Which came first – the flash or the past?
I always wondered why only Jack, Kate and Hurley were flashed back to 1977 when the Ajira flight was nearing the Island – why not Sun, Frank, Ben, or anyone else for that matter?
This kind of ties in with another theory – Sundial Park: An Example of Consistent Histories…..which I think makes a lot of sense – basically you can’t go back in time and change anything unless your present shows you’ve already made the change…in the past.
So would only Jack, Kate and Hurley have been transported back to 1977 because technically they were the only Ajira people who had already been in 1977 and altered the current 2004? Just think of the photo (Sun) finds of the new recruits in 1977. In which case is the flash just keeping this consistent?
But if so, the flash just kind of came out of nowhere solely to keep the timeline in check, which seems a bit nonsensical. Plus no-one was turning any frozen donkey wheels at that time (that I recall anyway), so why did it even occur?
So which came first, the flash or the past?!
Thats why I dont by the WHH stuff. When someone in a story goes back and does something in the past and then we say they had to because theyve already done it, it doesnt make sense. They cant be in the past without going back into the past at some point. The dont travel back in time because they have to, or because they already did. Like the chicken or the egg question, the answer is there has to be some start, there is always a beginning to a loop.
It’s not like they’re stuck in a perpetual loop, though. The time they spend in the past (let’s say a week) is how much time they are not in the present, and when the flashback ends, they go back exactly to the point they left from plus the time they experienced out in the past (one week). The loop would imply that they continuosly flash back in time to the 70’s, then live 37 years to eventually flash again and repeat the process indefinitely, which isn’t what’s happening.
As for the question of why those specific people flashed back, it IS a matter of what happened happened. When a variable is introduced, you get discrepancies, but the end result will always try to come about in some way or another (course correction). Eloise even admits that because not all of the circumstances of the original flight can be reproduced, there is going to be an unpredictable result, which is why those people were taken back to 1977. Note how Sun doesn’t find the picture of the people until after they have time travelled? If she knew about it before, she would not have been able to stop it anyway, say, kill Jack and Kate before they boarded Ajira. This is why Michael wasn’t able to kill himself. It wasn’t really about “the island isn’t done with you yet”, it was course correction because the freighter explosion was not supposed to kill the Candidates before they could come back to the island and time travel again.