Parallel Reality Theories

[theOtherMartyMcF]

Trombolobo summed up a lot of it, but I had suspected alternate realities back when there was a point made (suspiciously, I might add) of survivors never having heard of Apollo candy bars or Geronimo Jackson. Through the Looking Glass cinches it. I know some people think Jack was just loopy when he mentions his father, and that Naomi was a liar, etc., but we'll all know in 8 months. The alternate realities idea makes perfect sense out of a lot of the show's mysteries. Maybe many viewers wouldn't care for such an "implausable" turn, but I for one love it... that is, if they have the guts to follow through with it. In TV/movies, this motif is usually approached only through obvious sci-fi means from the get-go (someone in this thread I think mentioned Sliders, and I can think of The One with Jet Li, at the moment) but doing it they way LOST has, so subtly, is ingenious. Note that not all the survivors are from the same reality though; Locke comes from the reality where Geronimo Jackson existed, I think.

Also, the title of the finale says it all. The Looking Glass may be a metaphor-name for the underwater station, but going through the looking glass, into a distorted mirror world, is what the survivors in fact did upon being rescued. A suspicious point was made too by Sayid being unfamiliar with the satellite phone's technology, and need I mention the 4-toed statue? A dead give-away.

The island is accessible to many realities (timelines, if you must call them that), and there's probably the possibility of somehow shifting between them on the island itself if you know the trick (Patchy's 9 lives do come to mind). Locke regaining his walking legs twice is probably a similar phenomenon. The problem though, is in not knowing the tricks... of coming and going, of communication with the outside world(s), whtever. If you are just clueless Joe Blow Survivor trying to get home, you are just going to get more LOST than you ever though was possible. Ingenious.

[blueshirt]

"Loop man, loop"

What if the events are a "loop" so to speak, and this quote is a clue.

yip, yip, yip! does anyone remember the scene with hurley arriving at the airport after his car has broken down? he somehow crosses the same sliding doors twice, giving u the impression he enters the airport two times (and, as has been pointed out somewhere else, you see a man in a blue suit and a red tie walking from right to left each time u see hurley rushing into the airport building). did anyone else notice any other 'loopish' occurences on the show?

i guess the loop - concept is quite important for lost... not only timewise, but you might notice loops in the behaviour of the characters as well.

[Kriegster]

okay for those of you who dont know what the hell the parallel universe theory is, go here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

The parallel universe therory suggests that our universe doesnt go on forever. Instead when you reach the "end" there is another universe exactly like ours. Basically think of it as a mirror. If you look in the mirror and your wearing a shirt that has lettering on it, it will backwords instead of forwards. It is showing the oppsite of what you see.

In parallel universe theory this is the same effect. On our decision making level, Say your playing cards with your friends. You and your buddys are playing Black Jack and you decide to say "hitme" and your friend gives you a card and you end up wining the game because of the card you drew. In our paraell universe, however you dont say hitme, and you end up losing the game.

Draw a vindiagram. You draw two circles that are overlapping each other. Now the middle of that overlapping is the island. Basically one side is our universe. the other side is the paraell universe. In the middle is a collision with the island in it. Some how when flight 815 crashed, it got stuck in between. and landed on the island.

When Desmond Turned the key to the hatch in the finale of season 2, he got thown back in time to one of the universes to relive his life. How ever, this universe he went to was the one where he breaks up with his girlfriend, penny. In the other universe they end up marrying and everything. Since he was phyically there and he already rememberd thoughts about the island, he was probably going to marry penny. But then he runs into that old lady in the wedding ring place (forgot her name). Think of her as a gatekeeper. She knows when people will die and stuff. It was her job to make sure desmond would break up with penny because if he did, horrible things might happen. The old lady told him "The universe course-corrects itself" She is right.

Desmond gets those cool powers and then can see into the paraell universe to see if anyone he knows will die. "The universe course-corrects itself" when this law kicks in, it basically is saying if you die in ur paraell universe, you have to die in your universe. This person turns out to be Charley. Desmond can tell Charley hes going to die today from what ever and if he avoids death, then the universe will try again the next day.





