Fun article clipped from today's Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. It pretty much sums us the addiction that is "Lost". See below.
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Lost in the moment
By HEATHER SVOKOS
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/entertainment/12940791.htm
Posted on Wed, Oct. 19, 2005
I've fallen down the hatch.
Locke, stock and barrel.
And it's weird, because I'm not that person. I get sucked into the occasional TV show, but I'm never the one who gets swallowed up in the mythology, the one who scours the online message boards for theories and connections and screen captures.
But then Lost crash-landed into my living room, and I became an object of my own ridicule.
The ABC hit drama tells the many-tangled stories of the survivors of a plane crash, who are stranded on a mysterious island. Their cohabitants include:
Polar bears (yes, polar bears on a tropical island; oh, what does it mean?)
Unseen monsters apparently the size of 18-wheelers
Unidentified beings referred to as The Others
An iron hatch that leads to a groovy 1970s pad filled with books, food and Mama Cass LPs
And a half-crazed, gun-toting French woman. (In a pear tree.)
While ABC was busy last season feeding the hype machine of Desperate Housewives, Lost was busily unfolding layer after layer of story and back story, tiny detail after tiny detail. And while Lost is still a few paces behind Housewives in the Nielsen ratings, the island show has all but eclipsed the women of Wisteria Lane in water-cooler buzz. (C'mon, do we really care who Alfre Woodard has shackled in her basement? I don't -- unless it turns out he was on Oceanic Flight 815.)
Lost is an entire island of unanswered questions, inhabited by people who all have their own traumatic or spooky back stories. Because of the flashback device, the layers of storytelling seem endless; and with it, the writers have discovered a cycle that's key to the show's addictiveness: Raise questions, answer a few, then raise new ones that cleverly contradict what you thought you knew.
Take Locke (Terry O'Quinn), the group's hunter/philosopher/former paraplegic. Last season we watched, in flashback, as he was dumped by a phone sex operator called Helen, with whom he deludedly thought he was having a "relationship." Poor, pathetic Locke. But this season, we meet a Helen (Katey Sagal) who actually was his girlfriend.
So naturally, we have questions.
The first one: Whaaa? Then: Is she the same as phone-sex Helen? Did Locke's hateful father hire Helen to keep Locke out of his life?
This is where you turn to the Lost online community: the fan sites, the message boards, and even the artfully clever sites launched by ABC and the show's creators. Yes, they're in on this, too.
And before you know it, those people are feeding your fathomless hunger for knowledge and conspiracy theories and freeze frames and streaming video, and it goes on and on until you're in so deep that your eagerness has turned to anxiety and your temples start to throb and you vow that you will give yourself water breaks and at the very least you will crawl back out on Wednesday when it's time for the next episode. Annnd ... repeat.
If you haven't delved into this land of Lost arcana yet, let us help sort some of this out.
Get a clue, or two, or three
One of the most popular endeavors among Lostphiles is searching for "clues" in the show. A clue can be an actual clue, or a weird, unknown character connection. This obsession has even infected USA Today, which last week started soliciting "clues" from readers. Creators have tossed in a ton of these clues for the fanatical. Call it TiVo candy. A sampling:
In Hurley's dream in the hatch, he's drinking a carton of milk. The "missing child" on the carton is Walt, who is currently MIA on the show. (http://lost.cubit.net/pics/waltMissing.jpg)
Hurley's boss at Mr. Cluck's Chicken Shack was named Randy. So was Locke's at the box company; they were both played by the same actor, Billy Ray Gallion. (http://lost.cubit.net/pics/randyvsrandy.jpg) Also: After Hurley hit the lottery, one of the properties he bought was a box company.
In the episode where we learn the true nature of Boone and Shannon's relationship, a flashback has Boone making a complaint at an Australian police station. In the background, Sawyer is seen struggling with police officers.
The shark that stalks Sawyer and Michael on the raft is emblazoned with a logo for Dharma Initiatives, the research project responsible for the hatch.
Policeman, schmoliceman
Thank Lost for inflating the sales of an obscure 1967 book called The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. It made an appearance among the belongings of hatch-dweller Desmond. Before the episode even aired, Lost writers were blabbing to the press, saying that those familiar with the novel would "have a lot more ammunition" in examining the show's plotlines. The book is set in a two-dimensional, Byzantine police station where the rooms keep connecting to each other -- it's eternity. (Like, perhaps, our mysterious door-happy hatch?) Also, the narrator is a murderer who keeps reliving the same set of events over and over. Readers learn at the end of the book that he's been . . . dead the whole time. Cue spooky sound effects, then reject connection as a shameless red herring planted by writers.
Come again?
Rousseau: The woman Hurley refers to as "French chick," found the source of the numbers' transmission. After the rest of Rousseau's expedition was killed off, she erased that recording and replaced it with her own, which has now been repeating on a loop for 16 years. Translated from French, her transmission goes, in part: "If someone can hear this, they are dead. Please help us. I'll try to go to the black rock. It killed them. It killed them all. . . . It is outside, it is outside and Brandon took the keys. . . . Please help us. They are dead, they are all dead. Help us. They are dead."
