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FROM THE JOURNALS OF DOC JENSEN:

UNFINISHED LOST THEORIES
Crazy ideas that the author never had a chance to explore this past season — and maybe for good reason.

THEORY! The Dharma Initiative was investigating the potential for psychic communication, as well as the effects of psychic manipulation.

Secondary meta Lost theory: Lost itself is investigating the potential for communication between its audience and the show itself.
Big question: What happens to the identity and integrity of the artist when he/she allows himself/herself to be influenced by his/her audience?
Research: Harold Bloom — literary critic, famous for his manifestos The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading. Also a noted failed novelist: wrote The Flight To Lucifer, a fan fiction interface rife with David Lindsay's 1920 sci-fi novel The Voyage To Arcturus.
MEMO TO SELF: Apply Bloom's ideas of originality and influence to analyze anew the opening sequence of the first episode of season two. Be sure to incorporate: Mama Cass' ''Make Your Own Kind Of Music'' and the recurring themes of immunization and quarantine in the Hatch. Ask: Is the Hatch a conceptual diorama of Bloom's ''anxiety of influence''? Can the Numbers correlate to Bloom's ''six reversionary ratios''? (Try not to make it boring.) Also: Instead of relying solely on Wikipedia entries and other dubious Web pages, actually try reading The Flight to Lucifer and The Voyage To Arcturus before deconstructing their Lost resonances. And make sure you make lots of snarky jokes about the irony of a literary critic also being a crapstatic novelist.

THEORY! The Dharma Initiative was trying to save the world by using supernatural means to export Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of ''Carnival'' throughout the world.

Secondary meta Lost theory: Russian egghead Mikhail Bakhtin advocated the novel as a valid means of expression, helped bolster the legacy of Fyodor Dostoevsky, and influenced a broad swath of mid-to-late 20th-century literary analysis. Similarly, Lost is exalting the novelistic possibilities of serialized television. Its ability to succeed in this endeavor has exciting implications for the future of TV storytelling. Go Lost!
Make the following highly dubious claim: When Lost introduced the name ''Mikhail Bakunin'' into the show, they were secretly hoping that we would mishear it and stumble across ''Mikhail Bakhtin'' instead.
MEMO TO SELF: It could be argued that Lost has extrapolated several essential Bakhtin ideas and rendered them fantastically, particularly Bakhtin's notions of chronotype, grotesque, polyphony, and especially unfinalizability. Investigate all these ideas in the context of these Lost elements: the Whispers, the Countdown Clock in the Hatch, the flashback structure of the show, themes of redemption, and the variety of landmarks on the Island that have provided the inhabitants with a sense of identity and meaning within the grand context of human history. Or something like that. (Don't forget to make it sound like you know what you're talking about even though you don't!)

NEXT PAGE: More Unfinished Lost Theories and the Doc Jensen Manifesto


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