(First, props to everyone who has posted their own theories. What a fun show to speculate about!! Congrats to the writers--breakthrough television.)
The greatest stories in film, television, literature, and stage are the bedtime stories mankind has told for ages and ages. Boy meets girl, dream comes true, fountain of youth is discovered, etc. All of us have daydreamed at one time or another about one of our particularly favorite storylines: magical places where there is no sickness or death, where wounds heal themselves, where futures can be predicted, where man is one with nature, and where the impossible happens. We write stories about them (Once and Future King, Harry Potter), we watch movies about them (Wizard of Oz, Neverending Story), we even tell ghost stories around the campfire about them. We are obsessed with this Magical Place storyline.
What would happen if there really was a magical place on this planet and it was discovered? What would happen if some guy, somehow, somewhere, randomly stumbled upon the real, live Utopia? If you situate this storyline in modern day--in an age of technology, military, government, media, and science, it would look very different from the traditional fairytale. In the storybooks, the magical place is discovered and happiness ensues. Mermaids walk on land, puppets turn into real boys, and elves make toys for billions of children. Not the case in this world where the laws of nature, physics, civilization, and government rule, and the slightest challenging of those laws causes uproar and civil unrest.
No, no. In this modern age, if the real live Utopia were actually discovered, there would be governmental and scientific movement that would put the Philadelphia experiment to shame. It would be immediately guarded, perimetered, infrastructured, studied, and tested. Top military officials would be called in to implement army base protections, supplies, and surveillance. Top government officials would be called in to design an infrastructure for maintaining confidentiality, implementing scientific research projects, and documenting every detail of the Magical Place. They would have to accept the fact that, based on probability, there have been other accidental discoveries of this place in the past. Perhaps a slave ship or two landed here decades ago. No matter--there is work to be done! Top scientists would be called in from every field: geologists to study the land, meteorologists to study the air, chemists, biologists, ecologists, medical doctors, the list goes on. Each scientist and official would be kept to the highest standards of confidentiality. To ensure their loyalty, severe penalties would be put in place, and enforcers would be hired to follow through with them. Each member of this top secret group would be carefully selected, researched, psychologically profiled, and put through a battery of physical exams and psych testing. Once they passed, they would be allowed in the Magical Place to witness a defiance of the very laws of nature. They would be given their uniforms and protocol under a vague and seemingly meaningless company name, such as "The Hanso Foundation."
The scientific research would be vast and thorough. It would yield several unsatisfying results. Answers to questions would only reveal more questions. "Magic" is beyond our understanding and our laws don't apply, so the scientists would therefore be compelled to dissect, unravel, and deconstruct until they were blue in the face. Which would mean they'd probably end up spending many years in this Magical Place.
The more time they spent there, the more they would notice changes in their personal lives, as well as in the group's dynamics. The Magical Place would start doing magical things to the scientists themselves, and mental health and functioning would start to suffer. Enter the psychologists. Intricate, complex research studies would be designed to study the people themselves, now that the scientists were suffering from some kind of "sickness." Man's greatest fear--insanity--would enter the picture and the project would take on a new focus, or a sub-focus, perhaps under another nebulous name, such as "The Dharma Initiative." This study would be a complex observation of how the Magical Place affects the lives of human beings themselves. I bet the scientists probably wouldn't be too happy about becoming subjects themselves. I bet they'd actually become quite "hostile" toward the Dharma people.
Events in the Magical Place would encompass everything from cured cancer patients, to healed cripples, to magical numbers, to smoke monsters. (In fact, the smoke monsters would be necessary according to the traditional conventions of fairytale literature: All Magical Places have a "bad" element--the magic never comes without cost.) It would be the scientists job to study the events; the psychologists would have the responsibility of observing the human dynamics. After all, if the top secret government officials really do have a morally responsible agenda to grant access to the magic to all the world, they'd better know exactly what they're getting into. Human experiments would thus be justified, and it would suddenly become ethical for children to be abducted, for brainwashing to occur, and for a man to kill his own father. It would all be in the name of research.
You'd of course have to protect any outsider from entering the Magical Place. You'd have to set up some kind of forcefield, magnetic or whatever, to keep outsiders out and insiders in. You'd need a few watchmen at a few different watch stations maintaining the integrity of the defense. And at any time one of your watchmen could fall asleep, or, I don't know, run off to kill a man, and you'd probably face a breach in your fortress. These moments you'd better pray that the random plane or helicopter isn't flying by and that your invisibility is suddenly penetrated.
But then again, if it were to happen, if a random plane were to be flying by your Magical Place at precisely the moment your forcefield was disrupted, wouldn't it be a fortunate accident? Wouldn't you have an unbiased, truly randomized sample of humans on which to perform observation and testing? Might they be able to provide you with more opportunities to answer your difficult questions? (Like, why do I keep seeing horses that aren't there?) You'd have to keep your identity unknown. You'd have to let them think they've crashed onto some desert island somewhere in the ocean, and pray that they don't explore too close to where you've set up camp. And you'd certainly have to come up with a plan--fast--to explain away all the magic.
