LOST - 'LA X pt. 1&2' - Alternate Realities

Welcome back LOST fans! Season 6 is officially here and back with a vengeance. As always, we had a few questions answered on Tuesday, but many more questions were posed and I feel as confused as ever! That’s the glory of this show, just when you feel like you’ve got things figured out they throw another curveball and smash your previous theories to pieces. Last year I wasted most of my time recapping the episodes. Since I no longer have as much free time and if you’re reading this you should have already seen the episode, I will skip that part and just bring to light some interesting things that were noticed and theories to ponder. Anyways, here it goes…

Interesting things to note: “LA X”

Season 6 starts with a brief flashback of the events that unfolded in 1977 at the Swan station. Jack drops the bomb down the hole, the electromagnetic field goes crazy, and Juliet falls down and smashes the bomb…FLASH! When the dust settles we find ourselves back on good old Oceanic flight 815. It appears that the bomb reset the timeline and all the Losties have their original lives back in order. But some things are different? This flight is not the same flight as the original. Sure it’s Oceanic flight 815. And sure Boone, Locke, Jack and the gang are there. But like I said, things are ‘different’ this time around. On this new plane, Jack is sitting by the window when he is talking to Rose, originally he was sitting on the aisle. When Cindy, the stewardess gave jack the extra bottle of vodka, she only gave him one bottle. On the first plane she gave him two bottles. When the turbulence hits the new plane Rose is the one comforting Jack, originally this situation was reversed with Jack comforting Rose. On top of these things, Sawyer seems like a nice person, Hurley is the “luckiest guy on earth,” and Desmond is on the plane as well. We then follow the camera out the plane and under the water where we can see Dharmaville and the four toed statue fully submerged under water. So it’s obvious that Juliet exploding the bomb did something to reset the timeline but we are not sure exactly what it did.

But then we cut to another instance that is going on with the same characters. These scenes all take place back on the island with the Losties that were stuck in 1977 jumping forward back to the present time in 2004. Kate wakes up in a tree, Sawyer is pissed at Jack, Sayid is currently fatally shot, Flocke/Smokey is kicking butt and Juliet is still dead. What the heck? I think that the key part of these scenes is when Miles talks to the dead body of Juliet. She tells him that, “It worked.” Well what does that mean? Everybody is still on the island and nothing has changed from when they left it in 2004.

In doing my weekly reading on the internet and pondering my thoughts, I stumbled upon this tidbit of information. Lostpedia.com has a note at the bottom of the episode recap for “LA X 1&2” stating this, “Earth X: The "X" in 'LA X' stands for an alternate reality. It is commonly used in comic books including Marvel Comics which have an alternate history/timeline called "Earth X". DC Comics also had two parallel earths with similar names, Earth-X, introduced in 1936, and Jimmy Olsen's Earth-X, introduced in 1966.” Look a little closer at the title of the episode we can see this idea reflected. Everybody, myself included, assumed that LA X was a reference to the Los Angeles airport, but there is a space between the ‘A’ and the ‘X’. This leaves us the ability to assume that the bomb exploding did not reset the current timeline but it must have either created or altered an alternate timeline where Hurley is lucky, Christian Shephard’s body is lost, and the island is underwater. This new timeline exists parallel to the original timeline.

Questions to ponder:

During the beginning of Season 5 we experienced time travel while the island was “skipping” through time. The common sense rules of this fictitious idea of time travel tell us that the Losties were traveling backwards and forwards in time. But what if this was not the case at all? What if they were actually jumping sideways through time from one parallel timeline to the other? One thing that I have been pondering for a few seasons now is why Dr. Pierre Chang used alter egos in some of his Dharma initiation videos. He went by Pierre Chang, Edgar Halliwax, Marvin Candle, and Mark Wickmund. Originally I thought that he may have figured out how to control time travel and was using a different name each time he visited a new time, but it would make sense that he was using a new name each time he traveled sideways through time and visited a new parallel timeline as well. If the Losties can figure out how to harness this power, i believe that we will see these 'parallel' timelines meet or the Losties jumping from one to the other to affect the events. Something to think about…

Well that’s it for this post. It’s good to be back. I will leave you now with this fun fact from Doc Jensen’s weekly recap of LOST…

FUN FACT! Stephen King and Peter Straub's 1984 novel The Talisman is about a boy who can traverse between parallel worlds. His name? Jack Sawyer.

Please, if you are interested I encourage you to participate and share your thoughts. I would love to get some feedback and hear what each of you took from the day's topic. Just fill in the comment box at the end of each blog and let me know what you think! To read more posts and see my entire blog click the
Touch 'Em All Productions header at the top of the page!