You know why pilot Frank didn’t see a wedding ring on the hand of the waterlogged pilot’s corpse? Because the body will turn out to be Frank’s.
On Thursday’s show, the freighter captain shows Sayid and Desmond the black box flight recorder from the bottom-of-the-sea wreckage of Oceanic Flight 815 and says someone went to a lot of trouble to fill a sunken plane with corpses. Which proves: That’s not what happened. C’mon, that’s not how Lost works. When does anything we’re told turn out to be entirely true? No, it’s not a fake at all. They are dead. And alive at the same time. Discarding Total Recall theories that Lost‘s realities are all delusions in Hurley’s or someone else’s head, that leaves one explanation: Let’s do the time warp again. At the time of the crash, Desmond had left the Hatch, which was regulating the island’s magnetic fields somehow. The plane goes travels into this magnetic flux / force field and splits — not just into two parts, but into two planes. One becomes a graveyard down with the giant squid. The other deposits people on the island … the TV storyline.
Maybe that’s why Jack’s father wasn’t in the coffin. The dead can’t be in both timelines.
Maybe that’s why Rose doesn’t have cancer, and Locke isn’t paralyzed. The dead parts of themselves split away with the drowned.
But that’s kind of too simple and straightforward. It doesn’t explain Desmond’s time traveling, the polar bear fossil with the Dharma tag, Hurley seeing ghosts, Faraday’s failure to remember cards, or the lag time of the arrival of Faraday’s text missile.
Yes, time is out of joint, and Faraday’s group is trying to find out why, perhaps even set it straight again.
What if time didn’t just split at the time of the crash? What if it created a kind of loop?
What if the time warp could be undone. Then would the crash be undone? Would all the passengers then arrive safely at their original destination? Or did they all “really” crash … or they have to sink and die … to set the timeline straight?
Then the corpses at the bottom of the sea aren’t there in the past, but in the survivors’ future.
The flash-forwards, then, aren’t flash-forwards at all. They’re flashbacks to the part of the loop that precedes the final deadly fate.
Perhaps Jack learns this, and that’s why he stands on the bridge, thinking about jumping, later calling Kate, saying they have to go back.
They have to set the timeline straight. Not to save left-behind friends. But to set the timeline straight …
Prediction: We’ll find out sooner or later, something’s wrong with the world that the Oceanic Six return to. Things are not what they remember. The world might even be on some catastrophic course.
Who was in the coffin at the viewing nobody but Jack attended? In a double timeline theory, it could be Jack himself. But others would have attended. How about Frank the pilot?
Maybe time keeps shifting, and even after Frank rescues Jack and Kate, the going and back and forth reclaims Frank to his fate … and then he’s identified as having been the flier at the bottom of the sea.
Stranger things are bound to happen.