the magic box “i can show you things. things i know you want to see very badly. let me put it so...
TRANSCRIPT
The Magic Box
“I can show you things. Things I know you
want to see very badly. Let me put it so
you'll understand. Picture a box. You know
something about boxes, don't you John?
What if I told you that somewhere on this
island there's a very large box . . . and
whatever you imagined . . . whatever
you wanted to be in it . . . when you
opened that box, there it would be. What
would you say about that, John?”
Ben Linus in “The Man from
Tallahassee” (Season 3)
The Magic Box:Lost’s Mysteries and Enigmas
The Magic Box
Lost
(2004-2010)
The Magic Box
“Science is the eradication of mystery.”--B. F. Skinner
Damon Lindelof (r) claims to be an admirer of BFS.
The Magic Box
“Paradoxically, the very serial elements that have been so long reviled in soaps, pulps, and other ‘low’ genres are now used to increase connotations of ‘quality’ . . . In television drama.”
“U. S. television has devoted increased attention in the past two decades to crafting and maintaining ever more complex narratives, a form of ‘world building’ that has allowed for wholly new modes of narration and that suggests new forms of audience engagement.”
From Jeff Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries”
The Magic Box
“Certainly, chief among Lost’s pleasures is the show’s ability to create sincere emotional connections to characters who are immersed in an outlandish situation that, as of this writing, is unclassifiable as science fiction, paranormal mystery, or religious allegory, all constructed by an elaborate narrational structure far more complex than anything seen before in American television.”
Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity”
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
Jason Mittell: a growing tendency to “push the operational aesthetic to the foreground, calling attention to the constructed nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off; often these instances forgo realism in exchange for a formally aware baroque quality in which we watch the process of narration as a machine rather than engaging in its diegesis” (Mittell 35).
The Magic Box
John Millais,
“Pandora’s Box”
The Magic Box
HURLEY: So, dude? What do you think is inside of that hatch thing?
LOCKE: What do you think is inside it?HURLEY: Stacks of TV dinners from the 50's, or
something. And TVs, and cable, some cell phones, clean socks, soap, Twinkies -- you know, for dessert, after the TV dinners. Twinkies keep for, like, 8000 years, man.
LOCKE [laughing]: I like Twinkies, too.HURLEY: C'mon, really, what do you think is inside?LOCKE: Hope. I think hope is inside. (“Exodus,” 1.23)
The Magic Box
“Perfect Circles,” Six Feet Under (3.1)
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
Inside Schrödinger’s Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
“[Lost fans are] like Talmudic scholars. They have created a body of scholarship about every episode.”
Javier Grillo-Marxuach (Lost writer, Seasons 1 and 2)
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Oceanic Airlines Website
The Magic Box
The Hanso Foundation Website
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The
Lost
Library
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
Lost
Mysteries & Enigmas
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Dharma Initiative
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Crash of Oceanic 815
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Adam and Eve
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Agelessness of Richard Alpert
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Ben’s Secret Door
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Ben’s Murder by Sayid
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Black Rock
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Dharma Initiative
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Blast Door Map
The Magic Box
The Owl Cave Petroglyph from Twin Peaks
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Fail Safe Key
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Four-Toed Statue
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Four-Toed Statue
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Frozen Donkey Wheel
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Hatch Mural
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Mrs. Hawking
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Mrs. Hawking
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Island’s Healing Properties
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Hit by a Bus
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Hurley Bird
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Incident
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Infant Mortality
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Jacob
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Jacob’s Cabin
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Jughead
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Lost Crosses
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Lost Crosses
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Mysterious Arrivals on the Island
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
The Numbers
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Numbers
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Numbers
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Orchid
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Orchid Lab
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Orchid’s Exotic Matter
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Room 23
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Brainwashing in Room 23
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Christian Shephard
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Sickness
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Sickness
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas:
Smokezilla
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Time Travel
•Time Travel by Consciousness•Time Dislocation
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Temple
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Temple
The Magic Box
Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Temple
The Magic Box
Lost
Conspiracy
Theories
The Magic Box
From LostpediaIn February 2007, Damon Lindelof opened a question on Yahoo! Answers about the nature of the Monster. The answer he and Carlton Cuse liked the best was given by user ar233. Out of over 8000 submitted answers, the winner was: “I think the Monster was originally a highly advanced security system designed to separate participants in the experimental DHARMA hatches. I think it was an effect that was designed to frighten people (smoke, noise) if they strayed too far from their experiment location. (A bit Wizard of Oz like) However, the electromagnetic force has mutated it - in the same sense as Desmond experienced time travel and can now see the future after exposure - and made it malevolent and able to physically grab things in its force (Eko, the Pilot, Locke). So in theory it may be able to be deactivated, if they can find the control room for it (which would be another hatch somewhere yet undetected).”
The Magic Box
The producers' explanation as to why they picked that answer was:
“We were amazed at the imagination and prodigious creativity applied to answering the question, what is the Monster? We have chosen our favorite answer. Not that's it’s the right answer. Sorry, but we can't really give away the ultimate secrets of the Monster quite yet. The answer we selected might be somewhat right, totally right -- or completely off-base. But we liked it and found it very cool and intriguing. Thanks to everyone who took the time to write in. We loved reading your thoughts -- and thanks for watching!”--Carlton and Damon
The Magic Box
Lost Conspiracy Theories:
The Casimir Effect
Hendrik "Henk" Brugt Gerhard Casimir (1909-2000)
The Magic Box
“Exotic matter with negative energy density is required to stabilize a wormhole.[15] Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever[16] pointed out that the quantum mechanics of the Casimir effect can be used to produce a locally mass-negative region of space-time, and suggested that negative effect could be used to stabilize a wormhole to allow faster than light travel. This concept has been used extensively in Science Fiction.”—from Wikipedia
The Magic Box
Lost Conspiracy Theories:
String Theory Tessaracts
The Magic Box
Lost Conspiracy Theories:
The 2009 Theory
The Magic Box
Lost Conspiracy Theories:
Atlantis
The Magic Box
Lost Conspiracy Theories:
The Collective Consciousness Theory
The Magic Box
Lost Conspiracy Theories:
Purgatory
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
He sank so low that all means for his salvation were gone, except showing him the lost people.For this I visited the region of the dead . . .
– Dante, Purgatorio (quoted as an epigraph to Walker Percy’s Lancelot, a book Sawyer is reading in “Maternity Leave,” 2.15)
The Magic Box
G-a-r-y T-r-o-u-p
P-u-r-g-a-t-o-r-y
The Magic Box
Lost
and Fan Dissatisfaction
The Magic Box
On Twin Peaks, Cooper’s recall (and ours) of the Man from Another Place’s dream insistence in episode 3 (April 19, 1990) that “that gum you like is coming back in style” in episode 17 (December 1, 1990) allows him to identify Laura Palmer’s murderer. Most of Twin Peaks’ phenomenal original audience was long gone.
Lost expects/assumes our encyclopedic knowledge of its narrative (in present tense, via flashbacks, and, now, in flash forwards) over its six year run.
The Magic Box
The Magic Box
The Idiot Box
or The Magic Box
The Magic Box