European History 101

So Ben is a teacher in timeline B. And like Jean-Luc Picard he likes Earl Gray. Or he likes Locke for liking that flavor of tea. Ben teaches European History, I like that, being european and all. But what does it mean? Did his mother never die giving borth to him, and his father never spiralled down that road of drunk and violence, and they never met the Goodspeeds and went to the Island?

Matthew Fox said about season six that about a third of the way through the season both time lines will be "solidified into one time" and there will be one linear time throughout the story on the island with no more flashbacks. With the speed timeline Lost B evolves I start to wonder if that will really happen. We see a lot of crossings in B, now that John met Hurley, and even Rose. I wonder if the flashsideways show us the happy ending that will be the product of everything that will happen from now on till may 23 in Lost Prime. Time moves slow in Lost B, John has a new job and will not call Jack anytime soon, Claire will have Aaron. Looks not like collapsing timelines to me.

Really awesome moment in Lost Prime: Ben at the grave. Followed by another priceless comment of Mr. Lapidus. The climbing down to the cave was nice, and Sawyers encounter with poor frightened Richard was proof enough that candidate Ford was not ready to switch to the dark side yet. The cave with the scales and the candidates names on the ceiling reminded me of Myst, the Miller brothers game from 1994. The episodes name was genious again, covering Lockes new job as well as Jacobs efforts of finding a replacement.

Aly Et Alia Vident

Others see it yet otherwise, and we still don't know who these Hostiles are in the first place. But there seem to be factions. Maybe they are from different times, brought on the Island and stayed because of the healthy climate. Now that we had our first glimpses at the temple dwelling Others with their Fountain of Youth and their turbans I wonder why Tom bothered with his fake beard in the first place… and if Bea Klugh was part of their tribe. Dogen makes a pretty good mysterious leader for them, and his translator Lennon reminded me of another temple in another jungle.

In Coppolas Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now Ben Willard and his crew venture into the heart of darkness and meet a manic war photographer (Dennis Hopper), who is a translator of some sort for Marlons Brandos Colonel Kurtz.

Interesting is that both temple tribes have a knack for building stuff from bamboo…

Somewhere beyond the sea

We'll kiss just as before
Happy we'll be, beyond the sea
And never again I'll go sailin'

The sailin' is not over for us, yet. Everybody happy on Oceanic 815, as planned. Jack has a new haircut, plus he cut himself shaving or something, and the airline dispatched a different plane. The seats are rather gray than blue. Desmond is aboard, reading Salman Rushdie for a change. And then… the dramatic Pre-Title-Climax: The Island is drowned, including sonic fence, Dharmaville and Tawaret. BOOM.

What happened?

A couple of years ago Damon stated in the Lost Audio Podcast that the Hatch may have moved sideways after Desmond turned the failsafe key. Now we have a whole sideways (which I will call Lost B) universe to explore. A universe in which Kate did not kill her father, but his apprentice, and in which Hurley is the luckiest dude on the planet. (Really sweet that he is flying coach). Christian is still dead, but missing, and Locke is still paralysed… but Jack tells him that nothing is irreversible, with him performing neurological spinal surgery at St. Sebastian and all. So we will witness the totally awesome moment were Jack cures Locke in Lost B this season. What a payback for their relationship in Lost Prime. Talking about Lost Prime, the main timeline we followed the last 5 years, in which the crew jumped 30 years into the future after Juliet banged long enough on Jughead's core. Too late for Hurley to save 'The Phantom Menace', but he will rise to the occasion anyway, later in the Temple. Kate finds herself in a tree, but unlike Desmond with her underware in place! They are at the post-failsafe Hatch, and amazingly Juliet travelled with them. Sawyer blames Jack for her useless death, but she tells him post mortem via Miles that the plan worked…

which is hard to see right now, from the Lost Prime perspective. For them, nothing changed, except the jump from 1977 to 2007, but still in their timeline. Bear with me here for a moment. Faradays plan was to counter the incident with Jughead's fission core, to negate the catastrophic results of Radzinsky's drilling into the exotic energy pocket. And that plan worked. Lost Prime is the result.

Flash sideways to Lost B…

Oceanic 815 passes the Island on the way to LA. Everything is under water, but we see that Dharma was there, even the shark is still roaming the area. Radzinsky and his folks in the cool black jumpsuits drill into the pocket… and the catastrophe insues. Our time travellers were not there to stop this. Miles could not tell his father to start the evacuation, so he dies as a baby. Faraday was not in Ann Arbor, hurrying to the island with his plan to use the fission core to counter the Incident. Jughead was never hidden in the tunnels, because Faraday did not timejump to 1954. The Incident hits the Island, the Dharma Initiative and the Hostiles, totall unprepared. No one survives, and the Island drowns 1977. Rousseau and her team never set foot on the Island. Charles Widmore never becomes a business magnate in the UK. There is no Hatch, and no Desmond pushing the button. No crash. The lifes of Jack, Kate and everybody else are influenced by this. I don't know what the destruction of the Island in 1977 means for the game between Jacob and Esau, but I am sure that he visited our friends in Lost B. It is the only way for Locke to survive that fatherly push…