This week’s official video podcast is about the wonderful scenes, in 5×11 What Happened, Happened, where Hurley and Miles talk about time travel.
The podcast shows some clips from the scenes and also shows a bit of what was happening on the set while the scenes were being filmed. Between takes, Jorge Garcia (Hurley) and Ken Leung (Miles) bounce ideas off each other, trying to make some sense out of time travel — just like their characters do!
LOST is filled with Christian symbolism. Locke, for example, appears to be the show’s Jesus figure. Told that he would have to sacrifice himself in order to save his people, Locke died, only to rise again.
In the Sayid-centric episode, 5×10 He’s Our You, Sayid also appears to be a Jesus figure, though the signs may be more subtle than they were with Locke.
"Better put him in restraints"
Arms outstretched
Twelve people vote to execute Sayid:
Amy and the other Dharma-ites vote to execute Sayid
Sawyer is a Judas figure (albeit only temporarily), when he appears to join in on the vote to execute Sayid. Then, when Sawyer offers to help Sayid escape, Sayid turns him down, saying that he has finally found his purpose. Sayid, who had spent much of the episode regretting the killing he had done, seems at that moment to want to die for his sins.
Then, of course, the plot takes a twist, and Sayid reverts back to his old killer self. Or does he? At the time I wrote this post, we don’t yet know if Ben is really dead.
Either way, Sayid’s tenure as a Jesus figure appears to have been temporary. But we shall see.
Credit for many of the ideas in this post, especially the observation that there were 12 people who voted to condemn Sayid, goes to epiclogin’s comment on a reddit discussion thread.
Amy, pregnant, in 5x08 "LaFleur"
Back in Season 3, in D.O.C., Juliet told Sun that every pregnant woman who had conceived on the island had died.
Amy’s pregnancy and the successful delivery of her child, in 3×08 LaFleur, raises new questions and throws some doubt on existing theories.
I see three possibilities:
1. The problem was caused in the 1950s by Jughead, the atomic bomb. If it was poorly sealed when it was buried, radiation would have leaked out into the soil. In some as-yet unknown way, this could have caused all sorts of strange things to happen, including, perhaps the time jumps — and the death of all women who conceived on the radiation-contaminated island … or …
2. It was always a problem. If the four-toed statue was really meant to be Taweret, then there must have been an ancient civilization on the island that felt the need to appeal to a goddess who protected women in labor… or …
3. The problem was recent, perhaps starting in the 1970s after the Dharma Purge. I don’t think we know yet whether or not Amy conceived on the island. The Dharma Initiative had a submarine shuttling back and forth every couple of weeks, so it’s possible she was off the island when she became pregnant. But if she did conceive on the island, then unless she was some sort of special exception, the curse against the pregnant women could not yet have come into effect.
Picture of pregnant Amy cropped and lightened from a screencap by lost-media.com, from 5×08 “LaFleur” (c) ABC
Posted in Pregnant women dying, Season 3, Season 5, Theories
Mad scientist working on a Grand Theory of Everything
This is my grand theory of everything — from time travel to destiny — in LOST.
I’m starting with the premise that the writers want to avoid major time-travel paradoxes, that they don’t want to deal with problems such as a character being his own grandfather, or killing his mother before he was born, etc. Damien and Carlton have said as much, in one of their interviews (see this video starting at 4:05), and I’m going to take them at their word.
As part of that premise, I’m going to assume that the characters that we know were on Flight 815 cannot be killed while time-traveling in the past to any time prior to Flight 815.
For example, in LaFleur, Sawyer, while trying to rescue Amy, narrowly escaped being shot by an Other. Juliet killed the Other and saved Sawyer’s life. But what if Juliet hadn’t been there and instead, Sawyer had been killed?
It couldn’t happen. If Sawyer was killed in the 1970s, he could not be alive in 2004, and the future would have to be altered. That would create the kind of classic time-travel paradox problem that the show wants to avoid.
Therefore, even if Juliet hadn’t saved Sawyer’s life, his life would have been saved in some other way — because Sawyer simply could not be killed. No one would be “allowed” to kill him, and he would not be “allowed” to kill himself.
That means the characters, while they are traveling in the past, do not have total freedom. They lack, to a certain extent, free will. And that is because they are in the past.
Now, think about how this compares to the way the characters act in the present, and something very strange emerges. Even in the present, the characters appear to lack free will. Locke talks often about “destiny,” about what the Island compels them to do. Even Jack is starting to come around to that point of view. Christian Shephard told Locke that Locke was supposed to turn the wheel, not Ben. Ben said they all had to go back. Eloise Hawking said they could do it only in a certain specific way.
