Clan Murphy gets LOST
Feb 3rd, 2009 by Debra Murphy
First, in case you missed it, we posted originally, ca. Season One, on LOST and the persistence of Christian tropes.
As for the rest of this post: SPOILER ALERT. Clan Murphy is rapidly getting caught up on LOST, and (as of this post) have just finished the mid-fourth-season episode ttiled “The Constant”. If you aren’t at least that far along, or don’t want to read “LOST theories” which may (or may not) prove to be accurate, then this post isn’t for you!
Now that we are mid-fourth-season with our LOST viewing, and aim to be caught up with the rest of the world by the end of the month (February 2009), we tip our hats to the writers and creators of this show, who continue to…
- Keep us TV skeptics hooked by means of brilliant mystery-writers techniques and Prestige-worthy sleight of hand—i.e., mainly by keeping our attention on the character interactions while they slip in a plethora of seemingly meaningluess little details which are actually clue after clue after clue.
- Remain committed to dropping wonderful literary allusions at every turn, many of which are also clues, and…
- Be obsessed with Christian notions of sin and redemption in general, and Catholic tropes in particular. I mean, just as we “lost” our till-then-favorite character, Mr. Eko, to the Black Smoke—Eko was a badass African Catholic with a mystical bent, pretending to be a priest—the writers send (naughty Catholic) Charlie off with a wonderfully heroic ending, and bring to the fore another Catholic character, Desmond, who is at once a Dickens fanatic, an ex-monk, and a Scotsman with a lovely accent. And looks like Jesus to boot.
Sigh.
(The actor, Henry Ian Cusick, actually played the role a few years back, so Rachel tells us.)
We’ll post a separate piece on LOST’s abundant literary allusions, but right now we’d like to throw caution to the winds, risk being made to look ridiculous (given that the rest of the world is some ten episodes ahead of us), and share with you some of Clan Murphy’s “Series Theories.” (Once we get caught up with the rest of the world in season five, we’ll spend some time surfing the Net to compare notes on those theories with other folks’—something we’ve religiously avoided up till now.)
From almost the beginning—episode three I think, when Jack says to Kate something like, “Don’t you know we died three days ago? Everyone here has a second chance”—we’ve been thinking that whatever electro-magnetic anomaly is at work on the Island, one of its properties, besides healing sick people, is to keep dead people hanging around in a sort of “limbo of the Lost”. In fact, we’ve frequently wondered if the Island doesn’t represent some sort of Purgatory where “perturbèd spirits”, to quote Hamlet, stuck between the Finite and Infinite, are offered a Second Chance to get things right before the final judgment.
With that in mind, we started calling the Island “the Wood between the Worlds”, echoing the phrase in one of C.S. (Clive Staple) Lewis’ Narnia books about a limbo-like place between our world and Narnia.
Then wouldn’t you know it, the writers just a few eps ago went and introduced a character named “Charlotte Staples Lewis”, who seems to know far more than she’s telling about the Island’s more peculair characteristics. (She’s one of the “rescuers” who helicoptered in, and are probably working for Penny’s father, Widmore.)
For quite some time, too, we have suspected that the Island is not actually in the South Pacific. In fact, we suspect it’s near one of the Poles, and that the electro-magnetic anomaly, whatever it is, is creating the tropical conditions. This would explain the polar bears, which could even be “displaced” to Antarctica from the North Pole, where they normally hang out, by means of a whopper of a polar shift—more about polar shifts anon.
The arctic/antarctic location would also explain why Penny’s people, who are looking for Desmond, were somewhere in the middle of arctic or antarctic conditions, and why Desmond, when he tried to sail away from the Island by sailing due West, just went in a circle. (Notice that when Faraday, no doubt named after the famed scientist who studied electro-magnetism, gave the helicopter pilot directions for finding the trawler in this last ep, he was pretty much sending him due north—that’s what you would expect if the island’s location were actually Antarctica.)
