Revisiting the Questions

As many of you will recall, waaaay back in June I posted a list of questions that in my mind Lost has asked but not yet answered. (Click on the title of this post to go straight to my June 2007 archive for the full list).

Well, midway (or thereabouts) through the new season, it's time to look back on these questions and see which, if any have been answered. Also, what new questions have been asked.

But first...some Lost scheduling news. I'm pleased to report that ABC has confirmed we will get one more hour of Lost than previously announced. As the producers were writing the season finale, they realized they had too much plot (and, apparently, too many revelations) to squeeze into one final thirteenth hour. So instead of ending Lost with a one hour episode on May 22 following the two hour Grey's Anatomy finale, we will get a two hour Lost finale on May 29. The only downside is that the finale, which is actually a three-hour story, will begin May 15, but will only conclude two weeks later. Still, for one more hour of Lost, I'd say it's a fair trade!

Now, on with the questions (or the ones that have been answered, anyway):

5. DHARMA
0. Have we seen all the DHARMA facilities on (and around) the island?
No, folks, we most assuredly had not. This season we have already encountered The Tempest, a chemical weapons manufacturing facility that was commandeered by the Hostiles in their purge of DHARMA. We will also soon see the three-level Orchid station, which was teased in that "found" footage that was displayed at comic-con.

7. Smoke Monster
f. Does it in fact take different forms (like Christian Shephard, Sawyer's boar, Yemi, and the green eagle?)
In a recent podcast on ABC.com, the producers confirmed that sometimes Smokey takes the shape of a person or thing, sometimes that person or thing is some other sort of apparition, and sometimes it's just what it appeared to be. Yemi was Smokey. Christian...the jury's still out. The boar was just a boar onto which Sawyer was projecting his inner rage. And the eagle...they wouldn't talk about the eagle.

8. The Others
g. What do the Others call themselves as a group?
It doesn't appear they have a name for themselves. Juliet, however, has referred to them (and herself) as "Others," adopting the name given the group by Rousseau and used by the crash survivors.

9. Benjamin Linus
b. What does Ben want, and why is it different from what the Others and/or Jacob want (if it is)?
We've learned that Ben occasionally "steps out" from his island duties and pursues personal goals, often with deadly consequences. One such goal has been his romantic pursuit of Juliet, which resulted in his sending Goodwin off to die as a spy in the tail section camp.

e. Has Ben left the island since he was a child?
From the secret room Locke and Sayid discovered that was filled with passports and foreign currencies, I would say this is a yes. And we've seen in flash-forward that Ben certainly will leave the island.

10. Danielle Rousseau
c. What is this “sickness” supposedly suffered by Danielle’s crewmates? Why did she have to kill them? Why has nobody manifested this sickness in the three months of island time that we have seen?
We have finally seen more "sickness" in the form of time-tripping and otherwise nutty behavior on the freighter. It would appear that approaching or leaving the island at the wrong vector, particularly after being exposed to radiation or electromagnetism causes wildly erratic behavior. Those traveling through time (mentally) will die from an aneurysim if they don't find a "constant" in both time frames. Others tend to off themselves, so perhaps Danielle didn't really have to kill her people. Oh, well. As for why the crash survivors have not manifested the sickness - they all came in on the same vector, which presumably was the "right" one.
Random thought - Desmond's close-range exposure to the hatch implosion made him susceptible to the sickness. But, other than Aaron, who may have special properties due to his birth on the island, the Oceanic Six were farther away from the implosion than any other crash survivors - Kate, Jack and Hurley were being held by the Others on the dock, and Sayid and Sun were sailing around the island to try to ambush the Others. Of course, this doesn't explain why Sawyer and Jin are not amongst the Six, but it may explain why the other five are. Or not.

12. Desmond
b. What is the precise nature of his precognitive abilities? Is it completely linked to Charlie?
We now know (or think we know) that Desmond's consciousness actually gets propelled in time to inhabit his body at different times. It's a form of mental time travel. Whether or not it will continue at all now that he's contacted his constant (Penny) remains to be seen.

c. Did Desmond ever really change the universe, or did it course correct?
Yes, and yes. Desmond did not (and could not) create paradoxical alterations of the time stream. But he did go back and enable Farraday to perfect his time experiments (and determine that Desmond should be his constant), and he set Penny on the path to look for the island years before he contacted her from the freighter.

