'The constant' dvd commentary - they dont like ALT by Steve

On disc 2 of season 4, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and an editor are doing the commentary and I'd be curious to know what all you ALT-ers think of it...

CC: The one thing we assiduously avoid when it comes to time-travel on Lost is what you know, is referred to as Paradox, which is this whole notion that you turn up and see your same self in another period of time….

DL: we’re gonna come to paradox in a moment, because there is a scene all about paradox, you know coming up, but essentially this is our ‘Flux capacitor’ scene Desmond’s just come to, and here’s a key line coming up:

{Line spoken by Faraday] You can’t change the future

DL: there it is You CANT change the future, so those are the rules on LOST, you know, which is very hard to adhere to because if you basically tell the audience that something that Desmond does back here in 1996 can alter the present, we go back to the episode which we did last year, where essentially Ms. Hawking comes to Desmond and says no matter what you do, the course of time will find a way to course correct, so you can save somebody’s life who is supposed to die, but eventually the universe will find a way to kill them anyway.

Editor: so what you are saying is you can change the immediate future?

DL: yeah you can change the immediate future

Editor: speaking of the present, you know how Lassie was actually a boy, well Eloise is a boy

DL: yeah, so Eloise was sent, her consciousness was sent an hour into the future, where she already knows how to run the maze; Desmond’s past consciousness is travelling into the future as well whereas Minkowksi’s present consciousness is travelling into the past, because as we will soon learn he has no future to travel to because he’s about to die on the boat.

CC: Now you know why it took us so long to write this story and the thing was we had to work out all these permutations, and of course again you know we’re trying not to violate the concept of paradox, basically that’s the part where we find time travel is just not engaging for the audience, you wanna see the people move back and forth between the two different times, but with encounters with themselves or alteration of the future was something that we really are OPPOSED TO, coz we want people to be invested in the future we DON’T want the audience to think for example well you’ve seen Kate and Jack had this really intense conversation in the flash forward at the end of season 3 and discover somehow that it means nothing, that basically a new parallel future could be constructed in which that is rendered as not having existed, NO that was REAL, it means something, that can be the ONLY inevitable course of events.

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So from the horses mouth they DON'T do parallel realities. If Jack and Kates conversation is real then that nuke aint going to change ANYTHING. There will be no parallel future constructed where the other stuff then just didn't happen. Jack was Wrong about changing things and so was Farady. It's a total distraction technique the writers used to get the ALT camp going in the first place! They said it: "you CANT change the future"

WHH RULES!