A magnetic-pole shift theory could be used to explain, too, Oceanic 815’s sudden displacement thousands of miles away from its alleged location in the South Pacific. (Maybe polar shift is what happens when you don’t push that blasted button…?)
But now some thoughts on Ben Linus and the Others.
“Are you watching? Are you watching closely?” –The Prestige
We know as of this last ep that the Island’s wonky electro-magnetism can cause weird time-displacement effects—not only cause people’s consciousness to move backwards and forwards in time, but make what seems like hours or days on the Island to be only twenty minutes in the outside world.
With this in view, we step out on a limb, gulp a bit, and propose the following:
The Others—the “natives” of the Island, originally called “the Hostiles” by the Dharma Initiative folks (and who, with Ben’s help, slaughtered the Dharma folks)—are actually the survivors of the Black Rock, the slave ship that wrecked in 1846-ish, and whose remains are now somewhere in the middle of the Island. The same “healing” properties of the Island that have apparently healed Rose of cancer and Locke of paralysis, have prolonged these peoples’ lives unnaturally, but at the same time caused infertility; or caused fertility to be mortal, as it were. (Notice that the Other known as “Robert” looks hardly a day older now than he did when Ben Linus was a boy.)
For some reason, however, the Island’s effects don’t work with Ben, originally a Dharma-ist, as has already been pointed out with his cancer. This is the only way to explain the fact that the Others/Hostiles cannot have children, and yet were around long long before the arrival of the Dharma Initiative in the Seventies.
This might also explain why the Others haven’t upgraded the technology they inherited when they wiped out the Dharma people. They aren’t much interested in technology, being originally nineteenth-century folk, and rely on Ben to be their go-between with the modern world, and to help them find a way to replenish their population by bringing in specialists like Juliette, and by kidnapping children.
Enter Widmore, Penny’s father…we suspect he is doing a Donovan-in-Last-Crusade turn here, seeking the “elixir of life”. He wants to control the Island and its properties for his own gain, especially long life. With this goal, however, the Others are obviously in his way, as are the survivors of Oceanic 815.
We also suspect that the ghostly “Jacob”, who seems to be giving Ben orders, and who begged Locke to “help me”, is the ghost of the captain of the slaver, the Black Rock. (Again, one of the properties of the Island is to keep spirits hanging around—the “I see dead people” effect, as we’ve been referring to it for some time.) This possibility hit me quite suddenly when I remembered that the hymn Amazing Grace was composed by an ex-slave captain, John Newton, who turned Christian and was similarly “haunted” by the spirits of the thousands of slaves he had murdered. Of course the most famous line of Amazing Grace is, “I once was lost, but now am found…” In other words, Jacob is the tormented spirit of a man who has committed much evil, and is seeking eternal rest. The fact of his being a slaver from the 1840’s would explain the log cabin he “inhabits” as well. And perhaps all the “whispering” one hears in the jungle are the souls of the slaves he was transporting.
Meanwhile, Widmore has just acquired his captain’s log or journal. Notice how the writers kept our attention focused on the Desmond-Widmore interaction, while the really important thing was the book Widmore acquired.
(An aside: “black rocks”, whether of volcanic or meteoric origin, like the Kaaba in Mecca, often have magnetic properties.)
Jacob, in fact, might even be the Black Smoke, or “possessed” by the Black Smoke, if one wishes to think in diabolic terms. If so, that might explain the seemingly erratic behavior of the black smoke—why it kills some and not others; why it killed Eko (a rather rebelliousn African), not to mention the pilot of 815, who, like Jacob himself, was a ship’s captain. Both deaths seemed arbitrary (we were especially shocked and disappointed at Eko’s sudden demise) and extremely violent…as if the smoke was a very perturbed ghost.