14. Penelope and Charles Widmore
b. What does Charles want, if not just to keep Desmond from marrying Penny?
Despite some variations in the accounts of Ben and the freighter people, it seems pretty clear - Widmore wants access to the island. As for why, we still don't have the full story (though Ben's observations regarding his ability to exploit the island's powers seems to get us part of the way there).

c. Why was Penny trying to contact the Looking Glass Station?
Penny, we now know, had been researching and trying to find the island for three years as part of her search for Desmond. She obtained equipment that could contact the Looking Glass Station, and was alerted by the equipment that the station's jamming had stopped, enabling her to make the call while Charlie was in the comm room.

d. Why did Penny have Arctic researchers looking for large E-M bursts?
By extrapolation, this would appear to have been connected to Penny's search for the island, in general. I could not begin to guess why she would employ Arctic researchers looking for E-M bursts to that end, but that seems to be what was going on.

e. Why was she surprised Desmond would be in a DHARMA hatch?
She was not, it turns out, surprised, so much as elated. She was looking for Desmond all along, and the fact that he was in the very station she contacted at that moment was just exciting.

17. Richard Malkin (Claire’s Psychic)
a. Does he have any real abilities, or is he a sham like he told Eko?
b. Why was he so insistent that Claire raise Aaron?
c. Why was he then so insistent that Claire take flight 815, and no other flight, to give Aaron up for adoption?
d. Were there real people hoping to adopt Aaron? Was their hope specific to Aaron? Why go through Malkin?

I'll tackle this whole topic in one fell swoop. Now that we know the island can exert influence far beyond its borders, my take is that Malkin is a sham, but the island somehow provided him with one (and only one) clear flash. I believe (but cannot conclusively prove) that the island attracted Claire (and Aaron) by speaking through Malkin. Or not.

18. Oceanic Flight 815
a. How did so many people with such interconnected backgrounds end up on the same plane?
See my previous response. If I'm right about that one, it applies here, too. As Locke said back in season 1, the island brought them all there for a reason.

b. How did more than 50 people survive the crash of a jumbo jet that broke up at cruising altitude?
I suspect the how is not so important as the fact that the island seemed to know that they would.

d. Why did both Naomi and Anthony Cooper seem to think Flight 815, and the bodies of all aboard, had been found?
As we've learned, a sham flight 815 was recovered by a salvage vessel that had been searching for, of all things, the Black Rock, from the Sunda Trench in the Indian Ocean, complete with 324 bodies. We know this was a sham because the pilot's body did not have on his wedding ring. Both Ben's people and Widmore's people have blamed each other for the fake plane crash. The Others, at least, had a paper trail backing up their story, though all of it could have been faked fairly easily.

19. John Locke
b. Why is he the only person, aside from Ben, who could hear and see Jacob? Why couldn’t Ben hear Jacob at the moment when John could?
The former is now a moot point, as Hurley has seen Jacob. The question now should be why certain people can see Jacob (and his shack), while others cannot, and why Jacob appears at different places or to different people at different times.

c. What does he want to achieve by keeping people on the island?
It now appears that Locke himself doesn't know this answer. But he firmly believes that he should listen to the island, and that the island does not want people to leave.

20. Hurley
a. Why is he so jinxed? Can the numbers do that?
I have theorized that Hurley is not so much jinxed as gifted with mind-over-matter powers. He just doesn't know it. The jinx effect is merely a by-product of his low self-esteem. At other times, though, he actually seems to get "lucky."

d. Was “Dave” ever a real person?
No - he was always just an imaginary friend, even on the island. But perhaps the island "spoke" to Hurley through this image to which it knew he would respond.

