I didn’t see it as being some invisible hand of fate guiding things. I was thinking more along the lines of something like a river. Throw a rock into a river and you change its course momentarily but it goes right back to flowing the way it was. Throw enough rocks into it and you may be able to dam it up or deflect its course, but eventually it will wear through your rocks or overflow your dam and be right back where it was again. Just an inevitable result of physics and geology, not evidence of deliberate control.
This is from the “Lost Experience” thing that ran over last summer. Spoilerizing it since it hasn’t come out in the show yet.
[spoiler]The Numbers are the results of something known as the “Valenzetti Equations”, themselves the result of a UN program sponsored by the US and the USSR after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Basically the equations take as inputs things like population, the environment, politics and so on and attempt to make predictions of the future from them.
Unfortunately, the Equations show that the human race is doomed to extinction in the very near future. The primary goal of the Dharma Initiative was to change the results of the Equations (by manipulating its inputs) and thus save the human race.
The Numbers are the output results of the Equations. The purpose of the original broadcast was so that Dharma (and its sponsor, the Hanso Foundation) could monitor the progress of the attempt to change them. If any of the numbers changed, then it would indicate that the attempt to change the Equations had succeeded.)[/spoiler]
Well that clears it up. :smack:
Pretty good misdirection involved in that - did anyone manage to figure out that it was actually going to be Charlie and not Claire? They had me fooled.
-Joe
I wonder if we already did see our first paradox, back in Season One or Two, when Sayid and Hurley picked up that weird Glenn Miller radio transmissions that could have come from anywhere or anywhen. Then again, maybe not. (There is a thread somewhere where we discussed this, but I can’t find it, because I can’t figure out the right search terms – but it’s there. Honest, I mean it.)
I wasn’t thinking of “fate” as being supernatural or intelligent, just inevitable, kind of like the concept of equilibrium in science – Newton’s third law of metaphysics, maybe? Everything trends towards balance.
Episode 3.1 has just aired in Australia. A number of people in the thread for that episode wondered about the “upside down” CD player. It may be that that point has been resolved by now - obviously I haven’t read beyond that thread - but I just thought I’d pop in and say that I had such a CD player. I bought it for my wife (then girlfriend) in the early 1990s. We got rid of it some time ago and I can’t recall the brand. But, if it matters, CD players that had the label down and the shiny side up did get made.
I’m unlikely to participate in these threads again due to air times being months apart. Obviously, I won’t read any reply to this post for some time. But I’d like to thank you for the immaculate way these threads are organised. It’s never a problem to see a Lost thread in the forum list. And, when Australian TV finds it convenient to show episodes, the threads are fun to read and easy to find. I appreciate it.
You didn’t dream it, it was there. That scene was even part of the 1-hour “catch you up to now” show they ran before the new episode last week. Considering they put 50 hours worth of show into 1 hour and included that scene, I would tend to believe it is more important than we thought.
Hmmm… couple that with what everybody is saying is probably the intended anagram from last week (“Mittelos” == “Lost Time” or “Time Lost”), and maybe the island is not just lost in the ocean, but also lost in time.
Of course, it’s also an anagram for “Time Slot”, which our show just changed this spring, to keep from going up against American Idol, presumably.
And on the subject of anagrams, maybe that wasn’t the “secret” one. After all, last week’s title, “Not In Portland” anagrams out to:
“Plant rod inn to”
which is kind of what Sawyer was doing with Kate not so long ago… 
I’m not seeing what you guys mean about the fate thing not being a supernatural/intelligent influence.
Okay, so that guy was going to get hit by the falling scaffolding. Let’s assume for some reason, the woman knew it, and could’ve warned him.
So she does, and he avoids it and lives.
Now, how in the natural flow or reality or something is it decided that this man was meant to die? If that were the case, doesn’t it mean that some supernatural, intelligent force willed him to die and was thwarted?
And there’s no logical connection between being in a fatal situation one day and being in one the next - so the only thing setting him up for getting hit by a cab or falling in the shower is some supernatural, intelligent force deciding that he was meant to die, and then influencing reality in an infinitely complex and subtle way (think butterfly effect, and all of the little things that have to be influenced, unnoticibly, to make even simple things happen).
All of that, in my view, is bunk. Completely stupid, worthless storytelling. Invisible pink unicorns is equally compelling. And I’m not seeing how you could see it in some sort of “natural fate” way without an external supernatural intelligent influence. The only way it works is with magical fate fairies. Otherwise, why is someone fated to do anything? And what would change the physical nature of reality in nearly infinitely complex ways to accomplish that?
But whats ludicrous is that the very idea that Charlie Must Die is somehow an integral part of the, so to speak, flow of that river called the Universe.
Charlie dying or not, it seems clear, would be like a couple of molecules of water in the river going this way or that way. In other words, totally insignificant to the question of the flow of the river in general. Course correction, on the cosmic scale, to make sense, should be on a much grander scale than “this person should have waffles for breakfast” or “that person should unknowingly marry his sister” or whatever.
