LOST and Solitary

I have now got up to watching some episodes from season one of LOST that I had never seen until now. “Solitary” is familiar from flashbacks later on, but it was still interesting to watch it for the first time, and see how they set up viewers with ambiguities and false trails (as, for example, in the mention of Alex, Danielle Rousseau’s child, whose gender is never specified and thus one would assume that Alex would be a boy).

The sickness, too, was set up intentionally, as the hypochondriac with his spreading rash and Rousseau’s mention of a sickness. Presumably we are now to realize that what happened to the rest of Rousseau’s team was what happened to Minkowski and to Desmond.

That leads us to the biggest question of all: Why did Rousseau not become unstuck in time? She dies just in time for us to realize the need to ask that question. It will be interesting to watch these early episodes with this later perspective in mind. Even those who’ve seen them before should do this, since later information causes them to take on interesting new meanings.

I’m also wondering about Christian Shepherd. His coffin ended up close to where “Adam and Eve” were found. Were these people laid to rest in that cave because it was believed it would restore them to life, or in some sense cause them to have an ongoing existence? Or is one of the corpses Christian Shepherd, restored to life through the island’s power, but coming into contact with his own future self’s body, he created some sort of temporal anomaly (as would have happened if the bunnies came into contact in the Dharma video).