Song of Claire?

I finished Book 6 of the Dark Tower series, Song of Susannah and I can't even answer my own question given the cliffhanger ending of the book. Song of Susannah was that episode before the season finale. You know Born to Run, Three Minutes, Greatest Hits, and There's No Place Like Home, Pt. 1; that episode which is good, but in all honesty just resembles the five moves on the chessboard that precede the final three checkmate death blows. People who eventually have to end up together are scattered and you don't know how they'll get back together. And then with three minutes left, something starts to happen and then you have to wait to find out what. I'm somewhat fearful all of Season 5 may resemble that episode.

But there were a couple of ideas in Song of Susannah that I'm interested to see if they play out on LOST. The most interesting has to do with do-overs. Time travel has been very present in The Dark Tower series. From the very beginning we've known that there are other worlds than these. But here we are introduced to the idea of the true world, the "only one where, when things were finished, they stayed finished.” p. 176 What's more in this world you can never come back to an earlier time and get a do over. You have to get it right the first time. pp. 217-18

The new Season 5 promo and it's use of props that we've seen in the past have many speculating that some form of do-over may be where we're heading. Heck, that's been an idea ever since beardy Jack first started raving about going back. How could going back undo or make up for the bad things that happened after the O6 left, unless the O6 get some sort of do-over? I'm not a huge fan of alternate universes, but I'm willing to give TPTB one go at it. Just one though. We'll see. Will Jack and crew get on last chance to get everything right?

Another very LOST-ian idea is the role of magic/faith vs. science/rationality. Mia explains to Susannah that the world was formed by magic but then the magic receded and was replaced with machines. Now the machines are failing. Mia claims the same is true for Susannah herself. "You doom yourselves, Susannah. You seem positively bent on it, and the root is always the same: your faith fails you, and you replace it with rational thought. But there is no love in thought, nothing that lasts in deduction, only death in rationalism." p. 147 And to top it off Mia claims the only thing that can save the world is the return of magic.

Now this is the kind of explanation I'd like to see for the Island and what's going on with it. The Island is a magic place, then Dharma arrives and tries to harness that magic mechanically. As a result the magic departs. Then those maintaining the machines are purged, and now the machines are failing to control the Island resulting in rogue Smokey, moving Jacob and the inability of women to carry a pregnancy to term. And the only thing that will save it is the return of the magic. Well, a girl can hope at least. Or it could be an attempt to merge the science and the magic. That was something that happened in the Dark Tower world as well, but it failed in all but one remaining place, and the health of that place is pretty questionable too.

Finally, there's the repeated notion of twins. It arises in two key places in Song of Susannah. The first is in this duality of science and magic. Susannah calls them Tweedledee and Tweedledum in addition to rational and irrational, sane and insane. In the second instance Eddie is called the twin of Roland's childhood friend Cuthbert. But the idea isn't really so much that they are twins, but in fact the same reincarnated soul turning on the wheel of Ka.  I'm still looking for that bad twin.

I've only got one book to go in MY quest for the Dark Tower. I'm not sure when I'll get there, but I'm certain ka willing that it will be before the start of Season 6, my goal. 

What Kind of "Timers" Inhabit The Island?

More from Insomnia. Normal living human beings are known as Short-Timers. They (we) can only perceive our world with our five senses. There are 3 Long-Timers in the book who can perceive much more in the same physical space for example our auras which give a sense of our health and emotions and also when our end is near. Long-Timers experience time differently than we do. They live much, much longer and age differently. Then there are All-Timers who are immortal.

Additionally those who live longer have the ability to manipulate those who live shorter. The three main Long-Timers end the lives of Short-Timers and are also said to manipulate 3 Short-Timers in particular as if they were chess pieces on a board. Sound familiar? Additionally these Long-Timers are sent to perform these manipulations by others more higher ranking than they.

So I wonder -- Is Richard a Long-Timer? Ben? Widmore? In Insomnia these Long-Timers can't lie though they don't always answer questions and try to answer only what and to the extent that they desire. They also have to keep promises. This sounds a bit like Ben's ethos. They also can't interfere with each other directly, but need to use Short-Timer agents. Again this sounds like Richard, Ben and Widmore who seem to keep their hands technically clean. (Okay, not so much Ben, but the other 2.)

It also makes me wonder about Christian and Jacob and their manipulations of Short-Timers on the Island. Are they trying to get in on the chess game as well?

Does Time Move Faster On the Island
When Its Inhabitants Go Up?

On my road to the Dark Tower I've detoured once again to Derry, Maine where Stephen King's novels It and now Insomnia take place. Characters in Insomnia are moving between levels of the Dark Tower, a building that somehow controls time and worlds and how time moves in worlds. When these humans move up the levels of the Tower allowing them to perceive more than is normally available to our five senses time begins to move at a significantly faster rate.

So I wonder if what's going on in terms of Island time and its failure to quite add up is movement by the Island or those on it through levels of time resulting in the rate at which time passes failing to be constant. I especially wonder this with Daniel's experiment. The rocket literally went up (and so do characters in Insomnia at least once) and then had a different time from Daniel's watch. Ben went somewhere when he turned the wheel and 10 months passed. Did he go up?

Wolves of The Island

"[The] story has left me in a strangely disturbed frame of mind. I can't tell if it answers more questions than it raises, or the other way around." Wolves of the Calla p. 612

Book 5 of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, Wolves of the Calla was probably the least LOST-like book so far in the series. It's a way station of sorts on the way to the Tower. A pregnancy project if you will. As Eddie realizes:

Even though their main goal is the Tower, they aren't exempt from participation in other "quests." . . . and had Eddie really thought there was no work left for the line of Arthur Eld in this mostly empty and husked-out world? That they would simply be allowed to toddle along the Path of the Beam until they got to Roland's Dark Tower and fixed whatever was wrong there? p. 144

But there are some large thematic things happening in Wolves that remind me of LOST and make me wonder if they are clues as to what's going on on our favorite Island.

The Nature of Time

The very nature of time itself, a commodity that has been slipping throughout the Dark Tower saga is very present in this book.

Time is a face on the water. . . . The saying might have been true when Roland had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers, but Eddie thought it was even truer now, as the world wound down like the mainspring in an ancient watch. Roland had told them that even such basic things as the points of the compass could no longer be trusted in Mid-World; what was dead west today might be southwest tomorrow, crazy as that might seem. And time had likewise begun to soften. There were days Eddie could have sworn were forty hours long, some of them followed by nights (like the one on which Roland had taken them to Mejis) that seemed even longer. Then there would come an afternoon when it seemed you could almost see darkness bloom as night rushed over the horizon to meet you. Eddie wondered if time had gotten lost. pp. 45-46

It reminds me of the crazy way time seemed to act in Season 2 and also in Season 4 with Daniel Faraday's arrival. It was inconsistent. All of a sudden it was dark. It seemed like days on the Island before Sayid tried to call from the boat. The doc arrived before he was killed. Maybe time is running down on the Island too. Or it runs at different rates depending on external events as Eddie thinks. "When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening, time apparently quit altogether." p. 48

And time is not the only thing that's blurry. Eddie remarks, "The people are real. . . . But the way stuff from my world keeps showing up over here, that's not real. It's not sensible or logical, either, but that's not what I mean. It's just not real. p. 215 It makes me think of the Nigerian drug plane in particular. I still can't wait to find out how that got on the Island.

Even another character the main ka-tet meets along the way has experienced this time problem. Callahan says "For months--sometimes even years, as I tried to explain to you--time hardly seems to exist. Then everything comes in a gasp." p. 403 This reminds me of what's happened on Island since 815 crashed. Since the Purge the Others carried on in their day to day Land's End life in New Otherton and now "bam" the last 100 days have been insane. Same for Desmond. For 3 years all he did was push a button and now everything is coming in a gasp.

And we finally get a hint at what's going on with time when Roland, Eddie and Jake visit the Rose in New York. Eddie . . . saw the Tower itself in the burning folds of the rose and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in time's great helix. . . . for every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower. And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. "There are two hubs of existence," [Roland said] The Tower . . . and the rose." pp. 250-51 Is the Island also one of these hubs?


