In case you missed part one of this theory, let me begin by repeating my introduction to part one: this is not meant to be an end-all-be-all theory. This is simply an attempt to explain what we already know and what we should expect to learn given what we already know. Possibilities will be explored in an objective manner in an attempt to help others come to their own conclusions, though I may throw in my own personal preferences for which possibilties I favor. This series of three "theories" will hopefully allow us to explore the island a little deeper and in a much grander scope than would be possible (or feasible) in just one theory alone. And now let's begin where Part One left off (note: I'm trying to keep this theory as spoiler-free as possible, so let's all just pretend that the last bit of information we got was the Pierre Chang video at Comic-Con this year):
Despite occupying the island for no more than 20 years, the impact that the DHARMA Initiative would make on the island was bigger than almost every other event in the island's history. However, before we can further explore the island's history, we must explore DHARMA's history. The two items that are of the biggest help here are the Swan Station orientation film and the blast door map.
According to the show, DHARMA was founded so that "scientists and free-thinkers" could get together and combine their knowledge and research towards six key subjects that I will get into in just a bit. However, in The Lost Experience we were told that the DHARMA Initiative was assembled to find a solution to the Valenzetti equation that predicted the end of the world. The equation could ultimately be boiled down into six key factors: the numbers. Interestingly enough, in the Swan orientation video (from here on out abbreviated "SOV") DHARMA illustrated six key areas that they were experimenting in. These subjects were meteorology, psychology, parapsychology, zoology, electromagnetism, and utopian social... something (likely utopian social engineering). If the numbers mean anything, maybe they each represent a factor in one of these fields. All of these fields predict the date of the world's expiration, and so DHARMA is experimenting with them in order to try and manipulate t! hem in order to change the result of the equation. Of course since this is the end of the world that we're talking about, the numbers could represent any number of factors. Each number could reflect something that could bring about the world's end (with one number representing a separate way the world could end such as through nuclear strikes, biological warfare, environmental disasters, etc.). Of course the numbers could just represent natural processes that face the Earth on a daily basis. In an interview the writers claimed that they picked the number "42" to be one of the numbers as an homage to Douglas Adam's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in which the number 42 is the answer to "Life, the Universe, and Everything". So being the answer to life, maybe "42", in a way, represents the naturally occuring factor of "life" (something that might be important in an equation predicting the end of the world). If you've ever seen the movie "The Number 23", you know that there ! are some who could even associate "23" as representing "death"! . That's an interesting parallel there. Perhaps the other four numbers also represent naturally occuring parallels that would be significant in the Valenzetti equation. Most likely one of the first two options are the best explanation for the meaning of the Numbers, but I kind of like the third possibility myself. We may never know what the Numbers really "mean", if they mean anything at all. Still we know they are very important in the life and work of the DHARMA Initiative. (If you're waiting for me to get to the part where I discuss how the Numbers appear to be "cursed", I'm afraid you're going to have to wait until Part Three since that plotline doesn't really crop up until after DHARMA...)
Now we don't know when exactly DHARMA came to the island, but it is unlikely that DHARMA was formed on the island. DHARMA may have even begin their work off-island until they needed more money for their project. Then DHARMA found a man named Alvar Hanso who not only agreed to fund the Initiative, but also gave them a place to conduct their experiments: the island. We don't know exactly how Alvar procured this place for himself (and we know that the inhabitants of the island didn't give him permission to give their island to someone else, much less "own" it himself), but as discussed in Part One of this theory, most likely the journal of the first mate of the Black Rock somehow made its way into the hands of the Hanso family after pirates found it, seven years after the disappearance of the ship. The Hanso family then managed to use the information found in the journal to find the location of the island. Most likely this means that the island had not been moved at all between! the times that the Black Rock "landed" on it, and the Hanso family found it and claimed it as their own. Since the survivors of the Black Rock probably wrote in the journal where they were when an island appeared out of nowhere, it wasn't too difficult for the Hansos to track it down. Of course years later when a large group of scientists were looking for a good place to host their experiments, Alvar Hanso saw a winning possibility. He could not only get this group of scientists to explore all of the strange phenomena mentioned in the journal, but he would also have a small "army" that would be able to purge the island of the "intruders" living on "his" island. I'm talking, of course, about the natives.
Since Part One discussed the possibility of two different groups of "natives" evolving on the island (the somewhat more peaceful, "religious" group that consisted primarily of the original inhabitants, and the more violent group that consisted primarily of the Black Rock pirates), it is very possible that these two groups reacted differently to the arrival of yet more newcomers. Now obviously both groups of natives (assuming that there were at least two factions) now thought of the island as belonging to them, so they wouldn't be too happy about this intrusion. Likely the more religious group kept to their temples and such, knowing the "monster" would take care of any intruders that really needed to be gotten rid of, while the more hostile group took to attacking the group with whatever weapons they had on hand (which would probably be little more than whatever weapons they and their ancestors had brought along on the Black Rock). DHARMA was far too technologically advanced.! They had better guns and more of them. DHARMA's technology was probably enough to stave off the "Hostiles" and avoid the "monster" for long enough to do a preliminary search of the island. Once this search was done, DHARMA picked a place they thought would be perfect for living: the place we would later learn to call "the Barracks". This spot was a particularly good spot for two reasons. First, it allowed a great amount of fairly even ground that allowed DHARMA to build a number of houses and structures to keep the scientists safe from the Hostiles and monster, including the sonic fence. Second, it was centered around a certain spot that could be used to summon the monster. By blocking this off from the outside, DHARMA essentially blocked the only bit of "control" the natives had over the monster (unless the area is just a summoning point for the monster, in which case there is probably more than one scattered throughout the island). Still, this begs the question, why coul! dn't the monster penetrate the sonic fence? If the monster is ! any of t he things that Part One of this theory hypothesized, why would the sonic waves bother it? Can spirits or death not penetrate sonic waves? Did the Egyptians, Indians, and other cultures that created the monster through their dreams and imagination imagine that their protector should have a weakness to sonic waves? Or could it just be that the monster is simply a living creature with a low threshold for pain, and so as soon as the sonic waves start up, the monster immediately pulls back to stay away from the pain that the pressure or noise produces on all living things that walk between the pylons? Could it be something entirely different? Do the sound waves interfere with whatever holds the monster together? We simply don't have enough information yet to do anything more than guess.
We do know that within 10 years DHARMA would have managed to explore the island more fully and begin to set up its experiments. Now the Swan, Pearl, and Orchid orientation films have stated that there are 6 stations. There are also six areas of interest that DHARMA wanted to study. However, we have so far seen a total of at least 9 different stations on the island (or nearby). Why would DHARMA say there are 6 stations if there's really more than that? I think this is probably because DHARMA made a number of stations to study the six things that they were looking for, but they also needed stations for non-experimental functions. So let's go through the six things that DHARMA was studying, and then we'll go through any extra stations later.
The first thing on DHARMA's to-do list given in the SOV was meteorology. He have yet to see a station specifically referred to as a meteorology station on the island. It is unlikely that this was one of the topics that didn't need a station of its own, so that means that either we haven't seen the meteorology station yet, or it's a second function of one of the stations we've already seen. I'm actually leaning towards the latter on this point. The Tempest Station was said to produce poison gases. However, we know that DHARMA never used it on the Hostiles. Ben and the Hostiles may have eventually used the station on DHARMA, but it doesn't seem like it was ever used the other way around. Surely DHARMA didn't build the Tempest Station, immediately lose it to the Hostiles, and then get wiped out immediately afterward. DHARMA seemed pretty unsuspecting when the Purge happened. The Tempest had to have been used for something else. Juliet and Goodwin claimed that the Tempest was th! e island's power station, but after neutralizing the gases in the Tempest, Daniel would ask an episode later where the power on the island comes from, clearly showing that Juliet and Goodwin were just telling the lie they had been instructed to tell. Why they decided to lie about such a thing is a different question entirely that I'm not going to get into right now, but it does at least get rid of one other possibility for the Tempest before the Purge. The blast door map (from here on out abbreviated as "BDM") indicates that meteorological research was being done up in the mountains on the east side of the island. There is a single island up in the mountains on the east side of the map. The writers also claimed that the Tempest Station was drawn on the BDM. Upon Juliet visiting the Tempest station, we learned that it was located high up in the mountains. If the station high in the mountains was running meteorological research, wouldn't that make the Tempest the meteorologic! al station? The Tempest could have originally released certain! gases i nto the sky in the hopes that they would condense into clouds over the island and then affect the weather in some way. The name of the station works with this as well. A tempest is a storm. Instead of the storm being solely a figurative one (if the station was only built to kill off the Hostiles), it was once a literal one (in weather experiments). Once it was realized that the Tempest could be used as a facility to produce deadly gases, it became targeted by the Hostiles.
