Was Jack’s flash forward like Desmond’s flashes, a possible future? Or the “real” future?
Damon and Carlton have been messing with viewers for quite a while about the issue of time. And this apparent “flash forward” only complicates matters even worse.
If all of those scenes with ugly-bearded Jack are supposed to take place after he gets off the island, we’re left with a few important questions. For one thing, who was in that coffin? But I’m going to have a separate blog entry on that. Also, what happened to Jack after the on-island events we’ve seen to turn him into a pill-popping bridge jumper? That’s another blog entry as well. For another thing, why does Jack talk about his father like his father is still alive?
The Christian Shepard issue has been long debated. Some fans want to believe that Christian is still alive because his coffin was empty when Jack found it in the jungle. I don’t think that. But even so, could Jack’s father be alive in this future scenario? I very much want to believe that time travel is not an issue here. But perhaps there is some alternate timeline in which Christian survived. It’s a possibility I don’t necessarily like, but I won’t write it off just yet.
More than likely, Jack talks about Christian as if he’s alive because he’s hopped up on pain pills and booze. His reaction when the pharmacist picked up the phone to call his father’s office was consistent with knowing he’d be caught in the lie. It’s possible that Jack is messed up enough to truly believe his father is alive at times, and other times just lie about it.
But another wrench in the works is the golden pass that allows Jack and Kate to fly free for life. After Flight 815 crashed, Oceanic Airlines ceased operations. But as we saw in the first flash forward, Jack was flying first class on an Oceanic flight. This again begs the question concerning alternate timelines. Could Desmond really have changed things in the past so that Oceanic never went out of business? So that Christian was still alive?
This may be the thing that we all obsess the most over as we wait impatiently for season four to start in 2008.
