Lost In What Way?

When the ABC television series Lost first began back in September 22 2004, we thought the show was about survivors of a plane crash being lost on a mysterious island, and of course it is that. Since the story continued, we learned that even when some of them made it back 'home' they were still lost souls in a world that confuses and confounds them. These characters seem to be lost no matter where they are, and for some the Island has become a sort of home. By the end of season five we see that Rose, Bernard, and Vincent appear to have found peace with themselves and in the company of one another. Being stranded on a mysterious island doesn't seem to bother them anymore. Whereas, our featured characters in this story have become so lost, they get to a point where they agree to activate a nuclear bomb on the belief that such a paradox would result in resetting space-time entirely.

This of course doesn't work, as I already know, and the rest of you will learn in 2010. I've discussed this at length in previous blog posts and hesitate to elaborate again on it here because this is a tangent from the point I'm wanting to make this time, but I urge you again to watch the end of the season five finale and convince me that the white out at the very end looks like a nuclear explosion and not yet another "time hop" as we had seen the characters experience many times throughout season five. I'm going with time hop. The bomb never goes off, because the bomb never did go off, because whatever happened happened.

The use of the word "Lost" as the name of this series has always perplexed me. It seems an entire oversimplification of the series as a whole. It's like calling Around the World In Eighty Days a "trip," Moby Dick a "whale," or The Rise And Fall of The Roman Empire an "oops." However, it's plain that the writers and producers of the series are endeavoring to use the word "lost" in as many different ways as possible. Not only are these characters physically removed from their comfort zone and the lifestyles to which they had grown accustomed their entire lives, but these souls also appear lost in more emotional or psychological ways. They're all deeply disturbed and long before the crash most of them lived in various states of quiet desperation; strangers in their own skin.

Jack's frenzied tale about his tattoos for example reveal a man who appears on the surface to be together and reasonable, but deep down he's rebellious, selfish, has no respect for the cultures of others, and kinda spoiled and unable to properly love another in a meaningful way. What all has Jack lost? He saved a woman who later became his wife, only to lose her later on. He also lost his father. Jack even lost his half-sister, and didn't even know he had one until long after Claire was gone.

Other characters show signs of instability as well. Hurley has been in an insane asylum twice. He insists he's not crazy in season two, but by season four he comes to a decision that he's safer locked up in an institution than he is roaming freely about the world. However, Hurley first lost his sanity after an accident on a platform that broke which killed many people and due to his weight he felt it was his fault. This depression led to his mother having him committed. Hurley later lost his grandfather, friends, and others, when he won the lottery.

Kate's a murderer. She killed her stepfather in cold blood. She tells her mother she did it for her, but we also learn that Kate learned her stepfather (whom she despised) was really her father by blood and the man she thought was her real father was only a friend of the family. Kate lost her best friend as she tried to escape her mother's hospital, and his death was indirectly her fault. She's essentially lost everything, because whenever things get difficult her first instinct is always to run. If Kate's not psychopathic, she's surely sociopathic. She's constantly reinventing herself, has gone by many aliases, and loses one identity after another when each one becomes too complicated for her to continue to wear. She's even lost a husband whom she loved dearly, but had to leave him to maintain her freedom. Finally, she lost her freedom when she was captured in Australia, and was going to jail to answer for her crimes when the plane crashed.

Desmond lost his freedom when he was trapped in The Swan Hatch for three years. Before that he lost the boat race. Before that he lost his Penny. He's since gained his Penny, gained a child, gained a semblance of freedom where he and those he loves can travel around the world in their boat but along the way he lost his innocence and also a belief that his actions are his own. He's still haunted by Mrs. Hawking's words that time has a way of course correcting, and the Island is not done with him.

Shannon lost her father in the same auto accident where Jack found his future fiance. He chose to save her over Shannon's father, because he couldn't save them both and made a decision to save the woman he was confident he could save rather than divert his attention in trying to save and ultimately losing them both. That decision on Jack's part left Shannon essentially devastated. Without her father's presence, suddenly Shannon's lifestyle was in jeopardy. Her stepmother took control of the family finances and stopped paying Shannon's bills and credit cards.

Sayid lost Shannon when Ana Lucia shot her accidently. Sayid has also lost a confidence him himself, believing now he is little more than a ruthless monster capable of killing a child on the off chance that doing so would keep that child from turning into a pain in the ass like Ben. Sayid also lost Nadia after spending most of his adult life searching for her. He finally found her upon his return to his life after the Island, but she was run over by a car.

Juliet's estranged husband was ran over by a bus. She also feared losing her sister, but she saved her just before being taken to the Island, at which point Juliet slowly realized that by taking the job on the island, she lost access to her sister and her entire life back home. Juliet lost everything. Later on, Juliet thought she found a kindred spirit in Jack, but he left the Island with Kate. Over time (and time travel) Juliet fell in love with Sawyer, but also lost him to Kate. Then she fell in a hole. Juliet's lost a lot, and if there's anyone on the island who deserves living up to the old adage that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, it's Juliet.

Charlie lost Drive Shaft. He lost his fame. His drug addiction essentially caused him to lose his lifestyle, except for the drug addiction part. When Claire found out he was a recovering addict, he lost her respect for him and had to earn it back. And of course Charlie lost his own life. As have many people, from Frogurt to Boone.

Locke lost his parents when he was very young. He found them again but lost them when his father stole his kidney. Locke was then thrown out a building by his father and lost his life. It was given back to him by Jacob, but he lost the use of his legs. Locke lost Helen, and after the accident began losing a tangible hold on sanity, opting instead to escape into fantasies at every opportunity. Ultimately he took Abadon's advice and went to Australia to join in a walkabout. He was denied this because of his immobility (can't walkabout if you can't walk, apparently) and that led him to Oceanic 815. Locke had throughout his life invested this emptiness inside to various causes or co-ops or belief structures and repeatedly he lost his faith in them, only to embrace another possibility outside himself later. When the Island appeared to give him back his ability to walk, he responded by behaving as if he were some sort of servant of the Island. Ultimately however, he lost faith even in that, when he was alone in the hotel room having failed to bring any of them back. He was going to kill himself. Ironically, this act would give Ben what he needed to convince Jack to return to the island. Locke has literally lost everything, including his identity. However, he's gained a mysterious impostor.

Sawyer lost both his parents when he was very young. Ben lost his mother at a young age, and his innocence when Sayid shot him and Richard saved him. Hurley lost Libby. Penny lost Desmond but got him back. Faraday lost Lewis. Claire lost Aaron. Kate's also lost Aaron by giving him to Claire's mom. Ana Lucia lost her unborn baby. Ekko lost his brother three times. Jin and Sun have lost each other. Miles lost his fish taco.

So considering how much all the characters on Lost have lost, it's now difficult to think of a more fitting word to call it.

LOST Q&A Review

EW.COM recently came up with a list of Lost Mysterys That Must Be Explained. While their list was novel, I wanted to address them in a more personal matter for my own purposes. This may or may not be something I'll return to and refine as we get closer to Lost's return early in 2010. Essentially, EW just scratched the surface and used this as an opportunity to make us click fifteen times so they could get more ad revenue, but the list itself was poorly organized and very little thought was put into precisely what questions must best be answered.

Since at least mid season one, I have been operating under the preconceived notion that discussions among certain Losties (particularly Locke interactions) that have appeared to be innocuous or unimportant could arguably be attempts by the writers to speak to us about overarching plans or goals of the series. For example, when Locke refers to Jack as a Man of Science and himself as a Man of Faith, this can be construed as a looking glass through which to perceive other parts of the series. Furthermore, I believe the writers have been purposefully doing everything with the understanding that there are multiple explanations. Based on what I've read on the Internet, audiences often jump to the conclusion that Locke is correct and The Island is somehow responsible for all these events and occurrences due to supernatural powers. I believe the writers have purposefully led us to believe such a thing, but that everything and I mean EVERYTHING can also be explained via a vaguely less abstract yet still speculative and perhaps even pseudo scientific component. What is happening on the Island is due to sciences that we human beings have only begun to understand. Less than a century ago, authors like Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke were exploring issues of space travel, robotics, nanotechnologies, and a host of topics that at the time were innovative and seemed just out of our reach. Today we take them for granted. Less than half a millenia ago, the very idea of incandescent lightbulbs would have been seen as a miracle from God or the work of the Devil. Magic to human beings is merely science that we have not yet properly learned to comprehend. One can be both a man of science and a man of faith, given proper education and circumstances. In trying to understand these mysteries, one should use both the man of science perspective and man of faith.

Our Losties: By 'our Losties' I am referring primarily to the more significant survivors of Oceanic 815 which crashed on The Island at the beginning of the episode. Occasionally, particularly in latter episodes, 'our Losties' could also refer to survivors of Widmore's freighter, members of the Tail Section of Oceanic 815, the occasional reject from The Others (like Alex, Juliet, Karl), and even Desmond. More specifically when I say Losties, I'm talking about Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, and those in their immediate vicinity who are on 'their side' in whatever scene or setting is pertinent at the time. Charlie, Shannon, Boone, Locke, and others who have been dead or undead at various points are also Losties predominantly in early seasons but less specifically show as the series wears on. In general, how are these individuals significant as a group? Why of all of humanity were these forty some odd people chosen to crash on Oceanic Six? When we are shown how they are connected to each other via chance meetings or blood relations or orchestrated manipulations by various forces, is that coincidence or divinely purposed? To what extent is chance a factor, and how much of this is direct manipulation on the part of perhaps Jacob, Blackie, or others we've yet to meet?

The Others: There appear to be multiple kinds of "Others." In fact, the term has proven to be misleading if not wholly illegitimate. There were of course survivors of various wrecks and crashes that the "Others" accepted into their fold. There were survivors of DHARMA arrested from The Purge and incorporated into their ranks. Before that there were "Hostiles" whom we are led to believe are indigenous to The Island but more pointedly appear to be merely more survivors from previous wrecks and crashes. Beyond that there may be a group of people residing in The Temple whom Richard & others are trying to protect from the outside world.

Jacob & Blackie: Blackie (aka Essau or Jacob's Nemesis) did refer to Jacob as Jacob but we never heard his name. Is this because Blackie's name would be one we recognize, or did the writers purposefully not name him so that we would have yet another mystery? Would these two gentlemen be considered "Others" even tho they appear to be beyond mere human faculties? Or is that more hokum? Are these gentlemen actually a stellar equivalent of Penn & Teller? Are they glorified magicians teasing lowly humans with technology and science that far surpasses ours so that we'd imagine them to be godlike when they merely know the metaphorical equivalent of using a magnifying glass to burn ants with the sun's rays? Perhaps they are aliens from elsewhere in space-time? Perhaps they are evolved human beings from Earth altered by The Island into near immortal and omniscient status? My favorite personal theory is that they are temporally sentient tesseracts from the fourth dimension wallowing in the third dimension like children of gods slumming it in the bowels of an insignificant bit of spacetime for kicks. We are like Jacob's high school science project in his dimension and Blackie is trying to ruin it for him so he can get a better class grade. Something like that. Essentially, all of season six should be devoted to resolving this mystery once and for all.

The Whispers: Sawyer heard it. Sayid heard it. Jack and Kate and Juliet have heard it. Rousseau has spoken of hearing it. The jungle comes alive at night to the sound of curious whispers, sometimes just prior to the arrival of "The Others" and sometimes it just happens. Are these moments when there is a temporal distortion causing the voices echoed in a certain location in one time to waft into other time periods? Is it some otherwise undocumented invisible entity entering a spacetime that happens to coincide with stressful moments in the lives of our Losties? Is there a more scientific based explanation for these whispers? Are there hidden speakers throughout the Island controlled by some unknown indivudal who activate these whispers for specific purposes that currently elude our discovery? Are there creatures indigenous to The Island which are very small, hide in the jungle, and make sounds that humans perceive to be human whispering, but are actually the equivalent of babbling geese? I am reminded of the scene in the Robert Redford movie "Sneakers" where Redford's character mistook a pond filled with chattering ducks for a coctail party. It could simply be a variant of crickets chirping that causes the whispers.

DHARMA: There are some who believe there are still mysteries to solve with regards to the DHARMA Initiative. There may be, but beyond what we already know, at this point further discoveries would be largely academic. In summary we know that DHARMA was an acronym for Department of Heuristics And Research on Material Applications and that it consisted of a group of people in the 1960s who believed humanity was orchestrating its own demise; a fate that could theoretically be stopped if someone could recalculate the Valenzetti Equation in such a way as to change one of its corresponding variables. Like a butterfly flapping its wings to change the weather elsewhere in the world, if one of these variables about mankind's doomed fate could be altered, it would change the inevitability of self-destruction. Presumably all the experiments being conducted by DHARMA on that Island were intended to serve that purpose originally. However, the people of DHARMA lost sight of their overarching goal, by falling into the minutiae of supplanting their headquarters on The Island. They ended up spending more time protecting themselves from The Hostiles that threatened to overwhelm them, and took their eyes off the metaphorical ball. Benjamin Linus, son of one of the grunt workers in DHARMA, became a traitor to the DHARMA cause, allowed the Hostiles to infiltrate DHARMA's ranks and after The Purge, the DHARMA initiative largely fell in the hands of The Hostiles, who took over the inner workings of the organization for their own ends: to defend The Island against future infiltratiion and interference from the outside world. There may be a DHARMA initiative on the mainland that is still working the equation, but that's doubtful. Anyone that Ben's Others could not convince to join them became their victims. Ben & The Others then used DHARMA's extensive infrastructure both on island and off to manipulate events to their ends. Admittedly, we do not know yet how DHARMA is funded, but that will only be revealed if it becomes integral to the plot. At this point, most anything we are ever going to learn about DHARMA was given to us in season five. We will not revisit that time period, because after the final time hop at the end of the S5 finale, all of our Losties will be returned to their present time periods. Darlton has confirmed that there will be no more time travel. Is the Valenzetti Equation correct? Will humanity cease to be in a brief period of time due to variables in that equation that seem beyond humanity's ability to alter? Only time will tell.

The Numbers aka 4 8 15 16 23 42: As I mentioned in the DHARMA section, The Valenzetti Equation was meant to determine the fate of humanty, and with 100% certainty, Valenzetti believed the world would end by the end of the 20th century. The DHARMA initiative's purpose was to find a way to change one of the variables. Whether or not they were successful or whether or not they were right remains to be seen. The world hasn't ended yet, so Valenzetti may have been wrong. Or perhaps the fact they tried to change it only postponed the inevitable and the fate of humanity is ultimately what Lost's season six will be about remains to be seen as well. More pointedly, beyond the Valenzetti Equation, many fans have determined a wide range of examples in which one or more of The Numbers appears on the show. Flight 815 for example, or Room 23, or jerseys from girls on a soccer team appearing as Hurley rushed to the plane. Some reasons for the numbers appearing are self-explanatory once it's known that DHARMA and Valenzetti are linked. However, other times there's no way DHARMA can be at fault. In those situations one can only attribute it to either coincidence, or a sense of humor among the crew of Lost. Writer David Fury admitted that when he wrote the episode Numbers, he purposefully chose to use numbers which had already been mentioned by chance earlier in the series. For example, four was the number of years Locke had spent in a wheelchair. Forty-two was an homage to Douglas Adams. Eight and fifteen were the numbers on the plane. Why sixteen and twenty-three were chosen escapes me, except that accumulatively these numbers sum up to 108, which allegedly is a number that's significant to Buddhist teachings. You can learn more about The Numbers over at LostPedia.

Adam & Eve: The prevaling theory at the moment is that the two corpses found in the Caves by Jack in season one are actually those of Rose & Bernard, who opted not to join Jack and the gang on a hail mary pass to stop DHARMA and reset time. Rose and Bernard may have remained in the past with the dog Vincent, in which case they could have chosen to die in the Caves together for some unknown reason. That's one possibility, but we honestly don't know enough about the two bodies to make any logicl guesses. It's believed that when the identities of Adam & Eve are revealed formally on the show, it will lend proof to all viewers that the writers were not making this up as they went along; that the end of the series was preconceived before they began production. That remains to be seen.

Libby: This is another mystery that arguably has been solved as best as it's going to be, but for many of us diehard fans there will always be questions. Having never had a full episode flashback of her backstory, Libby is largely an enigma. Also, inconsistencies in things she told people indicates either bad continuity on the part of writers, or the character is in some respects a pathological liar. For example, she claimed to be a med student dropout who learned how to set legs in her one year of school, but setting legs is not something they teach first year medical students. We don't even know her last name, which indicates that if we did it would tell us more than the writers wanted us to know in season two. Libby did study medicine at a collegiate level but ultimately chose psychology as her vocation. She once broke her leg skiing. She was widowed by a husband named David who had named his boat after her (The Elizabeth) and Libby gave said boat to Desmond for the race that led to Desmond's arrival on the Island. After her husband died, Libby went into decline and ended up briefly in Santa Rosa Medical Hospital, which was the same hospital in which Hurley resided for awhile. The two appear to have never met directly prior to the 815 Crash, but we are led to believe Libby recognizes Hurley even though Hurley doesn't recognize her. Libby later gave the boat to Desmond, and some years after that was in Australia and took Oceanic 815 presumably to return to the states, where she was with the Tailies for the first forty-eight days and spent perhaps a week with our Losties before she was murdered in cold blood by a surprised Michael Dawson. Her death was unintentional, but very painful as Michael had shot her in the gut. Jack administered heroin to lessen her discomfort and he and Hurley watched her die. Hurley & Libby had managed a brief flirtatious relationship which seemed to promise more intimacy, but it was stopped short by Michael. Darlton has made it clear that there is little to no chance they can get Cynthia Watros back to complete Libby's story. So we may never know for certain where she fits into the Lost Mythology beyond her donating The Elizabeth to Desmond's efforts in the boat race. I like to believe she is Pennelope's half-sister, sharing the same father (Charles Widmore) but a different (unknown) mother. However, that's speculation that may never be confirmed or denied. Somehow she worked for Widmore, and I believe Charles' behavior towards Desmond about his daughter were intentionally confrontational to cause Desmond to rebel and fight for her; a morbid gamble. Charles asked Libby to give the boat to Desmond. I'm certain of this, but have no way of proving it, as it's doubtful this story will be explored further without the involvement of Cynthia Watros. There are some things about this tv series that there's a good chance we will just never know. Was Libby on board 815 on purpose or coincidentally? Why was she in Santa Rosa's at the same time Hurley was? What is her last name? Was her husband David related to the events in any way? Was his death coincidental like Walt's mother or orchestrated like Juliet's husband? We may never known any of these questions.

Egyptian Influence: This is not so much a mystery as a choice on the part of the writers. In season two we saw that if the numbers are not punched into the computer, the countdown clock changes from arabic numerals to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Later in the series we were told about "ruins" and a "temple" whose architecture insinuates Egyptian influences. There's also a statue of an Egyptian god which stood proudly once but in the Lost present day time line all that's left in "The Shadow of The Statue" is an ankle; which Jacob made his home. Still, fans would like to know what Egyptian buildings are doing on The Island, and also why the Donkey Wheel has deposited Locke, Ben, and at least one polar bear in the middle of the Tunisian desert.