Walt: The young son of Michael was kidnapped at sea in last season's finale. On this season's premiere, Walt (or his apparition?) visits Lostaway Shannon and speaks an unintelligible message to her. Lostphiles figured out how to reverse Walt's message: "Don't push the button, the button is bad." The Execute button on the computer in the hatch?
Airplane radio: Toward the end of last season, Boone climbed into the cockpit of the crashed plane, attempting to send out a message over the radio. When Boone said: "Hello. We're the survivors of Flight 815," a male voice crackled back over. It was barely audible, but close captioning reveals it: "WE are the survivors of Flight 815."
Where the bleep are they?
Last season, the theories swirled about this: It's purgatory. They're all dead. It's a dream. And they were all discounted by the show's creators, who insisted there was a reasonable explanation. Once inside the hatch this season, we've come closer to an answer. According to an instructional film inside, we learn that the underground facility was created in 1970 -- a "large-scale communo-research compound," where scientists were to study meteorology, psychology, parapsychology, zoology and the island's "unique electromagnetic fluctuations." Which may be how Locke's paralysis was reversed.
A few other theories being bandied about:
It's an elaborate, Hollywood-scale reality show -- Survivor meets The Truman Show (because the "contestants" aren't in on it. Or are they?)
Genetic Mirror Theory. Plug this one into Google and you'll find a wild thesis, supposedly supported by a 1988 book by a French mathematician named Marseille Rousseau. The theory: Everyone in the world has an exact twin, but you never encounter this person, "by laws of probability and other natural occurring phenomena." A series of numbers explains this theory, and they all have to do with -- you betcha -- 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42. (8 is for the eighth continent, the only place in the world you could meet your twin; 23 is the number of years apart you and your twin are, etc.)
There is no such book, and the theory's been debunked as a hoax, but the question is: Who put it out there? Perhaps those dastardly Lost writers, trying to throw us off-track?
Did you know?
Originally, the show's central character was going to be convict Kate (Evangeline Lilly); she was to get her strength from her encounter with Jack (Matthew Fox), who was to be killed off in the pilot. Creators discussed casting Michael Keaton as Jack.
The production budget for the two-hour pilot was $12 million, reportedly the most expensive pilot in history. Thinking he had "the next ER, ABC Entertainment Chairman Lloyd Braun greenlighted the show, to much ridicule. Before the pilot aired, Braun was fired; the show went on to become one of the network's biggest hits in years.
Fun with surfing
How to get lost most productively.
The Hanso Foundation (www.thehansofoundation.org/dharma.html) A recent addition to this ABC site makes it the most drool-worthy for die-hards: It now contains a flash video of the entire Dharma Initiative film, where you'll pick up on many things. (Notice the polar bears? The film's host has a prosthetic arm?)
Oceanic Air ( www.oceanic-air.com) From the show's writing team, this looks an awful lot like an Orbitz search page; if you let your mouse linger over the president's message to the right of the page, you'll see some "hidden" text: a distress call.
Fan sites:
Lost TV ( www.lost-tv.com) Serious message board action and one of the most satisfying fan sites for clue hunters.
Lost-Media ( www.lost-media.com) Interesting connections and the like, but move quickly to the site's photo gallery, where you'll find a treasure trove of frame grabs -- is the bearded researcher in the Dharma film the same guy who kidnapped Walt? -- that might just blow your mind.
Inside the numbers
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.
Are these numbers cursed? Maybe, maybe not. Personally, I think the show's writers just drop them in wherever they can so they can watch us all slowly come unglued. Either way, they are one of Lost's greatest recurring themes.
We first notice them: through Hurley, the show's big, bushy-headed major "dude" in residence. He first heard the numbers from a fellow psychiatric patient, who repeated them over and over. Hurley used them to win the lottery, but now he thinks they're cursed, because bad things have plagued his family ever since. (grandfather drops dead, lightning strikes at his funeral, Mom's new house catches on fire).
Before that: The sequence of numbers was rumbling at least decades ago, when it was being broadcast from the island's radio transmitter to Navy sailors monitoring transmissions out of the Pacific Ocean. Sixteen years ago, the numbers also beckoned French woman Danielle Rousseau and her expedition to the island.
Where else they appear:
During last season's finale, Hurley runs to catch his flight (Oceanic 815), and passes a girl's soccer team. The numbers on the backs of their jerseys are 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42.
They're engraved on the door of the hatch.
They're the code that must be entered every 108 minutes onto the computer inside the hatch.
They're printed on the medicine vials in the hatch.
Fun with math: 108 is the sum of the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42.
Take 108, subtract it from Hurley's net worth ($156 million), and you have 48, the original number of survivors on the island.
Related numbers: The Lostaways' flight number was Oceanic 815. This number pops up everywhere in the characters' flashbacks:
During the robbery Kate's involved in, she wants access to safe deposit box No. 815.
Charlie gets a job selling a photocopier called the C815.
Before the suicide bombing mission, Sayid walks out of a building with the number 815 on the door.
Locke points out shopping aisles 8 and 15 to his mother (Swoosie Kurtz).
In a complete coincidence, several of the men of Lost appeared on the cover of an Entertainment Weekly magazine last April. It was issue No. 815. And I am totally freaking out right now.
