'Lost': The Arrow points us in a new direction

We're just two days away from the third episode of the season, entitled "Jughead." That title is a huge clue as to what's about to happen. Clearly, Jacob=Jake Gyllenhaal. It was staring us in the face all alone. He needs Locke's help because he's stuck inside the New York Public Library, the only room in the northern hemisphere immune to the effects of massively subzero temperatures. Of course, in Lost terms, the day after tomorrow could actually be thirty years ago at this point. No wonder Jakey's been waiting so long. (Oh wait, he was in Jarhead. Not Jughead. Nevermind.)

OK, no more Jake references, I promise. But the episode's title does give me a chance to dwell on something I really haven't touched upon yet in my analysis of the first two episodes of this season: the apparent true purpose of the Arrow Station. I've compared the Arrow in the past as the Oliver to the other stations' Brady Brunch. Other stations save the world, house unlimited energy, communicate with the outside world, or most importantly, allow subjects to participate in hot sweaty cage sex. But the Arrow just kinda sat there, with a few knick knacks left behind, seemingly unimportant. Let's put it this way: if the Dharma Initiative were picking kickball teams, the Arrow would have been picked last.

But in the mind-bending opening sequence of Season 5, we finally learned its initial true purpose, as a seemingly put upon Pierre Chang filmed his orientation video for the station:


"Marvin" seems the pinnacle of calm in this film, but we know better. Behind the scenes, he's overtired, overworked, and seemingly annoyed that he has to do these videos at all. "I don't need a script. Let's go. I don't have all day," he tells the other Dharma employees. Some people have suggested that Pierre is just an actor, not a scientist at all, with his multiple names as proof that he's just playing multiple parts. I think the Arrow orientation video gives us another perspective: his name is "need to know," a phrase I'm using purposefully in conjunction with the military nature of the station in question. And it's that military nature of the Dharma Initiative that I think will come increasingly to light this season.

Let's look back at another one of Chang's greatest hits, the Swan orientation video. In this video, he's still going by Marvin Candle, albeit with one less arm. (More on this in a bit.) In that video, he talks about the Degroots, but also, "...Danish industrialist and munitions magnate Alvar Hanso whose financial backing made their dream of a multi-purpose social science research facility a reality." My emphasis there on munitions. Hanso was originally a weapons dealer, people. This is an important fact.

(Now, at this point, I have to stop and say I'm consciously NOT veering into any territory covered by the alternative-reality game "The Lost Experience." Not gonna get burned by going down that road. Until the show mentions the phrase "Valenzetti Equation," on air on ABC, I'm going to pretend like it doesn't exist. Which kills me, but there you have it.)

What we have in Hanso is a Tony Stark-type figure, albeit one with easier access to pølsevogns. We've long supposed that Hanso's family ties to the Island provided him with the ideal spot to place the Dharma Initiative, but perhaps we've overestimated his philanthropic nature. When you start to put all the pieces of the puzzle together---Chang's various names, the conscious manipulation of those inside the various hatches, the constant surveillance of New Otherton, the "need to know" basis of the work being done on the Island---and you start to get a sense that while scientific impulse may have ceded the Dharma Initiative, military-centric capitalism may have been its ultimate cash crop.

You could go all the way down the rabbit hole and say there's absolutely nothing scientific at all about the DI. The Degroots? Don't exist! Polar bears? Just brought for show! But that's both too cynical and too simplistic. To quote Chang, speaking as himself in the infamous Comic-Con video that set up Season 5: "I am the professor of theoretical astrophysics from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was brought to this... godforsaken island years ago, to conduct experiments to study the Kerr metric solution of the Einstein field equations..." There's no reason to believe this video is fake, and as such, we can infer with great certainty that Chang was part of the DeGroot's dream team to study in the world's greatest living laboratory. They just didn't know their dream would turn into a nightmare.

The DeGroots didn't realize what the wife and I realized when it came time to plan our wedding a few years back: if you have to rely on other people's money, you have to suffer some compromises down the line. CharlesGerald and Karen made a deal with the devil, essentially, and using the DI as a cover, Hanso put in place several operations that would exploit the Island not for benevolent research, but military superiority. This can be seen in things as overt as the Tempest (biochemical warfare), as indirect as the Orchid (limitless energy to power cities/countries/armies), and subtle (military-spec weapons in hatches and on persons such as Goodwin).

With the Arrow, and the appearance of the soldiers near the end of "The Lie," we have our first overt reference to direct military presence and intervention on the Island. The Arrow is nothing if not a war room (minus the hilarity of this one), in which ostensibly special op forces not only took care of the external threat of the Hostiles but also quite possibly maintained martial law behind the veneer of the namaste-centric lifestyle espoused by the DI. In other words: the DI sought to create Woodstock, and ended up at Altamont.

The soldiers' instant and abusive level of violence towards Juliet and Sawyer in "The Lie," assuming they are part of the DI Super Solider Program, only strengthens the notion of martial law I suggested above. A lot of people saw them threaten to cut off Juliet's hand and went, "Oooh, Montand! Montand!" Well, no, Montand lost his arm, not his hand, and only just before learning Darth Vader was his father. (Maybe I'm getting that mixed up.) But I thought of Chang, not Montand. I've long thought Chang lost his hand in the Incident, but the supposed Incident in question looks to have taken out a mighty edifice above the Orchid. Were Chang near that, he wouldn't lose an arm: he'd be vaporized or turned into Dr. Manhattan.

What's more likely now is that Chang disobeys an order from the military personnel, one that he knows will cause untold harm, and gets a hand removed for his troubles. Thus, the Incident, and thus, the new orientation film for the Swan. This new orientation video replaces the old one (would LOVE to see that baby filmed) and features a newly hobbled (and chastened) Chang.

It's perhaps not unsurprising then that Widmore uses a special ops force to take over the Island, in that the original one ostensibly died in the Purge. It "worked" once, why not again? Then again, as I mentioned in my recap, perhaps not all of them died. Maybe at least one got off, changed his name, and spent his later years earning enough money to make an attempt to reclaim what's rightfully his. All in the name of finishing the mission decades in delay, long unfinished.

That, or it's the Jake Gyllenhaal thing after all.

What do you think about the increasing military aspects of the Dharma Initiative? Is it less "Peace and Love" and more "Guns n' Ammo"? Leave your thoughts below!

Ryan also posts every 108 minutes over at Boob Tube Dude, then peruses Zap2It's Guide to Lost Facebook group. He also encourages you to subscribe to the Zap2It's Guide to Lost Twitter feed.