I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but I don't think I've heard anyone else suggest it, so I thought I'd throw it out there. Who knows, if I end up being right about this and no one else has thought of it, I could get Lost bragging rights the likes of which mortal man has only dreamt of in his wildest imaginings. (Or maybe everyone else thought of it months ago, or I'm just completely wrong, or both.)
As I said, it seems ridiculously obvious now that it's occurred to me. What if the Incident had the same effect on Jack, Sawyer, Kate, et alii in 1977 as the destruction of the Swan station had on Desmond in 2004, i.e., it made it so that the rules of "whatever happened, happened" don't apply to them, making them the "variables" that Faraday mentioned last season and allowing their consciousnesses to jump around through space-time? After Desmond destroyed the Swan by activating the fail-safe at the end of the second season, he got visions of the future (regarding Charlie's eventual demise) and an extended vision of what seemed like the past but with Eloise Hawking explaining how he couldn't change anything ("Flashes before Your Eyes"); moreover, it apparently made him much more susceptible to the consciousness-jumping effects of traveling to and from the Island, effects that manifested themselves instantly in him but took hours or even days to begin showing in others ("The Constant"). I believe this is also what the time-traveling Faraday meant when he told Desmond that he was "special," and in fact is why Desmond answered Faraday's knocking on the Swan door, despite the fact that he didn't do so originally ("Because You Left"). (Perhaps the reason Desmond answered when Faraday knocked but not when Sawyer did is that the interaction of two people who had been (or eventually would be) exposed to large doses of electromagnetic energy (as Faraday had been due to his experiments) was necessary for the rules to be broken and the past altered.)
Like the destruction of the Swan, the Incident was a massive release of the Island's biggest pocket of electromagnetic energy, so it would make sense for it to have similar effects on those near it. While Desmond's "specialness," his "variability," manifested itself in his consciousness's traveling back and forth in the same timeline, it may be manifesting itself in Jack and crew in their consciousnesses' traveling between timelines, either as obviously as with Juliet right before she died, or as subtly as when alterna-Claire decided to name her child Aaron ("I don't know why I said it. . . . I knew it or something."). Indeed, I think this is why they had to return to the Island (and, ultimately, why Jacob brought them to the Island in the first place), so that they would travel back to 1977, cause the Incident, be exposed to the energy that was released, and thus not be bound by the otherwise inalterable past. Perhaps this is Jacob's loophole to Loophole's loophole, that even if Loophole succeeds in killing him indirectly, he will have a group of people ("candidates," if you will) who can change the past and prevent his being killed (or effect his will in some other way).
OK, that's my theory. If it's a brilliant moment of lucidity on my part, or if it'll be dashed to pieces in the first five minutes of this Tuesday's episode, only time will tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment