Uncharted Island

We have now seen that the island’s reach extends past the boundaries of the island, past the stormy barrier that hides the island from the rest of the world. Michael heard the whispers on the freighter. And he saw Libby.

And apparently the island can control whether or not people live or die… even if they’re not on the island. Michael survived ramming his car into a dumpster. His gun malfunctioned and he couldn’t shoot himself in the head, even though the chamber was full of bullets. Jack didn’t jump off that bridge because the woman crashed her car after seeing him on the ledge.

Mikhail seems to have nine lives. He survived the sonic fence around New Otherton. He survived a stab wound. We haven’t seen him since he blew a hole in the side of the Looking Glass, so he may or may not really be dead this time.

Charlie had a lot of near misses with death. He’d been hung, stung by dozens of bees, nearly struck by lightning, nearly dashed to pieces on rocks… until he finally drowned in an act of self-sacrifice. The island must have been done with him to have let him die.

So everyone who has died on the island was supposed to die. It only makes sense. If the island can twist chance to jam a gun or provide last-moment distractions to prevent someone from committing suicide thousands of miles away, then it stands to reason that it could’ve intervened any time someone died within its boundaries.

I know the writers and producers have said all along that they wanted to stay firmly grounded in science - or at least pseudoscience - but what this points to is quite clearly supernatural.

Aside from Charlie and Mikhail, a number of people have had some extraordinary recoveries.

Jack resuscitated Rose the day they crashed. Locke survived a gunshot wound. Sawyer survived a rather nasty illness with only the antibiotics they had on hand. Naomi survived her fall from the helicopter; it was Locke’s knife that killed her.

And then there’s the little fact that the island can move through space… and time?

I can’t wait to find out more.

If you’re looking for some heavy reading during this seemingly endless hiatus, take a look at the theory Jacob’s Kin, written by Garden Mom at MyMedia.

It’s a very long theory, but well thought out and researched. It’s heavy on the Biblical history of Jacob. (It’s easier reading if you’re familiar with the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, because you’ll at least be familiar with the story when it comes around to Jacob’s son Joseph. But I digress.) The parallels she draws between Biblical Jacob and Island Jacob are great, especially when she compares Biblical Joseph with Island John Locke.

It’s not all about the Biblical story. It talks a lot about Locke’s visions, as well, and what makes him “special.” Want a sneak peek?

I’d like to explore the possible “family” more thoroughly in this theory. I have posted in other threads that I think many of the people we are seeing on the island are products of early genetic research experiments. I think it is possible that a native island inhabitant, perhaps Jacob, is the original donor of genetic material that has gone into these children. How the genetic material was transferred to the children is debatable; possibly through injections administered to pregnant women, or perhaps by altering the sperm of the men on the island. Perhaps they are all the progeny of just one man. What have the genetic alterations accomplished? I would speculate that each child has been blessed with a talent or ability that they would not have had otherwise. A few possibilities could be longevity of life, high intelligence, artistic abilities, or psychic abilities.

Even if you end up not agreeing with her theory, it’s a fascinating read. And how many months do we have left until Season 5? Yeah, you’ve got time to read it. Go and read it now: Jacob’s Kin.

Try to read through the comments, as well, as there is a very rich discussion. Garden Mom makes an extra summary in Post 35 of the thread, which I highly recommend.

Okay, so we know that, when Ben turned the frozen donkey wheel that moved the island, he was thrown about 10 months into the future, and he landed in Tunisia.

Did the island move forward into the future, too?

If it did, that would help answer a few questions, even if the science of time travel is hard for people to understand. If the island moved forward into the future, that could help to explain how the Purge happened 12 years ago (island time) but Danielle’s crew got shipwrecked 16 years ago.

Then again, now that I’m trying to write it all out, I don’t think the details would work. But I’ll see what you think, anyways.

This semi-theory requires someone to have moved the island shortly after Danielle got shipwrecked there. Who? I don’t know. Why? I also don’t know. But it could help explain how Danielle and her crew could’ve been left alone in the jungle with DHARMA trekking all over the island in their little DHARMA vans.

Here’s the shaky part. They were left alone because, perhaps, they got shipwrecked just as the island was about to move. Then the island moved, and BAM, it’s four years later… to the rest of the world. Danielle’s crewmates get sick and she shoots them. (Or rather, Danielle goes crazy and thinks they’re sick, then shoots them.) At the same time, the Purge wipes out DHARMA. Ben assumes leadership of the Others. When they find newborn baby Alex, they take her and Ben raises her as his own daughter. They leave Danielle alone in the jungle to fend for herself, the way they mostly left Flight 815’s castaways alone so long as they didn’t cross Tom’s “line in the sand” in the middle of the jungle.

And that explains four years of confusion.

It doesn’t explain why the iterations of Danielle’s distress call would’ve been playing for 16 years, though, if the radio tower had traveled the same four years into the future. And I guess it makes it a bit tricky to explain why Alex appears to be a well-developed 16 year-old girl instead of a girl of 12. Never mind. That doesn’t work.

Unless moving the island pushed the island back in time instead of forward.

This is something that just occured to me. I’m unsure how this would work. In order for the timeline to make sense, I can’t sort out the order in which the events must have occured. (The events being the Purge, Danielle giving birth to Alex, and the island moving.)

“16 years? Has it really been that long?”

Hmm. This is something I need to think more about. If you have any thoughts, please leave me a comment!

Okay, so according to our resident ghostbuster Miles, Charlotte came “back” to the island. That means that she’d been there before.

How?

My guess is that she was born to one of the members of the DHARMA Initiative. I don’t think that women started dying during pregnancy until after the Purge, when Ben took control of the Others. Some have suggested that she could be Annie’s daughter, maybe Ben’s too.

Other fans have suggested that she could be one of the island natives, like Richard Alpert, who doesn’t appear to age. I think that might be a bit of a stretch.

But it definitely makes sense that she’d been there before. She knew she’d find the DHARMA collar when she was at the excavation site in Tunisia with the polar bear skeleton. And the look on her face right before she cut herself loose when she first parachuted onto the island was breathless excitement. It was either “it does exist” or “it’s good to be home.”

Why did she react the way she did when Miles brought it up? A few people seem to think that she doesn’t remember being on the island before. I think this is silly. She has always been quite secretive. She denied knowing Korean until Jin told her what he would do to Daniel. It makes plenty of sense that she would deny something big like having been on the island before… until she got caught out in the lie.

Vincent’s barking alerts Bernard to a dead body washing up on the shore of the beach. The body is that of the Kahana doctor.

When Daniel gets the radio working enough to send Morse code to and from the ship, he tells them about the doctor’s body washing up on shore, and (to paraphrase) is told “WTF? He’s right here and he’s fine.”

So we have a doctor who is both alive and dead at the same time. Much like Schroedinger’s Cat in theoretical quantum physics. Except that, instead of the cat in the box being both alive and dead until someone can verify his state of being - different parties are both witness to the doc - dead and alive.

I’d like to take this as another sign that time flows differently, but now it’s more than that. If time “just” flows differently, that doesn’t account for how a body from the faster-moving time off-island arriving dead on the island while he’s still alive off-island.

So how do we account for dead/alive doctor? I can’t wait to find out.

It’s not just a Star Wars quote any more. Not that Karl has ever seen Star Wars before.

Karl was right. Ben was playing them. He sent Alex off to the Temple with the two people who are the biggest thread to his relationship with her - her mother and her boyfriend. He arranged for them to be not-so-tidily disposed of so that Alex has no one left in the world except for him, her lying, murderous surrogate father.

Is this the final nail in the coffin for the hope of a Danielle flashback? Or is she not really dead yet?

We have to wait a few more weeks to find out.

There is some excellent time travel confirmation, Desmond clarification, and more going on in this EW article with Doc Jensen and Damon Lindelof.

Personally, I can’t wait for the upcoming episode that revisits Desmond’s flashbacks with the course-correction that follows his time travel adventures.

Quote of the century:

Lightning flashed. Frank pulled up and out of trouble. So what was that weird weather all about? Well, I don’t think it was a passing storm. In, fact, I really don’t think you can call it weather. As I explained last week, I think the Island is located inside the mouth of a wormhole, a possibly volatile anomaly in the time-space fabric. The chopper was passing over the rough-and-tumble boundary that exists between the anomaly and the outside world.

Although I think those words are from Doc Jensen, unconfirmed by Lindelof.

Oh, and Star Wars. The fourth page compares LOST to The Empire Strikes Back.

There will be no squee-ing in this post.

It was slowly revealed throughout “Eggland” that Kate had a son. That was the “he” she was referring to when talking to Jack in the first flash forward we saw in “Through the Looking Glass.”

At first, I thought that Kate was just bluffing Sawyer about not being pregnant. I thought it was some kind of a test, where she wanted to see how he really felt about a baby before she told him about it. I mean, we already knew she had a son. It would make sense; she would have to get on the helicopter to leave the island if she was pregnant. So she wouldn’t die.

