Heck, he even looked like that way back on Party of Five!
As for backgammon-- I play a lot, and having a bad couple of games is no big deal. I’ve easily gone ten rolls on a fairly open end board and not managed to get my stones off the bar. No, what’s really weird is that the kid’s position was so bad. He had at least two blots showing, if not more!
And depending on how they started on the stakes, and if overconfident Hurley got suckered on some judicious doubling, you can easily get in over your head (after all, the cube does go up to 64…)
I thought Locke found Ethan a little threatening. At one point he said something along the lines of “Listen, I’ve hunted with this man. I’m a good tracker, I can do this, that and the other, but he can do it all better.”
So I think he’s in cahoots with the island too, but I’m wondering if the island is “neutral”. Like, Good Guys + Island = Utopia, but Bad Guys + Island = Braaaaaiiiiins.
When Locke and Boone found the metal bit, I wondered if the island is a big lab, or experiment. (What if a huge chunk of it is artificial or contains a massive underground lab?) Some long, lost and very ambitious secret government project. Perhaps abandoned when the brain-eater virus got loose. Danielle Rousseau and the other “science team” members were going back because after all these year, it was finally thought safe to do so.
Or maybe it’s all like the low-budget movie Cube. (Overview, of Cube plot. Pretty much spoiler-free, boxed just in case)People wake up in cube shaped rooms with trap doors on each surface (including floors and ceiling) leading to more identical rooms. Some rooms are booby-trapped, some are not. People find each other, make up a rag tag group that goes room to room, trying to find their way out of this weird and deadly labyrinthe, trying to solve it’s puzzle to hopefully escape. They don’t know why they are there, who is behind it (humans? aliens? is it an experimnet? are they dead and in hell? purgatory?)
Now, CubeSPOILERS (don’t look if you haven’t seen the movie!!! This SPOILER has the ending.)
It turns out that it started as some small theorectical project and grew into this obscene thing as a result of stupid bureaucracy. Since no one really new anything about the full scope of this top secret project, they were approving this and that, letting components be created without really having any idea how it fit in the big picture. No one wanted to admit they didn’t know what was going on, so no one questioned it. They kept working on it, each disaparate department doing its part, and the Cube project just kept growing. Then they had this thing that was complete, no one really knew its purpose anymore. And somehow as part of this weird bureaucratic mess, someone approved, putting people in it to see what would happen – I mean, “We must have built this for a reason, right?” Let’s test it!" The Cube is the product of “the system” – the total lack of intra-governmental communication and crappy bureaucracy. There was no master-plan behind the Cube, it just happened.
I’m kinda wondering if the above is kind of what’s happening on Lost.
I still think the most interesting character so far has been Danielle. I wish we had more interaction with her. As I said earlier, though, I think the writers will kill her off. Maybe Sayid leads a group to find her again, and what they find is her dead body. Perhaps they’ll even try to find the black rock-- I think it was on the map Sayid took. Assuming her info is real (ie, not misinformation the writers put in on purpose), what happened to her will happen to our new castaways. Her crew all were affected within 2 months-- won’t be long.
Yes, but I think many of the tracking and hunting skills he’s demonstrated have to come from experience. I can’t imagine how a guy in a wheelchair could have learned this stuff from books.
Wow… you’re extremely right! What could a guy in a wheelchair be wishing for most… the things that are farthest from what he has. This is pretty damn far.
I think this is central to the subtext of the show. If you’ll indulge me for a bit…
When Solitary introduced us to Danielle Roussea, I believe I detected some subtle influence from [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau’s expositions on education in the development of the relationship between Walt and [the character] John Locke.
Well, what about [the philospher] John Locke, and his ideas about education?
How does the first paragraph of Some Thoughts Concerning Education relate to [the character] John Locke?
We know that he had been preparing for his Walkabout for a long, long time. How? By educating himself, he has become a Wonderworker. Maybe his paraplegia was simply a metaphor for ignorance, and his ability comes from self-preparation?
What about the contrast between his Risk playing at the box company, and the satisfaction that he shows now that he has transformed himself into Great White Hunter?
As an aside, if John Locke’s Concerning Education is part of the inspiration for Lost, maybe the producers are giving us the straight goods when they say nothing supernatural is happening. Locke strongly cautions against allowing children to be introduced to the concepts of ghosts, goblins, or whatnot:
Is this a simple explanation to how John Locke walked away from the Tree-Crushing Monster, smiling, to return with a freshly-killed boar? It’s strictly imaginary, and he just overcame an irrational fear, allowing him to get down to business after the others fled? Is [Danielle] Rousseau’s matter-of-fact statement that there are “no such thing as monsters,” a classic purloined letter?
I don’t know about your theory. I just assumed that Locke’s paralysis happened later in life, after he had already acquired these skills (perhaps in the military?). Perhaps we’ll have another flashback episode that gives us more information on his background.
Of course, I don’t either-- it’s just tentative speculation. Of course it’s possible that the backstory on his paralysis will be examined in a literal way at some point in the future – but I can’t help but try to find some connection between the events in Lost and the works of John Locke and Rousseau, because deconstructing fiction is stimulating. (Like wanking.)
