Lost's Buried Treasures : The Unofficial Guide to Everything Lost Fans Need to Know

by Porter, Lynnette

• ISBN13: 9781402210310
• ISBN10: 1402210310
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-11-01
• Publisher: Sourcebooks Inc

Summary

The hit show Lost is a television phenomenon-and what brings fans back are the layers of clues that mystify and intrigue. Lost Clues, Secrets and Theories is the first in-depth guide to the hundreds of clues and mysteries embedded in the Lost world. Bestselling Lost experts Lynnette Porter and David Lavery provide an extensive guide to the clues and secrets of the show, detailing the connections between the secrets and anticipating what they will mean for the show's ultimate mystery. Using this guide, fans can decode new clues and connections while seeking to solve the mystery behind the show. Topics include: --Geographical clues --Exploring electromagnetism --New and old theories --Musical and other references --The best online resources --And much more Designed for impulse and word-of-mouth purchase, no Lost fan will want to watch an episode without this guide in hand.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. VII
Introduction	p. 1
Lost Reading and Viewing	p. 7
Is There an (Ancestor) Text on This Island?
Books on the Island
After All These Years
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
Bad Twin
The Bible
Book of Law
A Brief History of Time
The Brothers Karamazov
Carrie
Catch-22
Dirty Work
Evil Under the Sun
The Fountainhead
The Gunslinger
Hindsight
Lancelot
Laughter in the Dark
Left Behind
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
Our Mutual Friend
Rainbow Six
The Third Policeman
The Turn of the Screw
Watership Down
A Wrinkle in Time
Ancestor Texts
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
"The Damned Thing"
Death and the Maiden
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Lord of the Flies
The Odyssey
Of Mice and Men
The Outsiders
"A Psychological Shipwreck"
Robinson Crusoe
Solaris
The Songlines
The Stand
Stranger in a Strange Land
Walden Two
Must-See TV and Essential Movies
The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.
Alias
Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel/Firefly
Cast Away
Crossing Jordan
Disaster Movies
Forbidden Planet
Gilligan's Island
Jurassic Park
The Langoliers
Lost Horizon
Nash Bridges
The Prisoner
Survivor
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Twilight Zone
Twin Peaks
The Wizard of Oz
The X-Files
Lost Playlist	p. 141
The Singing Castaways
Channeling the Dead
Modern Music
Making the Band
The Genius of Michael Giacchino
Between the Lines: Lost and Popular Culture	p. 187
The Hurley-Sawyer Connection
The Power of Popular Culture
Lost as Reflector and Creator of Popular Culture
The Science, Pseudo-Science, and Social Science of Lost	p. 221
Anger Management
Astral Projection
Behaviorism
CPR
Electromagnetism
E.S.P.
Faith Healing
Geodesic Dome
Heuristics
Lacanian Psychology
Nanotechnology
Obstetrics and Gynecology
Parallel Universes
Parapsychology
String Theory
Telekinesis
Utopias and Dystopias
The Significance of Place	p. 233
Home Towns and Special Places
Common Destinations
Geographic Connections
Hawaii as a Character
Outside Honolulu
Around Honolulu
The Art of Selecting Locations and Dressing Sets
Giving Back to the Community
Playing Games	p. 279
A Puzzling Mystery
The Lost Strategy
Video and Mobile Games
The Lost Alternate Reality Game
Behind the Scenes	p. 305
The Cast
Lost Writers
Lost Directors
Top 10 Lists	p. 325
10 Books/Essays to Read about Lost
Top 10 Movies and Television Series for Lost Fans
Top 10 Lost Websites
Top 10 Lost Conspiracy Theories
Top 10 Images/Symbols on Lost
10 Reasons Why Lost Is or Is Not Science Fiction
The Authors' 10 Favorite Episodes
Bibliography	p. 347
Notes	p. 357
Index	p. 367
About the Authors	p. 376
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Excerpt from Chapter 1

Even before the library in the Swan Hatch, entered for the first time in "Man of Science, Man of Faith" (2.1, the initial episode of Season Two), and that Bible Mr. Eko finds in The Arrow Hatch, the one the Tailies stumble upon in ". . . and Found" (2.5) made Mystery Island more bookish, tomes were common enough on Lost- not as common as miniature liquor bottles, but not exactly rare either.

Throughout Season One, we find the unlikely avid reader Sawyer pageturning a variety of books, from Richard Adams' Watership Down (a book he rereads in "Left Behind," 3.15) to Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. In Season Two, he continues perusing eclectic tomes: Judy Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret and Walker Percy's Lancelot. In The Swan, even more books have screen time: Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and, most notoriously, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, an obscure Irish novel that became a surprise bestseller due to its unintentional product placement cameo. And speaking of product placement, in "The Long Con" we find Hurley reading the manuscript of Bad Twin, a Lost tie¬in novel written by the late Oceanic 815 passenger Gary Troup, later released by Hyperion, the publisher of official Lost books.

