Via Domus is a LOST tie-in videogame released for Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. Although it is officially licensed by ABC and received support and input from the show’s creators (Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the show’s two main writers, outlined the seven episodes of the game), its stories are not considered part of the official LOST storyline or mythology. There are also a few minor contradictions with the show’s stories. I decided to include the game’s storyline here anyway, for anyone who is interested.

The full version of this article shortly summarises all the game’s 7 episodes. Of course there’s no need to tell you that if you haven’t played the game yet, these summaries will spoil the surprises for you.

The last of the 4 jigsaw puzzles was released in February 2007. The following are some interesting notes from its blastdoor map excerpt:

• “Dharma protocol: no stations past security barrier. – Why a DHARMATEL intranet presence past this border?”
• “Believed to have divested from project in 1985 following AH/MDG incident. But could be #6.” This both hints at another undiscovered station, as well as an unknown incident. AH might stand for Alvar Hanso, MDG might be the initials of one of the De Groots, the main heads behind the DHARMA Initiative. It is unknown what incident this refers to, or if it might be the Swan station incident.”
• The note for the Staff medical station also mentions said incident: “Cauduceus station believed to have been abandoned due to AH/MDG incident of 1985. Or: possible catastrophic malfunction of Cerberus system.”

The season opens with a suburbian scene. A women seems to be crying in front of a mirror. She then goes on to host a book club meeting, when suddenly the floor starts shaking and they all rush outside. Out of the houses of this small community, people come rushing out – among them are Ethan, the man who infiltrated the middle section survivors’ camp, as well as the man who pretended to be Henry Gale. The look up to the sky and see a plane breaking apart and falling. The scene was taking place on the Island, with the Others, all along. The fake Henry Gale is in command, and he orders Ethan and Goodwin to have a look at the two crash sites and, if there are survivors, go undercover and send back a list of the people after three days.

Jack, Kate, and Sawyer, who have been taken by the Others, start coming to. All of them seem to have received an injection in their arm. Jack is imprisoned in a dark, cold cell. The woman from the book club talks to him and introduces herself as Juliet. She talks to him calmly, and tries to get Jack to relax and allow her to bring some food to him, but he overpowers her and tries to break out. On the way, he encounters the fake Henry Gale, who tells him to not open the door he is trying to escape through. Jack ignores him and opens the door anyway. Water starts filling the corridor, and only with help from Juliet he manages to close the door again. They seem to be in some kind of aquarium for sharks and dolphins. Juliet says it’s called the Hydra. Jack also thinks he hears his father’s voice on the intercom, but Juliet tells him it has been broken for years.

Kate wakes up in a shower with Tom, the formerly bearded Other. She is forced to take a shower and wear a dress, then she meets with “Henry” at the beach for breakfast. He tells her that he did all this for her, in order for her to have something nice to hold on to, as the next two weeks would be very unpleasant for her.

Sawyer is thrown into an animal cage outside. A less than talkative boy in the second cage nearby helps him escape from his cage, but they are both captured, and the boy, called Karl by Tom, has to apologise to Sawyer for involving him. Later, Kate is thrown into the opposite cage, and Sawyer tries to comfort her.

Juliet presents Jack with a file the Others have on him, documenting every detail of every aspect of his life. In his flashbacks, Jack remembers his divorce from Sarah. He was ready to let her have anything she wanted, if only she told him who she was with now, so he could know why she left him. But Sarah does not want to tell him, as it doesn’t matter. Jack starts losing it, calling every number from Sarah’s phonebook, and even suspecting his father Christian of being with her when he finds his number. He confronts him in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and is thrown in prison after attacking him. Sarah arrives to bail him out. She tells him that after 50 days of being sober, Christian has been drinking again, she was barely able to understand what he said when he called her about his son being in trouble. When Juliet asks Jack whether he would like to know anything about his file, in particular the information on his wife, he realises what his obsessive behavious has caused, and has only one question: whether she is happy now. Juliet says she is.

Juliet leaves the room and encounters the leader of the Others, the fake Henry Gale, and their conversation reveals not only that the two seem to have history, but also that his name is Ben.

Questions brought up in this episode

• Why was Juliet crying in front of the mirror?
• How can the Others maintain their suburbian lifestyle on the Island?
• Why does Ben want lists of the survivors?
• What were Kate, Jack, and Sawyer injected with?
• Where is the DHARMA station where the three are kept, and what was its purpose?
• Why are the next two weeks going to be unpleasant for Kate?
• Who is Karl? Why did the Others imprison him?
• How do the Others get all the information on the survivors?

Mysteries solved in this episode

• The man who claimed to be Henry Gale is in fact the leader of the Others, Ben. He sent Ethan and Goodwin undercover with the survivors in order to get lists of them.
• Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are held in or near a DHARMA station called the Hydra. It seems to have been used for zoological research as there are animal cages and an aquarium.