A WORK IN PROGRESS

[neenaw]

Originally Posted by theOtherMartyMcF

Trombolobo summed up a lot of it, but I had suspected alternate realities back when there was a point made (suspiciously, I might add) of survivors never having heard of Apollo candy bars or Geronimo Jackson. Through the Looking Glass cinches it. I know some people think Jack was just loopy when he mentions his father, and that Naomi was a liar, etc., but we'll all know in 8 months. The alternate realities idea makes perfect sense out of a lot of the show's mysteries. Maybe many viewers wouldn't care for such an "implausable" turn, but I for one love it... that is, if they have the guts to follow through with it. In TV/movies, this motif is usually approached only through obvious sci-fi means from the get-go (someone in this thread I think mentioned Sliders, and I can think of The One with Jet Li, at the moment) but doing it they way LOST has, so subtly, is ingenious. Note that not all the survivors are from the same reality though; Locke comes from the reality where Geronimo Jackson existed, I think.

Also, the title of the finale says it all. The Looking Glass may be a metaphor-name for the underwater station, but going through the looking glass, into a distorted mirror world, is what the survivors in fact did upon being rescued. A suspicious point was made too by Sayid being unfamiliar with the satellite phone's technology, and need I mention the 4-toed statue? A dead give-away.

The island is accessible to many realities (timelines, if you must call them that), and there's probably the possibility of somehow shifting between them on the island itself if you know the trick (Patchy's 9 lives do come to mind). Locke regaining his walking legs twice is probably a similar phenomenon. The problem though, is in not knowing the tricks... of coming and going, of communication with the outside world(s), whtever. If you are just clueless Joe Blow Survivor trying to get home, you are just going to get more LOST than you ever though was possible. Ingenious.

that's kinda what I'm thinking. I think the island is a different world to where the losties are originally from. i also think you can get there from other parts of our world as well as from other worlds. I think the electromagnetic thingy created a "window" and the plane flew through it to this other world and crashed. this all ties in with some bigger "plan" - destiny of some sort.

[letmeinplease]

Hi everyone

There is a lot of talk about time travel ect on this forum, and though the shows producers debunked time travel, the possibility of the island being set in a separate timeline to other parts of the world still remains. This has been covered before, and it explains a lot.

One thing it explains (which I don't think has been mentioned) is that it allows Locke to walk. If his father was brought to the island from a timeline BEFORE he pushed Locke through the window, then the moment Locke arrived on the island he would be part of a timeline where he had never had his back broken. That timeline would simply cease to exist. Different timelines explain a lot of what happens on the island, not just Locke's healing. The same windows could intersect on other timelines and change past events, the death of Jack's father, Charlie, and more. They could be dead in one timeline, and yet still living in another. People who have existed within both timelines could remember and perceive both lines.

As well as being a gateway to different times, and therefore timelines, I think that the island itself contains pockets of loose time, perhaps they were once controlled by the dharma people. But just like when a nuclear power station explodes it spreads pockets of radiation over a wide area, so when a station controlling the entrance to timelines explodes it spreads pockets of time. Some people (perhaps those effected most strongly by it) can perceive it. Jacob and his house perhaps exists in one of these pockets, and only a few people can perceive this pocket. Hurley, walking along behind the group in the most recent episode wanders into this pocket of trapped time and perceives a place that exists in another timeline. Jacob himself is trapped in a further timeline within this.

It also explains Walt's odd appearances. He too is trapped in a slightly different timeline. Existing in a line just slightly shifted out of the time of the people he is trying to communicate with.

This idea also explains (list is far from exhaustive!)

The whispering voices (noises from the jumble of hundreds of timelines which exist on the island).

The black rock crashing inland (The ship may have been traveling in open sea, and was shifted to a time where an island was in the spot it was floating).

The drug plane appearing to have crashed many years earlier than it possibly could have.

The island could be many years in the past or future as far as our linear time model (the way we perceive time) is concerned. But as it does not exist in linear time as we understand it this is not relevant.

The possibility of multiple timelines, and their convergence, has been well covered by both science fiction and science fact. The factual possibility of them exists. You would (I can only assume!) only remember what you have personally experienced, whether that is along one timeline, or many.

It goes like this.

Timeline 'A' has Locke experience a life in which he looses his ability to walk, goes to Australia, get in a plane crash etc.

This timeline is intersected by timeline 'B' at somepoint after he gets on the plane, probably around the same time as the crash. In timeline 'B' Locke somehow kills his father at a point in time before his father cripples him. So all that happens afterwards is different. However Locke does not remember this, as the timeline changed after he had experienced existence on the now defunct timeline 'A' up until the point where the timelines met.

Of course this all creates an interesting paradox. Had Locke not been crippled, he would never have been on the plane, and could therefore not kill his father, and so would not have changed timelines, which would then mean he was crippled, was on the plane, and so on, back to the beginning in an endless loop. No, I am not going down the Dr Who paradox machine here, (though this would certainly account for the fearful power of the hatch machine, and the others fears of it being switched off), but some force must be able to overcome that paradox. Certainly, if it did somehow contain the timelines Desmond could be expected to overwhelmed by visions of multiple futures if he were at the heart of the explosion.

