Thoughts (A Lot of Them) on Lost
I watch Lost. I’m hooked on Lost. The break has given me plenty of time to think and I have a few comments and obviously your thoughts are welcome as well. Unless you’re going to tell me to stop thinking about Lost, in which case I’ll cry and start cutting with a dull razor sporting your name on it.
If you want to read (a ton of stuff about) my thoughts on Lost, just follow the jump. There aren’t any spoilers proper, unless you’re not caught up on everything that has already aired.
The main thing on my mind, since all of season two so far has glossed over it, is the numbers. 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. Now right off the bat we know there are a lot of ways to interpret the numbers, but even that detailed assortment of clues glosses over the idea of the numbers actually being latitude and longitude plots. And of course, when you add them up, you get 108. Apparently, Desmond thought of this, too.
So let’s plot the latitude 4.815 and longitude 162.342. As you probably already know, they are located in the Pacific ocean northeast of Australia. It just so happens that the island of Palmyra Atoll resides at 5.52 minutes North, 162.6, West, (keep in mind that is the plotted center of Palmyra) placing it in near the very center of the Pacific ocean or about 1000 nautical miles south-southwest of Hawaii in the North Pacific Ocean, or about one-half of the way from Hawaii to American Samoa. You’ve probably figured out where I’m going with this, so let’s assume for a moment that it’s possible the castaways are on Palmyra island. I’ve considered the fact that the latitude is off by a few degrees (the numbers would have the castaways a bit further south), but the island itself is smack dab in the middle of 162 longitude - that’s for sure. In order to run with this theory, I’m not going to stress about the numbers plotting being approximately one degree off of Palmyra. Who knows, maybe the writers have a plan for that explanation. Besides, I’ve already seen a few different articles online disputing the exact location of Palmyra latitude-wise.
Anyway. Let’s say the castaways are on Palmyra. What does Palmyra look like, you ask?
First thing I noticed was that it essentially sits right on the equator. Besides that, the climate and terrain is is pretty consistent with Lost’s terrain. Apparently it harbors a ton of coconuts though, and I’ve never seen anyone eating a coconut on the show. Eh.
Anyway, some quick and interesting facts (and myths) about Palmyra for you to chew on:
- Palmyra is owned by the United States and is essentially a nature conservatory.
- Theisland was used as a naval air facility during World War II in the Pacific. Palmyra also became a base of operations for air attacks against Japan. As a result, military relics can be found in abundance there such as old gun emplacements, ammunition and fuel dumps, abandoned war equipment, machine-gun bunkers, underground tunnels and buildings, as well as what is left of the old landing strip, lending a timeless and ghostly feeling to the place.
Primarily, Palmyra functioned as a refueling station during World War II for long-range air patrols against Japan and extended submarines missions in the Pacific. The island itself was attacked only once when a Japanese submarine surfaced offshore and began shelling the beach and a dredging barge with it’s deck gun. A five-inch gun battery on the island drove the submarine off.
Hal Horton, a former Navy officer was stationed on Palmyra from 1942 to 1944 and had this to say about the island:
“Once one of our patrol planes went down near the island. We searched and searched but didn’t find so much as a bolt or piece of metal. It was weird. Like they’d dropped off the edge of the earth. Another time, a plane took of from the runway, climbed to a couple hundred feet, and turned in the wrong direction. They were supposed to go north and they went south instead. It was broad daylight. We never could figure it out. There were two men aboard that plane. We never saw them again. We had some very bad luck on that island. Old salts in the Pacific called it the Palmyra Curse. (The island)…is very small. You (could) fly over it at ten thousand feet and not see it if there (were) a few clouds in the sky. Once we heard a plane over head trying to find us, but he crashed in the drink before he could find the runway. We didn’t get to the poor guy fast enough. Sharks found him first.”
In 1974, the grisly double murder of a sailing couple that became the subject of And the Sea Will Tell took place on Palmyra. The evidence at the subsequent trail for murder showed that Mac and Muff Graham of San Diego, who had ventured to Palmyra for an extended stay of up to a year, were probably killed for their expensive sailboat, the Sea Wind and the food stores it contained by an ex-convict who had also taken up residence on the island.
- In 1855, a whaling ship was reported to have been wrecked on Palmyra’s dangerous reefs, but attempts to locate the ship and it’s crew turned up nothing.
