LOST: The Pre-Season Report

Why does the Pearl Station monitor the Swan?

More specifically, why was the Pearl Station told that the people in the Swan were doing something that they believed was important, and then document everything they did? I understand that Dharma might not want the rank-and-file to know that unless somebody pushes a button every 108 minutes, everybody dies. That’s the kind of thing that could set off a totally justified panic. But the whole bit with the notebooks seems unnecessarily risky. The thing is, I think they can come up with a totally reasonable explanation. After all, now that we’ve met a lot of the Dharma Initiative, we know that there were some paranoid wingnuts with positions of power. I mean, these are people who listened to Stuart “They saw my model!” Radzinsky! It’s going to be a lot easier for them to justify weird things Dharma does, now that we know them better.