Here’s another image of Tawaret. I’m 98% convinved it is her.
There are two things that do not match up though.
The statue is wearing a loin cloth.
All the images I’ve seen, from google images, she does not wear a loincloth.
The statue looks male.
Tawaret is female albeit with very droopy boobs.
I’ll say it again: It’s Ra.
Richard Alpert is Ra.
No one has ever heard of Tawaret. Everyone has heard of Ra.
Scupper’s Law of Television Mythology only allows for Six Egyptian Gods*:
Ra
Anubis
Osiris
Isis
Set
Thoth
Tawaret didn’t even make the callbacks, much less the final team, and even Osiris and Isis are on thin ice, due to their lack of animal heads.
Lost, though a fine show, has never really had much of an interest in fine details, particularly when they don’t help advance the plot. Just ask any of the nameless 815 survivors we’ve seen whittled away over several seasons. The show deals mainly in archetypes:
Doctor Jack
Scoundrel Sawyer
Mystery Woman Kate
Spiritual Seeker Locke
Everyman in Amazing Circumstances Hurley
Tortured Soul Sayid
etc.
No house painters on Flight 815. No advertising executives or retired landscapers. Those guys are the red shirts (at best – some red shirts have been somewhat specific, like the late, great Mr. Arzt).
** Stargate SG-1 is an exception, but not a notable one, because it’s lame.*
What I think he means is that they can’t change where they have been or how they got to where they are. They can think that they are trying to change something, as Daniel does with young Charlotte, but it ultimately it won’t matter. Everything they do, they have done, and has already been accounted for.
Imagine the main original timeline, the one we are seeing and the one that the real world operates on, as straight line. At the point that the flashes begin draw a loop in that line; this is the Losties’ timeline. Nothing that happened before, or on, that loop can be changed. However, anything beyond the point that that loop starts, and ultimately, the end of the line can be shifted/changed.
The real world continues on its steady timeline, but at the flashes the Losties have gone off on a detour, the loop.
Desmond was “special” only because he was in the real world/post-loop time.
From our perspective the Losties are in the past, but, especially now since the flashes have stopped, no matter *when *they are, they are technically in the present. From a first person perspective, they are still on their own original timeline. The futures of these original timelines have not yet been revealed, but nothing can effect what has happened on them already. What can be effected(or changed, but then you get into the whole ‘free will v fate’ thing) is everything that happens after they started the jumps; i.e. this and last season’s off island stuff and the 316ers time.
The outcome of this coming war could be(or has been) affected by the Losties’ actions, but the actual effects can not really be seen until our(the audiences’) and the 316ers’ present and future; anything beyond the point that the loop started.
Their dopplegangers, the other ‘thems’ created during some of the flashes, might as well be shadows or trails. Or ghosts. They will follow the same paths, say the same things, and make the same choices that we have already seen them make. I suppose you could call them reruns.
Sort of like in Primer.
Does that make sense?
I completely agree with this.
There is also this from Ra’s wikipediaentry…
From there I clicked through to Osiris and Horus, then Seth and Anubis, and on and on; trying to pick up on who else might be represented by which Egyptian god. It’s kind of a fun exercise, but there are too many connections to multiple characters, but nothing as difinitive as R.A = Ra.
ETA: Though I think Locke *might *be Horus and Ben is Set; WAG though.
Sarcasm? Whoosh? “nothing as definitive”? … Unless you count, you know, the statue of a different goddess that they just showed in this episode…
Well it *IS *American TV after all. Don’t count on seeing any saggy boobies either!
Unless you saw a different episode than I did, you only saw the statue from the back and it didn’t look particularly female and there was nothing to indicate a hippo head, either. They haven’t “showed” you anything specific.
I don’t think it’s Anubis, either, for the record, despite what may or may not be visible ears. More likely, it’s just the flared back of the headdress. Another near-ironclad law of Egyptology on film is that Anubis’ image is always presented with a shiny black finish.
Nice user name 
No, what I meant was there is nothing definitive connecting any of the gods to any other specific character. If Richard is Ra, then which Lostie, Other, 316er, etc… is the statue suppose to be?
The statue(along with the Ankh necklace eyeliner comment) have put the LOST story within Egyptian mythology, but we still don’t even know what god the statue is.
I said Locke might be Horusbecause he “fuses”(?) with Ra. There is also this from wiki…
Locke has that scar on his eye from the crash and has “looked into the eye of the island”.
I said Ben might be Setbecause apparently there is a conflictbetween the him and Horus. As well as this…
Have fun connecting the charactersto the gods. Better make a snack while you’re at it though, it might take a while.
Has the purgatory theory officially been ruled out by the writers?
I still say Richard’s a robot.
Some of the Egyptian theories are compelling, but imho the eyeliner comment has nothing to do with the plot.
I think the eyeliner comment was a nod to us, the message-boarding-blogging-posting viewers. Just like a few of the “Red Shirts” who have died have been wearing…red shirts. The writers enjoy reading peoples reactions (pet names, inside jokes, WAGs, etc) to the shows and then writing some of them back into the dialogue.
Yes, multiple times to my recollection!
