SPOILERS AHEAD
You’re going to have to stick with me on this one… This is going to be a long post.
I said in my A Secret War post that I thought there were people on the outside that wanted to find members of The Dharma Initiative. I have a theory about why, and what’s really behind what The Others are doing.
First, let’s recap what we know for sure:
The Dharma Initiative has been working on something on the island for more than 20 years.
They’re REALLY well funded.
The Others are working on experiments which involve fertility.
They’ve recruited specialists in infertility (Juliette) to try and keep women who got pregnant while on the island alive, since they die before the third trimester.
They’ve found an island that is very difficult to find in conventional ways to do these experiments in secret, and they’re going to great lengths to keep people from finding out what exactly they’re doing.
We’ve heard over and over about The Others desire to get “Good People”.
The Others and some of the survivors of Flight 815 know that something about the island makes people heal faster.
We know that the helicopter pilot told Mikhail “I am not alone”.
I could go on with this, but you get the idea…
The thing that really jumped out at me after finding out that the helicopter pilot told Mikhail “I am not alone” was that the pilot was making an attempt to scare Mikhail, in the way that we’ve seen in other shows in movies. Nearly every time you’ve seen someone that’s dying in enemy territory, you tell them, “There will be more after I’m gone”, and things like that.
So, what possible reason would there be for a group on the outside to be so concerned about what The Others were doing on the island that they wanted to get to the island in the first place? That group must really want to stop, or at least expose, what’s happening on the island.
It’s also been very odd that The Others have gone to really great lengths to disguise what they’re doing. Here you have an island that no one can find, and when strangers crash on the island, they feel the need to disguise themselves and keep the crash survivors away by scaring them.
And it turns out that the experiments they’ve been doing have been to make sure that women that get pregnant on the island live through the pregnancy. Why would they hide something like that? Wouldn’t you really want to be sure you could get all the help you could?
I was thinking all of this over and I realized that the reason The Others are so desperate to find a way to keep the women pregnant is that they HAVE to do it, in order for the rest of their plan to work.
The Others’ Plan
Well, take into consideration that they’ve found a place where people heal really quickly. We’ve been told there’s no cancer. What if they’ve figured out a way to harness whatever does that on the island? That would explain why Ben could tell Juliette with such certainty that Juliette’s sister would survive. Furthermore, it could even be that it would make people live a LONG time. (I know, we haven’t seen anything about that yet, but stick with me here).
Also take into consideration that there’s something on the island killing people who have been “bad”. Sure there have been some deaths that were accidental (Boone), but there sure have been deaths where people who have been bad on the outside were killed for that very reason (Eko).
Now, say that you wanted to rid the world of all evil and make sure that all the good people lived. In fact, you could even rid the world of all disease, have people live healthy lives, and not worry about anyone “bad” harming anyone.
You find an island, and you have both parts: You have something that would be able to go through the population getting rid of “bad” people, and you have a cure for every known disease.
But you discover the “downside” of curing people would be that with that “cure” is women couldn’t survive a pregnancy. That’s a pretty big downside.
You’d REALLY want to fix that kind of problem, because if you could, you’d have what you consider to be the perfect society.
Would you want to hide that? You bet. Would that be something everyone would want? No way.
If The Others are really in the final stages of unleashing their plan to create a Utopian society, people opposed to what’s going on would want to find them to stop them. That’s why I think The Others have been so secretative about what they’ve been working on. If they can find a way to make women survive that pregnancy, they’ll be able to create their Utopian world.
Now, whether this island is Atlantis or another mythical place that had a perfect society that ended up dying out because they couldn’t figure out the whole pregnancy issue, I don’t know at this point.
I think all signs point that this is what The Others are trying to achieve.
Update
Back in October of 2005, I wrote a theory about Lost. In there, I wrote that I thought nanobots were used by Christian Shepard to cure Jack’s patient, the woman that eventually became his wife. While it’s not nanobots, having a vaccine from the island does fit in well with my theory that Christian Shepard was working with Dharma on testing the cure. He was the head of the staff at the hospital, and would have access to everything. Including the woman that Jack didn’t think he’d be able to cure during the surgery on her spine, only to find out later that she was cured. If Christian Shepard were working with The Others/Dharma/Whoever-They-Are, he could have been the one that really cured her with a vaccine from the island.
Furthermore, who better to be in on wanting a Utopian society than someone who profited from the war industry… Alvar Hanso.