The second item on the agenda was psychology. We already saw that the Pearl Station was set up to study psychology. The occupants of the station believed that those in other stations (probably not just the Swan, and since there were 9 televisions, the Pearl probably watched 9 different places) were the subjects of the experiments, but they were being watched through a secret camera and were the subject of the experiments themselves. DHARMA had the capsules filled with notebooks that the Pearl station occupants had recorded their "findings" in dumped in a valley that no DHARMA worker would likely travel through and ruin the experiment. DHARMA may have removed some of the capsules periodically, but because of the large stack that was found there by the Flight 815 survivors, and likely the last time someone filled out one of those notebooks was before the Purge, we have to assume that DHARMA didn't regularly move the capsules from the dump, if at all.
Third was parapsychology. Here we are faced with a difficult set of possibilities. It is entirely possible that DHARMA set up a station devoted entirely toward studying parapsychology. In fact, there is (arguably) at least one station on the BDM that we have yet to identify (I'll address the "arguably" part shortly). However, we know that Walt seemed to exhibit some sort of abilities that would have fallen into the parapsychological field, and yet as far as we know, the Others just threw him in Room 23. And maybe Room 23 is the "parapsychology station". However given what we've seen of it both in the show and in the Missing Pieces episode, it doesn't look much like a place of study to me. Then there's the fact that parapsychological activity occurs all over the island. People and things appear where they shouldn't. Voices are heard. Maybe the island itself is the "parapsychology station". When the whole island exhibits the same amount of what you're trying to study, how do y! ou choose where to set up? All three of these things could work, but we don't have enough information to yet say which one is the case. (In just a moment I'll say which one I lean towards, however.)
Fourth was zoology. The BDM revealed that DHARMA brought polar bears to the island in order to see if they could repatriate and de-territotorialize the polar bears through gene therapy and extreme climate change. They also studied sharks and dolphins. Of course because of the dangers of experimenting with polar bears, DHARMA made sure to keep them largely separated from the rest of the project, so the experiments on the polar bears were conducted on a different island.
Fifth was electromagnetism. Now obviously the island produces electromagnetism all over the island, but apparently it produced a very significant amount in the southern sector of the island. DHARMA dug deep into the island in order to get at the source of electromagnetism, and it appears that for a while the Swan Station was used as a regular electromagnetism laboratory. Unfortunately that wouldn't last, but that topic comes up a little bit later.
Sixth was utopian social engineering. This one is very unlikely to have a station attached to it because it involves a large group of people living together in a "utopian" community. It seems most likely here that the Barracks themselves were set up as this experiment towards utopian social engineering. All children got equal education opportunities. Everyone got an identical house. Obviously there were a few things that kept the Barracks from operating perfectly in the mold of an ideal utopian social environment, but overall it seems that the Barracks did enough towards this ideal that it was likely the fulfillment of DHARMA studying that particular area.
We still have at least one more station that has to do with experimentation, however, that doesn't have to do with the main six. The Orchid Station is an experimentation station, and number 6 of 6 in the orientation films. Given this we know that there wasn't a station for every one of the six things that DHARMA stated they initially wanted to study. However, the Orchid appears to have been the last station established that was meant to be an experimentation station (because most likely only the experimentation stations would have needed orientation films). So DHARMA must have again been exploring the island when they happened upon an underground ice cave with its walls covered in hieroglyphics... Seeing a very large wheel protruding from a wall of ice, and recognizing the wheel as looking similar to a donkey wheel, they realized their luck. If they could get a polar bear down into the cavern, they could have the animal easily turn the wheel in order to see what it does. (Th! ough the opening through which Ben entered the area would have been too small for a polar bear to fit through, we did only barely see half of the cavern... There may be a bigger opening elsewhere, or the opening may have been larger 20 years ago when DHARMA found the wheel.) So DHARMA pulled a polar bear from the Hydra Station project in order to see what the wheel would do. The polar bear turned the wheel, and the island vanished, only to reappear in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (it had started in either the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean... more to come on this shortly). Likely DHARMA would realize that the island had moved in time as well as space, and so they began to build a new station over their finding in order to tap into the pocket of exotic matter being produced there. By building the Orchid Station (with its name being very apt as the orchid often lives off of parasiting fungi; in the same way, the Orchid Station parasites the exotic matter in order to function! ), DHARMA was able to use the exotic matter in its experiments! . By bui dling the Vault, DHARMA was able to localize the effects of the exotic matter and control it to some small extent.
Now speaking of the _ of 6 found in the orientation videos, we know that the electromagnetism station (the Swan) was number 3. The psychology station (the Pearl) was 5. The spacetime station (Orchid) was 6. So what were 1, 2, and 4? The only other experimental stations we know of for sure are the Hydra Station and the meteorology station (likely the Tempest). Those could satisfy two of the numbers. Does that mean that there is still a third experimental station that potentially has another orientation film? I think so. In fact, this is where I believe the "parapsychology station" comes in. We're missing one experimental station. We've got at least one station on the BDM that's still unknown (quick side note: the BDM shows us 7 or 8 stations; they are the Swan, the Flame, the Staff, the Arrow, the ? (which we know is the Pearl), C3 (which is likely the Tempest), C4, and the crossed-out station; it is possible that the Orchid is shown on the BDM, as station 6 is mentioned on t! he map (and is mentioned close to the crossed-out station), but we can be almost sure that the Orchid isn't C4 regardless because the Orchid is almost on the opposite side of the island when compared to the beach camp which is closest to the Swan station; either way station C4 can't be filled by any stations we know of yet). So why can't that one extra station be the parapsychology station? What else could it be? A station where DHARMA studied the monster? Maybe. It is surrounded by a number of Cerberus vents (and it's been confirmed that the Cerberus vents are the holes that the monster travels through). A cryptography/listening station? The BDM does mention something of the sort, but wouldn't that kind of be a waste of a station (especially since the BDM says that the particular area would probably cause a lot of interference for a potential listening station)? A remote viewing station? Well there is the notation next to the station claiming "High Potential For R.V.S. Fac! ility", but if RVS stands for "remote viewing station", that w! ould mea n that sentence reads "remote viewing station facility" which is a little redundant... However, if it is a remove viewing station, might this remote viewing be done in the natural sense (surveillance cameras, etc.) or in the parapsychological sense (in which case it could still be the parapsychology station)...?
Still the BDM does claim that the Flame Station is number 4. Why would the Flame Station need an orientation film? It's definitely not an experimental station. It was built specifically to allow communications off of the island. As long as you know how to use the computer there's no training required (and apparently as long as you can play a game of chess, quite a few options are automated). Radzinsky could have been wrong about the Flame having a number, of course. It does seem like he was wrong about the placement of the Flame and the Staff, so he could have been wrong about other things as well.
But still there were other stations that DHARMA made: the Staff, the Arrow, the Looking Glass... The Staff is an obvious one. You'd obviously want a medical station since there's no hospital, people are running dangerous experiments, the jungles are filled with dangerous people and creatures, and people are still having babies... Yes, as we learned in the Season 4 finale, it seems that Charlotte was born on the island. That means one of three things: her mother was with DHARMA, her mother was with the natives, or her mother accidentally crashed on the island and gave birth to her there. The last option doesn't seem very feasible to me since there's been no other mention of anyone else landing on the island by mistake yet. The first option would mean the mother definitely got pregnant on the island. The second option could mean that she was conceived on or off the island. However in Pierre Chang's video that was shown at Comic-Con (Marvin Candle for all of you who still know ! him as such), we can hear a baby crying. Now Chang says that the baby is a "him", so we know it's not Charlotte, but it seems very unlikely that anyone would have purposefully brought a young infant to the island. That suggests to me that this baby was born and conceived on the island by DHARMA. It would only be a few years later, however, before babies would suddenly end up killing their mothers before they are born due to (as Juliet says), the mother's body thinking the fetus is a foreign invader and turning on it (though this explanation doesn't quite explain the deaths of the mothers yet)... This was likely the beginning of DHARMA's curse for using technology to abuse nature and the island. Not enough information right now to confirm that though...
The Arrow's purpose is less obvious. The BDM says that its primary function is "restocking and staging area" as well as "possible manufacturing facility with light industrial equipment". When Goodwin and the Tail Section survivors find the Arrow, Goodwin says the station looks like it was used for storage. But if any of these are the case, why does Horace Goodspeed, a mathematician, wear the Arrow logo on his jumpsuit? There is still one other possibility I can think of for the Arrow (besides a place for mathematicians to run numbers and test equations as well). Beside the Arrow Station on the BDM, there is a notation that reads "Possible terminal point for subterranean E.E.P. tunnel network?" It has been revealed via the confirmed canon puzzles that replicate the BDM that E.E.P. stands for "Emergency Escape Protocol". That means Radzinsky was under the impression that DHARMA had an underground series of tunnels which were to be used if people needed to escape quickly. Escap! e what though? In the Staff Station, there can be seen a small door that says "Escape Hatch" (look up the "Staff Station" on lostpedia.com if you want a picture). This likely leads to the Staff's E.E.P. We also know that the Arrow station is the closest station to the Barracks. Goodwin managed to join the Tail Section survivors (who crashed closest to the Arrow Station) within a few minutes of the crash. The Tail section survivors knew the general direction where the Others lived and came from in order to kidnap their companions. This all makes perfect sense. If there was an emergency, and DHARMA needed to escape their stations to return to shelter, that shelter would likely be the Barracks. So everyone would need a way to get to the Barracks quickly. The Arrow could have provided such a means. So anyone who needed to get to the Barracks quickly would use the E.E.P. already installed in their station. This would take them to the Arrow Station. From there it was a very short! jog to the safety of the Barracks. Then again, maybe the Arro! w was ju st used for storage. I think the E.E.P. theory is a bit more likely though.
