So the new season of Lost debuted last week, and featured the island or the people on it to jump back and forth in time like a hyperactive child sitting behind you on a plane. And like said child, there is a danger inherent in the behavior. The danger is that I'll stop watching the show, like I might slaughter the child with extreme prejudice, if the behavior persists. And here's the reason why: there's just too much that can go wrong.
For any of you who saw the recent film Deja Vu starring Denzel Washington and a paunchy Val Kilmer, I'm about to revisit the concept of time travel there. So if you haven't seen it, stay tuned and I'll save you the 2 hours. Here's the premise: a terrorist blows up a ferry killing hundreds, and Denny's an ATF guy who's trying to find who did it. Enter Kilmer's team, who posses a sophisticated technology allowing one to look three days in the past, within a certain area. So they try to use the technology to see who did it, and after watching a hot girl shower and Denny's partner get killed, they finally see who did it. Denny then wonders why you can't use the technology to travel back in time and stop the tragedy from ever occurring. Despite assurances to the contrary, Denny travels back three days and changes things.
Okay. Here's the problem. He finds several clues that seem to suggest that he can prevent it. The girl gets killed by the terrorist and he finds clues at her apartment, like a message of refrigerator magnets and bloody tissues in her bathroom. It turns out that the message came from Denny when he traveled back in time, and the blood was his after being shot. So the clues that he left for himself when he traveled back in time are the clues that he uses to figure out that he can travel back in time and eventually helps him change the past. The only problem is that he already went back to the past and didn't change it, otherwise there wouldn't have been the clues there! You following me? Stick with me, it gets a little confusing from here. So why wasn't he able to change the past the first time? Because if he had he wouldn't have had a reason to go back again, right? He wouldn't have even known about the technology because they wouldn't have come down to help in the search. But how then did he go back and change things if the mechanism to go back and change things wouldn't be available if he did change things? You see? And that's with just one person, making one very specific change only three days in the past.
Now, apply this to Lost. You have a dozen or so people skipping around in time, to multiple times in the past on an island whose rules of behavior are already a little screwy. So multiple people have multiple opportunities to change multiple things, right? And even though the "expert" (Daniel) says they mustn't change things, he promptly tries to change things (and apparently does). So does Locke through several meetings with Richard and Ethan. And when Daniel changes the past, Desmond immediately seems to feel the effects of the change in the future (the future off the island, which is on a different timeline than the island, as if things weren't messed up enough). So did Desmond just now have that memory implanted? Did he recognize Daniel last season when the two met since in his timeline he'd already had the encounter? Did Daniel have to progress to the point in his life (or the present) to the moment when he goes into the past? But then this brings up the problem of someone in the future going back to add new information or change something in the past which would then change the future and might negate the future that allowed the guy to go back into the past and change things. The problems inherent in this storytelling are multitudinous.
You see what I'm saying? I'm sure this isn't an original objection raised to the creators of the show, and I hope they've thought loooong and haaarrd about how to pull this off. Personally I think that they should just eschew further plot lines involving time travel. And all this is the more puzzling if you refer to the episode last season where Desmond and Daniel's past first cross, when Desmond's consciousness seems to be traveling back in time and he must find his Constant to stop him from dying. The concept of only being able to time travel your consciousness back in time, so that your old mind is temporarily replaced by the "current" mind was far less theoretically problematic, even though it still had "changing the past to save the future" themes. Moreover, it was just a brilliantly written and executed episode with great emotion and pathos. If the writers can continue to provide such wonderful insight into the characters' psyches then I'll overlook a certain amount of sloppy and confusing plots. But the main appeal of the show has been the mysterious nature of the island, the strange and seemingly supernatural events that occur, and thus the explanation of some of these phenomena has to be at least relatively plausible and coherent. Otherwise they'll destroy the credit they've created with their audience, and doom the show to historical disappointment.
All this is to say that I remain cautiously optimistic about the show. The last season was so consistently good that my faith in the writers will keep me hopeful for the rest of this season.
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