Travel Through Time and Space

Another big component of Wolves is the traveling the ka-tet does away from the Calla to 1977 New York. They manage this travel in two different ways. This first is by going "todash" which is a kind of very real dream. When it occurs, they pass between two worlds, the World they were sleeping in and the world of 1977 New York. And as they were "todashed" to New York only the barest bit of them remained in the other world. Could this explain Jacob? While Jake and Eddie were todash they flickerd on and off.

What's more we meet a group of people, the Manni-folk who regularly engage in this sort of travel. The "elder Manni seek the other worlds[.] Not for treasure but for enlightenment[.] [Roland] also knew that some had come back from their travels insane. Others never come back at all. These hills are magnetic, and riddled with many ways into many worlds."  p. 533 I want to know if this is the sort of task that Richard wants to get his people back to.

There's even more time travel through alternate worlds in Callahan's story. While living in "our" world he often encountered "highways in hiding" that led to alternate Americas with different Presidents, different currencies and different town names.

And then there's a final form of travel and that's through a door, a door like those in Book 2 The Drawing of the Three, but to get through these doors you need a glass, Black 13 which was first introduced in Wizard and Glass. Using Black 13, the ka-tet and Callahan are able to direct their travels back to 1977 though there does seem to be rules.

Eddie believes that they can't go back in time via the door or todash to a point in 1977 New York they've already visited. If they were right about the rules, he couldn't go back to that day, not todash, not in the flesh either. If they were right, time over there was somehow hooked to time over here, only running a little faster. If they were right about the rules . . . if there were rules . . . p. 664

And as far as we can tell those rules do indeed hold, though they never really attempt to break them by going back to a day in New York they think has already past.

Can You Affect Time

But despite these forms of time travel, there are problems. For example, Black 13 tries to mess with you. It tempts you to in fact go back and do things differently.

Black 13 tempts you into going back and change things making you believe you will make them all better. Callahan says "I believe it lures people on to acts of terrible evil by whispering to them that they will do good. That they'll make things not just a little better but all better." p. 608

And these ideas continue to play out in the concept of ka and when you should meddle with it. For example, Roland tells Jake this advice from Roland's dad. "[W]hen you are unsure, you must let ka alone to work itself out." p. 508 Jake says this sounds like passing the buck. Roland emphasized again the "when one isn't sure about ka, it's best to let ka work itself out. If one medles, one almost always does the wrong thing." pp. 509-10 Sounds a lot like a Locke/Jack confrontation, though Locke is much more passive than Roland.

This is something I worry about with the O6 going back to the Island. The ka-tet discusses going back to prevent the Kennedy assassination and the fact that might have led to a worse person or people than Lee Harvey Oswald working to course correct. It makes me wonder if Desmond saving Charlie made things worse. And will Jack and the O6's return in the face of the "bad things" that happened when they left result in good things or just another form of bad things?

General References

Finally, a list of basic similarities.

There are magic numbers in the book. Nineteen appears over and over in the tree branches, in the clouds, in the number of petals of the rose and the number of letters in peoples' names. Also 99 and combinations like 1999. They also add other numbers up to 19 like the most rabid of LOST fans.

Susannah compares their experience with crossovers between worlds as a Dickens novel.   

There's a reference to the Red Sox winning the Series. They had not at the time.

There are several businesses that show up in all worlds, LeMark Industries, Sombra Corp., North Central Positronics. It reminds me of the everpresent Widmore.

There's a message on a loop.

There's a reference to George and Lennie from Of Mice and Men.

When the Low Men finally catch Callahan, they do it at an office building. Callahan remarks that most of the people there seem to be "extras," "stage-dressing," "a set-up . . . as elaborate as a Hollywood movie."

Callahan dies by falling out a window -- 32, not 8 stories.

Callahan crossed with Roland and Jake all the way back in Book 1 much like Jack crossed with Shannon at her father's death.

Susannah sneaks off from the group at night. This reminds me of Claire getting up and wandering off with Christian in the middle of the night.

The Jafford's special child is named Aaron.  

Twins are the focus of the Calla story.  And I'm still waiting for Bad Twin to be relevant.

In the Cave of the Voices/Doorway Cave you hear voices of people from your past. "The voices are coming from your own head. The cave finds them and amplifies them somehow. Sends them on. It's a little upsetting, I know, but it's meaningless." p. 662 This is a lot like Sawyer's encounter with the boar in particular and sometimes the Whispers.

Eddie refers to himself as being exiled from New York, yet he can return through todash and the door. Will that be true for Ben too?

The technology left behind by the "Old People" is technology of our world, of 20th century America. Reminds me of DIs left behind tech and that left behind by the 4-toes.

Jake finds a monitoring station full of TV screens fed by hidden cameras a la The Pearl, The Flame and The Hydra.

Andy the robot is tired of being dissed. Reminds me of Roger Workman and later Ben Workman.

And finally, we are briefly introduced to the Breakers who are telepaths and psychokinetics, i.e. "special."

So my quest for the Tower continues on. I'm going to have to add Salem's Lot to the reading list now. The general plan is to read Book 6 before the start of Season 5. Then read Insomnia and Book 7 before the start of Season 6. Until then, remember the face of your father.

Were The Four-Toed People Time Travellers?



I read H.G. Wells The Time Machine back in April of course looking for clues about LOST. I have to say from a literary standpoint I did not enjoy this book. Like Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad it's essentially a 100 page recitation of what happens to one completely undeveloped character. In fact, the character doesn't even have a name, he is merely The Time Traveller.

The Time Traveller builds a time machine in his home that allows him to move in time though not in the other three dimensions of space. The Time Traveller looks forward to what he can learn from the future. He expects great innovation and peace. Instead he finds technology-less imbeciles who cower in the darkness as buildings crumble around them coupled with carnivorous tunnel-dwellers. Once he manages to escape a cannibalized fate he can't get back to his own time fast enough.

Having now seen the hieroglyph surrounded donkey wheel, my question is did the 4-toed people make a similar trip into our time? Like the Time Traveller, were the ancient Island people so repulsed by the backwardness of society in our day that they gave up on time travel? And what's more did they give up on attempting to survive as a race given this horrible future abandoning the Island to Dharma and its likes, or will we still meet a 4-toed person?

One final note -- when the Time Traveller time travelled he and his device disappeared from his house and it returned to the same physical space once he got back to our time.  This is similar to what many think happened to the Island when Ben turned the wheel.  The big question then is how will the Island get back to our time and will it require someone (Locke?) to operate the device again to accomplish that feat?  [And if this is indeed the case it still makes me wonder why Widmore doesn't just stake out that ocean location until it reappears.]

Lost IT




I just finished all 1090 pages of Stephen King's IT. I decided to read IT because it was recommended by another person on a LOST board. While not the most overtly LOST-connected book in the Stephen King pantheon, there are some similarities between the two.

One clear connection has to do with the method of story-telling. There's real time stories, flashbacks and differing points of view constantly in the book. Part 5 in particular changes back and forth from main characters in the past to main characters in the present to subordinate characters in the story. And there's often a blending of past and present. As one character reflects: Is something really stapling the past and present together here, or am I only imagining it? A regular mobius strip.

There's also a circularity or repeating of patterns that take place throughout the story. But rather than literally having things repeat, patterns repeat but with the circumstances varying every 25 or so years. What's more the main characters who realize they need to repeat this pattern can't remember what they had done before. Their memories are blank when it comes to key items, and part of the story is them regaining their memory in order to accomplish the task they need to accomplish.

This repetition notion intrigues me looking forward to the O6s return to the Island. Will they have to try to re-do something? Will they have all their memories of the Island or have they successfully repressed them? And of course Ben's incredible ability to outplay everyone still makes me wonder if he's somehow repeating a pattern.

Another huge thing similarity between IT and LOST is the nature of the bad guy. IT's bad guy can appear to you as whatever your personal worst nightmare is. That's clearly reminiscent of what the Island or Smokey is up to when it appears as things from your personal experience. And in IT others can see your nightmare just like Sawyer saw Kate's horse.

