LOST Revisited: Pre-Game for “Follow the Leader”
It all goes back to Season Three’s episode “Flashes Before Your Eyes”. This episode flashes back to Desmond at the end of Season Two. The moment he turns the failsafe key in the Hatch, his life flashes before his eyes and he finds himself back in 1996. He has some knowledge of future events, so present Desmond is inhabiting past Desmond’s body. To me, it’s a safe assumption that the collapse of the Hatch is what caused him to come unstuck in time and see flashes of the future. We saw more of Desmond’s past in Season Two, and time progressed linearly for him then, without him having knowledge of the future. Up until the Hatch collapsed on him, he was a regular guy.
So in that episode, he goes to buy a ring for Penny and propose. In his first time through, he chickened out. When he relived that period, he was committed to doing it right, and then White Oracle showed up and explained that he couldn’t buy the ring, because he didn’t buy the ring. She explained fate, and that if he tried to change the past, the universe would course-correct. In fact, she specifically explained that the universe needs him to end up on the Island and turn the key. She, and I think this is incredibly important giving the events of last week, actually tells him that if those things don’t happen “every single one of us is dead.”
Now, before the Hatch collapsed on him, that’s not how Desmond remembered his past. If you’d asked him why he didn’t propose, he wouldn’t have told you “Well, this white-haired lady told me that I had to go to an Island and save the world”. So this means that White Oracle identified a critical juncture and put herself in a position to make certain that things happened the way they were supposed to. So she’s just as much of a variable as Desmond – she had to have known what happened originally, and that something different was going to happen.
And while we can credit Faraday’s notebook for some of her knowledge, this event wouldn’t have been in there – Faraday actually didn’t know Desmond for very long, certainly not long enough to transcribe his relationship history. So basically, White Oracle managed to insert herself into the moment in which somebody was going to change the past, with full knowledge of the future. That indicates to me that she’s at least got something going on, time travel-wise.
And it’s also clear that White Oracle has a vested interest in making sure that time works out the way it’s supposed to. All of her actions last week had the effect of making sure that events happened the way that she knew they were going to happen. And back then, she took steps to get Desmond to the Island. Remember, if Desmond doesn’t go to the Island, Flight 815 doesn’t crash. Faraday took the position that preventing the hatch from being built would prevent the crash, but if Desmond doesn’t come to the Island, then Kelvin keeps on pushing the button, and September 22, 2004 passes without incident. (Remember, Desmond had a crisis of faith after he accidentally killed Kelvin in a fight, and that’s why he didn’t push the button that day.) If it’s important to get Desmond to the Island, it’s important that Flight 815 crashes.
So, if White Oracle is to be believed, Faraday’s plan to change the past will be disastrous. Considering that Faraday’s idea involves detonating a hydrogen bomb, and now their group is short one brilliant physicist, this can only be a bad idea. And now it occurs to me that the conflict we’ve been hearing about for so long is between the people trying to change the past and those trying to preserve it. It’s chaos vs. order.
But who’s on which side? Jack wants to change the past, sure. But what about Kate? As spunkybuddy Jennifer said, if Flight 815 doesn’t crash, Kate goes to jail for murder. Is life on the Island better or worse than life in prison? Locke doesn’t want to change the past, because he doesn’t want to lose the Island. What about Sawyer? Does he want to go back to his old life, wracked with guilt over killing an innocent man and full of hate? How about Sun and Jin? Sun didn’t love her husband when she got on that plane, and Jin was a brutal thug. If most of the Lostaways were honest with themselves, for all the horrible things that have happened to them on the Island, they’d have to agree that they are better people than they would have been had that plane not crashed. Jack is more or less a wash, and Sayid was arguably better off before he got on Flight 815, but beside those two, I’m not sure how passionate anybody actually is about changing the past.
And again, we don’t know that it’s actually possible. Desmond’s past can be changed, at least to a small degree. Beyond that, though, we haven’t seen any indication that it can be done. So far, everybody’s attempts to change things have resulted in things working out exactly the way that they did before. Right now, it’s just a theory on Faraday’s part.
That said, a recent conversation with spunkyDon made me realize something. White Oracle has said that for the first time, she doesn’t know what’s going to happen. Remember Benry’s reaction when Alex died? He acted more surprised than anything. What if they know they’re in a time loop? Benry, White Oracle, Widmore – they’re constantly looping through and repeating events. Only now, somebody changed something. Suddenly, the outcome isn’t set in stone.
I know I’ve getting all nerdy here, but right now, we have a reality where Flight 815 crashes in order to bring about the events that cause Flight 815 to crash. A stable time loop. This time through, though, it’s unstable. Alex died, when previously, Benry had successfully talked Keamy out of shooting her. White Oracle always knew what was going to happen, because events keep repeating. But now they’re not repeating the same way, which intensifies the battle between Benry and Widmore – if things aren’t exactly the same this time around, then that means that one of them can finally win.
This is all speculation, of course. Right now, the only thing we’re sure of is that White Oracle believes it’s vitally important that Flight 815 crash.
You know what? That’s a lot of time-travel talk for one night. I’ll save the rest for next week, including Mrs. Don’s idea that Tovard Hanso’s journal that Widmore bought at auction could be Daniel Faraday’s journal. Pretty neat, right? Thanks to time travel and some missing years, we really could have a situation where Faraday was aboard the Black Rock at some point. I’ll be mulling this one over, but I thought it was such a cool idea that I need to get it out there.
By the way, if I had any idea how important White Oracle and Richard “Batmanuel” Alpert were going to be, I’d have given them much shorter nicknames. Sawyer’s so much better at this than I am.
