lost eternal

it's going to be a long time before lost comes back ... what am i going to do with myself until then? i know! drive myself (and possibly some friends at work) crazy with lost theories that can't be proven until next season!

here's the one i've been toying with since the end of last season: the natives of the island are immortal. ben believes that the island is the key to immortality, and that he can somehow learn its secrets, become immortal, and rejoin his dead mother, who has seemingly reappeared on the island.

now, there could be some evidence out there that disproves this theory. i'm not an avid follower of the writers'/producers' interviews, so they may have already stated that immortality is not the key to the show. however, here are the pieces of evidence that i present:

1. richard alpert has not seemed to age since ben first met him, even though ben is obviously twenty to thirty years older than shown at their first meeting. why is this? he's immortal.

2. mikhail is unkillable. he keeps coming back from seemingly mortal wounds. how can this happen? he's immortal.

3. no babies conceived on the island have ever survived. every non-native of the island who has gotten pregnant on-island has died, and so have their babies. this is because a baby born on the island would have to be immortal, and how could mortal parents give birth to an immortal baby? the question this raises: is aaron immortal, or does he disprove my theory? perhaps claire's ex-boyfriend, aaron's father, was really a native islander? we don't know much about him...

4. ben brought juliet to the island because she produced a miracle baby for her sister. perhaps he believed she could produce the same miracle on the island, creating immortal children.

to flesh out a bit more: perhaps ben's mother was really a native islander who left the island, fell in love with ben's father, and conceived ben. she was unable to have a baby off-island because she was immortal; however, her baby could live. her death was really not a death- she was somehow drawn back to the island (her soul, perhaps). ben sees her on the island because she comes to him, wanting to see her son, but he cannot join her because he is not immortal, having been born off-island.

we have already seen that ben's father drinks heavily and is emotionally abusive to the child ben. this scars ben and he obsesses over what life would have been like if his mother had lived. essentially driven crazy, he desires to take over the dharma project's research and turn it towards his own purposes: researching immortality.

he colludes with the 'hostiles,' who are really native islanders and probably do not want the dharma project to discover their true nature, to kill off the non-cooperative dharma researchers and be allowed to continue his own research. the natives allow him this freedom only on the condition that he agrees to help them keep the island secret- jamming communications between the island and the outside world and allowing no one who arrives on the island to leave. only those who ben and the natives trust may leave to further ben's plans.

thus, anyone who tries to leave the island without permission is a threat to ben, for he will incur the wrath of the natives if the island is discovered.

feel free to comment (but please don't tell me i'm a crackpot- i'm just having fun)!