This recap episode aired one week before the premiere of season 3, and recapitulated the major events of the first two seasons, with a special focus on the season 2 finale – the activation of the Swan’s failsafe, the freedom of Michael and Walt, as well as the abduction of Jack, Kate, and Sawyer. No new information is presented, but the following are some interesting lines from the narration:

Once upon a time there was an island. Some said it was in the South Pacific, but you wouldn’t find it on any map. Many people have been drawn to the island throughout time, lost in their travels, and lost in their lives.

[...]

It was a flight like any other, a plane full of strangers, bound from Sydney to Los Angeles. Among them, the doctor who lost his father, and lost his way. The girl next door turned fugitive. The con man out for revenge, who killed the wrong man. The couple whose marriage was slipping. The soldier. The rockstar. The lottery winner. The single mother-to-be. And of course, the man whose faith was lost, and whose body had failed him. These are just a few of the many who were brought together high over the ocean, by something they could not understand at the time.

The Lost Experience was the first Alternate Reality Game and took place between the second and third season of LOST. It focused on the background of the Hanso Foundation and its DHARMA Initiative, the nature of the experiments that were conducted on the Island, as well as the significance of the Numbers. The story was told through the eyes of Rachel Blake, who was revealed to be the daughter of the long-missing magnate of the Foundation Alvar Hanso.

The story began with Rachel Blake exposing that the Hanso Foundation, beneath its front of a benevolent organisation, was involved with various horrible crimes such as illegal organ harvesting, imprisonment and exploitation of mathematicians, abuse of mental patients, illegal experiments on animals, and more. All these were committed for the research conducted by the Foundation, and without any respect for human life. Secrecy and bribery allowed them to keep up this scheme.

The focus then shifts to a secret project of the Hanso Foundation: the DHARMA Initiative, the acronym being revealed as standing for Department of Heuristics and Research on Material Applications. This project is linked to the Valenzetti equation which is believed to predict the exact date humanity will get extinct, through whatever factors. The core parameters of the equation currently happen to be 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 43 – the Numbers. The aim of the DHARMA Initiative was to try, through targeted manipulations in society and environment, changing these paramters and in effect “postpone doomsday.” Research on the project was conducted in underground labs of a highly secret location – the Island on which Oceanic flight 815 crashed. The radio tower built on the island was broadcasting the numbers to the outside world in an encrypted fashion, so that the Foundation would notice once one of the values had been changed. However, everything indicates that the DHARMA Initiative was deemed a failure, and funding has been withdrawn in 1987, the project stopped.

Enter Thomas Werner Mittelwerk, the man who Alvar Hanso himself trained to be his successor, in a great act of misjudgement. Mittelwerk was bent on changing the Valenzetti parameters, no matter the price. Hanso and his morals were just an annoyance to him, so he made him disappear – imprisoning him and keeping him quiet. All the while Mittelwerk started a horrible new attempt to change the Numbers. He was about to test a virus in two villages in Sri Lanka, which is supposed to kill exactly 30% of any population. If the tests had been successful, this virus would have later been let loose on the whole of Earth’s population, as Mittelwerk was convinced that killing 30% of humanity would prevent the end of the world. He thought that saving the rest of humanity was worth killing “some” innocents.

The most important revelations are in the Sri Lanka and Norway videos. Rachel Blake’s uncovering of these facts led to the release of Alvar Hanso, who then set out to restore the Foundation to its former glory based on moral principles. However, Mittelwerk denied to have been defeated completely. It must also be noted that while the events of the show LOST are taking place in late 2004, the story of The Lost Experience was considered to take place in real-time, i.e. in 2006. Hence, the “evil” Foundation being shut down has not yet taken place as far as the events on the island are concerned.

(A minor revelation: the ship stranded on the Island, the Black Rock, is revealed to actually have belonged to Magnus Hanso, Alvar Hanso’s grandfather, who was involved in the slave trade. The ship’s log has since been found, but so far noone ever claimed ownership.)

After all the revelations of The Lost Experience, and after Rachel Blake has exposed the truth to the public, the website of the Hanso Foundation was updated one last time, containing a statement in which Alvar Hanso addresses the public. This version of the website is still online today.

In the letter, Hanso states that the Foundation is now being restructured based on the principles of transparency, open communication, and response to feedback. He also apologises for all the mistakes that have been made before. However, clicking on the second appearance of the word “humanity” in the letter reveals a hidden video message by Thomas Werner Mittelwerk, in which he claims that he has only suffered a minor setback, but that he still has the virus and that he will see the project to completion…

In his final show that was the official ending to The Lost Experience, DJ Dan provided the following relevant information:

• He mentions that the ultimate plan of the Foundation was to exterminate 30% of the whole human population, meaning that the two villages in Sri Lanka were just a preliminary test before deploying the virus around the world.
• A caller patches in a government radio channel he has been eavesdropping on. What can be heard is a raid on the Hanso Foundation building in trying to catch Thomas Werner Mittelwerk, based on all the evidence Rachel Blake uncovered. However, the pursued “Mittelwerk” turns out to be a lookalike, and a recorded message from the real Mittelwerk announces that he cannot afford to be caught. Then, the whole building is blown up.
• When calling in to DJ Dan’s show, Rachel says that she is going to post a final, explaining video on ABC.com.

