The New Yorker proclaims today LOST Theory Day

Still not sure quite what to make of last night’s LOST. I could bellyache about how I wasn’t satisfied with Mr. Eko’s flashback, or complain that I thought that the pacing was too slow, but I have bigger fish to fry. Last night’s episode had some startling and perplexing implications about the larger mythology, and I'm in the mood to theorize.

Mr. Eko goes to visit the family of the daughter who has been miraculously revived, and has a conversation with the girl’s father, who also happens to be Claire’s psychic. Last season’s episode “Raised by Another” was one of the creepiest episodes aired to date. The insistence of the sinister psychic that Claire’s baby must not fall into the hands of “others,” and that she must raise it herself was unsettling to say the least. His sudden change of heart and urgency that she get on a plane to give her baby up in America, was disturbing when considering that the psychic foresaw the plane crash. As it turned out, she would be the one to care for the baby, which is what he had argued for in the first place. But last night when the psychic spoke to Mr. Eko, he confessed that he was a fraud, and much to the chagrin of his wife, fabricated his psychic readings.

There are a few different possibilities here.

1) The psychic didn’t know what he was talking about when he told Claire that if her baby fell into the wrong hands it could be disastrous. He told her that to frighten her, and then since he’s an unsavory character, he lined up some buyers for the baby in America, and was somehow going to get a back end fee for setting up Claire’s baby with the couple in the U.S. The fact that the plane crashed and the baby’s well being would later be endangered was all a coincidence. This is my least favorite possibility. The eerie premonition of the baby’s importance is completely deflated if it was all just some mumbo jumbo spouted by a second rate faux psychic. I suppose there is an argument to be made that there’s something still significant about the role that fate played in Claire’s trajectory. The psychic actually wasn’t a psychic, and didn’t know about the plane crash, but his suspicious actions led her to the island at any rate.

2) The psychic was lying when he told Mr. Eko he was a fraud. This, however, doesn’t seem like a viable possibility. There was no impetus for him to bring up his profession at all, no reason for him to lay himself out on the line to a priest he had just met. His confession of disbelief in miracles seemed like a genuine reflection of his regard for “otherworldly” matters.

3) The psychic does in fact have the gift of sight, but he does understand it or believe it, and chooses to be cynical about his abilities, chalking them up to lucky guessing and coincidence.

Whatever the case may be, this scene laid to waste the crux of a solid episode from last season. I like it when inexplicable and potentially supernatural elements converge via the survivors on the island. Claire’s baby has a loaded future, Walt has special powers, Locke was miraculously healed, people continue to have visions on the island, etc. But now more than ever the show seems to be leaning towards a more specific scientific reasoning for everything, which I find remiss because I liked the whole “magic island” feel.

Also in this episode, Mr. Eko and Locke discover the pearl station, another piece in the Dharma Initiative puzzle. There, the two men discovered a monitoring station which had active video surveillance of “The Hatch” and another Orientation video. The video, much like the first one found by Eko earlier in the season, detailed the tasks to be fulfilled at the Pearl station. The men on duty are meant to record what they saw in the hatch in simple logs and then send them (via messenger tubes) to a central command of sorts. The video instructions did not give much explanation for the purpose of their duties, only that they must be completed. To complicate things, the station looked empty and unused, as if no one had been working there for years.

Here are some of my theories.

1)The island was once the sight of some grand scientific experiment perhaps funded by the Hanso Foundation that went awry. The leaders of the Others were once the executors of the experiments, but after “the accident”, they run wild and crazed through the jungle. They have now also absorbed the former test subjects into their group, and order them to do their bidding. So contrary to what I’ve said before (but in agreement with certain talk backers here) the Others are in fact comprised of two groups of people. Those who used to run the Dharma Initiative, and those who were the Guinea pigs. Just what this terrible event was, I’m not sure, but it might be that they lost control of the elements they were trying to harness such as the electro-magnetic forces and the biological components.

2) The experiment is on going. The Dharma Initiative is bogus, and the pearl station was nothing more than a staging prop, something to make the survivors believe that they are at the site of a failed testing ground. The orientation video tapes and equipment were purpose planted with the intention of being found. The Others are all just actors who use costumes (see fake beard) and technology to manipulate the survivors into thinking there is some rhyme or reason to the things that they find on the island. Everything is a part of the facade, the Black Rock, the Hatches, even Rousseau is cahoots with them. They even kidnapped Claire knowing that she would eventually have flashbacks and remember exactly what they wanted her to remember. This is why the medical hatch was abandoned when Claire, Kate and Rousseau went back to it. It was nothing more than a fake set. The coincidences and connections among the survivors exist because…well, I’m not exactly how that would fit into it. Maybe they are all unique in some way, or are drawn to each other for a certain reason. Maybe it’s a six degrees of separation thing, or maybe their ancestors were all involved in some crazy WWII scheme, who knows. I’m not sure how I feel about the experiment within an experiment thing however. If one was conducting a behavioral study on humans in an enclosed environment, why would the cover up be so close to the actual truth? It could be considered reverse psychology, but I’m not sure.

That’s all I got for today. Anyone have a better idea?