The ageless compass
One thing bothers me with the WHH theory, but it is of such little significance that I’m not sure the writers would have considered it. So it is not really evidence for or against WHH, but more a theoretical thought on time traveling.
This is about the compass that travels through a time loop indefinitely from John to Richard to John to Richard to … (I guess you see my point). We have seen that when the Losties flash, the object that they possess flash with them and stay the same. It means that if there is a hole in Sawyer’s shirt, he will flash 20 years before with his shirt and it will have the same hole. My point is the objects “age”. They change, and those changes are preserved when flashing through time.
Back to the compass, when Richard gives it to John in the jungle, it is 50 years older than when John gives it to Richard in the Other’s camp (because it stays with Richard for that amount of time). But for all of it to make sense (in a WHH theory), it needs to be the same age every time it goes through the loop. It needs to “loose” 50 years at some point. It cannot change at all, it cannot get scratches, it cannot rust …
Or it would have to be two different compasses. Richard knows that at some point in his life he will have to give a compass to John (because John tells him so), but he also knows that it cannot be the same (because he is super smart and he figured that “compass age” paradox) so he begins to build a new one very similar to the one John gave him except 50 years younger… Well, that is most certainly way too much thinking, but I thought it would be cool if the writers resolved that (small) paradox during season 6.
PS: if you want to solve that with an ATL, you need the moment John gives it to Richard to be in a different timeline than the moment Richard gives it to John. It means you have to set the start of timeline 2 before Richard gets the compass in the 1950’s. It also means that if you believe the two timelines somehow “merge”, they cannot do it before 2007, when John receives it.
PS 2: a compass which doesn’t age… Rings a bell … I’m not sure how it could apply to Richard, but it certainly seems an odd coincidence…
Relating the compass to Richard is interesting. I do believe Richard noted that the compass had rusted.
Just remembered something. Eko’s stick said something about “looking North”. Richard reminds John that the use of a compass is that it points North. I wonder if this is a subtle hint by the writers, that the compass is way more important to figuring things out than we know.
Found this theory on DARK, you might be interested:
http://theoriesonlost.blogspot.com/2010/01/compass-paradox-and-what-it-points-to.html#disqus_thread
What you’re describing is called an Ontological Paradox. The basic idea is that the compass has no starting point in time. Where did it originate from if John gave it to Richard to give it to John to give it to Richard?
I think that basically it’s “a line that results in a never-ending circle”, or in other words, the compass was on a normal scale of time when Richard first possessed it, and the moment he gave it to John, it began a never-ending spiral of exchanges in time between John and Richard.. or something like that..