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The Sickness/Theories

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Main Article Theories about
The Sickness 		Main Discussion
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Contents

The Temple

  • The Sickness is a communion with the Island caused by entering the Temple, or interacting with someone or something inside of it. It is sacred to those who have it, hence Ben's reluctance to divulge any information about The Temple, even to Locke, at the end of season 3. The Sickness is intrinsically changing, and it was this change that Rousseau feared in her team, and that caused Ben to "lose his innocence" and his memory ("Dead Is Dead").

Changed by the Island

  • The Island "adopts" Robert: Clearly, Robert still has enough faculties to lie to Rousseau and try to convince her that he is not crazy. But he is also not the same Robert that we see on the beach when Jin washes up on the Island at the beginning of This Place is Death. He all of a sudden wishes to shoot Rousseau who is pregnant with his child. The change, according to Rousseau came after he went into the Temple to rescue Montand.
  • The Sickness is becoming an Other. However, Juliet has passion for human life, maybe she never entered the Temple at all.
    • The sickness that Rousseau is referring to was "carried" by the Others. After her team went into the temple (without her) she claimed they had become sick. After Ben was taken to the Temple he became an Other (according to Richard). Ben became one of them. The same happened to Rousseau's team, they became 'Others'. Becoming an 'Other' is the sickness. Sick in the sense of not caring for human life and forgetting everything before hand. Her Team soon forgot her and the events leading up to the time she killed them. She saw this as being Sick.
  • The Island "adopts" Claire: Claire, similarly, loses interest in her formerly much-loved baby Aaron and being rescued after coming into contact with Christian Shephard, who we have seen in various contexts as a spokesperson for the Island. After she abandons Aaron, she is next seen sitting in the Cabin with Christian Shephard and appears uninterested in John Locke, and her former friends.

The Sickness is a hoax

  • The sickness was being used as social experiment by DHARMA and was continued after the purge by The Others
    • They used it to convince Claire (unsuccessfully) and Rousseau to give up their babies.
    • They used it to persuade Desmond, etc. to stay inside the Hatch and take the vaccine.
    • This is supported by the fact that Desmond witnessed Kelvin removing his HAZMAT suit outside of The Swan unaffected, suggesting that the sickness doesn't really exist, and the vaccine and quarantine doors are merely a part of the experiment and to convince the test subjects that the sickness is very real.
  • The sickness is nothing more than Ben's post- Purge ploy to hide the genocide from off- Island DHARMA officials. After he purged the Island, he told DHARMA officials of the situation, saying a sickness caused the death of many, but not all, DHARMA members, and not to send anyone else to the Island. DHARMA did not want to quit, and developed and sent a vaccine to the Island.
    • This is why food drops still occur.
    • Ben will not let anyone leave as it is believed anyone on the Island is sick and if DHARMA finds out he lied, he will be killed.
    • Radzinsky was probably unharmed in the Swan station as Ben's delivery never reached the Swan, and he was alerted to stay there and given the biohazard suit. He believed Ben's story, and thus spread the word to Kelvin when he appeared.
    • This is why Ben kept the Arrow operational, as it was a way for DHARMA to check in on the Island and he needed to keep up the hoax.
  • There is no sickness, it was a way to protect DHARMA employees, and keep them inside their stations, and to keep other people out making them think the people inside were sick

Counter Evidence

  • We have seen physical effects of The Sickness -- these are the health problems incurred by time travel.
  • Darleton have implied that The Sickness and the time travel health issues are one and the same, or at the very least interrelated.

The Sickness is infertility

Evidence

  • There is only one "sickness" on the Island: infertility. DHARMA was aware of the infertility problem on the Island, and CR_481516-23_42 is a prophylactic against it. It keeps both men and women from becoming sterile, and keeps babies alive in utero. This is why Claire had to be given CR_481516-23_42 by Ethan.
  • The sickness is a virus released by DHARMA during the Purge which results in the premature death of the mother during pregnancy.

Counter-Evidence

  • If CR_481516-23_42 was a successful prophylactic against infertility, or prevented pregnant mothers dying, then Juliet would not have been recruited to solve the infertility issue.
  • According to Juliet, the Island's healing properties increased Jin's sperm count, so men on the Island are not sterile.
  • According to Juliet, the infertility issue only affects women whose babies were conceived on the Island, meaning that the vaccine would have had no effect on Claire or her baby if the vaccine's purpose had anything to do with infertility.

