Lost: Season 5 (1 Viewer)

[Mikah Cerucco]

Thanks for that. I was actually going to have to look for a streamed copy on-line to rewatch that scene because I remembered it exactly as you've outlined.

 

[Joe_H]

Just wondering if anyone remembers, did they say whether it was Daniel's incident with his girlfriend/ lab assistant that caused his brain damage, or if it was his brain damage that caused it?

 

[Ronald Epstein]

First of all, I am so happy that I forced myself to watch the recap
show last week. As much as I frown upon those shows disrupting my
week of new episodes, I was able to learn a lot of things I had somehow
missed.

A comment about this week....

Firstly, I was shocked by the first scene showing Desmond being
rushed into the hospital. If memory serves me correct, the last
time we saw the dock scene, Ben shot Desmond's grocery bag. Desmond
was knocked down but apparently was not scathed enough to have
gotten back up, struggled with Ben, throwing him into the water.
I don't remember Desmond's injury being life-threatening.

The big reveal for me this week: "Why was Desmond down in the
hatch pushing the button?" I always knew that him not pushing the
button caused the plane crash, but we never knew the bigger story as
to why that button needed to be pushed. Huge reveal for me.

 

[TonyD]

they needed to do more of a recap then.
It's been mentioned a bunch of times why they nneded to push the button.

Desmond had a rush of adrenalin/energy because Penny was still in danger.
after he took care of Ben, blood loss kicked in and put him down.

 

[David Forbes]

I think any normal person would find that to be pretty slim comfort in this situation.

 

[TravisR]

I don't think they've said specifically. If I remember correctly, he used it on himself first but I don't know if that means that he messed up an experiment on her due to that.

 

[Matt^Brown]

Maybe we will see more of Faraday through Hurley. I did really like Faraday but I hope his character is dead. I really don't want to see everyone that gets killed be brought back to life like Lock.

 

[NeilO]

The next puzzle wrt the Hatch and button and such is how much information will The Others actually get about the situation? Who will know about The Incident and need to press the button? Ben acted like he didn't know anything about it and helped cause Locke's lack of faith which led to the Hatch blowing up.

Another thing to learn is about the failsafe discharge that was built into The Hatch. For that matter, what was so bad about what happened with that discharge of energy? Was it smaller than it otherwise would have been if they hadn't been pressing the button all those years? If not, then why build The Hatch in the first place?

 

[Holadem]

Most importantly, why do we need a human to push a stupid button when that sort of repetitive task is precisely why computers were invented in the first place? I've been asking this question since Season 2, and I hope to get an answer some day.

Richard Alpert is awesome. Part of me wants the character to remain a mystery, but I badly want to know more still.

--
H

 

[Sam Favate]

Seems like Faraday is dead as far as the show is concerned. No ambiguity here:

Lost: Daniel Faraday Is Definitely Dead

Or here:
‘Lost’ Producers Talk Surprising Death | Access Hollywood - Celebrity News, Photos & Videos

 

[Steve Y]

The inputting of numbers in Season 2 did seem to be a sort of "sacrifice" to the island every 108 minutes. Almost as if the island wouldn't have accepted anything but its mystical "code" from an actual human being. I know that doesn't make sense from a scientific point of view, but neither did the whirlwind of smoke engulfing Ben a few episodes ago. (Err - at least not yet.)

I'm beginning to wonder if we'll ever get a satisfactory answer to the numbers. They seem to have a MacGuffin quality to them... it almost doesn't matter why they exist, or why it's "those" numbers, but simply the fact that they are interwoven through all of the island's important events. A lack of concrete resolution with the numbers would bug a lot of people, but I've accepted that they might just be symbolic of destiny or something.

I think Faraday miscalculated the nature of the electromagnetic anomaly, and the atomic blast, rather than destroying the island, is going to absorb the energy, and subsequently release energy of a different sort - or threaten to. And only the numbers will hold it back... destiny holding it back. Wouldn't it be cool if Hurley "wields" his numbers to save the day?

I find it doubtful that Daniel's "variable" theory is anything but the ravings of a near-mad physicist who spent three years in Ann Arbor trying to figure out a way to save Charlotte. But Faraday will be missed - he was a great character.

 

[Josh Dial]

It was answered back in the season 2 thread, IIRC.

Cuse/Lindelof stated that they justified it by the sheer magnitude of what would happen if the computer controlling the pressure (instead of a button) should fail. In other words, pushing a button was better than risking a computer crash.

That's their justification--take it for what you will

 

[Jeff Cooper]

Regarding the failsafe that Desmond used at the end of Season 2 to blow up the hatch:

Perhaps the Hydrogen bomb is the failsafe. Faraday said that detonating the hydrogen bomb would destroy the energy, which is was seems to have happened at the end of season 2, since they no longer have to push any button, and the energy did not destroy the world.

Perhaps they buried the hydrogen bomb near the energy as the failsafe, and Desmond merely completed Farady's original intent by turning the failsafe key.

