I'm Not A Fan of Popular Mechanics



That's a broad generalization. While I'm not very mechanical, my husband is the scientist in the family; I'm the linguist and historian -- we make a deadly Trivial Pursuit team, it's actual Popular Mechanics Theory of Island Movement that I'm not a fan of. The analogy they draw is that the Island is in location x and that turning the frozen donkey wheel was equivalent of building a bypass around it. Staying on the bypass you never run into town, but the town (the Island) is still in the same location.

But I'm not buying it. The helicopter crashed within 5 km or miles of the Island. They did not seem to drift for long before Penny's boat picked them up. Surely, they used Penny's boat to go back and forth over the site they believed the Island to exist. Surely they looked for some evidence that Jin or others survived the freighter blast. Or are they so self-centered (Seinfeldian in that self-centeredness) that they immediately began motoring for the Indian Ocean? I just don't see how in an ocean without roads they can't find that Island if it is still there, bypass or no bypass.

Now I can understand the idea that the Island is somewhat like Narnia in that it is not in fact in our world and that turning the wheel forever reinserted the back panel of the wardrobe. But if that's the case, I feel like they played fast and loose in the latter half of Season 4 what with Doctor Ray and his fresh wound. By the end of Season 4 it felt like you could come and go from the Island in any direction and you'd get there, though there might be consequences you didn't prefer. What's more you could clearly see the freighter from the Island and vice versa and you could see it all from the helicopter. No interference.

This also really makes me wonder how the Dharma Initiative ever figured out how to safely come and go from the Island. Did Alpert teach them? Did he teach a Hanso?

As for what idea I do like, I think the Island literally got sucked into the ocean and will pop back up somewhere else. That could lead to very bad things. I also love the idea that this explains how the Black Rock got to the center of the Island. The Island popped up under it. I also like the idea that the Nigerian drug plane could have gotten there similarly or that it could have been sucked in from the Tunisian desert as a polar bear was spit out. After all Ben moved both physically and in time, so why shouldn't that also be the case with the Island?