The lowdown on the new Comic-Con video

Last year at their Comic-Con panel, Lindelof & Cuse debuted a version of Marvin Candle's orientation video for the Orchid Station that later showed up on the Season 3 DVD. This year, we got to see a similar video -- one with a nice twist and some real info interspersed with a lot of teasing.

In the beginning of the panel, Hans von Eigen, the "Dharma Representative," took four "recruits" -- people from the audience -- back to the Dharma booth to show them a "top-secret video." However, at the end of the panel, one of the lucky four, a dorky looking teenager, rushes back onto the stage, saying he secretly taped the video and wants to show it to us. (Yep, this is all staged and he's actually an actor. Very high-concept.) So the lights dim, and the footage comes on. We see the kid taken to the Dharma booth and told by the Dharma rep he's about to see something no one else gets to see, and the footage rolls...

It's Marvin Candle again. He's shooting a home video in what looks like his living room. He looks super-nervous. "As you may have surmised, my name is not Marvin Candle. It's Pierre [Peter?] Chang. I'm a Theoretical Physics professor at Ann Arbor, Michigan."

The footage is fuzzy and keeps cutting out at strategic moments, but we gather that he's speaking thirty years ago but knows a fuzzy outline of the future: "We at the Dharma Initiative will all die in some kind of Purge...you should be watching this thirty years from now...your president is named George W. Bush...you all use a new invention called the Internet." (I'm paraphrasing, but that's basically what he said.)

Then, an ominous note of possibility: "The Dharma Initiative has to be reconstituted...time is not just of the essence, it is the essence...complete the research and change the past so you can save us all."

He really needs to tell us something else -- maybe how we can change the past -- but then the guy who's videotaping him chimes in. "Look, this is pointless, nobody's going to see this," his voice chimes in. Chang pleads: "No, just wait, let me--"

But that's the end of the tape.

TAGS: Comiccon, Marvin Candle, Pierre Chang
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