Lost: Memory Cards ?
By fred | February 29, 2008
Alright, so let’s come clean : I know it aired for most of you guys, but I still haven’t watched the last episode of Lost (S04E05) yet. I have not, but I will soon there’s no doubt about it. But before that, there’s something I’ve been willing to talk about for a while now, but sadly I’ve been busy with other things and I failed to do so earlier. (Shame on me.)
But I will do now, so let’s talk a little about Eggtown some more. There was an incredible lot of new questions that were brought up during this episode, but I have a feeling that the one I want to talk about now, the one that obsessed me the most, might not be the most “popular” one. No, what haunted me the most, what I was left endlessly wondering about and would like to mention again is not Aaron, it’s not about when the Hell the trial took place, or about those $3.2 million.
No, it’s about Dan & Charlotte, and their little “cards experiment”…
It looked simple enough, didn’t last very long, but somehow I can’t help but feeling that it was of most importance. We all know what it was, I’ve heard or read a few theories about this, as well as tried to find some myself, but most of them don’t seem to be working.
The first theory is that the cards actually changed, that either Dan was trying to make the cards change, or that they just changed “on their own”, due to one of the mysterious properties of the Island. I’m about 100% sure that those theories are absolutely not right, for one very simple reason : Charlotte knows the cards. If the cards had just changed on their own, or if Dan was trying to make them be whatever he wanted them to be, Charlotte would have no way to know what the cards actually were until she turned them over.
But she does, she knows what the cards are, and if you missed it it’s not hard to check this out for yourself : simply look at that scene again, just make sure to focus on Charlotte. It’s always a nice thing to do, and you’ll see that when Dan names the first two cards, you can see a little smile on Charlotte’s face. She’s happy, because she knows Dan got them right.
But when it’s turn for the third and last card, as soon as Dan starts he got it wrong, and she knows it. For a brief moment there you can read some disappointment on her face, because she doesn’t need to hear any more of it : she knows he got it wrong, she knows that’s not the last card on the table. And for her to know what the cards are means that the cards did not change, obviously, and that at least she saw them before. We don’t know all that happened before, but Charlotte, she saw the cards, that we know.
And obviously Dan isn’t trying to just “guess”, because Charlotte asked him what he “remembered”. Now I’m sure this may not be the word that one would usually use in such a situation, but that it may have been used to keep us confused and wondering. Still, it has to make sense. So Dan couldn’t have been just guessing.
Then of course the most obvious theory is that Dan would have some memory problems, that he saw the cards, and can’t really remember them. Simple as that, Dan would suffer from memory loss problems, and they were only trying to test his memory, maybe see if it would improve now that he’s on the famous and mysterious Island.
