Is there a parallel, you think, between Ben killing his dad and Locke killing his? Is that some sort of rite of passage to join the Others, which is why Locke got the hardcore respect from Tom and Richard when he brought back the body?
And the more I think about the anti-aging, and I could be way off on this but I really, really don’t feel like going to Lostipedia right now, but wasn’t that one of the six experiments that was going on in the other hatches?
Were the Dharma sites AWARE of each other, outside of the spy-hatch?!?
You think they’d have to be, at least to a point. There’s a medical hatch, after all. Unless it was a bunch of doctors keeping each other healthy, that seems kind of unnecessary.
The reverence as far as killing your daddy…there has to be something to it. But what? It’s not like Jin is being asked to whack is sweet daddy to get in the club - these are guys who killed their enormously cruel and abusive fathers.
Still, it seems that whacking daddy seems like a pretty easy route to power when it comes down to it. Maybe, instead, Locke killing his father wasn’t so impressive for psychological reasons but because their Precognition experiments showed that Locke would not kill his father.
I think there’s that, but there’s also less to speculate about these days. Gone are the days of a completely mysterious tree-crushing monster, Adam and Eve, polar bears, unknown natives, an old computer terminal with seemingly random numbers as input, and a glow in the dark map of the island.
Right now, the focus has shifted over to the interpersonal conflicts between the characters. Less information is being provided about the island’s mysteries and more about the characters. It’s more fast-moving drama than broad Myst-like mystery, and there’s just not as much to chew on. Heck, even the Black Rock is generally accepted at this point; we simply haven’t received any new information to open that old puzzle up again to play with.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; I’m greatly enjoying the new Lost. But I think the discussions are inherently limited now.
I don’t think the gas would have killed everyone on the island, only those in the immediate area of release. Anything that can kill people would probably kill animals. Birds could certainly have migrated back in but it’s doubtful polar bears and boars did. Unless they were re-released to the island from the other island but anything that toxic could drift across to the other island. Also, anything that toxic would not likely disappate so quickly or accurately, Richard was timing when it was safe to take off the masks. Also, there would have been no need for Ben to individually gas his dad if the gas covered the entire island, except to prove he was willing to do it but if that were the case why not have him use another method?
I don’t think you can use Kelvin and Rousseau to figure out when the Dharma compound was gassed. In fact I would guess that it happened before Rousseau’s group were stranded because if the real Dharma group were still active they’d have likely rescued her group. Kelvin arriving later as part of Dharma would seem to indicate that the Hostiles took over everything Dharma and kept up the pretense of being Dharma, perhaps to keep the real Dharma group from sending a larger number of better armed people and to keep getting some handy supplies. Also, it seems they were aware of the button and it’s need to be pushed, so why waste their people on that duty when Dharma was willing to send them some replacements for that job?
I agree, along with storyteller0910’s excellent assessment concluding, “Locke made his choice.” But if the writers intend for Locke to be dead, dead, dead, what storytelling purpose is served by leaving him alive cliffhanger style? Wouldn’t it be more satisfying (given that intent) to see Ben shoot again to make sure, or at least have us as viewers watch John die?
Compare this to Nikki and Paulo. If that episode had ended with the first shovelful hitting Nikki just as she opened her eyes (boom, cut to “Lost” title), it would have had a lesser dramatic impact than seeing the fully covered funeral mound (boom, cut to “Lost” title). Assuming (as seems apparent) that Nikki and Paulo are permanently dead, it would have been messy storytelling to end with the shovelful, then waste more time in the subsequent episodes convincing us that they are completely dead.
What else can we read into the fact Locke was alive when last we saw him that we haven’t seen the last of him yet?
So why are they mad at Kate for killing her dad (apparently?) but insistent that John and Ben have to kill their fathers for very much the same reason?
Are we ever going to find out what they told Locke about “what Kate did?”
When Ben arrived on the island, the video orientation said something like, “Each day you will be given a code that deactivates the fence . . .” So it seems all members of the community had pretty open access to the codes.
Also, when Ben was about to shoot Locke, he said, “I was one of the people smart enough to make sure I didn’t end up in that ditch,” which to me could simply mean the other smart people were the Hostiles, or it could mean that some members of Dharma did something to be exempted from the purge as well.
Did the podcast people say anything about the lack of aging? As in, is it just bad makeup, or is it indeed the case that Richard and others have not aged?
Not that I recall. They did seem to be saying that Locke is not dead; they made a joke five dollar bet about it, actually. They didn’t say whether Anna got purged or not, even though it came up. And they wouldn’t say anything meaningful about who or what Jacob is. They did say that the reason that Ben shot Locke was that Locke heard him too, which means Locke really is/was special.
Well, we know they had access to the Pearl monitoring station. We know that Ben did indeed push the button when Locke was trapped by the door even though he told Locke he didn’t. Otherwise the “meltdown” that took place later when Locke didn’t push the button would have occured then. So from that I surmised that they must have some knowledge of the button.
Seems to me that means they would have also known about Desmond but weren’t really concerned because it was just one guy and he was doing a job they didn’t want to do so they left him alone.
Would that every thread I started were as “quiet” as 6 pages, 250+ posts, 7000+ views…
Well, this would put Danielle landing on the island around 1988. But Danielle very well may have been on the island when the Dharmites got gassed. There’s nothing that indicates the gas had island-wide effects (else all animal life would have died too). I expect the effects were more localized – heavier doses in the Dharma compound to wipe out everybody there, yet it is out in the open air, so it’s not going to reach the rest of the island without a lot of dissipation.
And even then, the Hostiles came in and were able to remove their gas masks not too long after the purge occurred.
That’s what I thought, too. I got the impression that Ben never really knew what the whole button thing was about, and it certainly seemed to take the Others by surprise when the “sky turned purple”. Ben was totally mind-fucking with Locke when he told him, “I never entered the code. I never pushed the button…” Ben pushed it alright (when Locke was trapped in the Lockdown), but he just can’t help playing mind-fuck games with the people around him. It’s what he does.
From the Nikki and Paolo episode, we know that Ben knew about the Pearl – and saw the video feeds of Locke and Jack in the Swan. But I’m not convinced Ben really ever knew the importance of “the button” in the Swan.
Right. The were obviously monitoring the Losties in the Pearl. We don’t know that they knew what the heck they were doing there or why. It seems like the DHARMA folks kept the purposes of some of the hatches a secret.
Kelvin’s gas masks were for Desmond’s benefit. He was trying to keep Des trapped in the hatch while he (Kelvin) fixed the boat.
It seems clear that Ben knew about the button. What isn’t clear is whether or not he knew about the reset key Desmond turned. I don’t recall it being mentioned in Candle’s orientation film and we only knew about it because Kelvin showed Desmond while on a bender one day. As I understand it was the key that made the sky turn purple, not failure to push the button.