Lost: Time Travel, Paradoxes, Alternate Timelines, And How Cuse & Lindelof Are Messing With Us…
By fred | March 6, 2008
So, even before he travels back in time to put this scar on his face, he already has. Because while he still has not done it, the truth is that he already has. Because before he travels back in time, he has not yet beat his past self up, that event is the future, or more exactly it is his future. But it is also his past, because it happened when he was only a kid. His conscious might not have lived, or relived, this event yet, but it already happen.
He can change the past, and the future, but without forgetting that the past already happened, and that includes his travel to said past, so whatever he will do, he already has. He could decide to travel back in time to prevent that stranger to attack his past-self, to not have this scar on his face, but the only thing he could manage to do is to end up being the one putting it there. That already happened, and it cannot be changed.
How Lost broke rule n°1.
There was two time-travel in the episode. The first one was obviously Desmond going back in time, and the second one was Dan’s rat, Eloise. And it is the later one that broke this rule. Because when she went to the future, learned how to run the maze, and then came back, she then altered the timeline. Because from this point on, Dan would never teach her how to run the maze. Why would he even try to do it, she already knows how to do it. Teaching someone how to ride a bike, when he already knows, is not teaching him, anything, at all.
So we found ourselves in a new reality in which Dan never actually taught Eloise how to run the maze, even though she could, and this can only be explained with alternate timelines.
Now one could argue that Dan may be wrong, maybe Eloise did not go to the future and came back, maybe a future Eloise visited from the future, so she knew how to run the thing, and then she came back to her present, the future, bringing the present Eloise back. Thus, Eloise would then not know (anymore) how to run it, and Dan could teach her. But we would then have to agree that in the middle of meeting Desmond and being overwhelmed with all those new numbers theories and possibilities, Dan would have stopped things and then taught his rat hos to run a freaking maze ??
A maze that she knew how to run just minutes ago at that !! And furthermore, that he wouldn’t have mentioned this incident to Desmond, how Eloise stopped knowing how to run the maze, and how he had to teach her after all, right before she died.
This just seems so illogic, at the very least, that I just cannot believe it.
Rule n°2 : The time travel or the actions done during the time travel cannot depend on actions done during the time travel or their consequences.
This one rule is required for things to keep making sense, to keep being possible to have happened in the first place. Because if I can agree and go with the idea that the entire timeline actually happens within one single moment, that all moments in time do happen simultaneously, in a way, and that it is only our perception of the temporal dimension that gives us the impression of time going by like we feel it does, and thing happen one after the other in a linear way, still it all needs to make sense, somehow.
And one absolute required rule for this is that in order to happen, an action cannot require to have already happened. One could not go back in time, meet a girl, fall in love and have a life with her, in the past/her present, have a family, only to realize that their kid was actually himself. He cannot be his own father, it simply doesn’t make any sense. I think we all agree there.
