The Swan/Theories

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Contents

Possible Swan References

  • "The Swan" was the name of an Elizabethan theatre in London. [1]
  • Swan is also close to the last name of Elizabeth Swann, in Pirates of the Carribean.
  • SWAN Instruments are instruments that can be used to measure electromagnetic fields.[2]
  • The constellation of Cygnus is also known as "the Swan". [3]
  • Sir Joseph Wilson Swan is an English physicist and chemist. [6]
  • HMAS Swan was an Australian Navy ship launched on 16 December 1967. The ship is now a dive wreck and artificial reef 1.3 nautical miles off Point Picquet, Western Australia. [7]
  • The Swan is a short musical composition for cello and piano from Carmille Saint Saens' "Carnival of the Animals".
  • The Sanskrit word for swan is hamsa or hansa, which sounds similar to Hanso [8] [9]
  • Swans are characterized by their monogamy in mating habits--they are always seen in pairs.
  • Swans are revered in many religions and cultures, especially Hinduism. The Sanskrit word for swan is hamsa or hansa, and a swan is the vehicle of many deities (such as the goddess Saraswati). Swans are mentioned several times in the Vedic literature, and some swans have also been said to have the knowledge of the Supreme Being Brahman. They are said to reside in the summers in the Manasarovar Lake and migrate to Indian lakes for the winter, eat pearls, and separate milk from water in a mixture of both. Hindu iconography typically shows the Mute Swan. It is wrongly supposed by many historians that the word hamsa only means a goose, since today swans are no longer found in India, not even in most zoos. However, ornithological checklists clearly classify several species of swans as vagrant birds in India.
  • The cartoon Jack is forced to watch in captivity features swans swimming.
  • A "Black Swan" is used to refer to an event that is catastrophic, and almost impossible to predict or prepare for. Some used the phrase to refer to 9/11.
  • "The Hatch" is what the Swan was called before we knew what was inside. this could be a possible reference to a Swan "hatch"ing from its egg. Similarly, the Flame exploded in Flames and the Pearl started out small like a grain of sand but will become expansive in season 3.

Theories based on the name

  • According to Constellations theory, The Swan is named after the constellation Cygnus.
  • As the station was once used for research into electromagnetism, it was named after SWAN instruments, used to measure electromagnetic fields. [10]
  • The station is named The Swan because of its similar shape to the animal (a large underground bunker with a long tunnel to the surface on one end).
  • Sanskrit words for The Swan are hamsa and hansa, which is similar to Hanso. [11] [12]
  • The Swan was named after Ingo Swann, an artist who helped develop the procedure of remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute, and has become well known as a remote viewer himself. Swann is commonly accredited with proposing the idea of Coordinate Remote Viewing, a process in which viewers would view a location given nothing but its geographical coordinates. [13]
  • The name bares similitude to the prefix "zono", found in the name "zonohedron". Those geometrical beings are important in topology and architecture. One major user of them was Richard Buckminster Fuller, who created the geode, and the doomsday equation. The computer room is a half-geode, which is the shape of ecological houses names "zom". [14] [15]
  • In the Matrix series, the name of the city of the machines is Zero-One, often cited as "Z-one". Same about Zion, which is a deep underground shelter for mankind. The computer screen is very similar to the famous digital rain. The station acts like a cage, and it's resident is called Desmond. This name is close to "demon" and is a reminder of Lucifer's underworld prison. Neo is the sixth "karmic" version, and number six is the number of rebellion in the Bible. [16]
  • Swan is phoneticaly close to the word zen, which means "voïd".

