If they were gonna kill Desmond I think they would have already done it.
bloo
6182
He hasn’t made the sacrifice Widmore mentioned yet.
MattN
6185
Were the polar bears ever answered for? The only thing I can remember is the throw away line about there being polar bears in the middle of the Sahara but that doesn’t really explain anything.
It was explained upthread that they were used to turn the wheel that moved the island. Why they went with polar bears instead of oxen or barbarians or some other domesticated animal known for applying torque remains, I believe, a mystery.
I thought they were also doing experiments on them in the 70s on Hydra Island. Chang threatens to send Hurley to Hydra Island to weigh polar bear shit and I recall him calling them quacks or something.
bloo
6188
That was a joke. The wheel room isn’t big enough to have a bear turn the wheel. And only a portion of the wheel is accessible.
Nope, that actually happened. How else do you think a polar bear got into the Tunisian desert (the exit, remember Charlotte finds the skeletal remains of a polar bear on one of her digs?).
E-phonk
6190
It was freezing cold in the wheel chamber. pic
The polar bears somewhat explained:
(lostpedia should be spoiler free - but it has tons of background information you might not know if you don’t follow podcasts/interviews/dvd commentary etc)
Weren’t the cages that Jack, Sawyer, and Kate were held in for the polar bears?
Yes, and there was some training involved for fishbiscuit rewards - but it didn’t seem terribly tied to wheel-turning.
Has the Dharma shark ever been explained?
Jazar
6193
Zoological research at the Hydra station. Jack was basically in a shark tank in season 3.
All of the animal research was in pursuit of one of the six factors of The Valenzetti Equation (presumably the biology one). If you played the game (note: not recommended), you get to see the part of Hydra where they would examine Ezra J. Sharkington.
It doesn’t explain how the polar bears got from Hydra Island to Cork Island, but I’m guessing that’s within their swimming range.
The Wheel is on the main island. I would guess it was more likely that Dharma found the polar bears on the main island and then sent them over to Hydra for testing.
bloo
6196
None of which helps explain how you might get a polar bear into that small room and pull or push a wheel, especially when the light starts to get painful.
That Dharma sent a polar bear through time and space is no suprise. They did it with a rabbit. They had that one room in a lab that got blown up. They might have had others. But I think it’s a leap to say they trained polar bears to turn the wheel - especially when they don’t know where they’d show up next on the planet, which would throw off their submarine visits, etc.
Shrink rays, duh! Haven’t you been paying attention?
I think the entire premise of Lost is “let’s make a show where when the viewers attempt to solve its mysteries by applying Occam’s Razor they end up cutting the shit out of themselves”
jason
6198
I thought the premise of Lost was “let’s introduce a bunch of cool stuff that doesn’t connect, watch the message boards to see how fans link it together and then steal some of their ideas.”
Face it, we all bought in to a show where they admitted, right in the title, that they had no idea where they were going…
It was obvious from the beginning that the plane crash and the Island and so forth was just a more or less clever vehicle to tell stories about people who are fucked up (“lost” emotionally) and how they deal with their fucked-uppedness, i.e., a soap opera, and any story or event was there to help that along and not to be taken as anything important to the premise of the show. The fact that the stories had been in any way contiguous or coherent at all was gravy.
Somewhere along the line, though, the production people started to take the story seriously and attempted to retrofit the various disparate plot elements into an actual plot, which for me has been rather fascinating to watch.
I hear a lot of people saying this these days, but you know what? It’s bullshit. If what you claim was obvious really had been obvious from the beginning I never would have watched the show because that’s just a massive waste of time. The writers repeatedly said there was a plot and a purpose lurking inside all that mystery, and it wasn’t until at least season 2, maybe even 3, that it became apparent they’d been lying and had written themselves into a bunch of different corners. I only kept watching after that to see if they could write their way out or if they’d just chump out.
