ABC drama Lost, now in its fifth and penultimate season, is finally starting to answer some of its many mysteries. One big answer involves time travel, which I often guessed but also feared.
I was scared because stories that use time-travel are usually predictable, and involve one or a few characters going back in time to change the past and hopefully change the future for better. Sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t.
In the Back to the Future series, characters are constantly trying to undo the damage they did by traveling to the past and upsetting the balance of time. But in either case, you go back in time, change something, and are faced with the consequences of your change.
Standard Time Travel
To borrow from Back to the Future’s own explanation, time travel in this respect looks like this.
Pretend that (A) is when I’m born.
(B) is when I gain the ability and make the decision to travel back in time.
(C) is the point I travel back to, which could be before or after my birth.
(D) is the thing I change, which sets the course of time on the splintered line instead.
It all seems to make a decent enough amount of sense. But look at what’s missing from the splintered line, as it moves forward. Point (B)! Which means that if point (B) doesn’t exist, then I never gain the ability or make the decision to travel back in time, which means I don’t travel back to (C) and don’t make the decision (D) to change the line in the first place. The continuity is broken and it takes an incredible amount of maneuvering explanations to make it stand up to even a small amount of scrutiny.
So Lost introduces time-travel, and I wondered if the whole story turns out to be these characters going back in time to fix their mistakes. Which would be dumb. But then they (re)introduced The Rules, and things got a little more interesting.
Lost Time Travel
Ms. Eloise Hawking first explained these rules to Desmond in the third season. You can’t change anything about the past, even if you get to relive it. Daniel Faraday reiterated the point in this season’s opener, likening time to a street. “You can go forwards on the street or backwards on the street, but you can’t make a new street,” he told Sawyer.
So, in Lost mythology, you have a new kind of time-travel. If it were to be drawn out, it would look more like this:
Here, the letters represent the same things, except that point (D) doesn’t represent a change. Instead, it represents the actual reason for whatever followed.
For instance, if the reason I become interested in time-travel, study it for 30 years, invent a time machine (Point (B)), and travel back to point (C) is all because I told myself to do it at point (D), then the whole line remains a continuous, complete path. I have to travel back in time in order to tell myself about time travel, so I become interested in it and build the time machine that allows me to travel back.
It actually makes more sense than traditional time-travel, because the past isn’t changed even though it’s affected.
Application to Lost
Anyone still care? If so, let me say how this applies to Lost by using one main example followed by a few others. Locke has now traveled back in time because the Island is “shifting”. He meets Richard Alpert and tells him to go to California on such and such date, to verify when Locke will be born.
In an earlier episode, we saw Locke’s mother and grandmother standing in the hospital shortly after his birth, and we caught a glimpse of Richard Alpert standing behind them. I’ve heard some people say that this is Locke changing something in the past, and according to The Rules, this isn’t allowed. But using this understanding of Lost time travel, Locke hasn’t changed anything at all. He’s the reason Richard knew of his birth. He always was the reason, because whatever happens, happened, and there’s no changing it.
That’s also why Locke couldn’t kill Widmore (because Widmore is still alive, so he obviously didn’t kill Widmore), but he could kill one of Widmore’s crewmates by tossing a knife in his back. Again, killing that man wasn’t changing anything, it simply was the way that guy died.
The only thing that stands out as not making sense within this understanding, as far as I’ve seen yet, is the flaming arrows. Those people are alive in the future, so they didn’t die by flaming arrows sometime in the 50s. How, then, could they be killed by those flaming arrows now? It’s a hiccup that I hope they’ve thought through, and can explain.
Why This Matters
Well, in reality it doesn’t. But it matters to the Lost storyline because I expect to see a lot more of these “changes” to the past, that aren’t necessarily changes at all. The point is that you can affect things in the past without changing anything. Hopefully it will start to make more sense as we continue to watch this season progress.
Filed under: smalltimecritics
The flaming arrows still make sense in this theory of time travel (which I think you have correctly described). You need to think about time all happening at once. Take Frogurt for example. He lived his life up to the time that he crashed on the island, went through all the events on the island, and traveled back in time only to be killed in the past by the flaming arrows. This doesn’t affect anything that comes after his death by flaming arrow. You can die in the past. Think of it like this. When he goes back in time to get killed by the arrow, there is another Frogurt who exists (younger Frogurt lets call him) living out his timeline whereever he was before he crashed on the island (or perhaps even before he was born). The only time a paradox would be created would be if you went back in the past and tried to kill somebody living in their present timeline who we know is around later. As you point out, Locke couldn’t kill Widmore because we know that the young Widmore grows up into older Widmore who we know exists in the future. The people killed by the arrows were always killed by the arrows. Just because you die in the past doesn’t cut off your timeline.
Like this:
A(born) —– C (age 35) —— D (age 40) —– B (age 30)
This is a little simplistic, but it is possible to die at D and the younger you would keep living the timeline. Its easier to think of it as all happening at once. Think of us as obsevers looking at the timeline all at once. Everything that happened has always happened. I know this was a little confusing, but hopefully, it helped a little.
I was considering the point where you state:
“Which means that if point (B) doesn’t exist, then I never gain the ability or make the decision to travel back in time, which means I don’t travel back to (C)”.
I am not sure I agree, since B (being you) changes point in time based on where you traveled. Your knowledge of inventing time travel stays with you, regardless where you travel. There will always be the “other you” continuing his own life in point D. You just changed the course of your life while you were at point B, and the “other you” will do the same once he reaches point B as well.
I think that in order to change B, you will have to go back to D, kill your “other you” and that maybe, will affect your present life, because you are not supposed to exist anymore. What I am trying to say is that, as long as you don’t interfere with the “other you” from the past, point B will still exist as is.
I hope it sort of made sense, I almost got lost too there while explaining my own point LOL.
Great quick explanations! It makes me think of the freighter, where Michael was going be killed and the gun from the captain would not work in all cases. Michael could not be killed. I do not know what “time” the freighter was in, but they weren’t at the same time of the island or present time.