Flashes Before Our Eyes All Along by Cassiopea

AN ALTERNATIVE TIME LINE WHERE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT THAT WE’VE WATCHING IN SERIES 1- 5 REMAINS THE SAME.

I want to suppose again that if we are to see an alternative timeline then it will not be as a result of what Jack had done but this time I’m writing a theory to make a new suggestion. As I said in previous theories - everything we witnessed in series 1-5 is due to play out again as we saw it and when Jack woke up after 815 crashed on the island he had just tried to blow up the bomb at the incident site. I’ll write the new part of the theory first to save you reading all my ideas but if what I say below makes no sense then I’ve tried to summarise all my thoughts behind the prediction afterwards.

I predict that back stories were not just back stories but they were flashes like Desmond had. Maybe some people chose to make a difference in their flashes, some people didn’t. Maybe some people (and I mean our Losties) were more aware that they had an opportunity to make a change. In fact sometimes the back stories we saw were changes that other people were making to our Losties pasts. Character development was taking place before our eyes, flashes were happening before our eyes all along.

Whatever happened happened regarding the incident in my opinion and Jack has ensured that the future will play out as it should, as we’ve seen it in series 1-5 - he did not achieve a reset. The advantage of showing us an alternative time line would be to show us what happened before ANY changes were made. Changes that were made by something else not the events we witnessed in The Incident. If they showed us a time line so different then we could work out what things were changed. Something so obvious that we’d then just know we’d be watching a time line BEFORE the any changes were made and the Losties never went to the island. Let’s see a time line where Sayid is in a relationship with Amira, yes Sami's wife Amira! He never became a torturer but met Amira and married her instead of Sami marrying her. We could see Desmond living with Penny with her father’s disapproval. I don’t think that Lost would give us such obvious scenes but I’d like to see that sort of th! ing. I’d like to see that Desmond was conned into going to the island all along and that Inman set up Sayid to become a torturer, both as part of the war on the island over time. Inman always spoke Arabic and did not need a translator; therefore the only reason that Inman asked Sayid to interrogate his commanding officer, Tariq, was to ensure that Sayid became a torturer. This could of course be to some other ends but then it’s very coincidental that Inman is on the island employed by Dharma don’t you think?

In my other theories I’ve supposed that mind time travel is possible for anyone exposed to EM and that the Others have been going back in time and making change to the time line. The changes are all to do with Jacob’s plan for trying to fix his mistake. Jacob is a Dharma scientist and in trying to alter the end of the world as predicted by the Valenzetti Equation, he experimented with time travel and causes the end of the world. He has been trying to make changes to the time line to alter the future. The Others got involved and now the sides in the war are unclear. What started as a disagreement between hostiles and Dharma scientists became a war over making changes to the timeline and the players have switched allegiance as time goes by. Each time a change is made in the time line, a new set of events replaces the old ones for each change would set a new sequence of events into motion. Some things may be drastically different but some things would not change at all. A m! ap of time would be necessary, perhaps like some of those maps we’ve seen, for example in Daniel’s diary, or the ones Caesar found.

Is there evidence for changes made in the timeline as a result of changes to the past? Not really, except Des did make a change, Eloise did make a change. The only other things are continuity errors and the real info is lost within a multitude of set errors, CGI mistakes or editing room mistakes. Maybe they aren’t lost, maybe the writers didn’t mind too much about unnecessary continuity errors so much since what we’ve be seeing would be a compilation of different timelines. Only errors which would spawn crazy fan ideas have been completely deigned. Look at them all - http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Bloopers_and_continuity_errors To base a theory entirely on continuity errors would be foolish, yet here I am proposing such a thing. Why? - because there are some things that don’t sit right. Clare’s Mum’s miraculous recovery from a coma she was very unlikely to recover from, Mikhail’s death where he didn’t really die. The degree of various mistakes or continuity ! errors has been discussed to death, I hope not to start a whole new set of discussions on these topics, but I just point them out to make a prediction for where I think Lost is going.

