Except for the whole Ben thing. They didn’t talk about the island like it got nuked (and little Ben shot for that matter), they talked about it like Ben’s Dad got sick of being a janitor.
-Joe
He’s more than just a limo driver…remember at the beginning he was asking what else he could do for Desmond (see the sights, have some…company)?
I got the impression he’s Whidmore’s bagman.
This Sawyer/Miles hypothetical TV series - is it going to be a bro-mance like Starsky and Hutch? I don’t know if I like the idea of Miles pining away with unrequited love for Sawyer, entertaining as that may be.
If it was me instead of Penny running around in that empty stadium, and some strange dude approached/called me by my name/pleasedtomeetcha/coffee later? - I would have been seriously frightened rather than intrigued.
Don’t forget that the original timeline also includes Losties traveling BACK in time, as far back as 1950s for sure (post-war/Jughead times) and possibly even farther than that (to a time when the statue was still intact). So there may well have been changes that pre-date 1977, at least if we believe that timeline, including its time travel, to have been undone by Jughead.
But . . . that can’t be the case, can it? Wouldn’t the timelines have to be identical up to the point where the bomb went off? If Jughead undid the time travel, that would mean there was no one in 1977 to set it off in the first place. So for the alternate timeline to exist at all requires the Losties to have been there in 1977 (and thus all the other time-flashes previous to that). Right?
I feel much the same way. While I’m sure the final explanation/conclusion will not satisfy everbody the least I’m expecting for is that when all is said and done you should be able to go back and watch the entire series and the pieces should all fall into place. It will be awesome if they accomplish this but I too am getting worried they are running out of time.
Indeed: it’s a paradox… and hence that’s perhaps WHY there are two alternate timelines.
One of my theories has always been that the timelines tie into each other: the LA X timeline may well end by causing the original timeline to happen in the first place.
If I’m right, then I think that’s a much more satisfying conclusion than LA X being just the “epilogue.” Because it means that there is a reason, at least in the LA X timeline, for all these crazy coincidences: they are related to connections in the non-Island timeline which then feed into the island… and then from that timeline into LA X. Ultimately it’s still an loop with no start, but that could be much more satisfying than a start that makes no sense, and an end in an alternate reality.
At the very least, this episode finally at least suggests that LA X is MORE than just happly ever after. Desmond is out to f it all up.
But Daniel had said they couldn’t change anything by being in the past because of the whole time paradox thing (“What Happened, Happened”). He eventually decided the ONLY way they could change the future was by setting off the nuke in the high-intensity electromagnetic whatchamajiggy hole.
But that’s one thing about the alternaverse I didn’t understand when Daniel showed up in the episode last night-- if the nuke reset things he shouldn’t have existed in either universe, because he was shot by his mother as an adult in 1977, and presumably his pregnant mother was killed by the nuke shortly after that.
So it would make more sense (Lost sense, that is) if the alternaverse was somehow Eloise’s doing, or was caused by something other than the nuke.
Except both she and Richard knew about Jack’s plan to set us up the bomb. It’s entirely possible that Richard organized the evacuation of pregnant Heloise before the bomb went off. Which, of course, would mean that ATL Heloise is actually the same as Lost-Time Heloise (i.e., she knows about the bomb thing, and has Daniel’s journal explaining stuff; she probably even wrote the weird quantum stuff in ATL-Daniel’s journal…), which would explain why she knows things - including that, in the past, she killed her son (thus, probably steered him more towards his musical abilities rather than into quantum physics this time around).
So was the hitchhiker that Desmond and Charlie passed while in the car someone from an earlier episode? Seems like they lingered on him a little too long.
Except it still doesn’t fit with Ben and his dad.
Maybe the ATL stuff is customized somehow?
-Joe
Ben and his dad would likely have been evacuated during “the incident”, along with all the other Dharma folks. The question is, did Ben actually get shot? If the bomb goes off and alters the timeline, then Sayid never shoots him and he never gets Templed. Or maybe he did get shot, and Templed, but doesn’t remember any of it. Either way, we do know that Ben didn’t officially join up with the Others until he was older, so the evacuation still works to get him out of nuke range.
As I recall, the last we saw of Kid Ben was him being carried into the Temple. I’m pretty sure Ben was still MIA there as the evac was occurring…though last we saw of Ben’s dad was him shooting Sayid, so we know he missed the sub and was on the island when the nuke went off.
Anyone else think that plan was incredibly stupid? “He’s been struck with lightning once & lived…let’s try it again! and if it doesn’t work - well, sucks to be him (and we’re still at square one).”
I wanted to like this episode, but Charlie ruins any episode that he features in. I don’t know if it’s the actor, the character, or the combination of both - but when he died the first time, I thought “good riddens” and every trip back I’ve cringed.
The episode didn’t move forward enough for me. They’ve got more than 7 hours of story left and not enough time to tell it in; they’re wasting some of the time they’ve got. I’m worried the ending will be badly paced just to get many things (no way they’re getting everything) stuffed in in that final hour or so.
The alt-timeline is simply not working for me. I think it’ll be really cool for someone who re-watches the season after it’s all over, but I’m not going to do that. While I like the show, I don’t like it enough, and I think they’re sacrificing the enjoyment of viewers like me for the enjoyment of viewers who will watch it over and over again. I wonder if that’s a conscious choice, whether they realize that’s what they’re doing or whether it’s an unintended consequence.
If things diverged when the nuke went off, Ben got shot. Ben’s dad was in the middle of a firefight minutes before the nuke went off.
Even if they didn’t feel like thinking about Ben getting shot or the other bullets whizzing around the island right before the nuke went off…the proper response to Dad wondering, “I wonder what would have happened if we’d stayed on the island?” would have been, “We’d have been nuked, dad.”.
In Ben’s story there was no indication that anything bad had happened on the island.
-Joe
I don’t know, I think they have enough time. Certainly at the pace of this season so far, there isn’t enough time, but there’s no reason to think that they’ll maintain this slower pace. The past few seasons have followed a loose pattern of starting slowly, with a number of character-centric episodes, and then the big events happen in the last few hours.
But we do know there was something bad that happened on the island, what with it being underwater and all, post-Dharma Intiative. It’s not like Ben said “We’d be underwater, dad”, either.
Oceanic 815 landing safely in LA results in a lot of things going differently, not just from 2004 forward, because the Losties aren’t on the island to muck things up. Which means Sayid doesn’t go back in time to shoot Little Ben, so Ben doesn’t get Otherized, so he and his dad exit the island more peacefully (and we know that Dharma folks did leave the island around the 1977 timeframe, since we’ve seen other Dharma kids [e.g., Ethan, Miles, Charlotte] in ATL 2004). So the alternate timeline may not be a strict divergence from the point of the nuke, but the nuke in conjunction with the EM incident would probably have triggered some sort of temporal loop.
I doubt it’s possible to make 100% logical sense out of the sequence of events, largely because it’s almost impossible to do so with time travel stories.
I normally agree, but I gotta say that the “Not Penny’s Boat” thing worked and made Charlie worthwhile. 
That’s true, didn’t think about that.
But like others have pointed out, Ben would still have gotten shot and he and his dad wouldn’t have had time to evacuate, so even before this episode it was hard to reconcile all the changes in the other timeline with the point of the nuke going off. With what Eloise said last night, there’s apparently more to it.
Man, I would love to see the Lost writers’ plot flowchart! 
Until last night, I figured the point of the alternate timeline was a way to explain the apparent paradox, that setting off the nuke caused a “many worlds” scenario where the two realities split. Not that that really explains a time paradox. But that theory’s out the window now I guess…