1. The Magic Box “I can show you things. Things I know you want to see very badly. Let me put it so you'll understand. Picture a box. You know something about boxes, don't you John? What if I told you that somewhere on this island there's a very large box... and whatever you imagined... whatever you wanted to be in it... when you opened that box, there it would be. What would you say about that, John?” Ben Linus in “The Man from Tallahassee” (Season 3)

2. The Magic Box: Lost’s Mysteries and Enigmas

3. The Magic Box Lost (2004-2010)

4. The Magic Box “Science is the eradication of mystery.”--B. F. Skinner Damon Lindelof (r) claims to be an admirer of BFS.

5. The Magic Box “Paradoxically, the very serial elements that have been so long reviled in soaps, pulps, and other ‘low’ genres are now used to increase connotations of ‘quality’... In television drama.” “U. S. television has devoted increased attention in the past two decades to crafting and maintaining ever more complex narratives, a form of ‘world building’ that has allowed for wholly new modes of narration and that suggests new forms of audience engagement.” From Jeff Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries”

6. The Magic Box “Certainly, chief among Lost’s pleasures is the show’s ability to create sincere emotional connections to characters who are immersed in an outlandish situation that, as of this writing, is unclassifiable as science fiction, paranormal mystery, or religious allegory, all constructed by an elaborate narrational structure far more complex than anything seen before in American television.” Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity”

7. The Magic Box

8. Jason Mittell: a growing tendency to “push the operational aesthetic to the foreground, calling attention to the constructed nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off; often these instances forgo realism in exchange for a formally aware baroque quality in which we watch the process of narration as a machine rather than engaging in its diegesis” (Mittell 35).

9. The Magic Box John Millais, “Pandora’s Box”

10. The Magic Box HURLEY: So, dude? What do you think is inside of that hatch thing? LOCKE: What do you think is inside it? HURLEY: Stacks of TV dinners from the 50's, or something. And TVs, and cable, some cell phones, clean socks, soap, Twinkies -- you know, for dessert, after the TV dinners. Twinkies keep for, like, 8000 years, man. LOCKE [laughing]: I like Twinkies, too. HURLEY: C'mon, really, what do you think is inside? LOCKE: Hope. I think hope is inside. (“Exodus,” 1.23)

11. The Magic Box “Perfect Circles,” Six Feet Under (3.1)

12. The Magic Box

13. Inside Schrödinger’s Box

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19. “[Lost fans are] like Talmudic scholars. They have created a body of scholarship about every episode.” Javier Grillo-Marxuach (Lost writer, Seasons 1 and 2)

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25. The Oceanic Airlines Website

26. The Magic Box The Hanso Foundation Website

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28. The Lost Library

29. The Magic Box

30. Lost Mysteries & Enigmas

31. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Dharma Initiative

32. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Crash of Oceanic 815

33. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Adam and Eve

34. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Agelessness of Richard Alpert

36. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Ben’s Secret Door

37. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Ben’s Murder by Sayid

38. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Black Rock

39. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Dharma Initiative

40. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Blast Door Map

41. The Magic Box The Owl Cave Petroglyph from Twin Peaks

42. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Fail Safe Key

43. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Four-Toed Statue

44. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Four-Toed Statue

45. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Frozen Donkey Wheel

46. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Hatch Mural

47. The Magic Box

48. Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Mrs. Hawking

49. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Mrs. Hawking

50. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Island’s Healing Properties

51. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Hit by a Bus

52. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Hurley Bird

53. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Incident

54. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Infant Mortality

55. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Jacob

56. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Jacob’s Cabin

57. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Jughead

58. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Lost Crosses

59. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Lost Crosses

60. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Mysterious Arrivals on the Island

61. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Numbers

62. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Numbers

63. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Numbers

64. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Orchid

65. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Orchid Lab

66. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Orchid’s Exotic Matter

67. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Room 23

68. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Brainwashing in Room 23

69. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Christian Shephard

70. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Sickness

71. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Sickness

72. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Smokezilla

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80. Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: Time Travel Time Travel by Consciousness Time Dislocation

81. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Temple

82. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Temple

83. The Magic Box Lost Mysteries & Enigmas: The Temple

84. The Magic Box Lost Conspiracy Theories

85. The Magic Box From Lostpedia In February 2007, Damon Lindelof opened a question on Yahoo! Answers about the nature of the Monster. The answer he and Carlton Cuse liked the best was given by user ar233. Out of over 8000 submitted answers, the winner was: “I think the Monster was originally a highly advanced security system designed to separate participants in the experimental DHARMA hatches. I think it was an effect that was designed to frighten people (smoke, noise) if they strayed too far from their experiment location. (A bit Wizard of Oz like) However, the electromagnetic force has mutated it - in the same sense as Desmond experienced time travel and can now see the future after exposure - and made it malevolent and able to physically grab things in its force (Eko, the Pilot, Locke). So in theory it may be able to be deactivated, if they can find the control room for it (which would be another hatch somewhere yet undetected).”

86. The Magic Box The producers' explanation as to why they picked that answer was: “We were amazed at the imagination and prodigious creativity applied to answering the question, what is the Monster? We have chosen our favorite answer. Not that's it’s the right answer. Sorry, but we can't really give away the ultimate secrets of the Monster quite yet. The answer we selected might be somewhat right, totally right -- or completely off-base. But we liked it and found it very cool and intriguing. Thanks to everyone who took the time to write in. We loved reading your thoughts -- and thanks for watching!”--Carlton and Damon

87. The Magic Box Lost Conspiracy Theories: The Casimir Effect Hendrik "Henk" Brugt Gerhard Casimir (1909-2000)

88. The Magic Box “Exotic matter with negative energy density is required to stabilize a wormhole.[15] Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever[16] pointed out that the quantum mechanics of the Casimir effect can be used to produce a locally mass-negative region of space-time, and suggested that negative effect could be used to stabilize a wormhole to allow faster than light travel. This concept has been used extensively in Science Fiction.”—from Wikipedia

89. The Magic Box Lost Conspiracy Theories: String Theory Tessaracts

90. The Magic Box Lost Conspiracy Theories: The 2009 Theory

91. The Magic Box Lost Conspiracy Theories: Atlantis

92. The Magic Box Lost Conspiracy Theories: The Collective Consciousness Theory

93. The Magic Box Lost Conspiracy Theories: Purgatory

94. The Magic Box

95. He sank so low that all means for his salvation were gone, except showing him the lost people. For this I visited the region of the dead... –Dante, Purgatorio (quoted as an epigraph to Walker Percy’s Lancelot, a book Sawyer is reading in “Maternity Leave,” 2.15)

96. The Magic Box G-a-r-y T-r-o-u-p P-u-r-g-a-t-o-r-y

97. The Magic Box Lost and Fan Dissatisfaction

98. The Magic Box On Twin Peaks, Cooper’s recall (and ours) of the Man from Another Place’s dream insistence in episode 3 (April 19, 1990) that “that gum you like is coming back in style” in episode 17 (December 1, 1990) allows him to identify Laura Palmer’s murderer. Most of Twin Peaks’ phenomenal original audience was long gone. Lost expects/assumes our encyclopedic knowledge of its narrative (in present tense, via flashbacks, and, now, in flash forwards) over its six year run.

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100. The Idiot Box or The Magic Box

101. The Magic Box