LOST: The Pre-Season Report

How does Eloise know things?

Or, as we like to call her around here, “White Oracle”. Of course, with her expanded role on the show, she’s proven to be a heck of a lot more important to Lost than the Oracle was to The Matrix. Here’s the thing that makes her so darn mysterious to me: She knows how time is supposed to go, and she makes sure that it goes that way. How does she know that Desmond is considering proposing to Penny when he ends up in the past and has a chance to do it all over again? It makes sense that she knows, for example, that her son is going to die on the Island and she takes steps to make sure that he ends up there. (She experienced his death when he ended up dying in the past.) It’s not so easy to explain how she knows that Desmond is unhinged in time at any given moment and trying to fix a mistake. And remember, as far as we’ve seen, she has not come unstuck in time, and is living a consistent timeline. Still, she knew that when she was talking to Desmond, falling debris would crush a nearby man. That implies that she had lived those events before, which would mean that time isn’t linear for her.