I am not a literary scholar. I have not read any of the books on the Lost reading list. So why would you want to read my theory? Well I think looking at concepts is the way to go. It’s too easy to get lost in the narrative of Lost. I don’t understand what a Heisenberg compensator does and neither do the writers of Star Trek for that matter. I can understand the concept of it though, that it allows transportation to be possible despite scientific proof by some scientist and some uncertainty principle... If you don’t like this theory as an explanation for what’s happening in Lost then enjoy it as fanfiction.
I have, however, read many of those choose-your-own-adventure books, do you know the ones? A definition - “The books are not meant to be read straight through; instead, each work consists of a collection of episodes which are read in a certain order depending on the choices the reader makes. The reader is in a situation and is faced with a choice of actions; having decided what action to take, he or she proceeds to the page of the book where the consequences of that decision are played out and a new decision must be made. Though the reader usually must decide between only two actions, sometimes three or more actions present themselves, with the maximum being five or six. Depending on the reader's decisions, they succeed or fail, live or die.”
I feel like watching Lost is a bit like reading the choose-your-own-adventure book from cover to cover, it wouldn’t make sense. Imagine if you had to try to figure out which pages led to which story because you’d lost the instructions. This is how I feel that theorising about Lost. I am following one train of thought and then the evidence (what the characters say or do) is vague and open to interpretation. You could go either way down a path or story line like in the choose-your-own-adventure books but you come to a crossroads. EG Does Hurley really see dead people or does he not? So let’s say he does see dead people. Then you come to another crossroads. Does John have a dream about Horace or is it really Horace appearing to him or someone else pretending to be him? So I follow different paths but I get Lost and forget which path/storyline I was following. I start to loose faith and think there are too many paths and too many options.
Lost can be enjoyed on various levels. A casual viewer (I believe there are these people still out there watching) or someone who really doesn’t understand sci fi but wants to watch it with a die hard fan (their partner or friend) can enjoy Lost for the mystery and the relationships between the characters. For people who want to know more they can read about the more interesting and complex sci fi using the Lost reading list to understand the quantum physics and higher dimensionalism. The writers have said that they have pushed the boundaries of time travel fiction from what we’ve seen to date on popular TV. Some thinking out of the box is necessary if one really wants to understand what it all means. Many theories out there I think are very accurate but appear to be fanfiction because it’s almost impossible to follow all the threads or paths that have lead these people to their conclusions. We do not have enough evidence to prove any of our theories 100%. This is beca! use the characters’ real meanings in what they say or do are lost because it’s vague and open to interpretation. If you are not able to follow all the paths it requires a leap of FAITH!
So that’s what I started doing, looking at time travel concepts and what the writers could be showing us. I’ve been tinkering around with a few ideas to see which fits the facts the best. Since most of the Dharma experiments are disused and have progressed to a different level, it’s difficult to see what they did previously, we can only guess. I have made certain assumptions and have been trying to fit the rest of the details in around them.
The Swan is like a Faraday’s Cage with its blast doors. A Faraday’s cage is said to, “dissipate any electric currents generated from the external electromagnetic fields”. I think it highly likely that the EM was being used to send the people inside the Swan back in time. They were being watched and studied to see if they suffered any detrimental effects as a result of the time travel. They were tested to see if they experienced any signs of sickness or mental health. I wonder if they saw some strange phenomenon which they attributed to “shadows” from previous time loops. Overlaps of actions that were carried out by the people in the Swan. To the observers, it looked like there were more than 2 people in the Swan when really they were seeing just the same two men just from previous loops. Maybe the men inside the Swan were the only ones who saw the overlaps/shadows and they became sick as a result or blew out their brains like Radzinsky. This is a large assumption! but I think that Dharma invented Cerberus as a device to prevent these “shadows” from interfering with the current time loop.
“Not long after the experiments began, however, there was... an incident... and since that time, the following protocol has been observed.” Swan orientation film.