The Looking Glass's purpose is debatable at best. The "obvious" explanation for the station is that it emits the sonar that the Others' submarine follows in order to find the island (which we've already established in Part One is invisible to the outside world and can send someone forward or backward in time if approached from the wrong direction). However, we know that the Looking Glass is also able to communicate with the outside world and jam transmissions coming to and going from the island. Why would that be included in a station whose primary function is for guiding submarines to the island? What about the station's name? Maybe it means that it guides the submarine through the "portal" to the island (the point where the sub is able to approach the island without being thrown backward or forward in time) as an homage to Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" in which the Looking Glass led Alice to another world. Of course since we know that it is possible to get to! the island without needing to go through a specific point (as long as you get close enough to the island to see it, you're bound to be able to get on it), there may be another reason for the name. One of my favorite theories that I've read for this (though I'm pretty sure it's wrong) says that the station is called the "Looking Glass" because DHARMA was able to manipulate the station's moon pool into a "looking glass" of sorts that allowed the scientists to see something through it (be that the future, another world, or something else differs from theory to theory that supports this idea). However, that seems unlikely because the Looking Glass was likely not an experimental station. As for the station blocking transmissions, maybe DHARMA added that feature to the station when the Swan station became a place to push a button and nothing more. After this, in order to make sure that the now even more isolated Swan station couldn't attempt to make contact with the outside worl! d, they had one of the most hidden stations on the island equi! pped wit h jamming equipment to make sure that any attempts the Swan station occupants made to get in touch with the outside world would be in vain. After all, DHARMA knew that it would be extinct soon (we know this courtesy of Pierre Chang's video at Comic-Con), and they knew that pushing the button would eventually become a permanent job for two unlucky souls...
We don't know how, but Pierre Chang claimed that he had a source that had proven himself to have knowledge of the future. This suggests to me that his source was a person from the future. Of course as most people have guessed from the voice of the cameraman in Pierre Chang's video, that person is probably Daniel Faraday, some how thrown back in time. The only ways that Faraday could have gone back in time to the DHARMA days at this point, however, are for him to have either traveled at a certain bearing on and off the island several times in order to go back in time to the '70s (since as far as we've seen, the barrier around the island only displaces a person in time a matter of days at the most). However we know that Faraday has been exposed to a large amount of electromagnetic radiation, so he would need to find his constant every time he went through the barrier at the wrong bearing in order to survive his effort to go back in time, and repeating that scenario over and ov! er again to get Faraday into the past wouldn't be very good television. Another option is that the island traveled back in time to the DHARMA days when Ben turned the donkey wheel, but that presents a few problems in itself that I'll get to in Part Three (but primarily it would mean that Daniel would have to leave the island that traveled back in time to get to the island that was already in the past with DHARMA on it which would be tedious at best). The third option, which seems much more likely to me, is that the island and everything connected to it teleports together. Anything nearby the island (like within the island's barrier or so) gets teleported as well, but to a "random" time and place of its own. Once Daniel had gotten back to the past, however, it would still be possible for him to get back to the island if the island was in the future. If Daniel did end up back in the DHARMA days while the island with the Flight 815 survivors ended up some time in the relative ! future (that just means after DHARMA, even though it could be ! the Flig ht 815er's past (such as if they teleported to 1998, etc.)), Daniel could have made his way back into the future in three different ways: 1) He could have gone through the time barrier at the wrong bearing to be thrown a few days into the future and repeated this method until he got to the "present" (but I've already pointed out the problems with this). 2) He could have used DHARMA's Orchid Station to teleport into the future to just before Ben destroyed the Vault, hidden in one of the side rooms of the Orchid Station when Locke and Ben came down, and then left the Orchid Station after Locke, so that he was on the island when it disappeared (yes, this would mean that there were two Daniels at once, but the two would never have interacted since one goes off the island and is sent into the past while another appears on the opposite side of the island during the "present" and gets teleported with the island, rejoining the rest of the survivors shortly afterwards). Or 3) Daniel ! could have ended up in the past at a point when DHARMA was on the island, but before they discovered the frozen donkey wheel. He met with Pierre Chang and told him all about the coming Purge, and proved himself with his knowledge of the island and DHARMA Initiative (Daniel could have even told the DI where the frozen donkey wheel was). Then when DHARMA got a polar bear to turn the wheel, Daniel sailed back out into the ocean, watched the island teleport again, and this time Daniel ended up in the ocean along with the "present" teleported island (the one with the Flight 815 survivors on it). Then again, maybe Daniel doesn't even rejoin the survivors. (Remember, no spoilers; I'm just listing possibilities given what we know since Comic-Con and before.)
However it happened, Pierre Chang learned about the Purge. He learned that the Hostiles were bound to kill off the DHARMA Initiative unless they could somehow change the future. At this point I believe the DHARMA Initiative did three things: they continued with their experiments, they made preparations in case they couldn't change the future, and they began trying to find ways in order to change the future despite all odds. Now as we would learn, DHARMA didn't end up finding a way to change the future (since it has been established time and time again that you can't change the ultimate destiny of something; you can change a few details through consciousness traveling, but you can't change the final overall facts, and it seems you can't change anything with physical time traveling), but let's still look at a few ways DHARMA may have tried to combat the Hostiles. If the third theory about Daniel above is true, then we know that DHARMA would soon find out about the frozen donke! y wheel, and they would soon begin experimenting with the exotic matter to see how they could manipulate space and time. Maybe they began these experiments to try and avoid the future in which they were all killed in addition to whatever good could come of the research. Obviously they began to transform the Tempest station into a chemical weapons factory. And finally I think it is possible that DHARMA could have been responsible for creating their worst enemy in an effort to save themselves. How ironic would it be if DHARMA was ultimately responsible for their own extinction? How ironic would it be if DHARMA was responsible for Jacob?
This sounds like a crazy theory at first. How could DHARMA possibly be responsible for Jacob? That's a good question. Equally good questions, however, are: Why does Jacob live in a cabin that was built by someone in the DHARMA Initiative? and Why does DHARMA mention Jacob in their Room 23 video if he is this really secret leader of the Hostiles that not even some of the Hostiles are allowed to see? We know that in the world of LOST there are people who are born with special abilities. Walt is one of these people. Miles may be another (though some have theorized that Miles got his abilities from the island, but we know that Walt has probably never been to the island before). Jacob may have been yet another still. This is why DHARMA knows about Jacob. Jacob may have once been a member of the DHARMA Initiative (or a child of someone in the Initiative) that had extraordinary abilities like Walt or Miles. DHARMA wanted to be able to harness these abilities in order to rid themsel! ves of the Hostiles once and for all. So they began a series of experiments on Jacob (this may have even been a code name). DHARMA succeeded in allowing Jacob to reach his full potential, but in doing so they created a person who hated technology with a passion for turning him into what he considered to be a monster. Jacob no longer existed as a normal person, and he was now one with the island. However he now had abilities that extended far beyond the island, and he knew that DHARMA must go (maybe it was for vengeance; maybe it was because he saw that it was destiny for DHARMA to be wiped out). He claimed the cabin that Horace Goodspeed had built for his own, but the Hostiles (or pehaps the religious natives) managed to put a ring of ash around it to limit some of Jacob's powers. Because he was now a bit more limited in his power, and possibly felt a bit more human because of it, he joined the Hostiles in wanting to rid the island of DHARMA, Richard found Ben, and before t! oo long the Purge was planned and ready. (Of course if that th! eory isn 't correct, there's always the chance that the island itself just manifested in the form of a human, showing "himself" only to those he trusted, and planned the Purge, but DHARMA managed to capture and question a Hostile; he told DHARMA about Jacob (despite the Others having shown themselves to not give up any information even under pain of death, making this unlikely) and this is how DHARMA knew about him to put his name in the Room 23 video, and after the Purge Jacob took over Horace's cabin almost as a trophy perhaps (and then Ben or one of the Hostiles laid the ash in order to limit his powers somehow, assuming that's what the ash is for).
