The Alternate Reality Hypothesis

If, as many esteemed Lost writers have been saying since episode 1 aired earlier this week, Lost is going to try to assert that the explosion in the Swan at the end of Season 5 created two simultaneous realities -- one in which the Losties remained on the island, and a second, concurrent reality in which Oceanic Flight 815 never actually crashed and landed safely in Los Angeles, this show will be dead to me.

Factors weighing in favor of the "concurrent alternate realities" theory:

1. We saw the two different realities during Season 6, Episode 1 this week.

2. Juliette desperately wanting to tell Sawyer that their plan did work after all right before she died, after just minutes earlier crying to him that their plan did not work.

Factors weighing against the "concurrent alternate realities" theory:

1. It is impossibly flip, and a massive copout answer that would not satisfy most thinking members of what remains of the Lost fan base.

2. We have seen flashbacks and flashforwards all throughout the history of this series, often at first without explicitly being told or being given the knowledge that these are in fact flashes in one direction or another. So just because we saw the two realities in episode 1, that does not mean that both are alternate versions of the reality following the H-bomb explosion at the Swan at the end of Season 5.

3. The perfectly plausible explanation -- and the one much more consistent with how the rest of this show has gone, to be honest -- that the scenes we saw this week aboard Flight 815 and then at LAX occur somewhere else along the same timeline as the one we also saw this week with the Losties back on the island trying to figure out what to do next.

Take it from me, Lost did get kinda convoluted and out-there during Season 5, but there is no way the producers are going to try to make the audience deal with the notion that the H-bomb explosion simply created one reality where the Losties stayed on the island, and another concurrently where Flight 815 never crashed in the first place, and that's that. If I have learned anything from six years of watching this show, they are going to find a way to bring the two stories back together, in one way or another.

Two other Lost thoughts I forgot to mention in yesterday's post:

1. Richard Alpert was at some point a slave on the Black Rock. This seems all but assured after the Nemesis told Richard this week that he didn't recognize him "without all the chains". Not sure where to go with this for now, but it's been put out there and seems more or less definite at this point.

2. The producers certainly went out of their way to make Desmond act all weird-like when he saw Jack on Flight 815. This, combined with all the talk from Eloise Hawking about how important Desmond is to the story, and how he is the one character who is "special", and temporally displaced, yadda yadda yadda, leads me to believe that for whatever reason, Desmond was the one person on Flight 815 in the other day's episode who actually knew all the other Losties he was talking to. And when he just up and disappeared from the plane, how much you wanna bet he somehow "flashed" back to some other place and time? Me thinks we will be learning more about Desmond's final chapter later this season.