Category: LOST

Continuing my trek through the Lost books…Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark makes its appearance on Lost in the season three episode “Flashes Before Your Eyes.” Hurley and Charlie find it while ransacking the missing Sawyer’s stash of goods found in the wreckage of Oceanic 815.

Ever since I read Lolita many years ago, I’ve wanted to read more Nabokov, but I never got around to it. Fortunately, the island has a magic box that gives you what you want (despite Ben’s revelation in last night’s episode “The Brig” that the magic box is just a metaphor) and I was served up an author I wanted.

Laughter in the Dark is thematically similar to Lolita – middle-aged man seduced by a wicked young girl ruins his own life – though in Laughter, the girl is eighteen thereby making the middle-aged man merely a tragic fool rather than a felon.

Nabokov tells the whole story in the first two paragraphs:

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling…

Eventually Albinus is blinded in an accident and his young lover – Margot – invites her lover, Rex, to live with them, unbeknownst to Albinus. The invisible man in Albinus’ world subjects him to all forms of mockery and humiliation as he and Margot rob Albinus blind (har-har, couldn’t resist).

How right he is that there is pleasure and profit in the telling and the reading. Nabokov’s writing here is thrilling. This is a writer who seems to love his work and this time, his work is to tell the tale of some really rotten people (not unlike on Lost).

While the story is grim and often depressing, Nabokov’s style keeps things light and humorous most of the time. Give Lost another point for introducing me to a cool book that I wouldn’t otherwise have read.

Speaking of Lost…

The novel shows up in “Flashes Before Your Eyes” one of the more unusual episodes in the series’ history. It’s a Desmond episode and it’s one in which the flashbacks appear to be more than just memories. Desmond seems able to interact with his flashbacks, giving the viewer the sense that Desmond might have some ability to change the past, in a sort of dreaming time travel. We know he can see flashes of the future as well.

Many of Lost’s storylines revolve around cons, and not just those perpetrated by such con artists as Sawyer and Anthony Cooper. Laughter in the Dark is a con story as well. One in which the con works because the victim – Albinus – can’t see. In a way Desmond’s view of the future and potential parallel time streams is much like Albinus’ limited perception of the world around him.

This is not unlike the situation on the island where the Others have so much more knowledge of the survivors than the survivors have of the Others. (It also makes me wonder if there is an Other in the survivor’s midst, one that the survivors aren’t yet aware of.)

Another potential connection is Albinus’ blindness and the fact that he constantly mistakes the intentions of the other characters, most notably Margot’s. Mistaken intentions is a recurring theme on Lost and in the Lost books. Like Albinus, our survivors are definitely in the dark, able only to listen to the strange sounds of the Others that sometimes echo in the jungle, knowing only what the others want them to know.

The closest parallel between Laughter and Lost comes in the similarities between Albinus and Desmond. They are both cowards, afraid and unable to find the strength to change the course of their lives when they have the opportunity to do so. Desmond, though, is not as far gone as Albinus and it seems he has the capacity – and desire – to change the course of fate, beginning in the lucid dream of his flashbacks. We see Desmond attempting to defy fate and prove the idea of free will.

Laughter in the Dark also reminds the viewer of Desmond’s experience of spending years in the Dharma hatch prior to the Oceanic 815 crash. For years, he entered the numbers and pushed the button. Like Albinus, Desmond was unaware that he was being observed from the Pearl Station the whole time.

I often wonder how much the Others know about Desmond since he wasn’t on the plane, but then Laughter reminds me that the Others at least know of him and have probably been watching him, making me wonder how many of Desmond’s experiences could be the result of an Other con.

Thinking about Laughter in the Dark and “Flashes Before Your Eyes” has led me towards my very own Lost theory…

Last night’s episode which included Anthony Cooper’s assertion that they were in Hell (“It’s awful hot for Heaven”) along with last week’s revelation from Naomi the parachutist that everyone on 815 had died (of course Cooper may have been delusional and Naomi may be lying) adds fuel to the (hell)fire that they are all dead. This had been hinted at with several of the other Lost books, most notably The Third Policeman and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” but the creators have allegedly debunked the theory.

I’m still bunking it though, because when you factor in the alternate time stream theory (reinforced by A Brief History of Time, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and A Wrinkle in Time) you’re left with the notion that in one time stream Oceanic 815 did crash and everyone did die, but when Desmond let the numbers in the hatch run down (revealed in the season two finale) somehow Oceanic 815 was pulled into another time stream (possibly accelerated) in which they crashed on the island. In their original world, they all died, but in the newly created timeline, they are alive.

“Flashes Before Your Eyes” further points in this direction, thus opening the possibility that the happy ending for the series would be for the survivors to reconcile the two time streams and get home alive. I suspect that Desmond is the key to this somehow, since he seems able to alter the various streams. In this way we see a free will/fate battle emerging (another recurring theme on the show). If free will wins, the time streams reconcile and the survivors get of the island. If fate wins, then they’re all dead. Of course I wonder if each survivor would get to choose his own path.

Regardless of what happens, the sound of “real” time will be as nothing more than the ghostly echo of laughter in the dark.

For more thoughts about last night’s “The Brig” check out…

• The House Next Door’s Lost Thursday post, in which Andrew wonders about the future of Sawyer. I hope he’s wrong. That would be like Star Wars without Han Solo. You know, like the prequel trilogy.
• Greg at Begging to Differ offers up a bunch of interesting observations and insights from “The Brig”
• BC TV/Film’s Lost analysis explores the coincidences that permeate Lost
• Holli at Watching Lost poses some questions including one about the hole the Sayid is digging
• Blog de Drew wonders when the smoke monster will be seen again
• And nothing to do with “The Brig,” Reviewing Whatever has some thoughts on Bad Twin (the metafictional Lost detective novel) and kindly even links to my review of it.

Next up on my Lost reading list is Stephen King’s On Writing.

Check out the rest of my Lost book posts here.

I love it when I catch a break in my effort to read and write about all the books on Lost. The latest break comes from last week’s “Catch-22.” Not only was the episode named for Joseph Heller’s brilliant antiwar novel, but one character – the mysterious parachutist – was even in possession of a copy, albeit the Portuguese translation, Ardil-22.

I read this book a few times in college and even devoted a large amount of time in grad school to studying the film. Naturally, I was pleased when Lost served up a book I already know and love.

Catch-22 is about the absurdities of life on a World War II airbase on the Italian island of Pianosa. The central character, Captain Yossarian, is a bombardier who wants out of the war because, well, millions of people are trying to kill him. Exacerbating his paranoia is the fact that each time his squadron completes the required number of missions, the number required is increased, creating a hopeless situation for the airmen.

Yossarian fakes illnesses and ultimately tries to get discharged on the basis of insanity, but in one of the novel’s many catch-22’s he is informed that trying to avoid flying combat missions is an act of pure sanity and therefore the harder he tries to prove he’s insane the more sane he appears.

There are a number of similarly circular and impossible situations that crop up throughout the book, each one deeply absurd and highlighting the ultimate absurdity of war and the immorality of those who profit from it.

It’s a great read and one that makes you laugh an uncomfortable sort of laughter. The kind of laughter born of pain and disgust.

On to Lost…

Like Lost, Catch-22 is a nonlinear narrative, often relying on flashbacks – particularly one in which Yossarian comforts a dying tail gunner – that are repeated, each time revealing new information. They’re also both about people stuck on an island.

The episode in which it occurs is a Desmond-centric episode in which Desmond gets one of his glimpses of a possible future. In his flashes, it seems that Charlie will die, but Desmond will be reunited with the love of his life, Penny Widmore, who may be coming to island to rescue him.

This situation presents Desmond with a terrible choice: Save Charlie and risk changing the course of the future in which case Penny won’t show up, or let Charlie die – essentially sacrificing a friend for his own happiness. Desmond ultimately decides to save Charlie and when they finally find the mysterious parachutist who should be Penny, it is instead some woman with a copy of Ardil-22 and a picture of Desmond and Penny.

The big unanswered question, of course is did Desmond change the future by saving Charlie? Can Desmond even affect the future? As Hurley says, his super power is kind of lame, especially if all it can do is leave Desmond stuck in the catch-22 wherein his only hope of being rescued is in sacrificing a friend.

At the end of Catch-22, Yossarian is busted for being AWOL, but he is given an opportunity to save himself and receive an honorable discharge if he will speak highly of and praise the policies of his crooked superiors. He ultimately refuses to sacrifice his fellow airmen just to save himself. Is this Desmond’s choice? Will he sacrifice the Oceanic 815 survivors to save himself or will he throw his lot in with theirs in an effort to save them all?

Last night’s episode, “DOC” (which stands for date of conception) contains its own catch-22’s (this time for Sun and possibly Juliet) along with one of Lost’s biggest wtf moments when the mysterious parachutist from the outside world informs Hurley that Oceanic 815 had been found and that everyone on board was killed. Holy living dead, Batman, that’s quite a bombshell. It kind of makes the whole show a sort of catch-22, as in, “hey we got off the island, but oh crap, we’re dead.” This leaves me thinking that the time warp theories are probably on the right track. Although it does also kind of point back toward the supposedly debunked purgatory theory, which is suggested by a large number of the Lost books from seasons 1 and 2.

I still say the island is a metaphorical purgatory, if not the real one (???).

