Sunday, February 28, 2010

The Dark Tower and it's connection to Lost

I tried posting this on the website several weeks ago and for some reason, it didn't come through. So I'm going to try this again, and see if I make any progress here. It's probably going to take several postings to get all the information down, and my internet connections the last few days has been spotty, but I'm going to try anyway.

Added note: Nikki, feel free to use any information on this if you read. I'm pretty sure that this isn't all in my head. So here we go:

As I tried to say before, Damon/ Carlton have said on more than one occasion said that they basically took 'The Stand' and put it on an island. I have seen the argument and the comparison, and while there Are some oblique connections, for the most part I don't see it.. I don't buy Locke as Glen Bateman/Trashcan Man, Rose is not Mother Abagail, and I've seen the Man in Black, and though he may be the epitome of evil, he is not Randall Flagg. (Yeah, I saw what the monster did to Jacob's guardians; Flagg tore a man apart with his teeth.)

However, I do see a link between a work of King's fiction, and there is a good chance thatthe Stand has a more direct connection with it. That would be the epic work that served as the link between almost everything King published between 1978 and 2004 --- The Dark Tower series.

In actuality I remember thinking that there was a link between the universes as early as Season 3. Remember that book club Juliet is hosting before Oceanic 815 does it little bisection in the air. From the way I saw it, the book they were talking about was The Dark Tower, the seventh and climactic book in the series. I thought it likely because the book was released to the public around September 22, 2004. (Yeah, I know they might have difficulty getting a hold of a copy hat soon, but how on earth did they get a couple dozen copies of Carrie? I've got a feeling that's one mystery that's never going to be answered.)

I know that Nikki's undergone some awesome reads for us during the course of the shows five seasons.Our Mutual Friend and Ulysses must have driven her to distraction, many, many times. But trying to get through this series (or even suggesting that there is a link between the two) would no doubt cause her a migraine the size of Portland. Not because it's that difficult to get through (eight hundred pages of King still goes faster than two hundred pages of Dostoyevsky) but because there's so much of it. There are seven books in the series, and each one becomes progressively longer. I'm pretty sure it clocks out to roughly 3600 pages altogether.

To attempt to do justice to this series would take a book in itself, and indeed several booklength compendiums have been written on the Dark Tower Series. In addition, a huge amount of King's other novels are referenced through the series in some way. (Indeed, the references got so widespread that by the turn of the century, King's publisher would show the listings of King's publicatiions in a special font in order to show which ones were connected to the Dark Tower.) So what I will attempt to do is try and summarize the books one after the other, pointing out whatever similarities I can find connecting Lost to this series. (And as Season 6 progresses, I'm beginning to find there are more connections every week.)

The first and by far the shortest of these books is The Gunslinger, which was originally released in 1978. Originally published as five interlocking short stories (King originally plotted out the series to be 25 interlocking short stories spread over five different books), twenty years later, he would eventually re-edit the stories so that there were more links to the following novels. (Supposedly, if you look at Ben's bookshelf in 'The Man from Tallahassee', you can see the book there, but I've never been able to find it). The first sentence alone may be enough to prove there is a link between the two: "The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed."

This is clearly going to take awhile, so I'm going to stop for now. If anyone thinks that I'm out of mind for suggesting this link feel free, but I am convinced that it is there, and intend to follow through on it. I'll try and be as succinct as I can, but trying to quickly summarize this series is like explaining quantum physics to a preschool class.