I am a LOST fanatic. I always knew I would be, but now that I've
finally caught up to the show and am watching the current episodes along
with the rest of the country, I can say it with an even greater degree
of confidence. It took me until halfway through the third season to
watch everything I needed to watch in order to be on track, so I'm very
displeased by rumblings that the show may have signed its own death
sentence by leaving viewers hanging for weeks. Come on, LOSTies, hang in
there! I certainly will. I've got too much invested in the show at this
point. Not only have I seen every episode, I've written 11 LOST-themed
parodies, I own talking figures of Charlie and Locke and intend to get
Hurley one of these days, and as I compose this I am wearing a t-shirt
featuring Dom Monaghan's stubbly mug and the words "I'm LOST without
Charlie." I also recently spent the better part of a week assembling a
1,000-piece puzzle involving the show's mysterious numbers.
I received The Numbers, the third of four installments in the LOST: Mystery of the Island Jigsaw Puzzle series, as a Christmas gift from my brother Nathan, along with The Hatch, the first installment. I purchased the second, The Others, shortly thereafter but have yet to see the fourth, Before the Crash, in stores. The numbers, which have become a source of such intense speculation among fans, were introduced in Numbers, an incredibly creepy season-one episode that is the first to delve into Hurley's back story.
We learn that not too long before the plane crash, he won the lottery
using a series of numbers repeated obsessively by a fellow patient at a
mental hospital where he stayed for a time. Hurley comes to believe that
these numbers - 4 8 15 16 23 42 - are cursed, and his trip to Australia
was in pursuit of some explanation as to the power behind these numbers
and how he might break free of their hold. After this episode, they
start showing up everywhere, both on the island and in the flashbacks of
other people. Most importantly, perhaps, throughout the second season,
the castaways must enter these numbers into a computer in the hatch
Locke finds in order to prevent some sort of catastrophic event eerily
hinted at by Desmond, the wild-eyed Scotsman Locke's party meets after
blowing open the door with explosives.
It was a combination of
extreme interest in the significance of these numbers and a hunch that a
puzzle filled with numbers would be easier to put together that led me
to attempt this puzzle first. To date, it's the only one of the three
I've completed; my friend Libbie also bought The Others, and
we've been pecking away at it for more than a month at her house, where
it never seems to get finished, and I haven't busted open The Hatch yet. I fear that my suspicion about The Numbers being easier was correct; that's worrisome because this was an incredibly difficult puzzle to put together.
One major reason it's so tricky is that we only get a portion of the
finished puzzle to look at on the front of the box. The main feature is
Hurley's head, which rests at the bottom of a large number 8. It took me
much longer than it should have to figure out two things that made
assembly much easier. First, the puzzle is laid out in such a way that
there are a large 4 8 and 15 on the top and a large 16 23 and 42 on the
bottom. These are silver-rimmed and rest atop a greenish-blue ocean-type
background in which floats, among other things, a bottle with a piece
of paper affixed to the inside in such a way that the mysterious numbers
written on it are easily visible. Second, within each of the large
numbers are snapshots relating to that particular number. Now, this
still is confusing, since many of these small scenes include more than
one in the six-number series. But it at least helps to narrow things
down a little, and having the large numbers is very useful for
sub-dividing the puzzle once the border is in place, if you're someone
like me who has to finish the border before anything else can happen.
When Libbie came over to help me put the puzzle together, she was
excited. After all, the box promises, in loud red letters framed by the
words "SPOILER WARNING," that "SECRETS ARE REVEALED!" We are warned not
to proceed unless we want "exclusive new insight into TV's most puzzling
drama series." She took this very seriously; I didn't, since I couldn't
imagine that a puzzle could really reveal anything too shocking. After
hours upon hours of poring over the pieces, I had an intriguing 19" x
26" work of art with all sorts of nice little visual references to the
show. But I didn't see anything there that I didn't already know, except
perhaps for some ID cards and scraps of paper revealing the addresses
of several characters, and that hardly seemed too noteworthy. I admired
the overall artistry of the puzzle and made plans to glue and frame it
at some point in the future, but I didn't feel as though I'd received
any spoilers.
Then Libbie did a little investigating online
and discovered something surprising. There was a part of the puzzle we
hadn't seen yet. It glowed in the dark. Well. That was an
interesting notion, but I didn't see anything on the puzzle that looked
like it might have secret lemon-juice encoding. We kept our eyes open
and our lights off, but no new messages came jumping out at us. And
then, nearly a month after finishing the puzzle, we finally glued it
together. Yes, we had it sitting out on a card table in the living room
that whole time, and I guess we were lucky the cats didn't make a mess
of it, even with a foam covering on top of it for protection. But we
finally glued the front of the puzzle, and after letting it sit for
several hours, we glued the back of the puzzle as well. The day was
winding down. It was dark. We left the puzzle alone. Several hours
later, we noticed that something looked different. There was writing on the back of the puzzle!
Incredibly faint, but it was there, and we turned off every light in
the house and gleefully watched as more little lines were gradually
revealed. Unfortunately, no amount of dim lighting was enough to allow
us to make sense of those yellowish lines. For that, we needed a black
light, which my brother furnished on his next trip home from college. So
on went the black light, and lo and behold, there were all sorts of
chicken scratches, Dharma-ish mutterings about Hanso and hatches and
strange diseases, not to mention a diagram of one of the hatches, albeit
only one-quarter complete. For a complete diagram, we'd need all four
puzzles pushed together on some absurdly large, empty, flat surface,
each of them glued into permanence and shuddering under the spooky
illumination of a black light. We haven't gotten that far yet, and the
chicken scratch we have is more intriguing than intelligible. But there
seems to be a secret or two hidden in there, along with the promise of
more insight the next time we feel like devoting a week to one of these
puzzles. You've got to be a pretty big geek to invest that sort of time
and effort into such an endeavor.
Good thing I am.
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