The question then would be…what about the slaves in the hold of the ship? So far we’ve noticed only one African or African-American among the Others. (“Miss Clue” from the episode where Michael is captured.) One could argue that there would have been few slave survivors, chained as they were in the hold of the Black Rock; but the other explanation is that these ex-slavers, staying true to form, have imprisoned all those of African descent that did survive in work camps on another part of the Island, or on that smaller island—in other words, that they have been imprisoned on a “plantation” where the slaves are being made to work to provide the Others’ with a comfortable little utopia. (The Others certainly seem comfortable with the idea of cages and forced manual labor…remember Kate and Sawyer breaking rocks for a runway?)
If this proves so, expect Michael and Walt to turn up once more among these captives. (If Desmond couldn’t sail away, neither will Michael and Walt.)
If all this by chance turns out to be the case, then we can also expect Jack Shepherd, who has already been referred to in Moses-like terms, to (ultimately, after many temptations against his “vocation”) to help free the slaves (literarlly and figuratively; dead and alive) before the series is over. (And before it’s over, will the remaining survivors of 815 become slaves of the Others and/or Widmore as well?)
Now as for the enigmatic Locke—a terrific character!—he seems to be being tempted by the Dark Side, as it were. In fact, if our Black Rock theory holds water, then Sawyer’s comment-in-passing about Locke’s being a “Kurtz” (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) might be prophetic. We believe he will turn out all right in the end, but right now he is being tempted, like Kurtz, to “go native”. Look for him at some point to say something like, “Exterminate all the brutes.”
About the plethora of literary allusions…this series is something of a romp through Western Literature, but while we intend to write more on that later, we would like to mention a couple of potentially key allusions.
First, expect James “Sawyer” Ford (as in Twain’s Tom Sawyer) to play an important role with the themes of white/black, master/slave. (Sawyer’s being the big Reader of the group may eventually come in handy, too, especially if they eventually figure out that much of what Ben is doing has been based on some of the more utopian/dystopian titles in his little “classics” library.)
We also believe that the slave theory is supported by a few dropped allusions to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. (Huxley also wrote a book called The Island, which we haven’t read, but will soon!) In that dystopian masterpiece, Huxley gave us a brutal caste system where “Epsilons” were made to do the hard labor of civilzation, while the “savages” (Native Americans, et al) were kept inside reservations by electrified fences; the nods to the problems of reproductive technology in Huxley’s future dystopia are telling as well. We’ve certainly seen one major BNW allusion: “Bernard Marx”, who on LOST is married to the African -American “Rose”. Both were names of major characters in BNW—a fact which I had forgotten, but which a quick check of Wikipedia’s article on Huxley just refreshed my memory!
For that matter, “Ford” is an important name in BNW as well: “Ford”, after Henry Ford, represents the industrialized “god” of that brave new world.
Expect more BNW allusions, and probably some to Wells’ TIME MACHINE as well, with its similar underclass of slaves supporting the rotten structure of “civilization”.
As for the “Oceanic Six” and why Jack lied (did he?) at Kate’s (future) trial that only eight survived the crash, one has to suspect that those who somehow got off the Island were warned that if they told what really happened, or tried to launch a rescue of the rest of the survivors/slaves, their friends would be killed. Either way, they will, of course, go back to try to rescue them, as the ghost of Charlie is trying to get Hurley to do.
Last but not least, since the authors have written up the Island’s electro-magnetic properties in occasionally apocalyptic terms, I would look for them to bring up the theory, well known among so-called “catastrophists”, of the potential for a cataclysmic Polar Shift. (If so, look for a character to show up soon named “Velikovsky,” as in Immanuel Velikovsky. Or that we’ll see Sawyer reading one of Velikovsky’s books.
Here, meanwhile, for your edification, are a couple of pertinent URLs on the catastrophic Polar Shift theory and Velikovsky, connecting it to the lovely predictions about the end of the Mayan calendar (and the world) in 2012:
http://survive2012.com/geryl1.php
http://www.survive2012.com/pole_shift_5.php
Next: A “reading list” for LOST, and some thoughts on the show’s obsession with (homicidal) father/child relationships.
