The statue is actually the Egyptian hippopotamus diety Tawaret. Mostly, we think. There are some differences whice we can't decide whether they are Darleton taking liberties with the mythology or reflective of differences in the beliefs of the statue builders themselves from orthodox Egyptian belief.
But equating the island with the garden of Eden is an excellent thesis,
Vogon. And good points.
phaze, sorry to hear that S5 lost you, especially after you hung in through the mess that was S3. To be honest, if I weren't a fansite moderator I probably would have stopped watching with S3. To give an idea of how frustrated I was getting with the show at that point...I decided to vent my frustrations at Darlton & Co in a creative fashion on the board.
I don't know if you ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but there was this story arc in which this Demon named Glorficus was trying to get back into her realm. There was a key to the realm which some uberpowerful monks possessed and they figured that the safest placed to hide the key was with the Slayer. They wanted the Slayer to protect the key, but not know what they key was so they turned they key into a girl and altered everyone's memories so that they believed that they girl was Buffy's sister Dawn.
Well, that's what I felt that Darlton were doing to us with Nikki and Paolo. We were just supposed to alter our memories and accept that they had been there the whole time. The scene were Kate and Sawyer arrive back at the beach and this gal, Nikki, who we have never seen before walks right up and starts talking to her was very reminiscent of the scene from BtVS where Buffy arrives home after killing some vampire or other and on her way to her room she bumps into a strange girl, but before she can ask who that girl is she hears he mom say "Why don't you take your sister to the store?".
My reaction to this was to start a thread in our board's General Discussion area entitled "Remember when Nikki And Paolo...?"
I started it with this little post:
"Just thought I would start a thread for reminiscences about Nikki and Paulo and their earlier activities on Lostie Beach. For instance, remember when Sun started wailing on Michael over that watch. I thought that Nikki was going to start crying right there. Or when she was sunbathing with Shannon. They both looked really cute
Or when Paulo was helping Boone find pens for Jack in the Pilot Ep? Priceless."
I was hoping that the sarcastic intent wouldn't be lost. I shouldn't have worried. It turned into one of the most popular threads over the next few months, and people still find excuses to post there. Just recently someone posted "Remember when Nikki was supervising the building of the statue and Paolo was supposed to work on the support beams but decided to take a bathroom break and forgot to set them up. Boy was Jacob mad at them when the statue fell. "