Oceanic-Air.com

courtesy of Media Life

How clever: Site for ABC's 'Lost' adds to the mystery

The last thing you’d ever expect from a TV show’s site is that it would be intellectually challenging. Most sites contain character bios, actors’ mugshots, previews of upcoming episodes and not much more. That’s why Oceanic-Air.com, the site for ABC’s drama “Lost,” is so refreshing. With its puzzles and cryptic buried messages, it’s a big exception to the boredom of most TV sites. Oceanic-Air.com, which launched just after “Lost’s” May season finale, is the faux official site for Oceanic Airways, the carrier whose Flight 815 crash stranded the castaways in “Lost.” The challenge is that there are hidden messages buried throughout the site. For those smart enough to crack the codes, there are some cool rewards. For instance, one page displays a seating chart for Flight 815. Clicking on the rows corresponding to the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42, a sequence that’s been part of a recurring mystery on “Lost,” highlights a specific seat on the plane. Those highlighted seats reveal a character’s name when rolled over with the mouse. When clicked, each highlighted seats provides insight into that character or one close to him or her. Clicking on Rose’s seat reveals her husband's wedding ring. Charlie’s leads to a photo of Claire's journal, while Kate’s shows her mug shot, and so on. When you click on the seat for Shannon, whose brother, Boone, died last season, one of two things appears: a photo ID of Sayid, Shannon’s island boyfriend, or the map of the island drawn by the French lady, which Shannon tried to help Sayid translate. Getting the right sequence of numbers will also lead fans to a trailer for season two. There are also hidden messages throughout the site about being stranded on an island, presumably the messages in a bottle that Hurley collected on the finale. The flight tracking portion of the site contains a disturbing message that reads “give us the boy” hidden within the information for Flight 572. That’s also a reference to the season finale, in which 10-year-old Walt was taken from his father by the island’s mysterious others. Plenty of references to the others, whose presence has not been explained on the show, also pop up on the site. Solve enough mysteries and you’ll be granted access to a message board where other “Lost” fans have been deconstructing the site’s meaning all summer. They are very serious about their theorizing and not kind to new posters who repeat old information. Traffic to the site has been too small for comScore Networks to measure but it’s received lots of buzz in newspaper and magazine articles. Though the site is clearly run through ABC, with disclaimers linking to Disney and ABC sites, the network has been coy in commenting on the site, as have the show’s producers, who are rumored to post updates every few weeks. But that only adds to its appeal. Oceanic-Air delivers on the promise many once saw for TV tie-ins on the internet, someplace interesting, thought-provoking and far outside the norm.