Hurley-Dave Snapshot

Think back to Season 2. Think back to the episode Dave. It’s the one where Hurley is seeing visions of a guy in a bathrobe on the Island that, it turns out, was his imaginary friend Dave in the real world back when he was in the Santa Rosa mental hospital. The reveal of this comes towards the end of the episode, when Hurley is given a photograph that he believed was taken of him and Dave but is really just a picture of him on his own.

There is a theory that the photograph given to Hurley, that is supposed to serve as proof that Dave is a figment of his imagination, may actually be a fake. Gasp! Shock! Horror! Etc.

Before we get into this idea, it should be pointed out that this entire issue is explicably due to continuity errors. For the record, that’s what I believe. And there's proof enough for me presented further on. The point of the photograph is that it proves Dave was not there when Hurley thought he was. In short: Dave is a figment of Hurley's mind.

That being said, let’s look at the discrepancies anyway.

So here’s the moment when the photograph was being taken (which I screen-grabbed from my own DVD so I know it's as close to the 'flash' of the camera as the picture gets taken as you can get). . .

. . . and here’s the actual photograph, once more, that was a snapshot of that moment.

Allowing for the slight change in perspective from the TV camera shot to the actual camera angle, there are numerous errors between what was in the live-action frame and what was captured in the photograph. To wit:

1. The arrangement of the celery on the plate.

2. The placement of the Connect 4 pieces and small cup is not correctly aligned. When the photo was being taken at least one of the Connect 4 pieces was underneath the edge of the plate, whereas in the photograph they are quite some distance away.

3. The person(s) sat behind Dave at the table. Potentially, from the angle the photograph was taken compared with the angle we saw the photograph get taken, the man sitting on our right at the table could have been missed off the picture, but the guy sitting to our left of the table should definitely be visible behind Dave's shoulder. He's not. (Is this guy also a figment of Hurley's imagination!?)

4. For the really pedantic, Hurley's grin isn't as big in the photo and he's not leaning in as much.

Of course, as stated, these are all surely just technical issues from the real world making of the show we call Lost - but if you want to get all conspiratorial then you would have to theorise that the doctor was involved in producing a fake photograph to dupe Hurley into believing he had an imaginary friend, that Dave was indeed a real person and, therefore, his appearance on the Island is laden with even more mystery.

Ah, but wait. We’ve got objective proof of the truth.

We do get another perspective on the whole scene. Libby. Here we see her point of view of the moment when the picture was being taken and here we can clearly see that Dave is not present.

Mind you, from this angle, it doesn't look like there are any Connect 4 pieces on the table. . . And where's the cup!? CONSPIRACY! It's a COVER-UP! Dave was really there all along! NURSE! MORE DRUGS!

Ahem. Well. Anyway. I guess that's the end of that. You can get on with your life now.

Milk Carton Walt

For anyone that missed it first time and never heard about it since, here’s a visual nugget of gold. The moment in question occurred during the episode Everyone Hates Hugo, in Season 2. Hurley was in The Swan Station larder, stuffing his face, and then Jin turned up, speaking English, saying “Everything’s going to change.”

Of course, this all turned out to be a dream.

But if you’d been paying attention to the milk carton, you might have noticed something quite interesting.

(Click image to enlarge)

There’s a picture of Walt, on the side of the milk carton, as a missing child. Quite where the tradition for sticking missing kids on the sides of milk cartons came from in America is not my concern here. But there Walt is. And, if you’ll remember, at this point in Lost we were just a few episodes after the incident where Walt had been taken by The Others – by Tom – from Michael on the raft; he was indeed a ‘missing person’.

The real head-scratcher about all of this is that, at the time of Hurley having this dream, he had no idea that Walt was a ‘missing person’. Hurley, nor anyone else on their side of the Island, knew about what had happened wit Walt, Michael, Sawyer and Jin in the raft. Fundamentally, Hurley was dreaming about something he had no knowledge of at the time.

It's not the only time we have seen this kind of thing happen, either.

Mr. Eko dreamed of Ana Lucia, shot in the gut, before he knew of what had happened to her. And there are all kinds of other examples of this phenomena on Lost. People dreaming about things they could not know about. This does open up all kinds of issues about there being a shared consciousness (for the Jungians amongst you) or some driving force on the Island feeding into the dreams and visions of the survivors, or the time travel nuts will believe this means all of the people are merely on a particular iteration of a time loop on the Island and are ‘remembering’ events that had happened before as they happen again.

Whatever. Personally I thought it was a cool little visual easter egg tucked away for the eagle-eyed that just goes towards making the show feel that little bit richer. Maybe that’s as much as we need to read into it.

