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The LOST Report

My Serious, Logical Thoughts on The Economist
Greetings, welcome to The Economist.

TITLE
Refers to the boss of the girlfriend of Sayid. Although Sayid says that he is no economist. But then again. Elsa is not the innocent person she claims to be. Sayid has been setting her up and all along she was setting him up as well. The scene where she shoots Sayid shows that the group of people Sayid is coming after now know who he is and what he is doing. Why does Ben say that it is good that they know Sayid is coming after them? Would it not be better to have the element of surprise, or is Ben that caught up in revenge. Perhaps he just want them to seat and live in fear. That seems logical. What was the incident Ben referred to when he said Sayid thought with his heart and not his gun?

OPENING
This may be the first episode beginning showing the eyes of someone closed. Usually they start with an open eye. The Sayid shuts the eyes of Naomi.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE OTHERS GONE, LONG TIME PASSING
Notice that the people of Ben do not make an appearance or try to save Ben. The last we saw of the people of Ben they were on their way to a place called the temple. Whatever that means.

OCEANIC NUMBER FOUR
Sayid is the fourth member of the Oceanic six to be revealed. Also Sayid is the first of the six to leave the island. Consider that Desmond will never be a member of the Oceanic six since he was never on the plane. Same goes for Juliet. It does not mean she will not leave the island. So there will be more than six people rescued. Also do not forget about Michael and Walt. They probably have aliases by now and are not members of the Oceanic six. After all, Michael is guilty of cold blooded murder and Jack and particularly Hurley would rat him out. Recall how much Hurley liked Libby and Michael killed her. So the grand total may be Oceanic six plus Juliet, Desmond, Michael and Walt. This is a total of ten. Just thought I would point that out. ABC might be setting us up to believe that only six people from the island get to the mainland but in reality there are more.

YOU KILL ME
Then man Sayid shoots on the golf course in Seychelles seems to be Italian. It looks like this man knows who the Oceanic six are and that the are his enemies. Perhaps this man knows the truth about what really happened to flight 815. For Sayid to kill this man he must have done something very awful. Is this the same Sayid who felt guilty about torturing Sawyer and went off on his own on the beach? (he was then captured by the French chick). When Sayid tells Elsa that he is a headhunter this could have a ring of truth in it. Although Sayid explains that it means he is a corporate recruiter, it could also refer to his secret job of being a hit man. He is lying but he is not. The answer to the question why would Sayid do this comes from Ben at the end when he says to Sayid do you want to protect your friends or not? Sayid kills to protect his friends on the island. By the way, why would the economist insist on using a pager and not a cell phone in this day and age? Then later we see Elsa talking in German to someone on a cell phone? Her boss? And just who is the economist? How is Alvar Hanso involved or mister Widmore or Penny Widmore?

FRANZ LISTS
Sayid mentions a list of people that apparently he is supposed to kill. We have seen the idea of a list several times. Lists were mentioned by Ben and the others. On the day 815 went down Ben tells Ethan and Goodwin that he wants lists in three days. Ana Lucia finds one of these lists when they are attacked by the others. But what do the lists mean? We have been led to believe that the lists contain the good people on them. But here the list that Sayid refers to seems to refer to bad people. Obviously since Sayid is killing them. Do not forget the light versus dark theme introduced in the pilot which resurfaces now and again. Could it mean two forces good and evil fighting for control of a very special island?

AM I ON THE LIST?
Who are the people on the list? Is R.G. the initials found on the bracelet of Naomi on the list? Are these the same people that sent a whole freighter after Ben?

FREIGHTER
We have never actually seen the freighter and have only the word of the freighter people that is a freighter. What if it turns out to be something else? Did anyone see that the Black Rock was really a boat before we saw it? LOST is famous for its twists.

