I don’t know how it’s going to happen, or what exactly will happen, but I got a feeling that next season, everyone present at the detonation of Jughead will be sent back (in regards to the comic-con stuff, most likely to their pre-815 lives) in order to live their lives again with something new: Desmond-like powers. Their powers would come from the same exact event that gave Des his powers in the first place: some exposure to electromagnetic radiation at the Swan site. Does this mean that everything we saw happen throughout the first 5 season and their flashbacks didn’t happen? Oh no, this means that everything DID happen, and everything functions in one form or another as a memory.
Let’s sit on this for a minute. We know Desmond has had flashes in which he is able to recall knowledge that he has of future events and, due to this knowledge, has the foresight and ability to change what happens. If this is because all of the characters are all existing within a time loop or circle, this does not mean that the circle gets written over every time like a cassette tape being taped over, but instead it will be kinda like a record in that each circle the needle traces gives us a new part of the same song. In this case the circle continues to grow, much like the insignia for the Orchid station. All of our characters’ lifelines continue to grow in concentric circles, meaning that everything that happened DID happen while simultaneously allowing for new events to occur on the same timeline. If this notion is correct, than perhaps LOST is like DHARMA in that it stands for something, in this case perhaps something like: Limitless Occurrences in the Same Tim! eline, or some riff on that (maybe Limited occurrences?…. I’ll leave that up to you in the comment section).
Anway, what does this mean for our characters? For one, it means that they’re all afforded with an opportunity to change that which pained them in their previous lives. Maybe Jack will try to repair his relationship with his father before he leaves to Australia; Maybe Sawyer won’t shoot Frank Ducket; Maybe Kate won’t kill Wayne but instead some other guy we’ve never heard of…..hmmmmmmmm. Maybe they remember to just not get on the flight in the first place (although Hurley’s Chicken commercial alludes to the fact that 815 does not crash at all, perhaps due to some action of Desmond’s which I will get into in a moment). Whatever the case, they can change things because they’re all variables as Faraday put it.
What memories will be remembered, though? Desmond’s namesake, David Hume, talked a lot about experiential learning and, in his discussion of the difference between man and animal, spelled out that the main differentiating factor between the two is that humans can correlate cause and effect:
It is certain, that the most ignorant and stupid peasants, nay infants, nay even brute beasts, improve by experience, and learn the qualities of natural objects, by observing the effects, which result from them (Hume, Enquiry, Bk IV, p. 25).
Hume goes on to say that we can “infer that the same events will always follow from the same causes” (Hume, Enquiry, Bk IX, p. 70). It seems that Sawyer understood this aspect of Hume’s philosophy already when, in his first flashback “Confidence Man” in which he chooses NOT to create the next Sawyer and walks away from the con, thus halting the perpetual spin of the wheel because of his knowledge of future events (that is, similar events caused James to turn into Sawyer). Now the characters will come to learn this in a new way, through memories of their past lives. How these memories arrive to them may be tricky. Perhaps they only get random visions of their past (or future), ala Desmond’s flashes of Charlie’s deaths, all of which, per this theory, happened in one timeline or another, but all were avoided by Desmond in the particular timeline we witnessed in season 3 (maybe what we’ve seen all along is the 10th iteration of these events happening, or mayb! e it was the first, regardless we should hope to find out at least that much by the end of the series).
Sorry for the length, but I got predictions, and here they are:
1. Desmond doesn’t chase after Kelvin, presses the button on time and effectively stops 815 from landing on the island. He would thus strike whatever chance he has with reuniting with Penny, which may be the major love arc for the final season. Maybe he turns the failsafe key earlier, too, with similar effects.
2. Kate remembers her last conversation with Jack before Jughead explodes. There, Jack tells Kate he would rather erase the love they had experienced if that meant that everything else would be erased. Kate would then know that Jack has let her down and she will choose Sawyer next season, who may or may not have memories of Juliet. (Perhaps Kate and Sawyer become Adam and Eve, and, in an even more far out theory, maybe they’re Desmond’s parents as he is the only character who’se parentage we don’t know yet; I would personally love this because the doors it would open for the writers would be SWEET).
3. Speaking of Juliet, maybe she chooses not to work for Mittelos Bioscience and stays on the mainland, never getting to the island and never meeting anyone. This would be an interesting way of writing her out—perhaps we would see her in the background somewhere living her life as if she had never been to the island.
4. Maybe Locke or Ben know that Locke can’t die otherwise he’ll be used by MIB for destructive purposes. Maybe it means Ben must make Locke lose faith in the island and not do what it tells him to do, which is kinda what Ben had been trying to do all along for all the wrong reasons (I think).
