Uncharted Island

I’ve made several theory posts about how time on the island is somehow different from time in the “real world” off the island, theories dating back to 2006. They’re all over the place, so I am going to take this time to put them all in one place, weed out anything extraneous that didn’t pan out, and clarify a few things based on new information.

LOST and the “physics” of RJ’s Wheel of Time

This was initially just a thought in my mind connecting time compression on the island to the time compression in tel’aran’rhiod in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time.

I’m not saying that LOST is in anyway “actually” taking part in the same universe as WoT, but that perhaps some of the physics work the same way.

My apologies to those unfamiliar with the Wheel of Time. I’ll try to give a quick crash course [pun intended] in WoTisms.

For a really brief overview: Wheel of Time synopsis

Tel’aran’rhiod and time compression

Tel’aran’rhiod is known as the World of Dreams, the Unseen World, and several other possible translations from the “Old Tongue” of the WoT world. The important thing about t’a'r as far as LOST is concerned is the flow of time. A Dreamer may spend an hour in t’a'r and find that it’s been 5 minutes or 5 hours in the waking world.

I know very well that there has to be some time compression built into a television show. An overnight hike can be covered in a one-hour show by cutting away from the journey to check out what’s going on elsewhere on the island and cutting back after the boring part has passed. BUT there seems to be another layer of time compression happening with our lostaways that cannot be explained by production constraints.

Walt is obviously growing at an abnormal rate. Yes, this can be explained in the real world because the actor has aged about a year while only two months has passed for the character. The writers and producers could’ve made a statement that we should ignore Walt’s apparent growth as an unavoidable side effect of the production schedule. Instead, they said it would be dealt with on the show, which means that an explanation has been worked into the storyline. Perhaps time flows differently on the island, maybe it flows differently on different parts of the island.

Aaron has also made a rather amazing growth spurt. I know there probably aren’t very many moms willing to let their newborns be actors. But Aaron looks larger than my 9-month-old! Claire wasn’t able to have a very hearty diet before Aaron was born, and she’s not exactly taking vitamin supplements to boost her breast milk. Perhaps they’ll work in Aaron’s size into the equation by having him age faster than he should as well because of the flow of time on the island.

Do I have more than supposition? Let’s look at Three Minutes. Ms. Klugh told Michael he had three minutes with Walt. The camera didn’t cut away from the scene to compress time, and it did not last three minutes. Did the visit get cut short because of Walt’s outburst? Or did it last the full three minutes in Other time? Maybe it was an entire three minutes on that side of the island.

There have been enough shots of Mr. Paik’s watch to imply that something is up with the passage of time.

Note: The above part of the theory was composed just after “Three Minutes” aired. Now that we are into season four and have seen “taller ghost Walt” and had Locke acknowledge that Walt was taller than the last he’d seen him, I believe this backs up this part of my theory.

Balefire anyone?

In WoT, balefire is a powerful weapon that can only be wielded by powerful channelers. “”When anything is destroyed with balefire, it ceases to exist before the moment of its destruction, like a thread that burns away from where the flame touched it. The greater the power of the balefire, the further back in time it ceases to exist… For as far back as you destroy [something], whatever it did during that time no longer happened. Only the memories remain, for those who saw or experienced it.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balefire

In the “How did the plane crash?” thread, someone suggested that the unusual positioning of the various pieces of the plane might be due to certain parts falling before they should have. Perhaps due to the varying flow of time on different parts of the island.

I’m not actually suggesting that balefire was used to bring the plane down. But the effect is similar to something that happened in the WoT. One of the main characters was on a boat. One of the Forsaken (main bad guys) wanted to kill her and decided to eradicate her by using balefire. She was distracted at the moment of weaving the balefire. Instead of balefiring the main character, she ended up balefiring a hole in the middle of the boat as well as some of the rowers.

So one second and everything’s fine and dandy on deck of the boat. The next second after the balefire hit, the boat is destroyed and already submerged quite a bit underwater several hundred feet back from where it had been. The rowers had ceased to exist several seconds before being balefired, so therefore the boat hadn’t travelled as far downriver and had started sinking several seconds before the balefire hit. So the boat and everyone on it ended up as far underwater as they would have been if the boat had really started sinking as far back as the rowers and the middle of the boat ceased to exist.