This statement seems strange because we know the experiments hadn’t started in 1977 because the building of the Swan wasn’t complete and yet we’ve seen the incident. There is also the discrepancy regarding Chang’s arm, whether it was injured in the incident or not. This is most likely explained by time travel and a change made in the past to alter the original events.
How exactly the time travel is controlled is open to debate but I’d say that the EM is harnessed and manipulated to create time travel somehow. Probably by harnessing the EM like they did at the Orchid and just drilled close to the pocket of EM, before the incident that’s how they used the Swan as a time travel device. They drilled close enough to the pocket of EM without drilling right into it like we saw Radzinsky do.
DR. CHANG: You're gonna do nothing. If you drill even 1 centimetre further, you risk releasing that energy. If that were to happen... then God help us all.
What happens when you do drill further into the pocket? Does the world end? Yes, maybe. Does time reset to the beginning of time? Yes, maybe but most importantly, I think the incident created a time travelling island.
At first, for the people on the island (and everything on it) it would still seem to be 1977 on the island but the whole island would be appearing and disappearing in relation to the outside world at random points in time e.g. 1845, 1961, 1954, and 1972. Everything on the island would be the same but if they left the island it would be 1845, 1961, 1954, or 1972. People living on the island would age while they were on it in the same way they would do if they were off it. Think of Doc Brown who was time travelling with his wife and two sons, Jules and Vern. They grew up while they lived in the flying time travelling steam train didn’t they? This is the same as Dharma, the Others and our Losties living on the island except certain people like Richard who seems to be ageless. He is an exception to the rule for other reasons, but just for now lets me use him as an example before he became ageless. He might have got on the island in 1845 but if the island was to then disappear ! and jump to another point in time, and another and then another then he may have only been to the island for weeks or months or a few years. We saw him in what we thought was 1954, 1961 and 1972 on the island but I propose that the island was skipping through time to those points in history or maybe being moved in a controlled fashion by Dharma. After he was in 1954 he might then have visited 1720 and say 1999 before the island got to 1961. These are times in the outside world, not the time on the island. Who knows how long they stay in one time period, hours, days, weeks…
The island wasn’t always jumping in time but Dharma controlled it so that the island has been stuck in a repeating time loop from 1977 to sometime in the future (approx 30 years). Exactly when is yet to be confirmed.
"You do remember birthdays, don't you Richard?"
Here’s how I think Dharma learned how to harness the time travel of the island. They would transmit the numbers to a place off the island which could record what points in time the island appeared in. They must have gone WAY back in time to set up a receiver, then sent the island through time to various points and then record which times the island appeared in and eventually were able to predict it’s location in the Lamp Post. They could then harness the power to send it to whatever time they wished. I believe they did the same experiments that they were doing in the Swan but on a larger scale. Originally I believe Dharma scientists intended Dharma people to be the test subjects. People who were employed to be teachers, janitors and motor pool operators; the ones who apparently have disappeared from the outside world in some alien abduction according to the latest Lost video, Mysteries of the Universe, Part 2. What better way to test if you can change the course of event! s, than testing a whole community of test subjects? Bring back the Valenzetti Equation. Could Dharma have eventually wanted to reset the whole of human existence to change the end of the world as predicted in the VE? If they could make changes in the time line then they could change the end of the world? Wouldn’t it be ironic if Dharma actually caused the end of the world by their meddling with time?
Check out this article: www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/science_news/4263315.html
I think things did go horribly wrong with the time travel experiments and the MIB and the MIW (Jacob) are all that’s left on the island of the Dharma team who are manipulating time. They have resorted to going further and further back in time to prevent the experiments from ever being conducted in the first place. They use the FDW to do this. I think they tried to stop Dharma with the Purge but it wasn’t enough. The Others became involved and then our Losties. They went back further in time to try to stop themselves from ever getting involved in Dharma in the first place. One change led to a different course of events in the time line, a different set of consequences that they didn’t predict. It reminds me of Anorax in Voyager’s 2 part episode, The Year of Hell. No matter what he did, he couldn’t undo the mess he’d made.
Jacob and MIB seem to be strange entities, God like, maybe even personifications of course correction due to Dharma’s interference in time. I think, however, it’s highly likely that they are Dharma scientists who have taken their experiments way beyond time travelling bunnies. Like all mad scientists, they have experimented on themselves. They have provided themselves with strange attributes that make them seem omnipotent. They seem to live outside of time or maybe they are just immune to many of the experiments that they are conducting on the island because they have created devices which allow them to not be affected by the time differences or places they can go where they are protected (e.g. the Temple or the cabin). Maybe they have already reached a higher state of consciousness and no longer need those places but those places are still being used by the Others.
BEN: It's a sanctuary. It may be the last safe place on this island.
Jacob maybe wants it all to continue, he maybe has some idea of people being able to exist in a higher plane of existence, out of time, a higher state of consciousness. Where as the MIB wants it all to end, he has had enough of playing the game and wants the end of the world he thinks they will never make amends. It could be the other way round, that it was actually the MIB’s objective to gain a higher level of consciousness. With his evil plan he didn’t care who he killed in the process of science. While Jacob is trying to save everyone and put things right, correct what the MIB has done. The pawns in the game don’t know who’s manipulating them, whether they are following order from MIB or MIW. I don’t think we will really know what the motivations of MIB and Jacob are until the very end. Who is really the bad guy or are they both?
One of the main things that has gone wrong is that Cerberus, the security system, has failed. You remember I was saying I thought Dharma had designed a way to stop the previous time loops from seeping into the next. I think when Cerberus malfunctioned it has become what we know as the black smoke or the monster. I believe that our Losties have been seeing previous iterations of the time loop. Perhaps they are starting to seep into one another and possibly interfere with each other. The people in the loop cannot comprehend what they are seeing and so they see black smoke when really it could be other Losties from the other loops. Does this lead everyone to a higher level of consciousness or is it this that is destroying the universe?
If the island is in a repeating time loop, then this puts it out of phase with the rest of the world. This is why the island is only accessible to get to for certain periods of time, certain windows, as Hawking said. I don’t know exactly how it works and I’m only guessing but I think that trying to get back to the island might be like trying to get onto a roundabout, you know how Faraday was talking about a spinning disc… Well I see time on the island where sometimes it is more in tune with off island time than at other times, maybe more like an elliptical orbit. When it comes close to off island time there may only be a difference of approximately 30 minutes but at it’s distant it could be a difference of 30 years, depending which part of the time cycle the island is in. That’s why when you come to the island you would be bridging the time difference between the time off island you were in to the time that the island is in at that point in its cycle. When the Kaha! na came to the island the island was actually in 1996, I think. I know that doesn’t tie in with when our Losties came to the island but they are not living in sync with normal time. If you don’t see that it can be 1996 on the island, then think of it this way - when you approach the island your brain cannot compute and your brain just gets flung around in time to points of your conscious where the island has been at some point. This bit is confusing and I’m not saying I understand it but it’s related to the higher dimensional stuff.
FARADAY: The Island... [sighs] think of the Island like a record spinning on a turntable... only now, that record is skipping. Whatever Ben Linus did down at the Orchid station... I think... it may have... dislodged us.
It did dislodge them and they have been shifted out of the ever repeating time loop and reinserted incorrectly into the wrong part of the loop.
One more wild assumptions for you that has no solid evidence to support it other than this theory - Clare’s seagull was sent out from the island and it arrived to the mainland in 80’s and this led Rousseau’s team to come to the island.
I hope I’ve been able to tie in a lot of the mysteries from Lost in this theory. I’m not saying all that I’ve said is all new, obviously I’ve taken many other people’s ideas and combined them together with some of my own. Hopefully it’s not too complicated, but if there are any remaining casual viewers they can cry at the deaths of our Losties (coz there will be more deaths). Then the die hard fans can sit back and feel like Lost has been an awesome experience, if only from all the nonsense we get to spout in our theories.
I have, however, read many of those choose-your-own-adventure books, do you know the ones? A definition - “The books are not meant to be read straight through; instead, each work consists of a collection of episodes which are read in a certain order depending on the choices the reader makes. The reader is in a situation and is faced with a choice of actions; having decided what action to take, he or she proceeds to the page of the book where the consequences of that decision are played out and a new decision must be made. Though the reader usually must decide between only two actions, sometimes three or more actions present themselves, with the maximum being five or six. Depending on the reader's decisions, they succeed or fail, live or die.”
I feel like watching Lost is a bit like reading the choose-your-own-adventure book from cover to cover, it wouldn’t make sense. Imagine if you had to try to figure out which pages led to which story because you’d lost the instructions. This is how I feel that theorising about Lost. I am following one train of thought and then the evidence (what the characters say or do) is vague and open to interpretation. You could go either way down a path or story line like in the choose-your-own-adventure books but you come to a crossroads. EG Does Hurley really see dead people or does he not? So let’s say he does see dead people. Then you come to another crossroads. Does John have a dream about Horace or is it really Horace appearing to him or someone else pretending to be him? So I follow different paths but I get Lost and forget which path/storyline I was following. I start to loose faith and think there are too many paths and too many options.
Lost can be enjoyed on various levels. A casual viewer (I believe there are these people still out there watching) or someone who really doesn’t understand sci fi but wants to watch it with a die hard fan (their partner or friend) can enjoy Lost for the mystery and the relationships between the characters. For people who want to know more they can read about the more interesting and complex sci fi using the Lost reading list to understand the quantum physics and higher dimensionalism. The writers have said that they have pushed the boundaries of time travel fiction from what we’ve seen to date on popular TV. Some thinking out of the box is necessary if one really wants to understand what it all means. Many theories out there I think are very accurate but appear to be fanfiction because it’s almost impossible to follow all the threads or paths that have lead these people to their conclusions. We do not have enough evidence to prove any of our theories 100%. This is beca! use the characters’ real meanings in what they say or do are lost because it’s vague and open to interpretation. If you are not able to follow all the paths it requires a leap of FAITH!
So that’s what I started doing, looking at time travel concepts and what the writers could be showing us. I’ve been tinkering around with a few ideas to see which fits the facts the best. Since most of the Dharma experiments are disused and have progressed to a different level, it’s difficult to see what they did previously, we can only guess. I have made certain assumptions and have been trying to fit the rest of the details in around them.
The Swan is like a Faraday’s Cage with its blast doors. A Faraday’s cage is said to, “dissipate any electric currents generated from the external electromagnetic fields”. I think it highly likely that the EM was being used to send the people inside the Swan back in time. They were being watched and studied to see if they suffered any detrimental effects as a result of the time travel. They were tested to see if they experienced any signs of sickness or mental health. I wonder if they saw some strange phenomenon which they attributed to “shadows” from previous time loops. Overlaps of actions that were carried out by the people in the Swan. To the observers, it looked like there were more than 2 people in the Swan when really they were seeing just the same two men just from previous loops. Maybe the men inside the Swan were the only ones who saw the overlaps/shadows and they became sick as a result or blew out their brains like Radzinsky. This is a large assumption! but I think that Dharma invented Cerberus as a device to prevent these “shadows” from interfering with the current time loop.
“Not long after the experiments began, however, there was... an incident... and since that time, the following protocol has been observed.” Swan orientation film.
This statement seems strange because we know the experiments hadn’t started in 1977 because the building of the Swan wasn’t complete and yet we’ve seen the incident. There is also the discrepancy regarding Chang’s arm, whether it was injured in the incident or not. This is most likely explained by time travel and a change made in the past to alter the original events.
