Well, another season of Lost has come and gone, and I’d love to say that I don’t resent the show’s creators just a little bit for not telling me the truth behind that god-forsaken island, but well. Man. I love this show.
If you haven’t already seen the final two-parter, you will probably not want to read beyond this line. Otherwise, carry on; I have a few thoughts that I’ve been aching to write down.
I’ve been waiting an entire season for Desmond to come back, and I’m glad he finally did. Unfortunately, he brought a shitload of new questions along with him, but hell, I guess they have to set things up for season three, after all (four months away, btw. argh.)
Some bits that really screwed me up:
Desmond couldn’t get away from the island. A man who has considerable experience sailing wouldn’t just get lost like that. Either the island’s electro-magnet is pulling him back, or he’s lying. Interestingly, Henry Gale gives Michael the exact bearing one needs to be headed towards, in order to get away. Of course, we’ll have to wait until season 3 to see if Henry is actually on the level.
That huge-ass pile of notebooks. To me, this says a couple of things. The first being that the observation room was, in fact, also an elaborate setup, as Desmond guessed. The second was that it indicated just how long the project had been “officially” abandoned. I’ll go into more of this later, but it seems to me that if the project was still in official hands, someone would come along to clean all that crap up every now and again, even if they weren’t actually being read (the reason being that Dharma wouldn’t want some of the other participants stumbling on to the pile inadvertently).
Oh man, four toes. There’s a theory stating that with continued human evolution, we will eventually lose our fifth toes, as they are largely unnecessary. Could this statue be some kind of allusion to that idea? The Dharma Initiative has a genetic modification project, so it’s possible that one of their ideas is to streamline the anatomy somehow.
They’re not in the future. One of the prevailing theories from mid-season was that the Losties were in fact in the year 2012, as theorized here. It fit in rather nicely with the idea that the hatch was somehow preventing the end of the world, and was supported by dates scattered throughout the show. Well, since we now know that the world isn’t really ending, this theory is not quite as compelling as it used to be. Also, the fact that Locke agreed that their plane crashed on September 22nd of 2004, tends to debunk that theory considerably (it’s been 65 days since their crash, so it should currently be late November, 2004 on the show).
So here’s the New Theory, based on evidence found by fans of the show and its alternate-reality game.
The Hanso Foundation and Widmore Labs (the company Desmond’s girlfriend’s father owns), as well as a Korean company called Paik Heavy Industries, are responsible for a whole slew of world-changing experiments, initiated to harden humanity against a potential asteroid collision in 2880. Our island is one of four test sites, the other three being in Iceland, Zanzibar and Korea.
The problems start when the US government gets involved and hurries R&D along at a reckless pace. Accidents happen, and one of the key experiments, the electromagnetic research initiative, goes awry. In order to keep the machine from overloading, someone must manually stifle it every 108 minutes. Why Hanso goes to such elaborate lengths to conceal this knowledge is beyond me, but so far, all this sounds pretty plausible.
The “Others” are gathering people to become part of the various experiments and tests; they pick children and a few adults they feel are “good” specimens. In the last 5 minutes of episode 24, Henry Gale remarks that Walt was “more than they bargained for,” so it seems Walt’s pseudo-psychic abilities have nothing to do with the island.
Here’s the big question, the answer to which I suspect will have a huge impact on the third season: why were the Others not concerned about the big “boom”? Henry Gale just resumed his conversation with Michael like nothing happened. Does that mean that it’s happened lots of times? (It couldn’t because the Swan station apparently gets trashed when you don’t press the button.) Does that mean the hatch doesn’t really mean anything? Do we even know for a fact that the act of turning the key was actually responsible for the sky turning violet?
The final scene, with the snow-bound researchers, confirms Widmore’s involvement with Hanso, as well as the fact that we will be seeing a whole lot more of Desmond and Penny’s romance throughout the third season. It’s quite likely that either Penny or her father were aware of Desmond joining their open ocean race, and were responsible for bringing Desmond to the island. Of course, what all that means is unknowable at this point.
God, so many secrets. Can’t wait for the third season.