Confusing? Very. Not nearly as confusing as when some characters were brought back to life because the person who had killed them was balefired and therefore ceased to exist for several minutes before he had killed them.

But this same principle could be applied to the plane. When the pieces of the plane began to fall, the flow of time on the island could’ve forced the fuselage to end up on the ground perhaps before it should have. This provides another explanation for how people survived the crash. (It may be a bit of a paradox, but bear with me.)

If parts of the plane ceased to exist before they actually fell apart, then the people on the plane would have to end up on the beach before they should have. This could have eliminated the actual impact of crash landing. One second they were in the sky, the next second they were on the beach. Due to an irregularity in time.

Many people have stated that there was no way so many people (if any) could have survived that plane crash. But if there was no actual impact, that provides a way for survival to be possible.

Note: This part of the theory was debunked when we saw the plane crash from Juliet’s and Ben’s point of view at the start of season three. I didn’t just kill these paragraphs, though, because the concept may prove worthwhile later on.

Other instances of time

I have not yet worked out how to explain the dinosaur of a computer and the updated washer and dryer, or the old time music picked up briefly on the radio. But as they people who make the show have stated, we won’t be able to boil down all of the explanations into a single sentence. My theory, if it turns out to be even a little true, won’t be the only one that will be correct.

Time Anomalies on LOST

As stated above, in Tel’aran’rhiod, an hour could pass in the dream, while five hours passed in the waking world; or an hour in the dream could be only five minutes in the waking world. This could possibly explain some of the anomalies happening on LOST, and I’m not the only one to think so.

TAZ on the LOST-TV forums pointed out:

The “flashbacks” for the new characters are actually flash FORWARDS for the Losties. For the Losties it’s still 2004, but the S4E2 “flashbacks” apparently happened AFTER 2004. (I noticed the newswoman talking about the discovery of Flight 815 as having happened in “September 2004″…the inclusion of the year in her dialogue suggests that the plane was discovered no earlier than 2005.

and

It is also necessary to EITHER assume that time passes MUCH more slowly on the island than it does off the island, OR that there is time (or “dimension”) travel going on, as the “post-2004″ discovery of Flight 815, and the subsequent arrival (on the island) of Naomi and crew demands such an explanation.

I don’t buy into the traditional theory of time travel on the show, but I do buy into a different flow of time. And I am grateful that TAZ picked up on the “September 2004″ detail of the newscast. Our castaways have been stranded for just over 90 days, which puts island time at December 2004. Newscasters would only refer to the crash as taking place in “September,” not “September 2004.”

The only problem with this theory is that Juliet had counted her days since arriving on the island, and it matched up with the real world date of the plane crash. The only explanation I can currently come up with to reconcile this fact is that time behaved normally until Desmond failed to push the button. Time started acting strange after the plane crash.

This would certainly help to explain why Locke saw a taller Walt; Walt aged faster off the island than he would have on the island. It’s a nifty way to address the actor’s growth in relation to the time span of production.

Why we KNOW that island time is slower than off-island time

Daniel’s experiment was the proof I needed to make this more than just a hunch or a silly notion of mine. We have Oceanic Airlines commercials coming on telling us that they’re back in operation, yet we have no had a “real life” news bit via the ongoing ARG about the discovery of the wreckage of Flight 815. If we’re seeing real life commercials on ABC about Oceanic Airlines flying again, we would’ve seen something on ABC, or at least online, about the discovery of the wreckage. Meta-thinking? Yes, but I feel very strongly that I’m on the right track.

I think it may be December 2005 for the castaways, but later than February 2008 for the freighter people. They’re not traveling into the past or future when arriving at or leaving the island… it’s more like how you can cross the international date line and arrive at your destination “before” you left. Or you can lose a whole day, but you haven’t traveled into the future. You just skipped through timezones in a manner that prevented you from experiencing a particular calendar date. With Sayid and Desmond leaving the island now, if my theory is correct, they aren’t traveling three years into the future. It’s more like jet lag caused them to lose three years. And the jet they were on was really the island.

I think that they may reveal the time disconnect on the show, and THEN use the ARG to announce in the real world (ours) that the wreckage was found.

I’m calling it now.