S1: Numbers

4 8 15 16 23 42

And without further ado, Lost proudly presents the infamous numbers!  I can't tell you how many countless hours I've spent theorizing on what they mean, talking about them with my friends, reading what the different combinations were added and such and so on and so on.  Fans obsessed over these numbers like they had been given the answer to an equation and they all had their own theory on what that the equation was.

Well what do we know.  We know that the numbers were being broadcast from a radio tower on the island.  Why...I forget and I don't know if we're ever told why.  Rousseau and her team found the radio tower and she changed the transmission to the distress call that has been playing for the past 16 years.  But while the numbers WERE broadcasting, some people in a branch of the military at a listening post heard the numbers.  They used the numbers for personal gain and bad things appeared to happen around them.  We learn that at one time, Hurley was committed and he befriended a man who was friends with the guy who worked at the listening post or might have worked at the post too, I can't remember, but he just repeated the numbers over and over again.  So we know the source of the transmission of the numbers and how they got to Hurley and we know that they brought Rousseau and her team to the island, so they appear to be cursed.  The kicker is at the very end of the episode the viewer sees that the numbers are on the side of the hatch that Locke and Boone discovered and have kept to themselves thus far.  We'll learn soon enough that the numbers are very important inside the hatch as well.

Note:  The Black Rock gets mentioned again by Rousseau and the radio tower is somewhere near there.  I can't recall but I think we'll be visiting the Black Rock sometime in the first season very soon.