Minor Spoiler Alert for those who have not yet seen the Thanksgiving eve Lost.
At about 23 minutes in, we see a crossword puzzle, with the clue for 42 down “Enkidu’s friend”. Locke is writing in “GILGAMESH”, which is factually correct; Enkidu was Glgamesh’s companion. However, if you look at the puzzle, it looks wrong. While all of the neighboring down words look like reasonable crossword answers, the words we can see that cross GILGAMESH come out to garbage, at least as far as I can tell (and I’m reasonably good at crosswords).
As I write this, I haven’t had time to go back and hold on the crossword pizzle for too long to figure out all the letters that should go there. It should start SPRI… I’m wondering if this is some sort of odd clue or hidden reference, or perhaps it was just that the producers wanted to show that Locke knew about Gilgamesh and just used some existing puzzle that had a slot the right size, putting in a fake clue and not bothering with the rest. The fact that the last H was already written in when it looks like it did not make a reasonable cross word (do you know any words ending in “GHR”?) actually lends to the latter explanation.
Later: I’ve pulled the puzzle back up. The first letter is either S for SHARE or O for OHARE (name of an airport) The second should probably be P for SPEND. The third, R for ACORNS. The fourth, I for IMITATIVE. The next, following LA_, could reasonably be B, D, G, M, N, P, S, T, V, W, X, or Y, so that leaves many possibilities. the next one is trickier, we just see the tail end of a long term with ISMSKEET, and the M is the letter in question; I don’t have a good guess of what this is spelling. Following that is like A for APERS, then C for ACIDS, and finally E is the likely letter between a G and an R at the end of the word (though I’m dubious about the R itself, actually, since “SPIR” is not so likely a term on what looks like a fairly easy puzzle grid; SPIT or SPIN are more likely.
So this leaves us with SPRI__ACE or OPRI__ACE… and I hate to admit that I don’t see anything obvious in either of those. Trying an online crossword puzzle dictionary search doesn’t find anything, so I’m likely making a bad assumption somewhere…
(It should be noted that it also doesn’t look like Locke filled in the rest of the letters that were there; the handwriting doesn’t match. You ‘can look at the stiff, angular lettering he puts, the dotted i, the darker writing in general.)
Oh, I’m a nerd. Happy turkey, all you turkey-eaters!
Thanks for the reminder. I didn’t catch much of a glimpse of that crossword myself and meant to go back later to re-examine. Will do so shortly, though I don’t expect to have any more revelations than you did.
______________________
In semi-related J.J. Abrams news this item was posted apparently late yesterday on SciFiWire and I hadn’t heard it till I just read it there now…
Alias Coming To An End
P.S. Yes indeed, Happy Thanksgiving to you, Nat, and the entire Nat clan—also to all the many fine discerning American blog readers out there. You know who you are.
i came to the same conclusions about the puzzle independently, including which letters ought to go where so i think you’re on the right track. i found your site while searching “enkidu + spri” hoping to get something. there’s not much. i wonder if it’s two words, but spri doesn’t give much to work with.
Googling Gilgamesh & Enkidu yields this summary page which, quite frankly, I just don’t have the time to read. Perhaps there are some Lost clues in the general story of Gilgamesh somewhere? I wouldn’t bet on it, but thought I’d post just in case anyone else has the time and patience to read up on the angle.
Did some further “reseach” into how the puzzle grid is laid out, but had no mind-boggling revelations.
It looks to me as if the black block right below “SPIR” was not there in the original puzzle and thus the word could be SPIRAL-something. I say this because the block immediately after the one below the “R” of “SPIR” has no number at all. Now, I’ve seen weird-themed puzzles that might do that, but it’s about a one in a thousand chance of that odd occurrence.
“Gilgamesh” is 42 down. 42 is one of Hurley’s numbers. Where are Hurley, Locke, et al? Down the hatch! That’s a common, though I believe older, phrase which refers of course to drinking. So the answer to the Lost mystery is that the island and most of the characters are all just figments of one person’s drunken stupor! There—mystery solved. Let’s wrap up the show.
