Dharma's Wild Orchid

With the master theory project still churning away, I thought I'd take a look at that latest, slightest bit of new material we got, first aired at Comic Con, and then this week on ABC.com. I refer, of course, to the "raw footage" of another Dr. Marvin Candle lookalike trying to shoot an orientation film for an as-yet unseen Dharma site, "the Orchid." If you have not yet watched this footage, it's at the bottom of the previous post on this blog.

What follows is certainly informed by this week's Doc Jensen post on EW.com. To read everything the meandering good doc had to say about this and other Lost hapennings, click on the title of this post.

So, here are my thoughts...

Holy Duplicating Bunnies!!!

The suddenly appearing second iteration of Bunny #15 is cute and wacky, but it does bring up some interesting questions...

First off, could duplication somehow explain why there is a Marvin Candle, a Mark Wickmund and, in this footage, an Edgar Hollowax? Or why "Candle" is missing an arm, while his doppelgangers are not?

And could this somehow explain how it is that the passengers from Flight 815 are simultaneously water-soaked corpses in an ocean trench and the protagonists on the island? More on this below...

There's that Pesky Jacob Feller...

Spliced throughout this footage are a few sudden jump-cut, non sequitur frames. One of these is the eerily familiar text-only frame that reads "God Loves You as He Loves Jacob" that we saw in the freightening aversion therapy montage is "room 23" on Hydra island. There was some speculation that such a bizzarre media creation as the room 23 film was the warped creation of Ben and his cohorts. The inclusion of that frame here suggests that that film's origins date back to Dharma's dominance on the island.

Of course, a link between Dharma and the name Jacob brings up other possibilities. Is mystery-shack-dweller Jacob a remnant of Dharma? Is Dharma the reason he needs John Locke to help him? And what kind of bizzarre experiments or procedures was Dharma using the montage film for?


Casimir for Dummies

Dr. Hollowax mentions a "Casimir Effect" in the film, saying this effect is created by the island's "unique properties." I've done the Wikipedia research on this effect. Unless you are well-versed in theoretical research, don't bother - I will tell you that, in general, this effect involves a charge-free attractive force between two objects arranged in parallel. How that creates duplicating bunnies, I haven't the foggiest. But I can tell you that the truly theoretical, Hawking-type big thinkers have stated that a Casimir Effect can stabilize a wormhole (a portal between different places in space-time that connects them more directly than straight travel can). Other recent reports on the impact of the Casimir effect on nantotechnology suggest that the effect can cause particles of matter to actually spontaneously spring into existence from nothingness. Again, some interesting concepts...

Jump (for My Love)

When the demonstration goes awry, and the second bunny appears, Dr. Hollowax asks his assistant about the jump settings, and she indicates the experiment was set for "9 minutes" but that they have difficulty controlling it. We've already seen time travel, of a sort, in the "Desmond effect." Could the second bunny be the same bunny, but from the past or future?

For that matter, why was Dr. Hollowax so adamant that the bunnies not touch each other? As Doc Jensen notes, there is a lot of sci-fi lore out there suggesting "touch-the-streams bad" outcomes if a time traveller makes direct contact with his past or future self.

Getting Stingy on the Logos?

As we all know by now, each Dharma station has its own unique logo. But Dr. Hollowax's lab coat clearly sports the logo we recognize as the Swan station logo. Doc Jensen has a theory on this, as well - the Swan station is the renamed Orchid station, and the lack of control over the island's "unique properties" demonstrated in this clip suggest whatever experiment was being run at the Orchid may have been the "incident" we know took place in the Swan before the infernal button-pushing became its raison-d'etre.

Putting it All Together

Here's where I get creative...expanding on the Doc's ideas: Dharma finds the island (no surprise, Alvar Hanso's ancestor, Magnus, was marooned there). They discover some bizarre electromagnetic anomaly on the island, a "casimir effect" that can create reality-warping effects like duplication of matter and time travel. They attempt to harness the power of this area in a station dubbed the orchid...but things go horribly awry. Not only is Dr. Hollowax duplicated a couple of times over (with one, flawed copy having an arm; or, alternatively, the duplication process itself may have cost Dr. Candle his arm), but soon Dharma's machinations force this anomaly into overdrive. Realizing that reality as we know it is in jeopardy, Dharma's scientists quickly assemble a jerry-rigged system that allows the anomaly's energies to be contained, but requiring a periodic venting. They re-dub the station where this venting occurs "the Swan," (which is why the Swan blast door map contained no mention of the Orchid station). And the system generally worked pretty well...until one day Desmond failed to push the button. The casimir effect energy built up beyond the system's ability to contain it. Flight 815 was pulled towards the island (and pulled apart)...and a duplicate of the doomed plane was created, which plunged into the ocean. Hopefully, our survivors will never encounter their crash-landed duplicate bodies, or else, there goes the universe!

Of course, there must be more to it, but all of that will have to fit into my Lost master theory...

Until later, Namaste!