Lost Discussion Group: Who's On the Boat?

The consensus around the blogosphere seems to be that the people on the boat are DHARMA. But I'm not so sure, and here's why:

When Ben was talking to Locke about the DHARMA Initiative (just before he shot him) and basically bragging about killing 40 of them, he seemed to be genuinely ridiculing them. There wasn't a trace of fear, or even respect, in his voice. Of course, when he was talking about the people on the boat, the opposite was true.

So I don't think it's DHARMA, or at least not DHARMA proper. What would be interesting, in my opinion, is if DHARMA had split a while ago, into a "good" and a "bad" faction, the good guys having been exterminated by Ben, Richard Alpert and co. Wasn't that even hinted at in the Lost Experience?

Jonathan's right--Lost Experience was a good place to start thinking about who's on the boat. If the Hanso Initiative made enemies among its contractors and allies, as suggested in LE, then it could easily be Widmore, Mr. Paik, or some alliance of anti-Hanso forces...

Or maybe it's Joop and his liberators.

I don't think the boat will be in chilly waters. It's supposedly 80 miles or so from the island. Unless we're still working with the theory that the island is adrift in space-time and could be located anywhere. I'm not buying that.

The rest of Chaddogg's opening sounds great though.

If the only way to locate the island is through the submarine homing signal, Hanso/Dharma could have lost the island if Ben and Co. changed the signal.

Of course there's still the food drops. That's a puzzle, all right.

I can see Cuse & Lindelof taking the just-introduced concept of the flash-forward to illustrate who was responsible for getting people off the island and where our friends are now. And then turn the flashbacks on their end. I wonder if C&L will go so far to change the paradigm so that the episode stories now start off-island, and when we hear that familiar "rushing wind" sound, we go to an island-flashback?

Picking up where we left in the post-island timeframe... unlike Jack, Kate looks rather well-off. Might she now be working for Dharma, or whatever organization that "rescued" them? Rather than Sawyer [or perhaps her son, as some have guessed], I think the "him" that she has to "get back to" is someone we haven't yet met. But that person represents a considerable amount of power and Jack knows that that power/influence/means is the key to getting back to the island... hence his appeal to Kate, who reluctantly meets with Jack out of some sense of loyalty. That seems to me as to where the show is going... to get back and undo the damage that has been/is happening.

@John: I too don't believe the "he" Kate needs to get back to is her son--that doesn't seem indicated by the tone of concern/apprehension she has that "he" is expecting her. It's sounds more like she's caring for someone frail (but who, unlike a small child, can be left alone), or married to / living with someone sinister.

I just realized that my comments were more appropriate for the pervious thread -- sorry 'bout that!

As for who's on the boat... I'll go with the Hanso folks, and I think they're also behind the fake "found the plane with no survivors" story.

I think we are looking at divisions, or at least, information isn't being shared fully (arguably, the theme of Lost) amongst the Hanso empire.

Going back a few weeks, to Ben's flashback, I raised the issue that we don't know what the truth of the 815 crash is - was it Others, Dharma, or chance that caused 815 to crash. Now that we know the Others aren't truly Dharma, but they still get significant logistical support from Dharma/Hanso! They get A) the food drops B) information, at will, from the outside island (Juliet's video feed, info on the crash survivors), C) new personnel, both willing and unwilling (Juliet, original Sawyer), and the thing I don't see anyone point out is D) it is still the same sub from before the purge!

So, does their Dharma support include crashing planes into the island (unnecessary, since Dharma pays for sub transfers to the island, after all)? In my opinion, no, and here's why: a lot was made out of Ben saying "who knows, there could be pregnant women on the plane". Most people figured it meant that Ben was involved in plotting the 815 crash.

Here's my alternative theory: that was Ben realizing "what would my enemies do to keep me in the open / stop me from not simply killing all those Losties today (or once I got my list of good people away from them) and ruining his plot".

