Kate took care of Aaron for three years, so it’s not like she bailed on a whim as soon as she hit the first hurdle. Also, she lied about being Aaron’s mom under direct instructions from Jack under penalty of being killed by whoever staged the fake plane wreckage. She couldn’t look for Claire’s relatives without endangering Aaron. At least that’s what the writers intended. Blame the weak writing for Kate keeping Aaron as her own.
This is what I saw too, independent of having read this post.
Ah… mhmm. Combine that with Jack’s strange non-remembering of his appendix surgery and his past with his son, and this makes me wonder, what if it’s all going to turn out something like that episode of ST:TNG where the crew arranged to give itself amnesia in order to avoid reporting on a particular planet the inhabitants of which would rather have destroyed the Enterprise than have it telling anyone else about its existence?
This theory doesn’t quite line up straightforwardly with the idea that the Island is gone in the alternate timeline because of the explosion, but with a little elbow grease that could be made to fit…
Aim makes much more sense. You are aiming a mirror at a certain direction.
You know Kate (in the Oceanic 7 timeline) said she gave birth to Aaron, so she sorta had to raise him. I don’t see that as so evil. She did help to save him in the escape from the island sequence too. I’m not seeing the reason for the hate, in this instance, anyway.
eta to say EllisDee commented on this before me, and better.
I came into the thread to see if anyone else noted this, so I’ll just say: ditto. Annotated Alice totally rocks.
The “Wallace” at 108 doesn’t look crossed out to me.
That won’t do… too low-res and jpeggy.
Look here. It’s pretty clear to me it’s [del]Wallace[/del]
ETA: I just noticed Ben Linus is at 117 in that shot (and crossed out, of course).
With a name for every degree (Are they all candidates? Maybe some are and some arent?) we can assume that there are only 360 people that are able to be brought to the island? Or perhaps names can be changed/updated?
Heh–I see it exactly the other way: Jacob is fate: he’s fucking with people’s lives without their consent, he’s playing headgames. MiB let Ben make the decision on who to kill, let Sawyer decide to come or not, etc.
Guess you’re right, in the lower res it sure didn’t. Looking at your shot I now notice “Faraday” is crossed out at 101.
re Alice - I thought of “Through the Looking Glass”, but Jack sort of smashed that, didn’t he.
I take that back. If you look around at other instances of lower case "d’ occurrences, they have much longer stems.
I don’t see “aim” at all. Aaron makes more sense, and maybe Jacob is trying to get Aaron onto the Island-- remember, he was supposed to be on the Ajira flight.
I don’t see “aim” either. I agree it make sense, of course… and I’m really trying to turn that second letter into an “i” in my head, but it’s not working. I just don’t see an “i” there.
The fact that Wallace is crossed out suggests to me that “Wallace” is a red herring. Jacob just wanted Jack to see the magical mirror, thus planting a seed which will somehow manipulate him into doing “the right thing” later on this season.
In the opening shot of S6, we see Dharmaville on the sunken surface. That means the island was above-water in the early 70s and the DI was established on it. Thus, something happened to the island in the 70s and it sank. Now, if the flash-sideways (hereby Alt-TL) is the original reality, then Jacob must have the power to make the island arise of his own accord, or prevent the sinking: since there already is an exposed island for Oceanic 815 to crash onto, and no action undertaken by the Losties since the crash in S1-5 indicate the outcome of raising a sunken island afloat. Hence Jacob shouldn’t need 815 Losties to keep the island afloat (at least not without postulating convoluted rules about what Jacob can or can’t do).
More parsimoniously, Alt-TL is a result of the explosion in 1977. The island is apparently this malign influence and the bomb, as per Faraday, was supposed to fix things. The island, sunk, and also Julie’s last words(“It worked”), both point to this interpretation. I think the in-story reason for the Alt-TL is to show that while the bomb may have temporarily fixed things, it will ultimately resolve to the same FAIL or to some dissonant juncture. And only a decisive resolution in the original timeline will stitch things up.
Don’t forget that it was Hurley writing down Jacob’s instructions on his own arm. If it were “Aaron”, that surely would’ve raised a big “Whoa, what’s up with that, Dude?” from Hurley, and he probably would have shared that tidbit with Jack, and/or brought it up again when Jacob appeared at the lighthouse.
If the producers/writers really planned everything from the start, we will see Waaaaalt in a future episode, but he will be the young Waaaaalt filmed from the first year…
Happened off camera. 
Since when have these guys been in the habit of sharing important info?