Hurley's "Whut?" Corner... Time Travel WTF?

[Q2UnME]

I saw this comment posted several time in the latest review thread and figured "count me in". Right now, this whole time travel thread in LOST is starting to hurt my brain. Personally, I like the Doc Brown explanation in BTTF:II when it comes to altering the timeline. Was the past always predestined to happen the way it did? Were the Oceanic 6 always suppose to be born, live their lives, crash on the island, get rescued, get bored ass hell and then go back to the island thereby end up in 1977 (which sucked, by the way)? Ouch, my brain hurts...

I'm over here with Hurley...... Whut!?!



Q2UnME

 

[Obiwanshinobi]

the answer is: 4 8 15 16 23 42

 

[Stone_Cold_Sisko]

Honestly i don't find it to be that complicated at all. At one point there was a minor complication the whole "oh what if Ben does die?' but that lasted half an episode.

Whatever happened, happened. That's it. Explained. Simple. I don't get what's so complicated here?

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I thought the scene was funny and made perfect sense. But I've already gotten the hang of the time travel rules on this show. And after seeing time travel used sloppily and nonsensically in other TV shows, I'm very happy to see that there are rules.

Ben has to survive childhood to grow up. If you put a gun to the kid's head and pulled the trigger, the gun would misfire. If you threw him off a cliff, an eagle would swoop by and save him. No matter what you tried, something would rescue him, however improbably.

We already saw this sort of thing in a non-time-travel context when Michael was trying to commit suicide. And it fits into the overarching theme that there is "something" frakking up probabilities to create a certain outcome. That theme existed long before the time travel issue came up (the weird numbers, plus the notion that so many people could survive such a terrible plane crash, many with light or no injuries), but they synch together nicely.

 

[Jaron]

The only time travel thing that I wish they'd explain more is what's up with Desmond. I don't think he can change things any more than the rest of the Losties, but how does his memory work? I'm not just talking about his message from Daniel either. What did he remember about breaking up with Penny before he turned the failsafe key? What about tracking down Penny for her phone number?

 

[Lindley]

I think they're going to go the Dune route: To know the future is to be trapped by it. So long as no one knows what's coming, you can create whatever destiny you want....but as soon as the future is observed, it becomes a fixed point. Inevitable.

Even Star Wars touched on this concept when Leia forbade Jacen from flow-walking into the future; the concept being that while Jedi visions only show possible futures, once you manage to interact with those visions even slightly they become inevitable.

 

[Skywalker]

You bastard! My royalty check better be in the mail.

 

[chrisspringob]

We already saw this sort of thing in a non-time-travel context when Michael was trying to commit suicide. And it fits into the overarching theme that there is "something" frakking up probabilities to create a certain outcome. That theme existed long before the time travel issue came up (the weird numbers, plus the notion that so many people could survive such a terrible plane crash, many with light or no injuries), but they synch together nicely.

Of course, it's entirely possible that all that other stuff (like Michael trying to commit suicide and failing, all those people being able to survive the plane crash, etc.) could turn out to have a time travel explanation as well. Someone from the future (Jacob?) could be trying to manipulate events a certain way, and that person knows that certain characters will survive to see the future, so they can mess around with their lives in the past all they like, and they'll still end up managing to live until a certain point in the future.

 

[Mr Light]

*GASP*! Jacob is Future Guy from Enterprise! They never did reveal who he was!

 

[Hober Mallow]

I saw this comment posted several time in the latest review thread and figured "count me in". Right now, this whole time travel thread in LOST is starting to hurt my brain. Personally, I like the Doc Brown explanation in BTTF:II when it comes to altering the timeline.

Good God, no. That sh*t's been done to death. It means none of the character-building flashbacks we've seen hold any real significance because they can be suddenly altered. I like the fact that every scene we've seen in the past all happened, are all significant, and will not be changed. I've seen enough of the "stop the time paradox!" story in the 475 episodes of Star Trek that follow that same lame cliche.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

My guess is they're gonna use that whole

Ben + Hypoxia (remember the blood transfusion?) = no memory

equation rather than divergent universes...es..eses.

 

[Seven of Five]

I understand the time travel enough, but Hurley and Miles sill had me rofl. Hurley rocks, and rocks hard!

 

[Mistral]

Time-travel is easy-pounding complicated concepts into Hurley's head-not so easy.
Laughed myself sick.