For that to work, you'd need to know what makes each and every one of them tick. You'd have to send an "inside man" to gather names and details. You'd have to contact your headquarters and have and FBI-like investigation conducted on each one of the survivors. Your psychologists would have to make predictions about what the next move of each survivor will probably be--all in an effort to protect the confidentiality and integrity of your original reason for being in the Magical Place in the first place. What a pain in the ass.
Not to mention that your headquarters back at the Hanso Foundation would flip out. The breach in security would result in a "sealing" of the project, in which case no one would ever be allowed off the island. They'd have to plant a decoy plane on the ocean floor--complete with dead bodies--to mislead the public. You'd be stuck there for good with these new people, and you'd be pissed and scared, and you'd be damned if you didn't try to take control of this new civilization using your incredibly honed skills of persuasion and manipulation. You'd concoct some illusion of a "great man" since you cannot sustain the appearance of such a man, and you'd refer to him often. (You'd probably choose a really great biblical name, too, just for the credibility.) You'd need some way to procreate, so you'd have to capture all the children. And to convince them that everything is fine and dandy, you'd have to turn to good ole fashioned brainwashing. It's a good thing Dharma already set you up a nice brainwashing chamber.
You'd be Ben.
And your people would be either pissed at you or desperately trying to hold on to the idea that there still is a real cause in this Magical Place.
Both Walt and Locke would interest you. Walt's unexplainable powers would need to be harnessed and studied, so you'd just go ahead and take him. Locke would scare the pants off of you due to his "communion with the island." He would certainly threaten your power, so you'd watch him especially closely. When the Magical Place brought visions to him, you'd be quick to use them against him.
Jack would be convenient. You'd convince him to cure your cancer while you waited for answers as to why it wasn't curing itself. Juliet would be a nuisance with her moral conscience, yet easy to control as long as she believes she can go home someday. You'd need Sawyer and Kate for...something. I'm not sure yet.
Everyone else would unknowingly become researchers themselves. You'd watch as they experienced the magic of the island themselves and take notes, incorporating their new information with your already existing library of research.
All the while, you'd lie in bed at night, reflecting on the universe and all of its cosmic nuances. You'd chuckle as you'd recall the "six degrees of separation" law, realizing that each of the survivors is connected in a way they may never know, as are we all on this planet. You'd note the ironies of the Magical Place, where each individual's past finds a way to confront them in the form of visions, objects, or events, and then allows them to overcome some psychological injury they have carried all these years. You'd note the repetitiveness of the numbers and allow everyone else to be distracted with numerology and such things. And as you finally started to fall asleep, you'd wonder if the Red Sox will ever win another World Series.
Theory by Angela and Aaron
The greatest stories in film, television, literature, and stage are the bedtime stories mankind has told for ages and ages. Boy meets girl, dream comes true, fountain of youth is discovered, etc. All of us have daydreamed at one time or another about one of our particularly favorite storylines: magical places where there is no sickness or death, where wounds heal themselves, where futures can be predicted, where man is one with nature, and where the impossible happens. We write stories about them (Once and Future King, Harry Potter), we watch movies about them (Wizard of Oz, Neverending Story), we even tell ghost stories around the campfire about them. We are obsessed with this Magical Place storyline.
What would happen if there really was a magical place on this planet and it was discovered? What would happen if some guy, somehow, somewhere, randomly stumbled upon the real, live Utopia? If you situate this storyline in modern day--in an age of technology, military, government, media, and science, it would look very different from the traditional fairytale. In the storybooks, the magical place is discovered and happiness ensues. Mermaids walk on land, puppets turn into real boys, and elves make toys for billions of children. Not the case in this world where the laws of nature, physics, civilization, and government rule, and the slightest challenging of those laws causes uproar and civil unrest.
No, no. In this modern age, if the real live Utopia were actually discovered, there would be governmental and scientific movement that would put the Philadelphia experiment to shame. It would be immediately guarded, perimetered, infrastructured, studied, and tested. Top military officials would be called in to implement army base protections, supplies, and surveillance. Top government officials would be called in to design an infrastructure for maintaining confidentiality, implementing scientific research projects, and documenting every detail of the Magical Place. They would have to accept the fact that, based on probability, there have been other accidental discoveries of this place in the past. Perhaps a slave ship or two landed here decades ago. No matter--there is work to be done! Top scientists would be called in from every field: geologists to study the land, meteorologists to study the air, chemists, biologists, ecologists, medical doctors, the list goes on. Each scientist and official would be kept to the highest standards of confidentiality. To ensure their loyalty, severe penalties would be put in place, and enforcers would be hired to follow through with them. Each member of this top secret group would be carefully selected, researched, psychologically profiled, and put through a battery of physical exams and psych testing. Once they passed, they would be allowed in the Magical Place to witness a defiance of the very laws of nature. They would be given their uniforms and protocol under a vague and seemingly meaningless company name, such as "The Hanso Foundation."
The scientific research would be vast and thorough. It would yield several unsatisfying results. Answers to questions would only reveal more questions. "Magic" is beyond our understanding and our laws don't apply, so the scientists would therefore be compelled to dissect, unravel, and deconstruct until they were blue in the face. Which would mean they'd probably end up spending many years in this Magical Place.
