I posted this theory just before Dark closed the old thread and it got missed, so I’ll do it again, slightly updated. It's a gut feeling that has been growing from the very beginning. It's certainly not the WHOLE answer but, IF I'm right, it's huge. I'm not sure yet how it fits into all the other mysteries of the island so I'll have to expand it as we get more pieces to the Lost puzzle, but it's a beginning. Here goes.
The survivors (aka our Losties) are clones. Their memories are all implanted memories. They are, in essence, an experiment being conducted by the others. Which others? I’m not completely sure yet, but I lean toward the other Others, as Ben considers his faction the “good guys” (although they are certainly not “good” in many of the things they have done). I’m sure we’ll know a lot more after “The Brig” and “Man Behind the Curtain”. With a few changes and a couple of twists here and there it could be exactly the opposite, with the new others being the good guys, but at this point I’m thinking not.
The first, and biggest clue was the crash itself. A plane breaks up thousands of feet in the air and falls to the ground. Even if it had been pulled to within 3 or 4 thousand feet before it broke up, that's quite a fall! Yet we have 40 or 50 people who not only survive that fall, they have almost no significant injuries at all. Could NOT happen!
If the other Others are some of the survivors of the original Dharma, and have underground facilities we haven’t seen, and if they are capable of incredible things (as some of the spoilers have led us to think), then they could have staged the whole “woke up on the beach after the crash” scenario. Lots of it could have been false memories programmed into them beforehand so they would “remember” these things happening even though they didn’t. Especially the very beginning when things were exploding and people were still dying. Then the wreckage conveniently “washed away” and they were left as “survivors” on the beach.
Some of the many other things that could tie into this theory are these:
Those who had health problems before the crash no longer have them. Locke, Rose, Jin, who knows who else we don't know about. Clones wouldn't have those problems anymore.
One of the big goals of DHARMA and the Hanso Foundation was prolonging life. We know it's possible to clone people, it just needs to be perfected. Now, if they discovered a way to transfer memories from the original brain to the cloned brain (chemically, electrically, whatever) a person could live practically forever. Have yourself cloned and if you became diseased, injured or just too old, transfer your memories into your nice new body and voila!
They would have had to discover a way to speed up the development of the cloned bodies. (Which could eventually be used to explain Walt's growth spurt.) The time needed for these clones to mature could explain a difference in time between what the Losties remember (they crashed a couple of months ago) and the true date off the island.
The Others could be researching and experimenting with the memory transplanting process, maybe it‘s not perfected yet. (While the cloned bodies were "growing" they had time to research the lives of the people they chose to clone, explaining how they know so much about them.) How well does it "take", will they really remember and believe they are the same people they were before they died in the crash? Maybe the fact that they died BEFORE their memories were transplanted (or most of them did) caused imperfections and blanks. Can they improvise, give them some memories that aren't real (maybe all the connections to each other) to "flesh out" the original memories? Can they improve on intelligence by some sort of gene manipulation during the cloning process? Lots of stuff they could be trying to learn.
It would also solve the “no babies” problem on the island. Clone yourself, let the clone grow up naturally and now you have children.
Ben’s Others could be a faction that split off from Dharma because they believed the clones are people in their own right and should ALL be allowed to grow and develop their own lives and memories just as if they had been born naturally, rather than some being used as "blanks" for other people's lives.
I read somewhere that Damon and Carlton are both Star Wars fans. For those of you who don't read much science fiction, Star Wars is not just 6 movies. There are dozens of books, authorized by Lucasfilm Ltd., that are all connected and continue the Star Wars universe. And they are full of clones.
I know this is a bit disjointed, and there are MANY loose ends, things I haven‘t worked out yet, a hole or three, and many other mysteries that would affect the story as a whole. But I'm pretty sure the writers would have no problem pulling it all together. This just feels so right to me. The only other possibility, for me, would be the parallel universe theory and, though it would work, I'm just not ready to go there yet!
Theory by the nightlighter
The survivors (aka our Losties) are clones. Their memories are all implanted memories. They are, in essence, an experiment being conducted by the others. Which others? I’m not completely sure yet, but I lean toward the other Others, as Ben considers his faction the “good guys” (although they are certainly not “good” in many of the things they have done). I’m sure we’ll know a lot more after “The Brig” and “Man Behind the Curtain”. With a few changes and a couple of twists here and there it could be exactly the opposite, with the new others being the good guys, but at this point I’m thinking not.
The first, and biggest clue was the crash itself. A plane breaks up thousands of feet in the air and falls to the ground. Even if it had been pulled to within 3 or 4 thousand feet before it broke up, that's quite a fall! Yet we have 40 or 50 people who not only survive that fall, they have almost no significant injuries at all. Could NOT happen!
If the other Others are some of the survivors of the original Dharma, and have underground facilities we haven’t seen, and if they are capable of incredible things (as some of the spoilers have led us to think), then they could have staged the whole “woke up on the beach after the crash” scenario. Lots of it could have been false memories programmed into them beforehand so they would “remember” these things happening even though they didn’t. Especially the very beginning when things were exploding and people were still dying. Then the wreckage conveniently “washed away” and they were left as “survivors” on the beach.
Some of the many other things that could tie into this theory are these:
Those who had health problems before the crash no longer have them. Locke, Rose, Jin, who knows who else we don't know about. Clones wouldn't have those problems anymore.
One of the big goals of DHARMA and the Hanso Foundation was prolonging life. We know it's possible to clone people, it just needs to be perfected. Now, if they discovered a way to transfer memories from the original brain to the cloned brain (chemically, electrically, whatever) a person could live practically forever. Have yourself cloned and if you became diseased, injured or just too old, transfer your memories into your nice new body and voila!
They would have had to discover a way to speed up the development of the cloned bodies. (Which could eventually be used to explain Walt's growth spurt.) The time needed for these clones to mature could explain a difference in time between what the Losties remember (they crashed a couple of months ago) and the true date off the island.
The Others could be researching and experimenting with the memory transplanting process, maybe it‘s not perfected yet. (While the cloned bodies were "growing" they had time to research the lives of the people they chose to clone, explaining how they know so much about them.) How well does it "take", will they really remember and believe they are the same people they were before they died in the crash? Maybe the fact that they died BEFORE their memories were transplanted (or most of them did) caused imperfections and blanks. Can they improvise, give them some memories that aren't real (maybe all the connections to each other) to "flesh out" the original memories? Can they improve on intelligence by some sort of gene manipulation during the cloning process? Lots of stuff they could be trying to learn.
It would also solve the “no babies” problem on the island. Clone yourself, let the clone grow up naturally and now you have children.
Ben’s Others could be a faction that split off from Dharma because they believed the clones are people in their own right and should ALL be allowed to grow and develop their own lives and memories just as if they had been born naturally, rather than some being used as "blanks" for other people's lives.
I read somewhere that Damon and Carlton are both Star Wars fans. For those of you who don't read much science fiction, Star Wars is not just 6 movies. There are dozens of books, authorized by Lucasfilm Ltd., that are all connected and continue the Star Wars universe. And they are full of clones.
I know this is a bit disjointed, and there are MANY loose ends, things I haven‘t worked out yet, a hole or three, and many other mysteries that would affect the story as a whole. But I'm pretty sure the writers would have no problem pulling it all together. This just feels so right to me. The only other possibility, for me, would be the parallel universe theory and, though it would work, I'm just not ready to go there yet!
Theory by the nightlighter