-FrL-
And mostly because I’m bored and playing with an anagram server (waiting around while my students take a test) – I decided to see if there were any secrets behind our other favorite Losties, perhaps revealing a bit about their true character…
Lots of people on the boards don’t seem to like Jack Shephard, probably because he’s a Chap Dash Jerk.
And we’d better be wary of Sayid Jarrah, who arrays jihad.
Sun Kwon hasn’t told us everything of her secret past, when she lived with an order of stir-frying celibates, the Wok Nuns.
Charlie Pace tries to put on a tough act, but inside he’s soft and squidgy, a regular peach eclair.
And speaking of a Claire, Charlie is still pursuing Claire Littleton, hoping to find out her ill erotic talent.
Sawyer had better be careful, getting so close to Kate Austen, as she’s the kind of person likely to nuke a state.
Perhaps other powers that be feel that Charlie Must Die IS an integral part of the universe… if for nothing else than because he’s a git. 
This seemed like an episode that was designed to plug in anytime since it wasn’t contiguous with the rest of the story. It may have been written back when every other week was a rerun and they felt they needed episodes like this that didn’t reference any on-going continuity.
Secondly, this episode confirmed that this show doesn’t take place in our earth/universe. Though there is an adult magazine named “Playboy” in our world, there is no “Playpen” adult magazine that I have ever seen.
Whoa. As og is my witness, I didn’t follow or look into any of the extended experience stuff. I tried checking out the Hanso website, and punched in a few passwords at the very beginning, but then it became incredibly tedious and silly. Almost like work. Interesting to find it jives with my thinking on the plot.
If we’re going on things like that, we could have concluded not our earth/universe long ago, as there is also no Oceanic Airlines.
Maybe Sawyer’s endeavors are larger than we realized, and he’s actually publishing Playpen magazine, to sell to other sex-starved Lostaways. That stack Charlie found probably features Sawyer boning Ana Lucia, but he’s been promising his readers that he’ll be working on the “All Kate Au Naturale” issue very soon.
Ahh, but this is exactly it. No matter how small the decisions we all make (ala A Sound of Thunder), it may have HUGE implications in the lives of many others. Let’s say you DIDN’T have waffles for breakfast, and by leaving the 15 minutes earlier for work that day, you were in a different part of traffic on your way to work. Your car is displacing some other car that would have been there instead. There by causing that car, to get in a mortal accident, rather than the person behind them. Unfortunately, the person in the car, would have gone on to live their life, maybe having a great effect on mankind. But no… you didn’t have waffles.
I think the DI, knows humanity is doomed. They also know the universe is course correcting. This is a huge problem. Maybe they’ve found a way to keep rewinding the world before D-Day (ala desmond). Obviously, the ring lady had been through this before. How many times? “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again”. But they’re trying to make a permanent change. Whoever ends up on that island, is going to take part in the grand scheme of how all this plays out. but something needs to change. Perhaps they don’t know what. Maybe there is an ultimate change. something the universe can’t correct… the pinnacle CHANGE. You figure that out… ultimately, humanity might be saved?
It is difficult to think of a chaotic system (e.g. one where something as tiny as a couple of water molecules could have an effect on something as big as the course of the river) as having a mechanism for course correction on as small a scale as that, precisely because each little thing can have a potentially huge consequence. This mean each little “corrective” measure could itself have huge and unpredictable consequences.
-FrL-
I like this idea. Maybe the DI keeps sending in groups hoping that this time it’ll work. Maybe Adam and Eve were their first experimental group. Maybe they can manipulate things well enough that they know they need certain traits and keep trying to stack the deck, going so far as to manipulate the past to send the Black Rock there.
Maybe they redirected the Black Rock there so that their latest batch of experimentees could interfere with the hatch to get Desmond out and doing things?
Then, things still haven’t been fixed, D-Day approaches, and someone hits the reset button. Of course, if this were all possible they could keep stacking things over and over for their plans. Need to excavate a dozen hatches in the middle of the ocean? No problem, we have forever…
-Joe
@ FrL:
True. But maybe what LOST is trying to say is this river is immovable. How we understand chaotic systems unfortunately doesn’t apply to the course of the river. Dharma is faced with the prospect of changing this river, knowing that it’s indelible. What they assumed was that by not having waffles, the chaotic repercussions this would have forever in time would apply. What? The end of the world is imminent? Well, let’s change the events that lead up to it. Much to their dismay, they finally found there’s nothing that can be done to stop it. Or is there? Obviously we don’t have all the information that Dharma does… but it has to be something along these lines. Either way, LOST is back on track for me.
I can’t believe I am the first one to point out that Charlie was singing Wonderwall on the street.
We’ve said for three years that Charlie’s band was a thinly fictionalized version of Oasis.
