Uncharted Island

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!

Here it is! I’ve got butterflies in my stomach!

Tiny coffin in the previous scenes… do we learn who was in it?

Kate’s backing up… from the end of last season’s finale! Jeremy Bentham? “You believed him? Him, of all people?” To keep Kate and Aaron safe. Kate’s reaming Jack out pretty good… I’m not getting all of the exposition.

Three years. She’s been trying to forget all the horrible things that happened the day they left for three years. That makes it the end of 2007 or the beginning of 2008 here.

“Of course you’re fine. You’re always fine.” Sundance. LOL.

Is Hurley peeing on a tree? Ha!

Meanwhile, back on the freighter…

Desmond did six months of explosives work when he was in the army. I’ll have to grab exact wording of that quote later. It was awesome. And he does seem to know just about enough to keep from getting blown up. Jin catches on quickly about the “boom.”

Wait… this episode shares the title from last week?

Okay, so Ben gave himself up so that Keamy and his team would leave the Orchid and head back to the helicopter so that Locke could find his way into the Orchid.

Kate is leading Keamy’s team into a trap, I think. Uh oh, whispers. It’s a traaaap!

Taser darts. Nice to see them again. It’s just another lovely ambush by the Others.

Keamy just kicked the grenade at one of his own guys. Nice one, boss.

Nice tackle there, Sayid. Action Sayid is definitely a good Sayid. And Richard Alpert to the rescue, shooting Keamy in the back just before he crushed Sayid’d windpipe.

“They help us free you, and we let them off the island.”
“Fair enough.”

“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”

Huh. It can’t be as easy as that.

I’m going to have to submit this after one hour and start a new one for the second hour. It’ll be way too long, otherwise!

Flash forward to Hurley in St. Rosa’s. “Are you Hurley? Are you dangerous?” It’s Walt’s grandma. And Walt is there. Wow, he’s gotten big. He’s a man now, with a man’s voice to go with it.

He was waiting for someone to come see him, but no one did… except for Jeremy Bentham. Will we learn who that is before the end of tonight?

Hurley says that lying is the only way to protect everyone who didn’t come back. Like Michael. So Michael is definitely not the man in the coffin. My money’s on him getting blown up on the Kahana as of right now. Would Hurley know Michael’s fate? I don’t know if they’ll make it back to the freighter.

Locke wants Jack to reconsider leaving the island. He wants him to stay.

Locke is the one who tells Jack they have to lie.

“Just wait until you see what I’m about to do.”

Here’s that whole man of science, man of faith thing again.

LOL at Ben shaking the flowers that Locke couldn’t identify to get into the Orchid.

Nitrogen? Cryo-Cyl? What’s that Michael has there? Oh, it’s supposed to take care of the C4. Hmm. So they can freeze the battery for a short time, but only until the tank runs out. Then they’ll have a warning before the whole thing goes off. Who’s going to stay behind and sacrifice themselves by spraying the battery until it runs out, so that the others can escape on the raft? It’s gotta be Michael. Desmond wants to get back to Penny. That’s when the island will let him die, when he makes up for what he did on the island.

“You’re very dire. But I’m still going to stay.” That’s great, Miles.

Miles knows that Charlotte has been on the island before? “What do I mean?” Cue the mysterious music… dun dun DUN!

“How deep is this station?”
“Deep.”

“Is this the magic box?”
“No, John, it’s not.”
The look on Ben’s face was hysterical.

Orchid video… becoming canon? No way!
*happy dance*
We are witnessing history.

Negatively charged exotic matter in the Vault. Highly volatile and unpredictable. But Ben is placing a number of metallic items in the vault… that must be how the island can be moved.

“Is he talking about what I think he’s talking about?”
“You mean time traveling bunnies? Yes.”

The elevator is going back up.

“You expecting someone?”
“May I have my weapon back?”

Oh man, here they are. The rest of the Oceanic 6… and Sawyer. Sawyer looks jealous as Kate inspects Jack’s wound.

Hacksaw for the handcuffs. Ha.

The film looked odd when Hurley mentioned coming back for Claire. He looked… pixellated.

Keamy’s not dead. I guess they should’ve buried him first. He was stabbed and shot in the back. Good body armor, although he certainly is limping and leaking blood.

Ah. His dead man’s trigger is connected to his heart rate. That makes sense.

“You just killed everybody on that boat.”
“So?”

He is so cold. Good thing the battery is, too…

Yay for the Pushing Daisies promo!

Charlotte is going to stay. For now. “Nothing’s forever.” She was born here. She can’t be Annie, can she? She’s too young. Unless she’s… slowed. Or halted.

