The Occasional Solipsist

I've been a LOST fan since early last year, having missed the first few episodes and then catching them on reruns a few months later. My wife and I have been hooked bad ever since. We never miss it.

It's not the best show ever made, and lately it has proven to have one of the more slowly advancing story arcs of any series I've been a fan of.

But the one really good thing about LOST is that it doesn't spoon feed the audience the answers to the questions the show raises. It usually just raises more questions.

And the thing about everyone that watches the show is that they all have formulated at least some kind of opinion about what the hell is going on. There is a really well thought out opinion by someone who has really been paying attention here. Look for it about halfway down the page under 'Q Theory'. He also has a nice rundown on the recent 'Lockdown' episode.

I myself have pretty much always been in the ‘someone is dreaming the whole thing’ camp since the get-go. Just like that entire season of Dallas (come on - you remember the 80's, right?) I have always figured that we’d find out at the series close that the whole series was just the way only one character was whiling away a coma or something.

And that’s why tonight’s episode ‘Dave’ was so great for me. First of all, it finally vindicated my one major complaint about the show: That the morbidly obese fat guy wasn’t losing weight on a deserted (sortof) island with no food. Turns out he was hoarding some of the only food that was available. So that was good.

But even better, lately I have been thinking that the writers have jumped the shark, in that they have lost control of their own show and really don’t know what to do with the arc, the characters, or some of the subplots they’ve dreamed up. ‘Dave’ did a great job of bringing my pet theory to the forefront by tackling the idea that everything that has been happening, from Hurley winning the lottery to the plane crash to everything that has been happening on the island, has in fact been going on in Hurley’s subconscious. Pretty much exactly what I’ve been saying.

The episode leaves us with Hurley not jumping off the cliff as his imaginary friend suggests (and thus not causing his real self to wake up). Instead he chooses to believe Libby and decides that the island is real, and so is Libby's love for him.

And so now that the writers have resolved this, they can go on and try to find some other way of explaining wtf has been going on, from the myriad coincidences surrounding all the people on the island to the Oceanic symbol appearing on the shark and the plane in Locke’s flashback, etc etc. But if the writers end up not being able to explain the show satisfactorily, I think they now have the best escape hatch they could ask for: If all else fails, they can go back to Hurley and have it turn out that everything was his dream. And if he had’ve jumped at the end of ‘Dave’, the whole thing would’ve been over.

A more detailed breakdown of ‘Dave’ and why my theory is right can be found here. Note that the rest of the site is an excellent source of current LOST information, and is fairly spoiler free.

And here’s something for the hardcore fans: the map from last week’s blacklight scene, where Locke gets a glimpse of a predecessor’s take on things. Click the image for a much larger glimpse of your own.



I don’t know where to start on this one, but the translations from Latin make for some very interesting reading. And since the map points out 6 or 7 hatches, only three of which we already knew about, plus a mysterious question mark in the middle (a city maybe), you know this will become one of the most important plot points of the whole series.

Now if they can just keep all of the religious symbolism to a dull roar, I can really start to get behind this show again.