Unanswered LOST questions?

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Who might have told him?

 

I disagree. I think you are the one missing the point here. There were only a few people who time traveled. In order to get to the scene where Friendly knew Michael wouldn't die, you have to assume that someone told either Friendly or someone else in the past a very specific piece of information about Michael. Why would they do that? And when did they do it? You can explain it away any number of ways by assuming something happened off screen, but you can do that with almost any "Unanswered LOST question". It doesn't contradict anything, but it's an unanswered question / plot hole nonetheless. Your explanation doesn't necessarily have to be the correct one. You are making a big assumption in order to state that this question is answered.

 

Consider this, though - no one had to specifically tell Mr. Friendly that Michael would be doing something in the future. It's possible that Mr. Friendly (and the Others) 'knew' that, if you couldn't die, that was because the island wasn't done with you yet.

They don't even have to know what that means. And they might just be making a BS explanation. But if they saw it happen a couple of times (someone couldn't kill themselves, and then finally someone was able to die), maybe that's what they used to explain it away.

 

But then it wouldn't fall into the category he posted / be related to Faraday's statements and remains a mystery.

 

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No, Alpinemaps has it right. Mr. Friendly didn't have to know the real answer at all, or even vaguely suspect it, for it to be the real answer. It works perfectly well even if Mr. Friendly has no concept of it, even if someone lied to him with something like "the Island isn't done with you yet" or even if he made that part up himself. What he said, what he believed, what he was told, has nothing to do with it. If he thought Michael couldn't die because he ate a cursed butterscotch pudding, that wouldn't change it either.

Michael couldn't die yet because he didn't die yet. The same way Sawyer couldn't leave a note for Desmond to prevent the plane crashing, because the plane did crash. Whatever happened, happened.

Trans-temporal dynamics is so much fun.

 

Complete nonsense. Friendly stated that Michael couldn't die using more or less the direct reasoning of the "Faraday rule." He didn't say anything about butterscotch. Therefore it DOES matter what Friendly knew or what the person to informed Friendly knew. There is no explanation for it that doesn't involve gigantic leaps of faith about what the VERY FEW time travelers did off-screen that they would have no real reason to do. This is by definition a plot hole if we take your assumption at face value.

Even if [unknown character] had told Friendly that Michael couldn't die because of butterscotch, then [unknown character] would either have known about the "temporal dynamics" relating to Michael (directly or indirectly) or gotten outrageously lucky in his assumption about butterscotch. No matter how you try to frame your position, it boils down to a gaping plot hole, and likely ultimately requires someone to have knowledge about what Michael did and to relay that knowledge to someone else. Which requires gigantic assumptions that we have no basis to believe.

People died or were killed throughout the series. The only way Friendly would have known that Michael couldn't die due to "temporal dynamics" would be if he had either:

A) Inexplicable knowledge about something that would happen in the future that he directly acquired

B) Inexplicable knowledge about something that would happen in the future that he acquired by way of a time traveler who traveled to the past

 

I'd have to disagree? He doesn't have to have knowledge at all.

It's as simple as I said - Mr. Friendly sees some people die. He sees other people that don't, even in circumstances that suggest they should. He knows the island is magical. Why can't it be as simple as 'well, he didn't die, every time he tries to kill himself, something keeps it from happening - it must be the island preventing it from happening.'?

 

I see. So in this interpretation, Mr. Friendly got sent out into the real world to visit Michael and follow him around without any prior knowledge of Michael's importance? And, though he was trying to recruit Michael the whole time, he let Michael try to kill himself repeatedly? Please fill in the gaps here... because I can't quite understand what the motivations are you are implying.

 

It's been awhile since I've seen the episode, but...didn't Michael repeatedly try to kill himself over the course of a couple of months?

If so...then the Others could have been watching him. Noticed that he had been trying and failing, and said - 'oh, the island must not be done with him - see, he can't kill himself.'

They don't have to know explicitly why it's happening, just that it's happening.

I was just speculating, and probably should go back and rewatch the episode before speaking with any real authority. It's just my gut feeling that they didn't have to have a time traveling knowledge to know that Michael was important. Maybe they were watching him because he left the island, and they wanted to make sure he didn't go blab to the world about it?

Let me ask you this - if you think that Mr. Friendly had to have time traveling knowledge - what in the show leads you to believe the Others knew about time traveling? If they had known about it, explicitly, wouldn't they have said something about the group that ended up with Dharma?

 

If this is really what you think is logical, that because Friendly said something that means that the truth of the universe's causality depends on him being wrong or right, then I suppose we've exhausted the discussion.

 

No... I just think that the answer to why Michael couldn't succeed doesn't have to be because of the Faraday time travel explanation. We don't have direct evidence of this, and it makes less sense to me. The odds are astronomically low that you would have such random, crazy luck that no matter how many times you legitimately tried to kill yourself, you would fail. It also leaves open the question of why Friendly let events transpire as they did.

Outrageously low probability events are what is required for the Faraday explanation, because all it really means is that you "didn't" succeed, which is outrageously improbable. So then, not only do we have some strange behavior by Ben and Friendly, now we also have this weak writing wherein Michael just happened to get lucky many, many times in a row when trying to kill himself.

If we assume it's something more like the various dynamites from season 6, it seems a bit less out there.

 

There was a time when I thought Jacob knew the future and gave his instructions based on this knowledge. Or MiB if he was the one telling the Others what to do at this point. Then later they seemed to be way less omniscient than I had thought. But we still don't know what they did with the lighthouse. Did it see other places in the present, past, or future? Another unanswered question.

