the mark on jacks neck

what we saw at the beginning is what is going to happen at the end of the season. they are going to find a way to stop the plane from ever crashing. what we think is two separate timelines is just one timeline at different points. the end of the island timeline will line up with the start of the plane not crashing timeline. your thoughts?

this is what I think:

the scene at LAX is 2004 ... Charlie and Boone are still alive and Claire is still pregnant.
the rest is in 2007.

the scene on the plane landing at LAX is what I like to call a Quantum Shadow ... a possibility, which in this case includes Juliet not having gone to the Island [her disembodied soul told Miles that it worked]

whatever is going on their seems to be 2 different timelines. but this is only because we can't observe the Island and the rest of the the world at the same time. it's remedial quantum science of 100 years ago being illustrated here, that all possibilities exists equally if equally probable. It is nothing more unusual than the fact that the spectrum of the hydrogen atom has 3 bands but only one electron because each of the 3 possible energy states are equally probable on the quantum level.

Yeah, I think so too. I'm thinking they have to die for their destiny to come true...remember Richard said " ...I watched them all die"...well they obviously didn't die in the incident, but is it that fate has already changed (as of now), or is it that he did watch them all die, just not in 77?

remember Jack going into the bathroom on flight 815 as it approached LAX and he had a scratch on his neck? There was no reason for that to be there at all, except if it were a hallucination, or a dream, or one of several quantum possibilities.

if they had affected a change in the same timeline, then that change would have happened in 1977, sinking the Island like Atlantis, killing Richard and Ben and everyone else on the Island ... allowing for Desmond to be on flight 815 and allowing for Juliet to have never gone to the Island.

but if that were true then Jack would have never gone to the Island and the bomb would never be buried in 1954 [which would have killed everyone on the Island from radiation leakage].

I don't think they changed anything. I think the LAX scenes of them landing are shadows for what could be for a reason, but not what really happened.

If the Island were blown up in 1977, Smokey would never read John Locke and never be able to emulate him and would not have the knowledge that it got from Locke. Also Ben would be dead and there would be no Donkey Wheel for him to turn to move the Island.

there is more but i cant remember at this moment

thats a good point. Alpert said he saw them all die and there they are practicly the day after he said it back on the island. i dont know about every1 else but i hope that alternate timeline thing was a one off because everytime it skipped to that i was just waiting for it to go back to the dead jacob/smoke monster time. its also strange how now jacobs dead they all fear the monster, correct me if i'm wrong but that thing was tearing off limbs and bodyslamming priests way b4 jacob died.

with Jacob alive, the Others could control the smoke monster ... now that Jacob is dead, nothing can control the smoke monster.

i really hop it doesnt end with the alt. timeline.....i want a more emotional ending.

The hard part is remembering that calendar date is not really time, just our way to represent it. Rather than actual year let's look at past, present and future. Regardless of the calendar year each person is experiencing their "present". Every choice, decision and action can affect their future, but only from their current present on (alternate timeline). So, let's say the bomb sent them back to 2007, which is now their "present" (and was actually their present before they started that whole TT trip) and sunk the island from 1977. So, now on the plane in calendar 2004 (and this is a flash to them at their "present" in 2004, there is no island so nothing happens. Des is there because there was no island for him to sail to etc.

Now, we all now that island time is warped, to say the least - the doc washing up on shore, Faraday's experiment with the arrow from the ship - and that warping explains why the island can be both sunken in 1977 yet there in 2007. Once whatever is happening on the island with Jacob/Smokey/the Others/the Losties is settled (whatever that is), island time is reconciled t one state/time.

The reaction to seeing the Losties all running into each other in LAX is that they are destined to be together. maybe, maybe not. I just think it's that we are all thrown together with different people at different times in different situations and what we choose to do, sets the future.

The moral of the story - do the right thing in the present because you never know what future it will bring but also know that as Jack said, anything is reversible, if you want to reverse it. Let's see what happens tonight.