I suppose all of this questioning of the bomb’s effects started in the foot. The four toed foot. There’s something that’s been bothering me about it… especially now after this premiere.

I thought I’d be satisfied just to learn who the statue was… but now I just want to know how the thing got destroyed. How did that thing end up being only one foot? We know it was there in the late 1800s… well, we know it was there when the Black Rock arrived, which was sometime in the 1880s.

So, sometime between then and 2003, that statue went down… but how, dammit?! How?!

So far, our strongest suspect has been “the Incident”, an atomic bomb blasting most of that thing out into the water. But if we’re to believe the Jughead explosion somehow caused it, then we’d have to reject this notion that the Jughead explosion somehow changed the course of histo- Okay! I know I know! I promised no string theory, no parallel universes! Sorry.

It’s just that… if the statue was toppled by that explosion, then the explosion couldn’t have prevented the crash… cause Sayid saw that foot in 2003. Sayid was on 815.

Well then maybe… Jughead didn’t topple that statue. Maybe something else did? Ben said the statue had been in that condition since the time he arrived on the Island. Of course, maybe he was lying, but let’s say he wasn’t. Let’s say that the statue was toppled sometime between the 1880s and the 1970s. Um, okay, that narrows it down a bit. What events happened between then that could be possible culprits?

Well, the US was using other nearby Islands as test sites for bombs in the 50s… perhaps a nearby test did the damage? Although it’s hard to believe a shockwave could reach that far, much less pass through the island’s protective bubble.

What else?

Well how about the Black Rock itself? Perhaps it smashed into the statue while making its way to the middle of the Island. But how on earth could it do that? Hmm.

You know, one of the things I’ve started to pay closer attention to are those “Previously on Lost” openings. Sometimes they show us quick clips of things that seem a bit unrelated to what we ended up seeing in the episode. I’ve started to use some of them as clues to figure out what the writers are actually trying to plant in our heads, remind us of. In this episode, I thought it was interesting that they showed us a small shot of the Black Rock sailing towards the Island. In an episode that seemed to deal with nothing pertaining to the Black Rock, I wondered why they didn’t just leave that shot out. A recap of our Man in Black criticizing the traits of mankind would certainly be enough to set up for the big reveal… the great truth that he is… Fake Locke is… Fake Alex… Fake Yemi… and Fake Christian were all… ♫ on top of old Smokey ♫. (<- I know you think I've been waiting months to sing that, but no... it's only been 2 weeks)

Last season I made a guess about Smokey... that the reason the dharma initiative were so concerned, almost fanatic, about burying their dead... was to keep their dead from being used by The Smoke Monster; a rule that was most likely part of the deal they made with the Others. A rule that most likely came from Jacob himself. Yemi, Alex, Christan, and Locke were all dead bodies that had not been buried. And so they became models for The Smoke Monster's different shapes.

"Okay okay, got it, you were right! So what about The Back Rock?!"

Well, I think we did see the Back Rock in this episode, represented in a few ways. And you can probably guess, if you've read some of my others posts here, I'm so eager to finally learn the back story of that ship. I feel like after 5 seasons, this has gotta be the one where we get at least one flashback aboard the Black Rock.

And if we do, one thing I can say with certainty... the writers are not bringing many more characters onto this show. I mean, Jeeze! In terms of sheer character count, this premiere was off the scale! Of course, that doesn't mean there isn't room for one more skinny, bespectacled, blogging, fun loving, Chad the Atlantean engineer... *sigh* but now that John Hawkes is on the show, I think my chances have gotten pretty slim. Regardless, there’s no way they can fit a whole crew of sailors. Which means we’ve already met the crew of the Black Rock. Is it Widmore’s group of Others? Is it these new folks at the Temple? Or is it a little bit of both?

Interesting thing about the Black Rock, though. It’s a trading vessel. And one of two things are carried in it’s cargo at any given time. Precious metals is one. Ooo, metal! That sounds interesting, right? Metal can be very magnetic, as we all saw at the end of last season. And that Island occasionally has a fixation on metal… as we also saw at the end of last season.

But don’t get too excited. Most likely, the precious metal that ship carries is gold. And unfortunately gold, like many precious metals, is not magnetic.

So what’s the other thing? Maybe there’s something else in that cargo that’s “drawing” the ship to the Island. Well how about the stuff they use to buy the gold… slaves.

“Oooo!!!!! Slav-!…… wait… slaves?”

“Slaves are not magnetic, Cabrera. What the hell are you getting at here?”

Oh slaves are not magnetic? Yeah, I suppose that’s true… but what about… the chains. Those cargo holds are filled with chains and other iron used to hold the slaves. Chains are certainly magnetic, aren’t they?

[UPDATE: These four pics were added to this post. Inspired by LINDYK's very interesting comment below.]
juliet chains

juliet chains

juliet chains

juliet chains

And we did hear something about chains in this episode too, didn’t we? Locke mentioned that it was nice to see Richard again… out of his chains. Is it possible Richard is on that boat? Is it possible Richard came to the Island as a slave?

We know that, somehow, Jacob “brought the ship”, and I can think of at least two ways he could have done that.

  1. by drawing the ship. Using the magnetic energy of the Island as a sort of fishing line to catch a batch of humans.
  2. by using a sort of advisor/emissary character to go out and fetch a batch of humans for you.