According to the book this type of creature exists in many cultures -- a Glamour in Gaelic, a Manitou by the Plains Indians, a Tallus or Taelus in the Himalayas, an Eylak in Central Europe and Le Loup-Garou in France. While I think Smokey is manmade (and out of control), it's interesting to think of a culture creating a machine that would duplicate this sort of monster.

Also looking forward to the return of the O6 to the Island, the children in IT found that 7 was a magic number that gave them power. I guess if you count Locke and Ben, but not Aaron and Ji Yeon you could get to 7 Island returnees in LOST. Of course you could also get 7 by adding Ji Yeon to the O6. While 7 is not one of THE Numbers, I think we're about in need of some magic numbers. Maybe 7 will be one.

Place is key in IT as it is in LOST. The pull and power and magic doesn't exist outside of Derry, Maine. The Island on the other hand seems to have much more influence outside of its physical sphere. How much of that is real, how much is psychological remains to be seen.

As a side note for those who've read Watership Down as well, Derry, Maine reminds me of Cowslip's Warren. Derry has made an unacknowledged deal with IT same as those rabbits. Every so often loved ones will be lost, but in general there will be prosperity as long as those losses continue.

And finally -- there's a love triangle. ;-p (and reproduction problems.)

Wishing I had a Wizard and Glass To Figure Out LOST

Just like LOST, I'm now more than halfway through Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and I still don't know what's going on. Though I do think I have a better handle on Roland's quest than the quest of Ben or any of the 815ers. Things from book 4 Wizard and Glass that remind of LOST follow.

Guys, Where Are We?

First a brief summary of where we are in our quest for the Dark Tower. Roland, a gunslinger from Gilead has put together a posse of sorts to search for the Dark Tower. That group or ka-tet consists of Eddie, former heroine junkie from 1980s New York, Susannah, a woman who can't walk because she has no legs from 1960s New York, Jake, an 11-year-old boy from 1970s New York, and Oy, a billy-bumbler, a sort of dog from Mid-World. The group is currently riding on a monorail train named Blaine and they are engaged in a riddle contest. If the group wins the contest by stumping Blaine, Blaine will deliver them to Topeka without killing them. If Blaine wins by having all the answers he will kill them all by driving at rapid speed into a wall. Now, on to the interesting, at least to me, things.

Each One of Us . . .

One of the main themes of all these books is the concept of ka, a word that means most simply fate but also includes a notion of sovereignty and inevitability. But that doesn't mean who we are and how we act doesn't matter as Eddie points out to Roland when he tells the dour gunslinger "[y]ou can't help your nature." p. 60

"The gunslinger considered this carefully, and discovered something that was wonderful and awful at the same time: that idea had never occurred to him. Not once in his whole life. That he was a captive of ka--this he had known since earliest childhood. But his nature...his very nature..." p. 60

This concept of both fate and nature surround our LOSTies. Locke feels it is his fate to be on the Island, to protect and serve it, but he can't get past his giant patsy nature. Jack has known since childhood that he has to learn to let it go, but he can't.

This passage and Roland's view of ka particularly reminds me of Season 1 "a sacrifice the Island demanded" Locke:

"So [Roland] had done [made a choice], believing in his youthful arrogance that everything would turn out all right for no other reason--yes, at bottom he had believed this--than that he was he, and ka must serve his love." p. 429

Guys, When Are We?

Time and its unreliability, alternate worlds with both alternate wheres and whens, and doors to those worlds play a huge role in The Dark Tower series, but the LOST PTB have ruled out alternate worlds as an explanation for the show, so I won't dwell on that too much. But I will mention that this book includes Bermuda Triangle like places called thinnies which are implied to be doors between worlds. Ones appearance is attributed to an earthquake. Some similar opening could exist on the Island due to the volcano we've heard briefly about.

When Did You Ever Tell The Complete Truth?

The bulk of Wizard and Glass is a flashback like the one we in Meet Kevin Johnson. That is it is a flashback narrated by the character himself, so the question of the reliability of the narrator is certainly at issue. Interestingly parts of the flashback that Roland himself could not have participated in were shown to him in the crystal-ball-like glass, but the reliability of the glass's narration should be looked at skeptically as well.

Repeatedly the ball showed Roland and others only what it wanted to them to know in order to get them to act in a certain way, a different way than they might have acted had they had all the facts. Ironically it doesn't lie to them, but it misdirects by omitting key facts and revealing others. 

This selective revelation reminds me of Smokey's encounters with Locke and the dreams on the Island. The LOSTies have been shown some things and they take them to mean they should do one thing, when in fact if they'd had more information they might have done something else entirely. Think Charlie's kidnapping of Aaron.

Ben's refusal to reveal to the LOSTies all he knows acts similarly. As we've debated since the end of Season 3, given what he knows, of course Jack called the boat. No one has told him or shown him anything that would logically make him do otherwise. But as happens with Roland, selective revelation leads to certain actions and later to regret once all the facts are revealed, eh bearded future Jack?

Reliability of memory is also explicitly called out in the book in essentially the notion that it is the winners who write history. Roland and his friends are framed for a crime they didn't commit and Deputy Dave knows it. But as Roland remarks to himself: "It was just part of the frame, and none of these men believed much of it, Dave likely included. Although, Roland supposed, they would come to believe it in later years and tell it to their children and grandchildren as gospel." p. 498 It sounds a lot like Jack telling his O6 story so much that Kate thinks he actually believes it.

Flashes Before Your Eyes

The ability to see the future has been present explicitly in LOST since Season 3 and I believe that Ben has some ability in this as well. In Wizard and Glass we're given a supernatural explanation for a similar ability. It comes in the form of a "glass" which can show you other worlds. There were 13 of these glasses in all, and this particular glass, the pink one, could show you two things, other peoples' secrets as well as some parts of the future.

I know most people don't want to see Ben gazing into a crystal ball, but there is something interesting about using these balls which could come into play in LOST. You can't keep and use these balls all the time because they are alive and hungry. "One begins using em; one ends being used by em." p. 457 Instead of the glass serving you, you serve the glass. The ends and means become tangled.  

I could certainly see something like that happening on LOST. In fact it might explain the true nature of Ben and Jacob's relationship which could have begun by Ben serving Jacob, but clearly seems to be Jacob serving Ben at least until 815 crashed. Maybe something along these lines will lead to Locke's Island downfall as well.  

Some Final Minor Similarities:

In the flashback, 14-year-old Roland and his friends are sent to a backwater community to keep them out of a harm's way. But they describe this time as being sent by their fathers to "meditat[e] in Purgatory." p. 159

Cuthbert is a slingshot specialist.

There are remnants of the past civilization present in Roland's time, and his enemy, Farson is attempting to harness that civilization's weapons to his advantage. There are similar theories out there about Smokey, namely, that he is an older technology that we don't know how to control anymore.

The "wizard" of the book can appear to you as people from your past.

There's a reference to Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, in particular to how much could work could occur in a single night.

The entire last section of the book is a retelling of the scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy's ka-tet encounters the Wizard in the Emerald City. The glass itself and what people see in it are very Wizard of Oz as well.

Roland has very Jack-like father issues. "[His father's voice] was the hardest voice, the one he so often heard in his troubled dreams, the one he so wanted to please and so seldom could." p. 675

And so I'm over halfway to the Tower! Hopefully before LOST ends I'll get there. With 2 incredibly lengthy hiatuses due before that occurs, I have all confidence that I will, but if not "there are always other worlds."

That Hideous Strength

Book 3 of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy That Hideous Strength is the least Sci Fi of the the 3 books. Instead it's more of a Tolkien-like fantasy complete with references to Tolkien's Numinor. This was my favorite of the three books which is essentially the showdown between good and evil on planet Earth.

The side of good is headed by series protagonist Ransom. Since returning from Venus he has failed to visibly age (a la Richard Alpert) and he is gathering a small group of people about him including Jane who dreams the future, MacPhee, the skeptical man of science and Mr. and Mrs. Dimble, people with strong Christian faiths plus a couple of others.