 

[JediFonger]

re: s2 failsafe human input explanation. if the human is inputting it and the computer fails... there's still nothing the humans can do. therefore that's just not logical. it's simply: dramatic license

 

[Holadem]

It's a silly one. The computer as it is (with human pushing the button) could still crash.

But if that's their answer, then it's a poorly conceived scheme, but it puts the matter to rest.

I was hoping we might find out at some point that the designers of the system wanted to ensure a human presence for a reason having nothing to do with system reliability.

Hah. While typing the above paragraph, it occurred to me that they wanted someone there precisely to maintain the system in the traditional sense, i.e., perform repairs, change out burnt out parts, etc... But then why couldn't they just have someone sit there monitoring the stuff 24/7, instead of actively pushing buttons?

It is also possible that Dharma knowingly setup the hatch as a time bomb that would go off should they for some reason no longer have control of that area. Perhaps they were willing to let the "anomlay" run its course in that case.

--
H

 

[TravisR]

It's not much in the way of explanation for using humans to punch in the numbers but Dharma did apparently use the people in The Swan for the test subjects in The Pearl (the hatch with all the TVs) to monitor.

 

[Holadem]

And I will never cease to be amazed by the number of people who would be OK with such a gigantic cop out. Thank goodness there seems to be a rational explanation for this thing.

--
H

 

[Derek_J]

Weak justification, but needing someone to push the button every 108 minutes could have been to ensure they kept monitoring the system, instead of simply nodding off or going fishing, etc.

Those machines lasted a long time after their obsolescence, and a lack of anyone to supply replacement parts though. It's a wonder the failsafe didn't need to get used a lot sooner.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Someone mentioned that Daniel should already have known where the H-bomb was. How? He was briefly at the spot in 1954. He didn't memorize his route from another particular spot to that location. He "popped" into existence not far from there and ran into the Ohters. Three years later (his subjective time) he's supposed to walk straight to a random spot in a jungle that has been growing for 23 years and identify it? Huh?


I think the monitoring was something set up after the fact, not the reason for people being in the Swan pushing the button. The "test subjects" explanation may have been the "cover story" given to whoever had to monitor the guys at the Swan.

I think the area around the Swan was still dangerous (residual radiation?) after The Incident which is why the guys inside donned exposure suits whenever they stepped outside. The crews may have been periodically rotated out, at least in the early days, but they were probably there for weeks or months at a stretch even so. The monitoring would be to ensure they weren't showing signs of losing it. The powers that be probably covered up the exact nature and consequences of "the Incident" and later Dharma recruits were probably told only what they needed to know. So the folks monitoring The Swan were probably not told the real reason for the button pushing.

Oh, and obviously I totally blew it on the Daniel and the gun thing. But even with Kate initially handing him the rifle, Daniel could certainly have said, "No thanks, I don't do guns" instead of "Got anything smaller?" The fact is, he took a gun when he could have declined one, and he insisted on taking it with him to his meeting with Eloise. (When Jack tried to dissuade him from taking the gun, Daniel said, "You don't know my mother." Which I took to be a fairly significant line.

I don't believe that Kate told Jack to let him go because she wanted him to fail and/or die. Nor do I think arrest and prison were the main reasons for her ambivalance about Daniel's proposal to change history. Don't forget, if the plane never crashes, she never meets Jack or Sawyer, both of whom she's loved in her way, and most of all she never meets Aaron, who has probably been the best thing that ever happened in her life. I don't blame her for being a bit conflicted, even leaving prison to one side.

Anyway, I think she told Jack to let Daniel go because Daniel seemed to be convinced he knew what he was doing, and they were following his plan.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that while I was wrong about the dialogue, I think my underlying point about Daniel willingly arming himself for his confronation with Eloise still has some validity. The very fact that Kate automatically thrust a rifle at Daniel means we'll never know if he would have asked for a gun himself. But the fact that he didn't decline the offer entirely, but asked for one he felft more capable of handling, suggests that he knew Eloise was dangerous and a particular threat to him.

Kinda makes you wonder how much time jumping Daniel did after his girlfriend died and he started using his time experiments to try to prevent the accident that landed her in the coma. He lost his memories of particular events once he became too damaged to continue working, but he still had emotional memories - as evidenced by reaction to the footage of Oceanic 815. Why would the sight of the wreckage bring him to tears if he had no connection to the flight? Answer: It wouldn't have. So how could he have been connected to it? Only by travelling to the island in the future - in one sense or another.

BTW, I don't think Daniel's journal is a conventional diary - and wasn't even before his mind fragmented. It was filled with notes on his scientific work, it wasn't a narrative of his personal life. So I doubt that Eloise could have gotten too many useful details about Daniel's experiences from it.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Josh Dial]

Unless, of course, the theory (from the Star Trek: TNG episode) I posted a page back is in the general area of correctness -- and I'm not saying it is (but everyone else and their dog has tossed out a theory over the past few years, so I figured I should too!).