 

It's a pretty clear requirement that MiB be able to see faaaar ahead to be able to plan Jacob's death, and for Jacob to be able to see faaaaaaaaaaaaaaarr ahead to be able to plan MiB's death after his own, using Desmond and Jack as tools.

Yet you're right, Jack didn't seem particularly omniscient, and said flat out to others that he had no idea what was going on.. (he "thought" Desmond was a weapon based on the idea that Jacob brought him there via Widmore).

Maybe the lighthouse was how Jacob and MiB were able to look into the future/past to make their plan? Maybe MiB made the lighthouse (like he made the donkey wheel).. He crafted his plan and Jacob crafted his on top of that.

Damn this stuff should really be in the finale episode thread. Gonna be a pain to find 6 months from now when this comes up again.

 

The Hurley bird

Allana beat up in the hospital and I don't recall a reason why.

Infection - what was it, what causes it, is there such a thing? If Sayid and Claire were infected; it looks like it cleared up on it's own. I remember after after Aaron was born that Charlie gave him an injection from the hatch. How did he know it was not poison? Really seemed irresponsible to give a baby a shot when you have no idea what's in it.

Locke's first encounter with the smoke monster in Season 1 - We know they met and after that Locke said something about seeing the heart of the island or something like that. Then he seemed to be able to predict rain and find things like the hatch and crashed plane. Wish I could see what he saw in the black smoke. Did MIB actually speak to him and if so what exactly did he say?

So we got the one line explaination after 6 seasons that the whispers were dead people stuck on the island. Why are they stuck? Why did they whisper when smokey was about to appear? Are the saying Run Forest Run! or are they ratting out the location of people to smokey?

There was a scene in Dharmaville where they were discussing a book. I think was the episode where the see the plane crash. One of the people discussing the book was "Amelia". Was that supposed to be Amelia Erhart?

Why is it necessary to have a human being keying in numbers on a computer to dispell energy build up? Couldn't you just build some circuitry to automatically do it?

Why doesn't MIB / Smokey have a name? The writers say it's not important. Smokey's been on the show since the beginning, give him a name! Don't they realize that by not revealing a name they are making seem that it would be a big reveal in the finale? If his name is not important then just call him John Smith and be done with it.

Don't call me a hater. I loved the show. The finale was good. I just wish that they would have revealed what the Origin of the island was.

 

I don't really recall the reason for that entire group that was supposed to protect Jacob. Had they ever protected him in the past? They certainly didn't seem to do a good job protecting him in the episodes we saw.

Back at the time, we assumed the smoke monster was some sort of nano-particle technology - either alien or military in origin - and seemed to have mind-reading intelligence enough to show you important memories from your past as we saw when Eko encountered it. The Eko encounter reminded me of the water tube encounter in the movie "The Abyss". Now that they've gotten into the "Man in Black turned into Smoke" explanation, who knows?

At the time, many thought this was just another Dharma station for experiments to be run and the number sequence didn't really do anything. It was more of a psychological experiment on the sequence enterers. When they actually let it count down and something really happened, yeah... dunno.

In the original casting call, scripts and various mythology stories the light/dark brother story is pulled from, it is reported the Man in Black's name is Samuel/Samael. Too much to go into here, but he seems to be a pretty popular character in Judaism as well as the Lilith Sumerian myths.

I figured what happened is they didn't use his name for a few episodes, then it turned into a "thing" and the writers rolled with it.

 

She wasn't supposed to protect him - she was supposed to protect the candidates.. I'd have to go back to see if she actually did any protecting of any of them before dying, but she probably did something (or, the very act of her returning with Sayid was important..)

 

Everything and more you'd want to know here:

http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Ilana_Verdansky

Just seemed kind of pointless to build up that character with the Jacob backstory just to have her Arzt herself off.

Unanswered Llana questions:
* Where and when did she first meet Jacob?
* When did Jacob's visit to Ilana in the Russian hospital take place?
* How did she get severely burnt?
* How does she know so much about the Island?
o How did she know how to find the cabin, the foot and the Temple?
o How did she know where the secret passage was in the Temple?
* What is the significance of her question about the statue?
o Why does Richard respond in Latin?
* Why was she unconcerned while handling the dynamite that was to kill her?

Also wonder why she asked them to burn Jacob's cabin down that seems to disappear and reappear at different locations on the island. Does fire/burning it down prevent it from doing that any more?

 

I still don't get why Ben couldn't be in the church just because he was originally intended to be a 3-episode arc and wasn't in the original scene as imagined six years ago - nobody else had any lines in the church, so why is it ok to let Juliet, Desmond, Penny etc in and not Ben? Makes no sense. Also, I would think Miles was important to Sawyer - they spent three years together in the 70s on the island (far more time together than many of the others). I guess just because his eventual life soulmate was someone not on the island, so he wanted to be with her (or him - not that there is anything wrong with that!) when it was time to move on...

But overall, while the Bad Robot employee's info is interesting to know the scene was imagined years earlier, that's about the extent of it - not the specifics of who was in the scene...

 

I assume that Jacob filled her in about the temple & cabin. Not sure why they use Latin unless it just was an answer past down by Jacob whose first language was Latin.

I do wish there was more of explanation about "Jacob's cabin".

It sure seems like they planned more with the Illana story line but ran out of time. Don't know how you manage to run out of time when you know exactly how much time you have left to wrap up the story.