If the flashbacks are not just back stories but are people experiencing flashes into their past, like I say, then why could some people do something about them and some not? I think it’s to do with the level of exposure to electromagnetism (EM the flash of light we see at the end of the Incident or after Des turns the failsafe key). Ben and Locke were in the wheel chamber, they were subjected to a high concentration when they turned the wheel and were in close proximity to the electromagnetism, just like Des, maybe more so. They would know what changes they wanted to make and could make them. I’m not talking about the changes they made physically after they’d turned the wheel when they turned up in Tunisia. I mean that when they turned the wheel, they also had a mind time travel experience to their past that we may have already witnessed. Many have said that Locke seemed different on the island. Sometimes he seemed like unsure Locke, a Locke who was wheelchair bound wh! o worked for a box company. Sometimes he was a hunter like he had already experienced life on the island hunting boars and throwing knives. Maybe that’s why he brought the knives to the island in the first place – he knew he’d need them because he had future knowledge. So did we see a Locke who was sometimes acting with future knowledge and sometimes not; maybe we saw a man who was doubtful and then shown the way by the island; or maybe we were watching different stories - or should I say – roughly the same story, but a combination of scenes from different iterations of the time line. What looks like one time line is a multitude of cleverly edited time lines made to look like one continuous story. Time lines that were different because changes had been made in the past. When Ben comes to get John Locke, when he pretended to be Henry Gale, it’s not because Jacob told him to, it was because Ben was acting with future knowledge.

Jack, Sawyer, Kate, Chang etc all at the incident site we now know have also experienced high levels of EM so when Jack wakes up on the island at the start of the show had he already just arrived back from trying to change the past. They will most likely have a similar experience to Des. After Des turned the failsafe key EM escaped, there was a bright white light and the sky turned purple. The same started to happen at the end of series 5. The people in the immediate vicinity, which interestingly should include Chang and Radzinsky should begin to experience flashes to their past where they could try to make different decisions. Interestingly those flashes could have been where Jacob seems to appear, the flashbacks we see in the episode The Incident. Did Jack go on to reveal that his Dad was drunk in the operation because of his little chat with Jacob? Did Sun decide to stay with Jin because of the interference of Jacob? Was John Locke OK because Jacob touched him after he fe! ll from the window? It was probably a lot more than a touch but for us it is an indication that these are where the changes to the Losties pasts are made. “A little push” was all that was needed. I don’t think that Jacob touched Jack to change Jack but to ensure that Jack instigates a chain of events which lead Christian back to the island – becomes a drunk, dies and Jack brings his body conveniently back to the island. That’s partly because I think Jacob is the bad guy. These were changes that were made and then those back stories were to show how those changes affected their lives. When we watched Jack’s flash back to where he was at the hearing and revealed that his Dad was drunk during the operation that was memory that was subject to change. When we watched Clare have an accident and her Mum ended up in a coma, that was a memory that is subject to change.

Clare, for example, was only exposed to a small amount of EM, she was not at the immediate vicinity of the Swan when Des turned the failsafe device. She was on the island when the bright light and high pitched noise engulfed the island. She was exposed to a lower level of EM so she doesn’t get the same realisation as Des. She is not aware that her memories of her past have been changed or that she can make changes.

Being at the site of the incident could, of course, explain Miles’ ability to talk to dead people. He can see between the timelines, just like Hurley. There is also the idea that the different iterations of the time line are not clear cut on the island since Cerberus escaped. That’s a whole other theory though.

One last prediction, one that I always seem to end up making. I think Jacob is the evil dude. I don’t think I even believe that there is such a man as the MIB who has become John Locke. I think John Locke is looking for a loophole just as the guy who played MIB, Titus Welliver, at the start of The Incident was looking for one. If there is such a character then he will turn out to be the good guy.

TDFN!