The Radio Tower

I know what you are thinking: how am I going to get through the next week? Will I be able to focus at work? I just cannot wait for Lost! Well, do not fear. I have a list of exciting and REAL holidays to celebrate during the next week:

January 25 – Opposite Day
January 26 – Spouse’s Day
January 27 – Chocolate Cake Day
January 28 – Fun at Work Day and National Kazoo Day
January 29 – National Corn Chip Day
January 30 – National Croissant Day

And voila! It is January 31! Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet) will be on The View! Oh, and the Lost Season 4 premiere. What a wonderful day!

But first things first. Let’s return to where the majority of our characters were at the end of Season 3.

The Radio Tower.

Allow me to summarize my research:

Built when the DHARMA Initiative arrived on the Island, the Radio Tower's purpose was to broadcast the core numerical values of the Valenzetti Equation (the Numbers) until such time that one of the research projects on the Island had managed to change one of the values - broadcasting to the their backers on the outside that "the one true way" had been found, and that the Equation can be changed. The tower was to broadcast the signal on a secret frequency in an encrypted format known only to the backers of the Initiative on the outside.

In 1988, two groups in the Pacific began to pick up the signal from the tower without any encryption. The first group was a listening post in the South Pacific where Sam Toomey and Leonard Simms picked up the signal. While their official purpose was to monitor long wave radio frequencies, it has not been established what part of the radio band the signal they picked up was on. The second was a French research ship at sea which included Danielle Rousseau. She claims that her ship crashed on the island. The members of the French team went to investigate the signal and found the radio tower "up by the Black Rock". Here, she claims to have lived for a short amount of time after she changed the feed to broadcast her distress signal rather than the Numbers, hoping that someone might hear it.

Rousseau’s distress signal indicated she was trapped inside something when she made it to the tower, and that something or someone that had "killed them all" was outside. She also mentions not having the key, adding that someone named Brennan took them. She presumably later escaped.

Since that time, little is known about what happened to the tower. Rousseau says without any further explanation that it and her signal are now under the control of the Others. The signal from the tower was blocked by jamming equipment controlled from the Looking Glass station. The survivors trekked up to the tower in "Through the Looking Glass" in order to get a clear signal to call for rescue. Inside, Rousseau turned off her transmission. Naomi was then able to call her ship for rescue from outside the tower. Interesting note: a tape in the deck inside the Radio Tower was labeled Makee Ailana, Melveen Leed. Melveen Leed is a Hawaiian country singer. The song title Makee Ailana refers to a small Hawaiian island off the shore of Kapiolani Park, and the lyrics describe romantic memories of the island.

According to the Sri Lanka Video (which was a part of the Lost Reality Experience in the summer of 2006), the Radio Tower broadcasts to DHARMA's headquarters. The Hanso Foundation headquarters is in Denmark. Based on the assumptions that the DHARMA headquarters is located near the Hanso headquarters, and that the Island is located at the expected crash site in the Pacific, the radio signal would need to have a very long range to be useful. While shortwave broadcasts of only a few watts can sometimes reach that far by reflecting off the ionosphere, long wave broadcasts such as those Sam and Leonard were meant to be monitoring would require extremely large amounts of power to cover that distance—potentially nearing 1 million watts. While such stations do exist, they generally are operated by state-owned or large commercial broadcasters, with masts around 1000 ft high. This Radio Tower appears to be much shorter than 1000 ft.

The Radio Tower signal seems to be broadcast on multiple frequencies. Sayid picked it up with radio equipment and Naomi's phone picked up the distress signal audio as well. As a point of clarification, radio stations that broadcast a voice reciting streams of numbers, known as Number Stations and Letter Beacons, actually exist. They are thought to be broadcasting coded messages using one-time pads.

What happened when we last left the Radio Tower?

Day 93 - Thursday, December 23, 2004

-Sawyer and Juliet turn back towards the beach but tell Hurley he can't come.
-Locke awakens in the mass grave, wounded and unable to move his legs. He is about to kill himself when he sees Walt just outside the pit, who tells him that he still has work to do.
-Ben intercepts the survivors on their way to the radio tower. He tells Jack that Naomi is not who she says she is, and demands that Jack hand over her satellite phone or he will tell Tom to kill Sayid, Jin and Bernard. Jack refuses and hears three shots fired over Ben's radio.
-Enraged, Jack beats Ben mercilessly then takes him prisoner. Seeing his condition, Alex comes to check on Ben where she is noticed by Rousseau. Ben introduces Alex to Rousseau.
-The survivors arrive at the radio tower and Danielle switches off her distress signal. Naomi is making a connection when Locke arrives and incapacitates (and possibly kills) her by throwing a knife in her back. He pleads with Jack not to make contact and threatens to shoot him, but Jack refuses and Locke is unable to pull the trigger.
-Minkowski informs Jack that they will be on the island shortly.