The Sickness is related to the Purge

The Others' Gas

  • The Sickness is the poison used to kill the Dharma Initiative during the Purge.
    • DHARMA could have based its findings of a sickness on the end result of the Purge. They assumed that only a widespread "sickness" was capable of such an atrocity, and prepared for it as such.
    • See above hoax theories.
  • The purge was the result of a intended release of the sickness but was somehow accidentally (or not) contracted by Danielle's team in a smaller dose resulting in their different reaction to it.
    • Rousseau has been on the Island for 16 years, which means her and/or her science team would have had to have shared the island with DHARMA at one point. They would have been on the island when the Others committed the Purge.
    • So the vaccine was what the Others distributed amongst themselves to keep themselves from being infected and killed by the poison gases.
    • They obviously knew that Danielle was on the island and pregnant so they found a way to inject her (like they did to Claire when she was sleeping) to keep her and Alex from dying.
    • Of course, Kelvin and Radzinsky were in the sealed Swan and were unaffected, but they were exploring the Island (the blast door map) so when they saw that the other DHARMA members were dead and or missing, they knew something was wrong and started wearing the HAZMAT suits for protection. The vaccine that Desmond was using was a cache that Radzinsky or Kelvin found stashed in the Arrow that the Others had taken over and were using for storage.

DHARMA attack on the Others

  • The sickness is caused by a chemical or biological agent that DHARMA used against the Others during the Purge. This was active around the time of the Purge, but may no longer be active now.

The Sickness is time-displaced consciousness

  • The Sickness is the collection of symptoms associated with time-transported consciousness as experienced by Desmond, Brandon, and Minkowski. The crew of Rousseau's science ship all failed to find their constants--with Danielle excepted--and so they all succumbed to the effects of the time-transported consciousness shortly after shipwrecking on the Island.
    • This is strongly suggested by the 21/03/08 podcast.
    • This might account for Rousseau's general spaceiness. She never really overcame the effects of time-transported consciousness.
    • Rousseau's music box was her constant. This would explain her obsession with the song "La Mer" in her notes.
    • Portions of DHARMA and the "science crew" Rousseau belonged to would probably have had exposure to EM fields or radiation (as diagnosed by Faraday), being scientists. This led them to be susceptible to the sickness. Rousseau, however, was pregnant when her crew shipwrecked and would have presumably avoided exposure to radiation.
    • The vaccine that Minkowski was injected with is the same vaccine that was in The Swan and Kelvin and Desmond injected themselves.
  • The sickness that we have seen so far in Desmond, Minkowski, Faraday, Charlotte, and Miles is in fact only 'stage one' of the condition. I believe that one of the consequences of the dislocation of the consciousness and the body is that the consciousness continues to exist after the body has died. I believe that after physical death, the consciousness of an individual affected by the 'sickness' continues to ricochet backwards and forwards through time, perhaps for the rest of eternity. This is 'stage two'. Furthermore, I believe that the Whispers are the disembodied voices of those people who have experienced the side-effects associated with arrival on the island and subsequently passed away in body alone. That is why the Whisper transcripts don't seem to make any sense: what we are hearing are the disembodied voices of long-dead people who are doomed to re-live fragmentary moments of their lives time and time again. These people are, presumably, utterly disorientated and truly 'lost'. Indeed, it is quite possible that at least some of the Whispers we have heard so far are the voices of Rousseau's dead crewmates. It was, after all, Rousseau who told us about the Whispers in the first place.
  • Not everyone entering or leaving the Island experiences the time travel and the need for a constant. e.g. Sayid, the other Freighties before the Island moved, the Losties.
    • The freighter crew and Rousseau's ship both approached by water; perhaps the sickness is the first line of sea defense. The only defense is a constant or the vaccine. Desmond wasn't affected because he had too short of an exposure before administered the vaccine by Inman. Danielle was affected, and Alex was taken from her for Alex's own protection. The Island gradually healed the worst of the sickness. The Losties and Henry Gale were not affected because they arrived by air or a faster speeds.
    • When the flight 815 crashed on the Island there was an electromagnetic anomaly (Desmond had missed the 108-minute button-pushing-deadline). This might have caused the electromagnetic/what-ever barrier around the Island to weaken or shut down. That's why the passengers aren't affected by the disease.
  • Read this closing line of Season 3's Every Man For Himself. Ben is quoting Of Mice and Men when talking to Sawyer. "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. It don't make no difference who the guy is, long as he's with you. I tell you, I tell you a guy gets too lonely and he gets sick." This is a very early reference (the first I know of) to the concept of a constant and their ability to protect one from the harmful effects of time travel. Read this way it strongly implies that these effects are the sickness.

