the smoke monster is time as a course corrector, it ‘judges’ people based on their place in time and if they belong on the island. a further explanation will be based on egyptian references and the islands original inhabitants (egyptians and richard (jacob)).

As for the compass, read the story and pay attention to the part about the dictionary. I think it illustrates it well.

hey, listen, I am all for the writers doing their thing and I accept that they may be up to something with that compass, its just not what I would have done. And that’s fine too. I would just prefer that they had established that the compass held some importance to Richard in 1955 otherwise its pretty useless as proof that John’s from the future.
All the paradoxical things aside, that bothers me more than anything else, and smacks of lazy writing to me.

On another note, I saw Star Trek as IMAX Saturday and all I can say is HOLY CRAP ON A STICK!

List of Awesome:
the View Screens
Warp Drive
Engineering

There are some interesting possible answers to the idea, however. For instance, say that something happens to the compass (it deteriorates or something) after Locke gives it to Richard, then Richard wouldn’t be able to give it to Locke, but Richard still would have had it for a time, but he would never have been able to receive it in the first place if it had deteriorated, etc. Is this a more troublesome paradox than the current one? If so, does this help answer why there is a paradox in the first place? This idea that the universe will allow for a material paradox of this sort in order to avoid a more difficult one has been put forward as a possible answer to the paradox. Perhaps you could come up with another, better one? Perhaps the writers already have?

At any rate, they certainly didn’t cop out. Instead, I think it’s safe to say that they have done a really nice job of helping to give some extra fodder to the hardcore theorizers without giving away any truly important information.