Ah, yes. So I guess we know that she came around more than 3 years ago-- IIRC, Desmond has been on The Island for about 4 years. God, I hate his character, btw. I hope they kill him off soon, but it looks like he’s become more and more central to the plotline.
I read part of an interview recently with writers on the show, who specifically said that they “weren’t doing paradoxes” but “loved twisted timelines”. (Paraphrased; maybe I screwed it up. It’s complicated, and there’s no time!)
Seriously, though, if you posit time travel (of either information or people) in a single timeline, you get paradoxes, which always bugs me no end. The fact that Faraday had that note about Desmond in his notebook suggests that it really is a single timeline, which gives us such popular paradoxes as The Information From Nowhere. (In this case, the settings for Desmond’s machine in 1996; Desmond told Faraday the settings from memory; Faraday wrote them down; in 2004 Faraday gave Desmond the same figures from his notebook; Desmond mentally travels back to 1996. . . and the information doesn’t come from anywhere.)
It’s not just that paradoxes bug me – real science fiction writers have been working almost every possible variation on them for many decades, so it’s not like “Lost” is going to show us a startling new idea.
John Mace - but, but - I love Desmond! The power of good acting, I guess. I think he’s a much more interesting character than Jack or Locke, tho I agree those are certainly necesary to the plot. Oh well - to each their own, on this show anyway.
Or maybe Faraday had already worked them out, but not told anyone, so when Desmond turned up citing the settings, it’s proof he met Faraday in the future. Like in BTTF when Marty tells the Doc about the Flux Capacitor.
1996 and 2004. My constant was porn.
I agree Desmond is by far one of the better characters.
In fact, I noticed the other day that very few of the original cast members are even in my top ten favorite Lost characters.
Since no one asked for it…
- Ben (There is not even a close second)
- Sayid(One of two original Losties in my list)
- Juliet (She has more secrets than Vincent the Dog!) [sub]Plus she made out with Angelina Jolie in Gia![/sub]
- Desmond (The actor is so likeable and makes the character so genuine)
- Daniel Farrady (took me forever to realize he was the nerd from Private Ryan)
- Rose (Used JUST the right amount!)
- Tom- Dead now, I love how he acted evil to the Losties, but was really just a dork.
- Libby- I was very upset with her death. It felt related to outside issues. Glad she is coming back. I still want to know why she was holding Cindy’s backpack.
- Mikhail- He’s not dead. You just KNOW he’s not dead.
- Hurley- The other of the two…but it’s freaking Hurley!
Tough to leave off:
Sawyer, Eko, Christian Shepherd, and of course Scott/Steve.
I realize I’m not in much company with my dislike of Desmond. Part of it is his Scottish accent soundislike nails on a chalkboard to me. But the whole relationship thing with Penny just seems overdone. And he’s always speaking in this frantic, cryptic mode* that I just want to smack him and tell him quit whining and lay out the details.
*And I’m grading on a scale here since “cryptic” isn’t exactly unusual on this show.
Cool, but that’s what I like best about him. He’s the only actor who seems to recognize that his character has underwent an enormous trauma and acts accordingly.
He still seems like he has been alone for years and only now getting used to people.
To me, a paradox is a logical contradiction. What is logically contradictory about what you refer to as The Information From Nowhere? It may disagree with your preferred model of how the world works, but I don’t see a paradox, as such. The very fact that we could coherently model such a situation shows that there is no logical contradiction in it (of course, it may require such counterintuitive features as are present in our model).
Also, do you prefer information to come from infinitely descending chains (the settings come from event B comes from event C comes from event D comes from…, never stopping)? What’s better about that? You’re free to prefer it, of course, but those are your only two options; either an infinitely descending chain (possibly in the form of a loop) or a point at which the chain stops. In either case, there can be no ultimate origin for the information unless you accept that the “information comes from nowhere” at that point of origin itself.
Rewording of last paragraph: Also, do you prefer information to come from infinitely descending chains (the settings come from event B comes from event C comes from event D comes from…, never stopping)? What’s better about that? You’re free to prefer it, of course, but these are your only options; either an infinitely descending chain, a point at which the chain stops, or a loop (which is really just a particular kind of infinite chain which repeats itself). In either case, there can be no ultimate origin for the information unless you accept that the “information comes from nowhere” at that point of origin itself.
Baldwin:
Didn’t 1996-Daniel have those numbers already on his chalkboard? Desmond only confirmed to him that those settings, which he hadn’t yet tried, would work.
Remember - those numbers meant something to 1996-Daniel BEFORE he brought Desmond to his lab - Desmond said the numbers, and Daniel recognized them (but still needed to hear about Eloise to be convinced it wasn’t a trick). So the information originated with Daniel in 1996, not from nowhere.
Or perhaps even worse, stuck with the same person for years. If I remeber correctly, he killed his hatch mate on the day he accidentally cause flight 815 to fall.
I’m glad I’m not the only person who’s wondering about that dynamite. I think that it came from Rousseau’s expedition. She might have hidden it there when the rest of her team “went mad.” Even aside from the anachronism, dynamite seems like a very unlikely cargo for a slave ship to carry. One escaped slave could blow the whole ship straight to Hell! And they found the dynamite in the same hold that the slaves were in, which makes the situation even more suicidal for the slave traders. No, I think the most likely explanation is that the dynamite was put there later. And since the Others don’t seem to know about the dynamite, that leaves Rousseau and her team as the obvious suspects.
