LT174: Biscuits, Boxes and Birds

BISCUITS AND GRAVY THEORY – The Incident

The year on the island is 1979-ish. The Survivors of Flight 815 are beginning to come to grasp with the fact that the time has shifted on them. Imagine you in their place. What would you do at that point in time?

One of the first things would be to retrace your steps, so to speak. Find the Swan Hatch! Find Othersville! Find the other hatches! We have to be careful here because we don’t the exact order that things got built on this island. But this is where The Incident mentioned in the Swan Orientation film might come into play.

To explain my theory a little better, I need you to go back to before the Dharma Initiative. Let’s imagine the Hostiles (the inhabitants prior to Dharma’s arrival including Richard) are living a pretty nice life. They know the secrets of the island passed down from the Ancients. This includes a Dharma Wheel.

In my mind the Dharma Wheel is in a fully sized room where someone or something is able to turn it the full revolution. I’m guessing donkeys since the name for the wheel provided by the producers is the “Frozen Donkey Wheel”. Now imagine that in order for the island to exist as it wishes, the wheel MUST be turning all the time!

With all that in mind, here comes Dharma. They start digging and building tunnels, laying cables, and setting up shop because Alvar Hanso is convinced the island holds the cure to what Valenzetti has predicted will happen to the world if he doesn’t do something. Combine the equation with the knowledge that his family is connected to the island via the Black Rock and one can understand why the Hanso Foundation is extra motivated to inhabit this island.

But in their haste – and stupidity – they begin to dig…oh wait…

SIDE NOTE: My wife suggests that instead of building hatches, maybe they were there to drill for minerals. This could mean that the Jump Back Date is the Black Rock arrival to the island. She makes a good point and I guess it could work the same because we would surely avoid any paradoxes with people in the mid-1800’s. I’m going to stick with late 1970’s for now, but keep this in the back of your mind.

So whether digging trenches and roads and hatches…or drilling for minerals and black rocks with special properties…the intruders are shaking the ground. These actions then cause the Dharma Wheel Room to partially collapse.


This then leads to “The Incident”.

As we work on this theory, we discover we might be able to merge the Black Rock with the Dharma Group. How? Imagine the Black Rock was drilling for gold and minerals which we know because mining equipment was found on the ship. This might have caused The Incident. Keep reading and you’ll see how either event could cause The Incident.

We believe The Incident refers to the impact on time on the island due to Wheel unable to be kept continually spinning. When the wheel stops turning, strange things begin to happen on Mysterious Island! This is why the Black Rock drilling COULD have been involved...if you subscribe that dated clothing points to strange events beginning with the occupants of the ship.

If the Black Rock drilling caused the damage to the wheel, then time might have skipped FORWARD to the late 1970’s. A few days later and this sea-faring people who wear frilly shirts might observe a nice, sleek, modern ship coming to shore which includes a crew member named Danielle. Bet that freaked them out as much as the Survivors are freaked about going back in time!
This drastic impact on time – caused either by the Black Rock drilling or the Dharma Initiative digging is The Incident. Without the Dharma Wheel spinning, time is not longer under control of the Hostile/Originals. To control this, a fail safe mechanism was put into place by Dharma which requires the power being safely released every 108 minutes – perhaps this number represents the amount of time it took an animal to cause one revolution of the wheel.

In the next blog, I’m going to then try to explain why I continue to refer to world events like the Cuban Missile Crisis and how it fits into our Biscuits and Gravy Theory.

HISTORICAL ODDITIES

Instead of an episode by episode review – which was too time consuming – I’m sharing some oddities that are new to me or seem to have a larger meaning with what we know now…

Not sure I knew this before, but in the episode Tricia Tanaka is Dead, the song “Road to Shambala” is featured. This is where Hurley gets the VW Dharma van started and the song plays on the 8-track. Well, the song was done by Three Dog Night whose name comes from the indigenous Australians who would dig a hole and sleep in it on cold nights while embracing a dingo – a native Australian species of a wild dog. On really cold night they would sleep with two dogs and if especially cold, it would be a Three Dog Night. With the references to Australia, dogs and music on LOST, I thought it was interesting.

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Boxes…something hit me the other day when reviewing the episode where John is shown his father is on the island. This is where Ben talks about his magical box. As you know from a recent post, JJ Abrams has been known to reference his magic box he was given as a child, so this took on even more importance for me. I must admit that while related to boxes, the scene where Ben reveals Anthony Cooper is on the island, the part that REALLY caught my eye was that Richard Alpert was present. In this episode, Richard seems to servant like to Ben. Plus he played along during the magic box story. Hmmm…

But my point here is boxes which have been mentioned a lot:

-- Survivors hope the plane has a black box
-- Danielle has a music box
-- Locke works for a box company
-- Hurley owns a box company
-- Lenny tells Hurley, “You’ve opened the box”
-- Charles Widmore tells Desmond that “one of those boxes holds your past, Hume.”
-- A former torture victim is talking about her cat to Sayid and says that children trapped it in a box
-- A piece of equipment in the Tempest Hatch is labeled “Box Maker”
-- Ben hides some stuff in box including those stale crackers Hurley doesn’t mind
-- Add the safe deposit boxes and that odd shaped box seen in scenes

For some reason this reminded of a preacher in my past who used to claim some verse in the Bible that spoke of “a strange glow coming from the people’s houses” referred to television sets. TV’s have often been referred to as a box.

