Lost

Introducing us to four new characters provided a whole new series of names and places to connect to literature and history. We all know that a name is not just a name on Lost, given the overwhelming number of philosophers (John Locke, Rousseau, Desmond David Hume).

Of course there’s physicist Daniel Faraday, namesake of Michael Faraday, a chemistry and physicist from the 19th century whose focus was on electromagnetism. That’s a little bit too on the nose, I think. Charlotte Staples Lewis is of course a close enough match to Clive Staples Lewis, better known as C.S. Lewis. In the first Easter Egg I talked about Lost’s obsession with religion, and I’m guessing naming a character after an author whose most famous work features a Jesus Christ allegory helps my cause. I suppose it’s slightly more mysterious than calling her Carroll Lewis.

And it’s not worth much, but thanks to the rich, dense Lostpedia.com, we see that one of the names on the Expose script Hurley found in Nikki’s things was Rick Lapidus. Could it be that the man who was supposed to fly Flight 815 is related to a TV actor?  Lostpedia also points out that a character named Lapidus was struck by lightning in the movie Sleeper.

Speaking of Frank Lapidus, we first saw him in Eleuthera, The Bahamas. That is a strange sounding place to be, but when you study the word, it makes perfect sense. Eleuthera is from Greek Eleutheria, and it means liberty, as in a sense of freeing yourself from society. In recent times, such as a play called Eleutheria by Samuel Beckett, it can refer to the notion of a man exiling himself from society. It makes sense, since that’s apparently what Frank did, leaving a life of an airline pilot to waste away on an island. Similarly, the castaways on the island, particularly John Locke and Ben Linus, are living a life of eleutheria, content to be isolated on their own private island, afraid of contact with the outside world.




<<PREVIOUS     NEXT>>