For some interesting write-ups of “DOC,” check out:

• Dorkeriffic (great name for a blog, btw) where some interesting questions are posed
• Magic Lamp where Steve wonders if there is some kind of military op going on based on the parachutist’s gear
• Brian at BRIAN!!! Top Marks for Not Tryin’ has a good analysis with some interesting thoughts about some of the dialog
• The Atomic Blowtorch has some thoughts about Mikhail
• John at Critical Myth wonders if the the-crash-was-planned theory is back on the table

And, I’m still working on Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark from “Flashes Before Your Eyes.” Look for that post next week.

Click here for a list of my other Lost book posts.

Continuing my effort to read the books that appear on Lost, I’ve arrived at Stephen King’s Carrie, which makes its appearance in “A Tale of Two Cities,” the season three opener.

Prior to Carrie, the only Stephen King books I’d read were his more recent ones (except for Firestarter, which I read perhaps 100 times in eighth grade) so going back to his first novel was kind of fun.

Carrie White is the girl that gets picked on by all the mean popular girls. She has her first period at age seventeen in the shower after gym class. Her insanely religious mother never told her what this meant, and Carrie thinks she’s bleeding to death. The other girls make fun of her. Carrie is bitter, confused and angry. With the onset of her late puberty, she also develops telekinetic powers. One girl tries to make amends. Carrie goes to prom. There’s a practical joke and then Carrie turns her powers against her classmates.

My English classes just finished reading Lord of the Flies (my Lost post on that is here) and the question always comes up: what would happen if it were a bunch of girls? With Lord of the Flies in my head, I couldn’t help but think of Carrie as a kind of female version, with Carrie playing the part of poor doomed Piggy. With that thought in mind, it was hard not to think of Carrie as an examination of the effects of cliquish cruelty on the outsider, the kind of fiction that makes one think of things like Columbine.

Unlike much of King’s more recent work, Carrie is short and brisk. It’s a fast-paced novel that tells the story from a variety of viewpoints including investigatory committee hearings, police reports, letters, books written by survivors, scientific articles, and popular news pieces all interspersed with King’s no-frills narration. It’s one of those books where the form is part of the enjoyment of the text. A good read.

On to Lost. The first five minutes of season three was one of the most amazing sequences I’ve ever seen on TV. We meet Juliet hosting a book group meeting with no idea who she or any of the members are. She puts in a CD, burns some muffins and deals with book group members who complain about her book choice: Carrie. There’s a rumbling, they all run outside and there in the sky is Oceanic 815 breaking up above them. Suddenly, we realize that Juliet is one of the Others and that they live in nice houses with electricity and plumbing. They have the ability to score at least ten copies of recent editions of Carrie from the outside world. Your head spins.

Juliet says she chose Carrie because it’s her favorite book. What does this reveal about Juliet? Well, now that I’ve read Carrie and gotten to know Juliet a bit better its easy to see that Carrie White and Juliet the Other are both outsiders in their communities. Like Carrie, Juliet plots revenge (I wrote about this in my To Kill a Mockingbird post) against her own people. They are cruel to her (first sentencing her to death and then finally branding her in “Stranger in a Strange Land”) and don’t appear to think of her as one of them.

Like Carrie White, Juliet vacillates between being sweetly concerned with being liked and being an accomplished and merciless asskicker, though without Carrie’s telekinetic powers (I think). We saw this in last Wednesday’s episode (“Left Behind”) in which, Juliet cuffed herself to Kate so that she would have someone to be with after being abadoned by the Others. She appears to want to be with the Oceanic 815 survivors, but her manipulative nature and the fact that she wasn’t straight with Kate suggest to me that she may not be 100% on the side of the survivors. Perhaps, Like Carrie, Juliet is ultimately on her own side and all the while wishing desperately that she could fit in somewhere.

Next week’s episode features more Juliet flashbacks with Sayid, himself an accomplished and merciless asskicker, apparently offering to kill her if she doesn’t tell him everything. Can’t wait.

Other connections via Lostpedia:

• Carrie White, the eponymous heroine, attends Ewen High School. The principal of that school is named Henry Grayle (similar name to Henry Gale).
• In a Carrie TV Movie, the role of villainess Chris Hargensen was played by Emilie de Ravin, who currently portrays Claire.

This is also yet another Lost book that deals with mental/psychic/telekinetic powers.

Having nothing to do with Carrie, but interesting nonetheless, here are some links to three interesting posts about last week’s controversial Nikki & Paolo episode, “Expose” (which I really liked, by the way):

• Check the Fien Print wonders if “Expose” was Lost’s own version of Rosencrantz & Gildenstern Are Dead
• South Dakota Dark commends the episode for giving the viewers a break
• The House Next Door has some very good and amusing analysis as well. In fact, check back there every Thursday for good analysis (h/t to Scribes & Scoundrels for directing me there)

Click here to read all of my Lost book posts, or here for the index.

