Lost Time

There are three not-so-subtle clues about the concept of time embedded in the "Not in Portland" episode. No doubt the writers are throwing something important into our laps.

Mittelos Bioscience - The producers of the show have come out and said on the official Lost podcast that "Mittelos" is an anagram for "lost time." They've also alluded to the fact that time behaves differently on the island.


A Brief History of Time - Aldo, the guard that was watching over Karl was reading this book.

"Only fools are enslaved by time and space" - clever fans have run the entire room 23 scene in reverse, and have discovered these words spoken by a woman in the audio
(check it out here).

Finally, what exactly are the Mittelos recruiters asking Juliet to do? They show her a slide of a womb CT sequence. Juliet asseses that it is a human womb, and judging by the scan, most likely of a barren patient in her 70's. However, she is told that the woman is in fact just 26 years old, and that she could find out why if she joined them.

Ok, pause on all of these things for a second while we revisit something that happens in the book "Lost Horizon." The people who live in the valley of Shangri-La age very slowly. But in the end of the book, one of the women leaves the valley, heading into the snowy Himilayan Mountains. She seemed about 19 years old when she was in Shangri-La, but now that she's left, she begins to age very quickly, until she becomes a frail old woman.

Lost time indeed.

(Human) Nature vs. Technology

Then why the need for a good fertility doctor?

So we know there's some sort of natural phenomena on the island, some sort of healing /geomagnetic energies. My thought is this: what once was pure is now tainted. Before anyone discovered the island (during the time of the four-toed statue), there was an indigenous society living in harmony with the natural tendencies of the island.

But the island has changed. The indigenous people have been wiped out. The Hanso Foundation (along with the help of Widmore Labs), worked on ways to profit from the island, trying to find ways to harvest the natural health benefits, trying to find what made it tick, thinking that if they found the answers to Shangri-La, they could find the answers to the world's problems. But somehow it went too far, the natural energies were f**ked with, and we now have unnatural side-effects.

The incident.
The need for a smoke monster.
The need for the swan to regulate a fluctuating and dangerous geomagnetic field.
The need for quarantine and a vaccine.
The need for a spinal surgeon.
The need for a fertility doctor.

Room 23

The brainwashing room was incredibly interesting to me, and it brought lots of thoughts to mind. Notice the re-occuring theme on this show of "good people" vs. "bad people." I think that Jacob's list is what divides people into one or the other of these camps. If you're one of the others, and you're not on the list, not one of the good ones, or perhaps it's undetermined, then you get sent to the brainwashing room to get converted. If it worked for Ted Haggard, it can work for Karl.

My shangri-la theory is that they're trying to create/maintain a utopian society. No room for "the bad ones," which is why they feel perfectly justified in killing those that they deem bad.
If you don't want to kill them, you brainwash them. Or perhaps more importantly, you get them when they are children, before they can be spoiled by the ills of society, and use dharma-sponsored psychological conditioning.

Also note the continued use of Buddhist images and eastern philosophical text. Again, this connects to the eastern philosophies that Shangri-La is founded upon.