How is Richard explained in all of this? If Jacob didn't come into being until closer to the DHARMA days, how is Richard still alive? Well we don't know for sure when Richard was born. All we know is that he either ages really slowly, he aged normally until he got to the age we see him now and then he stopped aging (since he looks the same in 1956 when he visited baby Locke as he does in 2004), or he time travels to random times, and this is why he always looks the same age. However, Ben has said to Richard, "You do remember birthdays, don't you, Richard?", thus implying that Richard might have some reason to have forgotten birthdays. The only reason I can think of is that Richard used to have birthdays, but he doesn't any more. That rules out time traveler, and that seems to rule out that he is still aging, but only very slowly. So how did Richard stop aging? Since it seems most likely that it was Jacob that caused Richard to stop aging, perhaps Richard was born into the Ho! stiles before DHARMA came around (and before the fertility curse came upon the island). He grew up normally, but he grew up to become a very important person in the Hostile group. The Hostiles eventually found Jacob, and Jacob chose Richard to be the person to choose the next leader for the Hostiles. To avoid having to find a new person to choose the leaders when Richard was gone, Jacob used his abilities to prevent Richard from aging. Under Jacob's orders, Richard founded Mittelos Bioscience as a cover to search for their new leader and to look for people that could aid them in their various undertakings. However when Locke showed that he wasn't quite ready to become the leader of the Hostiles, Richard found Ben who seemed to be a suitable placeholder until Locke was truly ready. (Alternately is is possible that either the island has something equivalent to the Fountain of Youth on it, but very few people know where it is or have drank from it (Ben and Alex certainly haven! 't tasted it since they continued to age on the island), or th! e island somehow chose Richard to not age without having manifested itself as Jacob, in which case Richard could have been born at any time after the Black Rock's crash (or could have even been one of the people on the Black Rock itself, but that doesn't explain why the island would have chosen him then).)
Regardless, it seems that DHARMA's attempts to prevent the Purge were in vain. Still there were a few things that DHARMA did in preparation just in case they couldn't change the future. The main thing they did had to do with the Swan station. Though it began as an electromagnetic research and experimentation station, something happened that caused the electromagnetic anomaly that the Swan station occupants had been studying to become unstable. The anomaly would slowly build up, causing it to need to be released before it got big enough to do serious damage. This incident caused DHARMA to seal off part of the station and convert it from an experimental lab into a place where a button was regularly pushed in order to "fix" their mistake. DHARMA did think to add a feature that would hypothetically cause the anomaly to seal itself shut, but because it was unknown what would happen to whoever activated this feature, DHARMA just continued to press the button to avoid any possible ! loss of life. Once DHARMA realized that pushing the button would become a permanent job, however, and DHARMA likely wouldn't be around forever to keep up the protocol (and DHARMA was unlikely to convince any of the natives to keep pushing the button), DHARMA had to figure out a way to make sure the button kept getting pressed. They decided to put two people in the Swan station, and then scare them into remaining in the station, pushing the button. DHARMA could only think of one fool-proof way of doing this: completely isolate the Swan station inhabitants, and then have someone not related to DHARMA tell the horror stories of what lies outside of the station. Because DHARMA isn't the one saying what's out there, the station occupants are more inclined to believe it isn't just a trick. But in order to get a person not related to the DI to say such a thing, they'd have to believe it themselves...
At this point DHARMA likely arranged a daring plan. They needed to get a group of scientists that were working in the Pacific Ocean where the island was located to happen upon it. In order to do this, a few members of DHARMA infiltrated a science team and led them close to the island. The boat would have picked up a radio signal, numbers being broadcast from the radio tower located on the island, and the science team would have "chosen" to investigate. As the boat approached the island, it would have crashed just off-shore, and the DHARMA members would have gotten everyone to shore. Among this science team would be none other than a man named Robert and a pregnant woman named Danielle Rousseau. (As a side note, DHARMA may have also specifically chosen Danielle's team because she was pregnant, and they were in need of a test subject after having been hit by the baby-curse which has begun to kill off pregnant mothers.) The boat crashed just off-shore in 1988. The Purge would n! ot occur until 1992. Danielle told the Flight815 survivors that she had never seen anyone else on the island besides the members of her science team. So the team would have had to have had members of DHARMA secretly amongst them in order to keep the science team from accidentally stumbling across any members of DHARMA for four whole years. Once the members of DHARMA had established where the group should and shouldn't go, they set their plan into action. They began to show symptoms of being "sick". They would get rashes (since Aaron's rash was what made Danielle think he had the sickness). They would apparently begin to act in such a way that made it seem vital that they died to keep from spreading the sickness as well. The scientists watched for the weakest psychological link amongst the science group. Identifying it as Danielle, the scientists slowly "killed" themselves off to make it look like the sickness had claimed them. Apparently the scientists began to show their s! ymptoms around the time the Whispers began (I'll probably go i! nto the Whispers in Part Three), and so Rousseau believed that the Others were the carriers of the disease. However it doesn't seem as if the plan went exactly as they wanted it to ultimately. Rousseau got so paranoid that she began to kill off the rest of the science team on her own before they could spread the sickness. One member of the science team even lost his arm... Despite these losses, however, DHARMA ultimately got what it wanted. Rousseau made it to the radio tower and changed the message to one of terror, disease, and death, a message that would frighten Swan station occupants away from the idea of leaving their "safe" hatch. The word "Quarantine" was printed on the doors of the Swan Station and the Arrow Station (the latter likely because if the Swan Station's E.E.P. was still active, they could have used it to reach the Arrow, and to keep up the charade, a quarantine marker would need to be placed there as well), and the Swan station occupants were advised to vaccinate! themselves every so often to prevent catching the disease that supposedly ravaged the outside world.
Knowing that DHARMA's time was almost up, one scientist who had lost his arm some time previously, editted the Swan station orientation video in order to give a much fuller knowledge of the DHARMA Initiative to those who would end up living in the Swan station likely for the rest of their lives. Whether Pierre Chang/Marvin Candle is the same man as Montand, the man who lost his arm while with Rousseau, is debatable, but I like to believe that someone as important as Chang would have been involved in the Sickness charade, and would have therefore been one of the DHARMA members to infiltrate Rousseau's group. Still, we know that he editted the Swan station video because all three orientation films we have seen so far have all been copyrighted 1980. However in film 3 of 6 he is missing an arm, while in films 5 of 6 and 6 of 6, he still has both of his arms. He must have altered the Swan's orientation video, or just filmed a new one altogether while failing to change the copyrig! ht date.
Still with all of this said, there are still a few DHARMA questions left unanswered. #1 Why does Pierre Chang use so many different names? I don't have a good answer for this, but it is definitely worth noting that when Chang tells us his real name, he says that the reason he is saying his name is because "there's no point in games any more". So were all of his aliases just a game? A psychological experiment? Or was there some deeper reason for them? #2 Did the drug smugglers from Nigeria land on the island during this period? If so, how? One very interesting possibility is the fact that we know that due to the Black Rock, the island was located in either the Atlantic Ocean or the Indian Ocean, right around Africa, before DHARMA moved it. We know that the drug smugglers started their flight from Nigeria, but we don't know exactly where they were going. However, if you look at a map of Nigeria (or if you're familiar with its geography), you will see that its lower border prot! rudes out into the ocean. The drug smugglers could have easily been flying over parts of the Atlantic Ocean if they started from this portion of Nigeria. So the Beechcraft airplace could have very easily crashed on the island just like in Locke's vision. However it would have crashed before DHARMA moved the island into the Pacific. And if it doesn't seem like enough time has passed, it is also possible that when DHARMA moved the island into the Pacific Ocean the island moved back in time a few years as well, giving the plane plenty of time to have crashed, Ben be recruited by DHARMA at a young age, and Eko to become a priest those few short years later. the only alternative right now would have to be something to do with wormholes or teleportation by other means, but as far as we know so far, this isn't yet possible. #3 Why did Ben take Alex from Rousseau? Ben was still with DHARMA at the time Alex was born, and Alex would be nearly four years old before the Purge even occu! red. My favorite theory that I've heard on the matter is that ! Ben ende d up with Annie and she got pregnant. However the baby-curse had just begun to act on the people of the island and Annie and the baby died before the baby could be born. Ben took Alex as a replacement for Annie and his unborn child (whether this was suggested by one or more of the members of DHARMA or Ben decided to do it on his own is unknown, but the former isn't unlikely since DHARMA may have been afriad that Danielle was crazy enough that she might kill her own child). #4 What was the Incident? All we really know about the incident is that it caused the electromagnetic anomaly that the Swan station was studying to spring a leak, and Marvin Candle worried that using the Swan station's computer for any reason other than inputting the code might lead to another Incident. Maybe the Incident was Jacob's last attack on the DHARMA Initiative before the Purge. In Season 2 we were shown someone using the Swan computer to talk to Michael. If this person was truly Walt as they clai! med, that would mean that special people are able to somehow uplink with the computers. Therefore Jacob could likely have done the same thing years ago and caused the Incident. Alternately a Hostile could have somehow gained access to one of DHARMA's computers, learned how to work it (which seems unlikely unless they kidnapped a DHARMA member and had them operate it), and caused the Incident. #5 Where did DHARMA get electricity? A brief knowledge of electromagnetism will tell you that an electromagnetic field consists of a changing magnetic field producing an electrical field, and a changing electrical field producing a magnetic field. So as the electromagnetic field of the island exists, the magnetic field may be responsible for producing an equal electrical field that could be channeled through a transformer of some kind in order to give DHARMA useable electricity. I have no idea what that transformer would look like or where it would be located (and I'm only fairly sure ! that I've interpreted the facts about electromagnetismcorrect! ly :P), but this could explain the question of where DHARMA (and now the Others) got electricity.
Of course when 1992 rolled around, DHARMA had still not succeeded in purging the island of the Hostiles and so got purged themselves. However, DHARMA wouldn't be the last group to make its stand against the harsh natives of the island and be faced with just as many questions as those that came before them...