Pearl Printout Problem

Probably you couldn't care less. Probably, if you bother to read this at all, you'll think to yourself: So what? Still, give it a whirl and have a look and if, at the end, you don't feel like I feel - that this is a cheat where Lost deliberately plays unfair - then so be it.

So what I am concerned with here is the printout sheets as taken from The Pearl Station. As you may remember, in the episode ?, Locke and Mr. Eko found the Pearl Station and Locke spotted a computer with a print command, and so pressed print. Reams of paper were produced. The printed sheets looked like this:



You're not to know this, but myself and a friend, we spent an unhealthy amount of time staring at screenshots like this trying to work out what the numbers meant. It turned out we only had to wait a few more episodes, when Live Together, Die Alone appeared, to find out. In that episode Desmond, with Locke, were determined to allow the Swan Station timer to run down and, whilst waiting, Desmond started getting twitchy and so checked these printout sheets. This is what he was looking at.



So here it becomes clearer. The printouts basically display when/if the Swan Station button was pressed. That is, the 4 8 15 16 23 42 numbers were entered into the Swan Station computer and the timer reset. Taking an above example we can work out exactly what the numbers mean.

"921041:16 accepted"

This breaks down as: 9/21/04 1:16

Month 9 / Day 21 / Year 04 and the time being 1:16.

From one date and time being accepted to the next date and time being accepted we can work out the time difference. So ‘921044:42 accepted’ is followed by '921046:40 accepted'. Dates are the same. The times are 4:42 and then 6:40. This just so happens to be a time difference of 108 minutes, which is the elapsed time of the Swan Station timer. Evidence, if more was needed, that the printouts show instances of the timer button being reset.

So the above example indicates that on September 21st 2004, at 1:16, the code was entered and the time reset. Happy so far? Because it was from working this out that Desmond was able to realise that his not pressing the button in a timely fashion was responsible for bringing down Oceanic 815 on September 22nd 2004.



At 4:16 on that day, Oceanic 815 broke apart into three pieces and crashed down on the Island. This is what the printout sheet tells us. It's all very clear and concise and fits nicely. So, you may be asking, what is my problem here? Well, let's go back to the first time we saw the printout sheets in the ? episode. Here's a close-up of what the figures looked like.



Let's take an example, shall we?

“41602108:05 accepted”

Taking the applied format - m/dd/yy time - this is what we get:

4/16/02 108:05

Doesn't make any sense. "108:05" is not a time. Nor does adjusting the month to double digits help. 41/60/21 08:05. It just makes it worse.

Using the principle of the times being apart by 108 minutes there is a format that sort of fits. So we can take 41602072:05 (time 2:05) followed by 41602073:53 (time 3:53) and see that the time between the two accords to the 108 minute rule. Which means the format is 4/16/02 (16th April 2002) with an "07" code lumped in for no clear reason, and then the time.

So that's my problem, basically. That "07" code. In another printout, the extraneous code is "10", which is equally meaningless, considering it isn't present in the finished version of the sheet that showed up for Desmond in Live Together, Die Alone.

There's no getting around it. Lost cheated. It presented a printout of numbers and information that didn't make sense with what was later presented. Basically, when my friend and I were looking at the sheets, trying to work out what they meant, we were wasting our time. Because we had been cheated. And it wasn't fair!

Tail-End Identity Parade

It's literally a second-long glimpse we get of the tail-end survivors making their first appearance to Sawyer and Michael on the beach having followed Jin out, whom they had previously captured. And so when these dark shapes appear, first time around, we have no clue that they are also survivors of Oceanic 815 and are led to believe they are threatening "others".

(Click on image to enlarge)

It's a startling moment, only diminished by us getting to know these people and realising they are not the band of savages we first thought. Except, the trouble is, those two on the left don't look like they have appeared with the rest of the tail-end survivors in subsequent episodes!

The woman that is supposed to be Cindy Chandler (second from left) doesn't appear to be the same actress, so far as I can tell. And as for the guy on the left. . . Who the hell is he? Don't tell me that's supposed to be fucking Bernard!

(Click on image to enlarge)

Here's a slightly better image of these approaching people, from the next episode, Orientation. Look again at the two people on the left, and see that the Cindy Chandler we will come to know in episodes like Abandoned and The Other 48 Days is clearly not the same person that is here.



But even more galling is the guy on the left, who is, indeed, supposed to be Bernard but obviously isn't. He's wearing the same clothes as Bernard, and has an approximation of the same age as Bernard, but that guy sure as shit isn't him!



To be honest, I'm not even wholly convinced the woman that is supposed to be Libby is the correct actress, either, but on that score I am willing to listen to the argument that it really is. You can't tell if Ana Lucia is the proper actress, either, since she's stood behind the probably-not-Libby person.

Obviously this is just a continuity thing to do with the actors that were available at the time of shooting, but even still. . . It's sloppy.