- “On a nautical chart, Palmyra is but a tiny speck in the middle of the mass of blue that represents the Pacific Ocean. The island lies well off of the major shipping lanes for vessels plying the Asian/American run and is geographically perhaps one of the remotest places on earth and one of the last few truly uninhabited islands left in the world.” This isn’t entirely true: there are 4 to 20 Nature Conservancy staff, US Fish and Wildlife staff (July 2005 est.) I would assume for the show’s purposes, they’re either ignoring the island’s inclusion in the U.S. territories and its subsequent inhabitation of it, or perhaps Lost doesn’t take place in the time we assume it does.
- It is privately owned, but administered by the U.S.
Engineer David Johnson soaks in the island’s sole bathtub. Water is furnished by a jury-rigged line leading from a concrete catchment basin, at upper right, installed by a U.S. military unit during World War II. The legendary soaking spot was eagerly anticipated by transient cruising sailors short on fresh water and grown grungy during long, tiring passages. Johnson, a patent attorney with a sideline in electronics, set up a communications system for the atoll, a crucial service for pilots homing in on this tiny speck of terrain in the vast Pacific.
So, we know for a fact that the U.S. used Palmyra during World War II for a variety of things. We also know that in 1988, Danielle’s team intercepted the numbers being transmitted repeatedly. Numbers also tells us that U.S. Navy short wave transmission monitoring station where Leonard Simms and Sam Toomie worked intercepted the numbers as well. Where would then numbers come from?
In the episode where we meet Danielle (or is the episode where she takes Aaron?), she tells Sayid that she went to the black rock and changed the transmission to function as her distress call. She found the source of the original, number-repeating transmission in that area - an area we have only seen briefly when Jack et al recover the dynamite. What we do know is that the numbers transmission was coming from the island, and it had been repeating for at least 16 years. Simms and Toomie weren’t old enough for World War II, but we do know they were stationed in Kalgoorlie (Simms says that’s where Toomey heard the numbers, and the widow Toomie says that’s where they lived when they won the bean-counting contest).
Kalgoorlie serves as a weather radar station (lat -30 60 00, longitude 121 45 00). There are lots of military posts in Australia that function with the help of the U.S. military (the Pine Gap spy station being the most notable), and indeed there is one in/near Kalgoorlie. Facilities that harbor U.S. military posts are notoriously hard to find on the web photo-wise (for good reasons), but there is plenty of information online to back all of this up. There was also HMAS Kalgoorlie, which served as a rescue ship during WWII and operated in support of Operation LIZARD III, a clandestine Services Reconnaissance Department. The city of Kalgoorlie is on the west side of Australia, but the Navy ship operated out of the eastern shore, closer to our points of interest. Given that Toomey and Simms worked in Kalgoorlie (where there is a weather station picking up transmissions and obviously they were intercepting transmissions, even if infrequent), and we all know names are typically hints with the show, it’s possible the writers are hoping us internet nerds will follow the Kalgoorlie trail and discover that the Naval ship was involved with reconnaissance missions and WWII endeavors in the Pacific. It was out of commission long before Danielle landed on the island, but it’s entirely possible that it visited Palmyra during WWII, since it launched from the eastern shore of Australia and Palmyra was a operating base for the U.S. during that same time period.
So the idea that the Others were broadcasting the numbers puzzles me, and at this point I’m actually under the impression that we should believe the U.S. Navy actually began broadcasting the numbers during WWII. Either the numbers represented some sort of code, distress signal or message, and perhaps the others have been procreating and surviving on the island for so long, none of them remember where they came from: perhaps a lost or wrecked Navy ship (as one of my links suggests might have actually existed).
There is a history of short wave spy transmissions from the WWII time period, referred to as the Conet Project. In fact, you can order four discs full of transmissions and listen to them yourself.
Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a “one time pad†is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.
These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.
Not much is known about all the Conet stations (there are still functioning Numbers Stations world-wide, so much of the info is classified), but 16 years ago, when Danielle heard the transmission, it would have been right before the fall of the Berlin Wall/end of the Cold War. This is only relevant if we assume Lost is happening in real time, and likewise assume that the transmission began around that time. It’s entirely likely that the transmission was going for much longer than that, considering the time period that Palmyra was actively used by the U.S. military.
In actual numbers stations transmissions, each number would correspond to a word or letter, that could only be deciphered if you had the key to the code. It all appears to be very low-tech, so I’m not at all sure how it might relate to the hatches or the computers, though. If the numbers were merely a communication to another set of “watchers”, as some theories have implied, a computer wouldn’t be necessary at all. All Desmond would have needed was a shortwave radio and a signal to alert his listeners that his transmission was beginning (incidentally, a music box tune not unlike Danielle’s was often used to signal listeners to the oncoming transmission numbers).