But it wasn’t a bluff.

When she left the court room, a satisfying scene that explained how she was free to meet Jack in a creepy lot behind the airport instead of locked up in the state prison.

I kept waiting for her to pull up in her little house in suburbia, and run into the welcoming arms of Sawyer, who would congratulate her on her freedom.

Even when we saw the nanny instead of Sawyer, I still held out hope. I sat through the last three minutes with my fingers crossed, waiting for a flash of that Sawyer smile. They’re meant to be together! The “baby” was a little blond boy. A little Sawyer baby, I thought. And he’d pop his head into the nursery at any time…

And then she called him Aaron.

Five out of six now. I think that rules out any hope of Sawyer getting off the island. KATE, HOW COULD YOU LEAVE HIM?

One big baby

Take a look at this screencap from Lost-Media. My first thought was, “Oh my God. Does Kate’s son have Down’s Syndrome?” Maybe it’s just some bad angles and weird facial expressions, but the kid looks like he’s working with some developmental issues. I have a cousin who is severely autistic, and I spent a lot of time volunteering to work with mentally retarded people at the ARC when I was a teenager. I know that there are facial indicators when there is a serious developmental problem. Am I the only one who thought this?

And if it’s true, would Aaron have been born that way if Claire had never crashed on the island? Maybe it was some unfortunate DNA. Or was it a factor of the island’s strangeness? Did all of that funky electromagnetism mess him up? Or was it Ethan’s DHARMA vaccines that he was injecting into Claire? Poor kid.

Developmental issues aside, that is one gigantic “baby.” I don’t think that anyone should be calling him a baby. Sure, he’s in a toddler bed. But I would never think he was young enough to be a baby. A kid, definitely. A toddler, might be pushing it. But he’s supposed to be two years old? No way.

Where do I get two years old? From the credits. The young blond actor is credited as “two year old boy,” most likely so as not to spoil the reveal for anyone looking at the casting credits ahead of time. I have a two year old. Two and a half, to be more specific. And he’s got nothing on this giganta-baby.

Compare the two pictures, of two year old Aaron, and my two year old son. Aaron’s head, arms, and ears look enormous in comparison! And you can see a bit of “baby face” still left in my son, but not in Aaron. That’s a big kid’s face.

Other implications of Aaron

Why is Aaron counted as one of the Oceanic Six? He wasn’t on the passenger manifest. The implication of Kate having a two-year-old son is that she had him on the island. And she wasn’t pregnant on the flight, or at least not pregnant enough to be showing - maybe second or third trimester. That leaves at least seven months of gestation, plus the two months old he’s supposed to be (island time) when Naomi and crew arrived.

This is more support for island time running differently than the rest of the world. If it ran the same, Kate would have to be pregnant, and showing, at the time of her escape from the island. But she obviously has a very alive Aaron with her, since he is one of the Oceanic Six, and no one questions the fact that she’s had a baby in her time on the island.

My guess is that the “official” story is that the baby is hers and Jack’s. It would explain the prosecutor’s question to Jack about whether or not he loves Kate, as well as his answer, “Not anymore.”

Another reason this upsets me so much is that Kate is acting as Aaron’s mother. “My son.” Kate’s mom thinks that Aaron is her grandson. Claire doesn’t make it off the island. If Claire did make it off the island, and died afterwards, Kate would not be able to pass Aaron off as her own child. So Claire doesn’t make it. And what mother would allow herself to be separated from her baby? Claire is going to die. She would never give Aaron to Kate and just say, “See you on the freighter!”

Unfortunately, I forsee a scene where Claire tearfully makes Kate promise to look after Aaron as if he were her own son… and then promptly dies. That would also explain why Jack doesn’t want to see Aaron; maybe it was a decision he made that ends up getting Claire killed.

I wanted Claire to be one of the Oceanic Six, and Aaron to be with her but not counted, since he wasn’t technically on the manifest.

This is not cool.

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.

I may have to eat my words, but I just have to say that NAOMI IS DEAD.

A small contingent on the fan forums seems to believe that Naomi is still alive because we saw her flashback, and the producers had stated in an interview that they would not give flashbacks to dead people. We all know that they have twisted their words before. The truth they speak may not be what you think you hear.

Even with this argument, I contend that they could get around their rule by claiming that the flashback actually belonged to Abaddon, who we know is still alive because he visits Hurley in the nuthouse at some point in the future. Just because the other four flashbacks were of people currently on the island doesn’t mean that the fifth one was.