All these characters believe that their actions are constrained. But this is exactly the same thing that happens to characters who are time-traveling in the past!
So why should this also be happening in the present?
How about this: Perhaps the present may not really be the present.
Think about how we watch the show. The show started with the crash of Flight 815, and that became our reference point for the timeline of the story. We saw Flight 815 and the subsequent events on the Island as being in the present. We saw the flashbacks as being in the past, and the flashforwards as being in the future.
But what if Flight 815 is not really the present, for the characters? What if their actual “present” is really decades after Flight 815 took off? What if all their experiences that we’ve seen, including the crash of Flight 815, are all part of the past to the people involved? What if they have been time-traveling in the past all along?
That would explain why their actions are as limited as the actions of the time travelers — because they are time travelers themselves. It might explain why all the Oceanic 6 had to go back, and why the conditions on Flight 315 had to replicate the conditions on 815 so closely. It would certainly explain Locke’s preoccupation with the idea of “destiny.”
If this theory is right, what happens to Locke on the Island would, in fact, be predetermined – because it has actually already happened. But what if Locke didn’t know that? What if he wasn’t aware that he was time traveling in the past?
Then he would have to grope for another explanation for why he sensed that he couldn’t exercise free will. He’d have to use concepts that were familiar to him — concepts such as destiny and fate. To Locke, it would appear that it was destiny that was pulling his strings.
Cool picture of the mad scientist via Wikiepdia. GNU FDL.
Posted in Destiny versus Free Will, Season 5, Theories, Time travel
Here’s another picture, where the resemblance is especially clear:
Taweret, the hippo fertility goddess. in the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose, California. Photo by Tom Fowler
The round thing on top of this statue’s head is identical to the one on “our” statue. The ears are very similar. The toes — I count four.
It’s no wonder that in LaFleur we could see the statue only from the back — look how distinctive the front is! One glimpse of the front, with its pregnant belly and its hippopotamus face, would have given it all away.
Here are some interesting things about Taweret (sometimes spelled Tauret or Taurt) from the site Ancient Egypt Online:
Taweret … was a patron of childbirth and a protector of women and children….
Initially she was viewed as a dangerous and potentially malignant force…. She represented the … stars of Ursa Minor and Draco … who guarded the northern sky. The northern sky was thought to be cold, dark and potentially dangerous …. However, by the Old Kingdom she was seen as a protective rather than an aggressive force…. As a result, Taweret became a mother goddess and a patron of childbirth….
She was thought to help women in labor and to ward off evil spirits and demons who intended harm to mother or baby….
According to “The Book of the Dead”, Taweret guarded the paths to the mountains of the west which led to the underworld and could also use magic to help the deceased pass safely through that dangerous and frightening land.
Expectant mothers often carried amulets depicting Taweret to invoke her protection….
She was associated with so called “magic wand” or “magic knives” used during labour to ward off evil….
She was depicted as the combination of a crocodile, a hippo and a lion…. She had the paws of a lion, the back of a crocodile and the head and body of a pregnant hippo but with the addition of a woman’s hair. She often wears a short cylindrical headdress topped by two plumes or the horns and solar disk of Hathor, bearing the “Sa” (representing protection) or the ankh (representing life)…..
With so many things about Taweret relating directly to the story of LOST, I think there can be little doubt that the Island statue was based on statues of Taweret. The only remaining question is whether the writers meant for the Island statue to be a statue of Taweret herself (and if so, would that mean the Island was at one time populated by ancient Egyptians?) — or whether the writers used Taweret as a jumping off point, an inspiration to create their own original mythological being.
Photo of the Goddess statue at the Rosicrucian Museum (c) Tom Fowler
The four-toed statue as seen in 5x08 "LaFleur"
In the beginning of LaFleur, the Lost-ies were startled to see the back of this giant statue.
It is, of course, the famous four-toed statue that we first saw in the finale of Season 2.
From episode 2x23
This past December, producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, in one of the “Dharma Special Access” podcasts they made to keep us entertained during the long off-season, had promised that we would see the statue again in Season 5 — and so we have — and that we would see it even more extensively in Season 6.
So I guess we’re going to have to wait until next year for the mystery of the missing toe to be solved.
(The part about the statue starts at 3:40):
The statue reminds me of the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away
I found a clearer picture of the statue, along with two pictures that compare it to possible inspirations: Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, and Taweret, a goddess in the form of a hippopotamus who was a protector of women in pregnancy and childbirth (!). The resemblance of the Island’s statue to Taweret is striking. Both have similar toes and are wearing virtually identical headpieces. Take a look.
Also available for men.