These people form a sort of ka-tet, to borrow from Stephen King's Dark Tower series. [You can check out a full definition of ka-tet in this post.] Ransom describes this collective in this way:

"I am the Director," said Ransom, smiling. "Do you think I would claim the authority I do if the relation between us depended either on your choice or mine? You never chose me. I never chose you. Even the great Oyeresu whom I serve never chose me. I came into their worlds by what seemed, at first, a chance; as you came to me--as the very animals in this house first came to it. You and I have not started or devised this: it has descended on us--sucked us into itself, if you like. It is, no doubt, an organisation: but we are not the organisers. And that is why I have no authority to give any one of you permission to leave my household."

p. 196

So a very LOST-like combination of people. They come from different walks of life, different classes, different educational backgrounds, etc. and are drawn together in a way they themselves would never have organized themselves by a higher power or powers to accomplish a world-saving feat.

Much of the main action of the book is driven by the attempt to reclaim the body of Merlin, Arthur's magician who is supposedly buried under a well in the woods owned by a small college in a small English town. There are several things in this storyline that are also alluded to in LOST. For example, it is believed that Merlin is a practitioner of Atlantean magic, that is, from the lost city of Atlantis. A lot of people have tried to link the LOST Island to Atlantis or other lost city mythologies.

There is also an emphasis on place as relates to this burial. "There is an old and wide-spread belief that locality itself is of importance in such matters." p. 198. The locality of the Island and whatever properties it possesses seems to be of supreme importance on LOST though recent developments in terms of the Island's reach may make this less important.

You should be asking at this point, but isn't Merlin dead? In fact both antagonists and protagonists in the book think that though Merlin has been buried for 1500 years, he is not in fact dead, just waiting to be released.

"That a body should lie uncorrupted for fifteen hundred years, did not seem strange to them; they knew worlds where there was no corruption at all. That its individual life should remain latent in it all that time, was to them no more strange: they had seen innumerable different modes in which soul and matter could be combined and separated, separated without loss of reciprocal influence, combined without true incarnation, fused so utterly as to be a third thing, or periodically brought together in a union as short, and as momentous, as the nuptial embrace. It was not as a marvel in natural philosophy, but as an information in time of war, that they brought the Director their tidings. Merlin had not died. His life had been hidden, sidetracked, moved out of our one-dimensioned time, for fifteen centuries. But under certain conditions it would return to his body."

p. 199

So a type of eternal life is at play here, but also messing with the idea of time and the combining and re-combining of consciousness with one's physical body. Sounds a little like an invisible, silent man in a cabin in a jungle and a certain tennis shoe wearing doctor not to mention a dead rock star.

There's more messing with consciousness and the physical body with the character Wither. Wither is true leader of the antagonistic group in the book, a group named N.I.C.E., the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, a kind of Dharma Initiative which combines many academic disciplines for the "good" of mankind. Wither is a character who at first appears to be an absent-minded professor of sorts, but one that seems often to be everywhere at once as a character Mark describes here.

"It may have been that Mark, both then and on the previous day, being overwrought, saw a hallucination of Wither where Wither was not. It may be that the continual appearance of Wither which at almost all hours haunted so many rooms and corridors of Belbury was (in one well verified sense of the world) a ghost--one of those sensory impressions which a strong personality in its last decay can imprint, most commonly after death but sometimes before it, on the very structure of a building, and which are removed not by exorcism buy by architectural alterations. Or it may, after all, be that souls who have lost the intellectual good do indeed receive in return, and for a short period, the vain privilege of thus reproducing themselves in many places as wraiths. At any rate the thing, whatever it was, vanished."

p. 210

Later Wither himself tells us why he is the way he is. "[Wither] hardly ever slept. When it became absolutely necessary for him to do so, he took a drug, but the necessity was rare, for the mode of consciousness he experienced at most hours of day or night had long ceased to be exactly like what other men call waking. He had learned to withdraw most of his consciousness from the task of living, to conduct business, even, with only a quarter of his mind." p. 247 "[H]is inmost self was free to pursue its own life. That detachment of the spirit, not only from the senses, but even from the reason, which has been the goal of some mystics, was now his." p. 248

So Wither while maintaining his body also managed to detach his mind in a mystic way. I'm still waiting to see if Walt, Hurley, Jacob, Ben are doing something similar.

Another main character in the book is Mark, Jane's husband. Mark has been recruited by N.I.C.E., but unknown to him, not for his own contributions, but instead so he'll bring Jane who dreams the future to them. A case of using one family member to get to another. Something that might be happening with Walt and Michael and may even have happened with Ben and his dad.

At the opening of the story, Mark's main motivation in life is to assure his place in the Inner Circle of power in any group to which he belongs at the expense of any other values including the truth. But like many of our characters on LOST, Mark reaches a turning point in his life. He has a time of true soul searching and recognizes the bad choices he's made in his life. He's not sure what to do to redeem it at this point, but he does make at least that step toward redemption. Mark muses:

"What a fool--a blasted, babyish, gullible fool--he had been! . . . [H]ere was the world of plot within plot, crossing and double-crossing, of lies and graft and stabbing in the back, of murder and a contemptuous guffaw for the fool who lost the game[.]" p. 242 It takes him a while, but Mark is ultimately redeemed when he realizes: "For he now thought that with all his life-long eagerness to reach an inner circle he had chosen the wrong circle." p. 358

Some other odds and ends.

Merlin becomes a sort of prophet kind of like Season 3 Desmond. "[Merlin] said that before Christmas this bear would do the best deed that any bear had done in Britain except some other bear that none of us had ever heard of. He keeps on saying things like that. They just pop out when we're talking about something else, and in a rather different voice. As if he couldn't help it. He doesn't seem to know any more than the bit he tells you at the moment, if you see what I mean. As if something like a camera shutter opened at the back of his mind and closed again immediately and just one little item came through." pp. 279-80.

There's a Room 23 style conditioning room.

At one point Jane has a weird vision and discusses it with Ransom. Timewise the vision seemed like something out of the Renaissance. Ransom tells Jane, "And I daresay that the presence of Merlinus brings out certain things. We are not living exactly in the Twentieth Century as long as he's here. We overlap a bit; the focus is blurred." p. 311

Part of what prompted the antagonists to act at this time was their understanding that forces from beyond Earth were not permitted to act on Earth. Ironically, Weston and Devine's trip to Mars back in Book 1 is considered breaking that deal and therefore forces from the Universe are allowed to penetrate and act on Earth.

I wonder if this is some of what's happening on the Island. Has Ben broken a deal that is permitting Widmore to find the Island? Or was Ben's actions what allowed 815 to penetrate the Island? Is that the first invasion of sorts?

One final note, once Wither realizes he and his side have lost he reflects:

"It is incredible how little his knowledge moved him. It could not, because he had long ceased to believe in knowledge itself. What had been in his far-off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar, had deepened and darkened, year after year, into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed from Hegel into Hume, then through Pragmatism, and then through Logical Positivism, and out a last into the complete void." p. 350

This is what I hope will not be LOST's ultimate outcome. After almost 4 years we still have yet to see what it is that Ben is fighting for in terms of the importance of the Island. Early on there were all the doomsday theories that the Island was a place to restart society when the rest of it destroys itself. There's the idea that something has to happen on the Island to prevent a doomsday. But as Season 4 progresses it seems that more and more Ben and his Others seem to be defending nothing more than Ben himself which leads us ultimately to the void.

Each One of Us Was Brought Here For a Reason . . .

Bet you thought I just felt like quoting Locke from back when he was cool, but no, this is my attempts to link LOST to the second book in C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, Perelandra.

Perelandra picks up after Ransom, Weston and Devine return to Earth from Malacandra, or as we call it, Mars. Interestingly, Lewis himself is a character in the book. He participates in sending Ransom at the behest of the Mars chief Oyarsa to Perelandra, or as we know it Venus. Issues of fate, free will, determinism and relative morality all play major parts in this re-imagining of the Eden story. Many of those things remind me (okay, everything reminds me) of LOST.