Next up… Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov.

When I set out to read the books that appear on ABC’s Lost, I started with the books that were either shown onscreen or directly referenced. I will make exceptions, however, for books I always inteded to read anyway and so it was with Robert Heinlein’s 1961 classic Stranger in a Strange Land.

I feel that I truly grok the fullness of Heinlein’s sci-fi tale about Michael Valentine Smith, a human who was raised on Mars by Martians and returned to Earth to grok the humans. Along the way Mike Smith (what a great name for a Martian) teaches humans about growing-closer through water sharing and he teaches them the importance of grokking.

Smith winds up starting a free-love cult that would have made many a hippy proud, and I can see why this book was so popular in the counterculture of the late ’60s, even lending the word grok to the hippy lexicon. Heinlein’s Smith teaches Martian ways to humans and takes the best thing humans have for creating happiness (sex, baby) and mixes them with the best of Martian culture (grokking, happiness, spiritual completion, mind reading, teleportation, immortality, cannibalism) making many an enemy among Earth’s politicians and megachurches along the way.

This is a book that requires a pretty serious suspension of disbelief, not just to swallow the Martian angle, but also the notion of humans being able to truly put aside all jealousy and selfishness in order to be happy. Most of the characters are thin and the book seems more than anything an outlet for Heinlein to ponder and argue with himself about social values, art, liberty, and religion. If you like a sort of wacky, semi-lighthearted philosophical novel with a sci-fi background, you’ll probably enjoy this. I did.

As to its status as a sci-fi classic, I suspect it makes so many of those kinds of lists not so much on its own merits as because of the way that it was picked up and embraced by the 1960s counterculture a few years after its publication. It’s one of those rare books where the author seems to have gotten ahead of the zeitgeist just enough to already be there waiting when the rest of the world caught up with him.

The connection to Lost comes in the title of the of the ninth episode of the third season, “Stranger in a Strange Land.” The episode is about Jack. The flashbacks find him in Phuket, Thailand, where he is, yes, a stranger in a strange land. On the island, Jack is still being held by the Others, but by the end of the episode, he seems to have joined them. We also learn that the tattoo Jack acquired in Phuket was gotten in violation of some mysterious taboos and says, “He walks among us, but he is not one of us.” In every way, we see Jack as stranger in strange lands.

We knew that though. The most interesting connection between Heinlein’s novel and Lost is in what it suggests about the Others. Minus the cannibalism and sex, the Others seem to have a quasi-religious cult based on attaining happiness, spiritual completion and possibly, teleportation, mind reading, projection and immortality. No wonder they seem so happy on the island.

Lost, as it it wont to do, turns the dynamic on its head, when the stranger in a strange land is not the man bringing the new and better way to live to humanity, but rather Jack, who seems to represent everything the Others are trying to escape in the real world. The question, then, becomes, will Jack drink the Kool-Aide? Based on the end of last week’s episode (“Par Avion”) it looks like he might have, making him no different from Heinlein’s Ben Caxton, the earthly cynic who joined Mike Smith’s Church of All Worlds and within forty-eight hours found a better way to live.

Of course, the title may have nothing to do with Heinlein’s book, Instead, it could be a reference to the Iron Maiden song, which is found on their Somewhere in Time album. That’s interesting enough when you consider that lately Lost has been playing up the question of whether or not the Oceanic 815 surviviors are lost somewhere in time. Some of the lyrics, which seem to tell of an Arctic explorer losing his way and dying, also bear a striking resemblance to certain issues of Lost:

Night and day I scan horizon sea and sky
My spirit wanders endlessly
Until the day will dawn and friends from home discover why
Hear me calling rescue me
Set me free, set me free
Lost in this place and leave no trace

Stranger in a strange land
Land of ice and snow
Trapped inside this prison
Lost and far from home

Strange how often a show about a tropical island has so many references to things Arctic, but there it is. The lyrics also speak of being gone for 100 years. I don’t know if we should start a Lost listening list, but the music and songs featured on the show are probably as meaningful as the books.

The last connection is biblical. “Stranger in a strange land” is a quote from that classic book about escape, Exodus 2:22: “And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.” Lost also references the Bible quite a bit, and this could be another instance of that.

So there it is: Stranger in a Strange Land, be it book, Bible or Iron Maiden tune, there are as many clues and suggestions as one cares to find.

For further reading:

• TheOrangeSlayedTheRake has a collection of interesting quotes about art and sex from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land
• Electronic Cerebrectomy’s TV Report: A Half-Season of Lost (check out the comments for some interesting theories about Watership Down)

For an index of all my Lost book posts, click here.

