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Jughead (bomb)
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Detonated at end of The Incident?[]

5x03 LookingAtJughead

Jughead

  • The detonation of the Jughead will cause a Grandmother Time Paradox as follows: The Losties detonate the bomb, causing the destruction of the Swan and thus preventing Oceanic 815 from crashing. This means that the Losties will never have made it to the Island, making it impossible for them to destroy the Swan. The Swan will exist again (because the Losties were never there to destroy it) and Oceanic 815 will crash and bring the Losties to the island, leading them to destroy the Swan and causing the whole cycle to repeat into infinity.
    • Not so, the Losties got there first before it was built, so they stop the swan construction. To say that they would not be brought there because they stopped it would mean that you have to ignore the fact that they did destroy it and sink the island. If they did destroy it, then they change the future which changes the past into the future into infinity. It's NOT a cycle, its a divergence where the most important event is the change into the sideways universe, which was caused by the island/losties souls saving itself/themselves from the nuke by creating 'a place where the losties could find one another' ie: temporal parallels solve temporal paradoxes.
5x16 JackWithTheJughead

Jughead held by Jack

  • Jughead is detonated, causing the crater on the south end of the island in Rousseau's maps. This was the event referred to as The Incident.
    • Unlikely, the detonation of a stationary atomic bomb at ground level would create a circular dip/hole in the ground. (Its a misconception that all bombs leave craters. this occurs because most bombs are detonated when they hit the ground, meaning that by the time they actually explode, they are already somewhat buried. nukes on the other hand are detonated far above ground in order to fully harness the power of the shock-wave they create. Which would leave a considerable amount of dead trees surrounding the crater.) The one in Rousseau's maps is an oval shaped crater with large raised edges more akin to a defunct volcano.
  • The detonation of the first stage, without the second stage of the Jughead, inside the pitch just created a big hole used by Dharma Initiative to create the Swan Station. The magnetic energy released by the drill with the shock wave create by the first stage have created a bigger "Faraday/Heloise Rat Experiment" affecting every one in the area.
5x15 Jughead

Jughead

  • The bomb detonated. The characters thought they were in 1977, but they were actually experiencing the Flash Sideways Universe. Everything--young Charlotte, the Dharma Initiative evacuating--was in the Flash Sideways reality:
    • If the reason the island was sunk in the Flash Sideways was because of the bomb, then obviously it exploded in the Flash Sideways--and it couldn't have exploded in the normal universe, because then the island would be sunk.
    • Flash Sideways Ben remembers being on the island and, presumably, being evacuated from it as a child. Normal Ben does not. This explains what happened with the bomb-detonating universe: it was the Flash Sideways reality!
    • Right before Charlotte died, she said she remembered Daniel from her childhood, and described their conversation:If you ever come back to this island, you will die). Charlotte thought she remembered this from her childhood, but actually, in her last moments of life she was flashing to the "afterlife" (Flash Sideways) and that's where she remembered him from. That's also why she said "I'm not allowed to have chocolate before dinner" right as she died.
    • How do I know this was her flashing between FST and the normal reality? Because we've seen it happen before. There's no other way to explain what Juliet was saying right before she died: "We can go Dutch." At the time, we were thinking, what the hell does she mean? But now we know that right before her deaths he had been flashing to the Flash Sideways, where, by the vending machine in "The End," she tells Sawyer, "We should go Dutch." And we know from Miles that she was thinking "It worked" in her last moments. This was clearly because she was transitioning to the sideways universe, where either she saw the sunken island or her conversation with Sawyer at the machine, where she said "It worked."

So we know that in their last moments characters can transition to the Flash Sideways and back, recollecting things from that reality. This must have been what Charlotte did.--Sammerjammer 00:51, October 10, 2010 (UTC)

Destiny and the detonation of Jughead[]

We all know that Jack's intention was to detonate the Jughead to prevent everything that happened for the past 3 years from ever happening, changing the survivors' "destiny", but what if their destiny was to detonate that Hydrogen bomb? What if Jack had a purpose on the Island (as Eloise had already pointed out), and that purpose was to detonate Jughead so that Oceanic 815 could crash? What if the destiny of those who went back in time was to go back in time to do the stuff they did, most importantly detonating Jughead?