I strongly suspect that the only person in Rousseau’s team who went crazy was Rousseau herself. One of the great Hollywood clichés is to have an obviously insane person say something like, “I’m not crazy! It’s the world that’s gone crazy!” I think that Danielle is a paranoid schizophrenic who suffered a severe break while on the island, and thought that everyone around her was plotting against her. So she killed them. Heck, the Others probably kidnapped Alex because they feared that Danielle would eventually kill the kid if they didn’t.
OK, I just got around to watching the Episode on Saturday and just made time to finish reading my way through this thread, so who knows how many people will even still be reading at this point, but I’m gonna share anyways since it appears I’ve got something a little new on my mind.
First, to get it out of the way, I don’t think that Desmond got back his memory completely. I’m not even sure he’s gotten it back at all. When Desmond got off the phone the way he approached Sayid, laboriously pronounced his name and extended his hand to shake made it extremely clear that he was essentially meeting him for the first time as a friend.
From the moment they got out of the chopper Desmond acted afraid of Sayid and several times made the statement that he didn’t know him and that they weren’t friends. The fact that Sayid believed him and enabled him to talk to Penny, in effect saving his life, proved to Desmond that Sayid was indeed his friend. Desmond knew his name because the men on the freighter asked him his name and he said it in front of him, the idea that his saying his name means he remembers him doesn’t hold water. If Desmond did indeed suddenly remember everything it would be very strange for him to approach him and shake his hand in a somewhat cautious way like that. If Desmond fully regained his memory the writers would have made it more clear by having him revert to a very familiar manner with Sayid and possibly had him refer to the other Losties or their mission on the boat or something IMO.
Second, and I’m surprised that this hasn’t been covered to specifically in this thread, is the revelation the Charles Widmore bought the Black Rock Journal. This seemed like the biggest revelation of the episode.
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We learned that the Journal has presumably been in the Hanso family since 1852 or so when it was discovered in an auction on Madagascar.
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The contents of it are unknown, but since the Black Rock is ship wrecked on the Island one can assume that it contains some explicit details and descriptions of the many unique qualities of the island, possibly including the magnetism, healing properties, apparent time-shifting etc. This probably means that the Hanso’s are probably one of the very few people who know about the island and explains why they chose it for their “research”. DHARMA was borne out of this information.
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Charles Widmore bid on this book and won it in 1996. Either he knew that it contained this information about the Island or after he’d won it he discovered it. This probably means that Widmore is indeed at the head of one of the entities who are seeking the island. Perhaps he’s affiliated with Ben’s group who over threw the Dharmaites, but it’s probably more likely that he’s the one sending the freighter and trying to get his hands on Ben. I say this because I think Richard and Ben killed the Dharma people longer than 8 years ago, but it’s unclear.
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Widmore is not part of the Dharma Initiative because if he was he wouldn’t have been looking to buy the Journal. This was up for debate a while back.
All this seems to indicate that the Black Rock is the start of everything. It’s the thread that seems to link all the powers that be together and that auction answered some crucial questions.
:shrug:
Seems to me we will know the answer to this in one of the next couple of episodes. Whether Desmond has/has not regained his “present” memories doesn’t seem to justify so much debate.
(emphasis mine) Sorry, I don’t get how this follows. Didn’t the auctioneer say something about the journal being taken/lost from the Black Rock, presumably before she shipwrecked? I mean, nobody in the real world knows where the Black Rock ended up, so they couldn’t have gotten the journal from the boat directly. So why would the journal contain any information about the Island, aside from possible oblique coordinates or intended destinations, maybe? I’m not seeing it as so important. More just an interesting connection. Or maybe I’m just dense, dunno.
They said that the Black Rock was lost at sea and that the only remaining artifact ever found was the Journal, which turned up at an auction of pirate booty 7 years after she was lost.
There’s no implication that the book was taken prior to it crashing. Of course there’s no explicit indication that the book made it to the island either, but I think for the purposes of the story that’s the only reason it’d have any value to the plot.
I think that since the writers went out of their way to show that Widmore bought it at auction and the the contents were secret we can assume it’s of importance to the plot. The fact that the owner’s family, the Hanso’s, are explicitly stated as the only ones who know it’s contents and we know that they set up the Dharma experiments on the Island it becomes pretty obvious that we are supposed to deduce that the Journal was a factor.
Not sure where the info came from, maybe one of the ARGs, but lostpedia seems to think the dynamite was there because the slaves were being used for mining.
Here’s a longshot theory, to be dismissed or expanded…
There has been no flashbacks in any episodes of Lost so far. They have all been timeshifts, where the person was there.
So there has been time events constantly threaded throughout the series, maybe not even just the “flashbacks”.
The trouble Desmond had was having his original conciousness returning after the “flashback” had finished…
Locke tells Sawyer this in the episode “The Brig”. I don’t remember if it was presented as a theory or what.
Probably not, just because we’ve seen Jack walking along, Jack have a flashback, and then Jack continuing to walk along.
No passing out in the middle there…
-Joe
Soon followed by an all-time favorite: