SubVerse

Okay, I’m clearly in a childish mood these days. First “Where the Wild Things Are,” and now this. But so be it, this made me very happy too.

Feist singing her song “1, 2, 3, 4″ on Sesame Street, changing the words to better fit. But it already seems as if it was always meant to be right here…

Man…

The LOST 2-hour season finale tonight was a little bit mind blowing, hunh?
Those guys are going all the way out now. They’re not holding anything back.
They have once again, completely transformed the scope and even the underlying concept of the show.
This thing is like a “serial” the way Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN was a comic book.

It’s true, at points along the way this season, I’ve felt like these guys have had no idea where they’re going. And I think some of that comes from their need (and orders from on high) to stretch the series out for five to nine years. But they’re answer to that is different that most TV shows, which try to recreate the same show season after season. Like CHEERS, most shows are all about giving you a place of comfort and familiarty to come to, where everyone knows your name.

But LOST, at the end of two seasons in a row now, have instead completely transformed the idea of what the show is about.

We now know that they are not on a normal island.
And we know how they were brought there.
And we know that when Desmond, the last inhabitant of the hatch, tried to escape by boat, he sailed for some eight weeks away from the island, and the first sight of land he saw - was this island again.

This brings up a few potential readings.

1) They’re in some kind of snow globe. A massive dome. And on the other side is:

a) Some kind of TRUMAN SHOW-like other world. Some huge experiment is being conducted on them from outside. The entire island is like the hatch. The hatch which was being watched by someone in an abandoned post for a very long time. The entire island itself is inside some kind of self-contained unit, and it is being watched.

b) Or maybe it’s some kind of virtual reality, where the edge of the world - like in a video game - just leads you back into the game platform.

c) Or there is nothing else out there, the rest of the world has been destroyed.

d) Or maybe, as Sawyer guessed, they’re on an alien planet. (Which would be backed up by the giant stone foot, the ruins of some colossus on the coast, which had only four toes.)

But I think the answer is clearer than that.
I’m leaning toward option:

2) It seems now that the island is, in fact, built on top of a massive magnetic energy generator.

The generator is controlled by the pushing of the button, which dissipates the excess built up energy every 108 minutes. When the button isn’t pushed, and the energy is allowed to build - the magnet effect builds so intensely, that anything with a few hundred miles is sucked toward it.

It’s this magnetism that, when Desmond failed to push the button, pulled Oceanic Flight 815 out of the sky and crashed it into the island. Just as the drug plane from Nigeria crashed, just as the 16th century slave ship crashed, just as Desmond’s boat was drawn there and the real Henry Gale’s baloon.

This explanation of the magnetic island seems to answer a lot of questions with some clarity. And, in terms of what the generator is, maybe even some kind of BLACK HOLE, pulling everything toward it with a gravitational sucking force.

But, then… there’s one clue at the very end that suggests one of the more wild first theories might be right.

After Locke doesn’t push the button, and the vast bright light fills the sky (which suggests a light coming from above, perhaps from the top of a dome), there’s quiet aross the beach… And then something falls out of the sky, from high, high above, and crashes in the middle of the camp.

What is it? …. The front door of the hatch.

The metal door of the hatch which seems to have been somehow sucked high into the sky, and then dropped back down when the button was pushed and the magnet when off.

So perhaps the island isn’t the source of the energy.
Maybe the source is high above…

At the top of a dome.

Or hey, maybe there’s a link of some sort, between the island and somewhere else - somewhere high in the sky. Maybe a dimensional portal or a gate is in the hatch. Or, maybe a black hole…?

6.1.06 - Theory Addendum
Remember that big re-stocking shipment of food and materials that fell from the sky during the hatch’s lockdown about 6 episodes back? Remember that nobody heard a plane fly overhead?

How much you want to bet it fell from a hole in the sky - like at the top of a big dome?

This theory’s really been floating around in my head a lot lately. The only problem with it - and it’s a big one - is how the hell did they get in there? They all left on a plane from Sydney, in the real world. At what point did they cross into the snow globe?

MUSIC:

In honor of the vast conspiracy that ABC is allowing these very clever writers and filmmakers to spin for us happy and hooked audience members, here’s some conspiracy and Lost-themed tunes to download and listen to on your iPod today:

1) “Another Lonely Night” - The Willard Grant Conspiracy [from the album Mojave]

2) Fah Daa Bah Dee Bah Doo Bomph - The Mother Funk Conspiracy

3) “Le Monde (ft. Lou Lou)” - Thievery Corporation [from the album "The Mirror Conspiracy"]

4) “Samba Tranquille” - Thievery Corporation [from the album "The Mirror Conspiracy"]

5) “Lost Change in D Minor” - Will.i.am [from the album "Lost Change"]

6) “If Not Now, Whenever” - The Books [from the album "Lost and Safe"]

7) “I Slept with Bonhomme at the CBC” - Broken Social Scene [from the Album "Feel Good Lost"]

INTELLECTUAL QUOTE OF THE DAY:

And here’s a relevant couple quotes from a radio show I heard today on my iPod, while wandering around through a summer’s day in New York today:

On Kurt Anderson’s STUDIO 360 podcast from PRI, he was talking with the novelist Anne Rice about conspiracy theories, and specifically about the popularity of the DAVINCI CODE.

Rice said she understands why so many people are so drawn to the conspiracy story Brown has invented. “Most of life,” she says, “for most of us, is meaningless. Things happen at random. There’s always been a great desire on the parts of journalists and historians and the media, to try and find threads and meaning. So, conspiracy theories are glorified versions of that. Because the random nature of life is pretty scary. And it’s comforting to believe that things happen for a meaning and that there are connections.”

Of course, the other obvious tale-weaver she leaves out is religion, which provides exactly the same kind of vast and cosmic cover story, that explains everything.

Kurt Anderson agrees, that conspiracy theories and religious narratives spring from the same impulse. “To try,” he says, “to impose absolute clarity on an existence whose purposes and meanings are murky and mysterious… It’s why fundamentalism of so many stripes is so appealing to so many people. And why 60 million copies of THE DAVINCI CODE have been sold.”

And perhaps why LOST is attracting record numbers of viewers back to the dying technology of the boob tube.