DHARMA & WALT ("LOST" IN THOUGHT)

There will be spoilers......

So we finally find out not only what's down in the hatch, but we've come a long way in splaining why. And I have to figure everybody who had sworn allegiance to any one particular theory had to have been mightily disappointed.

That was the risk the show's Creators were taking - once they locked into the path they chose, there would be people left just as unhappy as they would have been if no answers were ever provided.

So here's what I'm thinking about the Dharma Initiative and the Hanso Foundation*.........

The 1970 grad students from the University of Michigan who had originally conceived this project probably had the best of goals in mind. They were probably thinking in terms of creating some kind of utopia.

But in trying to bring their vision into reality, the couple (the DeGroots?) succumbed to temptation and accepted funding from Alvar Hanso, allowing themselves to be subsidized by the Hanso Foundation.

And in doing so, they allowed their project to be subverted to Hanso's goals for achievement.

The title of this post, "Dharma & Walt", wasn't a reference to the son of Michael on the island, who's been kidnapped by the Others. I was referring to Walt Disney and that hoary old rumor that he was cryogenically frozen and kept alive under Sleeping Beauty's Castle in DisneyWorld.

I think Hanso saw the work done by the DeGroots and realized that their experiment could tie in nicely with what he had in mind: keeping himself alive via cryogenics technology. The human lab rats who would be inhabiting the island would provide a cheap labor source for maintaining the equipment without ever having to know what they were involved with.

There were six stages to the Dharma Initiative project, and where the "Lostaways" are located is supposed to be Number 3 of 6. There's a list of projects on the Hanso Foundation's web site in the active link; one of them is for research into electro-magnetism. I think that's what Jack discovered as he first explored the hatch. And a foul-up in that experiment 44 days before caused the crash of Oceanic Flight 815.

Why was it important for the two human guinea pigs to remain in the bunker/hatch and press the button every 108 minutes? The man in the "Orientation" film said that there had been an incident. I'm thinking that incident involved some sort of technical failure with the cryogenics equipment. I think Alvar Hanso had already been frozen by then (He looked pretty old already in that footage from the early 1970s.), and now there was a danger of his stasis being corrupted unless somebody pushed the button every 108 minutes.

And in order to insure that the hatch inhabitants continued to do so, they would be fed propaganda that to do so insured their continued existence rather than Hanso's. Skip a paycheck to these guys and they might just say "Bleep it" and chuck the whole gig; leaving Hanso to melt into a small puddle of brown liquid goo.

The show seems to put a lot of stock into names. So I looked up "Alvar" and it means elf army. Who knows? Maybe a regiment of the Fair Folk might be involved; perhaps this is the realm of the Faerie Queene. Why not? The cast already includes a Hobbit......

Also, "Hanso" could be derived from "Hans" which is an alternate form for "John". We've already got a John in the cast, as well as a Jack which is a diminutive of the name. And there's a corruption in a way with the name of "Jin". Who knows?

Anyways, just a few thoughts off the top o' me noggin after only one viewing. Like Dennis Miller used to say, that's my opinion. I could be wrong.....

But I do know this - the University of Michigan is going to have a field day in promoting their connection to this plotline when it comes to their promotional enrollment brochures next fall!

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

*"Orientation" was the first episode after which I never visited any of the fan forums for "Lost". I wanted to keep my ideas free of any outside influence.