This week we're taking a look at The DHARMA Initiative. Yes, the one and only Department of Heuristics And Research on Material Applications.
SPOILER WARNING: Details from the most recent Lost episode, "LaFleur," are discussed, so if you haven't seen it yet consider yourself warned. Also, potential spoilers for upcoming episodes are discussed, if any of Our Theories are correct.
We may make fools of ourselves this time around. Trying to tackle the mystery as mysterious as DHARMA (Department of Heuristics And Research on Material Applications) might end up making our readers all the more maniacal. I'll preface all of this by saying that I won't be covering every single nook and cranny of this organization, since there are way too many nooks and far far too many crannies. The symbolism alone could warrant a thesis paper. Carabott, go for it!
So what is The DHARMA Initiative? I think we all have a good grasp on them so far. They're a "backronym" named scientific organization that came to The Island in the '70s after a "very intelligent man" used the time travel pendulum in a secret station in L.A. called The Lamp Post ("316"). Once on The Island, and fully funded by The Hanso Foundation, DHARMA sought to establish "a large-scale communal research compound where scientists and free-thinkers from around the globe could pursue research in meteorology, psychology, parapsychology, zoology, and electromagnetism." What followed was two decades of DHARMA experiments and tech that created about 80% of Lost's early baffling moments. A ton of things that the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 encountered in the first two seasons were leftovers from DHARMA's time on The Island. Polar bears, stations, instructional videos, strange maps; they all make sense to us now that we know they were all part of DHARMA's masterworks of mad science. But at the time, they served to turn what seemed to be an ordinary deserted tropical isle in to a bizarre bedlam of baffling beasts and boogeymen. DHARMA bears. DHARMA sharks. DHARMA vaccines. DHARMA countdown clocks and surveillance cameras. DHARMA giant jugs of ranch dressing. Their junk was all over the place, and it actually came in quite handy for the Oceanic survivors, who were able to use their leftover spoils for shelter and sustenance. And firepower. BANG BANG!
DHARMA set up stations all over The Island, each with their own name, their own team, and their own purpose. We know them as Staff, Swan, Arrow, Pearl, Orchid, Flame, Hydra, Looking Glass, and Tempest. The discovering of these stations and the pondering of their purpose gave us a ton of head-scratching moments back in the day, but it now all seems so commonplace. We're at a point now on Lost where we were able to watch four of our main characters, who have time travelled back to the Seventies, join up with DHARMA and take on jobs on their security and machinist teams. But we need to start thinking about how DHARMA is going to play into the essential overall story. Sure, they've provided their fair share of "WTF" moments, but are they going to prove to be essential to Lost's endgame?
DHARMA's plan almost got derailed immediately when they ran into a group that we call "The Others," but that they referred to as "The Hostiles." The Hostiles, who were the sworn and "chosen" protectors of the sanctity of The Island, took exception to this scientific invasion and thusly acted in a rather "hostile" manner. The full story of the twenty year relationship between DHARMA and Richard Alpert's gang of sooty-faced hoodlums is still yet to be revealed. We only know that there was once a "pact" between the two groups – that was almost undone with Sawyer and Juliet's gunfire in the episode "LaFluer." And we know that in the early Nineties, for whatever reason, The Hostiles had simply decided that the pact was a bunch of mulecrap and open violence began to erupt between the two factions. The fighting got so bad that DHARMA even began to rig their own stations, like The Flame, with self-destruct mechanisms. There were radio outposts that they simply abandoned because they were now out in "enemy" territory. Eventually, The Hostiles used one of DHARMA's own stations, The Tempest, and killed just about everyone in DHARMA with a toxic nerve gas – in an event known now as The Purge. Records show that this massacre occurred, with the help of DHARMA turncoat Ben Linus, in 1992.