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men made its appearance on Lost in “Every Man for Himself,” the episode in which Sawyer gets conned and the Others demonstrate the truth of Jack’s season one admonition to “live together or die alone.”

Considering I’ve read it many times, taught it, and the fact that there really isn’t any mystery as to why it was included, it seems to be relatively low hanging fruit for a blog post, and yet, I’m only now getting around to it several months after its appearance. So here it is, the latest addition to my Lost book club.

Of Mice and Men is about two Depression era migrant farmhands. George is small and smart; Lennie is huge, strong, and intellectually a child. They exist in an every-man-for-himself world where no one watches out for anyone and everyone is lonely. George and Lennie are different, though, because “they got each other” and they have a dream to earn enough to buy a small place and live “offa the fat of the land.” This is something that neither can do alone, but Lennie’s strength earns them money, and George’s concern for Lennie protects him. Things go bad when Lennie accidentally kills the boss’s daughter-in-law, leaving George to shoot Lennie, at that point the only merciful option left to him.

It’s a quick and grim read, a meditation on loneliness and the practical impossibility of achieving the American dream in a society that refuses to protect the weak. It’s also one of those books that kids will read willingly since it’s short, the writing is easy, and there’s lots of profanity. Good stuff.

On to Lost. We first see Of Mice and Men in Sawyer’s flashback. He’s shown reading it in prison, a lonely every-man-for-himself kind of place if ever there was one. The prison story plays out in such a way that Sawyer gets an early release and a bunch of money, which he asks to have put in an account for his daughter whom he’s never met and may not even exist. In a way Sawyer is setting her up so that she can find her dream unlike George and Lennie.

It’s referenced on the island as well. Sawyer refers to Ben’s bunny killing and says that he might like Of Mice and Men since a puppy gets killed. Ben feigns ignorance of the novel until they reach the summit of the island where Ben shows Sawyer that he is being held on a different island, that there’s nowhere to go, and that he does need Kate. Ben then throws Of Mice and Men back in Sawyer’s face with this quote:

A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. It don’t make any difference who the guy is, so long as he’s with you. I tell ya, I tell ya, a guy gets too lonely, and he gets sick.

Sawyer doesn’t recognize the quote and Ben explains it to him, thus revealing that he has a better understanding of both literature and human nature than Sawyer, which is of course how he is able to so effectively con Sawyer throughout the episode.

Of Mice and Men doesn’t provide any clues to the great mysteries of Lost, but it serves as a nice literary allusion in an episode that revisits one of Lost’s central issues, namely the live together or die alone calculation.

Click here for the rest of my Lost book reviews

Last week’s episode of Lost added another book to my list of Lost books. Fortunately, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is one I’ve read several times. In the episode “Not in Portland,” the book was being read by the Other who fell for “the old-wookie-in-handcuffs gag” while guarding the prison where Carl was getting a malenky bit of the old Clockwork Orange treatment.

Putting aside the verbal reference to Star Wars and the visual reference to A Clockwork Orange, we’re left with A Brief History of Time, yet another book suggesting that the island may exist outside the normal time stream of the rest of the world. The other books that suggest this are (links go to my posts on these books): A Wrinkle in Time, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” The Wizard of Oz, The Third Policeman, and Alice in Wonderland. When the Chronicles of Narnia appears I think the deal will be sealed.

A Brief History of Time is a wonderful and highly readable explanation of quantum mechanics, black holes, the big bang, relativity and the nature of time itself, which makes me wonder if we Lost fans should be wondering about the nature of time on a certain island in the Pacific. In the chapter, “The Arrow of Time,” Hawking writes:

The discovery that the speed light appeared the same to every observer, no matter how he was moving, led to the theory of relativity – and in that one had to abandon the idea that there was a unique absolute time. Instead, each observer would have his own measure of time as recorded by a clock that he carried: clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.

Now, Hawking isn’t arguing that that there are different time streams here on Earth, but then Lost is fiction, probably science fiction, which often begins with the question, “What if?” The fact that the Others seem to know so much about everyone suggests to me that somehow they are able to connect with a future in which everything about the Oceanic 815 survivors has become history.

What if there was a wormhole or timewarp or some kind of flux in the space-time continuum in the south Pacific? What if it could be manipulated? What if people from the future were trying to change humanity in order to save their world?

How might they do this? I bet it has something to do with the hatch. They lost contact with the outside when “the sky went purple.” Does this mean they lost their wormhole or timewarp or whatever they were using to communicate with the future? The ability to connect with the future would explain how they are able to know so much, as well as do things like send that bus down the road at the exact moment that Juliet’s husband was stepping into the street.