Purpose of the station

  • According to The Fall of DHARMA (theory) The Swan was used to research electromagnetism in order to deflect nuclear missiles. Whenever the Hanso rebellion (see theory) occurred and the station was smashed up the magnet became unstable and the remaining DHARMA Initiative employees who had escaped the Hanso Foundation's clutches had to press the button.
  • Kelvin's "dam" analogy is the key to understanding the Swan Station, its history, and its purpose (see Kelvin's Dam (theory) for further details).
  • The Swan's purpose was to synchronize the special/different island time with normal (off-island) time. In Kelvin's words it was some kind of time dam, which allowed time to flow only in a certain (the normal) speed. The electromagnetic anomaly was only a side effect of releasing the unnecessary/leftover time by pressing the button or it was used as a power source for the synchronization. As long as the station worked (and the button was pushed), island time was normal (this explains for instance John & Desmond agreeing about the date of the crash and Ben knowing of the Red Sox' winning ) and halfway normal travel from and to island was possible, if course/coordinates were known. Now the island is "out of time" and the discrepancy caused the helicopter crash, as like as Desmond not pushing the button caused a similar time discrepancy and the plane crash.
  • Swan was originally a time machine. The original purpose of the Swan was to see if time travel was possible. When the blast doors were lowered, control releases of energy would cause the Swan to visit timepoints. Nobody was allowed to go out, and they were closely watched by the people in the Pearl station to see if there were any adverse effects. The experiments were a disaster because someone used the console to communicate to the outside world. The project was shut down and a new orientation movie made telling them to periodically release the energy and not to communicate with the outside world.
    • After the the implosion so much of this "time" energy was released at once, and also through living at the swan for so long, that desmond absorbed the energy, he absorbed so much that he can now travel between different points in space and time, just like the swan could.
  • The magnetic "anomaly" was in fact man-made, and behind the wall is a huge magnetic field generator. For whatever reason, the generator switches on after 108 minutes, but the computer is there to turn it off. The machine could be simply a DHARMA experiment gone awry.
  • The swan was built to end the world. The electromagnetic force would kill pretty much any living thing. This would explain why the numbers couldn't be entered automatically-they were a dead man's switch.
  • Elaboration of "dead-man's switch" theory above: The Swan was a doomsday device build in response to the war with the Hostiles, designed to destroy the island if Dharma was defeated. They expected either that the Hostiles would kill the Swan inhabitants or that the button-pushers would give up if left unrelieved for too long. Dharma did not expect the isolated inhabitants to be so dedicated that they would continue at their job for years to come.
  • The Swan was researching the ability to tap into geological electromagnetic forces to supply the world with "clean" energy. This experiment failed when the incident occurred. The incident represented a fundamental flaw in how the energy was being collected: As the energy was being drawn out of the anomaly the rate of flow from it increased exponentially (for each X seconds spent collecting energy, the rate at which the energy is collected doubles). They soon discovered that as they continued to draw energy from it, it acted as a capacitor, building up a charge. They implemented the protocol in order to ‘discharge’ the capacitor’s buildup approximately every 104 minutes. Failure to discharge the capacitor results in an exponential buildup of energy in the capacitor.
  • Something happened (I wouldn't say The Incident or The Purge) that made this station become not a research one, as we see in Pearl video (two guys behind Mark Wickmund, in white clothes, discussing on some papers) but only a partially damaged station, holding up a mass of eletromagnetic force behind a weak wall of concrete and two guys there just to push a button that prevents this mass to blow up. The original swan video is not the one that we know and that was found in behind The Turn of the Screw, this one is a post-event film, made after DHARMA realized that they could not fix the problem due to funding problems.
  • One function of this station is to release heat every 108 minutes from the central energy-station. After the implosion of the hatch, the cooling stopped. Daniel succeeds in shutting down the system before it is too late.

Black Hole

  • The purpose of the swan station might be preventing a black hole to form bacause of the time anomality that remains the island hidden. In the Orchid Stations, according to the phisics law they are naming, they imply that if the two rabbits come near each other, they may cause a great force sucha as a black hole to trigger. Maybe thas what happened at the orchid, and the swan was created to controll this

The Mural

See also: Mural for a symbolic interpretation.

  • The man in the top right corner has his eye scratched out. Perhaps this is the owner of the glass eye that was found in the Arrow.
    • It also appears that the man in the top right corner is wearing a priest's collar (Yemi or Eko?); the woman just left of that image looks like the psychic's daughter. Perhaps a depiction of a prophecy within another prophecy?
  • The arrow in the center of the mural is pointed in a direction that looks to be N x NW, or approximately 325 degrees -- the same direction that Ben told Michael he'd "find rescue" if he sailed that way. To the left of this arrow, just below the arrow's head, appears to be another smaller arrow in the same direction painted with a yellow outline and the word "OUT" in the middle.
  • the little persons depicted in the top left corner on a yellow backround that might be sand, are the same number of main characters in the series.

Miscellaneous

  • There exists an undiscovered underground passage between The Swan and the Pearl. The blast door map seems to confirm this, as there is a crossed out passage coming from the swan. This could also be the area behind the magnetic wall.
    • On the Blast Door map, all of the stations seemed to have passages that would have connected to the Pearl station in the middle of the map. But all of those, except for the Swan's, were crossed out about halfway. However, these may simply be exits.
      • Here, we're assuming that the Pearl is the station in the middle, and not one of the ones on the eastern side of the map. Also, on the map, we can see that beside the main circle of the Swan, there is a smaller room marked H3, but the corridor between the Swan and H3 is broken with two crosses, is this where the concrete is?
    • The passage seems to continue exclusively from the Swan, however the walls are only represented by dotted lines until it comes to a smaller question mark.(see Blast Door Map)
    • This corridor may be blocked by the wall that Jack and Sayid investigated.
    • The remains of The Swan that are seen in "Further Instructions" may back this up as the three corridors visible in the side of the crater do not appear to match the layout of the section occupied by Desmond, the survivors et al. This implies that another room or passage has been uncovered by the implosion.
  • Destroying the electromagnetic field is essential for people needing to be rescued from The Island.
  • It is possible that the fail safe being triggered in the Swan in the episode "Live Together, Die Alone" had an effect on the island in the form of time alteration or time skewing.
  • In the episode "Further Instructions" Desmond commented to Hurley on John Locke's "speech" about finding and saving Jack, Kate, and Sawyer before Locke actually gave the speech. After the speech, Hurley noticed Desmond standing on the beach alone, throwing rocks into the water. Hurley saw this action take place twice, one right after another.
  • In the book "Bad Twin" there is a line on page 8 that reads, "..and became warped, the way space and time are warped by the presence of very massive objects."
  • The Swan might not be the only Electromagnetic facility on the inland. As in the orientation film, Marvin Candle states that the swan was built to study the electromagnetic fluctuations emitting from this sector of the island. It is plausible then, that there are more electromagnetic anomaly's on the island.
  • After the Purge, both the Swan and Pearl Stations continued operating without knowing that the Purge had occurred. Thus, no relief ever arrived to replace Radzinsky & Kelvin, and the notebooks piled up at the the Capsule Dump.
    • Pearl teams were supposed to leave the station after the 8 hour shift, returning to The Barracks via Pala Ferry. They would know that the purge ocurred. This may explain why so many Pearl jumpsuits are seen on the Mass grave. The Hostiles just kept killing them upon arrival.
  • The Swan Stations Electromagnetic field could be emitting radiation which could be a possible factor to the degeneration of a female islander's reproductive system.
    • This could also explain Rose's remission from Cancer.
    • This may explain the rough concrete barricade on the corridor.
  • In The Swan station structure there could've been magnesium or magnesium alloy in use. Recall the metallic wall near the mural, that could've been made of magnesium. During the swan implosion the magnesium could've ignited from a blast in the bunker resulting in the bright light.