At first it seems that who we are, why we are chosen for something is not important. Ransom explains to Lewis:

"Don't imagine I've been selected to go to Perelandra because I'm anyone in particular. One never can see, or not till long afterwards, why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity. Certainly, it is never for what the man himself would have regarded as his chief qualifications."

p. 22

But once Ransom arrived on Perelandra, that feeling seems to change. "It was strange that the utter loneliness through all these hours had not troubled him so much as one night of it on Malacandra. He thought the difference lay in this, that mere chance, or what he took for chance, had turned him adrift in Mars, but here he knew that he was part of a plan. He was no longer unattached, no longer on the outside." p. 44 Sounds very Season 1 Locke.

Finally, Ransom's fate becomes vitally important. But first a little explanation. At this point in the story, Ransom realizes he has been brought to Perelandra to prevent the Venutian Eve from falling prey to the temptation of the Devil-possessed Weston. Ransom finds that he must step in the void left by the absence of the Venutian Adam even if it means attempting the impossible which could very likely lead to his death far from home.

Ransom argues with himself.

"The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of early experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our use, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops down into the void, fluttering useless wings. He had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern. He knew now why the old philosophers had said that there is no such thing as chance or fortune beyond the Moon. Before his Mother had born him, before his ancestors had been called Ransoms, before ransom had been the name for a payment that delivers, before the world was made, all these things had so stood together in eternity that the very significance of the pattern at this point lay in their coming together in just this fashion. And he bowed his head and groaned and repined against his fate . . ."

p. 125

As you may be able to gather, Ransom the man finds himself in a position to serve as a ransom payment for the entire planet Venus. Quirky naming coincidence?

Nevertheless Ransom still has free will to reject this fate, but in doing so he recognizes: "If he now failed, this world also would hereafter be redeemed. If he were not the ransom, Another would be." p. 126 In other words, the Universe would course correct or Ransom could embrace his fate and if he succeeded it wouldn't need to. [This makes me conclude that Desmond could propose to Penny in 1996 without the world ending. I think the universe would have found another button-pushing patsy. Is that Mrs. Hawking working for Widmore? For Ben?]

Ransom goes on to reason:

"[T]here had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge 'about this time tomorrow you will have done the impossible.' . . . His fear, his shame, his love, all his arguments [regarding accepting and acting on his fate], were not altered in the least. The thing was neither more nor less dreadful than it had been before. The only difference was that he knew--almost as a historical proposition--that it was going to be done. He might beg, weep, or rebel--might curse or adore--sing like a martyr or blaspheme like a devil. It made not the slightest difference. The thing was going to be done. There was going to arrive, in the course of time, a moment at which he would have done it. The future act stood there, fixed and unaltered as if he had already performed it. It was a mere irrelevant detail that it happened to occupy the position we call future instead of that which we call past. The whole struggle was over, and yet there seemed to have been no moment of victory. You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say that he had delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged into unassailable freedom. Ransom could not, for the life of him, see any difference between these two statements. Predestination and freedom were apparently identical."

pp. 126-27

How's that for blending free will and determinism and even in a way that steps out of all boundaries of what we consider the normal flow of time?

There are a couple of other themes to note as well. First there's this odd way of viewing experiences and whether or not we should want to repeat them.

Ransom was hesitant to over-indulge in any extraordinary experiences (and there were many) on Perelandra. "This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards . . . was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself--perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film." p. 43

It makes me wonder if this is somehow at play on the Island. Does the Island allows you to control time and how fast and in what direction it rolls, unrolls, and rolls backwards? Is that why Widmore wants it and Ben is determined to keep it? And is their greed in desiring this ability to repeat experiences or extend them what will ultimately undo them both?

Finally, both Ben and Widmore could be like the demon-possessed Weston in Perelandra. Weston claims for himself an ultimate imprimatur on his desires and his methods to achieve his desires for universal domination by the human race. He explains to Ransom:

"The world leaps forward through great men and greatness always transcends mere moralism. When the leap has been made our 'diabolism' as you call it becomes the morality of the next stage, but while we are making it, we are called criminals, heretics, blasphemers. . . ."

Which prompts Ransom to query: "How far does it go? Would you still obey the Life-Force if you found it prompting you to murder me?"

"Yes."

"Or to sell England to the Germans?"

"Yes."

"Or to print lies as serious research in a scientific periodical?"

"Yes. . . . Can you not even conceive a total commitment--a commitment to something which utterly overrides all our petty ethical pigeon-holes? . . . I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil." p. 82

At times we get glimpses that this may be the way Ben feels about the Island. In fact I've often hoped we'd see that Ben acts the way he does, finds justification for his actions and the lives he's sacrificed in some greater good scenario such as saving humanity. But more and more it looks like Ben is merely protecting his corner of the sandbox. Oh well, we'll see.

Perelandra was a tough, but interesting read. And to go out on another Locke quote, it even provides Venus with it's very own Adam and Eve.

Are The Whisperers Eldila?

In addition to the more famous Chronicles of Narnia Clive Staples Lewis, i.e. C.S. Lewis, wrote The Space Trilogy. In the first of these novels Out of the Silent Planet the protagonist, a man named Ransom is taken from Earth to another planet in our solar system known to its inhabitants as Malacandra. Malacandra is inhabited by three human equivalent, though physically not very human-like, people groups. They are ruled by a being named Oyarsa who is the greatest of another group of beings, the eldila.

Below are descriptions of these eldil put into terms that Ransom, the mere human, will hopefully understand. Ransom has heard an eldil, but he's never seen one.

"[Ransom begins:] 'But what are eldila, and why can I not see them? Have they no bodies?'

[The being he's talking to, a sorn, replies:] 'Of course they have bodies. There are a great many bodies you cannot see. Every animal's eyes see some things but not others. Do you know of many kinds of body in Thulcandra [Earth]?'

Ransom tried to give the sorn some idea of the terrestrial terminology of solids, liquids and gases. It listened with great attention.

'That is not the way to say it,' it replied. 'Body is movement. If it is at one speed, you smell something; if at another, you hear a sound; if at another you see a sight; if at another, you neither see nor hear nor smell, nor know the body in any way. But mark this, Small ONe, that the two ends meet.'

'How do you mean?'

'If movement is faster, then that which moves is more nearly in two places at once.'

'That is true.'

'But if the movement were faster still--it is difficult, for you do not know many words--you see that if you made it faster and faster, in the end the moving things would be in all places at once, Small One.'

'I think I see that.'

'Well, then, that is the thing at the top of all bodies--so fast that it is at rest, so truly body that it has ceased being body at all. But we will not talk of that. Start from where we are, Small One. The swiftest thing that touches our senses is light. We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge--the last thing we know before things become too swift for us. But the body of an eldid is a movement swift as light; you may say its body is made of light, but not of that which is light for the eldil. His "light" is a swifter movement which for us is nothing at all; and what we call light is for him a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing he can touch and bathe in--even a dark thing when not illumined by the swifter. And what we call firm things--flesh and earth--seem to him thinner, and harder to see, than our light, and more like clouds, and nearly nothing. To us the eldil is a thin, half-real body that can go through walls and rocks: to himself he goes through them because he is solid and firm and they are like cloud. And what is true light to him and fills the heaven, so that he will plunge into the rays of the sun to refresh himself from it, is to us the black nothing in the sky at night. These things are not strange, Small One, though they are beyond our senses.'

pp. 94-95

Later Ransom finds that he can sense the eldila when he comes to an Island filled with them.