Unfortunately, I was not able to find an archived copy of the last live DJ Dan show. However, the video Rachel posted can still be seen on YouTube, or simply by opening the full version of this entry.

The video is of Rachel Blake’s visit to Alvar Hanso himself, at his home in Narvik, Norway. Rachel pretends to be replacing the nurse who regularly comes draw Alvar’s blood, but he sees through the ruse and is even willing to give the whole truth to her, on tape.

He says that the people around him in his home do not work for him, but for the Foundation, and that their job is to keep him hidden and quiet. He trained Thomas Werner Mittelwerk to be his successor, but it was a great misjudgement as now, he has taken over control of the Foundation and is doing all the horrible things Rachel has uncovered and more, all in Hanso’s name. Probably the more surprising revelation is that the real reason Rachel has been investigating the Foundation is that she traced the fund that paid for her upbringing and education back to it, and she knew that this trace must lead to her father. Rachel Blake is Alvar Hanso’s daughter, and he asks her to help him bring down Mittelwerk and expose the truth by making his confession public.

The website at letyourcompassguideyou.com has been updated to pretty much the state it still is in at the time of this writing. The conversation log between OpenersHep (Persephone, alias Rachel Blake) and wtkFleet35 (William T. Kilpatrick of Jeep) has been updated with a new conversation. The account of Kilpatrick has obviously been hacked by someone from the Hanso Foundation, who suggests that Kilpatrick has been made an involuntary organ donor, and that Rachel is responsible for it. He scares Rachel with knowledge about her apartment, and is pretty confident that they will get away with what they have done. The log is still available.

A .zip archive (also still online) is supposed to contain evidence about the illegal activities taking place in Hanso-sponsored hospitals. It shows two cases in which patients have signed a DNR (do not resuscitate) form, died within a year, and later were given drugs used to preserve organs for transport. The folder also contains schematics for turning Jeeps into organ transport vehicles as well as further correspondence linking Peter Thompson and the Hanso Foundation to illegal organ harvesting.

Finally the site now contained a link to a video on YouTube, a recording of a Jeep marketing event in a bar where Kilpatrick suddenly takes over the microphone to inform the audience of what he had found out, and that they should have a look at the missing_organs.zip file mentioned above. He is then abducted by some big guys who throw him in the back of a Dodge van and drive off. The video is posted as a call for help by Jeep to find the missing ex-employee. You can also watch it by opening the full version of this post.

All glyphs have been found, all video fragments unlocked, and in culmination of the ARG the Sri Lanka video successfully put together. Click through to the full version of this entry to see it in its entirety. Continue reading for a short recap of its contents.

The video starts out as just another DHARMA Initiative orientation film, copyrighted 1975. In it, Alvar Hanso himself addresses the viewer and talks about the Initiative, founded and run by the DeGroots.  He continues with information about the Valenzetti equation that has already been revealed, and the numbers as representing the core factors that need to be changes, should humanity’s doomsday be delayed. Research on how to change the values is conducted in underground laboratories on a highly secret island. Alvar also mentions the radio tower on the island, which constantly broadcasts the coefficients in an encrypted manner to notify the outside world of any changes that the researchers were able to make.

The view then zooms out to reveal that Thomas Mittelwerk was showing the film to a small audience. He says that despite all efforts, the DHARMA Initiative had failed. Then he reveals that in a more radical attempt to change the values, they will infect two Sri Lankean villages with a virus under the pretense of giving them vaccine for an imagniary sickness. The bodies are then to be brought in for examination, to confirm that the desired genetic mutation took place. The people at the Vik Institue have verified that exactly 30% of the population has to die for the operation to succeed. Mittelwerk goes on that it is terrible that innocent people have to succumb to this virus, but that it is the only true way to save the rest of humanity by eliminating all poverty, war, and famine.

The video ends as Mittelwerk detects Rachel taping the whole procedure, and she starts running away screaming.

While people were still happily collecting glyphs for HansoExposed.com hidden all over the web, in order to unlock the fragments of the video, there were also events where free Apollo candy bars had been distributed. A new website at WhereIsAlvar challenged visitors to upload pictures of them with the candy bars from all over the world, and promised that “the truth” would be revealed once enough people showed their determination to expose the Hanso Foundation that way.