The long awaited revelation of what’s down the hatch arrived in last week’s episode of Lost, titled “Orientation.” Those watching the highly-rated show (Wed. nights at 9 EST, ABC) have been strung along the whole first season wondering about the strange and dangerous phenomena on the mysterious island our forty-something plane crash survivors must confront each week. These include polar bears, invisible monsters, weirdly kinetic and powerful wisps of smoke, and the Others, a malignant band of humans who were already on the island and who all seem to have it in for our heroes.
In last week’s “Orientation,” we got a cluster of clues as to what’s down the hatch at the bottom of the long shaft as several of the series’ characters braved the underground shelter. They discovered a large bunker with living quarters, stores of food, weapons and other supplies plus very old computers under a geodesic roof. Desmond, the sole occupant of the bunker tells them he has been down there for three years after he was washed ashore. He was found by someone who had been down the shaft entering a numeric sequence into an old Apple II computer and hitting the “execute” button every 108 minutes for fear of–what? Convinced of the necessity of continuing the practice, Desmond took on the solitary task of hitting the button after the first occupant died. He implies something terrible will happen if the button isn’t hit. To explain, he has Jack and Locke watch an old training film appropriately titled, “Orientation,” made in 1980. Locke finds the film can behind a copy of the novel, The Turn of the Screw,” a Henry James ghost story about a governess who thinks she sees dead people (as Jack has of his deceased father).
The short film is a plethora of facts about the Dharma Institute, a counter-cultural research group begun in 1970 and dedicated to pursuing unorthodox experiments. It is funded by a reclusive munitions tycoon/philanthropist, Alvar Hanso. The best way to tell you what they see on the film is to show it to you. Within days of the episode’s broadcast, this website was discovered online. Yep, the producers of Lost are having great fun with their mysteries by adding an online component. Explore the site and when you get to the “Active Projects” screen, move you cursor to the area under the last item on the list, and you should see the words “Dharma Initiative” appear. Click on this and watch the film, and you will agree with Locke, that, “We’re going to have to watch that again.”
Of the several clues that the film offers, one of the most intriguing is that the Dharma project is based on the work of B. F. Skinner, the controversial behaviorialist whose “Skinner Box” experiments demonstrated that rats could be conditioned through the use of pedals or buttons that, when pressed, produced food pellets. Through the use of reward or its withholding, the rats’ scientist-guided behavior was conditioned. This research was the basis of Behavior Modification therapy.
Now that the survivors know that the numeric code must be entered within a set time and a button pushed, they have committed to being at the Apple II around the clock to push the button in order to avoid some unknown but possibly catastrophic consequences. Are they in a giant Skinner Box set up to test, guide or condition human behavior? Or will they decide they need freedom and dignity, and reject this scenario, proving that humans can risk changing their patterns of behavior independent of outside stimuli?
Lost has succeeded as a top-ten series in spite of its genre-defying nature. Most series fit somewhere within the genres of drama, mystery, comedy, science-fiction, horror or fantasy. Lost seems to have elements of all of these but lacks the formulaic conventions of any one category. It keeps the audience guessing as the strange plotlines unfold revealing complex and compelling characters. Audiences conditioned to staying in safe and familiar genres have shown they can think outside the box and be rewarded with some highly creative storytelling that asks questions about human nature.
