Category: Television

LOST: More Hieroglyphics

A couple of people have asked me where I found the information on Egyptian Hieroglyphics that lead me to the conclusions in my previous post about the LOST counter. I did all that research via Google. Here are some of the pages:

The Egyptian Vulture
Hieroglyphics!
Hieroglyphic Dictionary
Duke Papyrus Archive
Hieroglyphs.net

These are just some of the sites that I looked at. There are quite a few others on the Web that might help you draw your own conclusions about what the symbols mean.

One of the things I didn’t mention before was that apparently there is some controversy surrounding Hieroglyphics found in Australia, and whether they’re real or not. Since some of LOST centers around Australia, it brings up a lot of interesting questions.

There have been a lot of theories about what the hieroglyphics on the “countdown” timer in the hatch mean. The thing that occurred to me wasn’t so much what they meant, but why there were hieroglyphics symbols there in the first place. Doesn’t it seem a little odd that of all thins, Egyptian hieroglyphics would show up on the timer? Why not words? Why any message at all?

Dave Barry and “24”

If you like Dave Barry and the show “24”, you should head on over to his blog on the nights they show new episodes. On the nights Dave is home, he posts updates while watching the show, and people make comments while watching the show live.

A couple of weeks ago, Dave asked if folks could write summaries of the show, and I started posting some of my own. A few people over there liked ’em, so I thought that this week I’d post my entry here:

Super quick summary:

3:00-4:00 – Jack gets a phone call from The Guy Previously Known as the Guy in the Dark Room, through Audrey at CTU. Jack gets into a gun fight on the roof of a building, no one calls the police over the machine gun fire, or the helicopter that’s flying around with black smoke after someone shoots at it. After all, this is LA, and this happens every day here.

Audrey works with Chloe to get information from the chip Jack gets from The Guy Previously Known As The Guy in the Dark Room. The Hobbit goes CRAZY looking for the One Ring, and SWEARS that Chloe and Audrey are keeping the information from him. He goes so crazy, he locks up Bilbo…er….Bill, when he thinks Bill, Chloe, and Audrey are working against him. He looks threatheningly at Edgar, who was eating a ho-ho.

In the meantime, the terrorists get a hold of the President, because it’s SUPER easy to get ahold of the president, (well, at least President Manilow), and ask him if they can pretty please have the motorcade route the Russian President is taking back to the airport. Mrs. Manilow hears this and completely freaks out. She’s never been in a motorcade. She jumps into the limo at the end of the episode. As she drives away, it occurs to her she heard something about terrorists and a motorcade.

Body counts:
A number of people get shot, a living room in a video game commercial gets shot, Stylish gets knifed by yet ANOTHER terrorist (they must pay these actors per episode), who’s apparently the REAL bad guy, at least until next week. Jack shoots at least two people, and brings down a black helicopter by shooting at it.

Dave, in answer to your question about what “the twist we wouldn’t believe”…. I think it’s that Jack actually got to shoot at people this episode.

Be sure and check out this week’s “24” action on Dave Barry’s Blog.

LOST: Egyptian Hieroglyphics

On LOST last night, the episode entitled “One of Them” came to a climax where the timer hit zero and a partial display of Egyptian hieroglyphics was displayed.

It hasn’t even been 24 hours since the show as I write this, and someone has posted they’ve discovered what the symbols might mean. Check out this picture of the LOST timer glyphs posted by “onehundredeight” over on http://lost.cubit.net.

I saw this post, and took a look at a number of hieroglyphics sites on the web to see if I could get independent confirmation about what those symbols mean.

First of all, heiroglyphics can be read in several different ways. The biggest question is whether to read these symbols from right to left, or left to right. This is actually pretty easy to determine, even if you don’t have experience with hieroglyphics (and I certainly don’t). The direction the symbols are facing is the direction they should start from. So, for these symbols, you have to read them from left to right.

One of the tricky things about hieroglyphics is that even one symbol change can change the meaning of the phrase. Since we didn’t see the entire set of five glyphs, we have to keep that in mind.

Another thing to notice is that the first three symbols were on a black background, and the fourth and fifth symbols are on a red background. This may mean that there are two glyph phrases. Without the second symbol (which was never revealed), it’s difficult to know if the hidden glyph would make two distinct phrases that make sense.

The first symbol means “to cause”. The last symbol means “enemy” or “death”. Seems like a slam dunk, right? There are a couple of symbols that aren’t used, and like I said, those symbols are important.