Richard Alpert may be Ra but that doesn’t mean the statue is. Lost has certainly had plenty of easter eggs and obscure references, there’s no reason to think that they would shy away from a statue that isn’t one of the popular Gods. And Tawaret does fit into the whole island pregnancy things. And frankly, the statue looks more like Tawaret than any other comparison I’ve seen so far. It’s holding ankhs in both hands in a similar fashion, and has the same ears and ‘hat’. We haven’t seen a whole bunch of Ra symbology on the island so far, just generic hieroglyphics.
As far as no house painters… the characters aren’t any more archetypal or less specific than any other fiction. You can take any character in any fictional work and arbitrarily characterize them, but to do so you have to ignore many things about them. That says more about how you choose to label things than about how the character has actually been portrayed. While initially the tabula rasa effect of suddenly being on an island with strangers gave some of the islanders an aura of enhancement, through their flashbacks we see their true nature and their complicated histories and less than straightforward paths.
Sometime in the future, a drunken Horace will steal the statue as a prank. It will end up in a compromising position with the submarine, before it eventually sinks into the bay.
Apparently picnicking without a license is a capital offense in Otherland…!
Oh, and on the note of the ancient statue… Has anybody ever counted Richard Alpert’s toes?
According to Lostpedia, Olivia is his wife (or was, perhaps). But according to IMDB, they just listed her as “Olivia the Teacher”. Anybody remember if it was Olivia that was in the car with Horace when he pulled over and helped Ben’s dad when Ben was born?
Speaking of which, I think that pillar of light thing was inconsistent – at least Locke’s explanation of it. A few episodes ago, he said it was when he was banging on the hatch (“Why did you do this… to me?!!”) and the light came on. But when that happened, there was no strong light pillar shooting into the sky – the hatch window just lit up with a soft glow.
The time that the pillar of light DID happen (back in season 2) was after they’d already dynamited the hatch door, and Kate was climbing down the rope, held by Locke. The pillar of light suddenly came on, then when it went off Kate was no longer on the rope.
I already figure it’s clear enough that the Ajira 316 crash/landing was some point after the flashes started and the freighter sank. Largely because:
While jumping around, Sawyer and Co. ended up back at the camp. The Zodiac from the freighter was gone, but the longboat with the Ajira water bottle was there on the beach instead. We know this was later than the start of flashes, because the camp was there, but had been ransacked and destroyed (and it was still okay when the flashes started).
Ajira 316 lands on Other-traz. The pilot and some woman took off in one of the longboats. I would guess that this was the longboat that landed at the camp (with the empty water bottle in it) back on Island Central.
As for who destroyed the camp… or who took the Zodiac… or who was shooting at them from another longboat…? Who knows?
I’m hoping that Lapidus at least was the one who traded off the longboat and snagged the Zodiac. That would at least get him around faster, from beach to beach…
Horus…Horace…
I do think the Egyptian angle is pretty darned compelling.
Given that it seems this mythology was worked out from day 1 (unlike Heroes…) it’s interesting to speculate on other mysteries we’ve seen.
For example, why were the children kidnapped at the beginning of season 1? What was so important about them?
I have a suspicion that we’re ultimately going to find out that the children had to be grabbed because they turn out to be the people who grabbed them or something. Maybe the ‘others’ are people sort of trapped in time. Maybe they remember crashing on the island and being kidnapped, then flashing back 30 years and growing up on the island - to eventually see themselves crash again and know that they have to kidnap their future selves so that history can be repeated. Or something like that.
It seems pretty compelling that the two skeletons had black and white stones, representing Rose and Bernard.
I don’t get all the discussion about when the 316 survivors are.
The O6(-1) disappeared from the plane. They flashed back in time to 1977–exactly when they would have been if they had never left. They’ve synced up with the Flashers. (Three years passed for each group, if you recall.) If R&B still survive they’re somewhere in '77 too. Sun and Sayid will turn up presently in the same past. (I made a funny! Get it?) Daniel must be around then too, since we saw him in a flashback to the Dharma-era. Miles is probably wandering around somewhere, talking with dead people. (Jacob?)
The rest of 316 didn’t flash at all–they just crashed. It’s 2008 for Locke and all of them. Dharma is long gone. The Others (who never flashed) are all back on the main Island in the vicinity of the temple, if they are following their last orders from Ben.
My questions are:
Where (when?) will the story go from here?
They can’t tell two seperate stories, 31 years apart, for the rest of the series, can they?
If not, how will the Losties get ‘Back To The Future’?
Miles is one of Sawyer’s security flunkies. We saw him in a van when Sawyer was looking for Juliet.
I think they’ll sync up at some point. We saw in the first episode this season that Daniel was working during the construction of the Orchid, when they discovered the donkey wheel. There’s also the “incident” that should be coming up soon in 1977 time. So, my guess is something like: Daniel figures out a way to turn the wheel that will send the losties back to their correct time frame. He turns it, and this causes the incident that keeps being mentioned, and Daniel is then off the island, so he can go build the Lamppost station. This might also explain why Eloise had no reaction when Desmond told her about Daniel’s message - she could have had contact with Daniel after he’s left the island this way.
Actually, Miles was in the van with Sawyer when they were heading out to bring Horace back from his drunken campaign against the trees.
I’m under the impression that the Lamppost station already exists. Hawking seemed to imply that this was how Dharma found the island in the first place. And perhaps it also must be used to plan the sub’s mainland trips?