Paik Heavy Industries: The Lost Experience Redux
Fans who had followed the alternate reality game "The LOST Experience" during the break after Season 2 have been looking for connections in the actual episodes of LOST. In D.O.C. there was finally another firm connection. Sun’s father’s company Paik Automotive was featured in the storyline, but the Korean logos visible in the background translate to "Paik Heavy Industries." The connection? P.H.I. was mentioned numerous times in The LOST Experience, but we never knew for sure that the two Paiks were the same, since it’s such a common surname in Korea. Now we have confirmation that Sun’s father is the same Mr. Paik that built the Helgus Antonius for the Hanso Foundation. Read more at Nickb123’s entry at the LOSTpedia blog.
Interesting…….. They finally mention TLE in the show…. Bout time!
Comment by poyopoyo91 — April 27, 2007 @ 2:59 pm
is there a web site for this company by any chance, or is it just a spin off from the lost experience,also as regards to the recent found the plane wreckage thing, maybe it was hanso that was behind it and this is what all these little clues are leading to Hanso still having a part in it all, i’m not sure if this is relevant or not and i’m sure you know but considering hanso air has recently acquired pacific airlines i think that leads to a cover up incident as well!
Comment by nickk — April 27, 2007 @ 6:13 pm
That’s awesome. The producers have so much faith in this audience…and that guy nailed it. Very impressive sleuthing. By the way Mittelwerk=Mittelos? Mittelwerk fractured from The Hanso Foundation during the Lost Experience, I’m guessing that coincided with the “Purge”. Mittelwerk has his faction of believers and Hanso had his. Mittelos vs. DHARMA? If this is true maybe a refresher look back at that TLE film would be prudent.
Comment by Higdon — April 27, 2007 @ 9:11 pm
It’s impossible for the “purge” to have taken place with Mittelwerk’s running away from the Hanso Foundation. The events of TLE were set in real-time during the summer of 2006; the “purge” happened quite some time before 815 (or whichever flight the Losties were on!) crashed in September 2004.
Furthermore (I feel like I’ve said this about ten times now, so apologies for repeating it yet again!), the purge was initiated *by DHARMA against the Others*, NOT the other way around! The producers have confirmed this because they stated that Mikhail was telling the truth when he said that the only lie he’d told in the course of Enter 77 was that he’d been a DHARMA member. Mittlewerk’s mention of DHARMA having “failed” in its efforts to change the core factors in the Valenzetti Equation in the Sri Lanka film furthers this: there’s no way that the purge coincided with the operation Mittelwerk was pushing in his presentation to the Hanso scientists. The timelines don’t match and the information doesn’t add up.
Honestly, I think it’s very doubtful we’ll ever see anything more to do with TLE in the series than the information presented in the main DHARMA orientation film. Mittelos was probably chosen as a name for the front biolab because the anagram is “lost time” and little else. The Mittelwerk plotline is too involved to introduce into the already about-to-get-positively-even-more-insane main story arch of the series. There’s a lot of background mythology to work through and things are mostly planned for a five or six season show; there also has to be time to move through the actual story concerning the main characters.
Comment by Richard Lennox — April 27, 2007 @ 10:39 pm
Quick correction to the above: “anything more to do with TLE” should read “anything more complex to do with TLE”.
Comment by Richard Lennox — April 27, 2007 @ 10:41 pm
Thanks for your kind words, Higdon. And I agree with Richard Lennox, TLE will only ever really be mentioned in passing. I think when they explore DHARMA they might say “they originally came here doing mathematical related research into an equation, but then….” and move away from Valenzetti in the blink of an eye. Also they might say that the Island was found by serendipity when the founder was searching for a loved one, and we have to fill in the blanks (i.e. Alvar Hanso’s grandad/dad was Magnus Hanso, the guy who owned the Black Rock and whose body is probably on the Island).
I’m guessing it’ll be small little references like that.
Comment by Nickb123 — April 28, 2007 @ 1:06 am
Yeah you’re right the timelines dont add up. It was late and I got excited about that connection. But I’m interested in why you slammed it by the timeline but didn’t address the point I made about Mittelwerk. I’d be willing to bet that Thomas Mittelwerk has something to do with Mittelos. In my opinion, that would be a significant and possibly “complex” connection. And I didn’t even have to hit pause on the DVR to come up with that one.
Comment by Higdon — April 28, 2007 @ 6:03 am
Higdon, there’s no strong evidence in support of or against the Mittelwerk/Mittelos connection, period. You’re welcome to believe what you want to believe, but I’m not particularly inclined to believe that the producers of the show are going to go out of the way to include a major character from an off-season promotional game set well after the current timeline of the program. As I stated before, there’s *way* too much that needs to be explained in terms of the show-proper’s backstory and mythology already. The show’s at or pretty damn near the half-way point and it was announced long ago that none of the information in the game would be necessary to understand the show. Do you have any idea how much time would be necessary to establish the Hanso/Mittelwerk backstory in detail in a 44-minute (sans-commercials) tv program when it took months to develop in an interenet game swarming with both text and video? Hey, I should know, I spent *way* too much time just perusing the materials the truly obessive TLE players uncovered last summer: such ate up at least a couple hours a week when the game was slow (I remember because my wife wasn’t too pleased with how much time I spent on it!).
