This was the premise of an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Seven of Nine was recruited by a future time travel agency to fix some alleged problem in the past. The first few times she was sent back into the past, she failed at her mission. Apparently the strain of time travel was causing her body serious harm, and the agency was afraid that any further time travel would result in her death.
Does anyone know how many survivors of the plane crash are still alive on the island? It looked like at least five people got killed by the flaming arrows, and several people died when Keamy’s team attacked Locke’s camp last season. It seems like there shouldn’t be too many people left.
According to Lostpedia, there’s 14 left (plus Vincent) and another 15 from the tail section are with the others.
Journeyman also meets the description perfectly! Time travel TV shows are hard to pull off I guess. Better to throw it in around Season 4, once your show is up and running…
Ah fuck I don’t know… both?! My first thought was that, in some way, he had been to Oxford before he got on his sailboat. But yeah, Desmond’s rules are rather unique. His future changed his past.
I wonder if they’ll continue with the cutsie names. So far we’ve had: Locke; Rousseau; Henry Gale; Faraday; Hawking; and C.S. Lewis (and I probably missed some).
If they pull some lame shit like Atlantis, I’ll have to regret every minute I spent watching the show. But I hope that doesn’t happen.
And Hume.
One of the many minor mysteries: have they ever shown at what point in her life Juliet, an MD specializing in fertility problems, learned her martial arts skills?
I think the guy carried out on the stretcher who kinda looked like Sawyer was just some random schleimiel, to show the nasty mojo around the frozen donkey wheel. Sawyer was a kid then anyway.
You’re probably right, but your logic is terrible. Daniel was a kid then, too.
-Joe
You’re probably right (none of the recaps I’ve seen have mentioned the resemblance my wife and I saw). As to the age factor, since there’s time travel around, looking “too old” for any given time-period is no longer a reason to exclude a possibility…
And people say this show is confusing! I can’t imagine what makes them think that.
I want to throw somwthing out here. What was the most stupidest show that lost ever had?..Think about it…it made no sense in the story.
Give up?
The spiders!!..the one where they buried those two alive…cause they were paralized.
OK Ben said to Locke…you have to die!..I say he used the spiders on him and he isn’t dead!
Now that is thinking outside the coffin … er … box.
I have to (respectfully) disagree with this. I mean for other shows this is the +1 shark of jumping but for LOST I think it’s a brilliant move. One of the things that LOST does well is to show you a story, then show you the other side of the story. They do it in the flashbacks. They did it with the losties and the tailies. Then it was the survivors and the udders.
I can see myself being very entertained for the rest of the season watching them weave their current time traveling selves back into the stories that we’ve already seen manifesting themselves as the whispers and the visions.
But, in those cases, the past could not be changed. (Now, I am not a huge Dr Who fan, and it’s possibel there’s an epi or two where he changes his own past). The problem with TT in shows like Heroes is messing around with what has already happened, thus fucking with the viewers heads.
Now sure, in Lost they supposedly can’t change the past… but there’s exceptions, apparently.
Just watched this on the TiVo yesterday. Most of what I wanted to say has been covered but I’ll add a couple of things.
The first hour was extremely satisfying, as large sections of the show, going back to the first season, are finally clicking into place. My viewing companion and I both felt that the larger scenario is beginning to make sense, at least in the broad strokes.
That leads to a conclusion about one of the nagging questions of the show, namely, the debate over whether they are working toward a plan, or totally making things up as they go. If nothing else, the first hour, to me at least, makes clear that it’s a little of both. The “unstuck in time” thing appears to have been a constant all along; the showrunners have had the overall scenario in mind, and many of the weird little wrinkles now make sense in that context.
(Not all of them. I doubt we’ll ever find out what the deal was with that psychic guy who scared the crap out of Claire. These loose ends will nag, but the show is a heck of a lot tighter now than it was before this episode aired.)
On the other hand, while it seems clear that the what was known, and has been handled with at least respectable consistency, it’s the who that has been up in the air. The writers knew what the phenomenon would turn out to be, and have been playing (mostly) fair with it, but they didn’t have more than a vague idea of the throughlines of the people within that phenomenon; they didn’t know who would be playing which part, or making which choices or taking which actions, in the larger tapestry. That aspect, they’ve been making up as they go.
But the unstuck-in-time thing: that seems to have been the situation more or less from day one.
(Which invites the question: Is this show going to pose a challenge to its viewers, how geeky can we get away with making a mainstream series? At what point do the sci-fi trappings begin to scare off the Joe and Jane Sixpacks in the audience? That opening hour was pretty dense with concept. No wonder the second hour backed off in favor of character and comedy.)
All of that said, I do have a question, which I don’t recall seeing yet in the thread:
The island appears to be something of a constant. When the transitional event happens to the people on the island, they’re still on the island, except their physical surroundings have changed. The island is still there; its occupants are just being shoved around in time. But from the perspective of the people in the water, the island vanishes. Why wouldn’t they have seen a big flash, and then they get back to the island, and everybody is gone? The geological object that is the island isn’t physically moving around, is it? The folks in the helicopter and on the freighter could have been confused by the flash until they got back to the island and found it scoured of every trace of their habitation. I’m perplexed why moving the people on the island in time necessitates the island itself vanishing as seen from an outside perspective.
Well, unless what Faraday said about the route to the island can be interpreted as dropping some sort of cloaking field around it, or something similar; after the timeshift happens, you have to re-approach the island on a new vector, and be sitting in a new location, before you can see it again. It’s still there, but stuck in a spacetime crack or something, hidden by a warp of reality like a set of funhouse mirrors.
Thoughts?
What a great question, Cervaise (regarding why the island seemingly disappeared & not just the people who are unstuck in time). My thought is that the island is unstuck also, but at a different “speed” or setting. The flight 815 folks are going to reset it somehow - that’s why the “others” are so glad to see Locke. I think Widmore is responsible somehow for the problems, since he’s not playing by the rules. Remember Ben said moving the island was an option of last resort, so the island has moved. Of course Ben (who obviously only became a major player in the writers’ minds after the actor clicked so well with the role) also said he couldn’t go back to the island, so who knows what he says that we can believe.
I was thinking about this. When the island moved the island itself was in a bubble that moved in time and the folks in the helicopter were in a separate bubble (that didn’t move in time). Possibly the island did not ‘belong’ in that time because it had been destroyed in the past so once it traveled in time it was no longer there (in the same time as the helicopter).
This makes sense because previously the island was there but not really there. This is manifested in the storms encountered traveling between the freighter and the island and the radio transmissions and Michael having to follow a precise route to get rescue.
So in effect moving the island moved it in time. From an outsiders point of view, it also disappeared because it did not belong in the time that they were in.
This could set up a story arc where the O6 have to get back to the island because if they don’t it will be destroyed. They keep on saying they have to go back, this could be WHY they have to go back.
I don’t get why Daniel doesn’t get what Ben did. He’s supposed to be an expert on this stuff. He’s got his notebook filled with Dharma lore. And didn’t the boat people know that Ben would head for the Orchid and try to head him off?
But all he can come up with is:
Because You Left transcript | Lostpedia | Fandom Of course, he could be conning someone. 
Didn’t Ben (or was it Locke?) say exactly that toward the end of last season–that they are going to “move the Island?”
They could have meant move it through time, but I thought they meant geologically. And the weird old lady who might be Daniel’s mom seems to be trying to locate the island physically on a map of the earth using some arcane combination of a Foucoult’s pendulum and a 70’s green screen computer. So I thought the Island had been physically moved.
-FrL-