Lost: Unanswered
Ok, this one goes out to all your watchers of Lost. (Actually, it’s these two because I have a question and an observation…and technically, these are my wife’s question and observation, so maybe I should just quit while I’m behind. But anyway…)
SPOILER ALERT: If you’ve not watched last night’s episode, don’t read!
Ok, in last night’s episode, the remaining island gang (i.e. Locke, Sawyer and the others who are not part of the Oceanic 6) were reunited with the once-thought-to-be-dead Jin.
Well, included among current set of island dwellers is the fairly recently added Charlotte, who revealed last night that she actually grew up on the Island. She suddenly remembered, in the midst of other goings on, that there was once a scary man that came to the island and told her to leave and that if she ever got off the island, to never come back or else she would die. She confessed this memory to her shipmate, Daniel Faraday, and then proceeded to tell him that the man who told her this was none other than Daniel himself.
So, the question is this: Since she “just remembered” this experience, do you think that memory had just resurfaced because it actually didn’t exist before? Do you think that “just remembered” means that she actually just had that experience in some tangential version of the past–a past to which Daniel Faraday, knowing that she was going to die (which she did shortly after this revelation), traveled to warn her after watching her die in his arms?
Secondly, the observation.
Also happening in last’s night’s episode (carried over from the previous episode), the once-thought-to-be Jin was found to be alive. He was discovered adrift on some flotsam by a group of French sailers in a raft, which turned out to be Danielle Rousseau and her crew…but back when they first landed on the island rather than when we first met her in season 1.
Here’s the problem: if Danielle (and co.) ended up rescuing Jin, wouldn’t she have remembered him when she encountered him those sixteen years later when he ended up on the island after the plane crash?
I welcome all commentary.
February 15th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Interesting take on Charlotte’s reveal. I hadn’t considered that the memory may have been only been formed at that moment. In other words, it was Charlotte’s (imminent) death that would prompt Daniel to warn her never to go to the island.
I found a site a few weeks ago that addresses the good and bad of time travel as used in TV, movies and writing. One of the more interesting points is the paradox of the “uncaused cause” as discussed here: http://www.mjyoung.net/time/cause.html
The basic point is that you can’t have something happen only because it happens. There has to be a catalyst for the sequence of events that eventually becomes a loop. What I think Lost may be doing is providing that catalyst. In other words, the island is the cause.
That theory would explain why Rousseau did not recognize Jin. Maybe the island has caused him to be injected into that time stream where he wasn’t there when it originally happened. Of course, that would mean that you can indeed change the past, in spite of that principle having been repeated several times by Faraday.
So I think the writer’s are setting us up for a new reveal that time (or events in time) is not quite so fixed as we usually assume.
February 16th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
I hope that’s true, or that they at least have some direction in mind. That would re-engage my mind in the show. This season has been more interesting, but I think I’m still teetering on the “I’m not sure I’m interested” ledge.
March 3rd, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Time travel is getting the be the TV writers’ hack of choice, and it bugs.