There’s too much else to deal with in terms of the characters already introduced to do that.
It’d also be severely anti-climactic to deal with a character whom so many major things have happened to well after the present timeline of the show. Great: we know he gets away when he almost gets taken out in September 2006 but gets away like a typical two-dimensional cartoony villain who has no complex motivations for his actions. The fan community was harsh enough on TLE; imagine the general public and TV critics who are already bent on selling this show sort every time it moves a little slow or seems a little too complicated lashing out against this.
As far as your point? The producers have already said that the purpose of the Mittelos name was for it to be the anagram of “lost time”. The fact that the first six letters are the same as in Mittelwerk are most likely either an easter egg or purely coincidental. I’d find it pretty difficult to believe that the guy who was the President and Chief Technologist of the Hanso Foundation was also heavily involved with a bioscience laboratory with a name in part derived from his own surname. That’d be a piss-poor way to be covert about a front organization for a super-secret society that seems bent on nobody finding it other than people they desire to recruit.
Comment by Richard Lennox — April 28, 2007 @ 7:52 am
And here, lifted from Lostpedia’s quoting of some Buddytv.com content at http://www.lostpedia.com/wiki/The_Lost_Experience#Looking_back:
Carlton Cuse: I think that for us, yeah, I mean, all of Alvar Hanso and his relationship with funding the DHARMA Initiative is part of the mythology. The details of the Hanso Foundation�s demise�it�s tangential to the show but it�s not unrelated to the show. We sort of felt like the Internet Experience was a way for us to get out mythologies that we would never get to I wain the show. I mean, because this is mythology that doesn�t have an effect on the character�s lives or existence on the island. We created it for purposes of understanding the world of the show but it was something that was always going to be sort of below the water, sort of the iceberg metaphor, and the Internet Experience sort of gave us a chance to reveal it.
Damon Lindelof: I would say in terms of all the� background that we did, in terms of the Valenzetti equation and explaining the formation of the Hanso Foundation and doing the other films�we�d consider that stuff canon to the show. Where there�d have to be wiggle room is the Rachel Blake story where she�s in the real world, in the outside world as we define it, the show Lost might be defined in an entirely different outside world so we can�t vouch for the overall fit ability and veracity of everything that Rachel was doing. But we can say that all the factoids that she was uncovering were vetted, in fact many of them were written by us personally so they are canon.
Comment by Richard Lennox — April 28, 2007 @ 7:57 am
Blargh, sorry about the italics going wonk, think it’s got something to do with the auto-formatting used in the comments section here. The extremely big thing for me is Damon’s comments regarding world-separation between the show and the game. There was already enough murkiness in terms of the show being considered fiction in the game which was itself meta-fiction. That was one of the most convoluted elements of the game and I can’t think of anybody who liked it or could offer up a clear explanation of how it was possible.
Furthermore, Carlton’s comments lead me to believe that the Rachel Blake vs. Mittelwerk storyline was largely a framing device for divulging a lot of the Alvar Hanso-related background details that devoted fans of the show would find interesting but weren’t essential to understanding what’s going on in the show. There had to be an on-going mechanism for reveal these bits of information and the rather hackneyed basic plot of TLE -evil madman takes over a benevolent corporation while the long-lost daughter of the organization’s founder hunts him down and exposes what he’s doing, yet manages to escape alive and intact when she’s caught and then drive him into hiding- served this purpose, little else.
Comment by Richard Lennox — April 28, 2007 @ 8:05 am
So I guess that just leaves lazy writing. I never said Mittelos was a front company, nor was he covert about it. I said Mittelwerk split from Hanso at the end of the experience. Wrong I might have been to conclude that this was the purge, my point was that he had his own believers within the DHARMA corporation. When he split with Hanso, those on the Island get word and go medieval on Hanso’s supporters asses on the island. Mittelwerk does say that they have the virus at the end of the experience, the DHARMA boys on the island are under quarantine and wear quarantine suits when they romp around outside for 108 minutes. Your whole argument rests upon the notion the producers claim that Mikhail was telling the truth. What if he wasn’t? What if the purge was more recent? I can tell you’re getting frustrated with me, but at this point even the saviest Lost fan doesn’t know what the hell is going on. They’ve told us very little, so I’m taking what I got and rolling with it.