TIME DILATION
Faraday obviously has some idea about the strange properties of the island since the payload he had fired to himself contained a clock which he previously had synchronized with another clock he had on him. The clock from the payload reads 3:16 while the clock with Faraday read 2:45. That is a 31 minute difference. It would seem that the payload has been moving around out there for an extra 31 minutes while time stood still on the island. In another dimension? But if that is true then how could the freighter detect the payload hitting ground zero in real time? Time dilation or time slowing down is a scientific fact and is part of the theory of relativity. It can occur when something moves very fast like near the speed of light or when an object is near a very large gravitational field. The problem though is that time slows down for the object moving. The payload has a future time on it not a past time. This would indicate that the whole island is moving at the speed of light or the island is the source of a giant gravitational field. Neither makes any sense since the speed needed to achieve a 31 minute difference would be astronomical and the gravitational field needed would crush everything on the island. I would guess that time is moving more slowly on the island but then there is the problem as to how Faraday can communicate with the freighter in real time. Time seems to be passing the same for the freighter and the island. One way out of this dilemma is to suggest that time is altered at some point just outside the island like at a barrier but not on the island itself. This barrier might effect objects made of mass but not radio waves. The helicopter passes through a hole in the barrier and thus is unaffected by time dilation. The payload probably came to the island following the path of a large arch which shot it very high into the air. It may have flown over the hole in the barrier and hit the barrier itself thus producing the time dilation effect.

IHOB, INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF BEN
In the house of Ben a lot of different passports are found for Benjamin Linus. One of them is for a man named Dean Moriarty. Moriarty is the name of the villain in the Sherlock Holmes novels. There is also a lot of money in foreign currencies. This means that Ben has many aliases and may have been traveling around the world for reasons unknown. His travels around the world may have made him enemies which later on he hires Sayid to kill. Since Ben is totally devoted to the island it is reasonable to assume that his travels were for island business. Ben practically forbids almost anyone to leave the island. He tells Juliet that nobody is leaving the island even when she asks to be able to take a pregnant patient off the island to examine with better equipment. How did Ben get all that money? Are the passports mostly fake? Yes, probably.

A FRIEND INDEED
The dialogue:

Sayid: What do you know of friendship?
Ben: I know it is no use having friends you cant trust

May refer to the people of Ben as his friends but more importantly to his friend of the freighter.

TAKE SOME NYQUIL FOR YOUR COFFIN
In the flashforward episode of Jack last season, Jack goes to the viewing of someone in a coffin. Since Ben has many names, it may be Ben in the coffin. That is why the newspaper article Jack holds does not mention the deceased as being Benjamin Linus. Ben was using an alias and was buried under a different name. This would explain the comment by Jack that he is neither friend nor family. This theory gains support when you see Sayid working with Ben in this episode. Sayid works with Ben to protect his friends on the island. The ghost of Charlie also told Hurley that they need you meaning his friends on the island. He won a huge settlement from Oceanic for the plane crash. That means Sayid must be doing it because he believes in Ben and his cause not for the money. Also if Sayid won such a huge settlement does that mean that the story of how 815 went down is a false one? We know that 815 went down because Desmond and Kelvin did not push the button in time and the electromagnetic anomaly unleashed a pulse which brought down the plane. If this was the case they why would Oceanic be liable for this? On the other hand we do have that other plane at the bottom of the ocean purported to be flight 815. If a story is fabricated about how that plane went down, then in this fake story Oceanic may be found liable.

BRACELET
The bracelet Sayid takes off of Elsa reminds him of the bracelet he took off of Naomi.

STAY ON COURSE
Faraday tells the pilot not to deviate from the bearing he used to take them to the island. We have seen this before too. When Ben let Michael and Walt go, he told Michael to stay on a certain heading with the boat. He also told him that he would never find his way back to the island. So what happens if you deviate from the bearing when you are leaving the island? One gets the feeling that you will slip into some kind of wormhole where time speeds up. The same wormhole that befelled the payload. Does the island then have only a narrow opening through which it can be found in real space? Perhaps the rest of the island outside of this small opening is protected by a wormhole with a strange electromagnetic property that renders it invisible. We know that the island is next to impossible to find anyway. We have seen that from several sources. Consider that Jack wanted strongly to return to the island in a flashforward episode but was unable to. The two portuguese gentlemen in the arctic station could only detect the island when a strong electromagnetic pulse was emitted from it. The submarine needed a beacon to find the island and without it we are led to believe that even the submarine could not find the island.

WERE YOU AWARE?
Harold Perrineau is listed at the beginning in the cast list but makes no appearance in the episode.
Faraday is also the name of a famous physicist who worked with electromagnetism. Faradays law relates the average voltage induced in a group of coils to the rate of change of magnetic flux through the coils. Interesting that the physicist in the show has the same last name.