21. Walt (and Michael)
d. Where did Walt and Michael go when they followed Ben’s directions?
Somehow they returned to New York under assumed names (and rather quickly). Michael, wracked with guilt, confessed his killing of Libby and Ana Lucia to Walt, who then refused to talk to him. Walt went to live with his grandmother, and Michael become ineffectually suicidal before being recruited by the Others to spy on Widmore.

e. Did Ben, who never seems to want to let somebody go, actually allow Michael a path off the island?
The Others tracked Michael and recruited him to be their spy and saboteur on Widmore's freighter, by playing off Michael's guilt and convincing him that helping them would redeem him by saving the rest of the survivors.

22. Claire and Aaron
a. How did Claire survive to give birth to Aaron, when all other women since Rousseau have died?
Juliet's theory has been proven - the lethal combination is conception and birth on the island. If either occurs off-island, pregnancy and birth will be as normal as they can be while living in makeshift huts in a jungle or on a beach.

b. Does Aaron have a special property about him other than just surviving birth on the island?
If my one theory is correct, then yes (and this will make him one of the Six).

c. Why were Malkin and, presumably, the couple who wanted Aaron, so intent on getting this specific baby?
If my other theory is correct, it was actually the island making sure that Aaron would be born there.

23. Naomi and Minkowski (and the Other Freighterites)
a. Who does Naomi (and Minkowski, who answered the phone) work for, if not Penny Widmore?
Charles Widmore.

b. Why did Naomi have HALO jump gear while in a helicopter?
Whatever knowledge both Widmore and Farraday had about the island warned them that approaching would be rough. The jump gear was just a precaution (that proved necessary as Naomi's bird went down).

c. Why did Naomi have a picture of Desmond and Penny?
Presumably acquired by Charles Widmore from Penny's nightstand (though how Penny got a copy remains a mystery).

d. If not Desmond or the 815 survivors, what was she looking for?
We've been told Ben, but this seems unlikely to be the whole story.

e. Did Mikhail know whose flair Hurley had shot up?
Yes - the Others were aware that the freighter was sent by Widmore, and who the people on board were.

f. Was her phone, in fact, a futuristic design not available in 2004?
It was a proprietary design with only one use - communication with other similar phones on and off the island (i.e. it won't work to call any other phone in the world).

24. Jack
a. What lie did he tell that has him so distraught after his return to L.A.?
We don't know the whole story, but we do know that the world heard that Kate fished seven other people out of the water following the crash, but only six of them survived to get back to civilization.

e. Why did Jack tell the new Chief of Surgery "Go get my father"?
Typical response of an addict in a stressful situation - making reference to people who have died as though they are still alive.

25. Kate
a. Was she pregnant? With Sawyer’s baby?
No.

b. Boy or girl?
Neither (though she ends up raising Aaron in L.A.).

c. Does the baby know about the sister (Cassidey’s baby)?
Not applicable.

d. Who was the “he” Kate needed to return to? Is it Sawyer, the Floridian sheriff she left at the alter, her son, or someone else?
Aaron.

e. Are she and Jack the only flight 815 survivors to make it back to civilization?
No - they are part of the Oceanic Six, along with Hurley, Sayid, Sun and Aaron.

f. Why wasn't Kate immediately arrested as a fugitive when she arrived back home?
She was - but her mother then refused to testify at trial, and public sympathy over Kate's heroism in the fake Oceanic Six story and her custody over Aaron convinced the D.A. to take a 10-year probation deal.

30. The Black Rock
f. Is Magnus's getting marooned on the island connected with Alvar's knowledge and exploitation of the island through the DHARMA Initiative?
Somehow pirates found the first mate's log and brought it to Madagascar. Eventually, the Hanso family acquired the log, presumably informing them about the island. Widmore then bought the log at auction.

So that's it. In my mind, most of the questions on the June '07 list are not yet answered, and many of the answers discussed above will receive further clarification down the line. After Season 4 concludes, I'll address these questions again, and supplement the list with the additional questions we all know we'll have at that point. So, until I re-rehash the first eight episodes of Season 4 in anticipation of "The Shape of Things to Come" (which will air April 24 at 10, 9 Central), Namaste.