The only members of DHARMA, that we know of, to successfully survive The Purge were Kelvin and Radzinsky, who were both stationed at The Swan at the time, and were possibly already in "full quarantine mode" due to a psyche experiment. Or perhaps they decided to dust off the old biohazard jumpsuits due to The Purge. Either way, The Hostiles were generous enough to allow them to live, possibly because they didn't want to have to push that damn button.
From what we can tell, the folks at The DHARMA Initiative were okay. They were alright, man. Aside from the fact that they were human beings and flawed in the usual human ways, we can only take what Dr. Pierre Chang tells us in his handy instructional recordings as the truth - until proven otherwise of course. DHARMA seemed to know the exact magic spots on The Island and built their stations right over top some of the most powerful forces on Earth. They built the Swan station to contain the electromagnetic pulses. They build The Orchid over The Island's time shift wheel, in order to effectively try and harness the energy for controlled time travel experiments ("Because You Left").
There is definitely a '70s freethinking communal vibe to DHARMA, whose name alone has ties to so many different religions and interpretations that it immediately rings true as something that might have seemed like a great idea 30 years back. The '70s, as a decade, contained a societal focus on civil rights, environmentalism and feminism. An organization created to build a Utopian ideal seems like it could have stemmed from that period in history.
DHARMA had itself a recruitment program, but it also, as an organization, seemed to have a rather genial quality about itself. People were just "given" jobs on The Island out of kindness, which seems to be a bit at odds with an outfit that was doing all their research on a very valuable and mysterious floating piece of mirror matter. But "hey, come on in, man." Everyone can partake in the magic. Whoever it was that found The Island must have known how hard it was to track down, but once it got found…people could just come and go. They even had themselves a nifty submarine and the right coordinates so that they could effectively transport people to and fro. DHARMA employees tend to not have the most rigid sense of self-discipline. From bringing girls into top secret watch centers, to giving in to the "the drink" – several of the employees were, well, just human.
This week we're taking a look at The DHARMA Initiative. Yes, the one and only Department of Heuristics And Research on Material Applications. SPOILER WARNING: Details from the most recent
[Welcome to IGN's new weekly feature, "Lost Mysteries." Each week we take a look at one mystery from Lost and go over what we've learned to date, what we still don't know, and our theories on what it all may mean.
What don't we know? Well, we don't know quite a bit. We don't know who the "very intelligent man" was, and how it came to be that he knew about The Island at all. To have that knowledge implies a more sinister type of character, but The DHARMA Initiative did not seem like it motivated by any form of salacious ideology. Could the real DHARMA plan have been more devious than we've been led to believe? What was it that finally led The Hostiles to believe that DHARMA needed to be completely wiped out? The Hostiles were The Island's "protectors," were they not? Something must have been going on that didn't sit well with them.
DHARMA, as an organization, has given us some truly memorable moments – ranging from the humorously offbeat to the awesomely mind-blowing. But if there's nothing else to them than their "experiments" then they don't really serve the overall Lost storyline very well. We can sense that there's a bit of contemptuousness to them, by the way they use "test subject" mind games on their employees. The way Pierre Chang changes his name in the videos for no reason. Those types of practices could make us think that there is somewhat of a gentle cruelty behind their altruism.
We're so focused now on the old "Others" warring with each other over The Island, that we just tend to see DHARMA as the poor group of hippies that got caught up in the crossfire. We like to focus on Widmore and Linus, and who gets "control" of The Island, but maybe we should focus a bit of our energy now on DHARMA, who definitely now has a direct link to The Lamp Post and to the entire notion of The Island as a time traveling block of nonsense. Was Widmore ever aware of DHARMA? He couldn't have been or he might have used The Lamp Post to find The Island, or at least just hopped on board the DHARMA sub, which tends to make a trip out to Main Street USA every two weeks.
How did DHARMA come to know exactly where to build their stations on The Island? How did they know about the sweet spots? Now that we know that they built up that sonic fence rather quickly, we need to ask ourselves if they all knew that there would be a hostile group there to begin with. And if the "very intelligent man," who decided it would be a good idea to totally take over this Island with experiments, knew about The Hostiles and the Island's secrets, then there's a good chance that he had some severe "ulterior" motives for moving an entire town of people into the danger zone.
