What if they “fixed” things…
Ok, ok…so we have right now many who believe that alternate realities on the show are imminent.
Some believe that when the bomb goes off, 815 lands in LA, and the Losties are “magically teleported” to their place on the plane, just in time for it to land in LA…
I guess my question(s) counters…or at least proposes more questions to ideas and theories that I, myself, believe in…but are still necessary for answering to have any sort of understanding of what will occure if they do indeed accomplish their goal of preventing 815 from crashing…
Remember, this is based on the thought that they do what they say and 815 never crashes…
Lets do this in three questions to gt the most detailed answers pertainig to each…
1) Do the Losties who lived on island, and arrive safely in LA after the detonation actually remember anything that occured on the island?
2)Would stopping 815 from crashing actually prevent “The Incident”…and other island incidents from occuring…or are they simply taking themselves out of the equation?
and lastly…
3)Are they really supposed to stop it from happening, even if it wasnt supposed to happen?
My answers are as follows…
1) They do remember…it would most likely occur the same way Desmond remembers Daniel Faraday telling him to find Hawking for help. A memeory that is either awoken, or added from a collision of their own consciences colliding…
2)The incident would more than likely not occure, but something far worse may.
The Dharma initiative is trying to control and manipulate the islands energy, as Chang said, to be able to control and manipulate time…Why would we as a a species not want to do that…lol, well look whats happening right now on Lost…this is an island out in the middle of nowhere, that allows the possibility of (near) apocalyptic disaster…imagine if people learned to harnass such a power in the real world…
3)I think that as much as some believe that changing the past by detonating the bomb is the necessary measure to save the world/island…we have to take into account one thing…who actually wants the Losties there…from the finale, it seems Jacob does…
And if Jacob wants the Losties to be there for whatever is going to happen in season 6, or whatever did happen in seasons 1-5, he may be the one who wanted the bomb to go off, to ensure that whatever happened…does not happen again.
Let me know your thoughts…
(1) They would normally not remember. However, the people that Jacob touched will start to have lingering thoughts, memories, and dreams about the other reality.
(2) Some things that happened on the island will not happen in the alternate reality, else 815 would not land in LAX.
(3) I don’t know what they are SUPPOSED to do.
I think your answer to question 1 is right on, A.E.S., except they might land in Fiji instead of LA.
I’m somewhat confused by question 2. I’ve been under the impression that the incident that has been referenced so many times happened sometime in the 80’s. If that is the case I think Jack and company setting off the bomb at the Swan site may be the first instance of WHH not happening. I looked it up on Lostpedia and it seems to describe two seperate incidents involving the Swan. As for something worse occuring I think Tas’ post “Some interesting yet conflicting details” describes a timeline where something worse did happen, everyone on the Island was wiped out! I remember a story I heard about the Manhattan Project. Some scientists believed when they dropped the bomb at Trinity it would cause a chain reaction which would result in other atoms splitting in two and destroy all of Earth. Ofcourse they dropped it anyways.
I also like your answer to question three. Like they ask in many detective stories “Who benefits?”
My answers need to contextualised with my thoughts that the impacts of the bomb will have been felt from 1977.
1) Think that they may have consciousness flashes similar to Des ‘remembering’ the other timeline. I think for some characters, their histories will have been changed with varying levels of significance (Daniel, Miles, Widmore…)
2) For the button not to be pushed to crash 815, I’d assume the Swan didn’t get built. The blast door map talks about ‘incidents’, so I’d say that if the swan wasn’t built, maybe Dharma left because of the bomb and no one was around to cause or record any incidents
3) I think it was supposed to happen the way we’ve seen it already and course correction will work to bringing everything back (those who died in the crash or on the island will die post 2004 in different ways and there will be some trigger to bring the remaining losties back to the island, what will have changed is their experiences and past, which will impact on the way the ‘war’ will now play out.
Hi A.E.S.!
It feels like forever since we’ve talked about Lost, and I really need to get back into the swing of things…
1) This is a good question. I think it boils down to the island itself… or Jacob for that matter. Let’s say that this whole thing was a giant experement (not saying it is, just thinking objectivelly) and the losties are like rats in a maze. Remember when Faraday had that maze with the rat? Remember how he could control what the rat remembered (kinda)? Well, the same could be happening with the losties.