Let's start with the facts:

5x05 Charlotte'sDemise

Charlotte dying

  • Before Charlotte died, she told Daniel that he had warned her from returning to the island, and that hadn't happened yet at the time she told him. It happened about 3 years later (after Daniel returned in the sub), so this must've happened in the past, and if it happened in the past, then they've already went back in time and did the things they've done.
    • When Charlotte died she remembered this because for her, Daniel had already told her not to come back, it just had not happen for him yet. Think about it, a few episodes after Charlotte died, we see Daniel tell her not to come back. From that point, young Charlotte leaves the Island, grows up, returns, and dies. You have to remember all of these things always happened in the past, it just hasn't happened for the people that went back in time yet.
  • Miles. When Daniel alerted Chang about the energy at the Swan and told him to evacuate, he told his wife and child (Miles) to get off the island. That wouldn't have happened Daniel hadn't alerted Chang about the energy, so Miles and his mother would never have gotten off the Island in the first place.
  • Benjamin Linus. Would the others have taken him if he wasn't shot by Sayid? The flashbacks only showed Ben's meeting with Richard and his mother. They didn't show how they planned for The Purge and how Ben interacted with the Others. So maybe he officially became one of the Others when he was shot by Sayid, and then he began planning for the purge.
  • Just a sidenote about Eloise Hawking: When she kills her son Daniel Faraday, he says: "You knew", so he figured out that Eloise encouraged him on going to the Island because when the survivors where in 1977, Jack told Eloise what Daniel had told them about detonating the bomb, so she made sure that he made it to the island, and she told Jack that he still had a purpose on the Island(which was, in her point of view, detonating the bomb).
Normal theincident1452

Juliet detonates the bomb

The bomb does not detonate at the end of The Incident. At the end we see a white flash similar to the flashes that are seen when the Island moves. This may be because the Island does in fact move. Eloise is the most likely candidate since those that move the island are almost always the Leader of the Others - first Ben then Locke do this. We know Eloise winds up off the Island fairly soon since she is pregnant and Daniel Faraday will be born off the island. However, the idea is that if Eloise moves the Island by turning the Frozen Donkey Wheel, the Losties that are in 1977 will move through time as they had previously. Thus Juliet is no longer near the bomb but perhaps under the hatch (possibly close to where Desmond turns the Key to end the experiment) or she is in the present - 2007, where she is in a giant crater. The timeline continues as it was supposed to with the Losties still crashing in 2004.

  • Interesting idea, but is based on a lot of conjecture. For example, we never get any hint that Eloise plans on turning the wheel. The white light is much more in-keeping with the time flashes, and it would explain why Eloise leaves (and why she doesn't/can't return). Juliet is under the hatch, in 2007--after Jack and company blow it open. This theory doesn't totally explain why Juliet says, "It worked" just before she dies. Maybe to her, the time flash does actually look like the bomb did it.
  • However, this doesn't explain why there's another timeline in which the Island is submerged. It could be possibly that the two are unrelated and the producers are toying with the Many Universes theory regardless of Judghead. But that's a long-shot.

The bomb detonated at the end of the Incident, and it saved the world. Daniel Faraday was right and he was wrong. He was right in the sense that the time travelling Losties were variables, because they did not belong in that timeline; however they were SUPPOSED to be there because everything had already happened; just not for them. Widmore and Eloise remembered meeting the Losties in the present, even though it did not happen for the Losties until the time shifts. Eloise had to make sure all of the Losties went back in time so that they would be there to detonate the bomb and negate the POCKET of electromagentic energy that the Dharma's opened from drilling; it was impossible to negate all of the energy altogether. Faraday was right about the hydrogen bomb negating the electromagnetic energy; had the losties not gone back in time to detonate the bomb, "all hell would break lose", According to Chang. Since the Hydrogen bomb negated the pocket of energy, the Dharmas were able to build the Swan station with the button so that the electromagnetic energy wouldn't build up and destroy the planet. Jack was guided by the hand of destiny; he knew that he had a purpose, it was just not the purpose he thought it was. He thought he was supposed to change time, but he was really making sure that the things that were supposed to happen happen, and, he was saving the world by blowing the bomb. When Juliet fell into the pit you can still hear the sounds of electromagnetic weirdness happening; this is because the energy was building up for another more horrible blast, much like the energy builds until someone pushes the button in the Swan. When Juliet blasted the bomb all of the variables near the electromagnetic radiation that was no doubt lingering coupled with the hydrogen blast sent all of the variables back to the present. They were not harmed because the blast and the energy canceled each other out. In the beginning of the season 6 episode where Kate is lying in a tree, her ears are ringing as if she was near an explosion, because she was. In the present everyone was in the exact spot they were standing in in the past. Kate was in a tree because a tree grew out of the spot she was standing. Juliet was in the Swan pit because she fell into a pit in the past; same goes for everyone else. In conclusion; the Jughead bomb detonated and it saved the world because it negated the pocket of electormagnetic energy. It was all destined to happen and once it did all of the variables were sent back to the present. The sunken island in the flash sideways universe was just a part of the purgatory all of the losties created. In the purgatory the island sank therefore their lives were different and the plane never crashed. Obviously in the real world this was not the case, because the bomb only negated a pocket of energy, not all of the energy the island contains.