Claire: She disappeared cryptically late in season four. It's believed she will return in season six and we will learn why. We may also learn the significance of her blood relation with Jack & Christian.

Walt: He was special enough for The Others to spend unnecessary resources collecting him from Michael. They kidnapped Walt, did experiments on him, and then ultimately decided to give him back to Michael saying "he was more than we bargained for." We know Walt is able to glean information from people by touching them. We know that when stressed, sometimes birds around him fly into walls and glass doors. We know Walt has made astral appearances to Shannon and Locke. We don't know why. We don't even know if Walt knows why. The last time Walt was seen, in the episode Live & Death of Jeremy Bentham, we got the indication that at least Locke felt Walt had been troubled enough by The Island and should be left alone. The Island may have other plans for him. It's also possible the writers have chosen to write Walt completely out of the storyline for the series, due to unforseen circumstances of involving a child actor in a show that takes the breadth of his experience with puberty to tell the general public. This may be another of those mysteries that's best left unsolved.

Smokey: What is a smoke monster with sound effects that sometimes bring to mind the roller coaster on Coney Island, that tends to kill people or at the very least scare the crap out of them? This will probably be a secret that the writers of Lost will put off answering as long as they possibly can, because it's one of the oldest questions of the series, seeing as how to the best of our understanding it was Smokey that ate the pilot of Oceanic 815 in the series pilot.

Richard Alpert: Eyeliner? For the last time, no. That's naturally how the actor Nestor Carbonell looks. If you ever saw him in a beer commercial for the latino television networks, you'd understand more clearly. When not playing Richard Alpert, the guy is an hispanic heartthrob. As for while the guy doesn't age, that will also probably be addressed in season six, but due to temporal instability on The Island, I believe his apparent immortality is due to anomalies caused when three dimensional entities dabble in fourth dimensional physics.

Party Time Elusive, chapter one

Inside the alley in the late afternoon sun of a major metropolitan city sat a girl. She looked pale and frail and yet maintained a bit of fat around her mid section that was indicative of a woman who had only recently given birth. She sat hunched over breathing heavy and crying incessantly and aside from the distant sounds of cars and people and the hustle and bustle of the city, in this alley the only noticeable sound was her; breathing and wheezing and weeping. It had been like this for a short while, and it would be like this for awhile longer. She wore a conservative yet fashionable two piece outfit that seemed out of place on her in this alley. It also seemed a couple sizes too big, but it's what she had been wearing when they took her to the hospital, so its what she had to wear when they let her go. Her feet were bare, and now one of them was bleeding, but she hadn't noticed yet. She had the shoes when she started running, but took them off when she felt they slowed her down.

She sat there on the edge of the cement docking platform behind a practically abandoned warehouse. She didn't know that the warehouse was abandoned. She didn't know she was sitting on a dock. She barely had allowed it to register in her mind that she was sitting on cold dirty cement. She didn't know this was an alley. She didn't know other people would consider this a dangerous neighborhood. She didn't pay attention to the pigeons swooping down checking on the stinking garbage a few feet from her in the dumpster. She ignored the pain in her legs, the blood on her feet, and the emptiness in her gut. She had told them at the hospital there were people waiting for her, and when they wheeled her out of the hospital but didn't see the imagined friends she lied to them about, she stood up as best she could and she ran. It hurt. She was still weak and tender, but as she had done a thousand times before in her life, she pushed the pain away and did what she knew she had to do - the one thing in the world she was good at doing: get away.

That's when she found this alley, only a few blocks from the hospital. That's when she sat on the warehouse dock, unable to take another step without falling into the puddle. She had been there for awhile. The sun was still in the sky but it would be gone soon. With streaks of tears on her face and mucous coming out of her nose, she came to the numb understanding that she didn't know anything, other than the fact she had just lost the only creature in the entire world who would have unconditionally loved her.

They took away her baby.

She had signed the papers weeks before. She knew that much. She had been in total agreement that she was an unfit mother. Orphaned only four months after her birth, Elsie had only her initials to make a name. E. L. S. That's all she knew about the first four months of her life. She had been told her initials were on the linen and on the basket and monogrammed on her cloth diaper. The person who found her, a priest, noted more than once that he found it odd she was in cloth diapers. "People just don't use those as much anymore," he was fond of saying. She came from money. He made that clear. However, she'd never known a cent of it, and had a presumption that she never would.

She was cared for in an orphanage run by catholic nuns and the priest. She recalls seeing other orphans come and go but she'd always be left behind. She had many friends, and she tried to remember their names, but the only one that really stood out for her was Virginia. During their time together they were inseparable, like peas in a pod, the nuns would jest. Then, one day a couple wanted Virginia but they didn't want Elsie. They couldn't care for two. So Virginia went away and Elsie was alone again. No one wanted her, partly because strange things happened around her when a couple seemed interested. Unlucky things. Things she couldn't explain, but would keep her up at night, with tears streaking her cheeks, like they were now.

They took away her baby.

After the orphanage burned down, Elsie was carted about to different foster families but by law she wasn't allowed to stay in the same place for long, so she learned quickly not to build attachments to people. They would come and go and by the time she was fifteen she had accepted that saying goodbye was a natural part of life. She used the same false bravado for goodbyes as she did for hellos, ignoring how much it felt like breaking each time. Over time she developed a tough shallow exterior that was simultaneously welcoming and provocative without being too inviting. People loved being around her, but they didn't really miss her when she was gone. She liked it that way. She'd learned to prefer it that way. Then at the age of fifteen she learned she was pregnant: and they just took away her baby.

By then she'd fallen out of the foster family program. She slipped through the cracks. Although most foster families were very kind to her for many years, and the only reason why she'd move on was because the law required, in her situation, to stay with no particular foster family more than a few months. Well, that and the accidents. Strange things happened around her after awhile, and while all her previous foster parents had nothing but wonderful things to say about her, they wouldn't always have wonderful things to say about the time they spent with her. Strange luck.

Then there were the Courtneys. On the surface, to Child Protective Services, they were a middle aged, salt of the Earth couple. Around the time of Elsie's thirteenth birthday (even though she didn't know it was her birthday) she became a part of their family. When alone, they'd boss her around and shove her about and were all kinds of bitter and mean to her. When she threatened to complain to her social worker, they told her about Virginia.

They knew where Virginia was, and they knew she used to be friends with her. They told Elsie that if she didn't do what she was told, and if she didn't keep quiet, they would make sure Virginia never breathed again. She had no reason to doubt them. She never told them about Virginia. She couldn't understand how they knew about her.. unless they knew about the people who were there that night.. the night of the fire.. She did what they told her to do, and when they felt she was completely under her thumb, they started trying to get her to help them with their scheming. Oh, they were always scheming. Mostly small time con games and swindles. Never got caught. They were too good for getting caught. They taught her all kinds of things. Things she really didn't want to know. The Courtneys were a couple who could pretend in an instant to be kindhearted souls but deep down they were evil incarnate, and Elsie's gut churned to be so close to such utter despicable contempt for the human race. These two were leeches on society in a manner that was thankless and heartless. She was doomed to be her patsy, to protect Virginia. However, one night she awoke with a start to find that the two of them had been practically hovering over her bed like a couple vultures. She learned that night that the reason why they knew about Virginia was because they overheard Elsie talking in her sleep. They didn't really know where Virginia was. They had no way of harming her. So with that realization, Elsie ran from the Courtneys to the police, who of course didn't believe her, because one sweet conversation with Mrs. Courtney and the police learned that Elsie was just a troubled girl who caused all manner of hell to the Courtneys but they loved her and they wanted to take her home.

So she ran. And she kept running. For two years. She ran all up and down the eastern seaboard. She hitched rides in cars with strange men. She rode ferries and got on busses. She even stowed away on a commercial jet once but they found her and kicked her off. Sometimes she could pay. Usually tho she was just surviving the day, and she was ashamed to admit the Courtneys had taught her how to survive. They taught her how to use what she had to get what she needed, and how to leech off humanity like a blood tick. She hated herself, but people were always so friendly to her if she just turned on the charm. She developed a warm hard exterior that hid deep inside a cold soft broken heart.

Then she got in with a street gang, and fell in love with one of its leaders. Then she fell out of love with him and in love with a member of another street gang. She didn't know they were enemies at the time she fell in love with them. At the time, had someone pressed, she would have had difficulty explaining to you what a gang even is, and would probably rather attempt to explain to you how "it's more complicated than that. We're like family."

She found out she was pregnant. Then they found out. There was a question as to whose baby it was, and that led to an.. incident. She tried to fix it. Tried to get them to stop fighting, but it had become bigger than her now. They had always wanted to kill each her. They just used her as an excuse. So she ran.

She ended up in Bridgeborough. Again. Elsie had been in Bridgeborough New Jersey before. She didn't know why she'd been drawn to the city. Well, that wasn't entirely accurate. This was where the orphanage had been, and she had been told where the priest had found her. Although that orphanage was now long bulldozed and replaced with a shopping center. Still, she traveled far and wide the past eight years, but always ended up back where she had sort of started.

She learned from people in coffee shops and libraries and truck stops all along the east coast that if you were a girl 'in trouble' there were places in major metropolitan cities that could help a young gal out. Bridgeborough just happened to be the closest big city to her at the time she decided this was too big for her to handle alone. Elsie found it amusing that this particular kind of trouble could be easily discussed without ever actually using the words 'pregnant' or 'illegitimate' and if anyone ever asked her "where's the father?" she only had to give them a "you've got to be kidding me" look and that would end that. Truth of the matter was, she didn't know. There were a number of possibilities, but she'd quickly exhausted them as avenues for successful resolution to the problem. They all either didn't want anything to do with her, or wanted her to have an abortion. Or, in the case of her two primary suspects, the boys in the gangs, they were dead. While not averse to abortion as a choice for other women, she discovered early on it wasn't a choice she could make herself. She was carrying this baby to term, but she didn't want to keep it for life. Or so she thought.

Upon arrival to Bridgeborough, after waving the nice truck driver goodbye for dropping her off, she went to the first building that looked like it might have a doctor in it, and told them she was pregnant and had no money. That was pretty much all she said. She didn't even have to mention the orphan part. Somewhere around the ages of twelve and fourteen that word stopped illiciting from strangers any kind of sympathy. However, pregnant and poor made people even more sympathetic than ever, usually for only short periods of time.

The people in that doctor's office took pity on her, but as this was a veterinarian doctor, they couldn't help her directly. The receptionist there spoke with the doctor, who made a few calls, and less than a year later Elsie was in a hospital operating room with all kinds of equipment and doctors and nurses and strangers waiting outside the door. She had enjoyed the time from the vet's office to the operating room. She'd always been cared for and always had a place to sleep and someone would always make sure she had enough to eat, constantly reminding her she was eating for two now, but after the operation she somehow knew all that was going to go away. She dreaded that moment, but when it came she knew what she had to do: run.

Somebody else was paying for all of it and she'd signed papers, and she understood distantly that her payment for all this fuss was to give them her baby and she was completely okay with that. Then she saw her. She only got a glimpse. They wouldn't let her hold it. She doesn't even know what gender it is. They took it away. She was sixteen now, and a part of her was released into this world, into the hands of strangers, and she would never know anything. She would never even know the baby's name. This was oddly comical she thought, the tear streaks still on her face. Her body numb from the run but her breathing now returned to normal. She didn't even know her own name. Why should it make any difference that she doesn't know her child's name? It was all... somehow.. fitting. Yet she continued crying about it.

She did notice the limosine at the mouth of the alley, negotiating its way onto the small street like a young walrus negotiating its way onto dry land. It inched slowly towards her, partly because it was only inches on either side from debris and dumpsters and a lump of newspapers that might have had a dead homeless person under it, but also because it was almost as if the chauffeur inside were keenly aware this young girl was not unlike a startled fawn caught in headlights, and would run if spooked and startled.

When the limousine could move no closer to her without risking the paint job, it stopped. She looked at it with wide-eyes and a desire to run but a numbness in her legs that made it clear she wasn't going to be able to run this time. Not yet. Her legs were still in fine working order, but because of the way she sat and the stress she had put them under so soon after the delivery, they had decided to fall asleep. Her butt tingled in an uncomfortable way, and she began to have an inkling that something was wrong with one of her feet.

The chauffeur got out of the driver's side and attempted to walk around the front of the car. When that was blocked by a dumpster, the chauffeur cursed in a mumble and then crawled over the hot hood of the car, utilizing various F and S words wherever inappropriate. She then returned to an upright position on the other side and made her way to her employer's door, where she opened it. Elsie marveled at how despite her cursing and crawling, the dark-skinned lady chauffeur had managed to go about the ordeal in a very graceful and elegant manner. In fact, for a green uniform and snazzy cap, the woman belonging behind the wheel of the vehicle looked to Elsie like she should have been the one being driven.

The driver's employer however looked to Elsie more like he was playing the part, but didn't belong at all. He was a tall, thin, lanky man who unfolded himself out of the limo like a praying mantis climbing over a stalk of celery. The tuxedo he wore was plainly very expensive and fit him perfectly, yet it seemed as out of place as a poodle wearing a hoop skirt. He didn't have much hair on his head by choice, a full buzz cut that didn't show signs of receding. He wore horn rimmed glasses and a trite trim mustache that might have looked more at home on the face of a Latin lover. His skin was as pale as Elsie's but more gaunt and less healthy. His bow tie was red as were his shoes: sneakers. A full black tux with red sneakers. He smiled a toothy grin that made Elsie immediately want to punch him, and had she felt in better spirits, she would have.

In his hands, the gentlemen held two glasses of champagne. One of them was less full than the other.

"Ah. Thank you Daphne."

"Dagny!" the chauffeur corrected him.

"Yeah whatever." He looked at her and she at him, him expectantly and her annoyed, until it dawned on her that the only way he could move in this alley were if she went back the way she came and he followed. Elsie watched with amusement and disdain at the spectacle that then took place. Taking a full minute and a half at least, Dagny crawled back over the hood of the car, then took the two glasses of champagne from the gentleman in the tux. Then the young looking gentleman in the tux negotiated the hood of the car like a spry elderly man. Once back on his red sneakered feet, his tux only a bit crumpled, he took the two glasses of champagne back from Dagny and turned his spectacled eyes towards the only other lady in the alley.

"Whatever you're sellin' man. I ain't buyin." Elsie looked away, despite the fact she couldn't deny the spectacle had whetted her appetite for curiosity, and somehow she had a suspicion that he knew it. The entire display seemed to her fake - particularly him. As if this entire display was a show for her alone, and she wasn't sure if she was comfortable with that.

"Miss Seavers, allow me to introduce myself. I'm Sly Stephens, and I know this is the worst day of your life, but that's why I'm here. I want to change that." He now stood before her seated self, but because of the cement dry dock this still placed her easily a head taller than him. He extended the fuller glass of champange to her and took another sip from the one he'd obviously been imbibing from for awhile. "Dagny? I forgot the rest of the bottle. Can you be a dear and fish it out for me?"

Dagny cursed inappropriately and once again crawled the hood of the car to get to his compartment.

"You're not used to ordering people around are ya?" Elsie wiped a tear off a cheek and sneered at him. She didn't take the glass of champagne.

"I do it all the time."

"You suck at it." He offered the champagne again with a gentle gesture of the glass, but she didn't budge. He also didn't budge, and the crooked smile on his face made Elsie aware he would be able to stand there holding the glass of champagne for her for a good long while. She chose to test that theory by continuing to not take it, and he continued to stand there with a crooked smile, awkwardly hoping she would change her mind.

"Look," she said defiantly, despite the fact she was still obviously weeping, "I signed the papers. You have my baby. I don't want anything more from you people and believe me you don't want anything more from me cuz I got nothin'. I just wanna be left alone."

"With all due respect Miss Seavers, I'm not with them. I represent a ..a consortium of interested partners--"

"A what?"

"A consortium."

"Of for God's sake, Stanley!" Dagny stuck her head out of the back of the limousine, "You're a pig!" She stuck her head back into the limo but they could both still hear her shrieking clearly, "You been back her less than an hour and look at the mess you've made!"

The gentleman in red sneakers laughed nervously and then called back to Daphny, "Dearie the name is Sly. Mister Stephens to you Daphny."

"It's DAGNY!" the green-suited chauffeur reappeared out the back of the limo with a bottle of champagne. She closed the door with a slam and steeled herself for the hood of the car once again, "I'm not cleaning up back there. That's your mess you clean it up - and don't use big words like consortium on the gal. You and I both know she's been through hell and back - have some common deceny you pig!"

Elsie was keenly aware, having experienced hanging out with people used to being served and serviced by other people, that such insolence would normally be handled by immediate expulsion, or at least a fevered taunt and a dock in pay. However, Stanley's response was to look back and forth between the two ladies and laugh nervously, still offering the full glass of champagne to Elsie.

"Alright, not a consortium. Think of them as ..a party. You like parties Ms. Seavers, I know that."

"You don't know me. My name ain't Seavers. It's Elsie."

"Your name is Miss Elaine Lucille Seavers," began Stanley as if he were reciting from a file by memory, and still holding the glass of champagne for her. He took a brief sip from his own. "You were born right here in Bridgeborough New Jersey sixteen years two weeks and three days ago. In that same hospital coincidently enough from which you ran only a few hours ago. Not the same room though. Wouldn't that have been interesting though had that been the case? Your mother was Valerie Witcher, the daughter of a curious man and a celebrity of his time among the likes of The Amazing Randi and Harry Houdini."

"You're saying I'm Bewitcher's granddaughter?" Elsie

"Oh so you do know him?" He asked as if he already knew the answer. Stanley still held the glass aloft before Elsie and she she still declined.

"Yeah pull the other one. He was a debunker back in the seventies and eighties. Told people there was no such thing as magic. Then he saved the world a couple times using magic but later insisted those were just spectacles he'd staged to sell his books."

"Then he disappeared."

"Yeah so how convenient for you that you can claim he's related to me. I can't doublecheck that cuz he's dead."

"Not dead. Disappeared."

"So you say. He's been gone like twenty years and his daughter was my mom?"

"More importantly your father was Jonathan Seavers, then assistant district attorney who'd had a bit of a disagreement with the Vizzinis. They had both your parents killed, and you were to be killed too, but curiously enough you ended up on the doorstep of St. Michael's cathedral, where they clergy took you in and cared for you until the age of eight. The rest of the story you already know."

"I gotta say you do your homework. Now if you'll excuse me I had this alley first and I got some more crying I gotta do before the sun sets and I go find a corner to crawl in."

"You're not going to do that."

"I'm not?"

"No. You're going to come with me."

"I most certainly am not. I just spent the last six months with you people-"

"I'm not with the people you just left-"

"Your KIND of people! The people who got more money than brains and you use it to buy off flesh from folks like me and then you leave them on the curb like garbage."

"They didn't leave you."

Stanley spinned his head back at Dagny and hissed at her. Dagny rolled her eyes in response.

"What did you say?" Elsie tried to sound like a regal tiger ready to pounce but it came out more like a wounded lion with a limp paw.

