Category: Television

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.

LOST during the Super Bowl

I’m watching the Super Bowl right now… It’s halftime and The Stones are on right now.

Right before they came on, ABC ran a LOST commercial using the song “Addicted to Love” adapted to be “Addicted to LOST”. I hope they run it again… it was a fun commercial!

LOST: Fire+Water

Spoilers ahead…

What was THAT all about? Charlie has had a problem for a few episodes now watching how Locke is interacting with Claire, and feeling jealous. I think between Michael going off to find Walt, Sayid vs Ana Lucia, and Charlie vs Locke, we’re seeing the beginnings of how the survivors might eventually split. Charlie has definately become an outsider.

I thought it was interesting that a couple of things people on the web have been discussing were mentioned on the show. First, Hurley called the people in the tail section “tailies”, which seems to be the general nickname people have given them on the web. The second was that while he and Libby were washing clothes, Libby said something about the washer and dryer being a lot newer than the rest of the things down in the hatch.

I’d assumed that the newer looking washer and dryer were just a continuity error on the show, but since the characters mentioned it, there might be more to it. Everyone’s been assuming that people have been down in that hatch for a long time with no contact with the outside world…. now we know that probably isn’t true.

Other random thoughts:

It surprised me that Locke didn’t destroy the statues he took from Charlie, but put them in the vault instead.

I think the reason Hurley recognized Libby was not because he stepped on her foot (he was at the front of the plane, and she was at the back!, but because she was a nurse or possibly a patient in the hospital he was in.

Eko was marking trees, I think because he intended to build a chapel there. From the way he was sifting through the ashes after the fire, it looks like Charlie burned the area that Eko marked.

In the previews, we see Sun taken away. It looks like The Others are going to try and get Jin to go after Sun, which will cause him to leave the group in the same why that Michael was coaxed away.

LOST: “The Hunting Party”

SPOILERS AHEAD! Don’t read any further until you’ve seen this week’s episode of LOST, “The Hunting Party”

A few things about tonight’s show:

1) Alex (The French’s Woman’s child) brought Kate over when the bearded man called Alex by name.
2) The Bearded Man’s quote: “From the dawn of our species, Man has been blessed with curiosity. ” is a quote from Alvar Hanso, on the Hanso Foundation website
3) In the preview, Hurley asks Libby “Do I know you from somewhere?” Libby is a clinical psychologist…. Maybe Hurley saw her at the institution he was committed to?

Nanotechnology, the black swarm, and the Others

If you haven’t read my posting A Theory about LOST, you should probably go read that before you continue reading this page.

In the “23rd Psalm”, we got a really good look at the monster that the crash survivors have been hearing (and seeing) on the island. So far, the only two people that have really stared down the “black swarm” are Locke and Eko.

So, what the heck is that “black swarm”? The nanotechnology theory I posted about previously explains this. The monster appears to be smoke, but is actually made of many tiny machines that communicate with each other.

The idea of many tiny machines communicating with each other isn’t all that far-fetched. Research Smart Dust at Berkeley, and at companies like Dust Networks and Crossbow is being done right now. A few years ago, I worked with some of the Smart Dust “motes”. (I just worked with them, not on the actual project itself…just wanted to make that clear). They’re about the size of a quarter and have a tiny radio built into them. Each “mote” communicates with the other motes within it’s radio range to communicate the data it’s tracking. In the case of the devices I used, they communicated the temperature. The motes nearest to the base station communicate all the data from the rest of the “swarm” to that base station. The base station can then do whatever it wants with the data.

Now, extrapolate the idea of smart dust out in every direction. Make the motes as small as real dust (the size of machine in nanotechnology), increase the processing power, really soup up the software the things run, and it’s not all that far fetched to think that the smoke monster we saw would be possible. All they would need is some sort of propulsion.

I think that’s really what the monster is. A swarm of nanotech machines. “Nanites”, if you want to use a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” term. They’re moving around the island, and they’re smart. Or at least they appear that way. They could just be following their programming and have no real intelligence of their own. Right now, that’s my bet.

Eko stared the swarm down. While the swarm was in front of Eko, we saw a number of images from Eko’s past flash through the swarm itself. It appeared to read Eko’s mind. That could be just the “sci-fi” part of LOST that doesn’t need to be explained, it could be that it read Eko’s electrical brain impulses….however it did it doesn’t matter really. The main point is, it flashed scenese from Eko’s life and then moved on. Presumably, this is the same thing that happened to Locke. What was the swarm doing?

I think it was assessing whether or not Eko was an “enemy”. A enemy of what? ….Well, that’s the question. An enemy to the island? An enemy to something it’s trying to protect? Is it just deciding that anything that’s “hostile” is an enemy?

Well, that very well could be. The pilot was in a military-like uniform that the swarm could have taken as the identifying mark of someone that’s “hostile”.

Say for a moment that all that is true. There are people on the island that the swarm would kill (or worse… more on that in a minute) if it got a chance, and there are people on the island that the swarm would leave alone. If the swarm won’t touch anyone it doesn’t perceive as a threat, the vulnerable people on the island would surround themselves with people that are “safe”. I think that’s a reason they could be taking all the children. What could be safer than a child? Everyone assumes Walt was taken for his “psychic” abilities that everyone think he has; it could just be he was taken because he was a child.

So, what could be worse than being killed by that thing? I think it’s also likely that the swarm might have the ability to take people over, based on what Danielle said to Sayid (see my previous posting ).
In the comments someone asked why the word “quarantine” was inside the hatch, instead of the outside. If the swarm was able to infect people, that would be the reason. It also explains the reason Desmond has been taking the injections. If Desmond spent any time at all outside (gathering fruit, other food, wood, etc), he’d take injections to prevent the swarm from infecting him.