreams he had for his future (Nadia).

On the other hand, Hurley's dad's abandonment of him caused Hurley to develop a severe introversion with other people. Even when he had the courage to socialize, it was with the fear of rejection and abandonment. When the store clerk he liked ditched him for his best friend, Hurley's only escape was into his own dream world, a safe place where he could not get hurt.

Sawyer's mother and father ruined his life. His mother was conned out of the family savings, and his father went nuts by a murder-suicide with his wife instead of trying to rebuild his family trust and savings. That led Sawyer to a life of crime and revenge that de-humanized him to become the person he hated the most in the world, the con man Cooper.

Kate's parents divorced when she was a baby. Her mother fooled her into believing her second husband was her father. This deception led Kate not to trust men but to use them as puppets in her own bizarre rebellion. Kate's situation led her to a life of refusing to take responsibility for her actions, and to run away from her problems like her parents did when they divorced.

Jin and Sun were opposites tied together by their hatred for their family class status. Jin fled his poor fishing village life to vow that he would become a rich man. Sun rebelled against her strict, patronizing industrialist-criminal father. She would never get the status or position in the family business because of her gender. She took satisfaction that her father could not stand her taking a poor man like Jin as her lover. But she mistook Jin's desire for wealth over true love when he turned into her father's lackey. There relationship was based more on fighting back against their parentage than true feelings for others. In a way, there childish selfishness against being like their parents was their demise. No one can believe that one parent would orphan their child by drowning in a submarine; death was better than being a single parent?

Locke's traumatic childhood was the deepest cut of all. He could not find the family that he was searching for. He was blinded by the thought of a perfect, suburban picket fence reunion with his real parents. But their loathsome self-absorbed personalities destroyed Locke for a second time. Locke was so beaten down by his upbringing that he could not see the one woman who truly cared for him. He was so bent on his past he could not live in the present. He lost his family and the one woman who loved him. He created his own destiny of being a poor, miserable, bitter man because of his parents abandonment of him as a baby.

RELATIVE

Scientists have used Einstein's Theory of Relativity to calculate how time is measured in deep space flights. The conclusion is itself a paradox. For a deep space mission, the astronauts may age much more slowly traveling at the speed of light. For example, they may age 28 years on a light speed travel across the universe, but return to Earth 1,300 years later.

The fact that deep space travel can cause a return trip to take 1,300 years in "local" time explains why aliens have never returned to Earth.

Another factor in deep space travel is that human beings do not do well with forces over 1 g. We are basically water bags that can pop under pressure. Scientists think the best deep space travelers would be spiny, thin, small alien grays.

As private space firms have advertised in their speculative missions to colonize Mars, even solar system space travel is a one way street.  If you plan to go out into deep space, the chance of your returning home is near zero.

Which brings us to a hypothesis in LOST.

Some believe the island may have been some lost alien space craft. If true, then Jacob, the island guardian would have been the alien pilot and his brother his co-pilot. If these space aliens came from a distant solar system with advanced technology, they could have crash landed on Earth without the means of repairing their ship.

The clues of being space aliens comes in the form of their physical presence. Jacob and especially MIB appear to be shape-shifting smoke monsters. They can change their physical structure, morph into human beings or monsters. This would make sense for deep space travelers to avoid the pitfalls of human bodies. If these alien travelers were not humanoids but energy beings, they could survive deep space flight.

A further clue on the island aliens is that Jacob's narrative that people who come to the island are from "shipwrecks."  This mirrors his own situation. By bringing people to the island looking for a solution to his problem, Jacob cleverly puts the humans in the same position he is in: lost, looking for a way "home."

And the human beings brought to the island have been a clever bunch. Dharma and the military brought vast resources including nuclear technology and experimentation on electromagnetic properties including time travel. Perhaps these Earth technologies were being used to try to re-boot the space craft island so Jacob could indeed return "home" as MIB kept saying to the castaways. But MIB continues to get frustrated with the humans who want to take their advanced technology and use it to increase their own power on Earth. In order to control them, Jacob and MIB use human history of "gods" including borrowing ancient Egyptian rites, to control the humans on the island.

In essence, the series concludes not with the humans getting home, but the aliens finding a way to end their existence on a distant planet far away from their home. After centuries of failed attempts to get their ship technology working, Jacob and MIB apparently release themselves from their species protections (the immortality we saw during the show) in order to cease to exist. In that way, their alien technology does not corrupt the Earth society as they had found humans to be barbaric and crude in their emotional states.

MANIFEST DESTINY?

From the Hollywood Reporter and the web, there is news that NBC has ordered a pilot for a series which contains some initial traits of LOST. The synopsis is as follows:

A plane mysteriously goes missing mid-flight. Later, it reappears. For the passengers on board, it’s like it never happened. For everyone else, years have passed with the assumption that everyone on board was dead.

That’s the plot of Manifest, a new TV pilot ordered by NBC that’ll be produced by Robert Zemeckis. Jeff Rake (executive producer of The Mysteries of Laura) wrote the show, which will focus on how that passage of time changes the lives of the people on board as well as why it happened in the first place.

The show's premise is set up as a plane disaster to spawn dramatic mysteries which harks to LOST and the genre of castaways like Robinson Caruso. But this series seems to have no beaches, no smoke monsters—just one massive, unfathomable event, a long passage of time, and the fallout from it.

Zemeckis was the director and co-creator of Back to the Future.  He won an Oscar for directing Forrest Gump. He’s produced a few TV series over the years, but nothing in several decades.

This show will investigate maybe not the reason why the plane disappeared (any science fiction reason would probably suffice) but what happens to the characters who suddenly land 5, 10, 15 years later?  Of course their normal lives would have changed. Characters who were married probably no longer have spouses (since one can be declared dead after 7 years). Spouses who have remarried with children would want little to so with the returning spouse (or maybe not - - - that could be a point of conflict.) Characters would be coming home to find they have no job, no home, or lost family members who may have died without knowing their lost family member was still alive.

We could see the use of "flashbacks" to narrate the back stories of the airplane passengers as they try to navigate through a new world which forgot about them.

The pilot episode needs to hit hard and grasp the viewers immediately to avoid the curse of LOST strong start and weak finish.

ONE IN A DECADE

Pop culture website io9 is ranking the top 100 events in its first 10 years of existence.

93) The Lost finale

Lost was the first modern genre show that had the ability to turn almost anyone who watched it into a fan. People of every age, gender, race, and level of nerdiness could be heard talking together about about smoke monsters, time travel, and frozen donkey wheels over the course of its 2004-2010 broadcast. When the appropriately titled “The End” aired on May 23, 2010, people all over the world were rapt, waiting for the answers they’d been hoping for all along. That… didn’t happen. But the collective discourse about it—the frustration, the confusion, the anger, even enjoyment—was a singular moment in the expansion of nerd culture to the mainstream, and one not truly replicated until Game of Thrones.

LOST's continuing legacy is its popularity and its enigma.

Some fans liked the series and loved the ending.
Some fans liked part of the series then left it before Season 6.
Some fans liked the series but hated the ending.
Some fans liked the series and hoped it would return.
Some fans liked the series and hoped for more answers.
Some fans liked the series but would hate to see a re-boot.
Some fans liked the series but no longer dwell upon it.
Some fans liked the series and still talk about it fondly.