REVIEW: THEORIES PART 8

The last of this series of reviews of theories prior to Season 6 involves time travel. The theory is that the island was a Time Machine.

Once the writers put the matter of time travel on the table, we as fans had to deal with it.

We were familiar with the general literary rules of time travel: you don't go back in time to kill a parent to create a present paradox; changes events in the past can have unintended consequences in the future, etc.  In H.G. Wells' Time Machine, we know a brilliant scientist created a sled with a dial that when activated would send him to the time coordinates. But the machine did not move in space; it was stationary. Once those caveats were established, the viewer accepted the machine and its abilities.

But LOST's time travel references were more missing puzzle pieces than an actual functional machine.

The clues to the idea of an island time machine were sprinkled throughout the series.

The premise is that Oceanic 815 flew through a rift in the time/space created by the island's unique electromagnetic properties, and are now the passengers are lost somewhere in the past.

Time is an important theme,  making many appearances throughout the show. Flashbacks and Flashforwards show the lives of characters during a different time other than on the Island. The Island is known to have a different concept of time, as it moves at a different pace, as seen in Daniel's experiments. Time travel, both physically and through the conscious are also concepts that have been witnessed in the later seasons.

Time has been a clue mentioned in various context during the show:

Season 1:
Sayid comes to the conclusion that the distress signal has been playing for 16 years. ("Pilot: Part 2")
Would a distress signal really play for sixteen years with no one finding it?
During the discovery of Adam and Eve, Jack claims that they have been dead for 40-50 years. ("House of the Rising Sun")
Sawyer reads A Wrinkle in Time. ("Dues Ex Machina")
Kate and her childhood sweetheart Tom bury a time capsule and open it years later. ("Born to Run")

Season 2:
There is a countdown timer in the Swan station, which is reset every 108 minutes with the numbers. ("Adrift")
Mr. Eko does not talk for 40 days after he killed an Other. ("The Other 48 Days")
Michael meets with captive Walt for three minutes, which is also the name of the episode.
A system failure occurred at 16:16 on September 22nd, the time the plane crashed.

Season 3:
Ben explains to Jack what events have happened off the Island during the 67 days he has been there. ("The Glass Ballerina")
Aldo was reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. ("Not in Portland")
Richard Alpert shows a scan of a womb that Juliet believes is of a 70 year old woman, when in fact she was 20. ("Not in Portland")
Juliet said that she has been on the Island for 3 years, 2 months, and 28 days. ("Not in Portland")
Mittelos is an anagram for "Lost Time". ("Not in Portland").
Desmond relieves part of his life after the Swan imploded. ("Flashes Before Your Eyes")
The clock reads 1:08 in Desmond's flat. ("Flashes Before Your Eyes")
Ms. Hawking has many clocks inside the jewelry store. ("Flashes Before Your Eyes")
Richard appears to not age, after young Ben encountered him in the jungle in the 1970s. ("The Man Behind the Curtain")
Ben looks at his watch when he kills his father in the Purge; the time was 4:00. ("The Man Behind the Curtain")
Ben orders to kill Sayid, Jin, and Bernard while giving Jack a minute to respond. ("Through the Looking Glass")

Season 4:
Daniel does an experiment involving time. He launches a payload from the Kahana, and waits for it to arrive. It eventually arrives, 31 minutes later than what the time is on the Island. ("The Economist")
The perspective of the time it takes for the helicopter to travel from the Island to the Kahana is different from the Island and the Kahana. ("The Constant")
Desmond, Minkowski, and Brandon suffer from their conscious traveling through time without a constant. ("The Constant")
Ray washes ashore on the Island dead, but does not die on the Kahana until a couple of days later. ("The Shape of Things to Come")
The Orchid was built to experiment time travel. Ben turns the wheel underneath the Orchid to move the Island through time. ("There's No Place Like Home: Parts 2 & 3")

Season 5:
Daniel explains that the Island is skipping in time, causing the Island to travel through different time periods erratically. ("Because You Left")

For all the time references in the series, time travel like most things had no rules.

When several characters time skipped to 1977, there were other humans on the island at the same time who did not time skip. There was never an explanation for that different treatment. The same is true when the O6 returned to the island, a few time skipped to the 1970s while Sun was left stranded in the present.


The same inconsistency holds for the change to "mental time skips." If Desmond became a mental time skipper because of the Hatch implosion, then Charlie and Eko who were also in the station would have experienced the same side effects. They did not.


Then, the concept that the freighter crew led by Minkowski only visited the island for a short time, returned to their boat to have sudden and quick mental melt downs because their brains were time skipping makes no sense considering that the 815ers who made it to the freighter had no such symptoms.

The writers did not treat Time as a key element in the story mythology, but as a plot trick to drum up new story arcs. It was not even mentioned by men like Widmore as motivation to get back to the island or to control it because it was a Time Machine. And if it was truly a time machine, when Jack suddenly gained all knowledge of the guardians, would he not have considered using the island's powers to go back and not allow 815 flight path over the island to save all those people (Jack was a healer).

But the problem is that the writers did create two different and conflicting versions of time travel in the series. The physical time travel of people into the past, and the mental brain time skips that Desmond had after the Hatch implosion. Further, a few of Desmond's mental time skips were actually wrong (such as his vision that Claire, holding Aaron, would leave the island in a helicopter.)

A few viewers believed that LOST "jumped the shark" when it introduced the time travel story lines. In retrospect, that may be true. But the writers had the opportunity to make some plausible argument why time travel was an important part of the final season's conclusions, but they did not do so.