i have this idea that ther are two types of time travel, phsyical and mental, and to travel through time safley a balance of mental(posotive energy) and physiacl(negertive energy) and with the unbalanced amount of the other (desmond in the swan) (charlotte playing at the well as a child) caused prolonged exposure to one type of energy over the other and thus causes the sickness.

The Sickness is madness

Madness caused by the Numbers

  • The Sickness is a result of continued interaction with the Numbers. It is a memetic disease, spreading through ideas, specifically affecting people based on how much they concentrate on the Numbers.
    • The Numbers are a mathematical representation of entropy, a force in the Universe that leads all things to decay and die (in the case of the Valenzetti Equation, specifically the extinction of the human race).
    • The more one associates with the Numbers, especially using them for personal gain, the more one attracts this entropy (bad luck, insanity).
      • Rousseau claims that her crew tried to figure out what the Numbers meant, and then the Sickness came; whether she knows it or not, these two events are connected. The crew became raving lunatics, forcing Rousseau to kill them.
      • Sam Toomey, who used the Numbers, tried to kill himself.
      • Leonard, who used the Numbers, is in the mental hospital, and turned Rousseau's crew into raving lunatics, forcing her to kill them.
      • Hurley was on the same track after using the Numbers to win the lottery, but temporarily got away from the numbers, at least from his perspective, when he got to the island. When he realized the Numbers were on and in the hatch, he started to lose it again, eventually hallucinating Dave.
        • If this were true, wouldn't Hurley be extraordinarily sick by this time? Hurley might have gotten a little loopy, but he most definitely does not have The Sickness.
    • Dharma created the vaccine to protect themselves from this as they were working with the numbers on a daily basis, trying to change the values of the Valenzetti equation. Ethan injected Aaron with the vaccine because Aaron, for some reason, attracts this entropy physically (explaining Richard Malkin's warning that bad things surround the child).

Madness caused by the Monster

  • Smokey is the "sickness" since there were so few on Danielle's team, Smokey's apparitions affected a greater number of them, making them appear to go insane from seeing things. Being that there are more Losties than Danielle's team, the "sickness" isn't really noticeable since it's only happening to a select few.
    • The vaccine is to prevent the Monster from scanning you.
    • But Danielle was aware of the Monster, seemingly as something separate from the sickness (she refers to it in season one as a security system).
  • As other theories have said, the Monster may have the ability to take the form of other things. Therefore, the "sickness" could be the Monster attempting to posses someone.
    • Which makes sense since (if the monster/possession theory is true) the monster usually only possesses the dead With the exception of Walt which could be because he is "special" and connected to the island and (maybe) the monster itself.
    • The monster abducted one of Rousseau's team into a CV duct near the Temple. When the fist went down, he shouted back that the monster was gone and he needed help, prompting the rest of the team to go after him. Rousseau is the only one who does not go down, and later kills Robert when he reappears, having changed somehow and having tried to kill her.

General madness

  • The Sickness causes hallucinations.
    • Jack has visions of his father, Kate of a horse, Hurley's Dave and possibly Shannon and Locke's visions of Walt.
      • Sayid sees Walt at the same time as Shannon, and Sawyer sees Kate's horse at the same time as Kate. It is unlikely that these were hallucinations.
      • All of these (Except Dave who was confirmed to be a figment of Hurley's immagination)were confimed to be the monter in a 3-21-08 Podcast.
  • Charlie's actions in the episode "Fire + Water" could be the first signs of The Sickness.
  • The vaccine is taken by the Others to prevent such hallucinations.
  • The hallucinations could either be deliberately engineered by the Hanso foundation for some reason or a naturally occurring anomaly caused by the mysterious nature of the Island.
  • The sickness is the despair in any human, in particular the "curse" that accompanies people who believe in the power of the "Numbers".
  • In the season three episode Everyman for Himself, Ben quotes to Sawyer from Of Mice and Men about how loneliness can make a man sick. Perhaps this points to the sickness as a mental state rather than a traditional infection.

