Alvarez & Andrea

Season: 5, Episodes: 1, Faction: DHARMA Initiative

Overview

Alvarez was a member of the DHARMA Initiative. He was part of the construction crew who was building the Swan station.

War

Death

1977

5×13 – Some Like It Hoth

   

Soon after his death, Horace ordered Miles to deliver his body to the Orchid and keep it quiet as the situation was top secret.

   

Miles read Alvarez’s last thoughts and discovered that while digging a hole, he was thinking about a woman named Andrea. However, due to the electromagnetic anomaly, a metal filling in his tooth ripped from his mouth and shot right through his head, killing him. (“Some Like It Hoth”)

Images Source | Source 

Andrea “Alvarez” (Name)

Andrea Alvarez is a Spanish language avant-garde artist and drummer. She is well-known for her medusa-like hair, which is very similar in appearance to that of Alvarez.

Image Source 

Associated DHARMA Station 

Decoded Season 1 & 2 Characters

Hurley Reyes

Dr. Pierre Chang

Decoded Season 3, 4 & 5 Characters

Horace Goodspeed

Miles Straume

Stuart Radzinsky

Key Episode(s) to Decoding the Character

5x13 "Some Like It Hoth"

Wiki Info 

Perseus, the legendary founder of Mycenae and of the Perseid dynasty there, was the first of the mythic heroes of Greek mythology whose exploits in defeating various archaic monsters provided the founding myths of the Twelve Olympians. Perseus was the Greek hero who killed the Gorgon Medusa, and claimed Andromeda, having rescued her from a sea monster sent by Poseidon in retribution for Queen Cassiopeia declaring herself more beautiful than the sea nymphs.

Overcoming the Gorgon

After some time, Polydectes fell in love with Danaë, yet Perseus, who knew that Polydectes had grim intentions, constantly protected his mother from him. Polydectes desired to remove Perseus from the island so he could have Danaë, so he therefore hatched a plot to send him away in disgrace. Polydectes announced a large banquet where each guest was expected to bring a gift. Polydectes requested that the guests bring horses, under the pretense that he was collecting contributions for the hand of Hippodamia, “tamer of horses”. The fisherman’s protegé had no horse to give, so asked Polydectes to name the gift, for he would not refuse it. Polydectes held Perseus to his rash promise, demanding the head of the only mortal Gorgon, Medusa, whose very expression turned people to stone. Ovid’s anecdotal embroidery of Medusa’s mortality tells that she had once been a woman, vain of her beautiful hair, who lay with Poseidon in the Temple of Athena. In punishment for the desecration of her temple, Athena changed Medusa’s hair into hideous snakes “that she may alarm her surprised foes with terror”.

Athena instructed Perseus to find the Hesperides, who were entrusted with weapons needed to defeat the Gorgon. Following Athena’s guidance, Perseus sought out the Graeae, sisters of the Gorgons, to demand the whereabouts of the Hesperides, the nymphs tending Hera‘s orchard. The Graeae were three perpetually old women, who had to share one eye and one tooth among them. As the women passed the eye from one to the other, Perseus snatched it from them, holding it ransom in return for the location of the nymphs. When the sisters led him to the Hesperides, he returned what he had taken.

From the Hesperides he received a knapsack kibisis to safely contain Medusa’s head. Zeus gave him an adamantine sword and Hades‘ helm of invisibility to hide. Hermes loaned Perseus winged sandals to fly, while Athena gave him a polished shield. Perseus then proceeded to the Gorgons’ cave.

In the cave he came upon the sleeping Stheno, Euryale and Medusa. By viewing Medusa’s reflection in his polished shield, he safely approached and cut off her head. From her neck sprang Pegasus (“he who sprang”) and Chrysaor (“bow of gold”), the result of Poseidon and Medusa’s meeting. The other two Gorgons pursued Perseus, but under his helmet of invisibility he escaped.

Image & Source

Mythological Family Members & Associated Deities

HERMES	HADES	POSEIDON	ATHENA	HERA	ZEUS	STHENO
EURYALE	PEGASUS	CHRYSAOR

ANDREA (Conflated Character)

Andrea was a woman that a DHARMA Initiative worker named Alvarez was thinking about when he died.

Death

Underworld

Punishment

Protection

Fertility (Water)

Fertility (Earth)

1977

5×13 – Some Like It Hoth 

Soon after his death, Horace ordered Miles to deliver the body of Alvarez to the Orchid and keep it quiet as the situation was top secret.

