FINE!!! They didn't give up. You just gotta shot holes in my theories, don't you?
Sorry.
I can't help myself.
On another note, Daniel's whole "Whatever happened, happened" time travel theory. I believe it. Not because he said it. Or even because Mrs. Hawkings said it. I believe it because the producers/writers for the show said it. Here is an excerpt from The Official Lost Podcast with Damon and Carlton. They specifically address the time travel issue. And state that nothing the Losties do will change the present or the future. So, even though Sayid shot young Ben, he did not kill him. And young Ben was always shot.
Damon Lindelof: Just a quick sort of side note in terms of the way that we deal with time travel on the show - we are very paradox averse; that is to say, when our characters are time traveling, nothing that they do can change the present or the future that you have seen. Which is different than you know, the conventional
Back to the Future time travel story telling.
Carlton Cuse: Or
Heroes.
Damon Lindelof: Or
Heroes, yeah.
Carlton Cuse: For us, what we don't want is for the audience to not be invested in the flash-forwards. When you see that, it would be pretty meaningless if they were a changeable reality-
Damon Lindelof: Well, as far as time travel goes.
Carlton Cuse: As far as time travel goes, yes.
Damon Lindelof: As far as time travel goes, definitely not changeable.
Carlton Cuse: Right. Or that you have a different Jack popping up in an alternative reality which is different than the one that we've established.
Damon Lindelof: Right. That stuff is all really cool, I mean, the
Heroes - case in point for all those who watch both shows, we certainly do and are big fans of
Heroes - but if Hiro moves back to the past and says "There's a catastrophe that's gonna happen unless you guys save the cheerleader," if they do save the cheerleader, then theoretically future Hiro never exists to come back and warn them. But you know, that's paradox.
Carlton Cuse: The hard thing about this episode was actually structuring the time travel elements - or consciousness traveling elements - and avoiding paradox. But that again is something that I think a lot of people have speculated about - "are there parallel futures, are there sort of multiple universes and worlds that exist in the future depending on how events in the past play out?" and that is not our intention.
Damon Lindelof: Yeah, and
Ms. Hawking basically explained those rules in the first episode, "
Flashes Before Your Eyes" where she basically said that the universe has a way of course correcting, so even if you did something in the past that you didn't do before, somehow the sort of fabric of time like swoops in around you and fixes everything so things don't go off the rails. I assume probably after "
The Constant" we're going to get a lot of questions like "Well, did Penny know when she went to go see Desmond at the stadium in 2001 that he had told her to wait by the phone back in 1994?" and all of these questions, and to that we say refer to the Ms. Hawking scene in "
Flashes Before Your Eyes". She gives a fairly good explanation of how everything works.
