Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Jay was in town here yesterday and of course we talked about Lost. At this point neither of us had seen this week’s episode yet.

He shared with me his theory that 1) Daniel is wrong about the idea that you can’t change the past, and 2) during the flashy thing last week, when Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Sayid vanished off Flight 316 back to 1977, the rest of the plane shifted to an alternate timeline where events had been changed.

Guess that theory got a boost from this week’s episode, huh? We both had the same reaction – too bad he didn’t mention this theory last week. (Jay, you might want to give up your obsession with the lack of narrative unity in what is, after all, a serialized TV drama rather than a book or a movie. It’s distracting you from your true calling as our house NostraGreenedus.)

For discussion of this theory, we’ll call the original timeline T and the alleged new one T prime.

On the question of whether the past can be changed by anyone, I was skeptical. Yes, it’s theoretically possible that Daniel is wrong. But that would require a stunning lack of storytelling integrity on the part of the show’s writers. Jay had already lost enough respect for the writers (see last week’s post) to think that they will play that kind of arbitrary game with the rules of the narrative universe, but I didn’t think so. So far, at least, they haven’t done anything like that (Jay’s critique notwithstanding).

As for Flight 316 shifting to T prime, here was his evidence based on last week’s episode:

1) As the plane approached the Island, you could hear “the numbers” being read over the radio. Somehow, I missed this, even though I saw that episode twice. But last night I checked with my wife and she says she heard them, too. But in T, the transmission of the numbers was changed by Rousseau into a distress call some time after 1988, then shut off entirely in 2004.

2) The plane landed on a runway on the “other island.” But there was no runway on the “other island” in T. We know this because in Season 3, the Others were building it (they made Sawyer and Kate work on it).

3) When Sun and Frank arrive at the abandoned Dharma camp, it’s ruined (as we would expect) but it’s still a Dharma camp rather than an Others camp. It still has Dharma signs all over it. And it still has the old Dharma photographs hanging on the wall (one of which Christian showed to Sun). None of that was present in T.

There’s a problem with the second piece of evidence – there may have been no runway in 2004, but Flight 316 arrived in 2007. The Others could have built it in the interim.

The other evidence, however, seems convincing. It’s theoretically possible that somebody reinstated the radio transmission of “the numbers” between 2004 and 2007. But it seems a lot less likely than that we’re in an alternate timeline. And all the Dharma stuff still being in the camp the Others took over would be a shocking oversight if it were accidental.

And of course Sayid shooting the young Ben in this week’s episode makes it all the more plausible.

My defense of the writers’ integrity as storytellers is looking pretty vulnerable. Shifting the rules this arbitrarily would be pretty lousy craftsmanship on their part.

But remember, Ben may not be dead. Yet.

I’m hoping Desmond will show up and kill him.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Lost. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.