(Final note: There may be more questions yet, but I plan on addressing things like the food drops and the whispers in the next part when they're a bit more relevant. I apologize for the ridiculous length of this part of the theory, and I thank anyone and everyone who contributed one of the theories that I mentioned in this one (and I apologize for not being able to identify you).)
Theory by Trs10882
Despite occupying the island for no more than 20 years, the impact that the DHARMA Initiative would make on the island was bigger than almost every other event in the island's history. However, before we can further explore the island's history, we must explore DHARMA's history. The two items that are of the biggest help here are the Swan Station orientation film and the blast door map.
According to the show, DHARMA was founded so that "scientists and free-thinkers" could get together and combine their knowledge and research towards six key subjects that I will get into in just a bit. However, in The Lost Experience we were told that the DHARMA Initiative was assembled to find a solution to the Valenzetti equation that predicted the end of the world. The equation could ultimately be boiled down into six key factors: the numbers. Interestingly enough, in the Swan orientation video (from here on out abbreviated "SOV") DHARMA illustrated six key areas that they were experimenting in. These subjects were meteorology, psychology, parapsychology, zoology, electromagnetism, and utopian social... something (likely utopian social engineering). If the numbers mean anything, maybe they each represent a factor in one of these fields. All of these fields predict the date of the world's expiration, and so DHARMA is experimenting with them in order to try and manipulate t! hem in order to change the result of the equation. Of course since this is the end of the world that we're talking about, the numbers could represent any number of factors. Each number could reflect something that could bring about the world's end (with one number representing a separate way the world could end such as through nuclear strikes, biological warfare, environmental disasters, etc.). Of course the numbers could just represent natural processes that face the Earth on a daily basis. In an interview the writers claimed that they picked the number "42" to be one of the numbers as an homage to Douglas Adam's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in which the number 42 is the answer to "Life, the Universe, and Everything". So being the answer to life, maybe "42", in a way, represents the naturally occuring factor of "life" (something that might be important in an equation predicting the end of the world). If you've ever seen the movie "The Number 23", you know that there ! are some who could even associate "23" as representing "death"! . That's an interesting parallel there. Perhaps the other four numbers also represent naturally occuring parallels that would be significant in the Valenzetti equation. Most likely one of the first two options are the best explanation for the meaning of the Numbers, but I kind of like the third possibility myself. We may never know what the Numbers really "mean", if they mean anything at all. Still we know they are very important in the life and work of the DHARMA Initiative. (If you're waiting for me to get to the part where I discuss how the Numbers appear to be "cursed", I'm afraid you're going to have to wait until Part Three since that plotline doesn't really crop up until after DHARMA...)
Now we don't know when exactly DHARMA came to the island, but it is unlikely that DHARMA was formed on the island. DHARMA may have even begin their work off-island until they needed more money for their project. Then DHARMA found a man named Alvar Hanso who not only agreed to fund the Initiative, but also gave them a place to conduct their experiments: the island. We don't know exactly how Alvar procured this place for himself (and we know that the inhabitants of the island didn't give him permission to give their island to someone else, much less "own" it himself), but as discussed in Part One of this theory, most likely the journal of the first mate of the Black Rock somehow made its way into the hands of the Hanso family after pirates found it, seven years after the disappearance of the ship. The Hanso family then managed to use the information found in the journal to find the location of the island. Most likely this means that the island had not been moved at all between! the times that the Black Rock "landed" on it, and the Hanso family found it and claimed it as their own. Since the survivors of the Black Rock probably wrote in the journal where they were when an island appeared out of nowhere, it wasn't too difficult for the Hansos to track it down. Of course years later when a large group of scientists were looking for a good place to host their experiments, Alvar Hanso saw a winning possibility. He could not only get this group of scientists to explore all of the strange phenomena mentioned in the journal, but he would also have a small "army" that would be able to purge the island of the "intruders" living on "his" island. I'm talking, of course, about the natives.
Since Part One discussed the possibility of two different groups of "natives" evolving on the island (the somewhat more peaceful, "religious" group that consisted primarily of the original inhabitants, and the more violent group that consisted primarily of the Black Rock pirates), it is very possible that these two groups reacted differently to the arrival of yet more newcomers. Now obviously both groups of natives (assuming that there were at least two factions) now thought of the island as belonging to them, so they wouldn't be too happy about this intrusion. Likely the more religious group kept to their temples and such, knowing the "monster" would take care of any intruders that really needed to be gotten rid of, while the more hostile group took to attacking the group with whatever weapons they had on hand (which would probably be little more than whatever weapons they and their ancestors had brought along on the Black Rock). DHARMA was far too technologically advanced.! They had better guns and more of them. DHARMA's technology was probably enough to stave off the "Hostiles" and avoid the "monster" for long enough to do a preliminary search of the island. Once this search was done, DHARMA picked a place they thought would be perfect for living: the place we would later learn to call "the Barracks". This spot was a particularly good spot for two reasons. First, it allowed a great amount of fairly even ground that allowed DHARMA to build a number of houses and structures to keep the scientists safe from the Hostiles and monster, including the sonic fence. Second, it was centered around a certain spot that could be used to summon the monster. By blocking this off from the outside, DHARMA essentially blocked the only bit of "control" the natives had over the monster (unless the area is just a summoning point for the monster, in which case there is probably more than one scattered throughout the island). Still, this begs the question, why coul! dn't the monster penetrate the sonic fence? If the monster is ! any of t he things that Part One of this theory hypothesized, why would the sonic waves bother it? Can spirits or death not penetrate sonic waves? Did the Egyptians, Indians, and other cultures that created the monster through their dreams and imagination imagine that their protector should have a weakness to sonic waves? Or could it just be that the monster is simply a living creature with a low threshold for pain, and so as soon as the sonic waves start up, the monster immediately pulls back to stay away from the pain that the pressure or noise produces on all living things that walk between the pylons? Could it be something entirely different? Do the sound waves interfere with whatever holds the monster together? We simply don't have enough information yet to do anything more than guess.
We do know that within 10 years DHARMA would have managed to explore the island more fully and begin to set up its experiments. Now the Swan, Pearl, and Orchid orientation films have stated that there are 6 stations. There are also six areas of interest that DHARMA wanted to study. However, we have so far seen a total of at least 9 different stations on the island (or nearby). Why would DHARMA say there are 6 stations if there's really more than that? I think this is probably because DHARMA made a number of stations to study the six things that they were looking for, but they also needed stations for non-experimental functions. So let's go through the six things that DHARMA was studying, and then we'll go through any extra stations later.
The first thing on DHARMA's to-do list given in the SOV was meteorology. He have yet to see a station specifically referred to as a meteorology station on the island. It is unlikely that this was one of the topics that didn't need a station of its own, so that means that either we haven't seen the meteorology station yet, or it's a second function of one of the stations we've already seen. I'm actually leaning towards the latter on this point. The Tempest Station was said to produce poison gases. However, we know that DHARMA never used it on the Hostiles. Ben and the Hostiles may have eventually used the station on DHARMA, but it doesn't seem like it was ever used the other way around. Surely DHARMA didn't build the Tempest Station, immediately lose it to the Hostiles, and then get wiped out immediately afterward. DHARMA seemed pretty unsuspecting when the Purge happened. The Tempest had to have been used for something else. Juliet and Goodwin claimed that the Tempest was th! e island's power station, but after neutralizing the gases in the Tempest, Daniel would ask an episode later where the power on the island comes from, clearly showing that Juliet and Goodwin were just telling the lie they had been instructed to tell. Why they decided to lie about such a thing is a different question entirely that I'm not going to get into right now, but it does at least get rid of one other possibility for the Tempest before the Purge. The blast door map (from here on out abbreviated as "BDM") indicates that meteorological research was being done up in the mountains on the east side of the island. There is a single island up in the mountains on the east side of the map. The writers also claimed that the Tempest Station was drawn on the BDM. Upon Juliet visiting the Tempest station, we learned that it was located high up in the mountains. If the station high in the mountains was running meteorological research, wouldn't that make the Tempest the meteorologic! al station? The Tempest could have originally released certain! gases i nto the sky in the hopes that they would condense into clouds over the island and then affect the weather in some way. The name of the station works with this as well. A tempest is a storm. Instead of the storm being solely a figurative one (if the station was only built to kill off the Hostiles), it was once a literal one (in weather experiments). Once it was realized that the Tempest could be used as a facility to produce deadly gases, it became targeted by the Hostiles.
The second item on the agenda was psychology. We already saw that the Pearl Station was set up to study psychology. The occupants of the station believed that those in other stations (probably not just the Swan, and since there were 9 televisions, the Pearl probably watched 9 different places) were the subjects of the experiments, but they were being watched through a secret camera and were the subject of the experiments themselves. DHARMA had the capsules filled with notebooks that the Pearl station occupants had recorded their "findings" in dumped in a valley that no DHARMA worker would likely travel through and ruin the experiment. DHARMA may have removed some of the capsules periodically, but because of the large stack that was found there by the Flight 815 survivors, and likely the last time someone filled out one of those notebooks was before the Purge, we have to assume that DHARMA didn't regularly move the capsules from the dump, if at all.
