Lost: Beyond the Looking Glass

by Adam Bergstein

LOOKING BEYOND JACK’S SITE

jack1
The story told on this site is one of greed, corruption, and ultimately sacrifice in the name of friendship. Players first were given anagrams to decipher, each a clue for where next to look. The first message – “a click seek not” – unraveled to “locke in casket,” a reference to the striking image in the show’s season finale of Jack visiting an unknown man’s funeral. The images were varied, disturbing, and together hinted at pieces of a story we just couldn’t understand. I have cataloged them here for you, in no particular order, since the PhP script cycles through them randomly:

1. photo of Desmond and Penny, only that Penny isn’t the same girl as we have known her.
2. A photo of Juliette
3. Eko’s stick
4. Nadia
5. Animated gif of Cerberus and the Lost logo
6. Sawyer
7. Jack and the infamous casket
8. Jack and his tattoo
9. A blurb about Charles Widmore, apparently a photo of a piece of printed material like a pamphlet
10. Jack’s jeep with the license plate 2SAQ321 on it.
11. Ben’s cat
12. A photo of a Mr. Cluck’s sign
13. Two Oceanic Airlines tickets
14. Lock about to shoot himself
15. Renee Rousseau
16. A photo of Desmond in a pilot’s uniform walking with a woman also in uniform on his arm. We cannot see her face, but he is smiling. This looks like it is in the airport
17. Jack and Lock with the smoke monster from the Season 1 finale
18. A close up of Desmond as we know him on the island
19. One of the Others – Aldo – reading “A Brief History of Time”
20. Kate and her horse
21. Juliette talking
22. Kate in bathroom from her flashback about her upcoming marriage
23. Richard Alpert
24. Jin and Sun in the airport
25. Ben’s map to get to the Survivors before they reach the radio station
26. Desmond and Mrs. Hawking when she was buying chestnuts
27. Another pic of Richard Alpert
28. Widmore Labs home pregnancy test
29. Mrs. Hawking
30. The little model of a plane that Kate stole from the bank
31. A photo of Mrs. Hawking and the monk that headed Desmond’s monastery
32. The close up of the eye from the scene Jacob’s shack

More information could be gleaned, as more was added to the site. Periods appeared, each linking to a different webpage, each with another piece of the puzzle. The phrase “Jack.ff.6.1.2007” appeared on the page, a reference to a future date and coincidentally one of the famous numbers. One of the pages linked to showed a photo of Desmond saving Claire from drowning, another showed Claire reading a letter. A picture was then added to the bottom of the page, an orange eye surrounded by the words in Portuguese “lost forever” and “I liberate myself.” When players clicked on the eye it took them to a page with an image of a boar and the anagram “Ban Hicks Lock Pro,” which unscrambled means “on Black Rock Ship.” A link from the main page connects to Kate’s site, in case players had not yet visited the site.

Next.html is another page linked off the main page. This page contains another anagram with the words “magazine aloe map” that translates to “Amazon email page.” This lead sparked people to search for an Amazon.com profile, which turned out to be for Chad. J Peshark (the author listed of the page in the HTML source code), an anagram of Jack Shepard. On that page was a link to his email account, which people began emailing him on, and oddly enough receiving messages. Another anagram linked off of Jack’s site was “finale jet humour” or “email June fourth,” and that was the date that players began to receive messages back from Jack. He began letting them know that he was trying to find Kate, but that she was missing.