Daniel seems to know he’s not going to get back to the island again. And he’s taking a raft full of Redhsirts. They’re going down.

I wonder how the time anomaly works with Keamy’s trigger.

Gunshots are not good for helicopters. I wonder what all that stuff is that they’re tossing out.

“Just do it, Freckles.”

Sawyer bailed on the helicopter so that there would be less weight and enough fuel to get back to the freighter. He told Kate what to do about Clementine, gave her one hell of a kiss, and then dove for the ocean and swam back to the island. That was his choice. That’s the choice he made. I knew it wouldn’t be a long-thought-out decision. He wouldn’t rationally choose to leave Kate and stay on the island. He sacrificed his return so that the others could make it.

Sawyer’s a changed man. It makes it that much sadder that Kate can’t be with him.

16-year-old Emily, dancing to Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” in the 1950s. Look at that belt… she really didn’t look like she could be six months pregnant.

I like Horace’s tie-dye t-shirt underneath his DHARMA jumpsuit.

Emily did run straight past Richard Alpert when she ran out of the room crying, I think. She didn’t notice him. But Emily’s mother certainly seemed to recognize him.

Locke’s foster home doesn’t seem all that pleasant.

As LOST forum posters have pointed out, the test that Richard Alpert is gives to young Locke is similar to a test used in Buddhism to identify the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.

I like how the objects are laid out so that it looks like the man on the cover of the comic book is reaching for the knife.

Question: Why does Jacob inhabit a cabin that Horace was building at the time of the Purge? And why does it move?

The DHARMA logo for the Orchid was on the cover of Keamy’s secondary protocol. Apparently, it was also the logo on Ben’s parka when he seemed to drop out of the sky in Tunisia.

Morse code on the radio… that Daniel sent two days ago. Huh. Weird. I didn’t notice that the first time around.

Geronimo Jackson poster in teen Locke’s locker. Wahoo!

Hurley, Ben, and Locke all have very different, very character-appropriate stares when they find the cabin. I love it.

Why does Abaddon talk Locke into going on that walkabout? Was it all part of the setup, to get him in Australia, to get him on Flight 815, to get him onto the island where he’d be able to walk again?

Okay, so confirmation that the doctor’s body did not float to the island at the correct bearing in a little popup. The consequences of this… the guy on the Kahana had already received the Morse code message that the doctor’s body washed up on the shore. A message from two days earlier. The message was received before the doctor was killed. The body went… back in time two days?

Implications abound. There is time travel involved. Crossing the boundaries of the Island at the wrong bearing cause you to travel through time. Forward or back, and by how much time, probably depends on exactly what heading you travel.

And here comes the helicopter.

Ominous cabin of doom music.

Christian sure gets around in the afterlife. I think that not everyone can opt into the Afterlife Messenger Service when they die. Oh sure, spirits can hang around, like the ghost of that woman’s murdered grandson that Mile stole the money from… Maybe this needs to be a separate theory post. I’ll get back to you.

Okay, I don’t think time travel is as much fun as my own pet time theory, but I now have to seriously consider it.

When we saw Ben land on his back in the middle of the Sahara Desert in Tunisia, was it a flash forward? Or is that where he went when he ran back into his little panic room tunnel while his house was under siege from Captain Keamy and the Kahana crew?

If I recall correctly, there was no whoosh sound when Ben first appeared in the desert.

This would be very interesting for many reasons.

Ben asks the Tunisian hotel clerk for the date, including the year. It would seem that he’s used to showing up in unexpected places in the time/space continuum.

If Ben’s trip is in “real time” with the episode - at least partially, because I think we did get a whooshing sound later on, perhaps after he reappeared in the house? - this is very telling. Then he would know that Sayid lives and makes it off the island before October 24, 2005.

I made a flip remark about The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe while I was watching the episode, but the time compression seen in the Narnia trips could hold true for Ben’s little jaunts… If he stayed in Tunisia long enough to hear about (or orchestrate) Nadia’s murder, he could make a little stop in Tikrit to gain Sayid’s loyalty… and still be back in time for his little showdown with Captain Keamy, resulting in the preventable death of his pseudo-daughter Alex.

The only issue with this line of thought is his midnight visit to Charles Widmore at the end. Perhaps that was a separate trip and truly a flash forward?

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.

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.

Look at that. Actual confirmation that Desmond is time traveling, due to the lack of “swoosh” sound. Desmond is at Camp Millar.

And there’s my confirmation that, and I quote, “time works differently on the island,” per Daniel’s rocket. The time was indeed synchronized when it started out. Anyone who had offered up the suggestion that the people on the freighter were messing with Daniel by changing the clock can happily say that they were wrong.

