Hell, BEN and Charles on the same team (even if they don’t know it yet) is a hell of a development.
Wader
5982
Can we really say that? I suppose if you say “against smokey”, then sure, thats a team, but I would argue that nothing we have seen implies Widmore and Jacob share goals at all.
Slate’s discussion this week made the good point that there are two very different stories intertwining in LOST right now. The first is a fantasy story, featuring two mythical godlike characters and the fate of the world, with the major conflict being Jacob vs. Smokey. It’s best episode was the Richard one.
Then there’s a sci-fi story involving dimensional travel and a fight over the island’s resources. That story’s major conflict is Widmore vs. Smokey, and it’s best ep was the Desmond one.
nabeel
5983
Loved the episode.
Absolutely. I think she’s especially important because out of all the characters in the Alt reality, she and Widmore have something quite uniquely strange about them: they saw their son die before their eyes on the island, and yet here they are off the island with their son perfectly alive.
They are the real conundrum in the alternate universe puzzle because everything else more or less works in the current theory. One reality is if the island still exists, and the other is if it sank; we can more or less understand that everyone ended up living slightly different lives in the latter scenario. But it doesn’t explain Daniel existing. So obviously it’s not so simple as realities “splitting” from that moment after the bomb went off (or whenever they did “split”). The theory no longer holds, something else is occurring.
Exactly, I’ve been waiting for the sci-fi part all season.
walTer
5984
Wow.
I love Penny. Really. I do.
Great ep…it just never stopped. All the way to the final scene.
Further, the LA-X reality seems to be populated by the Island versions of these characters. Jack doesn’t remember getting his appendix out because it happened on the Island but he’s got the scar. Various characters had all sorts of deja vu moments leading into this episode where we now have characters actively remembering things from the Island reality.
Sure it does, if you let go of the idea of time being linear. If the island sinks in 1977 and 815 never goes to the island, Daniel never goes over on the freighter, never goes back in time, never gets killed by his own mom. Not in that “reality”. The whole idea of “what happened happened” is clearly upended by the dual reality system, though I suspect they’ll never attempted to really explain how or why.
Again, that isn’t a given. Eloise and Charles Widmore in the alt reality should have never seen Daniel die in the alt reality because there is no path for him to have gotten back to the 1950s or whenever it was that they killed him there. The big question there isn’t why Daniel exists but how Eloise is aware that they are in an alt reality (but she’s always been presented as someone who is privy to such knowledge for whatever unexplained reason).
I think they’ve painted themselves into a corner with the time theory stuff that they can’t get out of cleanly. The logical reason for Daniel existing in the alt reality is that “what happened happened” is only true for a single closed-loop reality and the alt timeline breaks that. Like Daniel exists because the island was blown up in 1977, so 815 never crashed, Daniel never went over on the freighter, never went back in time and thus never got shot by his own mom in this reality. But if that’s true, then I don’t know how they also explain that the explosion that changed everything still happened (and somehow sunk the island) because the 815 people should never have been able to contribute to the incident for the same logical reasons as Daniel still existing.
Detonating the bomb was the rough equivalent of turning the switch beneath The Swan, apparently. I’m guessing that both of those actions caused a major time hiccup. Earth 1973/7, in that case, may just never have happened, or may no longer be relevant. Alternately, the Earth 2004 could be, as some have theorized, a result of actions taken this season, though that doesn’t explain how the dead people came back to life. There are also aspects of Earth 2004 that seem to imply that it might be entirely created - i.e. Eloise’s assertion that anybody telling Desmond about something that he’s supposed to want from Earth 2007 was “a violation.”
If we consider Cork Island to be Jacob’s test of how these various individuals would operate in the equivalent of The Cave, where their past didn’t matter, it feels almost like Earth 2004 is “the winners” specifically dealing with the issues in their past that were driving their lives when they showed up on the Earth 2007 Oceanic 815 flight.
Thinking back to The Orchid training video, it’s entirely possible that both of these things are happening in the same spacetime area. Chang freaked out in that video when the rabbits got close to one another - it could be that individuals electromagnetically projected through time by whatever makes Cork Island go are, in fact, sent to other universes, but that the contents of Cork Island remains constant across possible universes.
Gah…my head hurts. I just hope they resolve this whole “sunken island” thing before the conclusion. Maybe I’ve just seen one too many episodes of How the Earth Was Made, but that’s just plain not possible with a geographical island. Even if there’s a volcano under it, you wouldn’t be able to explode the stuff on top to the bottom of the ocean - you can’t take an island apart from the bottom up. You either erode it from the top down or it gets subducted to nowhere. It’s probably just my crazy brains, but that’s really starting to irritate me. Time travel and parallel dimensions - totally cool. Bad geology - evil.
