Pearl Questions
The episode ? raises lots of questions about Dharma's Pearl Station.
1. Who salted a circle above the entrance to the Pearl? If you'll notice in the picture above, the circle doesn't ring the entrance to the Pearl because that entrance is underneath the plane. So who made this mark, when and why?
2. Given what the entrance of the Pearl looks like with its handles and locks, etc. it makes me wonder what was the purpose of the Hatch our LOSTies blew open at the Swan. Was it an emergency escape route? There was one of those in the Staff. Is there also one here at the Pearl?
3. Who was filming The Pearl? Locke looks up and sees a camera in the Pearl station. It wasn't hidden (or maybe wasn't hidden any longer) unlike those at the Swan. Was Mikhail watching from the Flame? Was someone watching from The Hydra? Is there another viewing station?
4. The procedure for manning The Pearl seems complicated. Teams of two are assigned to the Pearl for three week tours of duty. But they work only 8 hour shifts at a time and then go from the Pearl to the Pala Ferry to return to the barracks after each of those shifts. That seems to imply 6 people man The Pearl every 3 weeks. Why so many people? Why so brief a tour? What happpened after your 3 weeks? Were you reassigned or sent home?
Friday, November 30, 2007
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6 comments:
Q#1) One of my questions is, how did TPTB come up with this scenario: "OK, we'll have another underground station, and we'll put a salted circle over it on the ground..." Huh? Maybe the circle was one of the early supply drop or parachute LZ areas, and there are salted circles in other places too. Are salted circles commonplace in the world we live in? :-)
Q#2) Not a clue here
Q#3) Maybe just all a part of the panopticon-like network...I see you, you see me, we all stay "honest".
Q#4) It seemed to me way back then, that perhaps the DI might do a secret sweep and clean for something covert in between shifts. That is, collecting the videos and/or recordings that were made, or something like that. At the very least, the Pearl jobs might have been just a "make-work" kind of secondary job, and that the Pearlies also had other primary duties that they had to get back to. Probably something extremely boring that they dreaded doing, instead of having some free time. :-)
All just guesses.
Re: salted circles...it just occured to me that maybe the Pearl had a salted Pearl over it, and the Swan had a salted Swan, etc., for early aerial or above-ground identification or whatever.
Q4 - I wondered if the Pearl was a sort of training exercise. When you were there, they set the screens to the station they were considering sending you too. In the meantime you went through an evaluation phase. If they decided not to use you, you went to work in the Dharma cafeteria thinking you had the scoop on the fact that all the experiments were bogus. If they decided you were worthy, you were let in on the actual experiment and you had your own detailed notes to guide you as you went.
Capcom, I like the idea of the circle being a drop zone. Our Losties are certainly clueless enough to have missed something like that near the Swan.
Good idea about this being a threshold assignement LOST 2010. Maybe this was the step after Work Man. :-)
Eko suggests the salted earth was meant so planes could see it from above, and I'd go along with that. As for why it's a "?" instead of in the shape of a pearl, well, I have no clue!
As for the camera in the Pearl, I maintain that it belongs to the actual psychological station. I think the Pearl is part of a larger structure that hosted the experiments in psychology and parapsychology, and that it's more or less a dupe station (and also a way for the DHARMA higher-ups to keep track of their employees).
I thought Radzinsky salted the question mark. After all, he drew the map...so I thought he might have been the one to make the "?"
I'm not sure he ever got inside the station, but he must have found the hatch. Since he couldn't know what it was for, he drew a "?", using the hatch as the dot at the bottom.
And yeah, I figure the camera in the Pearl must be one that Ben can see from Falcatraz' monitoring station. Or maybe a monitoring room in the Barracks area.
good questions, Memphish!
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