So here's my history of events:
1) The purge. Ben & "the natives" kill off the resident Dharma population. They do not declare independence, and Hanso in general believes everything on the island to be hunky-dory; logistical support (food drops, sub usage, Flame info transfers) continue.
2) The partial reveal. Someone in the Hanso system finds out about the purge (probably Mittlewerk, given his Lost Experience role as Great Evil). Ben and this person soon come up with some sort of agreement that Hanso will not be notified of the purge in exchange for some action on Ben's side. (I already theorized a couple weeks back that Jack might hold some Dharma tech hostage to get off the island - did Ben do the same to stay on the island?)
3) The plot. Something changes (or they get bored) and the outsider (again, probably Mittlewerk) decides to get things rolling. An active military operation would result in Ben doing something bad (destroying the Dharma tech he holds hostage in my example above), so something more subtle has to be staged, something that Ben can't immediately view as a violation of the treaty: crashing 815. Heck, if 815 was Dharma involved, then there could be bonuses we haven't thought of: Mittlewerk could be keeping Paik in line by holding his daughter (that would be Sun, we know now) hostage, etc. He looks into Ben's requests (Juliet as a pregnancy doctor) and staffs 815 accordingly (Claire, potential mothers (Sun, Kate, etc.).
4) Real time events. As I said some other week, in Mittlewerk's view, the Losties have played their part (whether one+ of them is Dharma or not, I don't know) perfectly: they've disrupted Ben's operations, killed off many of his personnel, blown up the ruse that Dharma is in control of the island to the outside world (Mikhail & the Flame) while indicating it was a hostile force doing it, and now (the important thing) invited outside help onto the island.

5) The future: the boat is some Hanso branch, but it may or may not be owned by whomever made the non-intervention agreement (see Naomi note below). Again, I think the future views will show quite a few Losties made it off, but in island time, no one gets rescued quickly: instead they have to wait/get thrown in "quarantine"/get thrown in ship's brig, etc., making us continue to wonder what happened.

* The big problem with my theory is that if there was a nonintervention treaty, Naomi's arrival appears to violate it. Which is why I don't think Naomi and the boat are part of the Hanso branch that made the agreement. Instead, they are a valid (to the treaty) reconnaissance force looking into the Flame explosion/declaration the hostiles have take over. Naomi & the boat crew may actually even believe the Faux 815 (crashed plane) cover story is true - original Sawyer believes it to be so, after all, which means that either he too is lying or that the cover story was indeed reported in the popular media. How that makes Jack able to resume his old life is even more of a mystery, though.

Tom,

In a recent recap special, the show's creators said definitively that Desmond's failure to push the button brought down Flight 815.

While I really think we start next season on the boat, I'm now not so sure about my theory on who is on the boat (although the return of Marvin Candle would be awesome). And I must preface this by saying I'm totally unfamiliar with the Lost Experience stuff (as is most of Lost's viewing audience, I'd argue).

Here's why - if Dharma/Hanso can drop food on the island, why can't it find it? If the Others go off the island to recruit, wouldn't Dharma/Hanso be aware of that?

My one thought is that part of the experiment was radio silence/isolation from the "real" world for the Dharma scientists on the island - if they were trying to save the world, maybe there was some concern regarding "tainting" the people on the island with the outside world's influence.

Under this theory, by the time of Ben's betrayal, he knew how Dharma operated, and realized that if he killed all the Dharma-ites, he could still perpetuate the myth that the project was ongoing (thus ensuring food deliveries, etc.) As long as certain things happened (transmissions, or a lack thereof, or something; the Hostiles living in the ex-Dharma houses), the Hostiles could live on the island in perpetuity without Dharma/Hanso interfering and learning the truth of the mass execution.

When the Hostiles learned they could not have children, this posed a problem for their utopia, but not an unsurmountable one. They could go to the mainland world and recruit a fertility doctor under the guise of the needs of the experiment - maybe even use Dharma's own money to pay for it. Dharma didn't have much in the way of records of who lived/worked for them on the island, so Richard and Ethan could "pose" as Dharma's recruiting team, even though they were in fact Hostiles.

What broke this facade up? 3 things:

1) Flight 815 crashes. Ben viewed this correctly as both opportunity (to study pregnancy amongst the survivors; a chance to recruit "good" people who would want to stay on the island, like orphaned children or those "healed" by it like Locke) and threat (people looking for the flight might discover the island, or the survivors might fight back enough to demand to leave and thus expose the island's existence and the truth of the execution). He contacted Dharma to tell them the plane crashed on the island but no survivors existed. Dharma (hoping to keep the outside world from finding the island and thinking all was equal either way) thus "staged" the second crash site to deflect searches from finding the island, and unwittingly aided the "Hostiles posing as Dharma-ites."

