LOST Revisited: Pre-Game for “Recon”

I’ve heard it said that Timeline X is a version of the world where Jacob’s influence is absent. I agree with that to an extent – if it’s the Lockelganger’s world, of course it’s free of Jacob. But I don’t think you can point to just the lack of Jacob – Sayid and Hurley didn’t meet Jacob until after they’d left the Island in our world. Unless we’re going to find out that Jacob meddled long before meeting them, there’s no reason why their lives should be different as of their arrival in LA. And if we accept that whatever happened to the Island happened after 1977, then we still have a world where Jacob met Young Sawyer in 1977, and possibly even Kate in the early 80’s. Timeline X almost has to be a world where there never was a Jacob. And if we look at Zoroastrianism, that makes it a fundamentally unbalanced world, a world which probably can’t survive.