THE BOMB

It is hard to put context on the transition from Season 5 to Season 6. Season 5 had led up to the climax of the "need to escape" theme of the show. Season 6 made a drastic lurch into a sideways world purgatory.

What really happened with Juliet and the Bomb is major problem of the LOST mythology. Many fans assumed (based on the opening to the Season 6 premiere, "LA X") that the bomb that the Losties detonated in the 1970s (the Season 5 cliffhanger) resulted in the Island sinking and an alternate timeline being created, in which Oceanic 815 never crashed, and things were slightly different in the lives of the passengers.

This was based upon the flash and Juliet's cries that "it worked."  But what worked?

Later,  the “alternate timeline” was shown as a  purgatory where the Losties all met up when they were dead, and the whole “alternate timeline” bit was a red herring. So what, exactly, did the bomb do?

One commentator tried to answer the question:

The obvious answer is that the bomb propelled the Losties back through time to the present day, where the the Swan station (a.k.a. “The Hatch”) was now a slightly different version of its former imploded self.

Like most time travel narratives, the situation with the hatch raises a ton of logistical questions, such as: Would Desmond still be on the island if the hatch had been destroyed in the past? Wouldn’t that alteration to the time stream have a ripple effect that disrupted everything else regarding the Oceanic 815 crashing? And so on...

Instead what we got was a time travel scenario where that one location, the 70s Swan station, seemed to “overlap” on its present-day self, while leaving the rest of the time stream unaffected (or something like that). It’s confusing and very problematic – yet another reason why time travel is something you probably want to stay away from as a storyteller...

In the end though, the outcome is the same: Whatever conduit to the Island’s energy source that the Dharma Initiative tapped when they made the Swan station was ultimately exhausted. Whether it was exhausted by the bomb Juliet set off, or the the moment in season 3 when Locke lost his faith and refused to push the button (“Live Together, Die Alone“) the energy was released, and The Swan was destroyed. The Losties made it back to the present, and there was never two timelines, apparently.

Try not to think too hard about it, I guess... But it certainly is a major thread left dangling.


Considering that this was the most talked about cliffhanger in the series, the resolution was hardly great art. Fans were still left dangling questions about the cliffhanger.


From the obvious conclusion that a person cannot detonate a bomb by banging it on a rock (a-bombs do not operate that way), the scientific explanation was that the bomb did not go off. This is further buttressed by the fact that Juliet "survived" the incident in the implosion wreckage (until such time that she got her death reel for her resume). The final clue is that the implosion crater is similar to the one shown earlier in the series when Desmond used the fail safe key.

So the bomb did not go off. What happened to it? As a metal casing, it was ripped down into the ground along with the scaffolding by the intense electromagnetic energy of the island. It is likely that the bomb was disassembled and made inoperable by the energy field. (Perhaps, if the island was its own intelligence, it used the incident to take out something that could have harmed it, a nuclear device.) 

The crater must have sealed the light source incident just as it had done with Desmond's incident.

So what happened to the people? This is worse than a dangling plot explanation, because if the "incident" that imploded the Hatch site teleported the characters "back" to the present (even though several of the main characters never made the leap but were on the same island), then the whole time travel theme makes no sense. It has been totally inconsistent in its application. Ben's FDW stumble created the problem of time shifts on the island. Locke corrected that problem by turning the wheel again. But with the 1970s implosion, no one knows how it re-set the island perfectly back in linear time. Because if the Hatch had already imploded 33 years before Desmond, there would have been no Hatch when the island returned to the present (thereby erasing Desmond's story arc). If Desmond's story arc, which predates the Flight 815 characters, is erased then the series has has a major flaw of "remembering" things that never would have occurred in real time.

One could argue that Dharma would have built the Hatch after the implosion and after the Losties left, but that would mean that there would have been multiple time dimensions occurring on the island. But that would be in conflict with Daniel's time explanation, Eloise's island location device and prior representation of single cause and effect of the light source to the island space-time location. 

At that is the problem with incomplete thinking when throwing out a "time travel" story line. Writers need to answer the how and why of time travel in some logical and consistent way or it creates more problems.

If the bomb was neutralized by the implosion, then the Dharma group would have had little reason to continue working on the site. If the bomb was still feared, Dharma could have sealed it like any nuclear disaster in a concrete coffin. But in the Hatch with Desmond and Locke, the concrete bunker was not really sealing a bomb, but somehow controlling the intensity of the electromagnetic energy that could cause another implosion (and purple sky time flash). 

The bomb was not the catalyst to the last season. It seems like a red herring, increase the tension device, to instill a level of fear. The Incident, i.e. the implosion caused by massive electromagnetic pull, was the real danger. A pull so great that it could take the island in and out of time itself. Something that human technology could not control.

Another theory about the Season 5 cliffhanger was that when Juliet said "it worked," it meant that the implosion created the sideways universe. Since the implosion was known to change time, one thought was that the sideways world was the real world and that Flight 815 did not crash in the Pacific. The main characters were then living out their normal lives, not "remembering" the island side trip since human beings cannot have two sets of different "time memories." If this was actually the case, more fans would come to accept Season 6 as a character reboot to their past lives with the ticking mental time bomb of the island experience lurking in their future. A time bomb that when activated would lead to each character going into some sort of personal madness, depression and despair. Again, that could have been a final wrap up to a series that was "character driven."

But we were led on a different path. There was no character re-boot. The sideways world was created as a purgatory holding room for the lost souls of Flight 815. Now, why in the sideways world where there is no past, present or future, just the now, would each character have an extremely complex and real existence? This alternative world had characters in different relationships, different careers, and different adventures - - -  which makes no sense if the island time was "most important." If the sideways was truly a holding area, the lost souls could just be in suspended animation or a coma only to be awakened when everyone died on Earth. Instead, why give these "lost" souls a meaningful alternative lives?

Isn't that just like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown just before he attempts to kick it?

Is the true LOST mythology just a cruel joke on us?