2)The Hatch explosion. Once this happened, Dharma had to know something was wrong since the control on the electromagnetic anomaly had exploded/imploded. However, this "anomaly" was what allowed Dharma to keep "track" of the island's location in the first place. Now they were clueless of where to find it for some reason. (Notice, no drops of food since the Hatch imploded, right?) Which brings us to 3...

3)Michael and Walt left the island. Remember, Michael and Walt only knew them in "rags" etc., looking like what Dharma knew of the "Hostiles". They only knew the Dharma's "play-acting" as the people in rags....but to people off the island (in particular, Dharma), this meant that something had gone wrong, and the Hostiles, not the Dharma volunteers, were running the island. Suddenly, they realize they need to find the island, and fast - their experiment has been in the hands of "enemies" all this time. When Michael and Walt left and got rescued, Dharma went searching for the island....right when Ben started blocking all transmissions to and from the island, and claimed the Looking Glass had been flooded. Ben had to figure out a way to keep everyone on the island, because if anyone got off, they could potentially lead Dharma back to the island and expose his treachery.

That is, at least, one possible (long) explanation for the "if Dharma is dropping food, why is it now looking for the island" question....

As for who is on the boat? My predictions:

1) Dharma/Hanso (see above)
2) Charles Widmore's team
3) A new, previously unseen enemy
4) Penny Widmore's boat (under some time-space continuum idea, whereby her conversation with Charlie occurred in the past when she had no boat there, but to fulfill that destiny she sends a boat there or something equally confusing).

There are two things that people seem to generally assume which I think we should at least question:
-that the food drops were DHARMA's work (it could be some kind of freaky automatic mechanism, for all we know)
-that Naomi wasn't lying when she talked about the fake plane crash

One teeny kibitz re: the resupply drops. Isn't it true that this season we saw a DHARMA manual (at the Flame, perhaps?) that said that the food drops were made every six months? (I have this in my head, but of course I'm not going to bother to go and actually look it up.) If so, there would be no special significance to the lack of further food drops since the hatch blast.

I would think the plane making the drops would have to be piloted, but I'm no aviation expert.

Oh, also, Chaddogg, re "what broke this facade up?": couldn't Locke's alert about the Hostile incursion in "Enter 77" also have tipped off Dharma/Hanso people off-island? Yes, we know it triggered the explosion, but that's not to say it didn't also send out some kind of distress signal.

Anon, yes, the discharge knocked 815 out of the sky. My point is you have to look at the chain of causation: it was Kelvin picking that day to leave on the boat -> his altercation with Desmond -> Desmond not inputing the numbers in time -> 815 dropping out of the sky.

If you think chance crashed 815, then it was just their luck that Desmond/Kelvin didn't get to the numbers in time.
If you think it was planned, then a) Kelvin picking that 108 minute period to "leave" was plotted out in advance (note: he says he is a Dharma employee), or b) Dharma remote viewers saw their conflict on the beach and timed the plot to work around it (I hate the concept, but the Whispers seem to be leaning that way).

Johnathan: as I said above, the Others get significant logistical supplies, and said supplies are likely to be funded by the Dharma institute (Mikhail has to wear his Dharma outfit at the Flame's communication post, and the sub is still the Dharma owned one).

Now, it is possible that the Others could get some, or all, of their funding from other sources. Science fiction is full of scenarios where "immortals" (e.g. Richard Alpert) enjoy the benefits of hundreds of years of compound interest. But if Alpert is their funder, why would they have to disguise themselves with Dharma logos, and get their supplies via Dharma owned methods (the air drops, the sub). I suppose you could claim that Alpert or his fellow "immortals" themselves own significant chunks of Dharma, and are just using one of their own tools, but even in that case, you end up with the same scenario Chaddogg and I mention above: Dharma/Hanso as a whole believes the Island is Dharma controlled, at least until the Discharge (and certainly over at Enter 77).