"You ran away from them."

"Dagny!"

"Can it Stan."

"It's Sly!"

Still standing in front of the limo, Dagny ignored him and looked at Elsie. "You ran away but they had plans for you. They weren't necessarily plans you would have liked. They were gonna try to find you a job and a place to live and that kinda stuff. But you ran. And you end up ekeing out a life on your own for the next several years but it's gonna be a rough ride until you're twenty-three when-"

"Dagny so help me God if you don't shut up I will-"

"You'll do what Stan?"

He changed his tactic from a faux authoritative shout echoing the alley walls to a plaintive faux whisper that he hoped Elsie wouldn't hear but knew she would, "she's not supposed to know any of this you're ruining everything."

"Sly I love you, you know that. Otherwise I wouldn't put up with your shit. But we both read her file. This, none of this is gonna work on her. The only thing that works on Elusive is the truth. That's always been true and you know it."

Sly looked down, defeated. "I just thought I'd try something different this time." His arm still remained aloft before Elsie, holding the glass of champagne.

"Yeah well you're wrong and you suck but I still love you. We all do." Dagny took off the green cap and Elsie marveled at how her blonde hair fell out of the hat and onto her shoulders. Dagny was beautiful. Elsie was distantly disturbed by the fact her heart actually skipped a beat at the sight of Dagny loosening her appearance. Dagny unbuttoned the top button of her green uniform self-consciously, as if she were aware of her affect on Elsie. She stepped forward and took the glass of champagne out of Sly's hands as Sly took a step back and looked up, still smiling.

Now it was Dagny holding the glass before Elsie, and Elsie found herself tentatively reaching for it, but she still didn't take it.

"What Stan's trying to say.. Elsie is it? You still call yourself Elsie right?" No response. "Stan's telling you stuff you're gonna find out on your own eventually anyway, but we're here to speed up the process a little, and make the next few years easier on you than it was before."

"Before what?"

"We're time travelers!" Stan said with renewed exuberance. Now it was Dagny hissing back at him but he was nonplussed.

"Stanley!"

"Well you said yourself we should be honest with her. That only the truth works on Elusive. You saw it yourself. It's in the file."

"But she never believes this part!"

"Believes what part?"

"I know, Daphne-"

"Dagny!"

"Whatever. I know she never believes us so I thought we'd try something new but if you wanna go back to the same tired truth tactic then that's fine with me!"

The two of them continued to argue and Elsie started working it out. From the moment they drove into the alley with the limo, this entire fiasco was a staged spectacle. One they had done before. The two of them were performing lines as if they were reading off cue cards on a Saturday Night Live skit.

But this was crazy. Were they actually time travelers? Were they making up stuff about her past and future or did they honestly know things about her that would make her future easier? She absent-mindedly took the glass of champagne from Dagny's lips just before Dagny walked away to get into a more fevered argument with Sly Stephens but she wasn't listening to what they were saying anymore, rather how they were saying it. It was a performance by two bad actors orchestrated merely for her amusement. That was plainly true to her in ways she couldn't completely describe.

She took a sip of the champagne. It was actually very good. Her favorite, in fact. She recognized the taste.

What perhaps clinched it for her was the two of them were obviously familiar with one another and yet both insisted on getting each other's names wrong, as if they were pretending to not have a familiarity. This was not an employer employee relationship. These were two friends, or rather two strangers who had recently become friends due to some predisposed similarity they'd discovered. The one thing they both had in common was that they knew Elsie better than she knew herself.

She stood up, suddenly finding herself strangely comfortable with these two as if she'd known them before too, although that couldn't possibly be. Elsie's legs were wobbly and her butt still tingled, but she managed to stay upright. She took the stairs down the platform cautiously, still sipping from the champagne. Stanley and Dagny were now in a fevered discussion, citing previous times this had been attempted by other people, and how many times they had succeeded and failed. Also citing events in their past and Elsie's future that proved or disproved each other's suppositions. Elsie wasn't bothering to remember details.

..they were fans! How she didn't quite understand but if they knew her future then they had studied it. She made her way to the back of the limousine, fully expecting it to be a pig sty as Daphy had described, but found it to be pristine, immaculate, filled and stocked with either things she already knew she liked like green M&Ms, another bottle of her favorite brand of champagne chilling on ice, freshly chilled sushi inside a quaint little icebox, and a CD of the music group Beholden. There were also things she didn't know she liked but had a sinking suspicion she was gonna find out she did, like peanut brittle and black licorice. Elsie smiled to herself. Even Daphny's description of the back of the limo was staged. Stanley wasn't a pig. They were both fans of her work. Work she hadn't done yet. They knew exactly what would interest her better than she knew herself: they invented a mystery. She liked solving mysteries. It's often what would get her from one place to another. Mystery. Maybe that's what happens to her when she's twenty-three. The thing Stan told Daphne not to tell her: that she becomes a detective.

She waited paitently inside the limo for the heated discussion to die down to a curious silence outside. She had been swirling a black whip of licorice in the air for her own amusement. She never realized before but yeah she likes black licorice. She took another bite from one and looked over at the still open door. Daphny and Stanley both peered into the limo at her, shocked that she was inside.

Elsie looked at them both in a way that was new to her but that they'd seen her do before but always on vids or in pictures. Never to them. Elsie pointed at Dagny with her licorice. "Your real name is Daphny but you want me to call you Dagny." She then pointed at Sly. "Your real name is Stanley but you want me to call you Sly, right?" They both nodded. "Are there others like you? And you all do that?"

"Some of us do," Dagny looked embarrassed.

Sly was far less embarrassed about it but probably should have been, "It's kind of in honor of you. You go by Elsie right now, but your real first name is Elaine, and in the future the world knows you as Elusive."

She thought to herself a moment. "That... that's actually kinda cool!" She took a sip of champagne, and marveled at how champagne and licorice really don't go together in a way that she really liked.

Sly continued, "of course our telling you this kinda changes history. We don't know what happens from here on out this time."

"Yeah I'm not a scientist. You're talking over my head, Sly. Get in! Where we going?"

They both smiled at her and closed the door. Then Sly climbed into the passenger side up front and Dagny took her place behind the wheel.

"First," Sly said as he strapped himself in, "We have to make a few stops along the way to the hotel we have purchased for you."

"Hotel room you mean?"

"Nope," Dagny smiled at Elsie with the rear view mirror and Elsie smiled back. "We bought a hotel, just a few blocks from here."

"Dagny I hope you don't take this the wrong way.." Elsie noticed Dagny and Sly share glances, "but in the future do I find out that I'm a bisexual?"

"Yes ma'am." Dagny smiled again in the rear view mirror.

Sly groaned unhappily, "She never picks me."

"That's cuz you wear that stupid tux every time."

"Then you're gonna buy me a drink Dagny when we get to the hotel."

"Yes ma'am!"

"And Sly you're gonna change into whatever you normally wear and I'll let you try again. Keep the sneakers tho. I like the sneakers."

"See!? I told you!"

"So you got the sneakers right," she said to Sly. Then she turned her attention back to her idol, "but we're going to take it slow ma'am, because of your condition and the fact in the original time line you didn't know you were bi for a couple years yet."

"I think I always kinda knew."

"And because of your present condition."

"What's wrong with my condition?"

"You just had a baby, ma'am."

"Oh. Well. I'll manage."

"I'll be gentle. No pressure, ma'am."

"And stop calling me ma'am."

"Yes.. Elsie?" she looked into the rear view mirror quizzically and Elsie smiled back. She liked smiling at this one. It was going to be a fun evening, she hoped.

"That'll do for now. Not sure if I like Elusive. Sounds pretentious."

"You're very pretentious in the future, Elsie." Sly laughed nervously, "It's a part of your charm."

"Yeah well I ain't there yet." Elsie looked out the window and noticed Dagny taking a left onto a boulevard where her old friend the priest was. After the orphanage and cathedral burned down, he went into a decline for many years but last Elsie heard he was working at a homeless shelter not too far from what had been the orphanage but was now a shopping center. "Where to first?"

"You like hats, ma'am," Dagny had negotiated their way out of the mouth of the alley and was now on the road.

"How do you know I like hats?"

Dagny cleared her throat, now obviously even more self-conscious than before. "Because there's one hat in particular that Father McKenzie has which is yours but he doesn't give it to you for a few years. You're going to go in there now and ask for it. We'll wait outside."

"Why do I need the hat?"

"Because your fans want to see you with your hat," Sly said.

"You mean there's more of you future people than just you two?"

"Why do you think we reserved an entire hotel?"

"...Wow."

Lost Rewatch Season One

I've been watching episodes of Lost again with some fellow fans via Twitter. We get together on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings at 8pm CST. By the way, if you want to join us, you can learn more by getting in touch with @LOST_WFTB or @BatchOutLost or just do a search for hashtag #WFTB. You can also wade through the #LOST hashtag but that one's much more murky. There's other groups doing Lost Rewatches. For example, LOSTaholics is a group writing detailed essays and having regular podcasts where they discuss the mythology of the series. I'm not currently affiliated with that one. The way it works on Twitter is we all get together at the same time and whether one has access to lost.abc.com or uses the DVDs or a torrent or videotape, we all start a preselected episode at the same time and the intent is to watch previous seasons again with season five eyes. Knowing what we know thus far, it's interesting to re-experience the series to try to catch things we missed, or maybe see inconsistencies. It's also just nice to revisit these characters and their stories again. Lost is a series that gets better with repeated viewings, because the producers of the series purposefully weave the story in such a way that you can't help but miss things the first time, or the second or third time through, things that seemed inconsequential at the time suddenly take on new meaning. When the audience members perspective has changed, it's like the show itself changes.