Third was parapsychology. Here we are faced with a difficult set of possibilities. It is entirely possible that DHARMA set up a station devoted entirely toward studying parapsychology. In fact, there is (arguably) at least one station on the BDM that we have yet to identify (I'll address the "arguably" part shortly). However, we know that Walt seemed to exhibit some sort of abilities that would have fallen into the parapsychological field, and yet as far as we know, the Others just threw him in Room 23. And maybe Room 23 is the "parapsychology station". However given what we've seen of it both in the show and in the Missing Pieces episode, it doesn't look much like a place of study to me. Then there's the fact that parapsychological activity occurs all over the island. People and things appear where they shouldn't. Voices are heard. Maybe the island itself is the "parapsychology station". When the whole island exhibits the same amount of what you're trying to study, how do y! ou choose where to set up? All three of these things could work, but we don't have enough information to yet say which one is the case. (In just a moment I'll say which one I lean towards, however.)
Fourth was zoology. The BDM revealed that DHARMA brought polar bears to the island in order to see if they could repatriate and de-territotorialize the polar bears through gene therapy and extreme climate change. They also studied sharks and dolphins. Of course because of the dangers of experimenting with polar bears, DHARMA made sure to keep them largely separated from the rest of the project, so the experiments on the polar bears were conducted on a different island.
Fifth was electromagnetism. Now obviously the island produces electromagnetism all over the island, but apparently it produced a very significant amount in the southern sector of the island. DHARMA dug deep into the island in order to get at the source of electromagnetism, and it appears that for a while the Swan Station was used as a regular electromagnetism laboratory. Unfortunately that wouldn't last, but that topic comes up a little bit later.
Sixth was utopian social engineering. This one is very unlikely to have a station attached to it because it involves a large group of people living together in a "utopian" community. It seems most likely here that the Barracks themselves were set up as this experiment towards utopian social engineering. All children got equal education opportunities. Everyone got an identical house. Obviously there were a few things that kept the Barracks from operating perfectly in the mold of an ideal utopian social environment, but overall it seems that the Barracks did enough towards this ideal that it was likely the fulfillment of DHARMA studying that particular area.
We still have at least one more station that has to do with experimentation, however, that doesn't have to do with the main six. The Orchid Station is an experimentation station, and number 6 of 6 in the orientation films. Given this we know that there wasn't a station for every one of the six things that DHARMA stated they initially wanted to study. However, the Orchid appears to have been the last station established that was meant to be an experimentation station (because most likely only the experimentation stations would have needed orientation films). So DHARMA must have again been exploring the island when they happened upon an underground ice cave with its walls covered in hieroglyphics... Seeing a very large wheel protruding from a wall of ice, and recognizing the wheel as looking similar to a donkey wheel, they realized their luck. If they could get a polar bear down into the cavern, they could have the animal easily turn the wheel in order to see what it does. (Th! ough the opening through which Ben entered the area would have been too small for a polar bear to fit through, we did only barely see half of the cavern... There may be a bigger opening elsewhere, or the opening may have been larger 20 years ago when DHARMA found the wheel.) So DHARMA pulled a polar bear from the Hydra Station project in order to see what the wheel would do. The polar bear turned the wheel, and the island vanished, only to reappear in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (it had started in either the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean... more to come on this shortly). Likely DHARMA would realize that the island had moved in time as well as space, and so they began to build a new station over their finding in order to tap into the pocket of exotic matter being produced there. By building the Orchid Station (with its name being very apt as the orchid often lives off of parasiting fungi; in the same way, the Orchid Station parasites the exotic matter in order to function! ), DHARMA was able to use the exotic matter in its experiments! . By bui dling the Vault, DHARMA was able to localize the effects of the exotic matter and control it to some small extent.
Now speaking of the _ of 6 found in the orientation videos, we know that the electromagnetism station (the Swan) was number 3. The psychology station (the Pearl) was 5. The spacetime station (Orchid) was 6. So what were 1, 2, and 4? The only other experimental stations we know of for sure are the Hydra Station and the meteorology station (likely the Tempest). Those could satisfy two of the numbers. Does that mean that there is still a third experimental station that potentially has another orientation film? I think so. In fact, this is where I believe the "parapsychology station" comes in. We're missing one experimental station. We've got at least one station on the BDM that's still unknown (quick side note: the BDM shows us 7 or 8 stations; they are the Swan, the Flame, the Staff, the Arrow, the ? (which we know is the Pearl), C3 (which is likely the Tempest), C4, and the crossed-out station; it is possible that the Orchid is shown on the BDM, as station 6 is mentioned on t! he map (and is mentioned close to the crossed-out station), but we can be almost sure that the Orchid isn't C4 regardless because the Orchid is almost on the opposite side of the island when compared to the beach camp which is closest to the Swan station; either way station C4 can't be filled by any stations we know of yet). So why can't that one extra station be the parapsychology station? What else could it be? A station where DHARMA studied the monster? Maybe. It is surrounded by a number of Cerberus vents (and it's been confirmed that the Cerberus vents are the holes that the monster travels through). A cryptography/listening station? The BDM does mention something of the sort, but wouldn't that kind of be a waste of a station (especially since the BDM says that the particular area would probably cause a lot of interference for a potential listening station)? A remote viewing station? Well there is the notation next to the station claiming "High Potential For R.V.S. Fac! ility", but if RVS stands for "remote viewing station", that w! ould mea n that sentence reads "remote viewing station facility" which is a little redundant... However, if it is a remove viewing station, might this remote viewing be done in the natural sense (surveillance cameras, etc.) or in the parapsychological sense (in which case it could still be the parapsychology station)...?
Still the BDM does claim that the Flame Station is number 4. Why would the Flame Station need an orientation film? It's definitely not an experimental station. It was built specifically to allow communications off of the island. As long as you know how to use the computer there's no training required (and apparently as long as you can play a game of chess, quite a few options are automated). Radzinsky could have been wrong about the Flame having a number, of course. It does seem like he was wrong about the placement of the Flame and the Staff, so he could have been wrong about other things as well.
But still there were other stations that DHARMA made: the Staff, the Arrow, the Looking Glass... The Staff is an obvious one. You'd obviously want a medical station since there's no hospital, people are running dangerous experiments, the jungles are filled with dangerous people and creatures, and people are still having babies... Yes, as we learned in the Season 4 finale, it seems that Charlotte was born on the island. That means one of three things: her mother was with DHARMA, her mother was with the natives, or her mother accidentally crashed on the island and gave birth to her there. The last option doesn't seem very feasible to me since there's been no other mention of anyone else landing on the island by mistake yet. The first option would mean the mother definitely got pregnant on the island. The second option could mean that she was conceived on or off the island. However in Pierre Chang's video that was shown at Comic-Con (Marvin Candle for all of you who still know ! him as such), we can hear a baby crying. Now Chang says that the baby is a "him", so we know it's not Charlotte, but it seems very unlikely that anyone would have purposefully brought a young infant to the island. That suggests to me that this baby was born and conceived on the island by DHARMA. It would only be a few years later, however, before babies would suddenly end up killing their mothers before they are born due to (as Juliet says), the mother's body thinking the fetus is a foreign invader and turning on it (though this explanation doesn't quite explain the deaths of the mothers yet)... This was likely the beginning of DHARMA's curse for using technology to abuse nature and the island. Not enough information right now to confirm that though...
The Arrow's purpose is less obvious. The BDM says that its primary function is "restocking and staging area" as well as "possible manufacturing facility with light industrial equipment". When Goodwin and the Tail Section survivors find the Arrow, Goodwin says the station looks like it was used for storage. But if any of these are the case, why does Horace Goodspeed, a mathematician, wear the Arrow logo on his jumpsuit? There is still one other possibility I can think of for the Arrow (besides a place for mathematicians to run numbers and test equations as well). Beside the Arrow Station on the BDM, there is a notation that reads "Possible terminal point for subterranean E.E.P. tunnel network?" It has been revealed via the confirmed canon puzzles that replicate the BDM that E.E.P. stands for "Emergency Escape Protocol". That means Radzinsky was under the impression that DHARMA had an underground series of tunnels which were to be used if people needed to escape quickly. Escap! e what though? In the Staff Station, there can be seen a small door that says "Escape Hatch" (look up the "Staff Station" on lostpedia.com if you want a picture). This likely leads to the Staff's E.E.P. We also know that the Arrow station is the closest station to the Barracks. Goodwin managed to join the Tail Section survivors (who crashed closest to the Arrow Station) within a few minutes of the crash. The Tail section survivors knew the general direction where the Others lived and came from in order to kidnap their companions. This all makes perfect sense. If there was an emergency, and DHARMA needed to escape their stations to return to shelter, that shelter would likely be the Barracks. So everyone would need a way to get to the Barracks quickly. The Arrow could have provided such a means. So anyone who needed to get to the Barracks quickly would use the E.E.P. already installed in their station. This would take them to the Arrow Station. From there it was a very short! jog to the safety of the Barracks. Then again, maybe the Arro! w was ju st used for storage. I think the E.E.P. theory is a bit more likely though.
