LOST: What's it all about, ABC? (Jerome A. Holst © 2005)

Since its debut in 2004, the ABC drama LOST - a cross between the CBS reality show SURVIVOR (that watches people survive the rigors of being stranded in tropical environments) and the vintage ABC TV series THE NEW PEOPLE (about a group of young people stranded on a island after a plane crash) - has created all sorts of buzz on the Internet and won an Emmy for the best drama on TV.

Of the many topics of discussion in chat rooms worldwide are the questions: What the heck is the show all about?, and where is the island?

Well, in this very short summary, here's what I think is happening.

The survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 are part of a mind manipulation computer experiment. They are really not on an island, but inside a specially controlled medical facility called LOST: Laboratory Observation Stress Test).

Each of the so-called survivors are volunteers. They freely joined an experiment conducted by a Think Tank who wanted to observe the behavioral characteristics of humans being placed under various stress situations.

To activate the project, a cortical stimulator injects a virtual dream sequence into the minds of each test subject and induces a shared community experience.

To play the game, the computer provides basic building blocks to allow a commonality among all the participants in the mind control experiment. For example, a place (the island), a community (the survivors), and a reason why they exist (the plane crash.)

Then, from time to time, additional stimuli is injected into the game (the monstrous jungle entity, The Others, etc.). This provides the researchers fodder to evaluate how humans interact in stress situations.

For example, the appearance of The Others and their apparent acts of kidnapping (dragging people away in the night) may be nothing more than the Think Tank's way of recalling a character from the game. The game then capitalizes on the fear generated from these scenarios so it can further evaluate the stress levels of the participants in the experiment.

Occasionally, the participant's real thoughts (or are they real?) intrude upon the mind manipulation experiment and these are seen as flashbacks of the individual's past lives - leading up to their joining the experiment. But overall, the virtual mind game is in control and usually maintains a tight hold on what a test subject sees, tastes, smells, touches and hears.

As for the cryptic numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42), these are probably data from the real world leaking into the program via the minds of the test subjects. Perhaps, the numbers relate to patient chart ID numbers associated with each of the test subjects and the number "815" is the room or building address where the mind control experiment takes place.

I assume that when all the experiments have been conducted, the virtual mind control program will be shut done and the participants will go home. Then the Think Tank will take the data from the experiment and analyze it for the future. Possibly spawning a more advanced version of the project with new participants.

Points of Speculation: I don't think anyone has actually died on the program. For the sake of the plotline, we are supposed to think that, but, in reality, there have been no deaths.

Some examples. When a character in the game dies, this is the Think Tank's way of recalling a character from the game whether a real participant or a computer simulation. The game only creates the illusion of death, so the other players can make sense of their demise. These death scenarios offer the Think Tank additional ways of measuring the stress parameters on any one individual or the group as a whole.

In theory, the project protocols could not really kill off any of the "real" participants because according to established psychological beliefs, if a person dies in their dream, they die in real life, So, the Think Tank researchers would not place "lethal" stress on its test subjects within the induced dream landscape.

So technically, the only ones who die are the computer simulation characters. Their deaths are used to elicit various emotional responses from the game participants. So the death of Shannon Rutherford (who was mistakenly killed by gun fire) was just a calculated computer test performed to gather stress data..

With the possibility that many of the survivors are computer programmed characters and part of the overall mind manipulation matrix, this might lead one to conclude that the number of real humans in the experiment is smaller than the overall population of apparent players in the games.

If one accepts my theory, as stated above, then the real fun will happen on the show's last episodes when the scriptwriters reveal what game participants were actually real and which ones were generated for the sake of the game.

NOTE:  This article may be linked for distribution to other Internet publications with the agreement that you credit the article to the author, Jerome A. Holst and mention its URL

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