Ben Linus on the ATL alive?
If anyone has already asked this I’m sorry, but I did not know.
The thinbg is this: How can Ben be alive on the ATL? We know that after the H-bomb went off in 1977, the Others were with Ben ON THE ISLAND and we asume that they did not evacuate sice the DI were the only ones who did this. Therefore, how did Ben survive in order to be alive as we see on the last episode when he meets John Locke?
It has been suggested that Pierre Chang evacuated all the children (including Ben) before the bomb went off. What’s also strange is that Helen suggests to alt-Locke that his father would come to their wedding, which suggests that the crash was not the only thing changed in the alt timeline. It may be possible that the island was underwater before Ben and Roger came there, but with Dharmaville there, it must have “sunk” right around that time. What makes the most sense is that the island actually moved through time again but ended up in the alt universe this time?!?!?! If MIB moves the island with the Losties on it (through time) and ends up in the alt, maybe it ended up underwater, and everyone from Lost timeline is dead, but their alt personalities are still alive (spoooooooky) 😮
It is very possible that the alt timeline we are witnessing is not the result of bighead going off. The timeline could have split at a point earlier than the bomb detonation. We may be seeing the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics. Basically what happens is that at any point in time there is the possibility of two(or more) outcomes, the universe splits into two different timelines where each outcome plays out. Normally each resultant timeline would not be aware of the other timeline and a massive amount of energy is not necessarily needed for the split to occur.
That should read ‘jughead’ in my previous comment.
They pulled apart the bomb so they just used the core so the blast wouldn’t have been what we normally associate with a nuclear explosion and I think the fact that they showed Ben off the island indicates that the bomb is not the reason for DV and the foot being underwater. Ben couldn’t have been evacuated with the Dharma kids as he was with the others and the Dharma people didn’t know where he was.
Something happened after the bomb went off to lead to Ben being off island leading a supposedly normal life, or is he just pretending to be a teacher – he had a lot of passports in the original timeline?
We haven’t seen enough to know exactly why Ben is off island. At this point any idea about it put forth is equally valid until we get more info. My interpretation of the last episode is that this alt timeline split off earlier than most people think and that in this version Ben was never even raised on the Island. IMO the differences we’ve seen lead me to believe that something more than a simple alteration of ‘what it’s 815 didn’t crash. But we need to see more to figure out what has happened. All possibilities are valid at this point.
Great thoughts everyone. I agree with most of them, except the evacuation of Ben with the DI.
Achalli, I agree with you the most, we do not have enough data to make inferences on Ben’s life in the ATL…we’ll have to wait for an episode more focused on him.
The changes have definately occurred much earlier than 815, I believe the bomb caused the split and that the changes have been occuring since 1977, so yeah everyone’s lives can have massive differences from what we were shown before. My reasoning for feeling that the bomb caused the split is that from a narrative perspective I’m not sure what the point of most of season 5 would have been if those events didn’t lead to the change.
I’ve got a feeling that they aren’t going to show us the back stories of the losties in the new timeline, I think they might leave us completely in the dark on how and why they are different – just throw us a few hints now and then. That would frustrate heaps 😉
Mamey, you bring up a good point…One possibility could be the Others including young Ben were hiding in the temple, and that the temple has special powers as a sanctuary that escapes anything catastrophic happening on the island. I thought about that when the Keamy and the gang were attacking, and Ben (older Ben) moved the island by turning the wheel, he sent a group of Others to reside in the temple for safety..
Bobt, that’s an interesting idea. Perhaps the Temple is shielded in a similar way that the Island is shielded from the rest of the world.
On the Jimmy Kimmel show Cuse and Lindelof hint that the bomb wasnt the reason why the island sunk. They also said that what we saw in the brief scene showing the island underwater should give us clues as to why it sunk and when. As for Ben being alive in the school, did anyone notice that Goodwin’s wife was there in the teacher’s lobby too? Thought that was funny too.
As far as what I think happened, is that Smokey did something in that timeline to prevent the candidates from ever coming to the island, and in doing this he may have also found his way off the island. That would be a very valid reason of showing the ALT in showing what would happen if Smokey got off the island, and reached “home”. I would imagine that the Losties would somehow be tapped to stop him in the real world.
And why is Juliet the *only* one who knew that “it worked”? Do you think she could have been talking about something else…?