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From Lostpedia

Nature of the Purge

• The DHARMA Initiative did not make the first move against The Hostiles. Either Mikhail twisted the truth or was repeating the Others' version of events.
  • Or the events in Ben's flashback may not be the "purge" Mikhail was referring to. This was an unrelated attack on one of the DHARMA Initiative Stations during a long war.
    • Ben's flashbacks confirm that there were hostilities between Dharma and the natives since he arrived as a child, so it is possible the purge was initiated before he even arrived on the island, or began sometime in between his flashbacks and the beginnings of the purge were never shown.
• Since the Purge, the Others have been pretending to be the DHARMA Initiative to its support staff in the outside world.
• Since the Purge, the Others have been recruiting "DHARMA" personnel that they need (i.e.: Ethan, Juliet, Mikhail, and even Kelvin), and then absorbing these new people into their group.
• The DHARMA staff took strong precautions against the Flame falling into the hands of The Others at the time of the Purge. The station was wired with large amounts of explosives and a special code triggering the demolition of the station if it were taken by the Hostiles.
  • Why did The Others never remove the well-visible C4 explosive after taking control of the Flame? Didn't anyone ever win a game of chess while Locke could after a couple of trials?
    • Perhaps they thought it better to leave it rigged up in case they needed to destroy the Flame themselves. Or maybe they never felt the need to go through the trouble. Finally, maybe no one was qualified to deactivate the explosives, and thought it safer not to tamper with them.
• The Purge could be the incident and/or could be directly related to it.
  • The incident was conducted by the Hostiles during the Purge.
    • Its unlikley that it was related to the incident, as the orientation film in the swan was in the early 80's or even from the late 70's, and we know that the purge happened in 1992.
• The Purge was initiated because of a split in the DHARMA Initiative, whereas one group (The Others) decided that they would no longer follow the initial purpose of the DHARMA Initiative and create their own.
• The Purge was the Initiative's last chance to change the Valenzetti numbers. It is connected to what Thomas Mittelwerk tried to do in the Sri Lanka Video.
• Oceanic Flight 815 was brought to the Island in an attempt by DHARMA to create another army that could fight against the Hostiles.
• The DHARMA Initiative members were not merely a "bunch of scientists."

• DHARMA members had military training.
• DHARMA members had special weaponry developed by the Hanso Foundation.
• DHARMA members had special abilities created, e.g., by genetic modification.

• The DHARMA people were not run-of-the-mill scientists - that we know - but they were probably still scientists, albiet ones who, due to the ultra-sensitive nature of their work, required special training before being put on the Island. It is unlikely that the scientists themselves were genetically modified, but genetics may well have been part of their work.

• The Monster helped the hostiles win the purge.
  • Alternatively, as with the C4 in the Flame, the Monster was a 'fail safe' system, set to become active in the event of DHARMA falling foul of the "Hostiles". It certainly appeared to have a distaste for Juliet...
• The DHARMA Initiative released a virus during the purge that causes fatality during pregnancy.
• The regular workers (Workmen?) of the DHARMA Initiative revolted against the scientists, and started the Purge.
  • Then why wasn't Roger involved in it if he was one of the workmen?
• The gas used to exterminate the DHARMA Initiative workers was sarin gas, the same gas used by Tariq to kill members of a village in "One of Them".
• The Purge, from Mikhail's words, was an initiative from DHARMA, so it's not the killing of the Barracks' inhabitants: the Purge was the reaction from the DHARMA survivors at the other stations, but they lost the battle and the Hostiles killed them all.
• By the time the Hostiles expunged DHARMA, the initiative was able to change the natural development of the universe. Since in "Flashes Before Your Eyes", Ms. Hawking stated that the universe has a way of "course correcting", the denouement of the purge could have been the universe's way to correct its own course.

Casualties of the Purge

• The Purge played a role in Radzinsky's suicide.
• The Purge was the cause of Marvin Candle's missing arm.
  • If so, why make orientation films for stations not in Dharma's control?
• The natives that built the statue were killed during the Purge.
• Mikhail lost his eye.
• The purge was a war between a group of people who went insane due to extreme phsycological experiments by Dharma and another group who evolved and became perfected in the areas of adapting to stress, reasoning ability and self control due to those same experiments. The former rebelled and started the war. a mini scenario of what could take place worldwide.

Chefgirl 07:27, 20 April 2007 (PDT)

Date of the Purge

• It occurred before 1988, due to the fact that Ben did not have Alex at the time. Also Ben was born in 1963, which would make him 24 if the Purge occurred in 1987. The watch is nothing more than a continuity error by the producers.
  • Just because we didn't see Alex at that time, doesn't mean Ben didn't have custody of her.
• It occured in 1988, the same day as the crash of Pan Am Flight 103, and 16 years to the day from the end of Season 3. Immediately following, we see the numbers transmission has been decrypted. Danielle Rousseau's distress signal concerning "it/he" having "killed them all", which seemingly was recorded in 1988, could also be an allusion to the Ben and the purge.
• A network of dirt roads used by the Dharma vans crossed the Island at the time of the Purge, linking together the Dharma stations. This would make the locations of the various station and other Dharma buildings very obvious. The roads became overgrown after the Purge.
  • Carlton Cuse stated in a interview of the road map found in the dharma van: "the purpose of that map was just to establish that basically there was at one point a road that linked the Dharma stations but with 25 years of jungle growth those roads have been overgrown."
  • If the Island's road network fell into disuse following the Purge, and took 25 years to become fully overgrown, this would suggest the Purge happened before 1980, possibly explaining why old-fashioned VW Dharma vans were still in use at the time of the Purge.
  • Rousseau seems genuinely unaware of the location of Dharma stations, so must never seen the Island's roads. Rousseau must therefore have arrived on the Island many years after the Purge, when the roads were already far too overgrown to follow.
    • However Rousseau stated that she survived by avoiding confrontation and would probably not have followed any roads to their destination.
• Confounding efforts to nail down the date of the purge are the theories surrounding how time 'works' on the Island. Look at how Ben has apparently aged so much faster than Richard Alpert etc.
• ++++ THE DATE OF THE PURGE IS DECEMBER 19, 1992. You can tell because December 19 is Ben's birthday (from the reasoning for the Lostpedia timeline) and the purge happened on his birthday. It was in 1992 because Horace said, in a vision, that he had been dead for 12 years (Cabin Fever). ++++