"[Ransom] said to himself that he was having a look at the island, but his feeling was rather that the island was having a look at him. This was greatly increased by a discovery he made after he had been walking for about an hour, and which he ever afterwards found great difficulty in describing. In the most abstract terms it might be summed up by saying that the surface of the island was subject to tiny variations of light and shade which no change in the sky accounted for. If the air had not been calm and the groundweed too short and firm to move in the wind, he would have said that a faint breeze was playing with it, and working such slight alterations in the shading as it does in a corn-field on the Earth. Like the silvery noises in the air, these footsteps of light were shy of observation. Where he looked hardest they were least to be seen: on the edges of his field of vision they came crowding as though a complex arrangement of them were there in progress. To attend to any one of theme was to make it invisible, and the minute brightness seemed often to have just left the spot where his eyes fell. He had no doubt that he was "seeing"--as much as he ever would see--the eldila. The sensation it produced in him was curious. It was not exactly uncanny, not as if he were surrounded by ghosts. It was not even as if he were being spied upon; he had rather the sense of being looked at by things that had a right to look. His feeling was less than fear; it had in it something of embarrassment, something of shyness, something of submission, and it was profoundly uneasy."

pp. 108-09

Finally, when Ransom first encounters the greatest eldila, Oyarsa he describes Oyarsa as "the merest whisper of light--no, less than that, the smallest diminution of shadow." p. 118

I don't want to give away directly what type of being known to us humans the eldil are apparently intended to represent, but I did want to share these descriptions of these beings that are heard and not seen though are sensed in the way light moves around them since they reminded me of some of the stranger goings-on occurring on a certain Island we're all familiar with.

***All citations are to the Scribner edition of the paperback published in 2003.

LOST in Slaughterhouse Five






















After watching Desmond unstuck in time in The Constant I decided to re-read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five which features a similarly unstuck protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. I'm going to list out things from the book that remind me of themes in LOST roughly in the order they occur in the book. Feel free to comment and theorize away.

• The author of the book majored in Anthropology. Charlotte Lewis did too.
• Aliens abduct Billy, take him to their planet and keep him in a zoo cage where he mates with another abducted Earth female. The cage is furnished much like the Swan with appliances and furniture from Sears and a working record player. Billy exercises each day to stay in shape; makes his meals; cleans his dishes. I don't know if he does it to "Make Your Own Kind Of Music."
  
• Billy got to the alien planet through a time warp allowing him to spend years on the alien planet but only be gone from Earth a microsecond.
• The aliens taught Billy that when a person dies he only appears to die because he's still alive in the past. The aliens view time, past, present and future, as always existing and permanent. They can focus in on a particular moment like we would focus in on one part of the Rocky Mountains. Time does not pass one moment to the next with moments disappearing forever once they are past. You can be dead in this moment, but fine in plenty of others, so they don't fret about death.
  
• Billy first becomes unstuck in time while serving in the US Army in World War II.
  
• Billy describes his death as a violet light and a hum.
• As a child Billy's father tries to teach him to swim by throwing him in the pool leaving him to sink or swim. Kind of reminds me of Charlie.
• At one point Billy shifts from WWII to the 195os where he's about to give a speech. He worries that he will sound like his WWII young kid self, but in fact he delivers his confident Toastmasters-type speech. So unlike Desmond Billy seems to act appropriately wherever he is and can adapt. He seems to have all his consciousnesses at all times.
  
• But when Billy is moving around he does have to rely on visual cues such as his car to figure out when exactly he is. He does not instinctively know.
  
• Every so often, for no apparent reason, Billy would find himself weeping.
• Christmas 1944 passes unremarked for Billy and the author who find themselves as POWs in a railroad car at the time.
• There's an Alice in Wonderland "Drink Me" bottle reference.
• Billy's movements in time aren't always consistent. For example, being slightly unstuck in time he watches a movie backwards . He also knows in advance what time the aliens are coming for him, and willingly goes out to meet them. As the novel progresses he can clearly "remember" all the moments of his life from birth to death rather than being surprised that he's now in X year or Y place.
  
• In the POW camp, Billy begins shrieking uncontrollably and is taking to the hospital, strapped down and given morphine. The shrieking was not time travel related, but it reminded me of Minkowski and his description of Brandon.
• Within 4 years of starting this time traveling, Billy voluntarily commits himself to a mental hospital because he believes he is going crazy.
• Billy begins to look for meaning by reading science fiction. No mention of Philip K. Dick though.
  
• A fellow mental ward patient tells Billy that everything there is to know about life is in The Brothers Karamazov.
  
• A fake book is referenced about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the 4th dimension and doctors didn't know couldn't see or even imagine them.
• According to the aliens in order to get Earthling babies you need not only the normal mom and dad but you need homosexual males, women over 65, and babies who lived an hour or less after birth, plus 2 other types of people. Maybe that's what's wrong on the Island.
• Even though the aliens know what will happen at all moments in time, including the end of the universe, they do nothing to change any of those moments. Those moments are the way they are structured.
• The woman that Billy Pilgrim makes pregnant on the alien planet stays on the alien planet to raise the baby instead of going back to Earth.

Desmond and Billy Pilgrim are both unstuck in time, but there are stark differences in Billy and Desmond's time travel in The Constant. Billy never truly gets lost in time as Desmond seemed to and as seemed to lead to Minkowski and Eloise's deaths. Instead Slaughterhouse Five takes the position that moments in time are discreet events that your lifetime collective consciousness can move between. Billy doesn't need a constant to move seamlessly through time, though that may be in large part attributable to the lessons the aliens teach him about time and his subsequent nonchalant attitude.

In Slaughterhouse Five you cannot change these moments in time that you move through repeatedly. Billy knows when others are going to die, but does nothing to warn those people or stop them. Similarly the aliens know when and how the universe will be destroyed, but do nothing to prevent it. Death is therefore meaningless to Billy and the aliens and is summed up over and over with the phrase, "So it goes." Your moment of death is structured that way; you don't mess with it. A philosophy I'm sure would be Mrs. Hawking approved.

There is no traumatic event that triggers Billy's unstuckness in time. He wasn't exposed to radiation or electro-magnetism and thrust through some barrier. Instead he just started coming unstuck at a point in his life when he was tired, cold and frankly willing to die. Both Billy and Desmond were serving in their respective militaries when their unstuckness began. Other than that we're given no clue as to why Billy is unstuck or if there are others who are unstuck.

Another key difference is that Billy develops the ability to access every moment of his life from beginning to end as he's time-shifting. This ability seems to become stronger as the novel and presumably Billy's life progresses. Early on Billy seems nervous and uncertain as this happens, but later in the novel Billy can for the most part tell quickly and accurately where he is and what's going to happen next. And in the case of the alien abduction he even anticipates and plans for it. Desmond clearly hasn't developed this skill, but I wonder if Ben has.

Slaughterhouse Five is a unique blend of an anti-war book that examines critically the fate of child soldiers at the hands of removed commanders and the glamorization of war mixed with a unique form of the science fiction of time travel and aliens. Is this what's happening on the Island? To Ben? To Desmond? Definitely not in a one to one translation as is the case with every other reference the show makes to things literary, pop culture, and scientific. But is it worth taking a look at to figure out what might be going on in LOST? Absolutely.

Lost in The Waste Lands -- Final Thoughts

There are lots of other things in The Waste Lands that evoke LOST as well. I'll run some of them down for you in no particular order.

Eddie Dean, a character much like Charlie Pace thinks to himself, "Beating heroine was child's play compared to beating your childhood." What LOSTie couldn't say that as well? Later Roland tells Eddie, "What we don't need is a man who can't let go of the useless baggage of his memories." No wallowing in your flashbacks, please.

Literary references include Oz, Lord of the Flies, Catch-22, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Watership Down

The book explores the concept of ka-tets. Ka is a word that sort of means fate. But despite the existence of ka there is still free will. A ka-tet is "a group of people with the same interests and goals." It's also "the place where many lives are joined by fate." These characters, Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy form a ka-tet. "Each member of a ka-tet is like a piece in a puzzle. Taken by itself, each piece is a mystery, but when they are put together, they make a picture . . . or a part of a picture. It may take a great many ka-tets to finish one picture. You mustn't be surprised to discover your lives have been touching in ways you haven't seen until now." And in fact, Eddie and Jake discover they did "cross" back in the 70s.

There's a bear with a cave and a Tonka truck.

Time and distance are both messed up. According to Blaine, the temporal synapses are breaking down. Jake's watch measures odd times like "62 minutes past 40 on a Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday in both December and March." Roland claims that distance grows with each passing day so that what was 5 miles away is now farther away. What's more there's magnetism and other forces at work. "Physics in the nuthouse," one character remarks.

Roland makes a compass much like the one Sayid made in Season 1.