The more time they spent there, the more they would notice changes in their personal lives, as well as in the group's dynamics. The Magical Place would start doing magical things to the scientists themselves, and mental health and functioning would start to suffer. Enter the psychologists. Intricate, complex research studies would be designed to study the people themselves, now that the scientists were suffering from some kind of "sickness." Man's greatest fear--insanity--would enter the picture and the project would take on a new focus, or a sub-focus, perhaps under another nebulous name, such as "The Dharma Initiative." This study would be a complex observation of how the Magical Place affects the lives of human beings themselves. I bet the scientists probably wouldn't be too happy about becoming subjects themselves. I bet they'd actually become quite "hostile" toward the Dharma people.
Events in the Magical Place would encompass everything from cured cancer patients, to healed cripples, to magical numbers, to smoke monsters. (In fact, the smoke monsters would be necessary according to the traditional conventions of fairytale literature: All Magical Places have a "bad" element--the magic never comes without cost.) It would be the scientists job to study the events; the psychologists would have the responsibility of observing the human dynamics. After all, if the top secret government officials really do have a morally responsible agenda to grant access to the magic to all the world, they'd better know exactly what they're getting into. Human experiments would thus be justified, and it would suddenly become ethical for children to be abducted, for brainwashing to occur, and for a man to kill his own father. It would all be in the name of research.
You'd of course have to protect any outsider from entering the Magical Place. You'd have to set up some kind of forcefield, magnetic or whatever, to keep outsiders out and insiders in. You'd need a few watchmen at a few different watch stations maintaining the integrity of the defense. And at any time one of your watchmen could fall asleep, or, I don't know, run off to kill a man, and you'd probably face a breach in your fortress. These moments you'd better pray that the random plane or helicopter isn't flying by and that your invisibility is suddenly penetrated.
But then again, if it were to happen, if a random plane were to be flying by your Magical Place at precisely the moment your forcefield was disrupted, wouldn't it be a fortunate accident? Wouldn't you have an unbiased, truly randomized sample of humans on which to perform observation and testing? Might they be able to provide you with more opportunities to answer your difficult questions? (Like, why do I keep seeing horses that aren't there?) You'd have to keep your identity unknown. You'd have to let them think they've crashed onto some desert island somewhere in the ocean, and pray that they don't explore too close to where you've set up camp. And you'd certainly have to come up with a plan--fast--to explain away all the magic.
For that to work, you'd need to know what makes each and every one of them tick. You'd have to send an "inside man" to gather names and details. You'd have to contact your headquarters and have and FBI-like investigation conducted on each one of the survivors. Your psychologists would have to make predictions about what the next move of each survivor will probably be--all in an effort to protect the confidentiality and integrity of your original reason for being in the Magical Place in the first place. What a pain in the ass.
Not to mention that your headquarters back at the Hanso Foundation would flip out. The breach in security would result in a "sealing" of the project, in which case no one would ever be allowed off the island. They'd have to plant a decoy plane on the ocean floor--complete with dead bodies--to mislead the public. You'd be stuck there for good with these new people, and you'd be pissed and scared, and you'd be damned if you didn't try to take control of this new civilization using your incredibly honed skills of persuasion and manipulation. You'd concoct some illusion of a "great man" since you cannot sustain the appearance of such a man, and you'd refer to him often. (You'd probably choose a really great biblical name, too, just for the credibility.) You'd need some way to procreate, so you'd have to capture all the children. And to convince them that everything is fine and dandy, you'd have to turn to good ole fashioned brainwashing. It's a good thing Dharma already set you up a nice brainwashing chamber.
You'd be Ben.
And your people would be either pissed at you or desperately trying to hold on to the idea that there still is a real cause in this Magical Place.
Both Walt and Locke would interest you. Walt's unexplainable powers would need to be harnessed and studied, so you'd just go ahead and take him. Locke would scare the pants off of you due to his "communion with the island." He would certainly threaten your power, so you'd watch him especially closely. When the Magical Place brought visions to him, you'd be quick to use them against him.
Jack would be convenient. You'd convince him to cure your cancer while you waited for answers as to why it wasn't curing itself. Juliet would be a nuisance with her moral conscience, yet easy to control as long as she believes she can go home someday. You'd need Sawyer and Kate for...something. I'm not sure yet.
Everyone else would unknowingly become researchers themselves. You'd watch as they experienced the magic of the island themselves and take notes, incorporating their new information with your already existing library of research.
All the while, you'd lie in bed at night, reflecting on the universe and all of its cosmic nuances. You'd chuckle as you'd recall the "six degrees of separation" law, realizing that each of the survivors is connected in a way they may never know, as are we all on this planet. You'd note the ironies of the Magical Place, where each individual's past finds a way to confront them in the form of visions, objects, or events, and then allows them to overcome some psychological injury they have carried all these years. You'd note the repetitiveness of the numbers and allow everyone else to be distracted with numerology and such things. And as you finally started to fall asleep, you'd wonder if the Red Sox will ever win another World Series.
Theory by Angela and Aaron
