The show was built around some big, complicated, literary themes and symbols and a lot of these have been tied directly to The Third Policeman. The show's producers have talked about the book's influence on the show and you can actually SEE the book in a few scenes from season 2 (Desmond is reading it in the hatch...).
In the Third Policeman, not only do we have the origins of the Smoke Monster and a mysterious Hatch, but there are bigger themes - life, death, purgatory, parallel existences, sin & forgiveness, immortality.
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| Desmond reading TTP in the Hatch |
Maddening; my comment just vanished when i tried to publish and seems unretrievable. I just tried again. And again it failed/hung. Fortunately this time I did my composition in wordpad so still have the text. Now I'm doing it in Firefox. Maybe it's an ie problem. Not good.
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No. Lost always sounded a little too "Survivor" for me.
I'm still on Bradbury. I dont get a lot of time for reading, though the "policeman" sounds fun.
the 4th expedition's discovery of the apparent or extiction or near extinction of martians by chickenpox had echoes of, in north america, giving native americans smallpox infected blankets, and in central america, the notion that the aztec civilation was much weakened by "european" diseases and so a relatively easy conquest
I had wondered how "conscious" the martians were in their dealing with the humans. Whether there was some collective telpathinc subconscious guiding their actions. With the 1st expedition being dealt with by a jealous husband. The 2nd being treated as a manifestation of insanity. The 3rd being deliberately killed off seems more deliberate but could again been an action of collective subconscious and remembered only as a dream. The trouble with its being deliberate is that then the martians would at some point have had to become consciously aware of the Earth and the threat posed by its inhabitants. And there seems to be no triggering event which would have brought that about. The 2nd expedition was stated to have made no impact and been forgotten.
However each expedition seems to have been percieved subconsciously and might have been dealt with accordingly. The 4th seems a bit different. It could have been real. I suppose they might have telepathically projected the great dying off and then continued to exist in parallel, but invisible to the humans. It seems to me that it would have been simpler to convince the humans that it was a plague planet and have them all die off, while reporting home that the planet was unsuitable. Or less dramatically that there was simply nothing of interest on mars, no resources, no money to be made, an unlivable enironment, and so "been there, done that, boring"
"I suppose they might have telepathically projected the great dying off and then continued to exist in parallel, but invisible to the humans." -- I love that idea. It seemed, at least in some of the chapters, that the martians have the ability to alter the perceptions of the settlers, so why not just disappear? I guess It's made pretty clear that the martians aren't these all-knowing, superior beings though. They are just as confused and bungling as the settlers and so they probably are just reacting in the moment rather than creating any grand illusions.
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