Parent issues and father issues in particular exist. Jake, like Jack, despite doing everything his father wants him to do still can't please him. Jake's own strengths and interests are of no interest to his father. What's more, when acting as a gunslinger each character must remember his father's face. This is true even if that literal father was a bad or even absent father. This memory of ancestory is what allows the gunslinger to focus and act with certainty and accuracy. Perhaps the LOSTies need to remember their fathers' faces.

Dreams are powerful and important in guiding the characters' paths.

There are portals between our world and Roland's and between Roland's and the path to the Tower. There are also crossovers between the worlds like music, literary references and even airplanes like a 1930s Nazi plane that appears outside Lud. There's speculation that the Bermuda Triangle might be such a portal that is more or less always open while other portals need keys to be opened such as the way Jake enters Mid-World in this story.

The Grays have an underground room with a watertight hatchway with a big valve wheel and an intercom inside and outside it.

Blaine gasses the remaining inhabitants of Lud like the Hostile's gassed the Dharma Initiative. Did Smokey come up with that idea? It helps my theory in the last post.

So there you have it. I'll keep reading the Dark Tower and post when I find something interesting. It may take me until 2010, but hey, it looks like we've got the time. Season 3 centric posts will be coming up next, well after one last Season 2 post.

Lost in The Waste Lands -- Part 2

Certainly there had been an intelligence left in the ancient computers below the city, a single living organism which had long ago ceased to exist sanely under conditions that, within its merciless dipolar circuits, could only be absolute reality. It had held its increasingly alien logic within its banks of memory for eight hundred years and might have held them so for eight hundred more, if not for the arrival of Roland and his friends; yet this mens non corpus had brooded and grown ever more insane with each passing year; even in its increasing periods of sleep it could be said to dream, and these dreams grew steadily more abnormal as the world moved on. Now, although the unthinkable machinery which maintained the Beams had weakened, this insane and inhuman intelligence had awakened in the rooms of ruin and had begun once more, although as bodiless as any ghost, to stumble through the halls of the dead.
-----The Waste Lands by Stephen King

In the second half of The Waste Lands our travelers, Roland, Eddie, Susannah and Jake along with Jake's billy bumbler Oy arrive at the decaying city of Lud. It looks physically much like New York City of our present day, but with even a few more modern touches such as a sound-barrier breaking monorail running into and out of the city. The city has been decaying for approximately 800 years due to some cataclysmic event that wiped out most of its inhabitants. It's current population is made up of the Grays and the Pubes. Both groups barely subsist in the city's decaying infrastructure and the Pubes regularly "worship" and make sacrifices to the ghosts that run the machinery of the city.

That "ghost" is the computer Blaine which runs all the mechanical aspects of Lud. He speaks to the group of travelers and they note, "[t]hat voice belonged to a machine, an incredibly smart machine, a playful machine, but there was something very wrong with it, all the same."

Blaine himself describes to Roland and his group what's been happening in Lud.

[I suffer from] a degenerative disease which humans call going insane. . . . Repeated diagnostic checks have failed to reveal the source of the problem. I can only conclude that this is a spiritual malaise beyond my ability to repair.

I have felt my mind growing steadily stranger over the years. Serving the people of Mid-World became pointless centuries ago. Serving those few people of Lud who wished to venture abroad became equally silly not long after. Yet I carried on until the arrival of David Quick, a short while ago. I don’t remember exactly when that was. Do you believe, Roland of Gilead, that machines may grow senile?

At some point they [the people of Lud and Mid-World] forgot that the voice of the mono was also the voice of the computer. Not long after that they forgot I was a servant and they began believing I was a god. Since I was built to serve, I fulfilled their requirements and became what they wanted—a god dispensing both favor and punishment according to whim . . . or random-access memory, if you prefer.

What's more, Blaine reads people. He can see them through cameras around the city and he analyzes their voices to understand them and their motivations. Sound familiar?

So my new Smokey theory is that Smokey is a computer created by a now-defunct Island civilization that was more advanced or differently advanced than ours. Out of boredom, he uses his powers to dispense favor and punishment on whim. For example, he kills Eko because Eko won't play his game by confessing. He kills the pilot just because he's mad. I think Smokey is suffering from spiritual malaise that he cannot fix, and like Blaine, he should be avoided if at all possible.

But wait, there's more. Before Eddie and Susannah wake up Blaine, or I should say Big Blaine, they hear a small voice, Little Blaine, who warns them not to wake Big Blaine. The Whisperers?

Tomorrow -- more odds and ends.

Lost in The Waste Lands, Part 1



I want to go back and that is the truth.
I have to go back and that is the truth.
I'll go crazy if I don't go back and that is the truth.
-----Essay by Jake Chambers in The Waste Lands by Stephen King

So after two months I finally finished part 3 of Stephen King's Dark Tower Series, The Waste Lands, and this next series of posts will reveal how it answers every question on LOST. Just kidding, but there are some interesting items to dicuss. Spoilers for The Waste Lands as well as The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three will follow. Spoilers for Season 4 of LOST are not included because I don't know any and would like to keep it that way.

In book one of the Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger, Roland, the title character meets a boy, Jake, who has appeared in Roland's world from our world. Jake was killed in New York City in the 1970s by being pushed in front of a car and arrived in Roland's world. Roland and Jake travel for a time together, but by the end of Book 1, they are no longer together.

In book two, The Drawing of the Three Roland enters our world by going through three magic doors which he finds on the shore of a sea in his world. The third door takes him into New York in the 1970s into the head of the man who is going to push Jake in front of the car BEFORE he has actually pushes him. While Roland is inhabiting his body, he causes the man to be killed. Roland then goes back to his world.

As The Waste Lands opens, Roland is going insane. The reason for this insanity is that his mind knows that there are two competing truths in his memory. In the first truth, as played out in The Gunslinger he meets Jake in his world. In the second truth, he didn't meet Jake in his world because Jake never died because the man who was going to kill Jake died before he could kill him. In other words, Roland travelled in time and changed his past. But his brain still remembers the unchanged past.

Similarly, Jake knows something is wrong. In fact he lives the moments leading up to his death knowing that it is coming. He "remembers forward" each step in this trek before it occurs. But then it doesn't happen because the pusher is no longer there. This causes Jake to feel as if he has split and become two boys.

So how does this relate to LOST? When I was first reading this it made me think of despondent Future Jack on the bridge and later with Kate desperate to get back to the Island. In some sense the way our LOSTies got to the Island, to this alternate world of the Island, is that they died. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, everyone on Flight 815 is dead. This is similar to Jake arriving in Roland's world. He died in ours and arrived in Roland's. In fact I was expecting Jake to try to kill himself to return to Roland's world, since that was his portal the first time, and I thought perhaps that was what Jack was trying to accomplish on the bridge as well. But a portal that works one time won't necessarily work again as Jack's flying over the Pacific repeatedly should have demonstrated to him by now.

I think when Jack leaves the Island, by whatever means, he's going to find that his mind has split and he will be unable to reconcile the one past with the other. From that last scene with Kate it sounds like Jack's been lying about what happened to the two of them when they were missing, so at a minimum there's the reality of what did occur and the reality of what he has said occurred. Like in Roland and Jake's case, this is literally tearing Future Jack to pieces. I'm also guessing it is going to take Jack's second removal from our world and return to the Island world to mend that spilt.

In fact Jack needs to reach an internal place like the one Eddie and Susannah reach in The Waste Lands. They too have come from our world to Roland's, but they reach the place where they no longer want to go back to their world. Instead they want to move forward, even through this crazy, dangerous world. Jack, and arguably the rest of our LOSTies, all seem to need to reach a similar conclusion that they are ready to go forward with their lives, even if that means staying on the Island, rather than going back to where they came from metaphorically, if not physically.

Tomorrow--I know what Smokey is.

