WHH, I DON'T THINK SO by Theron

Okay, this is something that may have been brought up a while back but I thought I’d revisit it from a different perspective, because I know it was before the WHH vs ALT battles.
I’m primarily going to reference season two – ‘Live Together, Die Alone’, where Desmond meets Penny at the stadium before he goes on the boat race, and ‘The Constant’. This isn’t long, 2 parts question and one part theory.

Okay, so the idea of WHH is just that. No matter what time travel elements or alternate universe you want to add into it, the events from a chronological perspective always play out the same. Although I should point out that I disagree with the notion of a ‘course corrector’ and the fact that if someone is ‘supposed’ to die and gets saved that the evil universe will use all of it’s forces to kill that person in a way he wasn’t originally ‘supposed’ to die. For one I think that however that person ultimately dies is forever what happened – happened. Such as Charlie drowning, whatever Desmond ultimately did to delay his death until then was what went down. Now you can reference his ‘visions’ and how he cheated them, but they were just visions until he decided to do something about them.


Another thing I want to point out in the new physics model of time travel (not to get to technical here) is that when you time travel you are ultimately traveling to a parallel world that ultimately exists earlier or later from the timeline/universe that you came from. There’s technically no such thing as going back in the past on the exact same timeline. Everything looks the same and happened mostly the same because of it’s proximity to the world we are in. But it is not the same world from a quantum perspective. But when you combine real world wild ass theoretical speculation with fiction; then it doesn’t matter. Only that if we’re trying to determine what ‘rules’ the show is trying to stick to with regards to time travel and such.

So, with that idea in mind consider this; When Faraday first comes to the island and meets Desmond and realizes what’s going on in Desmond’s mind, he tells him to go see himself at the university and tell him about Ellie. Daniel tells Des that he needs a constant (Penny) to know where he is and to ultimately stay alive. So, in the end it’s revealed that Daniel had already written in his notebook that Desmond Hume was his constant. That makes sense given that Daniel would have written this down around that same time Desmond comes to see him in the lab. And also given the fact that Dan’s mind was messed up from the same experiments.

Okay, but now you have Desmond in The Constant asking Penny for her phone number and that he wouldn’t call her for another 8 years. This, of course happening while he’s actually on the freighter in 2004 about to make the call. But, then you have the scene with Desmond and Penny at the stadium. Now, this is certainly AFTER he was in the army and had the mind flashing episode from the freighter in the future. Why then does Penny not remember Desmond asking for her number and that he wouldn’t call her for 8 years? Why? Well, one explanation is that it hasn’t happened yet from the pov of the linear timeline that has them meeting at the stadium BEFORE Desmond made it to the island and had the mind flashes. But when you consider Daniel’s encounter with Desmond and seeing his note to himself about Desmond in the book which had to have been there BEFORE he set foot on the island – it’s not consistent.

The bottom line is that one of these scenarios are wrong. Either you can chalk it up to a writing/continuity error or perhaps something they may be trying to tell us with regards to the nature of the timelines and Desmond’s ‘gift’.

Now, having said all of that my theory is that perhaps good old Ellie Hawking might have been the one to actually write in Daniel’s notebook that Desmond is his constant. Just giving Daniel a little push so to speak about what he’s ‘supposed’ to do. You can’t say that Daniel just didn’t remember writing that –but it was already in his book before he told Desmond to go meet him in the past the next time he flashed.

As for Penny not remembering Desmond begging for her phone number so he could call her in 8 years, maybe it’s a result of that event happening in the so called ‘original’ timeline or universe and when Desmond does make the call to Penny in the future that is effectively the ‘alternate’ timeline or universe where they both would have remembered him telling her he was going to call 8 years ago at the stadium.

Now one thing that just came to mind is that when Daniel tells Desmond to go see Ellie when he was in the hatch, Desmond wakes up in 2007 and says ‘it wasn’t a dream it was a memory’. But even that is inconsistent with the above examples because Penny nor Daniel suddenly ‘realize’ that they have this new memory of Desmond in the past.

My theory is that maybe Desmond’s so called gift is the ability to not only mind travel in time and dimensions, but to make a change and carry the memory of that change back to his present time where everyone else does not have the memory all in an instant.

My head is starting to hurt so I’ll stop here. Would love some collaboration on this.
Theron