According to Lostpedia, the Other is shown reading a page from the chapter “Black Holes Ain’t So Black” (h/t to Joshmeister, who offers some other interesting details about this).� In that chapter, Hawking describes the nature of event horizons surrounding black holes and argues that despite black holes having the reputation of being places from which nothing can escape, they do appear to emit particles, and over time, eventually shrink away.

Perhaps, whatever the hatch was doing was preventing some kind of black hole like time warp on the island from evaporating. Could it be that the Others have lost, not their contact with the outer world, but with the future? In that case, they would also be truly lost, just like the survivors of Oceanic 815.

Perhaps, when the hatch imploded, Desmond got a glimpse of (or spent quite a bit of time wandering through) the future. Is that why he knows things will happen before they happen?

I’ve wondered about this parallel universe/alternate time stream idea since I began reading the Lost books and really thinking about the show. Brian at Lost…and Gone Forever adds some fuel to that fire in his analysis of “Not in Portland”:

The company that was courting Juliet wasn’t Hanso or Dharma – it was “Mittelos Bioscience”.

[…]

As many astute readers have already put together, “Mittelos” is an anagram for “Lost Time”.

[…]

Of all the scenes that they could have shown during the one hour recap before this week’s episode, which basically summed up two and a half years worth of Lost – they included the scene of Sayid and Hurley on the beach, listening to the radio, with Sayid saying “It could be coming from anywhere”, followed by Hurley saying “…or any time.”

That one really struck me as well. The first time I saw it, I noted it, and placing such a minor scene in recap seems like a pretty big hint.

Brian concludes:

If the series ended with us finding out that either a) only days had passed since Flight 815 crashed – with the rescue crew showing up or b) many years had passed and grown-up Walt and Grandpa Michael showing up to rescue everyone – I would not be in the least bit surprised, and we would all look back and think “Hey, they were hinting at it all along.”

There’s something else, too. A commenter on my blog mentioned a scene in which the big dipper is shown backwards in the sky. That’s a phenomenon that is not supposed to happen for 50,000 years. I don’t know which episode shows that, and I don’t have time to run it down, but if anyone has more info on that, I’d love to know. Perhaps the island exists in a different time altogether or maybe it hovers between planes on the spacetime continuum (or exists in a gap between branes – see my post on Universe in a Nutshell, also by Hawking).

“Not in Portland” really brings up many of the time continuum ideas that the show has been toying with since season 1, but with Lost, it sometimes seems that when we can see the big picture, the details get fuzzy. As we zero in on characters, plot elements and theories, however, it suddenly becomes impossible to see the whole thing.

I think of it as Lost’s own little version of the uncertainty principle (also explained in A Brief History of Time). The fascinating thing is that this is exactly what happens at the beginning of each show. We see the word LOST on screen, but it’s out of focus. As it flies toward the viewer, it comes into sharp focus, but all we can see are parts of the O and S, the big picture having left the frame.

Click here for all of my posts on the Lost books.

Update: Click here for the new Lost Book Club index page. I am no longer updating this page.

Last May, I started writing about the books that appear on ABC’s Lost.

Here’s a list of what I’ve read with links to the posts about the books:

• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (Blume)
• The Turn of the Screw (James)
• “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Bierce)
• A Wrinkle in Time (L’Engle)
• Lancelot (Walker)
• Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
• Lord of the Flies (Golding)
• Bad Twin (Troup)
• The Wizard of Oz (Baum)
• Watership Down (Adams)
• The Third Policeman (O’Brien)
• Alice in Wonderland (Carroll)
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
• A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
• The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky)
• A Brief History of Time (Hawking)
• Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
• Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
• Carrie (King)
• Catch-22 (Heller)

Here’s what I still need to read (or skim over again before writing about):

• Our Mutual Friend (Dickens)
• On Writing (King)
• Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov)
• The Fountainhead (Rand)
• Evil Under the Sun (Christie)

I will update this post as I read and review the Lost books, and as other books appear.

Back in May, my wife and I decided to read all the books referenced on Lost. I finally finished The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I started reading this at Chuy’s during the Green Chile Festival, which is in September. It’s a long book. I also read a number of other books while reading Brothers Karamazov, which naturally slowed me down, but I think it’s good that I spent so much time with it because I really got to know the characters. Anyway, it was originally serialized in the 1870s so its original readers spent even more time with it than me.

When season 3 of Lost began back in October, I was on page 186. I summarized it then as follows:

Dostoevsky’s book is dense, rich and beautiful, full of the kind of compelling characters that keep me engaged in a story that at this point is only now beginning. The book tells the story of the relationship between an old man and his three sons, each of whom represents a different psychological/spiritual type.

The father, Fyodor Pavlovich, is a drunken self-proclaimed buffoon. He delights in making a public ass of himself. He is a lecher, scoundrel and liar who is thoroughly unlikeable, despite the fact that some of the scandalous things he says are truly funny.

