Image Credit: Mario Perez/ABCLast week, in my recap of “Dr. Linus,” I proposed that Ben’s Sideways story line was an allegory for his entire Island experience. I said that the school where he worked was a metaphor for the Island. There was one aspect of the school culture that I didn’t discuss in my recap: Leslie Arzt’s underfunded science department. We heard him yearn for some more dough for quality lab aprons and updated lab equipment, which he claimed hadn’t been updated since the 1950s. Initially, I thought Lost was poking at the early series mystery of antiquated, mid-century weaponry on the Island. Since then, we’ve learned that in 1954, the U.S. Army came to the Island to test a hydrogen bomb. I also had this thought: Perhaps Arzt’s bitching about the neglected science was speaking to and for Lost fans who’ve wanted rational, science-based answers for the show’s seemingly supernatural mysteries.

This past week, I began wondering if there was something more to Dr. Arzt’s complaints, so I applied some of my (dubious) brain power and did some research — and I had a couple epiphanies. For starters, I think that Arzt’s line about ’50s-era technology was just one of many little bits in the episode designed to foreshadow the arrival of Charles Widmore to the Island. After all, Widmore was there during the Jughead affair of 1954. But on the theoretical tip, I wonder if Lost was suggesting that something went awry with the flow of time beginning in the 1950s — that some kind of progress has been thwarted or stalled since then. In my recap of “Dr. Linus,” I suggested that Island destiny was subverted when a mystery man struck Locke’s teenage mom with a car. My theory has long been that the mystery man (my pick: Charles Widmore) was trying to kill Locke’s mother so as to prevent Locke’s birth. He didn’t succeed in murdering Emily, but Locke was born prematurely, effectively changing the course of history… although as we all know from the show, destiny will always get what it wants anyway. You can try to change it and you can have some degree of impact, but you’re only delaying the inevitable, and you’re probably only creating a lot of suffering and collateral damage in the process. READ FULL STORY »