Almost all (not quite but close) of the islands mysteries both big and small can be explained by the divergence of timelines!

Anyway, I could go on, but I won't. If its not boring already it soon would be!

Take care

David

[Exie]

Moving this to the proper thread.

[letmeinplease]

Time travel has been debunked. However the form I have put it in it has not.

This is not a time travel theory, it is a converging timeline theory, these are very different things, and I can understand how one can be mistaken for the other. However they are not the same thing at all.

This post shouldn't have been moved here.

[Exie]

In that case, it belongs in the Parallel Reality thread.

The next time you have a question about a moderator's actions, please dont make it public; problems are best taken to PM with a moderator.

[Rokker]

Like in Narnia, when the kids go through the wardrobe, they're there for ages, but come back out the wardrobe and only a couple of seconds have passed in the real world.

Look at it like this: the losties land on the island and wonder where the hell their rescue is. But maybe rescue is on the way, it's just taking forever (from their perspective) to arrive. Would explain why Walt has aged, etc.

Of course this doesn't encapsulate the strangeness of the plane found under the water, or the freighter, etc, etc. But this theory doesn't need to take these into consideration.

Also, the whole [do not read this if you have not seen episode 2 of season 4] Spoiler: polar bear being found as a skeleton with a Dharma belt could somewhat be explained by the time oddity - perhaps the island exists in some separate "state" in the future.

I guess I'm just rambling now. But the whole "time goes slower on the Island than it does out in the 'real world'" I believe to be an interesting point.

[Jacob'sAdvisor]

Ever since Flashes before your eyes I've always thought Desmond wasn't seeing "flashes" like visions, but more like he was remembering things he'd already been through.

Involving "finite" univeres.. Einstein said that if you had a telescope with ultimate power and looked through it.. you would see that back of your own head.

Could Desmond have not traveled back in time but forward? And seen the back of his own head? so to speak.

[Cosmo7]

After the season finale this evening I thought I'd advance my pet theory (which I share attribution with my partners, Messers Vicodin and Redwine.)

Novelty Theory is collection of ideas regarding number theory, time and mysticism. It was championed by Terence McKenna during the 1980s and 1990s and picked up by R.U. Sirius and Mondo2000 around the same time (ie: during the Lost writers formative years.)

Essentially Novelty Theory is Chaos Theory escalated into a quasi-spiritual level. Events occur according to a fractal waveform of novelty, the universe is conscious, everything is going to change in 2012 (the point when the waveform collapses and, coincidentally, the point that the Mayan calendar runs out of dates.)

The main problem with Novelty Theory is not that it has been developed by people using large amounts of psychotropic drugs, but that it is a self-conscious parody of science (and yet still serious.)

All grist to the mill, right?

In Lost the sequence 4 8 15 16 23 42 is a strange attractor; it is the waveform that everything is tending towards - the Eschaton. Eschatology is part of many religions, but in Novelty Theory it takes the form of a strange attractor. No wonder Hurley is nuts.

Novelty Theory posits a dual reality - the everyday world we perceive, and a shamanistic, hyperreal, abstract reality, much like the aboriginal Dreamtime. This is paralleled by Lost's recurrent theme science v metaphysics, as well as the Australia - Los Angeles endpoints of flight 815.

Novelty Theory also advances the belief that our ideas of consciousness are overly limited and that many things exhibit consciousness, including the island (Smoke Monster, Jacob, etc.) and interact with us in hyperreality (Locke, Ben).

McKenna wrote at extensive length about time travel. If you like Lost, you might like this.

[Lost writers: I will accept bribes to keep quiet.]

[schu4ksu]

Haven't seen this spelled out. I think the split timelines shown in season 6 do not represent a many-worlds approach (very unsatisfying to the viewer) but instead show two unique and specific outcomes that will be resolved in time. The split we are being shown most likely, but not necessarily, occurred at a quantum level event associated with Juliet striking the A-bomb, it's detonation, and the energy negation.

Per the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the losties are simultaneously entangled in both realities until they collapse into to one or the other at the moment of observation. I believe this act of observation will involve great personal sacrifice, and choice, on the part of one of the characters. Desmond is the most likely. He's a key player in the swan/hatch history. He has special abilities to see the future and receive communications from the future. He has made a promise to stay with Penny and his family. Will he keep it?