The Looking Glass's purpose is debatable at best. The "obvious" explanation for the station is that it emits the sonar that the Others' submarine follows in order to find the island (which we've already established in Part One is invisible to the outside world and can send someone forward or backward in time if approached from the wrong direction). However, we know that the Looking Glass is also able to communicate with the outside world and jam transmissions coming to and going from the island. Why would that be included in a station whose primary function is for guiding submarines to the island? What about the station's name? Maybe it means that it guides the submarine through the "portal" to the island (the point where the sub is able to approach the island without being thrown backward or forward in time) as an homage to Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" in which the Looking Glass led Alice to another world. Of course since we know that it is possible to get to! the island without needing to go through a specific point (as long as you get close enough to the island to see it, you're bound to be able to get on it), there may be another reason for the name. One of my favorite theories that I've read for this (though I'm pretty sure it's wrong) says that the station is called the "Looking Glass" because DHARMA was able to manipulate the station's moon pool into a "looking glass" of sorts that allowed the scientists to see something through it (be that the future, another world, or something else differs from theory to theory that supports this idea). However, that seems unlikely because the Looking Glass was likely not an experimental station. As for the station blocking transmissions, maybe DHARMA added that feature to the station when the Swan station became a place to push a button and nothing more. After this, in order to make sure that the now even more isolated Swan station couldn't attempt to make contact with the outside worl! d, they had one of the most hidden stations on the island equi! pped wit h jamming equipment to make sure that any attempts the Swan station occupants made to get in touch with the outside world would be in vain. After all, DHARMA knew that it would be extinct soon (we know this courtesy of Pierre Chang's video at Comic-Con), and they knew that pushing the button would eventually become a permanent job for two unlucky souls...
We don't know how, but Pierre Chang claimed that he had a source that had proven himself to have knowledge of the future. This suggests to me that his source was a person from the future. Of course as most people have guessed from the voice of the cameraman in Pierre Chang's video, that person is probably Daniel Faraday, some how thrown back in time. The only ways that Faraday could have gone back in time to the DHARMA days at this point, however, are for him to have either traveled at a certain bearing on and off the island several times in order to go back in time to the '70s (since as far as we've seen, the barrier around the island only displaces a person in time a matter of days at the most). However we know that Faraday has been exposed to a large amount of electromagnetic radiation, so he would need to find his constant every time he went through the barrier at the wrong bearing in order to survive his effort to go back in time, and repeating that scenario over and ov! er again to get Faraday into the past wouldn't be very good television. Another option is that the island traveled back in time to the DHARMA days when Ben turned the donkey wheel, but that presents a few problems in itself that I'll get to in Part Three (but primarily it would mean that Daniel would have to leave the island that traveled back in time to get to the island that was already in the past with DHARMA on it which would be tedious at best). The third option, which seems much more likely to me, is that the island and everything connected to it teleports together. Anything nearby the island (like within the island's barrier or so) gets teleported as well, but to a "random" time and place of its own. Once Daniel had gotten back to the past, however, it would still be possible for him to get back to the island if the island was in the future. If Daniel did end up back in the DHARMA days while the island with the Flight 815 survivors ended up some time in the relative ! future (that just means after DHARMA, even though it could be ! the Flig ht 815er's past (such as if they teleported to 1998, etc.)), Daniel could have made his way back into the future in three different ways: 1) He could have gone through the time barrier at the wrong bearing to be thrown a few days into the future and repeated this method until he got to the "present" (but I've already pointed out the problems with this). 2) He could have used DHARMA's Orchid Station to teleport into the future to just before Ben destroyed the Vault, hidden in one of the side rooms of the Orchid Station when Locke and Ben came down, and then left the Orchid Station after Locke, so that he was on the island when it disappeared (yes, this would mean that there were two Daniels at once, but the two would never have interacted since one goes off the island and is sent into the past while another appears on the opposite side of the island during the "present" and gets teleported with the island, rejoining the rest of the survivors shortly afterwards). Or 3) Daniel ! could have ended up in the past at a point when DHARMA was on the island, but before they discovered the frozen donkey wheel. He met with Pierre Chang and told him all about the coming Purge, and proved himself with his knowledge of the island and DHARMA Initiative (Daniel could have even told the DI where the frozen donkey wheel was). Then when DHARMA got a polar bear to turn the wheel, Daniel sailed back out into the ocean, watched the island teleport again, and this time Daniel ended up in the ocean along with the "present" teleported island (the one with the Flight 815 survivors on it). Then again, maybe Daniel doesn't even rejoin the survivors. (Remember, no spoilers; I'm just listing possibilities given what we know since Comic-Con and before.)
However it happened, Pierre Chang learned about the Purge. He learned that the Hostiles were bound to kill off the DHARMA Initiative unless they could somehow change the future. At this point I believe the DHARMA Initiative did three things: they continued with their experiments, they made preparations in case they couldn't change the future, and they began trying to find ways in order to change the future despite all odds. Now as we would learn, DHARMA didn't end up finding a way to change the future (since it has been established time and time again that you can't change the ultimate destiny of something; you can change a few details through consciousness traveling, but you can't change the final overall facts, and it seems you can't change anything with physical time traveling), but let's still look at a few ways DHARMA may have tried to combat the Hostiles. If the third theory about Daniel above is true, then we know that DHARMA would soon find out about the frozen donke! y wheel, and they would soon begin experimenting with the exotic matter to see how they could manipulate space and time. Maybe they began these experiments to try and avoid the future in which they were all killed in addition to whatever good could come of the research. Obviously they began to transform the Tempest station into a chemical weapons factory. And finally I think it is possible that DHARMA could have been responsible for creating their worst enemy in an effort to save themselves. How ironic would it be if DHARMA was ultimately responsible for their own extinction? How ironic would it be if DHARMA was responsible for Jacob?
This sounds like a crazy theory at first. How could DHARMA possibly be responsible for Jacob? That's a good question. Equally good questions, however, are: Why does Jacob live in a cabin that was built by someone in the DHARMA Initiative? and Why does DHARMA mention Jacob in their Room 23 video if he is this really secret leader of the Hostiles that not even some of the Hostiles are allowed to see? We know that in the world of LOST there are people who are born with special abilities. Walt is one of these people. Miles may be another (though some have theorized that Miles got his abilities from the island, but we know that Walt has probably never been to the island before). Jacob may have been yet another still. This is why DHARMA knows about Jacob. Jacob may have once been a member of the DHARMA Initiative (or a child of someone in the Initiative) that had extraordinary abilities like Walt or Miles. DHARMA wanted to be able to harness these abilities in order to rid themsel! ves of the Hostiles once and for all. So they began a series of experiments on Jacob (this may have even been a code name). DHARMA succeeded in allowing Jacob to reach his full potential, but in doing so they created a person who hated technology with a passion for turning him into what he considered to be a monster. Jacob no longer existed as a normal person, and he was now one with the island. However he now had abilities that extended far beyond the island, and he knew that DHARMA must go (maybe it was for vengeance; maybe it was because he saw that it was destiny for DHARMA to be wiped out). He claimed the cabin that Horace Goodspeed had built for his own, but the Hostiles (or pehaps the religious natives) managed to put a ring of ash around it to limit some of Jacob's powers. Because he was now a bit more limited in his power, and possibly felt a bit more human because of it, he joined the Hostiles in wanting to rid the island of DHARMA, Richard found Ben, and before t! oo long the Purge was planned and ready. (Of course if that th! eory isn 't correct, there's always the chance that the island itself just manifested in the form of a human, showing "himself" only to those he trusted, and planned the Purge, but DHARMA managed to capture and question a Hostile; he told DHARMA about Jacob (despite the Others having shown themselves to not give up any information even under pain of death, making this unlikely) and this is how DHARMA knew about him to put his name in the Room 23 video, and after the Purge Jacob took over Horace's cabin almost as a trophy perhaps (and then Ben or one of the Hostiles laid the ash in order to limit his powers somehow, assuming that's what the ash is for).
How is Richard explained in all of this? If Jacob didn't come into being until closer to the DHARMA days, how is Richard still alive? Well we don't know for sure when Richard was born. All we know is that he either ages really slowly, he aged normally until he got to the age we see him now and then he stopped aging (since he looks the same in 1956 when he visited baby Locke as he does in 2004), or he time travels to random times, and this is why he always looks the same age. However, Ben has said to Richard, "You do remember birthdays, don't you, Richard?", thus implying that Richard might have some reason to have forgotten birthdays. The only reason I can think of is that Richard used to have birthdays, but he doesn't any more. That rules out time traveler, and that seems to rule out that he is still aging, but only very slowly. So how did Richard stop aging? Since it seems most likely that it was Jacob that caused Richard to stop aging, perhaps Richard was born into the Ho! stiles before DHARMA came around (and before the fertility curse came upon the island). He grew up normally, but he grew up to become a very important person in the Hostile group. The Hostiles eventually found Jacob, and Jacob chose Richard to be the person to choose the next leader for the Hostiles. To avoid having to find a new person to choose the leaders when Richard was gone, Jacob used his abilities to prevent Richard from aging. Under Jacob's orders, Richard founded Mittelos Bioscience as a cover to search for their new leader and to look for people that could aid them in their various undertakings. However when Locke showed that he wasn't quite ready to become the leader of the Hostiles, Richard found Ben who seemed to be a suitable placeholder until Locke was truly ready. (Alternately is is possible that either the island has something equivalent to the Fountain of Youth on it, but very few people know where it is or have drank from it (Ben and Alex certainly haven! 't tasted it since they continued to age on the island), or th! e island somehow chose Richard to not age without having manifested itself as Jacob, in which case Richard could have been born at any time after the Black Rock's crash (or could have even been one of the people on the Black Rock itself, but that doesn't explain why the island would have chosen him then).)
