Lost 3.16: "One of Us"

My thoughts exactly. If I trusted my memory (which I often don’t do, ymmv), the top photo here might be the very same cliffs from that shot on the show.

blunders into thread with eyes closed

I’ve had this eppie PVR’d all week and haven’t had a spare hour to watch it. It’s killing me to see this thread doing so well - I know it’s gotta be a great eppie and I’m missing the juicy week-long post-mortem.

[/whinge]

It looked like natural erosion to me, but with the bright light in my dark room, I was as blinded as Juliet.

One thing I didn’t see mentioned in this thread was the need for a sedative to travel to the island.

What’s up with that? Where exactly is this place? Through a wormhole?

I don’t see the newspaper date as concusive proof we aren’t in “LOST TIME”. That could have been recorded footage shown to Juliet as live.

I took that more as preventing Juliet from knowing how to get to the island, like blindfolding a kidnap victim. Could be wrong though.

Kind of a sidetrack, I guess, but doesn’t this sort of thinking about the show kind of ruin the experience for you guys?

I was one of those who thought the “Lost Time” theory was interesting and worth thinking about, so when I saw that date as live, I thought “Oh, sweet, island time is real time!” It was like a big revelation to me, so I could focus my thinking on something else.

I don’t think I’d enjoy the show nearly as much if I didn’t believe anything that was clearly shown in front of my face. If it’s all lies it’s not really an interesting show.

So what does “conclusive proof” mean to you, and why doesn’t the newspaper qualify? What would the show have to do to prove it’s “real time” if the newspaper and print-out dates from The Pearl don’t qualify?

I can see claustrophobic people freaking the hell out midway through a long journey in a tiny submarine.

We all freak out in a tiny submarine, tiny submarine, tiny submarine.

Sure, but this “conclusive proof” was from Ben in an environment Ben controlled. He didn’t let Juliet have the guy with the camera do something interactive. It could all have been done by script.

Ben is a manipulator. What was his line (to Juliet!) in the episode right before? “I find what someone wants most and use it to get them to do what I want them to do.” Not the exact phrase, but if that’s not blatantly telling Juliet that she’s being totally manipulated by Ben at all times, well, what is?

You can call anything and everything “probably true”, but this was Ben showing Juliet what she wanted most to get her to do what he wanted. If you think he was being straight with her I’ve got a bridge for sale.

-Joe

I’d imagine it was to prevent some kind of “WTF? SUBMARINE!??!?!!” freakout. She was under the impression she was flying before they sedated her.

Well, if, say, real world time is far ahead of island time, then the video would’ve had to have been taken long before and stored. But - they went out of their way to show a very specific date - and in order to have picked that date to show on the newspaper, they would’ve had to have known when Juliet was going to freak out and demand to see proof. It’s too big a coincidence to think that the date they recorded the video in real time just happened to be about the same time that Juliet was demanding proof in island time - it’s much more likely that it was indeed live.

If they’d have wanted to leave the possibility open that island time and real time are different, they wouldn’t have included the newspaper, I think.

Eh, why do you say ‘no’? They look the same to me.

They also look like a symbol used by UFO nutcases.

http://tinyurl.com/3avnfq
http://tinyurl.com/2r5ap7
http://www.extraterrestres.net/ummo/ummoweb.jpg

Google ‘UMMO’ for details, if you can stomach it.

I don’t think so. In the hospital scene early in the episode, they were wearing surgical gowns with the DHARMA symbol on them. Why wear DHARMA clothes if they aren’t DHARMA?

I think they ARE DHARMA.

I must have missed them.

These?

Uh…I still don’t see any ruins. Is it just me?

-rainy

Free stuff.

We don’t know what their resource/technology situation was pre-DHARMA. Maybe they hid out while DHARMA stuff was being constructed, and then took over.

I don’t either.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but outside of the whole “Henry Gale” thing, we haven’t really seen Ben carry out a lie for a long time. He’s a manipulator, sure, but he’s pretty upfront about it.

Like with Sawyer, he lied about the pace maker but fessed up to it just a couple hours later. With Jack, he planned to manipulate the hell out of him, but that didn’t work and he fessed up to that, too.

The writers make it pretty clear pretty quickly when something is a lie, or at least something we should be suspicious of.

I’m still curious as to what needs to happen to convince you that the island is on “real time”, not some alternate time. We’ve already got the print-outs and the newspaper… what else do we need?

Yep. Desmond also wore DHARMA clothes for a long time, and he certainly wasn’t DHARMA. I think they just wear/eat whatever they can, whether they have the logo on them or not.

The difference is that Desmond was trapped, had no contact with the outside world and wore the only clothes that were available to him. The Others had a submarine and a boat that allowed them to come and go at will.

Aren’t surgical gowns disposable items that are replaced often? Anyway, I think they would have brought their own supplies. Taking over DHARMA buildings is one thing. Using second-hand clothes is something else, and I don’t see it.

I guess this is another example of me enjoying the show and just accepting the information presented rather than 2nd guessing every single thing.

Mikhail, while wearing a DHARMA suit, admitted that he lied and was never DHARMA. Every single person on the island eats DHARMA food.

The show has made it pretty clear that 1. The Others are what DHARMA referred to as “hostiles”. 2. DHARMA still exists and drops off food and supplies, maybe surgical gowns included.

I would hate watching the show and not believing a single thing presented. I don’t know how you guys do it without going completely insane. Hell, I’d even love to be proved wrong, since that would be a huge reveal to me rather than a “I KNEW IT!” moment. I think it’s a lot better that way.