Although it’s entirely possible that the writers simply gave two of their characters the names of intimately-connected 17th century philosphers because they liked the names and intended no connection to be made between the story and their respective writings, there are a number of striking coincidences that tend to suggest to me that there may be a designed correlation:[ul][li]In the episode in which Daniel Rousseau is introduced, Locke begins his tutelage of Walt, fostering the child’s naturally-arising interest in useful work, which is a core principle of Rousseau’s treatise on education, Emile.[]Emile offers a novel about a man stranded on a desert island as the single best model for the natural education for a child.[]It also encourages the teacher to “put [the student] in the place of a solitary man,” which fits with the Lost convention of having several layers of signficance in their episode titles.[][Danielle] Rousseau appears to be paranoid, as was Jean-Jacques.[]Jean Locke’s treatise on education begins by stressing a mind/body synergy as a requirement for happiness. The character of John Locke is a before/after picture of a physically enfeebled, mentally confused, and miserable man transformed into a robust, mentally acute, and deeply satisfied man.There is also a contrast made between the satisfaction gained from trivial pursuits such as games, and a greater pleasure taken in doing hard but useful work, which is also straight out of Rousseau – as well as being a choice that Walt made for himself, ie; hit the ball with the club, or learn to hunt.[/ul][/li]There are enough correspondences that I tend to think that it’s intentional rather than accidental, and conclude that Locke’s paralysis is probably metaphorically connected to Lockean philosophy – ie; he’s made himself into a great man through education and will. If they write it such that Locke was Action Man in his natural state, and then some external event made him into the pathetic Underground Man we saw in the Walkabout flashbacks, and then a deux ex machina restored him to his normal Action Man status, well, not only does that make Locke into something totally other than Lockean, but (even if the whole “John Locke=John Locke” thing is just my imagination) it really wrecks the character’s story arc, which is a pretty big no-no.
I finally got around to watching my tape of this episode yesterday, and most of my thoughts have been echoed here already. Except one:
Am I the only one who thought it was weird that all Kate did was say that Charlie might not have been the one leaving the band-aid trail, and suddenly she’s a tracker? Hell, that thought occurred to me a few minutes before she said it, and I can’t track a damn thing. All it proves is that Kate and I don’t always take things at face value. That said, apparently she can do some tracking (the dad story and all), but IMO they could have come up with a better way for her skills to be discovered.
I am so glad that they’re going to re-run the pilot next week! I didn’t get into this show until the second or third week, so I’m dying to see the episodes I missed.
That was exactly my thought when Charlie started breathing again! I even said it out loud to my TV: “great, so now he’ll be seriously brain-damaged. . .”
If you come in on page four, and you want to post something that hasn’t been posted before, you pretty much have to stick to off-the-wall stuff with only the most tenuous of connections to the actual action of the episode. At least, that’s what I do.
Actually…think about it this way. The only person with a daddy figure on the island is Walt.
Somehow Walt and the baby are a key to the island.
Remember the first episode: Walt wished for his dog and it appeared. Walt was reading a comic book that had a polar bear and it appeared. Walt is playing backgammon with Hurley and he asks for a “7” and got it. He asked for a “double 6” and got it. Then he said something really strange. he said, “My dad says, I’m lucky, I’m the luckiest person he’s ever known”.
The thing which binds both the baby and Walt is the fact their imagination is boundless and limitless as it is with children. This island seems to feed on the imagination of its inhabitants.
Remember because of Locke’s condition he always imagined himself to be this great hunter, this great adventurer and hunter. Thats why he and the island were fast to connect with eaach other. Because of the drama with the Adventure trip in Australia, Locke was hurt and was already on another “plane” (no pun intended) when the plane crashed on the island. Locke was so far remove from his immeditate surrounding that the island picked up on it right away. And gave him the ability to walk. To be this great adventurer he saw himself as being…his mind was already on another level of conciousness…that of which a childs imagination is at constantly and which the island was able to hone into.
The baby comes into factor because the so-call “others” or “they” as Charlie referred them as know the secret of the island. If the use of the mind is what feeds the island, and the “others” know this…then the biggest weapon on the island is the mind of one that is not conditioned to have limits. A mind of a child, especially one that is yet to be born, one that can be molded and taught. (Rememeber the warning the psychic gave to Claire "Your child must not be raised by an “other”. Not “another”.
The psychic knew of the importance of this baby and purposely made Claire get on this plane.
Damn sorry didn’t mean to blabb like that. But what I actually wanted to comment on was what both Locke and Boone might have stumbled upon. I say its Danielle’s bunker. Reemmber when she captured Sayid, to get out of the bunker she had to climb up a ladder.
Wilderness Inquiry runs camping/canoeing/rock climbing/etc. trips for disabled people, so if it’s reasonable for there to be polar bears, it’s reasonable for him to know how to survive in the wild. Plus, I haven’t seen much of his backstory, but it’s not outside the bounds of reason (unless stated otherwise) that he wasn’t paralyzed from birth; he may have been the Great White Hunter until five years ago, then got hurt in an accident, and the accident/island cured him somehow.
I had the thought that she might come looking for Sayid because she’s worried about him with his people (who he supposed to keep a close eye on), and to return his picture, which she knows is very important to him. He was the first person she’d seen in a long while, it makes sense that she’d have some sort of protective feelings for him (she didn’t shoot him when she had a chance).
My first post in this thread is on page 5 . . .
I apologized already! 