anyone else notice that the computer the old woman was using was the same as (or very similar to) the one in the hatch?

I had forgotten about that, you're right.

Ana Lucia warns Hurley whatever he does, do not get arrested. Hmmm... wonder how they will work around that reality.

I envision a very cool Ben with some vague "agency" credentials waltzing in to free Hurley.

Do you suppose the baby of "Dr. Kandel" (the scientist has gone by a variety of names throughout the series) could be Miles? It's the right ethnic mix and possibly the right age. Just a thought.

Do you suppose the baby of "Dr. Kandel" (the scientist has gone by a variety of names throughout the series) could be Miles? It's the right ethnic mix and possibly the right age. Just a thought.

I'd been thinking that myself and wondered if anyone else had that idea.

So did the people that left the 4-toed statue create the mechanism with the wheel that's under the Orchid station? I want to know where that wheel came from.

When the man in the training films starts his day, he plays a record that later gets stuck in a scratch and repeats a certain refrain from the song. Later, being stuck in time is described as a phonograph needle being stuck in a vinyl record loop. Thus, this version of time travel represents time as fate, meaning unidirectional, the street analogy, as opposed to time as omnidirectional, meaning time as free will, move a grain of sand and you've changed the universe. If time is unidirectional, you can't change its path (you were fated to move that grain of sand--free will had nothing to do with it); if it is omnidirectional, you can alter (and thereby create) many branches of time, like a possibility tree, like Star Trek time travel.

I just saw "Dark Floors", a good sf movie, which develops a similar theme of being unstuck in time. It was interesting that in "Dark Floors", time gets unstuck while a handful of people are on an elevator, caught between the sixth and seventh floors: "Neither six nor seven/neither hell nor heaven." Which brings me to the Oceanic Six, or is it seven? counting Locke? Read Wordworth's "We are Seven" for further background on the six/seven mythos: In summary, Wordsworth asks a little girl how many siblings she has, and she answers seven: herself, five at play, and one in the grave; the narrator corrects her and tells her that makes six, that the one in the grave is gone; the young girl replies; No, we are seven: herself, five at play, one in the grave. And on and on. Lastly, check out "Slaughterhouse Five" for more on being unstuck in time. In interviews, LOST producers said that they were going to follow the path of unidirectional time and avoid the time travel of the TV show "Heroes."

Which brings me to my last point: Time travel as fate is predestination. If we were to unravel that vinyl recording and stretch it its length, the song would represent the past, present and future; the song never changes, no matter how many times you play it; neither does the song change if it gets scratched; the song merely becomes unstuck at a certain point, whether past, present or future. What one does to unstick it is to give the arm a slight push, jumping the needle to a future point in the song; then one pulls the arm back a bit, trying to put the needle back on track where it got unstuck, and ends up pulling it back into the past of the song: Thus, we have the jumps in fixed time, leaps in a predestined path. Locke is predestined to die in order to unstick time with his life, or his resurrection. In religious thought, only Christ could traverse the timeline; so, in this sense, Locke is the Christ figure. Alright, I'll stop here, but the religious aspects to LOST have been underappreciated in favor of sf: same mythos, different perspectives.

And no, I'm not a religious person; it's just that religion/faith versus science/faith has been the central theme since the show started. Even these threads have pondered whether the survivors were in heaven or hell, a time warp or Atlantis. Anyway, if you haven't read last week's TV Guide about LOST: Season Five, read it.

AC

P.S. The LOST producers also said this and next season will answer more questions than ask. Folks, we've made it over the hump. I look forward to this "time travel" theme with predestined giddiness.

Good stuff, harkens me back to Philosphy 101 in college. I've never read any of the references you make, but now i'll have a look. Has there ever been a television show that made people do as much "research" as this one?

I mean besides The Dukes of Hazzard, The A-Team, and Falcon Crest...

One last idea. Faraday said that the past couldn't be changed, the events would still happen. Yet he went to Desmond in the hatch and changed history himself with his message to go to Oxford. He consulted his diary first, as if was written down and he had forgotten.

I can't remember, do the characters that met each other in the past (a relative term in this show) remember each other once on the island? Did Jack remember meeting Desmond from running through the bleachers? I don't recall from last season Desmond ever acknowledging that he had met Faraday, yet in this episode clearly they met some time in the past.

Jack did recognize Desmond when he first encountered him in the hatch. The "brotha" gave him away

Do you suppose the baby of "Dr. Kandel" (the scientist has gone by a variety of names throughout the series) could be Miles? It's the right ethnic mix and possibly the right age. Just a thought.

good call!

I was trying to think of who it could be but I had forgotten about Miles.

Do you think the team from the freighter, Dan, Charlotte, Miles, are all former residents of the Island?

Miles could be that baby we saw last week.

We know Charlotte is trying to find out about her past and where she was born. And remember last season how Miles teased Charlotte about pretending to be new to the Island, hinting that Miles knows something about Charlotte's past and her history on the Island.

And Dan either time shifted and happened to wind up when the Orchid Station was being built, or he really was there when the Orchid was being built.

I have the feeling they all have ties to the Island, and we'll find out more about each one of them this season.

I don't think Charolette is going to be alive much longer with the island shifting as it is. She's had the nose bleeds and her memory is being affected.