Well, I’m exhausted and you probably are, too. So chime in with what you think in the comments and try to come up with other changes that will occur to our characters if they have knowledge of the events of the first 5 seasons.
Let’s sit on this for a minute. We know Desmond has had flashes in which he is able to recall knowledge that he has of future events and, due to this knowledge, has the foresight and ability to change what happens. If this is because all of the characters are all existing within a time loop or circle, this does not mean that the circle gets written over every time like a cassette tape being taped over, but instead it will be kinda like a record in that each circle the needle traces gives us a new part of the same song. In this case the circle continues to grow, much like the insignia for the Orchid station. All of our characters’ lifelines continue to grow in concentric circles, meaning that everything that happened DID happen while simultaneously allowing for new events to occur on the same timeline. If this notion is correct, than perhaps LOST is like DHARMA in that it stands for something, in this case perhaps something like: Limitless Occurrences in the Same Tim! eline, or some riff on that (maybe Limited occurrences?…. I’ll leave that up to you in the comment section).
Anway, what does this mean for our characters? For one, it means that they’re all afforded with an opportunity to change that which pained them in their previous lives. Maybe Jack will try to repair his relationship with his father before he leaves to Australia; Maybe Sawyer won’t shoot Frank Ducket; Maybe Kate won’t kill Wayne but instead some other guy we’ve never heard of…..hmmmmmmmm. Maybe they remember to just not get on the flight in the first place (although Hurley’s Chicken commercial alludes to the fact that 815 does not crash at all, perhaps due to some action of Desmond’s which I will get into in a moment). Whatever the case, they can change things because they’re all variables as Faraday put it.
What memories will be remembered, though? Desmond’s namesake, David Hume, talked a lot about experiential learning and, in his discussion of the difference between man and animal, spelled out that the main differentiating factor between the two is that humans can correlate cause and effect:
It is certain, that the most ignorant and stupid peasants, nay infants, nay even brute beasts, improve by experience, and learn the qualities of natural objects, by observing the effects, which result from them (Hume, Enquiry, Bk IV, p. 25).
Hume goes on to say that we can “infer that the same events will always follow from the same causes” (Hume, Enquiry, Bk IX, p. 70). It seems that Sawyer understood this aspect of Hume’s philosophy already when, in his first flashback “Confidence Man” in which he chooses NOT to create the next Sawyer and walks away from the con, thus halting the perpetual spin of the wheel because of his knowledge of future events (that is, similar events caused James to turn into Sawyer). Now the characters will come to learn this in a new way, through memories of their past lives. How these memories arrive to them may be tricky. Perhaps they only get random visions of their past (or future), ala Desmond’s flashes of Charlie’s deaths, all of which, per this theory, happened in one timeline or another, but all were avoided by Desmond in the particular timeline we witnessed in season 3 (maybe what we’ve seen all along is the 10th iteration of these events happening, or mayb! e it was the first, regardless we should hope to find out at least that much by the end of the series).
Sorry for the length, but I got predictions, and here they are:
1. Desmond doesn’t chase after Kelvin, presses the button on time and effectively stops 815 from landing on the island. He would thus strike whatever chance he has with reuniting with Penny, which may be the major love arc for the final season. Maybe he turns the failsafe key earlier, too, with similar effects.
2. Kate remembers her last conversation with Jack before Jughead explodes. There, Jack tells Kate he would rather erase the love they had experienced if that meant that everything else would be erased. Kate would then know that Jack has let her down and she will choose Sawyer next season, who may or may not have memories of Juliet. (Perhaps Kate and Sawyer become Adam and Eve, and, in an even more far out theory, maybe they’re Desmond’s parents as he is the only character who’se parentage we don’t know yet; I would personally love this because the doors it would open for the writers would be SWEET).
3. Speaking of Juliet, maybe she chooses not to work for Mittelos Bioscience and stays on the mainland, never getting to the island and never meeting anyone. This would be an interesting way of writing her out—perhaps we would see her in the background somewhere living her life as if she had never been to the island.
4. Maybe Locke or Ben know that Locke can’t die otherwise he’ll be used by MIB for destructive purposes. Maybe it means Ben must make Locke lose faith in the island and not do what it tells him to do, which is kinda what Ben had been trying to do all along for all the wrong reasons (I think).
Well, I’m exhausted and you probably are, too. So chime in with what you think in the comments and try to come up with other changes that will occur to our characters if they have knowledge of the events of the first 5 seasons.
