So, when I wrote about Lost last week, that was in this timeline, right? It can be hard to tell these days. Either way, there’s been time to reflect and re-watch, and some awesome reader input. So crack open a frosty Dharma Beer, because we are pre-gaming!

I’m going to try to break this into clearly labeled subtopics, since there’s a lot to cover. First off, it’s time for our contest winners!

Name the Fake Locke Contest

There were two suggestions I really loved, so Fake Locke will have two nicknames. And best of all, they’re both in keeping with our tradition of giving people longer nicknames than their actual names. From spunkybuddy Jennifer, we have “Look-a-Locke”, which is awesome. While local character Sam suggested “Lockelganger”, which just sounds sinister. Thanks guys!

LA X

Let’s talk about this alternate timeline. First off, note that the episode title is “LA X”. There’s a space there, so it’s not referring to LAX airport. The X could just be there to indicate mystery, or even to reference the idea of a map. X marks the spot, after all. And we have more than a few maps that have been important over time, particularly the room-sized one that White Oracle uses to track the Island. Or, it could be a Roman numeral. We already have the Oceanic Six – are their counterparts the Los Angeles 10? And who would those ten be? In the meantime, I think it’ll help to use the “X” signifier to distinguish the original timeline from the new timeline – there’s Jack, and there’s Jack X.

Now, as noted before, the changes to the timeline don’t begin with the whole “not crashing” thing. Shannon never got on the plane, for example. There have been some videos online that indicate other differences going farther back in time, and I’ll try to round them up as the season goes on. But for now, we can focus on the known differences as broadcast. I didn’t think about this, but spunkybuddy Jackie points out that Michael and Walt don’t appear in the episode at all. Now, obviously Malcolm David Kelly can’t play a ten-year-old anymore, but we don’t see Michael either. If they wanted to make it clear those two were on the flight, we could see him and the back of a kid’s head. We go up and down the aisles a couple of times, and there’s no sign of Michael. I think it’s safe to say that that’s further evidence of a change to the timeline.

It’s also worth noting that they did such a good job of reproducing key scenes from the pilot exactly, that the things that don’t match up exactly are especially notable. And by the way, they did a fantastic job of matching things up. That makes it really seem strange that Stewardess Cindy offered Jack one drink, instead of two. And while most of the characters look like their 2004 selves to an impressive degree, Charlie has a completely different haircut.

In the X timeline, several characters are long dead. If the bomb destroyed the Island in 1977, that means Benry, White Oracle, Widmore, and Richard “Batmanuel” Alpert are dead. Daniel Faraday was never born. Miles and Charlotte most likely survived, depending on whether the evacuation sub got to a safe distance. Penny might never have been conceived – we don’t know her exact age. And get this – if the Island is destroyed in 1977, the only Lostaway who met Jacob is Sawyer. Sawyer’s parents died in 1976 (Remember the Bicentennial stamp on his letter?), but all of the other meetings with Jacob happened after the bomb went off. It seems that the people touched by Jacob are special, and now, Sawyer is the only special one left.

The Desmond on Flight 815X, then, is probably a very different individual than the one we know. We don’t even know if Penny exists, but if she does, Desmond didn’t have to deal with her father pushing them apart. White Oracle didn’t talk him out of proposing. Heck, it’s possible that Desmond was never jailed as a deserter, since he left the army only when his 2004 consciousness inhabited his past body. Desmond is probably the person most changed in Timeline X. Unless he isn’t changed at all.

Remember, when Jack comes back from the bathroom, Desmond is sitting next to his seat, and he hadn’t been there before. (He claims that he moved because the guy next to him was snoring.) And then later, there’s no sign of him at all. Now, it’s possible he moved back to his old seat. But since Locke’s knives and Christian’s body disappeared from the plane, Desmond X might have disappeared as well. Or, just as Desmond tends to come unstuck in time, maybe our Desmond ended up in Timeline X. And since this could be a timeline where he never met Penny, or she doesn’t even exist, he may have a vested interest in changing things back. Remember, in the past, White Oracle took action to make sure that the timeline worked the way it was supposed to. If she died when the bomb went off, that might be Desmond’s job now.

And while we’re at it, Mysterious Don suggests that Juliet’s dying thought “It worked”, may have come from a conversation with another version of Sawyer (or possibly any Lostaway). After all, there’s no way she could know that “it worked”, considering that all available information points to the fact that it didn’t. Maybe Desmond popped between timelines to tell her. Something from Timeline X made its way to Juliet – that’s almost certain.

Finally, can Timeline X continue to exist? White Oracle and Desmond have both made it clear that the way things happened is the way they have to happen. Desmond explained at length that you can slow down destiny, but you can’t change it. If the universe says Charlie’s going to die, then Charlie’s going to die. So how does the universe make this aberrant timeline right, or will it destroy itself?

This is going to sound crazy, and you’ll probably all be making fun of me come May, but I’m going to go out on a limb here. What if something happens in Timeline X where the Lostaways need to make sure that the Island is never destroyed? Like, Desmond convinces them that this isn’t the world it’s supposed to be. And frankly, we know most of their lives are going to suck whether they’re in LA or on the Island, so it might not be a hard sell. What if two of the Lostaways end up in the 50’s where they defuse the Jughead bomb? And what if they die of radiation poisoning, and are left in the caves where they end up as a pair of skeletons? We could have a case with two alternate timelines creating one another. I’m not saying that’s where they’re going, but that would be the most awesomely complicated thing ever.