Season Three continued to be bookish. The opening scene of the first episode ("A Tale of Two Cities," 3.1) shows a book club-the assigned book Stephen King's Carrie. Later, in "Every Man for Himself" (3.4), Ben evokes Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in his humbling of Sawyer. In "Not in Portland" (3.7), Aldo is seen reading Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

To paraphrase a question literary critic Stanley Fish once famously asked in the title of a book: "Is there a text on this island?" Well, there are many, many texts on this one. Astonishingly, given that Lost is the story of the aftermath of a plane crash, not a single John Grisham novel has been found.

Not all the "texts" are literary, of course. Cinema ancestors-disaster films, Cast Away, Jurassic Park-and television series-The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilligan's Island, Survivor, The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, The X¬Files-have all influenced Lost's themes, its miseenscene, its characterization, its narrative style. The postmodern, as Umberto Eco has noted, is the age of the "already said." Books, films, and television have all had their say on Lost.

Each time a new Lost text opens for perusal, the fans go wild and speculation runs rampant as the Lost-fixated begin to read, backward and forward, an extraordinarily complex, still unfolding, still entangling narrative. The threads of a text, a "kind of halfway house between past and future," the critic Wolfgang Iser would write, always exist in "a state of suspended validity" (370), and such threads are particularly well-suited for today's avidly conjecturing, anxious to conspire "fan-scholar."

"Quality" television series, according to Robert Thompson's authoritative delineation, are "literary and writer-based" (15), and most readily, proudly, acknowledge their ancestors and their influences. When Twin Peaks' Black Lodge turned out to be in Glastonbury Grove and Windom Earle and Leo Johnson cozied up in their Verdant Bower, the Arthurian legends and Spenser's Faerie Queene were born again in a new medium. When Tony Soprano sobbed uncontrollably at the ministrations of Tom Powers' loving mother in the movie The Public Enemy, televised and filmic mobsters became brothers in the same gang-and genre.

Books, film, music, and television, as well as other manifestations of both low and high culture-to borrow the witty formulation of film scholar Robert Stam-are governed by the same principle as sexually transmitted diseases. To have sex with another is to have had sex with all of his or her other sexual partners, and every "text"- every new novel or short story, song, movie, or television series-is far from innocent; each potentially carries the "contagion" of every other text it, and its creators, have "slept with."

Lost is highly promiscuous, sleeping around with a wide variety of textual "partners." We divide these partners, one form of buried treasures, into three sections: Books on the Island considers texts which have actually put in an appearance on/in the beach, the hatches, or the barracks. Ancestor Texts3 offers accounts of Lost's literary predecessors. Must-See TV and Essential Movies provides a guide to the series' film and television ancestors.

BOOKS ON THE ISLAND
After All These Years
Susan Isaac's 2004 novel is one of several books Sawyer reads while convalescing in The Swan in "Everybody Hates Hugo" (2.4). It concerns Rosie Meyers, a Long Island English teacher suspected of murdering her husband on their twenty¬fifth wedding anniversary after she learns he has deserted her for a younger woman. Escaping the authorities, she sets out to discover the real killer.

Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
When caught reading Judy Blume's novel Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret ("The Whole Truth," 2.16), Sawyer downplays his interest in the pre-teen drama by calling it "predictable" and with "not nearly enough sex." Though Margaret is often referred to as the quintessential teen novel, with its focus on the title character's experiences with menstruation and buying her first bra, the novel is just as much about struggling with spiritual development. Margaret grows up with a mixed religious heritage-one Christian and one Jewish parent-and the novel follows her efforts to come to grips with her own beliefs. Menstruation and training bras aside, it is a story of religious quest.

Lost often delves into the importance of faith and the internal struggles between good vs. evil and scientific vs. spiritual. Like Margaret, the Losties have trouble deciding if they buy into spiritual mumbo-jumbo, and, like Margaret, they receive many mixed messages about faith-simultaneously bringing people back from the dead and pitilessly killing off members of the group.

Perhaps it would seem more fitting for a character like Locke, who frequently stresses the importance of faith and, even more frequently as of late, battles with his own ability to believe in the island's spiritual properties, to be seeking answers in Judy Blume. Perhaps Margaret would have taught him that it's okay to not be sure about every facet of spiritual experience-that it's okay to question a higher power.

Instead, it is Sawyer, the island's resident literati and bad-boy, who finds himself reading the coming-of-age novel, who has not yet had much affiliation with the island's spiritual properties, though he often struggles to find a balance between what is right and wrong. Even more, Sawyer's proclamation that the novel doesn't have enough sex further brands him as the most hormonally driven of the Lost clan. (He is the one, after all, who regularly engages in extramarital sexual activity-with Ana Lucia and Kate-on the island.)

When Margaret and her friends are desperate to increase their bra size, they chant, "I must, I must, I must increase my bust," a catchphrase that has surely raised the eyebrows of overprotective mothers across the world. But to Sawyer, of all people, Margaret's spiritual journey is predictable and the book's lust-factor dismal. - Sarah Caitlin Lavery

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Excerpted from Lost's Buried Treasures: The Unofficial Guide to Everything Lost Fans Need to Know by Lynnette Porter, David Lavery, Hillary Robson
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.