Monday, October 16, 2006

POST 12 - OUT OF THE BOOK CLUB


In the season premier, the Others sentenced Kate and Sawyer to hard labor “breakin’ rock in the hot sun” and many viewers have commented that it looked just like a scene out of the movie “Cool Hand Luke.” Yeah, it looked like that to us, too, but couldn’t it also be a scene out of Pale Horse Coming by Stephen Hunter, which is one of the books on the bookshelf in Jack’s office in A Tale of Two Cities?

This synopsis of the Pale Horse Coming plot gives us an idea of how they relate: “it is the story of a prison in the deep-south run by an aging madman with insane theories of racial purity and administered by a brutally efficient Stalin of a guard sergeant.”

We don’t know that Mr. Friendly could be described as a “Stalin of a guard sergeant,” but the upshot in the book is that “a multi-talented group of adventurers is assembled to assail an unassailable target or to perform an impossible feat” to free the prisoners. Could it be that Hurley has been sent back to rally the troops?

We think it’s an intriguing idea that what’s happening to the Losties are scripted scenarios hatched from the plotlines of books. We checked out a few of the novels on Jack’s shelf to confirm our theory.

In Clive Cussler’s Valhalla Rising a brilliant scientist who’s invented frictionless oil as well as a magnetohydrodynamic propulsion system is murdered by the all-powerful Cerberus Corporation, whose company logo is the three-headed dog with the snakehead tail. Cerberus sounds a lot like The Hanso Foundation, doesn’t it? And Cerberus is a confirmed security entity on the island.

Anyway, as the scientist’s daughter searches for her father’s killer we learn that dad had two extracurricular passions: studying the Vikings and their exploration of North America and Jules Verne’s character Captain Nemo and the “Mysterious Island” where he died.

If you followed The Lost Experience this summer, there should be some other bells rung by what follows.

The Viking part of the story (Rachel Blake had quite a lot to say about her fondness for Vikings) describes a pair of brothers, the younger of whom is named Magnus (Hanso). The scientist travels all over the country researching Viking runes (glyphs). It turns out the scientists’ house is built above a river-accessible cave (hatch) where the Vikings left their ships and treasure (technology). It’s also where, incredibly, the real proto-type of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus is discovered.

Cussler’s book also helpfully offers a synopsis of Mysterious Island: “…a group of castaways settle on a deserted island and are harassed by pirates. A mysterious unseen benefactor leaves food and supplies for the settlers. He also kills the crew of pirates who attack the settlement. Near the end, the settlers are led to a tunnel leading to a flooded cavern inside the heart of the island’s volcano. They find the Nautilus and Captain Nemo, who is dying. He warns them the volcano is about to erupt. They escape in time, as the island destroys itself, burying Captain Nemo and his fabulous creation.”

Nemo = Alvar?

In Catherine Coulter’s Eleventh Hour a priest who is part of a set of mirror twins is murdered by a man who is copying the scripts from a television show. The surviving twin is an FBI agent and in searching out his brother’s killer he meets Linus Wolfinger a TV wunderkind who runs the network. Linus is described this way: “…the Little Shit is really good when it comes to picking story concepts, and god knows there are zillions pitched each season. He’s good at picking actors, at picking the right time slots for the shows to air. Sometimes he’s wrong, but not that often. It’s all very depressing, particularly since he has the habit of telling everyone how great he is. Everyone hates his guts.”

We know that Ben Linus has been picking the books for the book club and most of the novels on that bookshelf are thrillers by bestselling authors. Now think of the flashback stories of the Losties. They’re all thrillers, too. Is there one that doesn’t include an intensely melodramatic plotline? We don’t know if they match the stories on the bookshelf, but we’ll wager that they at least mix and match. We also know that at least for Jack and Sun, the flashback characters they played last year scarcely resemble the ones in this year’s first two shows. They’re like different people; or maybe they’ve just been fed different scripts.

What kind of a world would it be where real life is cribbed from the bestseller list? We have no idea, except that it would be a very ‘hokum-pocum” kind of world where a person could survive a devastating plane crash only to rise from a wheelchair and walk, face off with a polar bear, or find a friend in an underground hatch. It’s the kind of world that when a plane falls from the sky, the guy in charge sends off his minions not to offer aid and assistance, but to make a list…kind of like a casting director. In other words, it’s the kind of thing that could only make sense in the otherworldly world of Lost.

Of course, this is just a theory. We won’t know for sure if the book club connection is correct until prom time…you know, when one of the characters starts exhibiting some rather alarming telekinetic powers…and Ben’s thriller gives way to Juliet’s horror.

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