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“I can show you things. Things I know you
want to see very badly. Let me put it so
you'll understand. Picture a box. You know
something about boxes, don't you John?
What if I told you that somewhere on this
island there's a very large box . . . and
whatever you imagined . . . whatever you
wanted to be in it . . . when you opened
that box, there it would be. What would you
say about that, John?”
Ben Linus in “The Man from
Tallahassee” (Season 3)
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Lost’s Mysteries and Enigmas
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Lost
(2004-2010)
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“Science is the
eradication of
mystery.”--B. F.
Skinner
Damon Lindelof (r)
claims to be an
admirer of BFS.
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“Paradoxically, the
very serial elements
that have been so long
reviled in soaps, pulps,
and other ‘low’ genres
are now used to
increase connotations
of ‘quality’ . . . In
television drama.”
From Jeff Sconce,
“What If? Charting
Television’s New
Textual Boundaries”
“U. S. television has
devoted increased
attention in the past
two decades to
crafting and
maintaining ever more
complex narratives, a
form of ‘world
building’ that has
allowed for wholly new
modes of narration and
that suggests new
forms of audience
engagement.”
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“Certainly, chief among Lost’s pleasures is the
show’s ability to create sincere emotional
connections to characters who are immersed in
an outlandish situation that, as of this writing, is
unclassifiable as science fiction, paranormal
mystery, or religious allegory, all constructed by
an elaborate narrational structure far more
complex than anything seen before in American
television.”
Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity”
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Jason Mittell: a growing tendency to “push the
operational aesthetic to the foreground, calling
attention to the constructed nature of the
narration and asking us to marvel at how the
writers pulled it off; often these instances forgo
realism in exchange for a formally aware
baroque quality in which we watch the process
of narration as a machine rather than engaging
in its diegesis” (Mittell 35).
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John
Millais,
“Pandora’s
Box”
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HURLEY: So, dude? What do you think is inside of that
hatch thing?
LOCKE: What do you think is inside it?
HURLEY: Stacks of TV dinners from the 50's, or
something. And TVs, and cable, some cell phones,
clean socks, soap, Twinkies -- you know, for dessert,
after the TV dinners. Twinkies keep for, like, 8000
years, man.
LOCKE [laughing]: I like Twinkies, too.
HURLEY: C'mon, really, what do you think is inside?
LOCKE: Hope. I think hope is inside. (“Exodus,” 1.23)
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“Perfect Circles,” Six Feet Under (3.1)
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Inside Schrödinger’s Box
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“[Lost fans are] like Talmudic
scholars. They have created a
body of scholarship about every
episode.”
Javier Grillo-Marxuach (Lost
writer, Seasons 1 and 2)
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The Oceanic Airlines Website
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The Hanso Foundation Website
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The
Lost
Library
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Lost
Mysteries &
Enigmas
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Dharma Initiative
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Lost Mysteries &
Enigmas:
The Crash of
Oceanic 815
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Adam and Eve
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Agelessness of Richard Alpert
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Ben’s Secret Door
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Ben’s Murder by Sayid
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Black Rock
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Dharma Initiative
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Blast Door Map
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The Owl Cave Petroglyph from Twin Peaks
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Fail Safe Key
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Four-Toed Statue
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Four-Toed Statue
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Frozen Donkey Wheel
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Hatch Mural
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Mrs. Hawking
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Mrs. Hawking
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Island’s Healing Properties
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Hit by a Bus
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Hurley Bird
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Incident
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Infant Mortality
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Jacob
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Jacob’s Cabin
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Jughead
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Lost Crosses
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Lost Crosses
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Mysterious Arrivals on the Island
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Numbers
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Numbers
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Numbers
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Orchid
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Orchid Lab
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Orchid’s Exotic Matter
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Room 23
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Brainwashing in Room 23
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Christian Shephard
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Sickness
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Sickness
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Smokezilla
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Time Travel
•Time Travel by
Consciousness
•Time Dislocation
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Temple
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Temple
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Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Temple
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Lost
Conspiracy
Theories
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From Lostpedia
In February 2007, Damon Lindelof opened a question on Yahoo!
Answers about the nature of the Monster. The answer he and
Carlton Cuse liked the best was given by user ar233. Out of over
8000 submitted answers, the winner was:
“I think the Monster was originally a highly advanced security
system designed to separate participants in the experimental
DHARMA hatches. I think it was an effect that was designed to
frighten people (smoke, noise) if they strayed too far from their
experiment location. (A bit Wizard of Oz like) However, the
electromagnetic force has mutated it - in the same sense as
Desmond experienced time travel and can now see the future
after exposure - and made it malevolent and able to physically
grab things in its force (Eko, the Pilot, Locke). So in theory it may
be able to be deactivated, if they can find the control room for it
(which would be another hatch somewhere yet undetected).”
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The producers' explanation as to why they picked that answer
was:
“We were amazed at the imagination and prodigious
creativity applied to answering the question, what is the
Monster? We have chosen our favorite answer. Not that's it’s
the right answer. Sorry, but we can't really give away the
ultimate secrets of the Monster quite yet. The answer we
selected might be somewhat right, totally right -- or
completely off-base. But we liked it and found it very cool
and intriguing. Thanks to everyone who took the time to
write in. We loved reading your thoughts -- and thanks for
watching!”--Carlton and Damon
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Lost Conspiracy Theories:
The Casimir Effect
Hendrik "Henk" Brugt Gerhard Casimir (1909-2000)
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“Exotic matter with negative energy density is required to
stabilize a wormhole.[15] Morris, Thorne and
Yurtsever[16] pointed out that the quantum mechanics of
the Casimir effect can be used to produce a locally
mass-negative region of space-time, and suggested that
negative effect could be used to stabilize a wormhole to
allow faster than light travel. This concept has been
used extensively in Science Fiction.”—from Wikipedia
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Lost Conspiracy
Theories:
String Theory
Tessaracts
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Lost Conspiracy Theories:
The 2009 Theory
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Lost Conspiracy Theories:
Atlantis
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Lost Conspiracy Theories:
The Collective Consciousness Theory
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Lost Conspiracy Theories:
Purgatory
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He sank so low that all means
for his salvation were gone,
except showing him the lost people.
For this I visited the region of the dead . .
.
– Dante, Purgatorio (quoted as an epigraph to
Walker Percy’s Lancelot, a book Sawyer is
reading in “Maternity Leave,” 2.15)
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G-a-r-y T-r-o-u-p
P-u-r-g-a-t-o-r-y
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Lost
and Fan
Dissatisfaction
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On Twin Peaks, Cooper’s
recall (and ours) of the Man
from Another Place’s dream
insistence in episode 3 (April
19, 1990) that “that gum you
like is coming back in style”
in episode 17 (December 1,
1990) allows him to identify
Laura Palmer’s murderer.
Most of Twin Peaks’
phenomenal original
audience was long gone.
Lost expects/assumes
our encyclopedic
knowledge of its
narrative (in present
tense, via flashbacks,
and, now, in flash
forwards) over its six
year run.
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The Idiot Box
or The Magic Box
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