Dharma Initiative
Dr. Pierre Chang (Francois Chau), under the alias of Dr. Marvin Candle, explains that the project began in 1970, created by two doctoral candidates from the University of Michigan, Gerald and Karen DeGroot (Michael Gilday and Courtney Lavigne), and was funded by Alvar Hanso (Ian Patrick Williams) of the Hanso Foundation.
[1] The episodes "LaFleur" and "He's Our You" indicate that mathematician Horace Goodspeed was in charge of Dharma Initiative operations on the Island, at least from the very early 1970s through the time of "the Incident".
After the Incident, according to notes on the blast door map painted by Stuart Radzinsky in the Swan Station, the Dharma Initiative's facilities on the Island seemed to fall into disrepair.
This drop was made by a drone launched from the Dharma Logistics Warehouse located on the Orote Peninsula on the island of Guam.
Two of the last known living members of the Dharma Initiative, known only as Hector and Glenn, had been sending regular supply drops to The Island for over twenty years.
This indicates a financial structure had been left in place by the Hanso Foundation, hinted at in the Sri Lanka video,[10] to pay the two workers and keep them supplied with packaged foodstuffs and equipment sufficient to continue sending pallets to The Island in perpetuity.
They were regularly given the coordinates of The Island via a teletype link to the still-working Lamp Post station, allowing them to program the drones with the exact drop locations for their cargo.
At the Lost panel, Hans van Eeghen, a Dharma executive, revealed that the results from the booth were "abysmal", and a few people had been selected to view a video that had been sent from thirty years in the past.
The Dharma Initiative built nine known research stations around the Island (as well as the off-island Lamp Post), most of which take the form of hidden underground facilities or bunkers.
The symbol for this station is the usual Dharma Initiative logo with a hydra in the middle, which can be seen on a large canopy behind Kate and Sawyer’s cages in season 3.
Also in season three episode "A Tale of Two Cities", Tom comments that the polar bears that used to be housed in the cage Sawyer was being held in figured out the "food" puzzle in two hours.
In "Because You Left", a flashback shows Chang doing the initial recording for the orientation film, where he explains that it is a station for monitoring the Hostiles and formulating strategies to combat them.
In "The Man Behind the Curtain", flashbacks of the Dharma Initiative in operation on the Island show one of the members, Horace Goodspeed (Doug Hutchison), wearing a jumpsuit bearing the Arrow station logo with "mathematician" written below it.
[19] In "LaFleur", Horace gives the order to notify the Arrow to "prepare the heavy ordnance" when he believes there is an imminent danger from the Hostiles.
[1] In the episode "The Incident", Dharma member Radzinsky claimed that when complete, the Swan would allow manipulation of electromagnetism that "would change the world".
This event required the entire Swan station area to be sealed with a large amount of concrete "like Chernobyl" (according to Sayid and Daniel Faraday) to contain the dangerous energy.
This caused a consistent build-up of electromagnetic energy, which resulted in a change of the station's use: a two-member crew, replaced every 540 days, were instructed to enter the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 into a microcomputer terminal every 108 minutes.
In the episode "Some Like It Hoth", set in 1977, the Swan is shown to be under construction in an area designated as the Hostile territory; a violation of the truce Dharma had brokered with them, under the primary authority of Radzinsky.
In the video game Lost: Via Domus, the Incident Room is the abandoned laboratory revealed to be on the other side of the concrete wall in the Swan.
Unlike some of the other stations (the Swan, the Pearl and the Orchid), the Flame is not an underground bunker, but rather a wood-frame bungalow with a large satellite dish on the roof.
On the day Oceanic Flight 815 crashes on the Island, Mikhail Bakunin (Andrew Divoff) uses the station to access news feeds to gather information about the survivors.
According to the orientation film that features Dr Mark Whickman, two-person teams, working eight-hour shifts over a three-week period, were to watch the video displays and take notes on their observations.
[26] After Oceanic Flight 815 crashes on the Island, Nikki and Paulo (Kiele Sanchez and Rodrigo Santoro) are the first survivors to encounter the Pearl, while searching for diamonds.
[7] During season three, some of the survivors visit the Pearl in hope of finding a way to communicate with the Others, but discover that the station is only capable of receiving data, not sending them.
[34] As a result of turning the wheel, the survivors of Flight 815 and the freighter crew members on the Island (who are all candidates to replace Jacob) begin to jump randomly through time.
They said they needed to press the button to save everyone, although they may have wanted to disable the station's gases to prevent Benjamin Linus from using the Tempest as a weapon of last resort against the Island's enemies.
[36] In season three, Sun-Hwa Kwon (Yunjin Kim) and Juliet Burke (Elizabeth Mitchell) visit the Staff station to perform an ultrasound to discover when Sun's baby was conceived.
In the season 3 finale "Through the Looking Glass" Charlie discovers that the rescue boat linked to Naomi (the parachutist) was not sent out by Desmond’s ex-girlfriend Penny Widmore.
In another twist which connects the two media, Our Mutual Friend is a book that Desmond was saving to read just before his suicide in the Swan station on Lost.
In Uriah's lab, there is an inaccessible room containing a computer terminal with the numbers shown on the screen and a Dharma-style octagon with a pine tree symbol for the White Forest base on the wall.
