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Of all of the many mysteries the survivors of Flight 815 encounter on the Island, one of the more enigmatic and bizarre is that of the Swan station computer. According to Desmond Hume (Henry Ian Cusick) — who inherited his directive from Kelvin Inman (Clancy Brown) and is all too happy to pass it on to the mid-section survivors — a number must be inputted into the Swan station’s retro-licious computer every 108 minutes. Failure to do so, he explains, will have devastating consequences. To keep the operators on task, the Swan station is equipped with an old-school number-flipping countdown clock on the wall, and an alarm begins to sound after the counter reaches T-minus four minutes.
With such a strict schedule to keep, it’s unsurprising that there’s eventually a breakdown in the system, especially with the chronic disunity that plagues the survivors. As John Locke learns in “One of Them” (Season 2, Episode 14), once the timer runs out, its tiles flip from the relatively neutral black-and-white number tiles to an ominous red and black, with the numbers replaced with cryptic hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs are a recurring theme on the Island and within the series. They can be found on Benjamin Linus’ secret door, in the frozen wheel chamber, on the temple wall, and inside the lighthouse, as just a few examples.
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According to Damon Lindelof in the “Lost” Season 4 DVD bonus features, the producers consulted an Egyptian hieroglyphics expert to create these details for the series. In the Season 3 DVD bonus “Access: Granted,” the showrunners explained that the Swan station hieroglyphics were intended to translate to “Underworld.”