Regardless, it seems that DHARMA's attempts to prevent the Purge were in vain. Still there were a few things that DHARMA did in preparation just in case they couldn't change the future. The main thing they did had to do with the Swan station. Though it began as an electromagnetic research and experimentation station, something happened that caused the electromagnetic anomaly that the Swan station occupants had been studying to become unstable. The anomaly would slowly build up, causing it to need to be released before it got big enough to do serious damage. This incident caused DHARMA to seal off part of the station and convert it from an experimental lab into a place where a button was regularly pushed in order to "fix" their mistake. DHARMA did think to add a feature that would hypothetically cause the anomaly to seal itself shut, but because it was unknown what would happen to whoever activated this feature, DHARMA just continued to press the button to avoid any possible ! loss of life. Once DHARMA realized that pushing the button would become a permanent job, however, and DHARMA likely wouldn't be around forever to keep up the protocol (and DHARMA was unlikely to convince any of the natives to keep pushing the button), DHARMA had to figure out a way to make sure the button kept getting pressed. They decided to put two people in the Swan station, and then scare them into remaining in the station, pushing the button. DHARMA could only think of one fool-proof way of doing this: completely isolate the Swan station inhabitants, and then have someone not related to DHARMA tell the horror stories of what lies outside of the station. Because DHARMA isn't the one saying what's out there, the station occupants are more inclined to believe it isn't just a trick. But in order to get a person not related to the DI to say such a thing, they'd have to believe it themselves...
At this point DHARMA likely arranged a daring plan. They needed to get a group of scientists that were working in the Pacific Ocean where the island was located to happen upon it. In order to do this, a few members of DHARMA infiltrated a science team and led them close to the island. The boat would have picked up a radio signal, numbers being broadcast from the radio tower located on the island, and the science team would have "chosen" to investigate. As the boat approached the island, it would have crashed just off-shore, and the DHARMA members would have gotten everyone to shore. Among this science team would be none other than a man named Robert and a pregnant woman named Danielle Rousseau. (As a side note, DHARMA may have also specifically chosen Danielle's team because she was pregnant, and they were in need of a test subject after having been hit by the baby-curse which has begun to kill off pregnant mothers.) The boat crashed just off-shore in 1988. The Purge would n! ot occur until 1992. Danielle told the Flight815 survivors that she had never seen anyone else on the island besides the members of her science team. So the team would have had to have had members of DHARMA secretly amongst them in order to keep the science team from accidentally stumbling across any members of DHARMA for four whole years. Once the members of DHARMA had established where the group should and shouldn't go, they set their plan into action. They began to show symptoms of being "sick". They would get rashes (since Aaron's rash was what made Danielle think he had the sickness). They would apparently begin to act in such a way that made it seem vital that they died to keep from spreading the sickness as well. The scientists watched for the weakest psychological link amongst the science group. Identifying it as Danielle, the scientists slowly "killed" themselves off to make it look like the sickness had claimed them. Apparently the scientists began to show their s! ymptoms around the time the Whispers began (I'll probably go i! nto the Whispers in Part Three), and so Rousseau believed that the Others were the carriers of the disease. However it doesn't seem as if the plan went exactly as they wanted it to ultimately. Rousseau got so paranoid that she began to kill off the rest of the science team on her own before they could spread the sickness. One member of the science team even lost his arm... Despite these losses, however, DHARMA ultimately got what it wanted. Rousseau made it to the radio tower and changed the message to one of terror, disease, and death, a message that would frighten Swan station occupants away from the idea of leaving their "safe" hatch. The word "Quarantine" was printed on the doors of the Swan Station and the Arrow Station (the latter likely because if the Swan Station's E.E.P. was still active, they could have used it to reach the Arrow, and to keep up the charade, a quarantine marker would need to be placed there as well), and the Swan station occupants were advised to vaccinate! themselves every so often to prevent catching the disease that supposedly ravaged the outside world.
Knowing that DHARMA's time was almost up, one scientist who had lost his arm some time previously, editted the Swan station orientation video in order to give a much fuller knowledge of the DHARMA Initiative to those who would end up living in the Swan station likely for the rest of their lives. Whether Pierre Chang/Marvin Candle is the same man as Montand, the man who lost his arm while with Rousseau, is debatable, but I like to believe that someone as important as Chang would have been involved in the Sickness charade, and would have therefore been one of the DHARMA members to infiltrate Rousseau's group. Still, we know that he editted the Swan station video because all three orientation films we have seen so far have all been copyrighted 1980. However in film 3 of 6 he is missing an arm, while in films 5 of 6 and 6 of 6, he still has both of his arms. He must have altered the Swan's orientation video, or just filmed a new one altogether while failing to change the copyrig! ht date.
Still with all of this said, there are still a few DHARMA questions left unanswered. #1 Why does Pierre Chang use so many different names? I don't have a good answer for this, but it is definitely worth noting that when Chang tells us his real name, he says that the reason he is saying his name is because "there's no point in games any more". So were all of his aliases just a game? A psychological experiment? Or was there some deeper reason for them? #2 Did the drug smugglers from Nigeria land on the island during this period? If so, how? One very interesting possibility is the fact that we know that due to the Black Rock, the island was located in either the Atlantic Ocean or the Indian Ocean, right around Africa, before DHARMA moved it. We know that the drug smugglers started their flight from Nigeria, but we don't know exactly where they were going. However, if you look at a map of Nigeria (or if you're familiar with its geography), you will see that its lower border prot! rudes out into the ocean. The drug smugglers could have easily been flying over parts of the Atlantic Ocean if they started from this portion of Nigeria. So the Beechcraft airplace could have very easily crashed on the island just like in Locke's vision. However it would have crashed before DHARMA moved the island into the Pacific. And if it doesn't seem like enough time has passed, it is also possible that when DHARMA moved the island into the Pacific Ocean the island moved back in time a few years as well, giving the plane plenty of time to have crashed, Ben be recruited by DHARMA at a young age, and Eko to become a priest those few short years later. the only alternative right now would have to be something to do with wormholes or teleportation by other means, but as far as we know so far, this isn't yet possible. #3 Why did Ben take Alex from Rousseau? Ben was still with DHARMA at the time Alex was born, and Alex would be nearly four years old before the Purge even occu! red. My favorite theory that I've heard on the matter is that ! Ben ende d up with Annie and she got pregnant. However the baby-curse had just begun to act on the people of the island and Annie and the baby died before the baby could be born. Ben took Alex as a replacement for Annie and his unborn child (whether this was suggested by one or more of the members of DHARMA or Ben decided to do it on his own is unknown, but the former isn't unlikely since DHARMA may have been afriad that Danielle was crazy enough that she might kill her own child). #4 What was the Incident? All we really know about the incident is that it caused the electromagnetic anomaly that the Swan station was studying to spring a leak, and Marvin Candle worried that using the Swan station's computer for any reason other than inputting the code might lead to another Incident. Maybe the Incident was Jacob's last attack on the DHARMA Initiative before the Purge. In Season 2 we were shown someone using the Swan computer to talk to Michael. If this person was truly Walt as they clai! med, that would mean that special people are able to somehow uplink with the computers. Therefore Jacob could likely have done the same thing years ago and caused the Incident. Alternately a Hostile could have somehow gained access to one of DHARMA's computers, learned how to work it (which seems unlikely unless they kidnapped a DHARMA member and had them operate it), and caused the Incident. #5 Where did DHARMA get electricity? A brief knowledge of electromagnetism will tell you that an electromagnetic field consists of a changing magnetic field producing an electrical field, and a changing electrical field producing a magnetic field. So as the electromagnetic field of the island exists, the magnetic field may be responsible for producing an equal electrical field that could be channeled through a transformer of some kind in order to give DHARMA useable electricity. I have no idea what that transformer would look like or where it would be located (and I'm only fairly sure ! that I've interpreted the facts about electromagnetismcorrect! ly :P), but this could explain the question of where DHARMA (and now the Others) got electricity.
Of course when 1992 rolled around, DHARMA had still not succeeded in purging the island of the Hostiles and so got purged themselves. However, DHARMA wouldn't be the last group to make its stand against the harsh natives of the island and be faced with just as many questions as those that came before them...
(Final note: There may be more questions yet, but I plan on addressing things like the food drops and the whispers in the next part when they're a bit more relevant. I apologize for the ridiculous length of this part of the theory, and I thank anyone and everyone who contributed one of the theories that I mentioned in this one (and I apologize for not being able to identify you).)
Theory by Trs10882