The Sickness is the illness referenced in the Sri Lanka video

  • The sickness is the disease referred to in the Sri Lanka video by Mittelwerk, i.e., "They think they are infected by a virus carried by local macaques...", "We must make absolute certain we are hitting precise genetic targets...", "We need not take any more lives than is absolutely necessary. Yes?", and most importantly "...we have engineered into the virus."
  • The sickness is the disease referred to in the Sri Lanka video by Mittelwerk, and is a solution that was created in order to alter the variables ([The Numbers]) of The Valenzetti Equation. The Dharma Initiative had brought intellectuals from several fields of study to find a way to alter the numbers. We find out through the video that the Valenzetti equation will predict the number of months and days until humanity extinguishes itself, either through war, famine, overpopulation, etc... It was the task of the Dharma Initiative to find a way to alter the variables to pospone or prevent the end of mankind, and as a result they developed a virus (i.e. The Sickness) to selectively "thin the herd" around the globe. The virus was designed to drive its victims insane, and was engineered to only effect a certain percentage of the human population. "The Sickness" was tested on the local population of the Island, "The Others" and the other groups that landed there (Roussoe's Group). Here is some supporting evidence form the Sri Lanka Video, "They think they are infected by a virus carried by local macaques...", "We must make absolute certain we are hitting precise genetic targets...", "We need not take any more lives than is absolutely necessary. Yes?", and most importantly "...we have engineered into the virus." After they perfected the virus, Mittlewerk was going to release it into the rest of the world, and the human population would be selectively thinned out thus altering the Solution to the Equation. In correlation to the efforts shown in the Sri Lanka video, Mittlewerk has been utilizing a small candy company (The Apollo Candy Company) that the Hanso Foundation had purchased in the 1970's to unknowingly medicate a small percentage of the human population (mostly members of the Hanso Foundation and select pockets of the world) against the Sickness since 2004 (on a side note Middelmerk is the new faceman of the Hanso Fondation). Mittelwerk's Apollo Candy Company has recently teamed up with Sprite, and in a related series of events has teamed up with Dr. Hackett. The Hanso Foundation is currently funding a secret project called Project Sumo, and has been doing so since 1988. The Project has been testing the effects of of psychotropic drugs in a beverage. Here are some of their findings which have been taken from Dr. Hackett's letters, "Your work is proving fruitful (pun intended!)" and "Initial research shows release of the psychotropic compound to be a success. The acid and flavoring agents of the beverage disguise the taste. More tests are necessary to reach optimum viral spread". The Hanso Fundation is planning on releasing The Sickness which will be masked in Sprite! The acidic and fruity taste masks the taste of the viral strain present in the beverage, and it is an easy way to spread the virus around the globe. If their plan succeeds then the equation will be altered, the human race will be saved, and the Dharma Initiative will have succeeded long after their demise.

The Sickness is beneficial

  • The sickness is actually what caused the mysterious healing for Rose (cancer), Locke (spinal damage), and Jin (infertility). It was part of the Life Extension Project that got loose, and for some reason is now seen as undesirable by the Others. This theory would also serve to explain why none of the survivors have contracted malaria or other tropical ailments.
  • The sickness is, in fact, the opposite of what it seems: it extends life, slows the aging process (or possibly stops it), gives protection from disease and heals wounds faster. The vaccine halts the effects of the sickness, so it is necessary to vaccinate the children, who otherwise may take decades (or longer) to reach adulthood.
    • This would apply, but it will only give longevity when someone reaches their physical peak.
      • Since Ben is one of the Others, he could have been taking the Vaccine.
    • Preventing aging wouldn't prevent 'growing up'. Aging is due to limitations of cells, growing up is due to development triggered by hormones.
  • The Sickness is part of the Life Extension Project. The Vaccine is what keeps you alive however it speeds up any other diseases you may have e.g. Cancer.
    • I like how this sounds but there's an obvious contradiction-- the Island healed Rose's cancer. Unless you can explain why the Sickness would give one person cancer and heal another person's cancer, your theory just doesn't work.

