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Lost 6x04: "The Substitute"

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This episode was okay. The storyline with Flocke carrying Richard off into the jungle sort of went nowhere, which I was disappointed about, and I was hoping for more of a showing by Ben in this episode...but other than that it was okay. Got a few answers and the cave sequence with Flocke and Sawyer was good.
 
So wait, how did Ben survive to the present day in the alt-timeline? Wasn't he on the Island when the nuke went off? Did he somehow manage to get off before it went boom? I mean, if I'm remembering correctly, at the time the nuke went off, he was with the Others, not with Dharma, right? So he couldn't have gotten off via the Dharma sub, right?

Richard backed out of the expedition saying he was "protecting our leader." He knew what was going down; it stands to reason he'd get the Others to safety, including Ben.

Speaking of Rose, where are she and the other 815 people on island time line? I'm confused about that. Are they roaming the island?

Rose and Bernard may have been returned to the present time along with Sawyer et. al., or they may have been killed by the nuke. Or the island sinking. In any event, they'll probably remain off-screen except for the occasional cameo appearance.

But the "Nuke" couldn't have caused the island to sink. Why? because the island is still there in one of the two timelines we are watching, but it went off in both.

I'm not certain about that. The only evidence we've seen that the 1977 events are the prime-timeline's past is the photo Christian showed them. And if you recall, *that* had a few differences from the scene we saw in "real time".....

(I still don't think it was nuclear since they only removed a small portion of the bomb and the "nuclear" part of a nuclear bomb is the big, heavy part that makes the bomb so big.)

The core of an H-bomb is an A-bomb, which is much smaller. They could have just taken the fission weapon and left the fusion part behind.
 
But the "Nuke" (I still don't think it was nuclear since they only removed a small portion of the bomb and the "nuclear" part of a nuclear bomb is the big, heavy part that makes the bomb so big.) couldn't have caused the island to sink. Why? because the island is still there in one of the two timelines we are watching, but it went off in both.

The timelines, as far as we know, diverged when the bomb went off, but it still went off in both timelines. So it couldn't have directly caused the island to sink in one timeline, but not in the other.

Well, if they were going by JJ-Trek rules, then the point of departure in the timeline wouldn't be when the bomb goes off. It would be when the Losties first show up from the future. So you'd have:

prime timeline: Losties never lived in the 1970s. The bomb never goes off. The Island never sinks. Flight 815 crashes in 2004.

new timeline: Branches off in 1974 when the Losties show up from the future. They end up setting off the bomb in 1977 and the Island sinks. When the bomb goes off, they're sent back to 2007 in the prime timeline.

Of course, there is the problem of the photo which, as Lindley notes, "proves" that the stuff in 2007 is actually happening in the same timeline where the Losties were part of Dharma in the 1970s. Though as Lindley also notes, the photo looks a bit different from the scene we actually see in the 70s.

I guess the main question is, when Faraday shows up in "The Variable" and spouts off the gibberish about "Oh, we're human so we have free will, so we *can* change the future", was that the writers' way of announcing that they're changing the rules away from the previously established "whatever happened, happened" time travel rules to something else, or was that just a red herring? And if they are changing the rules to something else, then are those new rules actually logically self-consistent, or do they just seem like they make sense on the surface, but don't really make any sense if you think about them hard enough (which is how most time travel in Trek works)? If the latter, then it'll be impossible to reason out what's going on, because the underlying logic wouldn't make any sense anyway.

For myself, I'm all for them sticking with the WHH time travel rules, and having it be discovered that the alt-universe has nothing to do with time travel, but is just a universe that exists for some non-time travel reason, e.g. the death of Jacob as you suggest. I'm all for that. I'm just too much of a pessimist to predict that they're going to do something that interesting. :)
 
Some interesting things about the list.

Juliet's name ("Burke") is crossed out. Since she died after Jacob, who crossed her name out?

"Linus" is on the list.

"Faraday" and "Straume" are on the list and both are crossed out. (Someone want to break the news to Miles?)

The last names we saw on the Others' stolen military uniforms in the 1950s are on the list.

No one from the 815 tail section seems to be on the list, even though Goodwin said Ana Lucia was a possible candidate.

Incidentally, I'm going by what this page says. According to it, there are there are "15 passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 on the walls, 4 Others, 5 Freighter people, 3 members in the French team, 3 members of the US Army, 1 DHARMA member, and 14 completely unknown people there."

And, for me, the most interesting bit of trivia:



There are several references to some of the characters written on the cave who are previously referred to as not being on Jacob's List:
  • In "I Do", Danny Pickett mentioned that "Shephard wasn't even on Jacob's list".
  • In "Par Avion", Mikhail states that Kate is not on the list because she is "flawed"; Sayid is not on the list because he is "weak and frightened"; and Locke is not on the list because he is angry.
 
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And if the MIB was pretending to be Jacob for a little while (If it was the MIB in the cabin that Ben thought was Jacob) then he could have been giving them false information, telling them people wern't candidates when the actually were. This would give the Other's more reason to kill off people who Jacob actually wanted to live. (If the Other's thought Jack wasn't on the List then they might kill him if they had a chance, thus taking away one of Jacob's candidates).

It does seem that the MIB is trying to kill list Candidates, since it apparently killed/infected the french crew (except Danielle, who isn't on the list).

Goodwin was making a case that Ana Lucia was a good person and a candidate to join the Other's, not that she was a candidate for Jacob's list.
 
Although, I do suppose, if the Nuke was the cause of the timeline's splitting, it's possible that it killed Alternate Jacob, which would have also prevented him from visiting the Losties in that universe.

I'm just thinking about a couple of the specific changes.

When he visits Kate, she is stealing a lunchbox from a shop with her boyfriend Tom Brennan. She is caught and then Jacob buys it for her to prevent her from getting in to trouble.

I'm thinking that if he didn't do that, maybe (for instance) Tom's parents might have told him that he's not allowed to see Kate anymore and so they didn't stay together for as long as they did. As a result, Tom doesn't die when the police come to arrest Kate at the hospital and Kate has no reason to retrieve the toy aeroplane from Mars' case.

With Sawyer, Jacob gives the young Sawyer a pen with which he writes the letter to the real Sawyer, Anthony Cooper. Without that letter, he might have processed his grief differently and not gone on to become a conman like Cooper.
 
True enough. That's why I actually prefer my original theory. I think it makes just enough sense to tie everything together while still having a bit of LOST mystery to it.
 
I think it's interesting to see the losties free from the influence of the island or Jacob (depending on your point of view) and that their lives are essencially the same but as a result of different circumstances. In Doctor Who this is explained by The Doctor as timey wimey wibbly wobbly or the duct tape of space & time.

In both Doctor Who and Lost, some events seemily can't be changed. If indeed the bomb did work and changed the timeline by removing the island from the timeline it's as if the universe itself somehow compensated for the missing piece of history by using a work around.
 
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