Things You Never Imagined

That episode helped a bit. None of our longstanding questions have been definitively answered, but we’re given enough information in tonight’s Lost to infer more than a few things about the Others and their reason for being on the island.

Quick Hits

• We learn Juliet played a role in experiments and operations to try and save pregnant women from an infection they contract “during conception.” From what we’ve learned of Ben and the Others, they look to be creating a self-sustaining society for themselves, shut away from the rest of humanity. That might be kind of tough if all the pregnant women are dropping dead before they can give birth, as we see with “Sabine” lying dead on the operating table in a flashback.

  

  The crash of Flight 815 not only gave Ben a spinal surgeon to remove his newly-discovered tumor, but also a new pregnant woman to experiment with in Claire. The treatment Juliet devised appears to have worked on Claire, but at the cost of being dependent upon what I’m guessing is the serum we first glimpsed in the season two premiere, and a few episodes since.

  

• Despite the ominous end to the episode, I don’t think Juliet’s intentions fall lockstep in line with Ben’s. As Jack said to her, and I’m paraphrasing, “you’d do anything to get off this island.” She’s doing just that by embedding herself with the castaways at Ben’s behest. She does appear to have learned a thing or two from Ben, manipulating Jack and the other castaways with the same deft hand the Other leader has used in the past. She saw Ben’s orders as a possible opportunity to get off the island for good. I’m sure we all know he won’t live up to his end of the bargain, whatever that may be, but Juliet seems to be under the delusion that he might finally let her go. I offer nothing more than what is now the show’s motto, “we’ll see.”

  One thing that should concern some of the castaways (though they have no idea) is Juliet’s newly-revealed romantic relationship with Goodwin. Though his murderer, Ana Lucia, is long dead and buried, she may still harbor some ill will towards the (relatively) new guests on the island for taking away the one man she may have trusted in Otherville.

  

• Juliet is taken to the island courtesy of the fine air stewards of Herarat Aviation, the Others’ very own airline, based at one of their mainland facilities (under the guise of Mittelos Bioscience, undoubtedly). The name, “Herarat,” sounded familiar to me, but the only thing close that came up in my research was Mt. Ararat in Turkey, the fabled last resting place of Noah’s Ark.

  

  The Mountains of Ararat is the place named in the Book of Genesis where Noah’s ark came to rest after the great flood [Wikipedia]

• The trip to the island via the aforementioned airline is described to Juliet as “kind of intense” by Ethan, and Dr. Alpert asks her to drink a tranquilizer cocktail with the urging that “you’re gonna wanna be asleep for the trip.” I don’t envision the submarine being their means of transport to the mainland, so that begs the question, why can’t they fly all the way to the island (they could certainly have built a runway)? Is it to keep from being tracked, or does it have to do with the metaphysical forces at work on the island?
• I liked the parallels between the shot of Juliet looking up to the submarine’s hatch and Jack, Kate and Locke looking down into the Swan Station hatch at the end of season one. The castaways entered a whole new world and set of circumstances by going down that hatch, just as Juliet did by coming out of one.

  

• Juliet doesn’t seem to have very broad taste in music. She’s a big fan of Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” which we last heard in the season premiere and hear her listening to on the way to the Mittelos Bioscience facility.
• We get to see just how much knowledge the Others did have of the real world, thanks to a satellite link-up in The Flame, manned by everyone’s favorite pirate, Mikhail. Who knew they got DirecTV on the island? Unfortunately for them, DirecTV doesn’t like enormous electromagnetic pulses, and the Others lost this capability when Swan Station imploded. What is made clear by the feeds is that the world-at-large is fully aware that 815 has disappeared, and there is or was a search underway. Nice to know that 815 didn’t fly into a trans-dimensional wormhole and copy itself, with one copy staying in reality and the other heading to the island, unbeknownst to the rest of reality. I know you had all been theorizing that up to this point.

  

  Not only did they get feeds of mainland TV stations, but they were also able to link up with Dr. Alpert’s surveillance of Juliet’s sister, Rachel, in someplace called “Acadia Park.” That would appear to be somewhere near or in Miami, if the “Miami Journal” newspaper is any indication.

• More confirmation, as if we needed it, of the date of the plane crash:

  

• Gotta love the built-in production values of filming in Hawaii.

  

  Hard to replicate the feel of that shot on a soundstage or in a computer graphics program.

• I’m not sure what to make of the markings on the sub at this point, if there is indeed anything to be made of them at all. But, they are reminiscent of the markings on the outsides of the many Dharma baguas. According to Lostpedia, the marking on the sub corresponds to the trigram for K’an the Abysmal in the Chinese classic text, “I Ching.” The symbol has multiple meanings, chief among them career, lifepath and water. Makes sense for a sub.

  

• Ben reveals they inserted an implant into Claire that can be activated to make her sick at their bidding. I wonder if anyone else has been implanted, and to what end those implants might be used by the Others in the future. I’d imagine those would come in handy in disabling any potential resistance when they take the beach by a storm in a week.

Other Stuff from Other Sites

• The tree symbol is similar to an ideogram for the planet Uranus, among other things. [Sledgeweb]

  

• I should’ve decrypted this earlier, based on the MITTELOS=LOST TIME anagram from a while back, but if you apply the same logic to the HERARAT name, you can get EARHART, as in Amelia Earhart, who disappeared somewhere over the Pacific during an attempted circumnavigation of the globe. [Sledgeweb]
• The name, “Sabine,” may be a reference to The Rape of the Sabine Women. [Begging to Differ]

  Wiki powers activate!

  The term “rape” in this context means “abduction” (from the Latin rapere). It refers to an event supposed to have occurred in the early history of Rome, shortly after its foundation by Romulus and a group of mostly male followers. Seeking wives in order to found families, the Romans negotiated with the Sabines, who populated the area. The Sabines refused to allow their women to marry the Romans, fearing the emergence of a rival culture. Faced with the extinction of their community, the Romans planned to abduct Sabine women. Romulus invited Sabine families to a festival of Neptune Equester. At the meeting he gave a signal, at which the Romans grabbed the Sabine women and fought off the Sabine men. The indignant abductees were implored by Romulus to accept Roman husbands. [Wikipedia]

  Ben told Juliet that he’d get her more pregnant woman to experiment on. I guess they weren’t exactly coming to the island of their own free will, eh?

As Ben told Juliet, folks, “see you in a week.”