Origins

  • The Swan, prior to the incident, which can possibly be seen in the orchid video, used to be The Orchid. After the catastrophic effects of the incidents, the only thing The Dharma Initiative could do to save the world was to set up the computer and prevent at all costs the release of the energy. Evidence of this lies in Dr. Edgar Halliwax's Swan Jacket in the Orchid Video.
    • This could mean that The Orchid was just a set up, created to go wrong.
      • Not likely, The Orchid is the crossed out station.
        • The orchid has been confirmed officially to be its own station; one that will be discovered in the fourth season.

Quarantine

  • The Swan was built, and its staff trained, such that those carrying out the mission of the Swan would survive any purge initiated by the poison gas of The Tempest. The Swan was hermetically sealed with its main entrance an airlock and its secondary entrance labeled with the word "quarantine". The station's staff were told that some pathogen existed outside the station and were trained to wear hazmat suits whenever venturing outside of the station and to innoculate themselves regularly. All of these protections were not against "the sickness" but rather against The Tempest; whatever else happened on the Island, the Swan station's staff were the most crucial and its mission the most important of the Island.

Ben/Others Knowledge of the Swan

  • What did Ben and/or the Others know about the location, functionality and operation of the Swan? Presumably, Ben is aware of the Swan station prior to his incarceration there as Henry Gale (based on his being part of the Dharma Initiative and Roger Linus working in the Swan). Additionally, we know that Ben and the Others at some point gained access to the Pearl Station and observed the occupants of the Swan (events of Expose). Thus, why did Ben and/or the Others decide to leave the fate of the Swan in the hands of the remaining D.I. inhabitants (Kelvin and Radzinsky, and later Desmond). If Ben (or the Others, or Jacob) wanted the island to remain hidden from the outside world (i.e. Charles Widmore and/or Dharma/Hanso), why didn't the Others staff the Swan following the Purge?
  • Furthermore, why didn't the suicide of Radzinsky (assuming Kelvin's story to be true) cause the Others to take action to insure the continued input of the Numbers into the Swan computer?
  • During the events of the Lockdown, did Ben input the numbers or not?
  • Kelvin was Ben's man in the Swan. Originally both Kelvin and Radzinsky were part of the Dharma Initiative but during the purge Kelvin defected to the Others and killed Radzinsky. A small number of the Others (such a Juliet), are not totally committed to the Island and are prevented from going home by Ben. Kelvin felt the same way and took the opportunity to escape when Desmond was ship wrecked.
  • The Others are aware off all the Dharma Initiative stations and facilities on the Island. After the Purge, useful stations were occupied by the new management (the Others) such as: Mikhail in the Flame - Bonnie and Greta in the Looking Glass. The most hazardous stations left behind from the Dharma Initiative experiments were also manned: Goodwin in the Tempest - Kelvin in the Swan. The remaining stations were abandoned becasue the Others didn't continue with the research being conducted in them: The Arrow. Some stations, having been abandoned are used on the odd occasion when they are needed: Ethan in the Staff - Ben and Juliet in the Pearl - Ben knew where to find the Orchid. The Others as a group have occupied the Hydra - Decoy Village - the Temple - Barracks. You never see the Others surprised that there is a hatch they never heard of before!


Theories about Locations
 v • t • e
DHARMA & Others The Swan • The Arrow • The Staff • The Flame • The ? • The Pearl • The Looking Glass • The Hydra • The Tempest
Barracks • Cages • Capsule Dump • Hydra Island • Pala Ferry • Quarry • Radio Tower • The Door
Misc. Island Locations Balloon • Black Rock • Church • Cove • Dark Territory • Drug Smugglers' Plane • Line • Polar Bear Cave • Rousseau's Camp • Statue • Waterfall
Off The Island Commune • Listening Station • Mr. Cluck's Chicken Shack • Santa Rosa Mental Health Institute
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