L O S T Answers

Previously on LOSTanswers:

“The hatch went into lockdown mode (revealing the map) in order to keep the Swan workers inside during a routine food drop. People have asked about the food drop, too. I’ll get to that, but not now, because this post ends in a cliffhan-“

And now, a brand new episode of LOSTanswers…

-ger.

I didn’t want to get into all of the food drop stuff, because it was just going to lead down so many other avenues. I’ll cover all of those avenues here. I hope to shed some light on a lot of “mysteries”, as well as on why a lot of mysteries were left for us to figure out on our own. First, I’ll go through these mysteries as though we were left to our own devices…

Food Drops

In season 2, we were shown a food drop that happened during the lockdown in the Swan hatch. Over the course of the series we were given little bits of information. DHARMA, although wiped out, still had operations active on the island. Specifically, the Swan Station was operating as though everything was fine. Kelvin and Desmond were both waiting for their DHARMA replacements (“What did one snowman say to the other snowman?” “Smells like carrots.”). After The Purge, The Others kept The Swan station going, lest the world implode or whatever. From that, I assumed that meant that they kept operations going to, you know, keep those Swan workers alive. “Let’s make sure the world doesn’t end by keeping these guys working, but let’s not feed them ever” doesn’t seem very conducive to making sure the world doesn’t end. Then, as the show kept going, we were told that DHARMA had stations off-Island, specifically “The Lamp Post”, which is able to locate the Island in time and space. It was also hinted that The Lamp Post was not the only off-Island DHARMA site.

Putting all of this together, it can be deduced that the food drop came from an off-Island station getting directions from The Lamp Post. The workers at the station, like those in the Swan, still thought DHARMA existed, and were maybe even waiting for replacements. More on this later.

Polar Bears

The food drop took a lot of connecting to figure it all out, with little information, so I can kind of understand why it remained an “unanswered question”. The Polar Bear Issue is way easier, and I’m a bit surprised it was such problem. But, let’s go through the facts…

Polar bears were on the Island. DHARMA experimented on various animals at the Hydra. There were cages on Hydra Island that used to contain bears. In Tunisia, Charlotte uncovered a polar bear skeleton wearing a DHARMA collar. After Ben turned the frozen donkey wheel and moved the Island, he was transported to Tunisia.

That’s all we need. The polar bears were brought to the Island by DHARMA, experimented on, and used to move the frozen donkey wheel, because it’s cold and hard to move. More on that later…

Hurley Bird

This was always a “don’t give a shit” question for me. It only showed up twice and didn’t seem to have any effect on the actual story being told. At first I thought it was some Island manifestation to mess with Hurley. Then, as we got a closer look at DHARMA and the Hydra, I figured “Oh. DHARMA experimented on bears, sharks, and bunnies. Guess they did crap to birds, too.” And that’s the answer I was fine with. DHARMA did crap to birds. More on that now…

Yawning

If you aren’t aware, the season 6 DVD contained a LOST Epilogue called “New Man In Charge”. It was meant to answer a few questions people wanted answers to, and to hint at the post-Jack’s Death lives of some characters. You can watch the whole twelve minutes here. It’s a “gift” from the writers that answers questions about the food drops, the Hurley Bird, polar bears, and Room 23.

The thing about the epilogue is, for the most part, it’s fucking boring. A lot of it is within a DHARMA video, and it spoon feeds us answers we could figure out on our own. “Pierre Chang used aliases so he could protect his identity? Oh, cool, now I know what an alias is.” It’s a perfect example of why I’m glad the show didn’t have much Answer Time. I’m glad we got to think for ourselves instead of watching episodes of characters explaining semi-obvious facts to us. Nothing in the epilogue was news. It was all right there in the show; it just wasn’t spelled out for us. I would have rather watched 8 minutes of Vincent playing catch with Jack’s rotting corpse.

But, you know, there are some answers for you, both from my brain and from a DHARMA video. Food drops, Hurley Bird, polar bears, Chang’s aliases, Room 23, and a hint at the causes of the pregnancy problem, which I’ve already covered. All questions, but not really. There’s also a bit in the epilogue with Walt and it’s classic LOST. Mysteries slightly addressed through strong character moments, leading to more questions. But not really, because we can figure those out, too.

More on Walt later…