Flashbacks/Theories

From Lostpedia

Main Article

Theories about Flashbacks

Main Discussion

Theories may be removed if ...

Stated as questions or possibilities (avoid question marks, "Maybe", "I think", etc). More appropriate for another article. Illogical or previously disproven. Proven by canon source, and moved to main article. Speculative and lacking any evidence to support arguments. Responding to another theory (use discussion page instead). This does not include responses that can stand alone as its own theory. Usage of an indented bullet does not imply the statement is a response. See the Lostpedia theory policy for more details.

• The flashbacks form the only pre-crash information that can be considered to be the truth. Anything that a character says about their life before they arrived on the island cannot be trusted.
• The flashbacks are seen not only by the audience, but also by the character featured in the flashback as it occurs. That is to say, we only see what the characters remember. Judging by how Jack reacts to the flash-forward in "Through the Looking Glass", however, it appears that the characters cannot see their flash-forwards.
• The unique time-space properties of the Island cause the character experiencing the flashback to actually travel into their own past and relive the events, however the character does not realize this and dismisses the flashback as a vivid dream or intense memory. Desmond, due to his proximity to the energies of the Hatch when it imploded, became cognizant of the phenomenon and was able to attempt to change events in his own past. As the story of LOST unfolds, the characters will come to realize they can interact in their "flashbacks" and take steps to interact with one another and alter their collective futures, however the Universal "Course Correction" phenomenon will prevent this. The prevalence of the Numbers in their past and the strange Pre-Island connections among the characters will be revealed as a sort of "fingerprint" signifying these attempts.
• Constant - The show's producers had always said that there was a reason characters appeared in each others flashbacks - a significant reason, it wasn't just accident. What if the writers have set it up so that the characters can be each other's constants?
  • Interesting theory, but many of the characters who cross paths in flashbacks are not connected meaningfully enough to be constants for one another. Desmond knew and cared about Penny in the both the past and the present.
    • We have not seen a "meaningful" connection between Daniel and Desmond, yet Daniel (who is presented as knowing the most about constants) writes in his journal that Desmond can be his constant if anything goes wrong.
      • Daniel may feel a meaningful connection to Desmond, seeing as how Desmond gave him the information to administer his first successful time travel experiment (with Eloise and the maze), in "The Constant".
  • This is true. Maybe because the characters are not consciously aware of their ability to actually travel their consciousness back to the past, their minds cannot be "screwed with" like Desmond before he finds his constant and Minkowski who doesn't find a constant at all. The energies Desmond was exposed to may have just increased the strength of this awareness of time travel. Thus, once you reach the stage of being consciously cognizant, you then need a constant. So if the other characters achieve this level of awareness they can use the other people they've interacted with in the past as constants, given that they now know each other on the island.
• Until "Through the Looking Glass" I believed that the flashbacks were implanted memories by the island (or some other guiding force controlling all of the events of the show) into the characters' subconscious to get them to behave in a certain way. The flashforwards kind of nixed my theory but perhaps the flashforward has a different purpose. The flashforward may be the likely result of the course of action in each episode as computed by the island. So; the flashback is the island's way to get the characters to act a certain way, the time on the island is when the characters make decisions that lead to the desired aims of the islands which are shown to the viewers as flashforwards.
  • Instead of implanted memories by the island flashbacks are actually changes made to their past by the interferance of others (namely the Others!). The Others have been going to the past and changing the pasts of the survivors of Flight 815 to change the future on the island. Those memories are new to the person who is having the flashback but they may not be aware what they are actually remembering new memories rather than what has always happened to them. Some people may have interpreted these flashbacks like Rose and John. From the conversation they have on the beach in SOS, Rose and Locke share an understanding about healing on the island as if they know they both know that each other knows they are healed. Rose has seen John in a wheelchair and now sees him able to walk so she realises that something on the island has changed Locke. She "knows" she's free of cancer, we know this as later in the episode SOS she tells Bernard that she is cured. I think she knows because she has had a flashback which shows her how she was cured.--Cassiopea 08:32, September 29, 2009 (UTC)Cassiopea