Personally, I like the first of those two ideas. But if you’d rather entertain the second, then it’s entirely possible that Richard, as Jacob’s long time “advisor”, left the Island, got himself captured as a slave… then convinced the captain of the ship that he knew the location of an Island worth more than all the gold in the world. It would explain why the ship sailed east rather than its scheduled journey west.

Okay, but that still doesn’t explain the four toed foot, does it? Because I said the Black Rock may have somehow been involved in its destruction. Well, before I get to my thoughts on that, we should probably revisit the biggest question surrounding the Black Rock: How did it get into the middle of the Island? How does a boat just wind up in the middle of an Island? Well if you’re Werner Herzog you make your cast carry it (<- joke for the film nerds. Bad joke.)

@SarahSamudre has another very interesting theory at her blog that you really must read if you have the time. Much of it deals with a strange time shift she noticed between the Black Rock and the Island, but here’s a little bit that jumped out to me:

the only way to get the Island and the ship to sync up is to do it the same way that Ben got it to disappear at the end of season four.

BLOOP.

That’s right. It gets moved in both time and space. And where it pops back up again, the ship is catapulted up from the surface of the sea onto the middle of the island, all at once in sync with the land and the time of the Island.

It’s the only way to explain the lack of damage to a 160 year old sailing vessel that is smack dab in the middle of a very large tropical island.

Um, Sarah, your theory is kind of awesome, but there’s one small detail you got wrong… it’s a BLIP not a BLOOP. Just saying.

Anyway, I like this theory, I do. I wouldn’t necessarily say the ship is lacking in damage, but as I mentioned in my last post, this theory does support one of my other musings regarding Ben moving the Islan- I’m not gonna mention parallel universes, okay??!! Anyway, if we were to combine Sarah’s theory with my #2 for how it even found the Island, I think we’d have a decent story for what happened here.

But… I’d like to stick with this magnetism theory for a bit, my #1… mostly because I think it may support two theories for the price of one. I mean, what a bargain, right?! Who says johncabrera.com doesn’t have the best deals in town on Lost theories… even if some of them are a little defective.

Anyway, let’s say there was a magnetic force strong enough to drag all the metal on that boat to the middle of the Island. That would have to be a pretty strong force wouldn’t it? Something on par with the release we saw last season at the Swan site.

And if there was a force that strong, I could image it pulling that sucker pretty fast. Anything in its way could be in serious danger. Perhaps a statue? Nah, that couldn’t work, a large wooden vessel like that would get smashed to bits if it hit that statue…

although….

… the anchor wouldn’t.

A huge iron anchor? That thing would be flyin! I wouldn’t wanna be in its path, no sir!

I suppose the only snag is the fact that during this period in the Island’s history, the Swan site doesn’t exist, and all that magnetic energy is locked up underground. It seems the only mechanism at this point that could release that kind of power would be.. our good’ole donkey wheel.

frozen donkey wheel

locke's frozen donkey wheel

And we’ve actually seen that donkey wheel recently… and what’s more, the statue was still standing at that very point in history when we last did. Locke was down in the well. He was getting ready to push the thing, while the rest of our Losties were above staring at the back of the statue.

Now I always assumed that the wheel Locke encountered was dislodged, shaking loosely, because of what Ben had done. But if you’ve read Part 1 of this post, you probably remember my realization that the Island is not traveling through time with them. The Losties are traveling through different periods of time in the Island’s history. Which means the shakey dislodged donkey wheel was a part of its natural history at this point. Which, of course, means someone other than Ben dislodged it. But who?

Well how about Jacob? Maybe he dislodged it. But why would he do that?

Well he is a fisherman… maybe he was just trying to catch some fish. Stay with me, here.

What if the wheel allows for different degrees of magnetic release. Pushing it as far as it can go would release such large quantities (amounts perhaps as large as what a nuke might release at the Swan site) that time is altered in some way. But perhaps… if it’s only pushed a bit, left sort of stuck in that position, the Island will release a very mild amount of it. Enough to slowly drag in vessels that are nearby.

A sort of makeshift fishing line, if you will.

And what might happen if Locke were to push a wheel like that right in the middle of it reeling in a catch?… well it might pull in Jacob’s fish a little faster than he’d hoped. And that fish might bring down his statue. It might also do some strange things to “time” on the Island.. might set some other “wheels” in motion.

Of course, to me, all of this lives at the heart of the show’s biggest mystery: What’s that Donkey Wheel doing there anyway? What is it?! Who in the world built that thing?!

……

*sigh*… who in the world.

Should I just say it? Are we really ready? Should we wait for the writers to develop it a bit more? Allow it to sound cooler than it will if I just blurt it out here?

…… Okay screw it!

In its most literal sense, this is a show about an Island with strange properties that challenge the limits of our science. An Island with immense pockets of power and gear-like devices that control them. It’s a show about ships and planes and other forms of transportation crashing on an Island. It’s about its crew and passengers stranded there, far from their homes. Lost.

And as we learned this week, much of this show is about the Smoke Monster… the Black Smoke… about his fairly reasonable desire to finally “go home”. Because it turns out he’s stranded too. On an Island he hates just as much as our Losties hate theirs.

But is his “Island” the same one as our Losties’? Or is he talking about an Island slightly bigger? An Island the size of, say… a planet?

If he is… where’s his crashed ship? Perhaps the better question is, what is his ship?

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