Unfortunate; Reboot Nonetheless by Jack's Surgical Intern

Ruminations on reboot versus WHH got me thinking of a once seemingly unimportant line from "Flashes Before Your Eyes". This episode reveals what happened to Des when he imploded the hatch. He thought he was going insane for a bit, realized he might actually be traveling through time, and remembered the ending of a soccer game. When he has this Eureka moment, he is sitting in a bar with his very skeptical good friend who also happens to be a Physicist (or maybe a Mathematician/Philosopher? An esoteric theorist? Something along these lines). Earlier in the episode, when a wild-eyed Des rushes into his friend's place of employment, we hear the friend talking to what I assume to be a colleague. He is saying something about randomness and chaos: how if you repeat the same action(s) over and over you will get "a different outcome every time". Because we the audience "walk in" halfway through this convo, it's unclear wh! ether this man agrees with the statement or is trying to debunk it. It seems (by his tone, paralanguage, etc.) that he espouses the theory. I don't want a reboot, but this seems to be evidence that we'll be getting just that. :( Also, possibly related: Locke's flashbacks show that he's had about one billion jobs (enough for two lifetimes, perhaps). he looks about the same age in all of them: the toy store, the box company, the wacky tobaccy farm...could we be seeing different iterations of Locke's timeline here? Thoughts?