Bad Numbers, Man! But Good Puzzle. Just Don't Get LOST Along the Way...
Written: Mar 20 '07 (Updated Mar 20 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: extremely intriguing, artful presentation, clever
Cons: need all four puzzles, a black light and puzzle glue to "get" this one
The Bottom Line: Don't be frustrated by the challenges this puzzle presents. Be energized.
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| bilbopooh's Full Review: LOST: Mystery of the Island Jigsaw Puzzle, The Num... |
I am a LOST fanatic. I always knew I would be, but now that I've finally caught up to the show and am watching the current episodes along with the rest of the country, I can say it with an even greater degree of confidence. It took me until halfway through the third season to watch everything I needed to watch in order to be on track, so I'm very displeased by rumblings that the show may have signed its own death sentence by leaving viewers hanging for weeks. Come on, LOSTies, hang in there! I certainly will. I've got too much invested in the show at this point. Not only have I seen every episode, I've written 11 LOST-themed parodies, I own talking figures of Charlie and Locke and intend to get Hurley one of these days, and as I compose this I am wearing a t-shirt featuring Dom Monaghan's stubbly mug and the words "I'm LOST without Charlie." I also recently spent the better part of a week assembling a 1,000-piece puzzle involving the show's mysterious numbers.
I received The Numbers, the third of four installments in the LOST: Mystery of the Island Jigsaw Puzzle series, as a Christmas gift from my brother Nathan, along with The Hatch, the first installment. I purchased the second, The Others, shortly thereafter but have yet to see the fourth, Before the Crash, in stores. The numbers, which have become a source of such intense speculation among fans, were introduced in Numbers, an incredibly creepy season-one episode that is the first to delve into Hurley's back story.
We learn that not too long before the plane crash, he won the lottery using a series of numbers repeated obsessively by a fellow patient at a mental hospital where he stayed for a time. Hurley comes to believe that these numbers - 4 8 15 16 23 42 - are cursed, and his trip to Australia was in pursuit of some explanation as to the power behind these numbers and how he might break free of their hold. After this episode, they start showing up everywhere, both on the island and in the flashbacks of other people. Most importantly, perhaps, throughout the second season, the castaways must enter these numbers into a computer in the hatch Locke finds in order to prevent some sort of catastrophic event eerily hinted at by Desmond, the wild-eyed Scotsman Locke's party meets after blowing open the door with explosives.
It was a combination of extreme interest in the significance of these numbers and a hunch that a puzzle filled with numbers would be easier to put together that led me to attempt this puzzle first. To date, it's the only one of the three I've completed; my friend Libbie also bought The Others, and we've been pecking away at it for more than a month at her house, where it never seems to get finished, and I haven't busted open The Hatch yet. I fear that my suspicion about The Numbers being easier was correct; that's worrisome because this was an incredibly difficult puzzle to put together.
One major reason it's so tricky is that we only get a portion of the finished puzzle to look at on the front of the box. The main feature is Hurley's head, which rests at the bottom of a large number 8. It took me much longer than it should have to figure out two things that made assembly much easier. First, the puzzle is laid out in such a way that there are a large 4 8 and 15 on the top and a large 16 23 and 42 on the bottom. These are silver-rimmed and rest atop a greenish-blue ocean-type background in which floats, among other things, a bottle with a piece of paper affixed to the inside in such a way that the mysterious numbers written on it are easily visible. Second, within each of the large numbers are snapshots relating to that particular number. Now, this still is confusing, since many of these small scenes include more than one in the six-number series. But it at least helps to narrow things down a little, and having the large numbers is very useful for sub-dividing the puzzle once the border is in place, if you're someone like me who has to finish the border before anything else can happen.
When Libbie came over to help me put the puzzle together, she was excited. After all, the box promises, in loud red letters framed by the words "SPOILER WARNING," that "SECRETS ARE REVEALED!" We are warned not to proceed unless we want "exclusive new insight into TV's most puzzling drama series." She took this very seriously; I didn't, since I couldn't imagine that a puzzle could really reveal anything too shocking. After hours upon hours of poring over the pieces, I had an intriguing 19" x 26" work of art with all sorts of nice little visual references to the show. But I didn't see anything there that I didn't already know, except perhaps for some ID cards and scraps of paper revealing the addresses of several characters, and that hardly seemed too noteworthy. I admired the overall artistry of the puzzle and made plans to glue and frame it at some point in the future, but I didn't feel as though I'd received any spoilers.
Then Libbie did a little investigating online and discovered something surprising. There was a part of the puzzle we hadn't seen yet. It glowed in the dark. Well. That was an interesting notion, but I didn't see anything on the puzzle that looked like it might have secret lemon-juice encoding. We kept our eyes open and our lights off, but no new messages came jumping out at us. And then, nearly a month after finishing the puzzle, we finally glued it together. Yes, we had it sitting out on a card table in the living room that whole time, and I guess we were lucky the cats didn't make a mess of it, even with a foam covering on top of it for protection. But we finally glued the front of the puzzle, and after letting it sit for several hours, we glued the back of the puzzle as well. The day was winding down. It was dark. We left the puzzle alone. Several hours later, we noticed that something looked different. There was writing on the back of the puzzle!
Incredibly faint, but it was there, and we turned off every light in the house and gleefully watched as more little lines were gradually revealed. Unfortunately, no amount of dim lighting was enough to allow us to make sense of those yellowish lines. For that, we needed a black light, which my brother furnished on his next trip home from college. So on went the black light, and lo and behold, there were all sorts of chicken scratches, Dharma-ish mutterings about Hanso and hatches and strange diseases, not to mention a diagram of one of the hatches, albeit only one-quarter complete. For a complete diagram, we'd need all four puzzles pushed together on some absurdly large, empty, flat surface, each of them glued into permanence and shuddering under the spooky illumination of a black light. We haven't gotten that far yet, and the chicken scratch we have is more intriguing than intelligible. But there seems to be a secret or two hidden in there, along with the promise of more insight the next time we feel like devoting a week to one of these puzzles. You've got to be a pretty big geek to invest that sort of time and effort into such an endeavor.
Good thing I am.
Charlie figure
Locke figure
Season One
Season Two
Parodies:
Bohemian Rhapsody
I Am a Rock
White Christmas
Christmas Canon Rock
We Wish You a Merry Christmas
Christmas in Killarney
Henry the Eighth
Sweet Baby James
The Only Living Boy in New York
Here, There and Everywhere
He Was My Brother
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 12.99
Type of Toy: Puzzle
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Epinions.com ID:
bilbopooh
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 in Movies, Books |
 - Top 500 |
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Member: Erin McCarty
Location: Erie, PA
Reviews written: 2470
Trusted by: 194 members
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