Sayid and Jacob

This is a really good one, and it was strangely pointed out by two people who then passed the credit to somebody else. Long-time spunkybuddy Chicago Rachel credited a fellow named Vince, while another founding spunkybuddy, Amanda, gave her bonus points to Stephanie. They all suggested that Jacob might be taking up residence in Sayid’s body now. And that? Is brilliant.

See, we don’t necessarily know that Jacob and Silas have the same abilities that work in the same way. While Silas can appear as another (at this point, always somebody who died), Jacob might actually have to use a body. (Which gives us the maddening possibility that both of them were Christian at one point or another.) What if the temple dwellers used the spring to heal his wounds, and then drowned him so that Jacob could inhabit his body?

Sayid has his “Come to Jesus” moment, when he wonders to Hurley what will happen to his soul, and that means a lot more if he dies in the episode. Silas spent centuries looking for a loophole, maybe Sayid is Jacob’s. You have to admit, the idea of Silas as Locke and Jacob as Sayid fighting for the soul of the Island is pretty fantastic. I think it’s a really cool idea, but I also would hate to find out that Sayid is actually dead. Suffice it to say, I’m going to be keeping an eye on that dude for the foreseeable future.

If Sayid is Desmond’s loophole, that fits in nicely with his willingness to die in last season’s finale. Remember, he doesn’t fight back and instead, almost taunts Benry. I think I mentioned this last year, but the Lost guys do enjoy their Star Wars references. In the first movie (the real first movie) Obi-Wan tells Darth Vader, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Only, in Star Wars, that doesn’t pan out. His ghost gives Luke advice a couple of times, and then shows up at a party. Isn’t it weird how such an awesome line goes nowhere at all? Sometimes George Lucas claims he had a plan all along. George Lucas is a big liar. Anyway, that might actually be the case with Jacob – the gloves are off now. Without his physical form, he can fight the Lockelganger on his own terms.

“I want to go home”

That’s what the Look-a-Locke tells Benry – he wants to go home. Well, Sara thinks she knows what “home” is. (She also gets MVP Points for linking the recap on her Facebook page!) It’s the Temple! Now, we’ve seen Smokey around the temple and underneath the outer walls, but what if that’s as far as he can go? There’s a power in the Temple, and maybe that’s what he really wants. After all, where is it that the Lockelganger is headed at the end of the episode? The Temple. And as soon as they hear that Jacob’s dead, the first thing they do is start surrounding the entrances with circles of ash – they know their enemy is going to head there first. I think that one’s a winner!

The Temple Dwellers

I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of them in the near future, but I’m still fascinated that these are the first real non-White Others that we’ve seen. (Except for Miss Klugh, and she dressed more like the Temple Dwellers than the suburban Others.) This opens up some more possibilities as to who might have come from the Island. As spunkybuddy Julie points out, Sun’s father has ties to Widmore and does business with the Hanso Foundation – he might have been an Other. Although if he was, he must have left the Island before 1977, since the indications are that he’s alive and well in Timeline X.

And as long as I’m uncomfortably discussing race, here’s something to think about. Look-a-Locke tells Richard “It’s good to see you out of those chains.” I took this to mean that he was a slave at one time. Since the Black Rock was a slave ship, that all fits together. Except, there’s a little bit of a hang-up. Nester Carbonell, the actor who plays Richard “Batmanuel” Alpert is Hispanic. Anybody held captive on a slave ship in 1845, the year the Black Rock ran aground, wouldn’t be Hispanic. (Interestingly, the original casting notice for Richard’s part specified that the character was Black.) Now, there are obviously several answers. Richard might have been a prisoner when he landed on the Island, as opposed to a slave. Or he may be much, much older than the Black Rock. Something to think about, at least.

Books!

A couple of books appeared in last week’s episodes. The dead Frenchman had a copy of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Tremblin”. This is a book about faith and God, topics which play important roles in Lost. However, I found a bit on Wikipedia that’s especially interesting. It introduces the “Knight of Faith” and the “Knight of Infinite Resignation”. The Knight of Faith gives up everything, but has faith that he will receive it all back. The Knight of Infinite Resignation gives up everything “in return for the infinite” but constantly deals with the pain of loss. These labels could apply to several of our Lostaways, but especially John Locke. I think he’d be a Knight of Faith, myself, since he never really regrets his sacrifices, at least until it looks like he’s going to fail.

Desmond’s reading a book by Salman Rushdie. It is not, as I mistakenly identified it, The Satanic Verse. It is, in fact, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. That’s a book aimed at children that he wrote shortly after his more famous work. It’s a work of magical realism, and while I don’t know much about it at all, most of it takes place on a Earth-orbiting body that moves through “Processes too Complicated to Explain”. Well, that sounds at least a little bit familiar.

That’s enough for this week, I think. Next week, we’ll get into Don’s theory that the battle in Lost is really “Change vs. Tradition”, rather than “Good vs. Evil”. In the meantime, I’ll see you back here in 24 hours or so for “What Kate Does”!