As of right now, DHARMA has served to provide us with one truly integral part to the Lost storyline – Ben Linus. His story is directly tied to them, and for some reason Richard Alpert recognized something in Ben that he felt he could bring over to his own group of "protectors." Or maybe he just saw Ben as a psychotic young man who would be more than willing to assist in wiping out his own team, and then just gave him a spot in The Hostiles as a token of good will. But what was it that ignited the war between the two groups? Now that we know that there was a "pact," we must assume that there is more to discover about this catalyst.
There are a ton of lingering things we could throw out there too. Did DHARMA know that it built its barracks right over The Smoke Monster room? Why is DHARMA still getting food drops? Why is meteorology the only scientific field that we haven't seen a station for? Why was The Orchid the only station to need a fake cover station over top of it? And so on and so forth. We could be peeling the onion layers back on DHARMA forever, but in reality, so far, it's served us only as a story device.
This week we're taking a look at The DHARMA Initiative. Yes, the one and only Department of Heuristics And Research on Material Applications. SPOILER WARNING: Details from the most recent
[Welcome to IGN's new weekly feature, "Lost Mysteries." Each week we take a look at one mystery from Lost and go over what we've learned to date, what we still don't know, and our theories on what it all may mean.
The DHARMA Initiative helped explain the phenomena of The Island to us, through our main characters. As of this moment is seems like more of a device than an integral part of the show. Sure, it gave The Island itself a tremendous history, but nothing DHARMA has done has had any resonance in what's been going on in the story as of late. Yes, Sawyer and Juliet became part of DHARMA and made a happy and harmonious life together, but on a show like Lost, things need to pay off and as of right now, DHARMA has not. DHARMA was a tool that gave us, the viewer, information during the first couple seasons and it grounded The Island, which seemed like a fantastical circus, in a semi-reality.
But doesn't the whole DHARMA Initiative just kind of smack of bullsh*t? Some of their experiments seemed important and some seemed like hogwash. I feel like the forces behind DHARMA had a grander plan. The structure of the entire outfit was very "need to know" and the people who acted as the heavy lifters for DHARMA acted as if they were just doing a normal job. They didn't really have the larger picture in mind. Which makes you think that there were people way up in the top echelon that had all the answers. The forces behind DHARMA might have convinced The Hostiles that they were there for the good of mankind, or if you actually have watched any of Lost's supplemental, non network-aired material – they were there to help stop the doomsday clock (i.e. the numbers). This might have led to the initial "pact," that still seems like a strange and odd arrangement to me. I mean, The Hostiles didn't like poor shipwrecked souls wiping their feet on the beach much less a giant group of people coming in with labcoats and housing plans.
Could it be that Richard let The DHARMA team co-exist because he was waiting for Ben Linus? Could it be that he knew a future leader was coming? Perhaps the original intent was to wait it out, kill DHARMA, and then take all their cool stations. If you think about it, The Hostiles, under Ben's lead, acted a lot like DHARMA, but with more brutal "recruitment" techniques. Ben kept up the research, but focused it in on medicine. Life and death stuff. Infant mortality rates. Cancer research. Toxic chemical research. He used their homes for his people, and they used the sub to head out into the real world and seek out the best and the brightest in the scientific community. Or to just kidnap people, like Locke's dad.
DHARMA still offers us viewers the most possibilities as Lost plays out its final seasons. And while we don't have a definite idea of how it'll pay off, the feeling that…it has to. DHARMA is integral to Ben, and now that we know that someone connected to DHARMA used The Lamp Post to find The Island, we may, in fact, be in store for a whole new character on Lost. A new player. A new schemer. We still don't know why Ben feels a connection to The Island, since he seems to abhor humanity in general, but the answer to all of that might lie within DHARMA.