LOST Spin off thread

A question I've asked myself a few times.

I think at this point it's doubtful it's going to get answered, or if it is it'll be in a very offhanded way.

A recent interview (On Sky 1 here in the UK) with Cuse/Lindelof indicated that they aren't necessarily concerned with solving the same mysteries as the fans are, RE: Libby at the mental hospital, so I think we can chalk that up as something that won't be mentioned again.

Obviously with this Season end date I think that they've become so zeroed in on getting where they want to go that a few things are going to fall by the wayside. It's also obvious that there were quite a few things they brought up without really knowing the answers to.

I expect at some point tie in materials will clear up most of it.

I am going on a wonky limb here but one could theorize the following. Basically the Others have taken over the Dharma initiative at this time. They are living in Otherville and operate their stations etc.. But apparently they are aware that Dharma and furthermore the people pulling the strings like Widmore are still looking for the island. So maybe they try to keep up the impression to still be essentially the Others living in the woods that look dirtied up like Alpert in the jungle.

Kinda like a smoke screen for the first encounter with the eventual arriving forces they are set upon to combat. While the crashed plane certainly does not count as the expected threat for them I guess maybe they just went according to an established protocol for contact with outside forces. Or something like that.

To intimidate them?

Because Ben told them to.

That would certainly be a factor considering all those time jumping shenannigangs. But they still had a whole set of clothes and disguises stored and ready. It does not look like one of Bens improvised plans but rather like a longer thought out protocol thing.

I've wondered if the others' hillbilly outfits and fake beards were safety precautions to prevent enemy time travelers from recognizing and retaliating against them. If your enemies become unstuck in time and could recognize you at a point in the "master timeline" prior (or even subsequent) to your initial encounter with them, it makes sense that you'd want to disguise yourself.

Yeah, it definitely has something to do with the time travel. Remember, they made a point of showing Alpert in a hillbilly outfit when he first meets Ben, but we see him looking normal in th 50's. I think they allow the Others to be underestimated no matter who sees them.

But, assuming Alpert is living on a linear timeline, his stint in the 50´s was triggered only by Lockes appearance in 2005 (?). So this encounter would take place way after he first met Ben in the seventies. At least on his lifeline.

I haven't watched this season so maybe I should just shut up and stay out of this, but I want to add: weren't the fake outfits all Dharma-issued? I thought when Kate found them it was all like "Dharma Spirit Gum," "Dharma Scraggly Beard," etc., etc. So it's something the Others appropriated but the original idea/use for the costumes wasn't theirs.

No. Alpert is not time traveling. The earliest we've seen him was 54, clean cut. He meets Ben in the seventies in costume.

Yeah, you are right actually. I mixed up the compass scenes between Alpert and Locke in 54 and 2005. My bad.

I hate to say it, but I think this boils down to simply wanting to dupe us, the audience.

They didn't want the castaways to know about how they "really" lived and that there was technology on the island (or more than they knew about, anyway). But mainly, I think it was a "neat" way to mislead us.

I've said it many times before, but not everything on this show is some grand, well thought out scheme. Some of it is cheap misdirection. I could end up wrong though, but I doubt it.

Hmmm... this makes some sort of sense too. I wrote my first post without reading the whole (short) thread.

I forgot about the timeframe of when Richard looked like a raggedy hobo.

Yeah. I'm assuming Ben was there and had his run-in with Alpert a little bit before that? Or was it after?

Either way, Alpert was obviously up to something walking around in that getup. That obviously wasn't his natural state of dress.

They still never explained why the others initially seemed to have supernatural strength. Are they going to conduct steroids experiments on baby Ethan to make him the extremely hard to kill soldier we see in the first season?


Or is the superhuman faux-hillbillies subplot ignore wholly?

The Others didn't want the castaways to know they had a little resort in the middle of Death Island. The costumes made them seem like savages - no one goes looking for a bunch of ragged huts and dirt patches to take over, but if you see clean-cut people in clean clothes, you might go looking for their laundromat...

Aaah, the convincing power of simplicity.

Actually, how was it explained in the series in the first place?

Even IF they use Alpert's "shaggy meeting with young Ben" to somehow tie this into time travel and all that... I'm still sticking with what I said earlier, and you somewhat reiterated with your post above.

I think at first it was a simple misdirection, and something they were prepared to change/toy-with as they went along.

Every time one of their stations or camps is discovered, they abandon or destroy it. Their sonic fence is defeatable (we've seen it defeated repeatedly). Their strength is lower than they show. They want to keep the castaways scared and huddled on the beach, not asking any questions.

It seems pretty logical to me that some kind of costume that doesn't pique curiosity would be desired.

Without a doubt... but it's not like they have cable.

Maybe building false identities and fake communities is their hobby.

My initial answer would be "Maybe Chang doesn't want any traceability if the films ever left DI control," but if that were the case, he would have just left out his name entirely.

It's possible that the films that introduce Chang as Candle were purely subterfuge and were attempts to trick an outside party.

Random guess would be that at this point the Dharma folks are still building a lot of the stations (the Swan is only a model in 1977) so the real experiments hadn't fully begun yet. Maybe later occupants of the stations were meant to be merely human guinea pigs unaware of the larger workings of dharma, hence the pseudonym's. Kinda retarded, but it can be rationalized.

My burning question is what the hell happened to Bernard, Rose, and the rest of the Oceanic extras? They were jumping with Sawyer and Co. and presumably wound up in the 70s as well.

Wasn't the point of the fake village to lure Jack and the gang in to rescue Walt?