General Questions I just want to throw out there

Going into the premiere with this scene in mind, we have a lot of new, unanswered questions:

1. Who does Naomi work for? Penny? Mr. Widmore? Someone else?
2. What are they going to do with Ben? He is their prisoner right now -- will he stay that way?
3. Why did Locke kill Naomi if he was unable to kill Jack, and he claimed he needed Sawyer's help to kill his father in The Brig?
4. What are the "forces stronger than anything the Island has faced in many, many years" that Ben warned about?
5. What was the power source for the radio tower?
6. John Locke's character has gone from expert jungle boy in Season One…to weak-willed invalid through season 2 and most of season 3…to Killer John at the end. Which John Locke will show up this season, and how will his new relationship with the island affect everyone else?
7. Where is the island? We know that even God, according to Ben, cannot see it. Desmond, a seasoned sailor, was unsuccessful in sailing away from it, but had no problem crashing there. So far, unless you crashed by pure happenstance, the only way the island seems accessible is by submarine. It took bundles of Penny’s money and a couple guys in an arctic listening post to even find the island.

My take on Find 815.com

For those of you who did not dive right into the find815.com mystery about a month ago, allow me to catch you up. I, in fact, have been a faithful find815 user since December 31. This is what you need to know:

Find815 started with a new, revamped Oceanic Airlines website. While watching the Oceanic video, the website was “taken over” by a man named Sam Thomas. His low-quality home video began to play and he told viewers to go to find815.com…that he had a story he needed to tell.

Once you arrived at find815.com, you soon found out that Sam’s girlfriend, Sonya, was a flight attendant on Oceanic 815. Sam is an IT guy for Oceanic, too. Sam is pretty upset that Oceanic Airlines has announced that they will no longer be searching for Oceanic 815…as he feels like there has been no closure on what happened to Sonya. He decides he will try to find the plane himself. (Note: This is a key difference from the story we got from Naomi on the island. She told our survivors the plane had been found and all the bodies were inside. Sam is telling us that the plane has not been found and the search is over. I’m still trying to get my head around the possible reasons for this inconsistency.)

Over the next three weeks, you follow Sam on his journey to find Sonya. He begins to get cryptic emails from the server “@maxwell-group.com” telling him to stop his search, that it will do no good. He gets fired from Oceanic Airlines for speaking ill of the company to the press. He does research on a place called the Sundra Trench, where he believes the plane crashed and is underwater. He does research on Amelia Earhart, trying to find out all the information about her disappearance.

Eventually, he decides to go to Jakarta and board a boat, called the Christiane I, that will be sailing out towards the Sundra Trench on an expedition to find a sunken ship. He deceives the captain of the boat on what his real purpose is – and is invited aboard to serve as the IT guy for the boat’s computer systems. The financier of the Christiane I’s expedition is also on board – and guess what? He works for the Maxwell Group. While he is up on deck, Sam enters his cabin and goes through his things. What does he find? Oh, just a few random things – like Penelope Widmore’s phone number, for example. And a bottle of pills with a prescription label from the Santa Rose Mental Institute. And strange green lights out in the distance on the sea. And that the sunken ship the boat is searching for is really the Black Rock, the ship marooned in the middle of the Lost island.

What does this all mean? Well, we have just completed the third of the four chapters of Sam’s story on find815.com. It is still unclear how he/Sonya fit into the bigger Lost mythology – and what, if any, role he will play in the show. I’ve wondered multiple times if he is going to end up on Minkowski’s freighter, but that might be too obvious of a leap.

Nevertheless, the find815 experience has been very interesting. If you have some time this weekend, I’d suggest looking around the website on your own. Who knows what clues you might find?

Coming Next Week

Stay tuned next week for our return to the preview/review format. Also, we will have information on the Lincoln-area watch party at Charlie’s house. We’ll provide the Dharma Beer and fish biscuits. Don’t know which apartment is Charlie’s? It’s the one with the large Dharma logo on the door.

Namaste,
-Maggie