If Desmond doesn’t sail, he doesn’t crash on the island.

If Desmond doesn’t crash on the Island, then he is not in the Hatch.

If Desmond is not in the Hatch, the he is not there to not push the button
(Remember the plane crashed because Desmond left the hatch and wasn’t there to push the button).

So if Desmond never appears on the Island, the plane never crashes, then the losties never make it to the island.

So my theory is that Desmond marries Penny, the Losties get on the plane in Australia, and arrive in LA, nothing happens, and they go on with their lives like nothing ever happened.

Here’s my theory: for every other character, time is a closed loop, as you masterfully point out. However, because of his massive dose of magnetism, Desmond is special (or the Island could be rewarding him for his Christ-like self-sacrifice). Desmond CAN change the timeline, which is why Faraday calls him miraculously special, and why Faraday asks him to find his mother. For Desmond, the universe must course correct as timeline repair. This type of course correction still preserves the theme of free will vs. fate; Desmond can exercise his free will in changing the timeline, but fate ultimately has its way (this matches the religious theme of people disobeying God, but God’s will ultimately being done). Therefore, Desmond’s flashes are small expeditions of his consciousness into the future, and these expeditions are exacerbated when he leaves the Island at the wrong bearing in “The Constant”. Those uncontrolled expeditions (i.e. Minkowski Syndrome) are finally cured when he finds his constant, but he is still special in that he can still change the timeline when Faraday contacts him in the past.

however, if he works the answer out on his own, and it is that answer that he gives to Des, then he got the answer from himself, then worked it out independantly from the equations. the end.

I still don’t understand why Daniel, if he already knew the solution (via Des), would bother working out the problem. It seems like a pointless waste of time, no?

Too many questions. And necessary questions. To make it random would be one of the biggest deus ex machinas in the series.

This is simple logics…. everything that happens in the world has a “cause” and an “effect”. There you go. To one action, there can only be one specific set of reactions. But these are not random, or optional. That’s it. That is the definitive evidence of the existence of FATE. Even our decisions (the foundations of free will) have causes, that have other causes, in a very tight deterministic setting. They do not come from nothing. It’s all an unstoppable chain of events…

……. and an irrelevant one. Because, unless we find a way to predict the future (the SPECIFIC future, and not some general, basic info) then out decisions are as important to us as we may think. There doesn’t have to be a superior power for Fate to exist. It just does. But since we can’t read it, then free will can keep on existing. As an illusion, of course, but a highly practical one.

And not to be pedantic, but the light has both wave AND particle properties (photons).

I’d say that, whatever is making the castaways jump in time, it has to be on their brains. Maybe it’s the disease. Maybe their brainwaves frequencies became vulnerable to the electromagnetic fluctuations of the island, making small amounts of mass around their brains unstuck in time (i.e. the castaways bodies, and the things they were holding). But whatever it is, it’s happening in their brains… to explain how Desmond and Faraday have those memory problems.

Two things that don’t fit in with the theory.

singitloud@mac.com

In a self-consistent universe, all this talk of “changing the timeline” is, by its very nature, illogical. You can no more “change the timeline” than you can “move the universe.”

Saying that anything “changes” immediately implies the passage of time for that object. You cannot have change unless there is a start condition and an end condition, meaning that one happened before the other – time would have to pass to get from start to end. Therefore, in order to “change the timeline”, the timeline itself would have to be experiencing the passage of time, which is inherently impossible.

Just as in my initial example – if you were to “move the universe”, to where would you move it? What dimensions of spacetime exist in which you can move space itself to another location? In the same sense, there is no dimension of spacetime which will allow you to age time. If time cannot get older, than it cannot change. Just as you cannot move the universe to another location (since the universe by definition consists of ALL locations), you cannot age the timeline, because the timeline contains ALL time.

Now, that said, Lost has redefined itself several times so far – a large part of why I enjoy the show and admire the writing skill so much. I can’t say definitively right here and now that Lost is, without a doubt, guaranteed, 100% following completely with this philosophy through to the very end. Desmond (or someone/something else) may very well end up ultimately “changing” something. If not done perfectly, an event like this (i.e. nothing we’ve seen ever really happened because Desmond changed the past to prevent it) would weaken the story so much that I CAN guarantee that such a change would be a huge, earth-shatteringly important on-screen event, and not a subtle “pictures behind Miles in that house moved,” production/set-error sort of change.

What we are seeing right now is meant to be watched the same way that the Nikki and Paolo episode was meant to be watched. (Aside: As much as that episode ended up failing from a viewer-approval perspective, I rather liked the idea behind the episode… even if I didn’t love the final product. In retrospect it appears to be, in a way, an attempt to prepare everyone for the narrative style we are experiencing this season.) You are not seeing anything new. You are seeing what already happened. Stop watching as if you’re about to see something happen for the first time, and start watching with the mindset of “OH! So THAT’S how that happened.” To see the narrative elegance of the past half-season for what it is – pieces of the puzzle, missing threads at long last being woven into place in the fabric of the story – is to recognize the genius of the writers in building a narrative that is at the same time mind-bendingly complex, yet beautifully simple and consistent.