More LOST (Horizon?) Musings

Leading Two Lives



















Another interesting aspect of Lost Horizon is the dual nature
of the hero, Conway. Conway is an interesting combination of
LOST's Jack and Locke. Physically he resembles Jack, not yet 40,
in good health. And like Jack he's had an outwardly golden life,
school success, solid war record, respected in his work, in fact
viewed by his co-worker Mallinson as an outright hero. But
Conway has a much more Locke-like connection to Shangri-La.
He is the first of his group to meet the High Lama (a Jacob of sorts),
to have certain secrets revealed to him and to be told that his
group will not be permitted to leave. This is revealed to Conway
because his spirit connects with the place Shangri-La.

Conway must then lie, at least by omission, to his compatriots
about this fact. He muses:

He [Conway] needed equanimity, if only to accommodate himself
to the double life he was compelled to lead. Thenceforward, with
his fellow exiles, he lived in a world conditioned by the arrival of
porters and a return to India; at all other times the horizon lifted
like a curtain; time expanded and space contracted, and the name
Blue Moon [the mountain framing Shangri-La] took on a symbolic
meaning, as if the future, so delicately plausible, were of a kind
that might happen once in a blue moon only. Sometimes he
wondered which of his two lives were the more real, but the
problem was not pressing; and again he was reminded of the War,
for during heavy bombardments he had had the same
comforting sensation that he had many lives, only one of which
could be claimed by death.

Several things stand out in that passage. First there is the idea
that Conway must hide special knowledge he has been given.
Could Locke have received similar information during his first
"monster" encounter? We still don't know what he saw and how
he survived that, but only a few days later he destroyed the
transceiver and there's his explosion tour to account for as well.
Locke definitely doesn't share everything he knows or thinks
he knows with the rest of the LOSTies, nor does Ben, even with
his own people.

The next thing that hit me was the reference to the shifting of
time and space. I guess Conway is losing his foolishness as he
contemplates his Shangri-La life. Time is definitely extended in
Shangri-La. It seems that both in Shangri-La and on the Island the
inhabitants may no longer be enslaved to time, but what about
space? None of them can leave relatively small spaces. Conway got
it right when he said space contracted in Shangri-La. Is that true
of the Island as well?

Then there is the idea of having more than one life. Clearly the
castaways in both stories have pre- and post-crash lives, and
satisfaction with those lives is a theme that plays out in both stories.

Which leads to my final point. In the end as Conway is poised to
turn his back on his empty life in the "real world," no wife, no kids,
an indifferent career, and to inherit the fullness of life Shangri-La
has opened to him, but he rejects Shangra-La for a woman he loves.
And not only that, the woman has already chosen another man,
not Conway.

No, it is not this woman.















But, Conway shut off that part of his brain and emotions that heard
and understood what Shangri-La had to offer him and "was doomed,
like millions, to flee from wisdom and be a hero." At this point the
Jack in Conway clearly dominates, and as our vision of Future Jack
and Kate shows us the Jack in Jack dominated too.

And what happened to the true believers, the Lockes, the Bens?
Like at the end of Season 3, we don't know in Lost Horizon either.
But maybe Future Jack's desire to return to the Island which matches
Conway's will allow us to find out on the Island, if not in Shangri-La.

LOST (Horizon?)

So after months of Capcom's urging, I finally got around to reading
James Hilton's Lost Horizon. There is an entire blog,
Lost in Shangri-La created by a friend of Capcom's discussing
connections between LOST and the book. That blog has a lot of
information and discussion of those connections. This post is
just about a few things I noticed. I'm sorry Tommy if I duplicate
something you said earlier.

First, the story is largely narrated by Rutherford. No not
























this Rutherford. Still it's a nice name tie in.

How Do You Build A Society To Repopulate The Earth?

Through the course of Lost Horizon we learn that the leader of the monks at Shangri-La anticipates the destruction of the Earth's population, but believes that Shangri-La and its inhabitants and culture will survive this return to the Dark Ages. To that end, Shangri-La has "recruited" new inhabitants mainly from people lost in the mountain passes. The 4 (one of Hurley's numbers) castaways this time are flown in by a resident of Shangri-La, but much like the survivors of Flight 815 they are merely the four people who happen to be on this certain plane. They were not chosen for who they were or what they could contribute to Shangri-La.

There were two passages in Lost Horizon that struck me in regards to this notion of how you build a post-apocolypse society and whether or not something like this is happening on the LOST Island. When first arriving at Shangri-La Mallinson, the young "castaway" who most wants to get home tells his host, Chang he expects Chang to help them facilitate their departure at a fair price to which Chang replies:

I can only assure you, Mr. Mallinson, that you will be honorably treated and
that ultimately you will have no regrets.

Ultimately? Mallinson exclaimed . . . And so did I.

It seems to be Ben's/Jacob's/the Others' position that ultimately the people chosen to be on the Island will have no regrets even if in the short run they need the submarine to maintain the illusion that they can leave. Mrs. Klugh at least was willing to make an ultimate sacrifice to protect whatever it is the Others are up to. Most of Ben's statements and Michael Emerson's as well seem to imply that ultimately the LOSTies (and the audience) will approve of the Others end, if not means.

Which leads to the other thing that stands out to me in this interchange, the fact that the LH castaways are indeed treated honorably. In other words, people aren't sent into their camp as spies, castaways aren't dragged into the jungle by people in costumes, pregnant girls aren't stolen and rock stars hung with vines, kids aren't stolen off beaches or rafts. You see where I'm going with this.

The way the Others choose to interact with those stranded on the Island still baffles me. If all outsiders are enemies, then why not kill them all? Why not view all people trapped on the Island as potential new members of your community? You have Room 23 at your disposal to deal with the tough cases after all. Kidnapping just doesn't seem like an ideal way to add to your community, but maybe I'm old-fashioned in that respect.

This idea of how you build a society designed for weathering the end of the rest of the world is further explored by the High Lama. Conway, leader of the LH castaways, observes that there are doubtless many people in the world who would be glad enough to be in Shangri-La. The Lama replies:

Too many, my dear Conway. We are a single lifeboat riding the seas in a gale; we can take a few chance survivors, but if all the shipwrecked were to reach us and clamber aboard we should go down ourselves.

Back before we saw what Ben and the Hostiles did to the Dharma Initiative I might have guessed that Dharma was culling the Flight 815 survivors to fit in with their Valenzetti project in the same manner Shangri-La took on prospective apocolypse survivors. But having no real understanding of what Ben's Merry Band of Others are up to, I still don't understand their approach to the chance survivors of Flight 815. At a minimum, you would think they'd have taken all the women for Juliet's distracting fertility project, but in the tail section alone, they left more women of child-bearing age than they took. The vague references to Jacob's list and to being good obviously all play into this, but vague is all we've really got at this point. Can Jacob please have the first flashback?

More on Lost Horizon next post, and check out my Bonus Post below.

Are Richard Alpert and Walt Lloyd
Time Travelers?













If fools are enslaved by time and space, get out a jester
hat and a stick with bells on it because when it comes to
trying to figure out what's going on with time on LOST,
I'm lost. But the book The Time Traveler's Wife has
a theory of time travel that I can get my head around, and
I wonder if it can be used to explain how Richard Alpert
looks the same both above and below this text.












The idea in the book is that Henry, the time traveler,
can move from the present day at his present age both
forward and backward in time. So, for example, when
it is 1994 and Henry is 30, he could time travel and his
30 year old self could go back to 1988, but he would still
be 30 or it could go to 1998, but he would still be 30.

So could that explain non-aging Richard Alpert? When
Ben is doing his best young Harry Potter impression at
age 10 or so Alpert is 35. Then when Ben is 40, Alpert's
35 year old self has time traveled to 2004. Could that
also explain why Ben is in charge because the rest of the
Others only think that Alpert is 35 and hasn't been there
as long as Ben? Could it also explain why Alpert is the only
one we've seen off the Island after we saw him on the Island
(in chronological time) because he time traveled to Miami
in order to recruit Juliet?

And is a similar thing going on with












Through the Looking Glass Walt?

But in Walt's case, instead of age 10 Walt in December 2004
and points forward, we've got some form of future Walt,
be it age 13, 15, however old the actor is now.

Let me know what you think. And don't ask me about Desmond.
I've got no way to explain his time traveling or flashes. Though
the hero in the book was naked every time he traveled, other than
that I've got no links to Desmond.