ON A MOBIUS KICK: Why Some Can Die or Kill, and Some Cannot by Darth Chin

Okay, first theory, apologies if already proposed elsewhere, and also for the length!

I keep coming back in my mind to all the talk of Jacob can't kill MIB, Ben can't kill Charles, Richard and Michael seem unable to kill themselves, etc. and yet others can die quite easily - Ilana being the most recent example. Ethan seemed confident enough that leaving Charlie Pace strung from a gum tree would be enough to assure his final bass line, Anna Lucia, Libby, Tom Friendly and Shannon were far from impervious to bullets and the Dharma Initiative certainly didn't think life was a gas.

Even the teenage Ben Linus took a slug, and would have died - perhaps even *did* die .... orginally.

The key things here are the elements of different time zones, and different realities. Different versions of history, like spokes of a wheel, like the degree-points at the Lighthouse. What if the Island was the hub at the centre of that wheel?

We have seen countless times, over all six seasons, how the fates of Our Heroes are interlinked, cause and effect style, and how the core characters are common to multiple versions of the timeline. They *interact*.

Different interactions, within different spokes of the wheel, all with different outcomes.

Except that at the hub of the wheel, the Island, the "nexus" of the realities if you like, all possible realities are viable, and all possible outcomes are valid.

Take Jack and Locke for instance - if Jack saves Locke's life in one version of reality, and Locke saves Jack's in another, then they cannot kill each other because that would create a self-cancelling paradox.

Similarly, when Jack plays dynamite roulette with Alpert the damn thing explodes and, simultaneously, doesn't explode because his death would "reset" the effects of all his previous interactions, across all timelines. And that would then reset others, etc. and so on. The universe protects its own integrity. The same thing with Michael's suicide attempts.

The phenomenon is set in stone, however, when someone *physically* moves from one reality to another e.g time travels, or leaves the island and then comes back. This is how Mother, Jacob and MIB achieve immortality - by moving between realities, by using the electromagnetic properties of the "hub" to observe and select the best spots in the reality's history and then interfering with certain people's lives. All they then have to do to be immortal is quickly scurry back to the island and ensure that the person with whom's life they have meddled also comes to the island and therefore becomes part of its reality. Bingo, instant immortality. This is why certain groups of folk have to arrive/depart the island together.

Perhaps these are The Rules - you can kill someone who you owe your life, not necessarily in the same reality, but you run the risk of erasing your own existence.

And consider this - all the folks who died straightforward deaths did so without time-travelling, or getting radiationed, electromagnetised, leaving the Island etc. They had no opportunity to interact with their "constants", in any other reality. Those that did time-travel, however, changed history and therefore created their own little paradoxes as well as potentially skewing Ben's original history. At the same time, though, they may have also reset some already established paradoxes and made some who were immortal mortal again (Daniel Farraday step forward). Let's go ahead and call this part of the theory ... the Loophole.

Ben was originally dead, now, due to the actions of Our Heroes, he ain't. Hence he is able to kill Jacob.

Desmond seems able to perceive multiple timelines at once, and this will prove to be key. Someone needs to explain all this to the poor viewer, after all.

So finally let's address the issue of Mother "arranging" for Jacob and MIB to not be able to hurt each other. Did she chart her two lovely boys' futures, using the Lighthouse or similar, and work out when the loophole would occur? Is theirs the longest running paradox of all? Is the long, long unfolding of this cause and its effect a little story called ... Lost?