Tidbits

Couple tidbits, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly. First off, Doc Jensen points out this important little plot point on Radzinsky:

And so, at long last, we met Radzinsky, who preceded Desmond as Kelvin Inman's button-pushing partner in the Hatch and was the originator of the map of the Island that John Locke found on the blast door in season 2. The conventional wisdom about the map has always been that Radzinsky was somewhat clueless about the scope of the Dharma Initiative, and that the Map represented everything he had learned about its facilities and history during his own Island adventuring.

But this doesn't quite jibe with the Radzinsky we saw last night. Here he was, a fully-involved Dharma member, possibly someone in leadership, stationed at the Flame, Dharma's telecommunications center (I dug The Muppet Show clips playing on his monitors), creating a model of the geodesic dome structure of the Swan itself — perhaps the same model seen in the Hatch's orientation film. Clearly, this was a man who knew a lot, if not everything, about the Dharma Initiative. So, presuming Kelvin was telling us the truth about Radzinsky — including the fact that the egghead blew his brains out inside the Hatch — why paint that map on the blast door? Because I'm guessing Radzinsky didn't really need to paint the Map for his own edification. THEORY: Again, I am taken with the notion that perhaps much like the landing strip, the map was painted on the blast door simply because it needed to be there for John Locke to discover it in the future in order to preserve the time loop and avert paradox.

Doc's completely right in that if Radzinsky really designed the Swan and worked in the Flame, he wouldn't be needing to piece together tidbits of questionable DHARMA info in invisible ink. Kelvin, on the other hand, didn't seem to know much about DHARMA at all outside of the Swan, so it's possible he could be responsible for some of the more vague entries on the map, but certainly not all of them.

And I'm sorta willing to buy Doc's theory that maybe he was setting things up for Locke, but the other thing we don't know is how much of the map Radzinsky drew before he killed himself (or so Kelvin says). A simpler explanation is that he might have drawn the basic outlines of the stations he knew and some of the more detailed entries (like those of The Incident and Smokey), but died shortly after that and the remaining stuff was simply Kelvin trying to fill in his own blanks to pass the time. He was still certainly drawing it when Desmond arrived.

Another idea is since we've never actually seen Radzinsky in the Swan Station, we don't know for certain whether it really was him as opposed to, say, an Other impersonating Radzinsky to try and figure out what the Swan Station really was. Maybe Kelvin figured out he really was an impostor and killed him (or maybe Kelvin figured out he wasn't who he said he was and the impostor killed himself before Kelvin could question him). Just a couple ideas of the top of my head...

Secondly, seems the discrepancy regarding Charlotte's age has been resolved. And it was a writer's error, as I thought:

There were a gazillion questions about the timeline discrepancy in that young Charlotte clearly exists in 1974, but wasn't supposed to be born until 1979, per a single line of dialogue courtesy of Ben back in episode #402. When we inquired as to how this happened, the intel came back that we used Rebecca Mader's birthday, July 2, 1979 because she was actually eight years YOUNGER than the character as originally conceived/scripted. We misremembered this as having come from Rebecca herself on the set, but in fact, it came several days earlier when our continuity expert Gregg Nations pointed it out and suggested using Rebecca's actual birthday for Charlotte. And so, the mistake was OURS. Rebecca's production draft DID have the date as being 1979.

So I guess Charlotte was really born in 1971.

The last thing I want to point out is possibly spoiler-ish, so be warned. It seems one of our Losties has been cast in something I'm eagerly awaiting, which may suggest he/she could be killed off at the end of the season. I'm incredibly excited by the casting choice, but don't want to spoil anything for anyone, so click only if you dare.

There's also a spoiler-ish headline in one of the EW articles right now (that I haven't read), so be careful in general when browsing the site. :)