Friday, July 13, 2007

Lost Theory Question #3: Influences


We all know Damon, Carlton, and J.J. Abrams were heavily influenced by Stephen King. Lostpedia has an excellent list of Lost King references and King himself is not only a huge Lost fan, but met with the writers last year to talk some shop.

Given this, I don't think it's implausible to look through the literary influences and references of the show for clues as to what the ultimate ending is going to be. I've already speculated on how King's Dark Tower series could factor in, as did Bigmouth recently.

But there are lots more. Lostpedia also keeps a list of literary works seen or mentioned by the show. Some that stand out are:

1. The Third Policeman - In this book (which I haven't read... yet), Lostpedia says it mentions a "black box" that contains "ominium," a substance once described as “the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden in the root of the kernel of everything,” literally whatever one desires. Magic Box, anyone?

2. A Wrinkle In Time - One of my favorite books of all time. A brother and sister travel to another dimension (through a "tesseract," a wrinkle in time) to rescue their father from a great evil being. Sawyer's been seeing reading this one twice. This one fits into the multiple dimensions/realities theory.

3. The Time Traveler's Wife - This was brought to my attention yesterday by Memphish, whose site is a must-read folks. Here's her description:

Henry, the time traveler in the book, has a genetic
mutation that results in his involuntary movement
through time. One minute he's in the present, and
the next he's naked and somewhere else in time. A
geneticist replicates this mutation in mice, but it took
a while because:

The hard part was getting the dams, the mother
mice, to carry the altered mice to term. They kept
dying, hemorrhaging to death. . . . The mothers died,
and the babies died. We couldn't figure it out, so we started

watching them around the clock, and then we saw what
was going on. The embryos were traveling out of their
dam's wombs, and then in again, and the mothers bled
to death internally. Or they would just abort the fetus
at the 10-day mark.
Creepy, huh? And very cool - sound a lot like our baby problem. Remember when Richard Alpert showed Juliet a 26-year-old woman's womb that looked like she was in her seventies?

So what other influences so think there are? Anything which really stands out to you?

3 comments:

memphish said...

Jay, thanks for the shout out. I hope your blog readers will stop by and comment. I love to hear what other people think about LOST.

As for your post today, according to the info. on the Season 3 DVDs there's going to be a "Book Club" with some hopefully some explanation of how the books we see on the show relate to the overall story. Even if they don't relate at all, to me they are still fun to read, and LOST had led me to some books I'd have never found otherwise.

Over at The Lost Community discussion of A Wrinkle in Time should be starting up this week, and there will probably be a related podcast as well. I recently read the book to my 8-year-old son and he loved it and I loved remembering back to when I first read it as a kid as well. Are Ben/Walt/Alpert/other Others/Locke more evolved like the young boy in AWIT which allows them to perceive things the rest of us mere humans can't?

The Third Policman will be discussed during the hiatus as well, so for additional input on those books and other things LOST, check out the TLC blog and podcast.

Bigmouth said...

Whoah...that's a really disturbing parallel re the Time Traveler's Wife! One word of caution re the Third Policeman -- I seem to recall Darlton confessing recently that neither of them had actually read it.

Bigmouth said...

PS: I just read the portion you quote on Google Books. Did you catch the final explanation? Turns out the mothers' immune systems were rejecting the embryos like an infection. Now, check out the Squirrels of Santa Monica:

http://eyemsick.blogspot.com/2007/04/squirrels-of-santa-monica.html