Time travel was a recurring theme of the series, and referenced in different ways such as the Island "moving" and teleportation of the user of the ancient frozen donkey wheel under the Orchid station. It was said that the electromagnetic power on the Island allows the inhabitants to travel through time. However, the narrative changed when characters began to consciously time travel (not physically) which often end with death, due to the inability to find a "constant."
Here were the writer's various explanations for time travel during the series:
1. Faraday says the island is like a spinning record on a turntable, but now the record is skipping after Ben's turn of the FDW. He said it may have "dislodged" us from Time.
2. In the Orchid orientation film, it was stated that Dharma was "to conduct unique experiments of both space and time." Candle placed rabbit number 15 inside a device he called the "vault", which was constructed adjacent to "negatively charged exotic matter." He explained how the rabbit would travel 100ms ahead of four dimensional spacetime - three consisting of space and one of time.
3. When Desmond had time skipped into the past, he went to Oxford to find Faraday. Faraday demonstrated to Desmond that he could transport a lab rat's consciousness forward in time. He did that by using a machine he designed which emitted an unknown radiation, set to 2.342 and oscillating at eleven hertz. Once exposed, the rat was able to move directly from one end of a maze to another. Faraday explained that he was not going teach the rat to run the maze for another hour. Later, however, the rat died of what Faraday said was likely a brain aneurysm.
4. Desmond's consciousness randomly traveled through time between December 24, 2004 and an unknown date in 1996. Faraday stressed that for a mind to survive the continued transitions of temporal displacement, and to make it stop, it needs to find a "constant," or anchor, to focus on. This constant must be something that means a great deal to the person, and it has to be present in both time periods. For his constant, Desmond chose Penny.
5. When Desmond first encountered Eloise Hawking, she explained there are rules for time travel: that "the universe has a way of course correcting or fate may intervene to any changes. If a man was supposed to die in an accident but survived, fate would create another event in which the man would die.
6. The effects of time travel on the traveler seem to be similar whether the travel is physical, or where just the consciousness travels. In both cases, temporal displacement causes nose bleeds, headaches, forgetfulness, and in the worst cases, death by apparent brain aneurysm. However, the severity of the effects appears to differ from person to person. However, people right next to a time skipping person, such as Danielle with Jin, were unaffected by the time displacement.
So which explanation of LOST's time travel is correct?
One would have to conclude that none are the correct answer. The conclusion is based upon the fact that each alleged time travel rule was inconsistently applied through the story line. If one person is affected by physical or mental time travel, but the person standing right next to him (under the same conditions) does not have any time travel affects, the explanation is a nullity.
If the island was Faraday's conscious time machine but in a scaled up version, then everyone on the island would have been affected with mental time skips. But that did not happen. The same is true with the physical time travel: only a few of the 815 survivors were teleported back to the Dharma 1970s while the others were stuck in the present.
But the most egregious violations of time travel rules occurs during the physical skips. When Locke skips in front of Alpert, it makes little sense considering that Alpert had been on the island longer than Locke. Common sense would state that Alpert should have skipped along with Locke. In addition, when Faraday is killed by his mother in 1977, how could he have been born later? The same is true for Charlotte, who claimed to have returned to the island but died during time travel. Lastly, when Juliet is trapped in the hole with the atomic bomb, she is in the 1970s Dharma era. When there is the final time flash, she blurts out "it worked," but we still don't know what she is talking about. She dies in the rebooted present. Is that course correction at work? And did this change Juliet's past life, i.e. in the sideways world ending she had no contact with her sister, her closest friend, who would have been her "constant."
In fact, the whole notion of needing a constant was ridiculous. Under the definition of a constant ("something that means a great deal to the person"), everyone has multiple constants in their lives to focus upon, including parents, spouses, children, family, friends and even favorite sports teams. Minkowski had a family; Charlotte had her "work." Therefore, neither should have died as a result of failing to have a constant in their lives.
The physical time travel story arc led to a dead end, since the alleged explosion of the atomic bomb did not change anything. Desmond's mental time skipping to the past or future did not change anything - - - people still died. In fact, all these time story lines led to dead ends.
In show biz that is called "filler." The principle is to throw new tangents in order to keep the audience engaged. But adding filler tied to science concepts without a reasonable explanation of how things are applied to all the characters is poor execution. You could cut out all the time travel story plot lines from the series and viewers would not miss anything.
We cannot even say the time skipping created any alternative universe. TPTB continue to claim that all the island events were "real," but one can question in what "reality?" The notion that the numerous time skips did not cause massive changes in the course of non-island events is also hard to believe if the island was the source for life, death and rebirth (in essence the creator of time and space itself). But the writers never tackled that concept or the unintended consequences of throwing in time travel into an adventure-survival story.
Some fans still believe the time travel arcs in LOST were the most disappointing feature of the series. It is even more so when the character "experts" in the show itself, were wrong in their explanation of events. Time travel in the series was like white noise, TV static or a blank box.