And also, if you think about it, when the losties would have landed in LA it would have been shortly after they crashed (if you know what I mean?). For example, I can’t remember exact dates right now, but let’s say 815 was supposed to land in LA around noon on Sept. 1st. Now let’s say that the crash happened 9:00 pm on August 31st (not yaking time zone’s into acount). If the losties are “magically transported” to the un-crashed plane even after all that has happened, technically they only missed 15 hours. So would they only remember those hours on the island…? Let me know if I’m way off on this, like I said it’s been awhile for me…
2) Um, this is that wierd roundabout question that seems to lead everyone in circles… I think I agree with your answer, A.E.S.
3) This is a really deep question. I think we have to find the answer as to WHY Jacob wants what he wants befor we can answer that very fully.
AES, as always you give us a lot to ponder. This is going to be a printer I see. As for question #1 I agree with you in your reasoning.
Now for #2, it would depend on which ‘incident you’re talking about. As I’ve explained in other posts and comments I believe that there are two incidents. The one talked about on the blast door map and the incident we were shown in the finale.
Although I would agree with you that the Jugghead incident may not occur, the other incident that leads to the implementation of the 108 protocol would still happen if the Swan is built. Let’s face it, the DHARMA Initiative hasn’t a clue about what they’re doing.
Anyways, that’s my first take on it but I’m going to print this out and ponder on it for some time so I can give you something a little more in depth.
Great read as always AES!
what if whatever happened at the end of S6 didn’t do anything and just made events happen as they have already done up to now.
i will now stake my claim by using 2 pieces of evidence.
Firstly, when Sun and Frank meet Christian, he shows them a picture from the 70’s whereby we see the Losties who have travelled back in time are part of the Dharma. This picture means that this time period (the 70’s) has already been lived out and so whatever happened in this time has caused the events to happen as we have seen them in seasons 1 – 4 ie. the crash of flight 815.
look at it from my perspective, assuming i could travel back in time. maybe i want to go back and change something. I cannot and the proof is that i am sat here right now. if i had changed something in the past, i wouldn’t here right now so the fact that i am here right now means that i haven’t travelled back in time and changed something (phew!!!).
anyway, on to point number 2. if everybody did really want change why didn’t Eloise tell Jack what happened in 1977 and then tell him what he (or other people) needed to do to change things when they went back in time? the fact that she didn’t meant that events took place as they always have done. Once again the evidence is that Eloise is still in 2007, sending people back to the 70’s because nothing changed.
(i hope i made sense!)
1) I would like to say that they shouldn’t remember anything, unless some fancy Hollywood quantum physics comes into play. I can’t say that I’ve fully understood what happened to Desmond and why he time jumped but I would love to get a plausible answer before the show is over. For now, I guess we have to settle with the assumption that the strong magnetic field somehow caused a worm whole enabling time travel and that’s it. I guess that Desmond’s experience is why some people say the strong magnetic field combined with the nuclear bomb somehow caused an alternate reality to be created. This may very well be the case. However, originally I had assumed that if the bomb goes off and destroys everything, then this will possibly lead to either the whole world taking a different path from 1977 and onwards, or simply that flight 815 never crashed and that’s it and then no one ought to remember anything of the island. And if the bomb does not go off, then everyone ought to remember everything assuming that they survive the incident. So if there are two alternate realities (one where the bomb went off and one where it didn’t), the losties would remember in one of the realities but not in the other one. And logically it is not obvious that the two realities would ever be brought together unless e.g. Jacob or MIB does some tricks. But I also understand that story wise this may not be the most attractive approach for the authors. I just hope that it won’t just be more flashing à la Desmond without a plausible explanation.
2) If flight 815 doesn’t crash, I have some difficulty to picture what the time between 1974 and now looked like at the island. Was there an indident or wasn’t there, and when was it? I guess it’s a classical time travel paradox in the sense that no answer that anyone can come up with is without logical flaws unless there is a significant amount of course correction going on in the universe.
3) Beats me.
*worm hole
I don’t think they have changed anything, but I’m a single-time-line-guy. 😉 I think they have created the situation that leads to the Incident. Remember, the man who came up with this whole beautiful plan was going completely by the seat of his pants and never even visited the Swan as it had been blown up for quite some time before his arrival. Sorry, but I don’t care how smart Daniel is supposed to be, there’s no way he can know enough about the Incident to predict how it actually happened.
So what happens to the Losties? What if the only “course correction” that happens is that they find themselves laying around outside of the detonated Swan in 2007? Possibly with Juliet naked after some reliving of her life experience?