I wasn’t able to determinate what the third symbol meant, but the fourth symbol was “the vulture”. One of the heiroglyphics sites (and I’m sorry, I don’t remember which one) described the Egyptian vulture as a bird that will repeated try and open eggs by flying over them with a rock and dropping the rock. Needless to say, this doesn’t work very well, but they continue until they succeed.

So, if we take those two symbols alone, could they mean “drop death”? “Drop death”, as in a bomb? Think about it for a minute. They’re in a hatch near a sealed chamber that’s highly magnetic. There are blast doors in the hatch. Sayid said that there may be nuclear material behind that thick wall of concrete.

Could “drop death” mean “drop a nuclear weapon”? Sure, it’s a variation on “cause death”….but, that’s my theory.

I think the real question that people are overlooking here is not what the heiroglyphics mean, but….. What the heck are Egyptian Heiroglyphics doing on that counter in the first place?

Update 02/23/06 – Read More about the Lost Heiroglyphics

Update 08/22/06 – According to the LOST writer’s themselves, the meaning is “Underworld”. The writers revealed this at this year’s San Diego Comic Con.

LOST: Has Walt met Alex?

Michael’s been gone for two episodes now, and is trying to find Walt. I’ve been hoping that Walt will be back soon, because we might get a better idea of what The Others have been thinking when they tried to grab Walt.

We saw the bearded man (the guy Sawyer called “Zeke”, and that the producers call “Mr. Friendly”), ask Alex to bring Kate to him. Could Walt have met Alex? Might Alex try and leave with Walt to go back to the LOST camp? That sure would make Danielle a larger part of the show.

LOST: Hanso and the DeGroots

Here’s another LOST theory I’ve been thinking about.

Hanso and the DeGroots start working together, Hanso for some other
reason than he’s not telling the DeGroots. He finances the
construction of the hatches on the island so they can be used as
observation posts for the “perfect society” ideas the DeGroots have.
The observers keep in the hatch, saying they’re just going to observe
what’s going on.

The experiment starts, only to have everything go completely berserk
once the people on the island itself figure out they’re victims of
whatever Hanso had planned. Maybe he found out about the black
smoke, and wants to weaponize it, or something like that. The
people in the hatch take injections so that they can’t be taken over
by whatever Danielle was referring to. I remember her saying
something about not wanting whatever happened to the rest of her group
getting loose in the “real world” if they were ever rescued.
(Possibly, “infected” by the black smoke?)

The Others have figured out they have some kind of defense using
people that the black smoke won’t mess around with, and that’s why
they’re grabbing people.

LOST: The Countdown to Zero

Well, it looks like next week (Feb. 15th) will be a very interesting episode. In the previews, it appears that the counter reaches zero.

If you’ve seen the preview, it’s a bit of a shock…. Well, it was to me because I wasn’t expecting anything like that until closer to the end of the season.

In any event, if you look carefully, you’ll see that the counter in the preview is NOT the same counter has has been shown in the room with the computers, and the button. Is there more than one counter in the hatch? Is this another red herring, along the lines of seeing Jin speak English to Hurley?

Let’s assume for a moment that counter really does hit zero…. What will happen?

I’m going to make a couple of guesses here. First, if it’s just Locke and Jack down there, I think the counter will hit zero….and nothing will happen. Jack will turn to Locke, say something “Well, John, nothing happened. This was a waste of time….” …and then all hell breaks loose.

Personally, I’d rather see something like this happen: The counter hits zero, and someone else in the hatch sees Locke and Jack near the computers just as the blast doors go down, cutting them off from the rest of the LOST group. The show would end there, and then the following week would focus entirely on Jack and Locke trying to get out. By the end of the show, they’d find their way out… only to find that the LOST camp is empty. Then they’d have to find out where the rest of the group went.

Should be interesting to see what they’ve planned.

Whatever happens, it’s likely that camp life won’t be as relaxed as before. We might see Desmond again, or we might end up getting a closer look at The Others.

We’ll see soon enough.

LOST: Widmore Construction

Last couple of podcasts, the producers talked about the building in
the background after Charlie walks out of the soundstage where the
commercial was being filmed. The producers said to watch for an
Easter Egg (the name on the building). This week they said it was
hard to see, but it had a “Widmore Construction” on it. They didn’t
say what it meant, but they said to write it down and watch for it.

Michael’s in the construction business….. Maybe he worked for
Widmore Construction?

By the way, Widmore.com and WidmoreConstruction.com have already been registered as domains, in case you were thinking of doing so yourself. They’re not affliated with ABC, they’re probably going to be fan sites, along the lines of Mr. Cluck’s.