Other theories

  • I don't think the quarantine symbols and Kelvin with his HAZMAT gear is related to the sickness, especially after the events of the Other Woman. It seems that Kelvin came after the purge, so they were instructed to always wear Hazmat gear when going out to keep protected from gas getting released from the Tempest.
  • The Sickness is a biological weapon developed by DHARMA in order to wipe out the Hostiles. They already had an antidote for it (CR 4-81516-23 42), but the Hostiles were able to steal it which prevented them from being wiped out. Rousseau and her research team arrived shortly after the Purge when the virus was still active, therefore Rousseau is the only person to possess the virus currently.
  • The sickness is what has made the Others the way they are.
  • There is only sickness
  • The sickness is one of the experiments created by the DHARMA Initiative with the hope of changing one of the factors in the Valenzetti equation. By eliminating 30% of the population, the environmental factor dealing with overpopulation would have to change.
  • Everyone on the island is infected with the sickness but none of them know it because the island protects them from it somehow. Once they leave the island, the sickness slowly kills them. This could help explain Jack's depression, drug addiction, and thoughts of suicide since leaving the island. He knows that if he had not made the decision to contact Naomi's rescue ship, nobody would have died from the sickness, and he blames himself for any deaths that occurred from it.
  • Kate didn't seem to be affected by this theoretical sickness like Jack was, though.
  • The sickness is the loss of free will.
  • The sickness is actually a brainwashing in Room 23
  • The sickness is the nose bleeding maybe. Danielle survives because JIN is her constant!
  • The sickness comes from my other theory of the electromagnetism anamoly. I believe that it is some sort of radiation that is the effect of the incident. Their are so many clues that back this up as well. The quarantine signs on several Dharma hatch doors. Calvin wearing the radiation suit when he found desmond. Rousseau said that her team wasn't infected until 2 months after they crashed on the island. Babies had the ability to be born on the island pre-incident as we know Ethan was born in the 1970s Dharma era. So I think after the incident and the sickness, babies were unable to be born on the island due to high levels of radiation at the time. Claire was able to have Aaron because by the 2000s the levels of radiation had diminshed. I think after the incident all the Dharma stations became Quarantined and the Dharma workers were forced to stay in their stations because of the high levels of radiation. The Dharma iniative knew about the infertility problem but not the hostiles, and when the hostiles killed the dharma team, they did not know the reason behind infertility hence hiring Juliette.
  • The sickness is caused by the hydrogen bomb that the Other buried in 1954. DHARMA build the Swan above it because of the properties that it exudes. They manage to harness its power, but it doing so they created a magnetic interruption that is the reason why the button needs to be pressed. At one point someone must have missed a punch in and since it was the first incident it released the sickness.
  • The sickness is Jacob's rival trying to find the right form so that he can find his "loophole".
  • The sickness (if real) is caused by fallout from the jughead bomb exploading. The fallout also makes women sterile so they cannot have children and also heals people (Rose's cancer, cancer is prevented through the use of gamma radiation). This also explains why Kelvin wore a HAZMAT suit, suggesting that upon arrival swan worknig are told about the sickness and are told to wear the suit, however Kelvin found out there is no problem with not wearing it. This raises the question of why the fallout didn't stop vegitation on the island and didn't have huge consequences as is the outcome of nuclear devices.
  • There is no sickness. What Rousseau thought was her infected team was actually manifestaions of the monster.

The vaccine

    • Ethan injected Claire with the vaccine to keep her from dying in the late stages of her pregnancy.
  • The vaccine is actually a harmful agent. An inscription on the blast door map reads Aegrescit medendo, which translates to "The disease worsens with the treatment".
    • From what Mikhail Bakunin says, this inscription can also refer to the relationship between DHARMA and the Hostiles, wherein "disease" stands for the Hostiles and "treatment" for the Purge.
  • The sickness is the aging process and the vaccine slows the process.


Spread of the Sickness

  • The sickness is contagious by touch and Ethan injected Aaron with it in order to potentially spread it around the castaways, wiping them out. It begins with a rash, then leads to slow hallucination.
  • Naomi's ship does not land on the Island, in fear of a repeat of the sickness which affected the team they sent to the Island 16 years ago: Danielle's.

Characters Who Have Succumbed to the "Sickness"

All possible victims of the Sickness:

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