We've not seen the induction of lab rats. The people living in the gated community with him would be pretty hard to fool, but the people who get whisked away and locked in remote stations will never see him outside of tapes.

Finally seeing Dharma is opening up a lot of small questions, but considering they had to plan for this storyline -years- in advance, I'm not too worried about the questions having answers...

But was there a lab rat in the swan in the first place? Apparently Radzinksky was still setting up the swan station as a model. And he seems to be way more than merely a lab rat but rather one of the bigger figures. And from what we know he, Kelvin and Desmond have been the only ones responsible for pushing the button. So I think these "button pushers" where anything els but no mere lab rats.

Yep. About as nutty as having an episode's "cliffhanger" be Libby in one of Hurley's past mental institutes, and then never, ever bringing that coincidence up again.

And re: Chang... I think it's just a way for them to dupe the "human guinea pigs" that were used in places like The Swan (these were obviously not likely to be just guinea pigs) and The Pearl. I'm sure there's some holes in that. Namely that he obviously doesn't hide the name "Chang" from new members. (He did tell Jack his real name, correct?)

According to Lostpedia, he's only clearly identified himself in any way in the videos for The Swan, The Pearl, The Orchid and The Arrow. He used "fake" names in all of these (Candle in both The Swan and The Arrow). We also know that he shot The Arrow's video a ways before they had completed (and thus, shot) The Orchid's video.

The only thing I can figure is that people who worked at The Swan, Orchid, Pearl and Arrow stations were handled differently on intake? It seems all of those stations were built after the time in which we're seeing the castaways right now, no?

True. But for better or for worse I chalk that up to the nature of story telling. The enormous pile of scripts surely seems like a guinea pig thing. But there still could be a valid explanation for that. Or not. But filling these blanks would feel like fan wanking right now for me.

Again, I chalk that up to a little bit of making things up as they go along and a lot of figuring, "ah, people won't nitpick that much (even though we know damn well they will)."

They've pulled some cheap manipulation without thinking about how that might effect things they do in the future.

Just so I'm not defending everything they've ever done on LOST... Libby does seem like an aborted plotline. Them showing her now and then makes me think they might resolve that loose end with a quick mention at some point, but it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't.

Anyways, clearly the station that shot report tubes into a garbage pile was a test, but did they ever state that the others were, or did they just let us (and more importantly, Locke) infer that from the tubes?

And I wouldn't call it cheap manipulation or making things up as they go... They clearly wanted Locke to doubt himself, and there's no doubt they knew all along that not pushing the button would have consequences.

Well, lets look at it this way...

First time we see Alpert he's wearing his nice clothing in the 50's. Every other member of the others is doing the Hermit crab thing and wearing army jumpsuits.

We see him again in the 70's wearing the same nice clothing. But we don't see any others so either they're wearing the same stuff, now in the form of rags and scraps, or somehow they all have access to nice clothing. At one point Alpert is spotted by Ben dressed as a hillbilly. Odd.

Fast forward again to 2004 when all of the others are wearing raggy kind of stuff. We find out they actually have access to nice clothing and wear fake beards, to protect identies, frighten... I dunno.

Fast forward again and the Others leave the Barracks, and now whenever we see them in camp mode they have a cross between the nicer clothing, and the hillybilly dirter rags again.

I think with the exception of Alpert in the weird Hillbilly rags it makes pretty good sense.

Alpert is special, so most of the time he gets the nice clothes, and for reasons we don't know he once dressed up as a hillbilly. As for the rest of the Others they had access to good clothes, and then they lost that access and the looks of their clothing degenerated. They dressed in rags and beards to keep anyone from knowing who they were, or what kind of equipment they had access to.

My best theory is that before Dharma could automate the system they were killed, and the lab rats assumed the gas attack was some other lingering form of bio terrorism or whatever. Unfortunately that doesn't really explain the Pearl. If you have the time to build a physcology station whos data is based strictly on The Swan(and seemingly no other station) you have time to automate the button before they were all killed.

Hmmm... I think it's best to wait a few episodes before calling bull on that aspect, but I'm not hopeful.

No I'm not doubting the timing of the incident, I'm just saying I'm going to wait for a certain upcoming episode titled appropriate to this conversation, to see if they have some kind of explanation or not. My theory is obviously bust but they might have some kind of awful retcon that makes sense of the button. It doesn't look good right now and I don't have alot of faith that they can explain the whole two dudes running an extreamely dangerous operation concept, but obviously there's more to the puzzle. Once we know what the incident is we might know more.

No one really thinks that the writers had everything planned out in advance, do they? The writers WERE making up the Others as they went along.

However, things like the Others dressing up like hillbillies can be explained, albeit through convoluted methods. Some things will have to be left with answers that are not necessarily 100% logical or practical, that is the nature of a 7 year show that is not completely storyboarded from the beginning.

Stop saying the writers didn't know what they were doing. The writers are hired hands who do what they're told to write. It's Damon and Lindolf who had the "plan."

Well obviously they hire different writers for a reason. But sure, substitute, "Damon and Lindolf" for "the writers" in my previous post. My point still stands.

Didn't the story bible they developed with Abrams contain like 6 or 7 seasons of general plot lines?

No, it didn't. It did supposedly have a general outline of the show and the answer to the monster/others/island. But in any case I think they've done a tremendous job in even coming close to handling these questions, small and large. When you think about the lack of respect many other showrunners have, I personally think that Damon and Carlton generally do want to wrap up most of the plotlines. Some things were definite mistakes, but I wouldn't jump the gun on which things are unanswered, especially as we descend into a long Dharma arc where alot can be answered.