No Such Thing As Course Correction by Nate G

Over the course of the show it has been hinted at and somewhat shown that people have prior knowledge of events before they happen. From Hawking's premonition of the red shoed man's death, to Ben's claim that for the first time he didn't know what was going to happen, it seems that some characters know the future while others don't. Many theories have tried to explain this, but the simplest has to be Faraday's journal.

I propose that Hawking and whoever else she's in cahoots with have been using the events outlined in the journal to make sure that history plays out exactly how it says so she can potentially save the life of her son Daniel. I think that she tricked Des into going back to the island with the guise of course correction and destiny because his ultimate return was necessary for the events that lead to ughead's explosion and the possible saving of Faraday. How she knew that Red Shoe Man would die is difficult to tell but she certainly didn't prove that he had to die but merely that she saw it coming. Premonitions aren't hard to come by in lost, but hard proof for course correction kinda is. All Hawking knew was that Des needed to be back to save Charlie and ultimately get the Oceanic 6 off the island and back in time. Once Des decided that she was right and he would indeed return to the original timeline of things his now unstuck-in-time-mind (thanks to the fail-safe key) jumpe! d back to the future, back on the island.

The main problem with this then is that if it wasn't course correction that kept trying to kill Charlie what was it? For this I suggest that Des's future telling powers regarding Charlie's death were possibly intervention by Jacob to send Jack, Kate, Hurley and Sayid back in time to change the past. In case you forget it was Jacob trying to get everyone back to the island as much as Hawking (at least with Hurley) and had they not gone back, and back in time, Sayid would not have shot little Ben and started the events that lead to the stabbing of Jacob (this little tidbit was taken from a previous theory I read and quite liked). Jacob has shown is the past that he has supernatural powers of some sort (whether some people like it or not) is it not possible that he made Charlie think he had to die (via Desmond) because he was the only one who could turn off the jamming device in the Looking Glass?

All of this is kind of my roundabout way of saying that next season definitely can start in an ALT timeline because we have never been given irrefutable evidence that course correction actually exists, where things go from there is anyone's guess. My idea may be full of holes and/or complete gibberish but at the least it seems like the kind of false-assumption twist that lost has made quite commonly over the course of the series.