Oldest brother, Dmitri is passionate and ruled by emotion. He behavior is much like that of his father, except that Dmitri has a working conscience buried deep inside. He despises his father and seems to love his brothers. Ivan, the middle brother, is a rationalist and intellectual. He is an atheist who wrestles with issues of faith. The youngest brother, Aloysha is the central character in the book. Aloysha is sweet and gentle, a deeply religious and good-hearted soul whose faith guides him in all things. There is also an illegitimate brother – Smerdyakov – who is dark and brooding, but I haven’t learned much about him yet.

Each brother has varying degrees of conflict with each other and with their father, Fyodor. I think – based on the back of the book – that one of them will kill Fyodor. I don’t know for sure, but my money is on Dmitri.

Well, it turns out I was right about Fyodor, and wrong about Dmitri even though he was convicted, it seems clear (though with enough uncertainty to make it interesting) that Semerdyakov was actually the killer.

The greatest connection between Lost and The Brothers Karamazov, however, is that both are stories of people who are lost (in the figurative sense) and both explore the line that divides faith and reason. Brothers Karamazov is at heart a philosophical novel that wrestles with the idea of faith and the consequences if living without it.

Alyosha is at all times kind, decent, humble and driven by compassion and love. Ivan rails against the church and ultimately it is his pronouncements against God that lead Smerdykov to believe that “everything is permitted,” a belief that ultimately destroys his family. Through it all, though, we see Alyosha living a life ruled by love and compassion, and it is his example that we should take away from the novel, the admonition to be our best selves, to strive for perfect human kindness.

It’s a beautiful and moving book, with characters drawn so real that it’s hard to believe I don’t actually know them.

Regarding Lost, this is all a bit dated. The book was given to Henry Gale (now Ben) while he was being held in the hatch (way back in season 2). It served the purpose of bringing up the conversation about Hemingway feeling like he could never be as great as Dostoevsky, which made Locke wonder if would always play second fiddle to Jack. Tension ensued, which as we know from watching season 3 is probably exactly what Henry/Ben wanted.

When I related it to Lost in my last post on the subject, I said this about how the characters in Brothers Karamazov resemble certain characters on Lost:

• Dmitri and Sawyer are both passionate and ruled by their emotions especially lust and greed; both use women, and each possesses a deeply buried conscience.
• Ivan and Jack are both rationalists, both men of science.
• Alyosha and Locke are both men of faith, both good-hearted.

I admit, not having read the book in its entirety (yet), that there may be deeper parallels. I particularly wonder if Alyosha has a crisis of faith as Locke did when he stopped pushing the button in the hatch. I also see that Kate could as easily be the Dmitri character as Sawyer; likewise Mr. Eko resembles Alyosha in many ways, though not as closely as Locke.

I don’t see a Fyodor character yet except in that Jack, Locke (and Kate if we go that way) have major conflicts with their fathers. Sawyer’s father hasn’t really come into play except his “spiritual father” – the con man who destroyed his family – from whom he took his name and trade. Interestingly this “father” is the man that Sawyer went to Australia to kill. Kate also killed her father.

Now that I’ve finished the book and seen the first six episodes of season 3, some comparisons seem a bit clearer. I stand by the Alyosha/Lock, Ivan/Jack, and Sawyer/Dmitri comparisons, especially the last now that we’ve seen Sawyer’s deeply buried moral side. Like Dimitri, he’s a bastard who wants to be good, though his darker instincts often get the better of him.

Once again, above all else, we find a book on the island that explores the issues and themes central to the show. Quite frankly, as Lost got farther away, I stopped reading Brothers Karamazov for insight into the show and just enjoyed it for its penetrating insight into the human character.

Click here for more of my Lost book reviews.

Check out this interview with Lost’s creators transcribed on Lost…And Gone Forever.

Season three of Lost began with an episode called “A Tale of Two Cities,” the two “cities” being, I have assumed, the suburban neighborhood inhabited by the Others and the beach camp where the survivors live. It was a clever title for an episode that gave us our first look into the world of the others while continuing the Dickens references that cropped up throughout the season two finale.

I read A Tale of Two Cities (probably excerpted or abridged or both) back in eighth grade and only have dim memories of the story. It was the best of times and the worst of times, and some guy went to the guillotine doing a far better thing than he had ever done.

Memories come flooding back like a flashback to my life before the island (helped by a quick trip over to SparkNotes), and I recall that the doomed man a scoundrel throughout his life willingly chose to die in place of another man. He made his choice because they loved the same woman and he knew that the other guy was the better man. Or something. The whole ruse worked, of course, because the two men looked very nearly alike.

So, as usual, what does A Tale of Two Cities have to do with Lost?

