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lost-flashes_l
FLASHES BEFORE YOUR EYES'' Back in season 3, the mysterious Mrs. Hawking schooled Desmond in Lost time: Both freedom and predestination are at work

Back by popular demand:

THE LOST CHEAT SHEET!
SEASON 4, EPISODE 5: ''THE CONSTANT''
This week, no crazy non sequiturs, dubious pop culture tangents, or flat-out lame jokes. Only helpful information. Honest! Today's cheat sheet is indebted to two books: Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, by Lisa Randall; and The New Time Travelers, by David Toomey.

Dedicated to all you wormholes out there. You know who you are.

THE HATCH
A bunker buried in the jungle, properly known as the Swan, and part of the Dharma Initiative, a Utopian science outfit financed by the Hanso Foundation. It was allegedly created to study the Island's unique electromagnetic fluctuations. In the finale of season 2, the Hatch either exploded or imploded; regardless, it went bye-bye, leaving nothing but a charred crater behind. Desmond, Locke, and Mr. Eko were all inside the Hatch during this destruction event. They, too, should have been blown to smithereens. Instead, Desmond woke up naked, Locke woke up mute, and Mr. Eko woke up delirious. To this day, I have been convinced that Lost has not given us a satisfying explanation for how those three survived. But yesterday, a theory came to mind. First, we must revisit:

''FLASHES BEFORE YOUR EYES''
A pivotal season 3 episode in which it was revealed that after Desmond turned the failsafe key, he experienced something like time travel; his Island-present consciousness downloaded into his flashback-past self. Even more odd, when his mind returned to the Island present, Desmond came back with ''flashes'' of the future. Did Desmond's consciousness simultaneously expand forward and backward in time, then reverse course and contract back into his head? Does super-electromagnetic Desmond have the ability to omnisciently experience the arc of his existence (or his ''worldline,'' to use a word coined by Lost-cited egghead Hermann Minkowski) all at once, but chooses not to, or at least, only in manageable ''flashes''? Perhaps tonight's episode will offer illumination. During his ''Flashes'' flashback, Desmond learned from a mysterious lady named Ms. Hawking two things about the nature of Lost time (assuming that she was being truthful, of course): Both free will and predestination are at work. Hawking warned Desmond that if he proposed to Penny, ''every single one of us will die.'' But then, after they witnessed a man's death, Ms. Hawking told Desmond that despite knowing the man's fate, she was powerless to stop it; the universe would have found a different way to kill him. This brings us to:

DAVID LEWIS
David Lewis is the name of Charlotte Staples Lewis' father. (We know this from when Ben ran down Charlotte's bio at the end of ''Confirmed Dead.'') David Lewis is also a famous thinker in the field of physics. During the 1970s, he gave a series of lectures about the topic of time travel. One of his most important contributions was a response to the problem known as ''The Grandfather Paradox.'' This is the idea that a time traveler can't go back in time and kill his grandpa because it would create a new timeline in which the time traveler would have never come into existence. Lewis resolved this paradox by simply suggesting that in a world where time travel would be possible, creating paradox would be impossible; the cosmos would basically work against you and execute what Desmond would call...

''COURSE CORRECTION'' PART ONE
Example: Charlie. But two things about Charlie's death: (1) Fate technically didn't kill Charlie. Remember what happened: Desmond flashed on a new version of Charlie's death — one that offered a future that was beneficial to all castaways. Heroically, Charlie embraced this fate. Charlie exercised his free will and essentially killed himself. (2) Regardless, Fate got what it wanted. Which brings me back to the mystery of how Desmond, Locke, and Eko survived the Hatch implosion. Were they saved by ''The Grandfather Paradox''? Did Fate spare them because they just weren't supposed to die yet? Maybe. And if so, it would be awfully convenient; Lost could basically get away with any leap in narrative logic by chalking it up to ''course correction.'' Ironically, this is exactly the complaint that many physicists have to paradox theories like the one suggested by David Lewis. Which brings us to...

NEXT PAGE: ''Course Correction'' Part Two


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