By the way this should only be read by people who have already seen the series up to the end of season five. This would be very spoilery for people who haven't already seen the show. You have been warned.

There's a number of interesting things I've noticed while doing this. My opinions of the main characters have changed very dramatically. When I first watched season one, I saw Jack Shepherd naturally as the hero figure, but now he's just creepy to me. A desperate man who does not see himself as a hero. In the opening scenes of the pilot episode when Jack is saving people, he originally seemed to be like the noble First Responder who behaves altruistically and makes saving lives look as graceful as a dancer doing ballet. Now when I look at this scene, I see that he's still trying to win the approval of his father. He's driven for success and fears failure. He's not saving these people for their sake but for his own. This is made most apparent when Jack fails to write personal vows for his wedding to Sarah, but he admits to her in front of God and everybody that when he saved her legs, she saved him. She sees him as a hero but he sees her as a success. Then later when Sarah leaves him, it's not because anyone was unfaithful. It's because she has learned Jack needs to fix people and things. She doesn't need fixing anymore so he doesn't pay enough attention to her.

Locke has always been cryptic, but when I first watched season one I thought he was a man who had learned from the mistakes in his past and had risen above them, so thaat on the Island he could truly become the warrior and hunter that he's always wanted to be. However, as more of his back story is revealed, we see that he's really a broken man in more ways than one, who is easily manipulated. He has an emptiness deep inside because of a lack of a father figure, and that void can be filled by anything. He's willing to believe because he must fill that void with something outside himself, otherwise he doesn't feel whole. He's constantly trying to understand "The Island" and is frustrated when he does what he thinks The Island wants him to do, but things fall apart again and again.

Both Locke and Jack have one thing in common: there is a tragic flaw inside them, and they never learn an important lesson. For Locke it's filling that emptiness with faith. He has to believe in something but he fails to verify what he believes with facts and logic. This endlessly frustrated Jack, who can't accept anything without involving the scientific process.

For Jack its fixing things. He has to succeed. He fears failure. In season five it appeared he began to learn that lesson, but Sawyer calls him on it when he says Jack never stopped to think when he was leader. He just would do. He would fix. Sawyer prefers to observe and process events and then makes informed decisions. Of course, his approach didn't really have a better effect. He ended up in custody with Juliet and was in the end forced to make rash decisions for survival, just like Jack.

So for both Jack and Locke, I used to see them as heroes but now I see them as broken men, and sometimes even villains. Of course, with Sawyer it's exactly the opposite. When we first meet Sawyer in season one, we assume he's a bad guy. The man's a selfish, conniving, murdering con man who makes no apologies for his behavior beyond that of a letter he wrote as a child to the man who was the cause of his parents' deaths. We later learn that man was Anthony Cooper, the same man who fathered John Locke, then decades later conned Locke out of his own kidney. Later in the series Locke and Sawyer join forces and end Cooper's life in what's one of the more ingenious and insidious scenes of the entire series.

Whereas Jack and Locke appear to want to be loved, Sawyer wants to be hated. He knows what he's done all his life has no excuses, but he doesn't care. He doesn't want to change his behavior because he is so filled with anger and bloodlust for vengeance. So he pushes people away, but Kate finds herself drawn to him and learns his secrets and the lies he tells himself. Over time Sawyer simmers down and cools off. So I now see Sawyer in a more forgiving light, knowing where his character arc is going. Seeing him in the first season is like seeing lumps of coal and knowing with great pressure it could one day become a diamond.

Kate was in my opinion beautiful in season one, and of course Evangeline Lily is no less beautiful now, but the character has become much darker and less appealing. I think the writers want us to see her as neither a hero nor a villain, but as a fugitive. She's constantly on the run. If all these characters have tragic flaws, Kate's problem is she can't seem to just stop. She doesn't like being cornered. She doesn't like feeling trapped. She's constantly trying to think ahead in order to anticipate possible avenues of escape in case doors start closing. This informs many of her actions until season four when she stops dead in her tracks to make a home for Aaron, and even then, it doesn't take much for Ben to push her out of that role and on the run again, running back to the Island to find Claire.

Getting back to Locke, now that we know (from season five eyes) that Jacob's nemesis (I prefer to call him Blackie but some call him Essau - we don't know his name yet) is pretending to be Locke in season five. So it's interesting to watch Locke in season one, searching for signs that maybe Jacob's nemesis has been posing as Locke longer than we thought. However, I haven't seen any evidence of that. What I do see is a man who had been crippled, but is now physically whole after a plane crash that should by all rights have killed him. So now, Locke naturally feels he owes the Island something. He has filled that emptiness inside him with a faith in The Island. He believes the Island is speaking to him, and we see evidence that he's gleaning information that he wouldn't otherwise know. He seems in tune with the Island and its wildlife. He knows more about boars for example than one would get by just reading about them in Wikipedia. He can also tell when the weather on The Island is changing. He gets dreams and visions and clues from happenstance that indicate to both the character and the viewer that something more than coincidence is going on here.

Personally I think what might be happening is that John Locke, while not possessed yet by Blackie entirely, may somehow have an almost empathic or even telepathic connection with either Jacob or his nemesis. This might explain why he knows things he couldn't possibly know. Locke also seems to heal quickly, and when Shannon shot him late in season one he insisted it was just a graze. However, it was a graze that knocked him to the ground. So like we later see Michael upon his return to the Island in season four, Locke may have a form of temporal invulnerability. Desmond learned from Mrs. Hawking in Flashes Before Your Eyes that time has a way of course correcting. If something is supposed to happen, time will make sure it does. It's my theory that John Locke can't die, because time insists he has to be somewhen in the future, alive, and he may still be destined to live.

At the start of season six, now that John Locke's body is out of the box, the Island might be able to reanimate it. Jacob's nemesis, the one posing as Locke, may find that suddenly his disguise disappears because John Locke's body comes back to life. Crazier things have happened on this show. I guess we'll just have to wait until January to find out. Those of us on the Live Tweet up for Lost Watch From The Beginning are currently going through season two. I might leave some random notes here when we finish. Although I just learned some schedule changes at work may cause me to start missing them. I hope that's not the case, but work has priority over play.

Legalize it? Really? You're kidding.

Greetings to the world at large, once again I come before you with a worthless rant that will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks some time after Stephen Hawking discovers the light switch inside a black hole.

Allow me to preface this rant by saying I am not a drug user. I quit smoking cigarettes six years ago and I only smoked weed twice back in my college days. Didn't enjoy it. I don't honestly get what the big deal is. I don't own a bong. I don't know how to make a bong out of anything. Although I've witnessed other people do that and that is awesome. Marijuana users are very resourceful. If you sit still long enough around them they might turn you into a bong. It's kinda creepy now that I think about it. Ah, the parties of my youth. Good times.

It is not because I believe there's something wrong with drugs. I don't. It's because one, they are slightly illegal at the moment. Two, I can't afford them. And three, my brain's pretty fucked up already without any help from foreign chemicals invading my bloodstream. However, I consider drug usage as a form of body manipulation. It's not against the law for an informed adult to get a piercing or a tattoo, so it shouldn't be against the law to send your consciousness to Mars and back for the day, so long as you pay the fare your own self.

That is of course where my idealism breaks down. I mean if I got a tattoo with my ex-wife's name, and I wanna get married again, and my fiance wants me to get rid of the tattoo, I don't go to the government and ask them to pay for it. However, if I am addicted to drugs and I can't afford to take care of it myself, I have read there are currently processes in place that'd help me rehabilitate and those processes are sometimes paid for by the government.

Now let's avoid the argument of lumping all drugs together. I'm going to dismiss cocaine and heroin and acid outright, or at the very least reserve them for another rant that may never come. I'm sure others find them therapeutic. I might agree with straight LSD under very controlled conditions but acid? Laced with strychnine? Let's just skip that. That stuff ain't gonna become illegal.

However, marijuana becoming legal, while President Obama laughs at the notion openly, is not completely out of the question, which is why I'm ranting.. or rambling. California is under financial duress. Heck, all of America is. California has been wrestling for decades with the issue of marijuana. A lot of people there want weed to be legal, and a lot of people there don't. However, like in most of America, if you really want cannabis, there's a way to get it. The law only keeps people like me from partaking, and I'm very much in the minority. In California it's easier, because although federal law is the same across the country, in the state of California they've invented a loophole - marijuana for medicinal purposes is acceptable. So all you gotta do is find the right doctor.

We like to believe we live in a free society but the fact of the matter is our freedoms are bought and paid for every day by corporate monolithic monsters that I like to believe the book of Revelations refers to as The Beast. Not because I necessarily believe in the modern day evangelical interpretation of the New Testament, but because I find it amusingly poetic. The corporate beast owns our souls, and the corporate beast wants us to coexist together in a lulled state of illusion where we think we are free to do anything but we are really only free to do anything that will allow us to still show up at work on time and operate heavy machinery when needed. So, why is alcohol still legal? Well, have you ever had a vodka martini at three in the afternoon? Corporate beasts really like to drink their vodka martinis at three in the afternoon.

When push comes to shove you can sober up if necessary. Not to operate a forklift maybe, but a breath mint and a glass of water and you're right as rain. However, if you've been getting high? That's a slightly different story. You might think you're fooling us straight and narrow types? But your eyes are bloodshot, you just laughed at the fern in the corner, and you smell like a Cheech and Chong Marathon.

People are thinking we need to legalize marijuana. My gut instinct is to agree. Legalize it. Let the government, in conjunction with the corporate beasties out there, regulate it. Tax the shit out of it. Our current economic recession/depression would be solved overnight, on a federal level at least.