Interesting - Desmond’s Royal Scottish Army scenes were filmed at Hawaii National Guard’s Diamond Head Garrison.

Oh, and to respond to other fan comments, the army guy from the phone booth did indeed knock the coins out of Desmond’s hand on purpose. But it wasn’t to make him aware of the passage of time; I don’t think he was “in” on it. It was because he was angry about having to do calisthenics double time and do extra running that morning. I do agree that some sort of conspiracy is involved in Desmond’s story, but not in this instance.

The Kerr metric equation is on Daniel’s Oxford chalkboard, and apparently implies the possibility of time travel.

Tovard Hanso is distant relative of both Magnus Hanso, Captain of the Black Rock, and Alvar Hanso, founder of the Hanso Foundation.

Oh crap, don’t tell me this really is time travel. What’s up with Desmond seemingly flashing literally from past to present?

“Your perception of how long your friends have been gone isn’t necessarily how long they’ve actually been gone.” BOOYAH! *does a little time theory victory dance*

And look at that. It’s the freighter!

Is Desmond jumping through time as a side effect of a moment off course from Daniel Faraday’s heading because of the electrical storm?

“This is not happening.” That’s not the first time we’ve heard this.

DUDE! Is that Hurley’s buddy from the psych hospital? What was his name - Lenny? Leonard? The one who kept repeating the numbers? His face was only shown for a second, so it wasn’t enough of a look to know for sure.

Look’s like Frank is in trouble for bringing Sayid and Desmond back.

Don’t go trying to call Baghdad. Ha!

Yes, Desmond has been exposed to high levels of radiation or electromagnetism. Hatch explosion, much?

I think Desmond’s going to kill himself if this doesn’t stop happening to him. It’s too bizarre. Poor Desmond is back in 1996. Can Dan fix him? In… the past?

This is where hundreds of time travel theorists are starting to do a happy dance of their own. Although it’s not Desmond’s body traveling through time, it’s his consciousness. He is physically in both 1996 and… whatever year it is on the freighter, but his mind is slipping in and out on its own little travel through time.

“I need my journal or I won’t believe him.” Does Dan’s journal travel through time? Oh, okay, good. He just has to repeat information that he couldn’t possibly know unless he had traveled back through time. And he knows about Heloise.

Hippy Professor Dan of Oxford thinks his colleagues are messing with him because they think he’s crazy. Until Desmond mentioned Heloise. “This is where I do the things Oxford frowns upon.” Heloise is a lab rat. And she ran the maze she hadn’t been taught to run yet. Sweet. And it was her consciousness traveling forward through time! I think I should pat myself on the back for that one.

The guy in the bed is George Minkowski, the freighter’s Communications Officer. Not Hurley’s crazy pal. Penny’s been calling him on the boat, and he was told never to answer it. That would almost explain why Charlie ended up speaking with her in the Looking Glass station… except for one thing. That means that the Looking Glass’s incoming frequency was set to the same frequency as the freighter. Why would that be? Is the freighter Ben’s? Is he playing both sides? It wouldn’t be a surprise. Why is Minkowski traveling through time, though? Has he already been to the island?

Poor Desmond, catatonic in the middle of a sentence. Five minutes in the future… 35 or 75 minutes in 1996? Desmond needs a constant. Faraday’s constant. I don’t know what that is in the scientific world, but I know it’s something.

Crap, Minkowski’s going to die before he can help Desmond, isn’t he? The nosebleed can’t be a good sign.

The Black Rock in the painting! It was headed for Siam! The First Mate’s journal was found in Madagascar. Lot 2342. Is that Penny’s father Charles Widmore bidding on it? Yes, it is. He just won it auction for either the journal or the painting… I lost track.

They have civilized urinals in the auction house.

“It’s not me who hates you,” Mr. Widmore said. Oh really? And is that really Penny’s address he gave him?

Oh, okay, Minkowski did try to get to the island. Because he was bored. That explains it.

“I need a minute,” Sayid says. Just a minute to fix that mess?

And… Minkowski bit the big one.

Penny’s house number is 423.

It’s Christmas Eve 2004 on the island. I stand by the fact that it’s not necessarily the same date on the freighter. But if the freighter folks knew that they might find the Flight 815 castaways, and they know who Ben is, they might be able to count the way time passes on the island.

Although it is Christmas Eve at Penny’s house. And Penny has my phone.

Aww. Happiness for Desmond and Penny!

“If anything goes wrong, Desmond Hume will be MY constant.”

Awesome.

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.