 

[Nardpuncher]

I've only watched the first 2 episodes of this season ( "Because You Left" and "The Lie") and I like that they're doing time travle they way Robert A. Heinlein said it should be.

If you go back in time, you can't change the past or the future because ,as Faraday says, "What happened,happened".
Thinking that you can go back and change the past is two dimensional thinking...that time is somehow being replayed, but this time with YOU in it, and you can do things differently...but if you are in the past...then you always were in that past time, there are no 2 universes...one with you in the past through time travel and the "original" one without you. I like that.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

The only time travel thing that I wish they'd explain more is what's up with Desmond.

I agree. Is it because he turned the key, yet survived the purple-sky-whatszit? That is also unexplained. The way they fussed over pushing that frakkin' button, I expected some big catastrophe if they failed. At the very least, one person's life should have been sacrificed, and logically that should be Desmond. But instead he got a power that nobody else has. The other shoe needs to drop.

Lost's fatalistic approach to time travel is unusual because ordinarily, it would make the audience wonder what the point of watching any of this is, if the characters have no free will?

It's particularly deadly on a TV show - with a movie, like Twelve Monkeys, the audience only has an hour or two (depending on how long it takes to set the time travel theory up) to get antsy. Lost gets away with it only because the characters are so well developed by this point that the predetermined plot isn't a problem - we'll watch this just to see how the characters react and behave.

But they would have never dared use this approach in ENT - instead, we just got no-rules gobbledygook.

 

[Nardpuncher]

The only time travel thing that I wish they'd explain more is what's up with Desmond.

I agree. Is it because he turned the key, yet survived the purple-sky-whatszit? That is also unexplained. The way they fussed over pushing that frakkin' button, I expected some big catastrophe if they failed. At the very least, one person's life should have been sacrificed, and logically that should be Desmond. But instead he got a power that nobody else has. The other shoe needs to drop.

Lost's fatalistic approach to time travel is unusual because ordinarily, it would make the audience wonder what the point of watching any of this is, if the characters have no free will?

It's particularly deadly on a TV show - with a movie, like Twelve Monkeys, the audience only has an hour or two (depending on how long it takes to set the time travel theory up) to get antsy. Lost gets away with it only because the characters are so well developed by this point that the predetermined plot isn't a problem - we'll watch this just to see how the characters react and behave.

But they would have never dared use this approach in ENT - instead, we just got no-rules gobbledygook.

To be clear on why I like the Lost approach to time travel...it's not that there isn't free will...it's just that if you ate your cake...you ate your cake...you used your free will there and there's no way you can make it come back.
Though I must mention I've only watched the first 3 episodes of this season.
Desmond may exist outside the rules, but I'll accept that, as Lost still uses some wacky stuff...like Miles sensing ghosts.

 

[Hober Mallow]

I've only watched the first 2 episodes of this season ( "Because You Left" and "The Lie") and I like that they're doing time travle they way Robert A. Heinlein said it should be.

Yep. Two of the most famous time travel stories ever written, Heinleins "By His Bootstraps" and "All You Zombies," followed a single character time traveling and interacting with himself at various ages, never altering the timeline in any way.

 

[chrisspringob]

To be clear on why I like the Lost approach to time travel...it's not that there isn't free will...it's just that if you ate your cake...you ate your cake...you used your free will there and there's no way you can make it come back.

Yes, people are too hung up on the idea that "whatever happened, happened" means that you might as well act as if it doesn't matter what you do, because it was always predestined anyway. But it's only in cases where you already know the outcome that you should think of it that way. Example:

Two guys go back in time to last year, and one of the guys says "Well, everything's predetermined, so it doesn't matter what I do. So I'm going to go play in traffic, because my decision to do so doesn't really affect whether or not I'm going to die. If I play in traffic and live, it was always meant to happen that way. If I play in traffic and die, it was always meant to happen that way. So I might as well do it, just for kicks."

So the guy plays in traffic and gets flattened by a bus. The other guy, the one who played it safe, lives. It was always part of the timeline that the guy who played in traffic got hit by a bus and died, while the other guy played it safe and lived. But the fact that the one guy died and the other lived surely has something to do with the decisions these guys made. In a sense, while the future was "already written", it was rational for these guys to behave as if it wasn't.

OTOH, if the one guy *knew* with absolute certainty (because he has info from the future) that he would still be alive and uninjured tomorrow, then there is no reason why he shouldn't play in traffic. He knows for certain that he's going to live through it, so it doesn't really matter what he does.