However, let's imagine for a moment that you're a drug seller. You don't have to admit it. This is just hypothetical. A friend of mine explained this to me and I found it an interesting psychological conundrum. You've been selling for years. You don't sell to get rich. You know a guy who knows a guy and you make it available to your friends at a reasonable price. Maybe you don't even make any profit but if you're smart you make a tidy one. You believe drugs should be freely available but they shouldn't be free, and why not make enough money on the side to maybe cover your cable bill? What would happen if suddenly all your friends who come to you for marijuana were suddenly able to go down to the local convenience store? Maybe the price at Seven Eleven is more than it was with you, but there it's legal. There it even comes prepackaged and in a cute little box that a thousand marketing dudes figured out was going to please the buyers more than the cellophane bags you've been using. And though marijuana might become legal, it still won't be legal for you to sell it. The corporate beast will see to that. Why would they want your competition, when they already own the infrastructure to sell products to people, and they already control the government that makes the rules determining who can sell how to whom?

You will not be able to compete with the corporate beast if it gets its hands on your business. Suddenly you won't be able to pay your cable bill. Will this happen overnight? Depends on how soon the corprate beast realizes it's been letting you make money that it could have been making all this time.

This could be the worst thing that's ever happened to the people who have been selling all this time. It won't be illegal to sell marijuana, so major companies will partake. It won't be illegal anymore to carry marijuana, so buyers will no longer need a black market to help them keep the transaction quiet. And will this be grandfathered? Would all the people currently in jail because they broke the laws on the books at the time be allowed free? Won't they be pissed? They get out and see their livlihoods of selling drugs are in the hands of Krogers and Walmart. If you ask for a job from these corporate beasts, you won't be able to put "have illegally sold weed for years" on your resume. For the people who have been doing this illegally all this time, the idea of legalizing it is the worst thing that could possibly happen to them. You'd probably be better off being arrested and thrown in jail. At least then you get free room and board.

You still want to legalize it? Really? You're kidding.

Prismism

What follows is actually the "copy" I wrote for myself prior to recording a YouTube video in response to this video that John of VlogBrothers made for his brother Hank. What he said got me thinkin' and I also wanted to make a video that would bury my stupid Michael Jackson enough is enough video. I wrote my copy and posted it here because I wanted to make the video without my glasses on. So I increased the font in my web browser so I could read the copy without glasses. Admittedly, in hindsight it really didn't matter cuz both John and Hank wear their glasses but somehow they're able to avoid glare. My glasses seem to reflect the computer screen when I make a video wearing them. Anyway. I digress. I'm uploading the video response I made as I type this otherwise I'd leave a direct link. I don't know what it is yet but will add it seruptitiously after I'm done typing this probably. If I forget to do that, you can go to www.youtube.com/zachsmind and look for the video I left on this date.

Don't forget to be awesome. Without further adoo-doo, here's what I wrote.

Hi John Hi Hank and hi Nerdfighters it's Monday July 13th 2009 and it's very late. Or early. Depending on how you look at it. Why am I still up watching YouTube videos? I dunno. I dunno if I'm a nerdfighter. I guess I'm at least a nerdfighter watcher. We all have to start somewhere.

In response to John's video On Iran, Islam, and Amazingly Stupid Comments, I was like ..Wow. That was cool, man. I don't agree with every syllable but I hear ya when you say you feel more akin to some liberal muslims than you do conservative Christians. I look at American Christians today and I don't recognize the religion of my childhood. Everything from Chuck Norris to Sarah Palin's got me seriously reconsidering my theological choices.

Until very recently I used to consider myself a Christian. I think I still am. Asked Jesus Christ into my heart at the age of eight. Sounded like a good idea at the time. The Sunday school teacher's pitch was hard to deny. Eternal salvation and a piece of candy. I was sold.

I've had a few decades of studying history and observing current events. Watching history unfold before me, and I've come to the conclusion that whenever there's violence between men, someone's religion often seems to be a factor. Maybe it's not THE direct factor, but like rooting for sports teams, both sides always think their one and only true god is on their side. And if a god takes sides, how does anyone know?

Christianity. Judaism. Islam. Hinduism. Buddism. Zorastrian Whatchamacallit. Paganism. Deism. Atheism. I got a new ism. Prismism. Every human being's a prism. We think we're seeing the light for what it is, but we all got filters and the light of reality goes in us and through us and out it comes and you get spaghetti. or a Picaso painting. Or a man who thinks god wants him to kill. That it's okay to kill cuz god says so.

I'm reminded of the words of Groucho Marx who once said he didn't want to join any club that would accept the likes of him as a member. I think any god that would accept mankind at face value, considering what we do to one another in God's name? I gotta question that.

But that's me. That's not you. If anything's consistent among Mankind it's that each person has their own religion. They each think they share religion but when one finds oneself on the outside looking in, after being part of the illusion that there's one true god? Wow. Mankind to the concept of Diety is like three blind men holding different parts of an elephant and none of them guessing right as to what it really is.

Religion is like a gun. It doesn't do bad or good by itself, but men have done bad or good things with it. I personally don't like having a gun in my presence, cuz a gun in my presence increases the chances I might get shot, as opposed to the odds of getting shot by a gun if a gun is not within gunshot of my face. I'm beginning to have a similar opinion about religion, but that's just me. Others can carry around guns and religions all they like. Just don't point them my way.

Oh, and in the argument regarding pirates and ninjas?

Arrrrr matey!

Lost Time Sickness

Yes I'm painfully aware that much of what I'm now spouting here in my blog about the ABC TV series Lost may become out of date - in fact completely and totally wrong come January when Season Six kicks in. However, after watching the last five seasons I think I'm piecing together what we've been shown, and I've come to a number of conclusions. Chiefly among them? Danielle Rousseau might have been right. There is a sickness among people on the Island. However, not quite the way she had anticipated.

Why did she think there was a sickness? Well, she tells Sayid (and by proxy us) in season one episode nine "Solitary." Then, we get to actually see the events happen before Jin in season five episode five "This Place Is Death." What happened? Well, Danielle Rousseau is separated from the rest of her research team members. They go into the catacombs underneath the island that lead to the temple. When they come out, they all immediately try to kill her. She responds in self defense and kills them before they can kill her. We see no indications any of them hate her prior to their disappearance into the catacombs. In fact one of them was her betrothed. These events drive her crazy. She's left alone on the Island.

Ben later comes along and literally steals Danielle's baby Alex from her crib. We see this in the fifth season twelfth episode titled Dead Is Dead. He had been ordered to kill the baby by Charles Widmore. Ben opted instead to take the child and raise her as his own, with a warning to Danielle never to seek her daughter under penalty of death. Not the best of compromises, and this not only secures animosity between Ben and Charles but more importantly for our purposes here, it further drives Danielle into insanity. However, her brand of insanity doesn't match the insanity her copatriots from the research vessel exhibited. They tried to kill her. No warning. No explanation. They just turned on her and she fought back out of instinct more than anything else. Now, why would they do this if they weren't sick? Why would they try to kill her if they weren't crazy? We're not told what happened to her research team to turn them on her.

Again, we're not privy to what happened to her team during their disappearance, but we can speculate. What if somehow they were given a glimpse into their futures, and were made to understand in simple terms that they were fated to die at the hands of Danielle Rousseau? They'd be exposed to the events of their fate and made to believe them real. From their perspective this would be ludicrous, and yet it's true. They would be unable to deny what they were shown. With this knowledge they would return to the surface with every intention of taking out Danielle before she could take them out. So they go up with some quickly formulated plan. This plan fails and she kills them. What is not made known to them at the time they are told about their fate is the fact that what they were shown would be the events that would play out after they were told she'd kill them. Essentially, their change of behavior towards her caused her to become defensive and fight back, which led to their deaths. It would be a case of self-fulfilling prophecy.

They chose to try to change their fate, but the very fact they make that choice seals their fate.

Similarly, the events that lead Sayid to Ajira flight 316 are myriad and too complicated for me to explain here, but ultimately when he is faced with young Benjamin Linus in the late 1970s, and he is given an opportunity to murder the man who would be responsible for so much pain and suffering in Sayid's more recent past (and young Ben's future), he makes the choice to murder young Ben in cold blood. Indeed, he's been working towards this his entire life. The events of his life had molded and shaped him into being a cold blooded murderer. It is a choice that he makes, but the choice is essentially the only logical choice given his state of being at the time. In fact, the audience would have difficulty NOT understanding why he did it, whether an audience member can condone the action or not. It certainly makes sense, like killing Hitler when he was but a janitor.

However, many argue that it is Sayid's act of vengeance to a young Ben that turns Ben evil. Failing to convince Jack to save him, Sawyer and Kate take young Ben to Richard Alpert, who does the one thing he knows to do in order to save young Ben's life: he takes him down into the catacombs that lead to the temple. Richard cautions Kate and Sawyer that Ben will be forever changed from then on. He will irrevocably become one of Richard's people. Years later we know from the episode Man Behind The Curtain (s3e20) that Ben works with the "Hostiles" or "Others" to purge the island of the DHARMA Initiative. He even kills his own father. Sounds very much like the behavior of Danielle's friends after their return from the catacombs under the island that lead to the temple. However, Ben's plans were more complicated and took years to complete.

Ben's also given multiple indications that he can predict the future. At least up to a point. In season five there's a moment where he admits that for the first time in a long time he honestly doesn't know what's going to happen next. Now, whether we can believe him or not is difficult to determine, since we've witnessed Ben lie about every other sentence. However, his behavior since his return to the Island has been that of an outsider. If he does know more than he's letting on, he's uncharacteristically good at hiding it. He's manipulative, and good at lying, but before now his actions would often betray his lies.

