And Vincent has recently washed and brushed hair despite spending four days in a jungle, deliberately staying away from its owner and a source of food. I would normally assume this is foreshadowing that another group is on the island, but here I’m sure it really means that they were afraid of offending petlovers if the poor doggie had a matted coat.
According to TV Guide. Jack was supposed to have been killed off in the first episode but they changed that after casting Matthew Fox. Wonder who’s pissed about being bumped out of the lead role?
My guess: Kate’s crime was one of those political activist things, where somehow people got hurt when they weren’t supposed to. Among those killed was a cop…who, naturally, was the Marshall’s mentor/young partner/brother/whatever.
The biggest problem I had with the first three episodes came last night, when (sorry, don’t know all the character’s names yet) the Texan that shot the Marshall was so upset for causing him more pain that he…angrily threw his cigarette away!!
As a former smoker, let me say that I would have rather gnawed through my own foot than angrily thrown away one out of possibly my last 20 cigarettes…ever.
Ditto when he lit his Zippo and just left it sitting there lit for a while before giving it to the fugitive. Jebus, man! Save that lighter fluid!
I think maybe you’re thinking too hard. He woke up to find her hovering over his head; he probably thought she was trying to kill him and lashed out in self-defense.
“Blank slates” are all well and good, but I really think he should have asked her what the hell she did to become an intercontinental fugitive. I mean, it makes a difference if she was passing bad checks, versus, say, killing people and eating their livers.
The thing that upset me about throwing away the cigarette was that there are campfires blazing. Just light it off one of those! Tho you could argue he wasn’t thinking straight.
Ok, the mountaneers decide not to mention the Franch transmission. They also decide not to mention the Polar Bear?
Just because the radio transmission is ~16 years old doesn’t mean the polar bear has been there that long. (How long do pbs live?)
Brian
The guy just had to shoot a man in the chest. Not only that, but he failed, and now he had to live with hearing the guy gurgling and struggling because of what he did. And people to expect him to be totally calm and rational?
I just assumed she was lying. Her story was that she’d graduated “college” and impulsively flew Down Under to see the world. However, at some point she went to Harrison Valley (PA?) and got arrested for something serious enough for a U.S. Marshall to head to Australia to get her.
A quick couple of points on the “latitude/longitude” tangent (Heh heh, tangent. In a post about latitude calculations. Oh, never mind.)
A lot of the survivors seem to be just milling about, and some such as the pregnant woman are not going to be going into the jungle looking for food. You could find (or make) a relatively flat area of sand, stick a straightish stick in it, and get someone to sit there, with the watch voted on as being “most likely to be correct”, and make a mark in the sand every hour (half-hour, whatever) where the tip of the shadow is. Use shoelaces as a measuring device to get the height of the stick and the length of the shadow at various times, thus finding the time of your “local noon”.
There are 48 survivors - not everyone is out looking for food or going on the expeditions that we see. Some are sunbathing – at least give them something useful to do while they bronze!
Of course that’s true – it’s just that if they do get to talk to someone it would really help to give out their best guess of location.
It doesn’t matter, and they don’t even need to know the exact lengths, just the ratio (so “shoelace units” would work). They just need to tell their radio contact (if they ever get one) that the maximum shadow-to-stick length ratio was whatever they measured. Let the search party organizers do the angle calculation.
In any case, there’s at least a finite chance that someone – alive or dead – is wearing a calulator watch, or had a calculator in the luggage.
Fortunately, it doesn’t matter where Sydney is located within its time zone, because people in modern-day Sydney don’t calculate noon by looking at the sun. Noon in Sydney is defined as being exactly 10 hours ahead of GMT (except when Daylight Saving Time is in effect), and in Greenwich noon is when the sun is at its heighest. So a watch synchronized recently in Sydney was also synchronized (with an offset) to GMT and there isn’t the “Maine/Ohio uncertainty”. That’s ne of the beauties of modern communications!
In summary, they ought to be able to get their longitude rather precisely, and their latitude perhaps less so. but certainly better than Algernon’s “between 30 and 45 degrees”.
Any potential rescue plane, given their measurement information, would probably start the search by flying down the relevant line of longitude, within the likely range of latitudes.
They didn’t mention the transmissiong because they didn’t want to take away Hope. Presumably, they didn’t mention the bear for the same reason, as if seeing a polar bear would remove hope. Beats me.
What was funny, was them saying, “we can’t remove their hope” then they get back to the beach and the people say, “Did you get a signal?”
I’m a bit hesitant to continue this hijack, but could you say more about this? How would anyone know that Sydney noon is exactly 10 hours ahead of Greenwich noon?
(And, to fight my own ignorance, is this really true? Is Sydney exactly 150 degrees of longitude removed from Greenwich?) [Hmmm. That’s interesting. I just now looked it up and Sydney is at 151 degrees 0 seconds of longitude.]
I concede your point. I guess the survivors don’t have to have knowledge of all this stuff. All they have to communicate to potential rescuers is a) the ratio of lengths of the stick and the shadow at noon on the island, and b) the Sydney time on their watches at noon. That information would be sufficient for someone off the island to come pretty close to pinpointing their location.
That would be pretty cool actually if they did this information gathering on the show. Probably too boring for the average viewer though.
Of course, as others have pointed out, it’s all a moot point unless they do find a method to communicate – and I doubt if that is going to happen.
I was thinking a little more about it. First of all, I was using “NOON” to mean, “when the Sun is at it highest point”. It’s unlikely that that happens at 12:00 in Sydney. It almost certainly happens somewhere in Sydney’s timezone though.
It doesn’t really matter if Sydney is EXACTLY 10 hours ahead or what.
If they tell a rescuer that their watch is set to Sydney time and “noon” occured at 4:45 on their watches, then that gives the rescuers good information.
I was thinking the other way when I said it would be inaccurate. If I tell you what time zone I’m in, you can’t tell me exactly when “noon” occurs. Although, you can if you know my exact coordinates.
I agree. Belatedly, unfortunately. What I found interesting is that Sydney happens indeed to be exactly 10 hours from Greenwich. Well, 151 degrees is 1 degree from exact, but as they say, it’s close enough for government work. It’s something less than about 50 miles.
