Top 15 Unanswered Questions - Part 2

EW.com recently polled their readers on what they considered the “must-answer” questions for Lost before it comes to an end. Over the course of three posts I’ll reproduce the Top 15 questions that got raised, and then provide my best attempt at answering them. If anything it may at least prove to be amusing once the finale is over and we all (hopefully) know the real answers. Let’s get cracking with Part 2, questions 10 to 6.

10: Who are Adam and Eve?

Early in season 1, Jack found a pair of male and female skeletons, dubbed ''Adam and Eve,'' near a spring of water. Fans immediately wondered if they belong to characters we know, and indeed, the producers have said that the bones are connected to season 5's time-travel story line. So: Who are they?

Over the years I have touted the idea that they are Desmond and Penny, Jack and Kate, Amelia Earhart and Tom Noonan (real life aviators that went missing) or Karen and Gerald DeGroot (the Dharma Initiative pioneers glimpsed only in Orientation films).

That the identity of these skeleton cave people is linked to the time travel plot of Season 5 is an interesting element, and suggests to me that it really could be Karen and Gerald DeGroot (such pioneers were they that they managed to blast themselves into the past) – but somehow it doesn’t seem likely they’ll turn out to be people so obscure.

If the skeletons are linked in with time travel then the characters this also links them in with, as couples, would be: Desmond and Penny, Faraday and Charlotte, Widmore and Ms. Hawking. So those, at the moment, are my current favourite guesses.

How does it work? How did people in the present day, some of whom are even dead, end up in a cave approximately in the 19040s? Dunno. Beats the hell out of me. But this is Lost. If it seems unlikely it’s probably going to happen!

9: What's the significance of The Numbers?

4 8 15 16 23 42. Together, they add up to 108, another recurring digit in Lost. Hurley played them to win the lottery, and the Dharma dudes used them as computer code. An explanation for The Numbers was provided via ''The Lost Experience,'' a 2006 online ARG (just Google the words ''Valenzetti Equation''), but that explanation has never been referenced on the show itself.

So The Valenzetti Equation is reported to be one that calculates the end of mankind. That’s the theory. But as the piece above states, it’s not an explanation that has ever been mentioned on the show itself (aside from a notation on the Blast Door Map!). That’s not to say it may not be ushered in for this last series as a major critical element as part of what’s going on, but it does seem somewhat unlikely.

Discounting the idea of it becoming a fully-fledged plot element then, and barring the Lost Universe online game explanation for the numbers, I suspect the manner by which we are supposed to take the numbers is as another example of this strange fabric that binds and bonds our Lost characters together.

I draw the parallel with the tapestry Jacob weaves being indicative of the Lost characters being individual threads strung and bound together to form one finished article. The numbers are part of this tapestry, like the glue, but perhaps it’s really better to consider them as symbolic totems present in the Lost universe that reinforce the interconnectedness of all these people to this Island.

The Numbers are recurring motifs. Like McCluck’s, or MacCutcheon’s, or even references to white rabbits. The Numbers populate the Lost universe to signify that they are all a part of the same world and are bound up inextricably together. Treated as such, they embroider the Lost TV show with an extra layer of understanding that requires no deeper explanation. (Although I would like to know why Dharma selected them as a code to be manually input into the computer!)

8: Why are there Egyptian ruins on The Island?

At least, we presume they are Egyptian ruins. The hieroglyphics on the Temple are Egyptian, while the Four Toed Statue was recently revealed to be that of the Egyptian deity Taweret, linked to fertility, death, and evil.

The natural and obvious answer is: Because there were Egyptians on the Island! Indeed, I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if The Temple turned out to be in the shape of a large pyramid. Ancient cultures, such as Egyptians and Mayans, are perfectly-suited to this idea of old cultures with fabulous technology and understanding of the world. So I can’t help but wonder if some kind of splinter group of Egyptians (were Egyptians particularly good sailors? Did they get involved in much global migration?) found the Island and made it their own for quite some time. Alternatively, though we’ve seen the Island move in time we still have no true comprehension of how it exists in space. Does it move around in space too? (Ms. Hawking’s big pendulum suggests it does.)