In season five he no longer knows the future. So whatever happened to him in the temple as a child seems to have only affected him up to a point. We've also witnessed him glean information from extensive files made for him by Patchy and others about most if not all the inhabitants of the Island. In the episode Confirmed Dead (S4E2) Ben is able to recite information about Charlotte Lewis having never met her before as if he were reading her obituary stamped on her own forehead. He must have read her bio long before and committed it to memory. If he could do similar feats with all the inhabitants of the Island, it would explain how he's been so skillful at manipulating everyone: he knows their weaknesses.

This would also mean he knew about Locke's missing a kidney. So if he actually had wanted to kill Locke, why would he aim almost point blank at the one place where it would do the least damage? Perhaps because he didn't want to kill him, but he did want someone to believe he was trying. Could Ben even be manipulating Jacob and his nemesis? Just who isn't Ben trying to trick?

But again I digress. The sickness. What is it? What causes it? Well, to understand that, we have to understand time. And time is difficult to understand. It's like trying to explain to a square what it's like to be a cube. Having never been three dimensional, the square would not have any frame of reference from which to understand. If a sentient cube were to appear before a sentient square, and try to explain that life is more than just two dimensions, the square would no doubt be changed forever, and perhaps not for the better. A square in a cubical world would be a fish out of water, unable to interact properly with its surroundings, yet unable to deny that its perspective of reality had been changed forever. This is known as The Flatland Phenomenon and Carl Sagan makes an interesting and successful attempt at explaining it in that link.

Now imagine if you will that you're in that square's predicament, but you are not a square. You are a cube. You are a sentient three dimensional, temporally linear being, and you are touched by a sentient being who is four dimensional. You are exposed briefly to the reality that there are more than three dimensions. Like the square facing a cube, your life is changed forever. You may not be able to comprehend the full implications of what this means. For a brief instant, you witness your own existence from birth to death outside of a linear framework. You witness for an instant your entire life and how your life interacts with that of others also trapped in a linear three dimensional existence. Then you come back to your three dimensional senses, like a completed cake being forced back into the cake mix box.

I believe this is the sickness. I believe that many - if not all of the major characters on the television series Lost are three dimensional beings who in various ways have been exposed to a fourth dimensional existence. This has affected some characters indirectly, and others are more directly affected. I can start with the easiest among them first. Charlotte Lewis was getting nosebleeds and brain hemmoraging from the time hops that she and the others were going through. However it seemed to have affected her worse than the others. She was more susceptible. Some theorized that was because she was already on the Island as a child but Miles was too and he didn't die from temporal exposure. As I said, it affects different people in different ways, and in Charlotte's case: This Place Is Death (s5e5).

The nosebleeds also affected Miles, Juliet, Faraday, Jin, and Sawyer. Each to lessening degrees of severity. I am speculating that time hops are dangerous for three dimensional linear beings. Not only are they traveling through time but also space. The Island itself is moving, as is the Earth itself which constantly rotates and revolves around the sun, which moves relative to the rest of the galaxy, which is constantly expanding. The time hops that were happening to these characters in season five are not occurrences that third dimensional beings were even remotely designed (or evolved depending on your beliefs) to experience.

However, because these characters were exposed to time travel in their adult lives, it's very possible that such exposure could have affected their entire existence as linear three dimensional beings. This could explain for example how Miles is able to glean information from dead bodies. He's able to tap into their fates, similarly to how the smoke monster makes one able to witness events of their life to characters like Ben, Eko, or Locke. Miles has a similar capability inherent inside him. He's not able to witness the entirety of time, but he can get occasional glimpses under specific circumstances, probably because of his exposure at any point in his life to temporal anomalies. Though his life is linear, temporal anomalies can affect a three dimensional linear being at any and all points across its past present and future.

Another example of this "side effect" behavior in response to temporally anomalous stimuli can be seen in Hugo Reyes aka Hurley. Throughout his life he appears to have been exceptionally lucky. He survived an accident that killed twenty-three people around him. He blamed himself for the event because of his weight, but it's equally possible that what happened to him was an act of distorted probability. Because Hurley has had exposure to a temporal anomaly at some point in his future, any possibility along his linear existence that might have killed him cannot successfully kill him now, because he is meant to exist perpetually on his linear axis for the duration that the temporal anomaly dictates. So if a knife is nonchalantly thrown in his direction, in that moment he will just happen to have a canteen in his hand that will catch the knife and protect him. He can't die until the temporal anomaly allows him to. However, this probability distortion around him may adversely affect others who are not so temporally charged. So whenever he pushes his luck, it can cause bad things to happen to those closest to him.

We've seen that Hurley is uncharacteristically lucky when it comes to games and sports. He beat Sawyer at table tennis. He never missed a shot when playing basketball with Jack. However, he lost to Walt repeatedly when playing backgammon. This might be because Walt is even more temporally charged and probability ridden than Hurley. Walt is also strangely enough able to confuse birds into flying towards him, usually when he's upset. I can't see how this would be a temporal distortion. It sounds more like gravometric or electromagnetic. Walt may cause birds to think he is whatever direction they were flying if they get to close to him, like a compass going wonky. They might mistake him for true north.

We witnessed Michael Dawson repeatedly try to kill himself after leaving the Island, but he was unable. This is because he was destined to return to the Island. Or at least that's what Tom told him in the episode Meet Kevin Johnson (s4e08). We see him try but he fails. A gun misfires. A car crash leaves him relatively unscathed. Like Hurley, he seems to aquire a probability field around him that protects him from harm. This could be because he was destined to be on that frieghter when it blew. It could also be because his destiny isn't over yet.

Desmond was in the Hatch in the episode Live Together Die Alone (s2e23) when Locke stopped him from pushing the button. Desmond responds by activating a fail-safe key which is meant to save the world if the recitation of the numbers and the pushing of the execute button were ever to fail. After Desmond triggered the fail-safe, the sky around the island lit up purple, the hatch imploded, and Charlie, Eko, and Locke managed to escape relatively unscathed. I think Charlie's ears were bleeding and he was temporarily deafened by the blast. Desmond kinda disappeared.

In Further Instructions (s3e03) Hurley encounters Desmond in the jungle, completely naked and a little disoriented. It's only a day later, but Desmond begins behaving in ways that indicate he has aquired the ability to see glimpses of the future. Sometimes he senses these future glimpses as if they were recent memory. Sometimes they come to him in dreams. Sometimes they appear as flashes of inspiration and knowledge: images and sounds that are brief and out of order and difficult for him to interpret. It's as if he was recently exposed to the entirety of his future, but can only now see bits and pieces, because that's all his three-dee mind can comprehend.

Eventually these visions seem to settle on the fate of one person: Charlie Pace. Desmond is able to predict his death, so he acts to thwart it. However, this only seems to give Charlie a temporary reprieve, as another flash tells Desmond again how Charlie's going to die. Through this ability, Desmond is able to help Charlie die a heroic death of choice, that potentially saves everyone on the Island, or at the very least gives them a fighting chance.

Locke & Eko were both exposed to the smoke monster, as was Juliet. The smoke monster appears to show its intended victim something akin to their life flashing before their eyes. It studies the life this individual has led and then it seems to pass judgment. That may not be what actually is happening, but it seems to either let one live with a set of instructions, or just kills them outright as it did with Eko when he refused to comply. We know Locke was exposed to it but we're not quite clear on what was said. We know Juliet was exposed to it briefly, but she was able to use the sonic fence to ward it off. Ben encountered the smoke monster in season five, but that did not seem to be his first experience with it. In fact Ben had reason to believe he could summon the thing. He successfully used it to kill Keamy's men in season four (Shape of Things To Come s4e09), but was unable to use it in season 5 episode 12 (Dead is Dead). How the smoke monster works is still largely a mystery, but I have reason to believe that it too is a remnant or byproduct of temporal physics.

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have freely admitted that the time travel stories are over. Season five was riddled with time hops and yet they say there will be no more. It was necessary for the plot but that it's over. However, they did not say that temporal physics in general would no longer play a part in the events of season six. I speculate that we'll learn in season six that most if not all of the major players in Lost are lost predominantly because Jacob, Blackie, and perhaps others are agents of a fourth dimension who use three dimensional linear entities as their toys. Just as we use squares and cubes to build the world around us, so too do these fourth dimensional entities use tesseracts to accomplish tasks and achieve goals. We may never fully understand what they want beyond Blackie's desire to kill Jacob, but our major characters in the Lost mythology are experiencing the side effects of being touched or 'tainted' by fourth dimensional nonlinear beings. I believe when touched by Jacob or Blackie or other fourth dimensional nonlinear beings, the entire linear timeline of a third dimensional linear being is adversely affected, causing a myriad number of strange symptoms. Since a third dimensional linear being is not supposed to know its future or comprehend that of others, being so affected by a fourth dimensional being is like a sickness. It may happen in a character's future, or it may have happened in their past, but once done, it adversely affects the probability and awareness of the individual, to the point where it could bring about insanity, alterations in personality, strange occurrences of probability variation or brief insights of future events or past clarity.

Our Losties are sick. Temporally sick. Their linear lifelines have been diseased. This could cause friends to turn on one another as enemies, or complete strangers to suddenly know one another as if they were friends. It can turn brother against brother and make strange bedfellows. Each from their limited perception, they will believe they are behaving completely rationally and coherently, but those around them will appear to have gone insane and even bloodthirsty, causing them to respond in kind. If I'm right, the final season will set the stage for a final battle where people we've seen very close may come to blows, and people once believed to be enemies will band together out of desperation for survival.

It's gonna be fun. It's gonna be exciting. However, Danielle Rousseau was right. It's also gonna be sick.