Said would be very good in the Gulf Wars version of Apocalypse Now, (not Jarhead, although that’s also a good movie). The Men Who Stare at Goats also comes to mind. Intel and comms.

In Survivor: Borneo, and other seasons, the tribe-mates eat rat. They’re not eating rabbits on the Lost Island. Speaking of rodents, here comes the Island plague. The Losties begin lathering up, to prevent disease. Got to stop the boar rash. Avoid a genetic bottleneck.

Rousseau is a genius. She built her whole bunker and several bunkers – like my underground Minecraft lair, in 2011-2013. She is good at signal, SERE and EOD. She knows her weapons: can’t shoot an M9 without a firing pin.

Rousseau says there are no monsters. Hell is other people. Some people, on the island, are way scarier than random beasts, like polar bears or obscure smoke monsters. Sartre. Cut to Soldier Said executing a prisoner. Nadia’s real name is Nur, Arabic for Light.

There are polar bears on the island, but humans are the most dangerous animal. In a museum I went to, as a kid, they would show you a mirror, after asking you what the most dangerous animal was. They were holding up a mirror to the darkness of the human condition. The true heart of darkness.

As noted earlier, the B plot is a bamboo aqueduct. The Losties get a plumbing system, like in ancient Rome. Showers and bathrooms. Unfortunately, for Rome, many of those pipes, back then, were made of lead. Plumbum. Pb. That certainly made for some wild Saturnalia feasts, near the Winter Solstice.

The Staff Station reminds me of the caduceus, carried by the god Mercury, namesake of another dangerous element. This mystical staff is also often connected, mistakenly, to medicine. Moses lifted up a serpent, on a staff, to heal the Israelites of a disease, in the Old Testament.

Rousseau faced the disease that killed her expedition – an epidemic from the slave ship, the Black Rock, like smallpox blankets, given to the New World. The Black Plague followed one of the Crusades, and was featured in the film, The Seventh Seal. The flu outbreak, that followed World War I, took the lives of millions.

The Others. Polar Bears. Two shipwrecks. Dharma Stations. There are so many threats on the Island. It is a quantum space-time sinkhole, the bottom of the world. One step above the Netherworld, the Other Side. One Step away from the global spirit world. Rocket scientist Wernher von Braun believed that there was life after death. He created the Saturn V rocket that took us to the moon.

The Dark Territory. Smoke monsters. Remnants. The island is a very dangerous pocket dimension. Survivor: Ghost Island is the Lost Island. Rousseau’s expedition was there to study space-time. The Numbers (from the equation) involve all of the planet’s history and time. And of course, the Hatch is a time capsule.

The whole island, itself, is a conduit and a time capsule, from ancient times. It folded away, from the rest of the world, almost 6000 years ago, only to be reconnected by wormholes. The Lost Island is a place that is a medium. The spirit of that place is very strong, like Genius Loci, in ancient Roman spirituality. Some of the statues, of those spirits, that have survived, held up snakes, to offer pilgrims protection and healing. Snakes and rats. Mercury and lead.