How exactly the time travel is controlled is open to debate but I’d say that the EM is harnessed and manipulated to create time travel somehow. Probably by harnessing the EM like they did at the Orchid and just drilled close to the pocket of EM, before the incident that’s how they used the Swan as a time travel device. They drilled close enough to the pocket of EM without drilling right into it like we saw Radzinsky do.
DR. CHANG: You're gonna do nothing. If you drill even 1 centimetre further, you risk releasing that energy. If that were to happen... then God help us all.
What happens when you do drill further into the pocket? Does the world end? Yes, maybe. Does time reset to the beginning of time? Yes, maybe but most importantly, I think the incident created a time travelling island.
At first, for the people on the island (and everything on it) it would still seem to be 1977 on the island but the whole island would be appearing and disappearing in relation to the outside world at random points in time e.g. 1845, 1961, 1954, and 1972. Everything on the island would be the same but if they left the island it would be 1845, 1961, 1954, or 1972. People living on the island would age while they were on it in the same way they would do if they were off it. Think of Doc Brown who was time travelling with his wife and two sons, Jules and Vern. They grew up while they lived in the flying time travelling steam train didn’t they? This is the same as Dharma, the Others and our Losties living on the island except certain people like Richard who seems to be ageless. He is an exception to the rule for other reasons, but just for now lets me use him as an example before he became ageless. He might have got on the island in 1845 but if the island was to then disappear ! and jump to another point in time, and another and then another then he may have only been to the island for weeks or months or a few years. We saw him in what we thought was 1954, 1961 and 1972 on the island but I propose that the island was skipping through time to those points in history or maybe being moved in a controlled fashion by Dharma. After he was in 1954 he might then have visited 1720 and say 1999 before the island got to 1961. These are times in the outside world, not the time on the island. Who knows how long they stay in one time period, hours, days, weeks…
The island wasn’t always jumping in time but Dharma controlled it so that the island has been stuck in a repeating time loop from 1977 to sometime in the future (approx 30 years). Exactly when is yet to be confirmed.
"You do remember birthdays, don't you Richard?"
Here’s how I think Dharma learned how to harness the time travel of the island. They would transmit the numbers to a place off the island which could record what points in time the island appeared in. They must have gone WAY back in time to set up a receiver, then sent the island through time to various points and then record which times the island appeared in and eventually were able to predict it’s location in the Lamp Post. They could then harness the power to send it to whatever time they wished. I believe they did the same experiments that they were doing in the Swan but on a larger scale. Originally I believe Dharma scientists intended Dharma people to be the test subjects. People who were employed to be teachers, janitors and motor pool operators; the ones who apparently have disappeared from the outside world in some alien abduction according to the latest Lost video, Mysteries of the Universe, Part 2. What better way to test if you can change the course of event! s, than testing a whole community of test subjects? Bring back the Valenzetti Equation. Could Dharma have eventually wanted to reset the whole of human existence to change the end of the world as predicted in the VE? If they could make changes in the time line then they could change the end of the world? Wouldn’t it be ironic if Dharma actually caused the end of the world by their meddling with time?
Check out this article: www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/science_news/4263315.html
I think things did go horribly wrong with the time travel experiments and the MIB and the MIW (Jacob) are all that’s left on the island of the Dharma team who are manipulating time. They have resorted to going further and further back in time to prevent the experiments from ever being conducted in the first place. They use the FDW to do this. I think they tried to stop Dharma with the Purge but it wasn’t enough. The Others became involved and then our Losties. They went back further in time to try to stop themselves from ever getting involved in Dharma in the first place. One change led to a different course of events in the time line, a different set of consequences that they didn’t predict. It reminds me of Anorax in Voyager’s 2 part episode, The Year of Hell. No matter what he did, he couldn’t undo the mess he’d made.