The last clues on the clue page of the puzzle book are 42 & 43 down. In the same shot you can also see the extreme lower left-hand portion of the grid page and one answer number which is triple digits. It’s either 103, 105, or 109 since all I can make out of the third digit is the leftward-point bottom curl of the digit. So there’s no logical way I can see to explain the last numbered clues on the facing pag being only 42 & 43 down. So I believe they just threw the clue and answer haphazardly into the middle of an existing puzzle for some reason.
What does any of this mean? Probably absolutely nothing. But you could make a case for it being the producers’/writers’ statement that viewers will never be able to solve the puzzle that is Lost!
Last post errata:
…”ReseaRch”…
…leftward-pointING…
…facing pagE…
One ‘o these days I gotta get me a spell-checker so it can tell me the right way to spell “gotta.”
thought I’d send this pic along to illustrate (pun intended) just how much time I have on my hands. I went back and looked (over and over) at Locke’s crossword puzzle and had no great insights beyond what you already posted, but I did notice a few minor things.
This image rendering is not meant to be definitive, but it’s the best I could do. Freezing the VCR (SLP) image on the screen made it fuzzy in lower portions, so for some of this I had to continually rewind and play over and over until I had it. Some of the partial blocks along the edges may be in question, but any whole blocks shown, especially with letters, should be OK (unless, of course, I misread a letter, but I don’t think so).
The puzzle pretty much looks as you describe. As you say, the “Gilgamesh” answer seems to have been just thrown into an existing puzzle where it didn’t naturally fit. I guess one advantage of doing that is that it makes the answer stand out just a little bit more in the brief screen shot of the puzzle, thus ensuring most folks will “get it” and not be too distracted by anything else in the puzzle.
“Gilgamesh” is 42 down and, of course, that’s one of Hurley’s numbers. The “down” part could have all sorts of vague significance (or none at all), but the one that pops to my mind is the common (though not so much these days) phrase “down the hatch…” which is, of course, where Locke et al are. (I seem to remember the phrase from as far back as Three Stooges shorts, meaning, of course, “to drink”. Hey, maybe the island and the inhabitants are all just figments of one character’s drunken stupor!
The puzzle’s across/down clue page shows “42. Enkidu’s friend” and “43. Less brazen” as the very last ones on the page. However, you can see the lower left corner of the puzzle grid just to the right of the clue page and the one grid number we can see partially visible is “10x”, where “x” is a digit with a leftward-pointing curl at the bottom, so it’s either “103″, “105″, or “109″. All of those are way beyond the numbers for the last down clues on the facing page, so there’s no way those clues go with the puzzle grid shown in the book. (Also indicative that there’s no way viewers will ever figure out the puzzle that is Lost?)
You see 97 (across & down) there at the bottom? “ALA”? The “L” block doesn’t have a number! This indicates to me that most likely the black block immediately above was not there in the original. So the 69 down “SPIR” entry could possibly have been followed by an “A”, then the “L”, making it SPIRAL-something…
Finally, I have Excel versions of the large sunday NYT crossword puzzle grids (one 21×21, another for one instance of a 23×23 puzzle) which let me input the grid layout in such a way that I fill in the black blocks in one half of the grid and the other half is automatically filled in symmetrically across a diagonal axis. The whole shebang is automatically numbered as well. I tried to use the 23×23 file to lay out Locke’s puzzle grid, but it seemed I couldn’t get it to work out. Now, it’s possible I just didn’t have the patience to stick with it long enough, but no matter what I tried I couldn’t seem to get the black blocks to work out so that the part that was the other half of the grid would also fill in right symmetrically and maintain the proper numbering. (I just had to guess at some imagined black blocks toward the outer edges in an effort to get the numbering to work out, even in my eventual asymmetrical version which I brute-forced.) Of course, not all crossword puzzles are diagonally symmetrical or even necessarily symmetrical along any axis at all, but I think it’s safe to assume that 99.9999…% of them ARE diagonally symetrical.
What does any of this mean? I haven’t got a clue! (Again, pun intended.)
Note also that 90 across is a two-letter word, generally considered a no-no in serious American-style crossword puzzle design. This suggests to me that the black square following it is a fake, it used to be white… and with that, square 97 used to be black, with the “97″ appearing in the square to its right instead.
Hi, the answer of the puzzle should be SCRIPTURE, which is highly relevant to the topic of the series, isn’t it?