It is worth mentioning, however, that the concept of the hatch itself being a quarantine is unlikely. An outside door pretty much makes that impossible unless there are snap-doors that would close the partners into the immediate entrance to the hatch. Besides, it says “Quarantine” on the inside, which would indicate that the island is the quarantine, not the hatch.
It’s also my postulation that the Others aren’t “the bad guys”. Remember, Goodwin tells Ana Lucia that they might not be “attacking” them. Additionally, if you listen to recordings of “the whispers”, you’ll hear the words “they could help us” as a woman and man watch Sawyer search in the jungle during “Outlaws”. (Hear right, left and over-lapping versions of the “whispers” here, and download for a truly creepy experience.)
Reading the transcripts of the whispers also indicates that the Others don’t know nearly as much about the castaways’ life on the island as many of us assume. They don’t know who to trust, and aren’t sure who is a crash survivor and who isn’t. The come to the conclusion that Sawyer is, and leave him alone when they decide he’s only after a pig. (”Maybe we should talk to him/If he sees us it will ruin everything/What did he see?”) We are, however, asked to believe (if we hear it in the audio and trust the transcription) that Boone is speaking to Shannon right before her death. The transcripts also support Danielle’s story - “black rock, bring the boy I’m in someone’s dream” is heard, as is Frank Duckett’s voice (the guy Sawyer kills) saying “He’s not the one”. So we’ve heard Walt’s voice, Boone’s and Frank Duckett’s voices in the whispers, and it seems as though the whispers are coming from the Others, right? One of them says, right before Shannon is killed, “Shh, you’re going to get her killed”. Creepy as hell, if you ask me. Are the Others ghosts masquerading as inhabitants? WTF? Also in the transcripts is a mention of “the brothers help us”, and the Lost Character Dossier on Wiki mentions two male twin “others” being alive and on the island. I for one don’t remember how we know that, but they would be the only brothers on the island. What do they help with? What is the goal of the Others? Perhaps they have spent the last couple of decades in fear of the people running the hatches.
So, this is getting long (understatement of the year, at least by me), but I’ll run down my little theory really quickly. They are on Palmyra, have a strong connection to Kalgoorlie (a mining area in Australia which also happens to have shortwave transmission posts), and the transmissions were coming from the U.S. military. If I’m right, the experiment that Hanso has been funding on the island for years might be government research related and long since abandoned for reasons unknown (Desmond never got a replacement, right? Or are the castaways the replacements unknowingly?). There is definitely a supernatural aspect to the show, but I believe it is controlled primarily by the Others and the island itself, not by the hatch people. In fact, I would venture to guess that one of the overall battles through the seasons of Lost would be the electromagnetic, super-real powers of the island and its inhabitants (Walt and Locke included) vs. the Hatch’s scientific pursuits. This would also explain the Others’ weariness of island inhabitants and quite possibly their fear. It would also mirror Jack the realist doctor vs. Locke the faithful Colonel. Shit, it would also fit into the Dharma symbol’s Yin-Yang imagery.
I’ve read the “Ultimate Theory”, and I’m not sure if any of it would directly contradict much of what I’ve said here, perhaps what I’ve thought about would potentially mesh with it. It’s entirely possible that what used to be a U.S. military station of sorts during WWII was, quite by accident, a mysterious and supernatural location, with unusual levels of electro-magnetism. In real life (see the ultimate theory),
The Oersted satellite indicates that a polar reversal might be imminent, the effects of which could be cataclysmic: if Earth were to lose its magnetosphere, it would be vulnerable to massive radiation from the space/sun. The satellite also revealed an anomaly in the magnetic field… (read the theory!) and yeah - scientists have placed the castaways on the island to perpetuate a new race. The Others might know about this and not want to be a part of it. (Just a thought) If you visit The Hanso Foundation website, a lot of this can be supported, at least by looking at their projects: Life-Extension and Electromagnetism. There are ties to the World Health Organization and it is noted in Hanso’s biography that he “first made his mark during the Second World War, providing munitions to various resistance movements around Europe. After the War, Hanso became the leading purveyor of high-technology armaments to NATO.” WWII sure comes up a lot, huh?
So it’s really late and I’m probably insane but that’s what I’m up to in between new episodes of Lost. Sorry for the length!
Other Stuff:
1. What the fuck did Walt say? Find out.
2. The U.S. Government’s 1962 order to establish Palmyra as a wildlife conservatory.
6 Comments