Jacob and MIB seem to be strange entities, God like, maybe even personifications of course correction due to Dharma’s interference in time. I think, however, it’s highly likely that they are Dharma scientists who have taken their experiments way beyond time travelling bunnies. Like all mad scientists, they have experimented on themselves. They have provided themselves with strange attributes that make them seem omnipotent. They seem to live outside of time or maybe they are just immune to many of the experiments that they are conducting on the island because they have created devices which allow them to not be affected by the time differences or places they can go where they are protected (e.g. the Temple or the cabin). Maybe they have already reached a higher state of consciousness and no longer need those places but those places are still being used by the Others.
BEN: It's a sanctuary. It may be the last safe place on this island.
Jacob maybe wants it all to continue, he maybe has some idea of people being able to exist in a higher plane of existence, out of time, a higher state of consciousness. Where as the MIB wants it all to end, he has had enough of playing the game and wants the end of the world he thinks they will never make amends. It could be the other way round, that it was actually the MIB’s objective to gain a higher level of consciousness. With his evil plan he didn’t care who he killed in the process of science. While Jacob is trying to save everyone and put things right, correct what the MIB has done. The pawns in the game don’t know who’s manipulating them, whether they are following order from MIB or MIW. I don’t think we will really know what the motivations of MIB and Jacob are until the very end. Who is really the bad guy or are they both?
One of the main things that has gone wrong is that Cerberus, the security system, has failed. You remember I was saying I thought Dharma had designed a way to stop the previous time loops from seeping into the next. I think when Cerberus malfunctioned it has become what we know as the black smoke or the monster. I believe that our Losties have been seeing previous iterations of the time loop. Perhaps they are starting to seep into one another and possibly interfere with each other. The people in the loop cannot comprehend what they are seeing and so they see black smoke when really it could be other Losties from the other loops. Does this lead everyone to a higher level of consciousness or is it this that is destroying the universe?
If the island is in a repeating time loop, then this puts it out of phase with the rest of the world. This is why the island is only accessible to get to for certain periods of time, certain windows, as Hawking said. I don’t know exactly how it works and I’m only guessing but I think that trying to get back to the island might be like trying to get onto a roundabout, you know how Faraday was talking about a spinning disc… Well I see time on the island where sometimes it is more in tune with off island time than at other times, maybe more like an elliptical orbit. When it comes close to off island time there may only be a difference of approximately 30 minutes but at it’s distant it could be a difference of 30 years, depending which part of the time cycle the island is in. That’s why when you come to the island you would be bridging the time difference between the time off island you were in to the time that the island is in at that point in its cycle. When the Kaha! na came to the island the island was actually in 1996, I think. I know that doesn’t tie in with when our Losties came to the island but they are not living in sync with normal time. If you don’t see that it can be 1996 on the island, then think of it this way - when you approach the island your brain cannot compute and your brain just gets flung around in time to points of your conscious where the island has been at some point. This bit is confusing and I’m not saying I understand it but it’s related to the higher dimensional stuff.
FARADAY: The Island... [sighs] think of the Island like a record spinning on a turntable... only now, that record is skipping. Whatever Ben Linus did down at the Orchid station... I think... it may have... dislodged us.
It did dislodge them and they have been shifted out of the ever repeating time loop and reinserted incorrectly into the wrong part of the loop.
One more wild assumptions for you that has no solid evidence to support it other than this theory - Clare’s seagull was sent out from the island and it arrived to the mainland in 80’s and this led Rousseau’s team to come to the island.
I hope I’ve been able to tie in a lot of the mysteries from Lost in this theory. I’m not saying all that I’ve said is all new, obviously I’ve taken many other people’s ideas and combined them together with some of my own. Hopefully it’s not too complicated, but if there are any remaining casual viewers they can cry at the deaths of our Losties (coz there will be more deaths). Then the die hard fans can sit back and feel like Lost has been an awesome experience, if only from all the nonsense we get to spout in our theories.