About Faux 815 (why will no one use my term): I too doubted her story, especially after seeing in the flashforward that Jack was able to return to his old life (i.e. how can he do that if they saw his corpse on the bottom of the ocean). But, again, original Sawyer also states that to be the case. So we have two cases:

A) Naomi and original Sawyer are both lying, for what can only be vastly different reasons.
B) The Faux 815 story is real. Whether it is to keep rescuers away from the holy island (Chad's view), keep rescuers away from the island while the Losties wreck up the place (my view), or some other reason, the result is the same: Dharma crashed a plane into the ocean with at least semi-reasonable body doubles.

Personally, I now am leaning back to B), for one reason: when Naomi's boat arrives, and the Losties say they are 815, the Losties all get incarcerated/shot, because Naomi's forces don't know Faux 815 was fake and assume they are hostiles.

Uhh, who says Dharma is looking for the Island? The airdrops and the sub (again, both Dharma branded) certainly know where it is.

Penny apparently doesn't know where it is, but I think it is extremely uncertain as to whether or not she is part of Dharma proper.

Naomi's(?) boat say they don't know where it is, but that could either be because:
1) They are not Dharma.
2) They are a Dharma branch, but not part of the organization cleared for Island knowledge.
3) They are Dharma, and know where it is, but due to something (e.g. my theorized nonintervention treaty) are not allowed to go there, at least until they get the hostile report of Enter 77 or Jack's rescue call.

@Tom Shaw: Agree with you on the airdrops--which makes me wonder if the boat can be Dharma--but did the existence of the sub necessarily mean contact between the Others and Dharma? Suppose the sub was docked at the island at the time of the Dharma massacre and the Hostiles just... kept it.

Also, and excuse me for being dense, but have we seen evidence that the Others are definitely getting Dharma logistical support? When the food drop comes, the Losties take it; the Others don't contest it and aren't waiting for it. They must not rely on it that badly, if at all. Richard's off-island recruitment activities certainly need explanation, but we don't know how they're funded.

Perhaps there are other bits of evidence I've just forgotten. Have we ever seen the Others eating Dharma cornflakes at their own encampments?

I like the idea of the hostiles wiping out Dharma and then assuming their role on the island. Let's say that during Dharma's heyday when Ben first arrived, that the only communication with 'mainland Dharma' and 'island Dharma' was through the Flame. The Looking Glass has always been blocking outgoing transmissions (and maybe incoming?). Why else would it have that capability? Ben and the Others didn't build it. Richard and the Hostiles recruited Ben after the Purge. Ben said something like "I was one of the few smart enough to stay alive" (To Locke in 'The Man Behind the Curtain'). That sounds like a definite reference to Mikhail, who we've seen stay alive and may also have switched sides to save his neck (was originally a Dharma employee). Ben also told Mikhail that he's "always been loyal" (In 'Through the Looking Glass'). If Mikhail stayed in contact with Dharma, it's plausible that the mainland contingent is under the impression everything is going as planned. After all, there was a school there. It's not too far fetched to think those students were being raised to take over duties on the island, like a commune.

The boat could very well be Dharma, having been tipped off by either Locke blowing up The Flame (no more transitions) or Locke blowing up the sub (no more recruiting off-island, which had been going on since before The Purge - it's how Ben and his dad ended up there). I still like the idea that the people on the boat do not have agressive intentions and that the 'death' Ben predicted would be for the Losties and the boat's crew at his own hand.

I'm pretty sure that the opening for the next season will have some kind of retro music. It will probably be with someone we haven't met yet. Most likely someone on that boat.

I can't believe we have to wait so long for the next episode. It's like waiting for the sequel to a movie. The next Harry Potter will be done by then.

I got to say that the last episode of Season 3 was amazing. I want to know who's funeral did Jack and Kate miss? I'm still a LOST fan.

Thanks for the link, Tom. Now to determine where they're growing the tomatoes and watermelons.

Here's what I've been wondering:

1) If the people on the boat are hostile, what will be the immediate implications? Will Jack and the Losties team up with Ben and the Others? What sort of role will the nomadic Locke play? What kind of death toll are we going to see?

2) If it's my theory that the boat isn't hostile, will the Losties and the boat's crew team up to fight Ben?

3) Will there be no direct conflict for awhile and if so, what plots will develop?

I have an issue about the statute with only the toes remaining. I think the people on the boat are looking for the island as Ben stated and based on the fear in Ben's voice as he was trying to get Locke to kill Jack they are people who Ben can not control through mind games. I think the statue is the key as to who the Hostiles really are and who "owns" the island.