Then that led my brain to think that maybe the “magic box” that is referred to on the show is our, the viewers, television sets. The dual time concept is our time in real life versus the show’s time on our boxes. The show did begin on the small screen the same day it started on the television. The same this lines up with season 4 and the re-opening of Oceanic Airlines. And again Season 5 appearst to synch with Ajira Airlines new Destination Destiny program. Hmmm…

Could this mean that “imagine whatever you will and the box will provide it” that Ben mentions is really our TV boxes? A lot of things from writer’s imaginations are shown on those boxes.

And perhaps the most intriguing oddity from my historical review of past episodes is Cindy. Recall when she visits Jack when he is moved to the outdoor cages. She tells him, “We are here to watch.” Jack says something back like, “Watch what, Cindy?”, but she is interrupted by the children (or your wife during a football game, etc. HA!).

We’ve seen surveillance camera’s all over this island as well. Danielle and Frank are watching TV when they hear of Flight 815 being discovered. Hurley learns his lottery ticket result from TV. Expose is a TV show. Desmond watches the football/soccer match on TV. Hurley is seen in the background when Jin delivers his “message”. Kate visits her step-father at the military office and Sayid is on the TV in the background.

In summary, the show is hinting for us to view our TV’s as the magic box. Now my mind is led to contemplate things like subliminal marketing…after all we’ve noticed this is nearly every video clip related to LOST. There was some sci-fi show about using televisions to communicate a signal that would trigger a reaction in human brains. Ok…enough with the oddities.

SEASON 5 PROMO

Here is another postcard for the new season:

Since that really isn’t showing us anything exciting, here is another promo picture sure to excite you:

When I was on ABC.com website looking for a Season 5 promo picture, it made me sit through an ad for a new movies called The Unborn. You’ve probably seen it on TV. Being that it was on ABC’s website and my mind was on LOST, it struck me as strange that the movie trailer includes a close up of an eye. The next line was something about an evil twin. I’m just saying…


STARS IN HIS EYES

Recently the mention of constellations on LOST has come up. In fact, a recent posting on TIDBITS mentions one star formation during the discussion about the Underworld. That constellation is called Cygnus.

In the Underworld post we mentioned that Cygnus was the son of Apollo. Cygnus was an evil persona and was eventually punished by being transformed into a SWAN. Now that rings a bell. Zeus disguised himself as a swan and produced Gemini – Kate’s sign we discover way back when Claire and Kate were talking about the feasibility of astrology.

The U.S.S. Cygnus was also the name of the spacecraft in the movie, “The Black Hole”. Again, with the bells.

In the sky, the Cygnus constellation contains the famous Northern Cross; which happens to be the mirror image of the Southern Cross.

So, I started digging a bit more on Cygnus and discovered a group of researchers believe that this star has the greatest potential for the formation of a black hole. Others believe that all religion and life originates from the stars. Some authors claim that the star proves the existence of multiple dimensions. You can see why this stuff caught my LOST eye.

The brightest star in the Cygnus constellation is called Deneb. It seems that most ancient temples – including the Egyptian pyramids and the stone circles of Europe – were all oriented towards this star. Often the swan is the symbol but over time and adaptation into other cultures, it had been modified to an eagle or a vulture (think of the symbols on the Countdown Clock). These birds all shared the same function: to carry a soul into the afterlife.

Most religion stories share a commonality that these birds would lead a soul to the Underworld via a portal found where the Deneb star is – also known as the Polar Star. Growl. In one particular version, each person would stop at the Pole Star and be judged as worthy or not. If good enough, they would pass over the Milky Way and meet their “over-soul” or “twin soul”.

In Christianity, the star constellation was seen as the Cross of Calvary. This religion converted the bird shape of the stars into a dove. Recall the doves that Charlie sees in his very religion vision. Christianity adapted the judgment process into whether a person’s name was on a LIST or not, called the Book of Life.

The most modern adaptation of Cygnus comes from Carl Sagan who proposed that solar radiation from the constellation affected human DNA some 18,000 years ago and caused a new germ lines (germ in the sense of the three initial cell layers to form in an embryo, not germ as in bad bacteria) to make drastic leaps forward along the evolutionary path. Scientific evidence does show the earth was bombarded by strange sub-atomic particles in days past and spawned the phrase “children of the swan”.

Do all this star-gazing serve as the basis of the mythology of LOST and the research work by the Dharma Initiative? We can’t know for sure, but there is something finally that caught my eye. Ancient religions developed a symbol to represent the Circle of Cygnus – again, “The Circle” being the original name of LOST. Here it is:

Tell me this doesn’t remind you of the brand on Juliet?


EMAILS FROM READERS

LOST TIDBITS received a nice email from a faithful reader. He offered to link to TIDBITS from his site which is always welcomed. To return the favor, if you have a few minutes you might check out his blog on top of the line sports shoes at www.MyAirShoes.com. It is always nice to hear from readers, so email me or drop a comment.


NEXT ON TIDBITS

On Monday, I expect to post Dharma Special Access 8, so keep you eyes on the lookout...

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Thanks for reading!

Enjoy,
KC