   

Miles read Alvarez’s last thoughts and discovered that while digging a hole, he was thinking about a woman named Andrea. However, due to the electromagnetic anomaly, a metal filling in his tooth ripped from his mouth and shot right through his head, killing him. (“Some Like It Hoth”)

Images Source | Source 

“Andrea” Alvarez (Name)

Andrea Alvarez is a Spanish language avant-garde artist and drummer. She is well-known for her medusa-like hair, which is very similar in appearance to that of Alvarez.

Image Source

Decoded Season 1, 4 & 5 Characters

Hurley Reyes

Miles Straume

Stuart Radzinsky

Wiki Info 

In Greek mythology Medusa (“guardian, protectress”) was a Gorgon, a chthonic monster, and a daughter of Phorcys and Ceto. The author Hyginus, (Fabulae, 151) interposes a generation and gives Medusa another chthonic pair as parents. Gazing directly upon her would turn onlookers to stone. She was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who thereafter used her head as a weapon until he gave it to the goddess Athena to place on her shield. In classical antiquity the image of the head of Medusa appeared in the evil-averting device known as the Gorgoneion.

Medusa in classical mythology

The three Gorgon sisters—Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale—were children of the ancient marine deities Phorcys (or Phorkys) and his sister Ceto (or Keto), chthonic monsters from an archaic world. Their genealogy is shared with other sisters, the Graeae, as in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound who places both trinities of sisters far off “on Kisthene’s dreadful plain”:

Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged
With snakes for hair— hated of mortal man—

While ancient Greek vase-painters and relief carvers imagined Medusa and her sisters as beings born of monstrous form, sculptors and vase-painters of the fifth century began to envisage her as being beautiful as well as terrifying. In an ode written in 490 BC Pindar already speaks of “fair-cheeked Medusa”.

In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a ravishingly beautiful maiden, “the jealous aspiration of many suitors,” priestess in Athena’s temple, but when the “Lord of the Sea” Poseidon raped her in Athena’s temple, the enraged Athena transformed Medusa’s beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. In Ovid’s telling, Perseus describes Medusa’s punishment by Minerva (Athena) as just and well-deserved.

Death

In most versions of the story, she was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who was sent to fetch her head by King Polydectes of Seriphos as a gift. With help from Athena and Hermes who supplied him with winged sandals, Hades‘ cap of invisibility, a sword, and a mirrored shield, he accomplished his quest. The hero slew Medusa by looking at her harmless reflection in the mirror instead of directly at her, to prevent being turned into stone. When the hero severed Medusa’s head from her neck, two offspring sprang forth, the winged horse Pegasus and the golden-sworded giant Chrysaor.

Jane Ellen Harrison argues that “her potency only begins when her head is severed, and that potency resides in the head; she is in a word a mask with a body later appended… the basis of the Gorgoneion is a cultus object, a ritual mask misunderstood.”

In Odyssey xi, Homer does not specifically mention the Gorgon Medusa:

“Lest for my daring Persephone the dread,

From Hades should send up an awful monster’s grisly head.”

Harrison’s translation states “the Gorgon was made out of the terror, not the terror out of the Gorgon.”

According to Ovid, in North-West Africa Perseus flew past the Titan Atlas, who stood holding the sky aloft, and transformed him into stone. In a similar manner, the corals of the Red Sea were said to have been formed of Medusa’s blood spilled onto seaweed when Perseus laid down the petrifying head beside the shore during his short stay in Aethiopia where he saved and wed his future wife, the lovely princess Andromeda. Furthermore the poisonous vipers of the Sahara, in the Argonautica 4.1515, Ovid’s Metamorphoses 4.770 and Lucan’s Pharsalia 9.820, were said to have grown from spilt drops of her blood.

Perseus then flew to Seriphos where his mother was about to be forced into marriage with the king. King Polydectes was turned into stone by the gaze of Medusa’s head.

Then he gave the Gorgon’s head to Athena, who placed it on her shield, the Aegis.

Some classical references refer to three Gorgons; Harrison considered that the tripling of Medusa into a trio of sisters was a secondary feature in the myth:

The triple form is not primitive, it is merely an instance of a general tendency… which makes of each woman goddess a trinity, which has given us the Horae, the Charites, the Semnai, and a host of other triple groups. It is immediately obvious that the Gorgons are not really three but one + two. The two unslain sisters are mere appendages due to custom; the real Gorgon is Medusa.

Image & Source

Mythological Family Members & Associated Deities

PHORCYS (Father)	CETO (Mother)	STHENO (Sister)	EURYALE (Sister)	HERMES	ATHENA	HADES
PROMETHEUS	PEGASUS	CHRYSAOR	POSEIDON	ATLAS