Comment by Higdon — April 28, 2007 @ 9:10 pm
Damnit I read that thing twice to make sure I wrote what I wanted. I meant to put in What if the purge never happened? after What if the purge happened earlier? And with the Deus Ex Machina of them all the Mutiple Time Line theory that being floated around out there, people going back in time and course correcting, I think there may be something deep down in all this. I’m still betting on a connection.
Comment by Higdon — April 28, 2007 @ 9:15 pm
If D&C were lying when they told us that Mikhail was telling the truth about everything he claimed to be telling the truth about, we can then stop listening to them and their decidedly un-funny podcasts utterly, because this was one of the few involved issues they’ve *ever* addressed in a direct fashion.
In regards to the virus: There’s plenty of reason to believe that there is in fact *no* virus on the island and that the quarantine was faked. Even if there is one, why believe it’s the same virus as in Mittelwerk’s plan? The latter is distributed via a phoney vaccine intended to kill a fairly high percentage and very specific target group of the population of an inhabited island that can be safely reached by a normal ship doubling as a large clinic/hospital. The former hasn’t been known to drop anyone save Danielle’s fellow crew members, and that’s based on her claims alone. The one connection I could see is if we see suddenly see anyone taking the injections Desmond used to take killed as a side-effect. That hasn’t happened yet.
If you really want to pick nits, consider that your argument rests on a connection between Mittelwerk and Mittelos -mere name similarity- and requires a ton of extra explanation and background thus far irrelevant to the plot of the show, and then stuck on top of a lot of complicated time-travel (or near-equivalent) gobbledygook which also needs explaining. Sure, it’s not a particularly realistic show, but you can only stretch such a thing so far in a major network program. Speculation’s one thing, and damn, it can be fun, but I honestly just don’t see Lost going the way of the more gimmicky genre shows out there. If it does, it’d be one of the biggest “f*** you” moves by a successful show, but it’d also be stupid. I know I’d stop watching at that point for having had a big elaborate setup that took three whole seasons to really start getting anywhere in terms of a major story arc movement turn into a peanut-laden steaming coil.
To spell out my own opinion even further: Mittelwerk was a cookie cutter villain who wasn’t especially interesting and couldn’t even manage to kill off his arch nemesis when his faithful staff had her cornered and unarmed, and I would really, really hate to see such a second-rate character brought into the series as a “menacing” adversary when he’s decidedly incompetent, period. Charles Widmore is creepy. Anthony Cooper is a completely hateful bastard. Mr. Paik is tyrant. Ben is super-creepy. Mittelwerk? A cheeseball mad doctor with a ponytail. To break the tradition like that would be a tremendous loss.
Like I said, believe what you like, Higdon, so don’t take offense at my conjecture. However, please be willing to accept the fact that putting forth any conjecture in a quasi-public forum opens it up to armchair critique, and that nobody’s being mean until they start directly insulting one another.
Comment by Richard Lennox — April 28, 2007 @ 10:27 pm
Y’all need to simmer.
Comment by Ben — April 28, 2007 @ 11:32 pm
Lost is sooooooo amazing how could anyone think otherwise!? My favorite characters Kate, Sawyer, Hurly, Charlie, Desmond, Syiid, Sun and Jin!! I luv Lost loads but i’m having dificulty finding a British Lost fan club.
Comment by Kelsey Martin — April 29, 2007 @ 6:57 am
i feel like boasting but i cant remember why!!!??
the Giist of it was as follows:
the H.Antonius translates to the St Anthony, if i remember coprrectly; i happen to have one of my names from being born on his day of the week (tuesday, i think!?), and Saint Anthony is in fact the Saint of (amongst other thingS) lost things: a prayer to St Anthony is often a prayer to find a lost or stolen item.
I wanted to gloat a bit because i mentioned this a couple of posts back
Comment by mw — April 30, 2007 @ 5:17 am
Where did H. Antonius come from? Did I miss something?
Comment by Shannon — April 30, 2007 @ 2:08 pm
was from the lost experience thing: basically, the camped up bad guy who had “taken over” the Hanso foundation and created an uber-virus to kill 33% of the worlds population (or..was it 66?) in order to alter one or more of the key variables of the valenzetti equation, thereby “saving” the world, had a ship made, and dubbed it the “helegus antonius” (pardon my spelling), to take him to some mysterious island we got a glimpse of in a satelite photo. Now, dont get too excited, since we cant say whether or not the island is indeed our beloved lost island, or in fact whether the events depicted in the LE are in fact Canon.
Furthermore, to make it all the more complicated, the times shouldnt match up at all, since the events of lost are set..er..back in 2004 i think, whereas the LE was based “now”…so unless the ship can time-travel, or the writers sidestep the issue with some sort of scriptwriterly slight of hand plot device…well, then ostensibly, it shouldnt really make sense. but ill bet it does
Comment by mw — April 30, 2007 @ 2:43 pm