Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The Discharge and the Sickness

Sorry for the unnecessary gross title. I really just couldn't help myself. =)

Anyhoo I'm back from Virginia! This week's review will be up on Friday and I'll be posting fairly regularly during the break as well.

Couple things I've meant to mention in the last couple reviews. First off, do any of you guys usually watch the Pop-Up Video re-hash of the previous episode every Thursday? Usually I'm too busy doing laundry or cooking dinner to really pay close attention. But last week I sat and watched all of "The Constant" again from start to finish and one little tidbit stood out to me. When Daniel zapped Eloise with the giant purple hairdryer, this popped up on the screen (I'm paraphrasing here):
The purple radiation Daniel is using parallels when the sky turned purple after the explosion of the Hatch
I probably should have picked up on that, but for some reason I was more focused on the Slaughterhouse 5 reference. So I guess the question here is whether this means that the island is now "unstuck in time" or not? Obviously something is wrong with time between the island the outside world, but is it going to, say, jump forward 10-20 years all of a sudden now? Interesting thought, eh?

The other thing I wanted to point out was this tidbit buried in Doc Jensen's preview of "The Other Woman"
I tip my hat to Lost blogger Vozzek69 (at darkufo.blogspot.com) and some of my own readers for catching this one: It seems most likely that the time-travel illness that killed Minkowski is the same mythical ''sickness'' that killed The French Lady's fellow scientists wayyy back in the day. I really love this idea. I was never fond of the idea that ''the sickness'' was a Dharma hoax. It just didn't feel right. But this — this feels right. And if it is right, I love it even more for the way this answer was basically left for us to puzzle out, as opposed to having some dude explain it all to us. I expect that in the coming episodes and seasons, more Lost mysteries will be resolved this way.
This just makes a ton of sense. We know that the DHARMA sickness (the reason QUARANTINE was written on the back of certain DHARMA station doors) was a hoax, both from the Lost Puzzle clues and from Kelvin. But it always puzzled me that Danielle still killed her entire team because she thought they were sick. Thus there really did seem to be something about the island that drove her men insane, something that she never contracted in her 16 years and something that none of the Losties contracted either. Considering she and her team were all scientists, it's possible they all were exposed to enough radiation or electromagnetism to also unstick them in time and make Danielle put them out of their misery. It also would explain why we've never gotten a Danielle flashback - if we did it would have given too much away at too early a point in the storyline.

Thoughts on all this? Can't wait for tomorrow! =)

6 comments:

Missie said...

You mean "back from an extremely awesome time in Virginia", don't you? :)

I do watch the pop-up rehashes if I can, and definitely made a point of catching "The Constant". I thought the purple light parallel also made Daniel's setup look less hokey.

Nice catch on Danielle's traveler's. I'd forgotten about that, but it does work nicely.

Unknown said...

Sorry, my bad.

What I really meant was BEST VACATION EVER! I'm still dancing over my narrow Phase 10 victory. Heh, heh, heh. =)

Hannah said...

Totally good theory. I hope that's it. That would be really cool.

One more day till Lost! Woo-hoo.

Imperceptible Me said...

Hey Jay, yeah I think that definitely is a possiblity about Danielle and her buddies. They probably all had the time travel sickness. Can't wait until tomorrow.

Paula Abdul Alhazred said...

I agree that Desmond and Minkowski's symptoms would fit with Rousseau's "sickness," but I'm not 100% certain the DHARMA vaccine was a hoax. Don't forget this mysterious implant that's inside Claire; it certainly seemed as if the DHARMA vaccine really did alleviate her symptoms. So maybe the vaccine is connected to whatever these implants are.

Capcom said...

I never liked the "sickness is a hoax" train of thought either. Especially after seeing the Purge. TPTB threw too much at us that could have been causes, remnants, or residue in the case of poisons, that could be the source of many kinds of maladies that would be overwhelming on a deserted island. Not necessarily a disease, per se, but anything.

And now this...the unstuckness, or whatever...is just awesome, and something that we never could have dreamed up in theories. :-D