Dharma Special Access, Week 5
This week’s DSA video is a but of a let down. It is essentially a Christmas greeting from Damon and Carlton and plug for the Season 4 DVD. I don’t yet have the DVD so I can’t be sure, but is sounds like the cutsie flash forward to themselves part of the video may be the same flash forward to themselves that appears on the DVD. If this is the case, then that part of the video isn’t really all that exclusive to begin with. In my opinion, this DSA doesn’t really give us any inside information–sure they talk about course corection, but that is nothing new. The only part of the video that could possibly be seen as a clue or sneek peek is a very quick look at new cast members Caesar and Ilana played by Saïd Taghmaoui and Zuleikha Robinson at the end of the video.
Enjoy!
Dharma Special Access
Password: yksnizdar
EDIT: This post was edited because my fellow Tailies correctly pointed out that it wasn’t really very nice to call it "lame" and that I should be grateful that Damon and Carlton took time to do this. I am of course grateful but do feel that this week’s DSA wasn’t all that "special".
New Promotional Photos for episode 5*01
http://spoilerslost.blogspot.com/2008/12/episode-501-because-you-left.html
Comment by mary — December 22, 2008 @ 3:27 pm
the password is radzinsky backwards…
Comment by joe — December 22, 2008 @ 4:16 pm
You are so missing the point of this video and it’s a lot more than a Christmas greeting. Damon and Carlton say they were visited by their future selves, and told their ending to the series was crap, so they changed the ending. Thing is, nothing changed and their future selves were still in the same predicament. Uhm, hello…Course-correction!! This is an important clue/reminder.
Comment by LostInTranslation — December 22, 2008 @ 4:45 pm
If you are going to run a LOST website you shouldn’t insult the producers. I actually thought it was pretty funny. You do know that they don’t HAVE to give us these bonuses.
Comment by Hello — December 22, 2008 @ 8:18 pm
I wasn’t in any way insulting the producers and maybe the word “lame” wasn’t the correct word and I will change that. I was simply pointing out that they didn’t really give us as much as they have in the past and that the little blurb about themselves in the future is something that (apparently) some people have already seen on the DVD. Since I have not yet opened my Christmas presents, I don’t have the DVD so perhaps this flash-forward on the DSA video is different from the one on the DVD.
I am, of course, very appreciative that Damon and Carlton do this for us but in comparing this week’s content to the previous week’s content, I felt like it cam up short. I apologize for choosing the wrong word and will make my own course corrections at this time!
And let us recall that while they didn’t HAVE to give us this, they did it as an olive branch to those of us who had invested time in an ARG, only to have it closed down before the game part of it really got started.
Comment by lost_grrl — December 23, 2008 @ 11:47 am
The most important thing from the video is one word. Paradox. I searched for “time travel paradox” and here is some of what I got…
When one reads Science Fiction there is hardly anything so fascinating and yet so frustrating as the ‘Time Travel’ story. Fascinating, because it often explores the question ‘what would things have been like if…?” or “if one could change a small thing like the position of a grain of sand would that have large effects in the future?”. These questions are at the heart of personal or historical regret. Suppose Hitler were never born. Would this be a better or worse world today? Would it be a different world 100 years from now or would the forces of history push towards a singular result?
The stories are often frustrating due in part to a vaguely spelled out theory of time which often allows events that are confusing, contradictory and paradoxical. A science fiction story should not leave us with more questions than it resolves. For a reader of Fantasy, this may be acceptable, for Fantasy is not supposed to be taken as explanatory, prophetic or possibly realistic. But a good science fiction story should have explanations that are not incoherent and if in the story there is something which is claimed to be impossible, then there should be an explanation for that also.
At the heart of the problem is the ‘Time Travel paradox’ which goes something like this. Suppose a person travels to a time before she was born and breaks a causal chain that led to the traveler’s birth. This problem has been commonly explored by asking ‘What if you killed your own grandmother before she first conceived?’ If you kill your grandmother then you would not be born, which in turn would bring it about that you not travel into the past, thus you would not kill your grandmother, thus you would be born causing you to again travel into the past to kill your grandmother…. ad infinitum.
The presupposition of almost all time travel stories is that each point along a time line is in some sense existent now, even the future points. This provides a conceptual basis for allowing us to visit a time point in the same way that we might visit a space point in ordinary experience. Einstein may have reinforced our comfort with this view by taking seriously the notion of time as another dimension very much like the spatial dimensions we are already familiar with.
There are several different standard attempts to resolve or avoid the paradox. The most standard is to ignore it. By sending someone far enough into the past, we do not know what influence that person will have and thus for all we know the person caused the world as we know it today. Another way to avoid the paradox is to state up front that we cannot change the past. There are different versions of this thesis. One is that we can go back and participate in a past causal chain but only in the way that already happened and the other way is to go back merely as an observer.
Some stories entertain the notion that you can go back and change things, but not those things that would lead to paradox. I would like to put forth the view that there is something wrong with all of these approaches and that the only view which is successful at resolving the paradox is an alternate universe theory of time travel which we shall explore momentarily. Such a view was expressed in “The Terminator” in which a character from the “future” confesses that maybe he just comes from a “possible future ” not the actual future of this time.
There is ton more about this subject here…http://homepage.mac.com/billtomlinson/newtt.html
How does this all relate to Lost? From the previews of Season 5 and all the conjecture thats gone on since Season 4 ended, most believe that Ben moved the island to previous point in time. The Fray video suggests as much, with the beach camp looking confused about their tents being gone, Juliet and Faraday at the hatch and so on. If the island was moved to a pre-Purge time, then it is possible that those who stayed behind could have a hand in altering events on the original timeline. By the island moving to the 1980’s, we would now have 2 John Lockes, the one on the original timeline and the one who calls himself Jeremy Bentham that traveled back in time from 2004. So, the Locke in the coffin existed on the orignal timeline, relived the 80s and 90s on the island before leaving to persuade the Oceanic 6 to return in 2008. So when the O6 return to the island, perhaps the Locke from the second timeline will still be there to save.
I’ll not speculate any further because this is insane. Anybody else have thoughts on this?
Comment by Losted — December 23, 2008 @ 6:57 pm
Losted, I’ve been thinking the same thing for awhile now. Also, there are a few things that I never completely understood. one of which being, charlie being strung up from the tree. i’m still not convinced that ethan did it. i have a feeling that this “course correction” that is necessary is charlie needed to die. sooner. much sooner. in the first episode charlie is precariously close to dying by being sucked into the engine… then the moth. and being strung from the tree. not to mention all the times that desmond saved charlie. i think to change it all… charlie needs to die sooner. could be wrong though…
Comment by hurleybird — December 27, 2008 @ 4:26 pm
The island may have moved in time, but it also would have had to move geographically, otherwise, there’d still be an island there, wouldn’t there? Unless the island killed its grandmother, of course….
Comment by Seytom — December 28, 2008 @ 6:04 am
The best way to resolve the paradox:
First off the paradox — if you go back and time and kill your father before you are born, then you cannot exist to back in time…yadda yadda yadda. Generally your change makes it impossible for you to make the change.
The multiverse theory circumvents this problem. What that means is that each decision someone makes creates an alternate timeline that remains. In most cases these alternate timelines converge, but some persists creating several parallel, but slightly different timelines will continue(check out Heinlein’s “The Number of the Beast” or the TV series “Sliders” to better understand.
In the case of our intrepid time traveller, the change is made to the past and a new timeline created, but the future from which the traveller originated remains unchanged. Hence the past cannot be changed, but an alternate reality is created.
Comment by QuantumSam — December 30, 2008 @ 8:11 am