The LOST Tower by Darlton King by Skilly

Towards the end of summer I was getting bummed out over lack of reading material. I wanted to read something really entertaining but well written enough to learn from, considering I plan to be an author. Also being a LOST fan, I remembered in either an interview or a podcast Damon and Carlton holding up Stephen King's book The Stand and claiming it is basically a "bible" for the show, they keep it on the set and while they're writing the episodes. If you read the book, LOST has a lot of similarities to the novel.

The first part of the book introduces a wide array of characters, each describing some form of an "every-man" quality. This in itself is similar to the characters in LOST, with every character being a representation of different typical types of people in our society while a bit of extra importance is added. Even a few of the characters are similar. Larry Underwood is a rock star who saves several character's lives before being blown up. That's just one example. Although how our Losties all meet up at the start of the story is a little more abrupt than how they slowly meet up in The Stand, most of the first part still stays in the area of strange, science-fiction but still wholly possible. It's not until the second and third part of The Stand that everything starts to shift from hypothetical-science to science-fiction and then finally into the supernatural. Damon and Carlton said specifically this is how they want the show to go.

So the thought crossed my mind that I could read The Stand, but I already read it 6 years ago during my freshman year of high school. Then I was reading on Wikipedia that Cuse and Lindelof both along with JJ Abrams plan on adapting The Dark Tower for either television or film (they still haven't said how they are going to adapt it). Suddenly I knew what to read. The book is seven books total, each of which feel more like a chapter within a giant book rather than separate books that make a whole. The story is so incredibly unified. I'm on the seventh right now and over the course of reading these books I'm really starting to think that Season 6 of LOST will delve pretty deep into The Dark Tower territory.

Similarities between the two tales are everywhere from the second book on, we have a heroin junkie that Roland Deschain (the main character) pulls through a door to another world, forcing the character to go cold turkey off of the stuff. Along with that another character is a legless woman with multiple personality disorder, who had a brick chunked at her head when she was a kid by the same man who pushed her in front of a subway train causing her nubbs. This man was also the reason for another important character, a child, dying and arriving in this other world that they spend most of their time in. When Roland ends up time travelling and entering this evil man's body he stops that from happening and the child has to meet up with a younger version of the heroin addict to get back to the other world after he didn't die. The story is filled with coincidences and meetings with people that are linked to other characters in a very similar manner as LOST.

This last season of LOST we had a bomb detonated to stop a chain of events that caused our Losties to crash on The Island. Pretty debatable as to what might happen, from what they've been telling us in previous episodes and what they aren't telling us. In The Dark Tower, the Tower itself is the center of EVERYTHING, all universes, all dimensions, all possibilities. Every floor of the Tower is another reality. But there are only two realities that remain true, that whatever happens happens in them and it is impossible to go back and change it.

So, here's where the what-ifs start coming, so what if the bomb detonates and creates a chain of events that keeps the Losties from ever crashing on The Island. If that happens then how was that bomb ever detonated in the first place? The folks never time-travelled to the past where Faraday convinced Jack and friends to detonate the bomb, so technically the bomb never detonated. So the only logical and "paradox-free" way for Damon and Carlton to go about this would be to have two lines created from that event, everything up to that point was a single ribbon representing time, when the bomb was detonated it ripped the ribbon in two and thus created two separate but intact timelines. If this doesn't happen, then the ribbon would either be obliterated or stay one solid line which wouldn't make sense considering they DID change things.

So the first timeline is what we've seen so far, with Jack and friends detonating the bomb and Guy-Who-Looks-Like-Locke and friends on The Island based solidly in the original timeline.

The second timeline is what we're about to see, with Oceanic 815 landing safely in LA, and what happens then.

We'll see both timelines in the Sixth Season, and my guess, even though this is really "Fringe-ish" is that in one of the timelines Jacob lords over the Island and in the other timeline Jacob's-Old-Buddy lords over the Island. This ultimately creates a war. When Jack and friends detonated the bomb they themselves created the alternate timeline, and in doing so they started a war over realities. This is the war that has been hinted at since the conversation between Benjamin Linus and Charles Widmore on that fateful night. I think Widmore was banished from the Island for more than just seeing an outsider, I think he was actually recruited by Jacob's-Old-Buddy and promised eternal leadership or something of the sort if he helps Jacob's-Old-Buddy take over, through the manipulation of certain characters such as John Locke for instance.

Well that's my theory, I hope it holds true, but I really don't care either way. One thing really puzzles me though, in an interview a few months ago, before Comic-Con but after the fifth season finale, they spent most of their time answering routine questions and didn't reveal even the slightest of information. But when I believe the interviewer, or it could have been a fan, walked up and asked Damon and Carlton to sign their copy of Harry Potter 7, they signed it with a little note, the note said, "Locke is extremely similar to Snape." That really begs the question, is Guy-Who-Looks-Like-Locke really the bad guy? Could it be Richard all along?