Quote:
Originally Posted by Oliver
...one more thought about the phones just occurred to me. Yes, I'm being silly.
As long as the actual line is not cut somewhere inaccessible, like the ocean floor, it's trivial to hook up a phone directly to the line bypassing the PBX, unless the PBX also serves as the concentrator, which I think it doesn't. If you're crafty enough, on a pulse dialing line, (which, according to the available graphics showing rotary dialer phones, is probably the kind they have) you can make a call with nothing beyond the headset ripped off a phone by slapping bits of wire together - if you have a whole phone, you just twist the wires and go, no serious technical expertise required.
To actually kill the outside line dead dead so that nobody can make a call from the island even if they think of that, you would need to destroy the equipment on the other end. Basically the only reliable way to do that from the island that I know of involves thousands of volts fed into the line to blow the fuse, (just connecting it to mains power is known not to work) which is neither easy nor safe to do.
I.e. if you're serious about not letting people call the police, you're not going to have an easy time of it.
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How about this? If I remember correctly, in any Episode that the phone lines are cut, no one ever makes an evident phone call the on the first day of the conference. As well, the weather is still calm for a good chunk of the first day, so the sea would still be fairly calm, compared to how it's likely raging during the second day.
If there is an undersea phone line, then the line must surface on the island somewhere where it's easily accessible, like the beach or something similar. So, while the weather is still nice, you could travel down to the beach, cut the lines, head back up and act like nothing happened. Heck, if you've got the guts, you could probably even do this during the early hours of the first night.
And once the second day begins, the weather's too rough for anyone to consider going anywhere near the beach, so there's no way to check to see if the line's intact down there.