Does anyone think that "Aliens" are involved...at least in some small way...with the island?
So does anyone else think this? Or do you think that the writers would never do such a thing because ANY alien involvement at all in the islands history would be considered "cheating" and a weak plotline for mainstream TV?
I don't think "cheating" or the needs of mainstream TV have anything to do with it (perhaps you've heard of
The X-Files,
Invasion,
Surface,
The Invaders?
)
The producers have obviously been very cagey about exactly what
is going on with the island, but at the same time they have been repeatedly, explicitly and adamantly clear about what
isn't involved:
1. There is nothing supernatural about these events, everything has a rational scientific or at least science fiction explanation. (Which will be given in the course of the series.)
2. They are not dead, the island is not Purgatory.
3. There are no aliens involved.
Juliet's comment, like Naomi's "you're all dead" and the various references to Hell or Purgatory, is just the writers having fun with the audience. They know perfectly well what theories people are putting out there on the internet, and they put them in the character's mouths as a way of winking at the folks who discuss the show on-line.
The Atlantis thing certainly fits. There is evidence of an ancient civilization. Time travel and various oddities with the space-time continuum is also a definite possibility. But we don't know how it all fits. But certainly the
Black Rock is in awfully good shape for a wooden ship that has been sitting in a hot jungle for a couple of hundred years.
I think people (here and especially on the HTF) are jumping to
way too many conclusions about what that little snippet of the future we saw means for both the characters and the mechanics of the show.
It could merely be a
possible future, one that Jack finds a way to avert. (Presumably with the help of Desmond. I'm not sure if Desmond can actually travel through time, but it is possible that he could sent
himself a message, a vision if you will, in the past. I don't know if was just my local cable company or a problem with the ABC feed, but from about the time Desmond sees Charlie's warning until the end of the Island segment, the video had a slightly choppy feel to it. Could have been digital compression, could have been a visual cue that what we were seeing wasn't 100% "real".
I like the Varn/Jacob idea.
Let's consider the following:
The Island is a source of great power, a natural generator of electromagnetic energy, and a temporal anomaly, akin to the rift in sector 14. At one point it was the home to an ancient civilization. These ancient either died out, or transformed, along the lines of the alien race in
River of Souls. All or most of them might have wiped themselves out messing with the Island's power - or they may have fought a war to control it and offed themselves.
The Island has some kind of sentient guardian. This could be an advanced machine, a human/machine hybrid, the energy forms of the original inhabitants, or just one of them, who either became trapped their or stayed behind deliberately. This could be Jacob.
As civilizations outside the Island arose, the Island "hid" itself to protect its secrets and the immense power that the primitives around it would not be able to handle. Ships that got too close were drawn in and sunk, and the survivors not permitted to leave.
The Island may have some interest in repopulating itself, but only with the "right" kind of people. Some survivors may have been kept young and healthy for long stretches if they were found worthy. But it won't let just anybody reproduce. Or maybe the fatal miscarriages are an accidental side-effect of something on the Island itself. Maybe that's what wiped out the original inhabitants. Invisible Jacob could be the result of some experiment to fix that problem - as could the seemingly immortal Richard. In the meantime, the core permanent population has been supplemented by whatever children reach the island, who are captured and raised by them.
It may be that only certain people can sense the Island's controlling intelligence, and that communicating even with them is difficult. Thus the Island can't just give orders directly, it depends on "prophets" like Ben.
The problem is that Ben is a paranoid sociopath, a very imperfect vessel. I think Jacob told him to "take care" of the Dharma people because they had proven a disappointment or because they were learning too much - by which he probably meant, "capture them" - and Ben translated that into an order for mass-murder to take revenge on all the people who had slighted him.
If the breeding problem was never solved, it may be that the Island has been using its agent and the mechanisms (and money) of the Dharma Initiative to try to get 20th/21st century "normal" civilization to solve it for them. Hence Juliet.
Because the Dharma people were all peace and love and "let's help mankind", the Island may have permitted their colony to establish itself, then used events like "the incident" to isolate them on the island to repopulate the place. As noted above it is an open question whether Ben's actual orders were to capture the Dharma sites once and for all or to massacre the population, but I'm inclined to think it was the former.
I think "The Others" are the "good guys" in the sense that they've been working to protect the Island's secrets from falling into the wrong hands - to keeps its immense power away from a human race not yet prepared to use it. Their mission is good. But their methods suck and their secrecy, especially under the guidance of Crazy Ben, has caused nearly all of their problems and everybody else's. Ben thinks he needs to control the information to maintain his power. He never explains anything fully and that's probably going to get him killed. That's why Locke is such a threat to him. Unlike Ben, Locke is a natural leader, and mostly an honest man. If he can talk to Jacob, they don't need Ben. And if Locke tells the Others that Ben has been manipulating Jacob's orders for his own ends, they'll probably kill him. (We can only hope.
)
Either some other influence or the Island itself has been manipulating events in order to bring a certain planeful of people to the Island. That's what Ben had them building the landing strip for. But somebody got their wires crossed, or the space-time anomaly affects even the Island's influence when it tries to operate at a distance (or Ben was deliberately dragging his feet) because the runway clearly wasn't ready when Oceanic 815 appeared overhead. (Presumably drawn off course deliberately and already heading for a crash.) But thanks to Desmond's error, the plane didn't crash miles away at sea and take everyone to the bottom of the ocean with it. It broke up above the island and some people survived the wreck.
Some or all of the people on that plane had been hand-picked by somebody, their lives manipulated to put them on that flight. And most shared the characteristic of having nothing to really to go home to. It may be that the Island intends the Oceanic survivors to be the founders of its new civilization, and its defenders against the outside world. It may be that what everybody has assumed to be the point of the show - getting the castaways rescued and sent home, which would necessarily have to be stalled to the last episode - isn't it at all. It may be about all these people learning that their destiny is to stay on the island and make sure that they are never rescued.
Regards,
Joe