Speculation time, what if 2004 and the current 2007 are actually the same timeline and we’re just seeing them simultaneously. No multiple universes or anything. By that I mean the bomb went off, no alternate line was created, the island sank everyone was moved through time to 2004 and their life as if the island sank. Desmond starts putting the pieces together and some other event occurs to then undo what the bomb did again with everyone changing to correct the time line. There’s no reason that the 2004 and 2007 sequences contradict each other or exist outside of a singular time loop.
I think this is what’s happening and why Widmore has to use Desmond. I think that as the “alternate” timeline continues to run and grow it comes closer and closer to being reality, but it essentially exists in the same space as the original timeline, so if it reaches a certain point then they would both be destroyed. Widmore is also clearly concerned with Smokey/Locke getting loose as well, but I don’t know if/how the two problems are related. I don’t think there’s any evidence that Smokey influenced the bomb detonation and is just using the chaos to his advantage now, but you never know.
The island moves through space-time when a polar bear spins a wheel on it… I’m pretty sure it isn’t, you know, a real geological island.
How does the history of the characters having been changed (sometimes drastically) fit into this? Eg. Helen is alive and marrying Locke, Jack has a teenage son, etc?
You guys make my head hurt.
While I don’t think his theory is correct, it’s clear that the island can impact the rest of the world, so without its presence for ~30 years it makes sense that there would be large scale changes in the lives of the people it influenced in the initial timeline. If Locke was not visited by Richard every couple years and given tests to see if he was ready for his destiny it makes sense that he lived his life differently. If Jacob wasn’t around to observe Jack and speak to him at a turning point in his life then maybe his life did completely change. If (I assume) Hurley can’t see dead people and doesn’t end up with mental issues then he doesn’t get the numbers from another mental patient so he doesn’t think he’s cursed. Of course the implication of these and most of the other changes we’ve seen is that the island is actually a very bad place, and any good things that happened to any of the people while they were there may not have actually been good.
Oh, yeah, I’m fine with the butterfly effect of the island not existing having a huge impact on people’s lives, I just don’t see how 2004 and 2007 could both be the same unified timeline with all those changes, at least not if there’s anything to the oft-repeated “whatever happened happened” business.
Well, there aren’t too many episodes to go so we’ll soon see what the answers are. I suspect they won’t really hold together if you think about them for more than 30 seconds though.
jason
5996
There never were any alternate timelines, but parallel worlds. 2007, 2004, 1977 are all happening at the same “time” in different realities. The Big Bang occured in more than 3 dimensions and caused each world to “start” later than the previous world. Using the island’s energy, they’ve opened the ability to travel between worlds, many of which, despite being at different points in history, are largely identical. In fact, the more similar two worlds are the easier it is to cross over; the more different, the more difficult. The bomb that ended last season has caused realities which are not similar to become more easily bridgeable. Jacob being dead is allowing consciousnesses of people to see/feel across dimensional boundaries, and this will only be resolved when a candidate becomes the new Jacob and can reassert the walls.
Yeah, I’m not sure I believe any of that either, but it was fun to write…
You can take an island apart from the bottom up, but it isn’t going to happen often and when it does, it is catastrophic. Volcanic pressure ruptures the surrounding earth under water, exposing a large magma chamber to the incoming seawater. Very large boiler explosion as the water gets flash boiled to steam. The world kind of sits up and takes notice when it happens (Thera, Krakatoa), but this is a sort of a magnetic anomaly explosion, or maybe implosion, so time and space got rippled by shock waves rather than sea and land.
The Island is sunk in the X timeline because the Island isn’t needed there: Smokey escaped. That’s why everything is so fucked up over there, and why Whidmore et. al. want to change it back, he’s not supposed to get free here as well! (Alternately, in the other Island timeline it’s Jacob who was kept prisoner, and Smokey was keeping him there?)
We know the Island can move, and we know that it was not sunk catastrophically, the statue is still chillin’ in it’s post-Richard arrival state. It can be surmised that the Island was sunk to get it out of the way. If we imagine the Prisoner killing everyone on the Island and never wanting to return, sinking it to the bottom of the ocean would be a marvelous way to make it difficult for him to be returned to it.
XPav
6000
See, I constantly get irritated that the “side” timeline is treated as “bad”, based on the experience of the main characters. In the side timeline, everything seems normal, and hundreds of other people (Oceanic 815, like everyone on the Ajira flight, etc) are not dead.
The utter callousness towards which the murder of lots of innocent people, who’s only fault is to be background characters, is brushed off by the self-involved but supposedly-mostly-likable main characters really makes me not like them very much.
I mean, poor, poor Froghurt, but how about the rest of em?