A Tale of Two Cities focuses on the reinvention of the self, moving from the selfish to the selfless and from the scoundrel to the hero. Interestingly, this is the trajectory that nearly every character on Lost experiences.

The other observation relates to the idea of the two men looking alike. We’ve seen this throughout Lost characters looking very much like other characters even when they are unrelated. Ben told Jack that it was no coincidence that Juliet looked a lot like his ex-wife. Who also looks like Desmond’s love, Penny. There is also the book Bad Twin, which obsessively twins both people and ideas.

I suspect that if I reread A Tale of Two Cities, I’d probably find it there two too. I mean, two cities. Come on. If that ain’t twinning I don’t know what is!

Finally, the most compelling connection, and the one that didn’t play out fully on Lost until the end of this first mini-season, is the self-sacrifice angle. Sawyer, the resident scoundrel, has finally learned to think of someone else first. In fact, he seems completely willing to sacrifice himself to save Kate. Is this a far better thing that he does now than he has ever done before?

Here’s a link to a fascinating post at Quigley that explores the mythological references in Lost. Really interesting thoughts about the spiritual nature of the “polar” bears.

Click here for the rest of the Lost Book Club entries.

I actually read To Kill a Mockingbird earlier this year (post here) so I’m not rereading it, and yes, I know it was the movie not the book that was referenced in last week’s episode “The Cost of Living,” but either way, I thought I’d post my thoughts on how it intersects with Lost.

The mention is brief. Juliet wheels a TV up to the aquarium where Jack is being held prisoner and tells him she’s going to show him a movie: To Kill a Mockingbird. She then goes on to explain to Jack why he needs to save Ben who is a great man and will die if Jack doesn’t operate, but on the TV screen there is no To Kill a Mockingbird. Instead we see Juliet holding signs telling Jack that Ben is a dangerous liar and asking him to botch the surgery and kill Ben.

Part of me suspects that this is yet another one of the cons psychological tests that the others perform on the survivors. Still, why To Kill a Mockingbird? Briefly, it’s about two children who watch their father Atticus Finch stand up to the prejudices in their small southern town by defending a black man who is accused of raping a white woman. The events leading up to and surrounding the trial effectively bring an end to the youthful innocence of the two kids.

In the book, Atticus tells his son Jem that it is a sin to kill mockingbirds because they are themselves harmless and innocent creatures. Throughout the book we see a variety of ‘mockingbirds’ – innocent people destroyed (or almost destroyed) by evil: Tom Robinson, Boo Radley, Jem and Scout Finch.

This keeps bringing me back to the whole question of whether or not the others are good people. Is it possible that Juliet is evil and Ben is as good as he claims to be, just an innocent mockingbird who only beats the crap out of people like Sawyer when he has to? Of course the book also reminds us that everyone carries the capacity for both good and evil.

Which brings us to prejudice, the central problem in To Kill a Mockingbird. Are the writers asking us to reconsider any prejudices that we viewers may harbor against the others? Should we take Atticus’s advice to Scout and not judge a man until we’ve walked around in his skin for a little while? Or at least enjoyed an episode featuring his flashbacks?

As with the blacks and whites of Maycomb County there are tensions between the survivors and the others, tensions that may stem mainly from a lack of understanding. Is the conflict between the survivors and the others based mainly on mutual fear and ignorance?

Jack, like Atticus, is a professional man who must decide to take on an unpopular case. When Atticus chose to defend a black man – and really defend him – he made a very unpopular decision that turned many of his own people (the white folk of Maycomb County) against him, but his belief in the constitution and the equality of all men gave him no choice but to do the right thing, despite this being a dangerous decision for him and his children.

Will Jack follow the path of Atticus Finch and save the life of the man who is holding him prisoner, or will Jack betray his Hippocratic oath and kill Ben for Juliet? Apparently, we’ll find out more in tonight’s episode, “I Do.”

I think Jack will operate and save Ben. He’s too principled not to. I don’t think he’ll kill this mockingbird.

Now the big question is who is the island’s Boo Radley? Who is hidden away from sight, feared and misunderstood by all, but secretly coming out of the basement as it were to help the survivors and save them from evil? Could it be the smoke monster? I wonder if the visions – that always seem to help the survivors find what they need, be it inner peace or clean water – might be the smoke monster.

I wonder if the smoke monster also protects the survivors by showing up out of nowhere, just like Boo Radley, to open up a can of whupass when needed such as that opened up on Mr Eko who turned out to be not quite as good as he appeared.

Smoke monster as Boo Radley? It may be a reach, but why not?

Check out these blogs for some good Lost analysis: Lost…and Gone Forever and The Joshmeister’s Lost Blog and Podcast.

Click here for all of my Lost Book Club posts.