Potentially, then, the Island might have popped up near Egyptian culture and then moved on again, taking them with it (provoking the idea that they had been pulled off to some netherworld between life and death, hence all the underworld and death and statue iconography they produced). Or the Egyptians found a way onto the Island through some portal, similar to the one Locke and Ben exited out of when they left the Island after turning the ‘donkey wheel’. Again, this might have prompted the (potentially even correct!) idea that the Island is a purgatory-like place between life and death that, really, mortal people ought not to be hanging around on.

7. Where are stewardess Cindy and the kids?

Little Zack and his sister Emma were among The Tailies and were abducted by the Others shortly after the crash of Oceanic 815. Stewardess Cindy was taken a couple weeks later. In the third season, we learned they are living happily among the Others. But why did the Others want them in the first place?

Well, last we heard they were on a pilgrimage to The Temple following the mass Others exodus of The Barracks. I can only assume that’s where they’ve been. It’s been theorized that, in light of the Island bouncing around in time, potentially there would have been people that would have become unstuck in time the same way Faraday and Locke and the rest were. That might have included Cindy and the rest. It’s thus been suggested that The Temple presented a place where they would be protected from such activity. . .

Since Richard had encountered Jack and Kate and so forth in his own past, in the 1970s, he must have known something time-travelly was going to happen so getting Cindy and the other kidnapped Oceanic people into a safe haven seems like a sound plan.

Of course, there’s a lot of strangeness in The Temple. Ben was taken there as a boy and something was radically changed in him, his memories wiped and his becoming eternally bound to The Others. And Rousseau’s science team apparently had some dealings in those Temple areas and it changed their personalities entirely. Had Cindy undergone some kind of similar alteration? When she told Jack she was there “to watch”, was this a transformed person speaking?

Presumably Cindy and the kids were taken based on this odd claim that they were “good people” who were on the list. By “good people” I interpret that as being suitable as part of The Others. But then there’s the added complication that suggests these lists didn’t come from the real Jacob, rather from Nameless masquerading as Jacob.

It’s too complicated to comprehend, so I am going with a simple answer that states Cindy and the children were taken because they were uncorrupted and made of the right stuff to become a part of The Others’ group.

6. What is the Island, anyway?

When fans ask this question, what they usually want is an explanation for the Island's seemingly supernatural properties. Why is there an anomaly surrounding it that kills people or zaps them back in time? How did it heal Locke's legs? How can it be home to ghosts? While there may be answers for some of these specific concerns, the producers have already warned fans that resolving the meta-question ''What is the Island?'' may be impossible.

The Island is many things to many people. Whilst that may seem like an utterly oblique and vague statement, it’s probably as close as we’re going to get to an ‘answer’. Consider Rose and Bernard. What is the Island to them? It’s not a place that’s full of danger and action, of crises and war. They have purposefully distanced themselves from all that heady business and have simply created a tranquil life for themselves in peace. The Island to them is an idyllic place to end their days. Alas, such a story for all visitors to the Island would not make for an interesting television programme.

So the major issue of the Island as we have seen it has been focused through the unresolved dramas of the Oceanic 815 survivors as it collides in the grander scale of The Others, Dharma, an upcoming war and a Black Smoke monster set against this backdrop of affairs between Jacob and Nameless. The Island is the stage where all this has taken place, but I don’t think it was specifically designed for this performance!

The Island provides a platform to be a proving ground. It’s a place of heightened psychic phenomena, electromagnetic properties, judgemental Black Smokes and a whispering audience. That this Island is slightly ‘out of place’ from the real world is perhaps what allows it to behold such healing properties and time-relative discrepancies. It’s not quite part of the real world and so it doesn’t quite behave like the real world does. Is it a place for a large scale test of humanity headed by Jacob and Nameless? Or are Jacob and Nameless locked in some kind of test of humanity and the Island just happened to be the ideal location to hold this trial? I believe the latter.

Part 3, looking at questions 5 to 1, will follow shortly.