  • Instead of returning things to the present, the explosion/cancel out created two parallel realities, the realities were kept on track with each other by Desmond and slowly more of the Losties caught on. In both of these realities, the swan hatch cannot have/will not be been built because the ruined equipment is the same as 1977/sunk under the ocean (ie'found universe', where the Island can 'let go' as well), Losties leave on Ajira 316 and Hurley is in charge not Jacob, this is not the present we knew, it is a different reality present where the Swan did not exist, due to the energies negating each other, the Losties return to the new future they created and simultaneously find each other in death('found universe').

Why was Jughead on the Island at all?[]

DogenKnife

Dogen with the 2000 year old knife

In What Kate Does there is an interchange between Dogen & Jack which suggests that it is a fact that everyone on the Island has been ‘brought’ there. Given that in The Incident, Parts 1 & 2, we know that Jacob brought the Black Rock to the Island, we can presume that it is him who is doing the bringing. If it is not, then most of the argument below still follows, but may need to be tweaked.

If the US Military was brought to the Island in 1956, together with Jughead, then the reason for this could be:

  • (a) that Jacob wanted to destroy the Island at some point and for some reason
  • (b) that Jacob wanted the bomb in order to ‘kickstart’ some process.

Destruction of the Island as an end in itself does not seem likely intention for Jacob. The MIB in The Incident, Parts 1 & 2 says “They destroy. It always ends the same”, but Jacob says “It only ends once, everything else is just progress”. From this we can take it that it is not Jacob who is causing the destruction, but the people he brings to the Island. In fact it seems from this that Jacob’s role is to prevent, rather than cause, the destruction. In addition, we can infer that this process is not new; it has happened before – many times: “...it always ends the same”.

Unkown logo shark

Dharma shark

Additionally, if it were simply the case that the bomb needed to be brought to the Island to explode, then why was the Island still existing in the 1970s? (Note that even in the ‘alt’ timeline, Dharmaville can be seen underwater, together with a shark with a Dharma logo – this means that even in the alt timeline, no bomb had exploded prior to the 1970s.) This fact suggests that the explosion needed to occur at a specific time in order to be effective. This means that specific people needed to be involved, and they needed to carry out specific tasks, in order to fulfil the purpose in bring the bomb to the Island.

Forget, for a moment what Faraday said, and what Jack tried to do. Consider what the consequences might be of detonating a hydrogen bomb in the vicinity of the Island. We know that the island is capable of producing some remarkable behaviour, and affecting time, causing inhabitants to travel through space (to Tunisia), and time, to disappear and to bring objects far away (Eko’s plane, Black Rock), into its compass. Exploding an H bomb in that environment would cause some pretty devastating effects. It would probably, in reality, destroy the island and everything on it; given the sort of phenomena exhibited by the island, it could be that such an event would be cataclysmic – the end of the world. However, if that were the purpose in bringing the bomb to the island, it makes no sense to hold off its detonation for over 20 years.

5x03 FaradayAndJughead

Daniel with Jughead

It must therefore be the case that the bomb is not there to cause a cataclysm, but to prevent it. We know that the Island can move backwards and forwards through time. What if, in detonating the bomb, the island were effectively dislocated from the space time continuum, putting it into some sort of temporal equivalent of a black hole, and possibly allowing the Island to transport back through hundreds of years. An impending catastrophe could be avoided by such an act, if a way could be found during the ‘rerun of history’ to avoid the events which gave rise to the catastrophe in the first place, thus providing an opportunity to reboot, to “progress”, avoiding the destruction.

When the bomb is brought to the island and is captured by the hostiles, they do not have the know how to detonate it, or to deal with it. Over time, the bomb would have deteriorated and eventually have exploded either on its own or triggered by some other event (e.g. earthquake, volcanic eruption). It does not matter when this reboot occurs, provided that there are people on the island who can then ‘remember’ events and act as the time police to guide humanity in the next iteration.

5x16e The Incident, Parts 1 & 2 caption

The Incident Pt 2

If this is correct, then what happens during the ‘Incident’ is crucial. So far in seasons 1-5, we have not seen any events in the external world which could be described as ‘potentially cataclysmic’. That does not mean that events are not in place to cause such a cataclysm, it’s just that the event itself has not yet occurred. This means that there is no reason for the bomb to have been detonated, and therefore it DID NOT explode in the ‘incident’.

Now, consider this. Suppose after a series of reboots, the rewriting of history has worked; the threat to humanity has been averted. This means that the island does not need to reboot. However, the island is now stuck inside it own time loop, and is destined to keep on exploding the bomb and rebooting the same piece of history over and over again. How can this be avoided?

Counter 108

108 Minutes and countdown

In order to avert this, a mechanism must be found to cut into this timeloop, and to stop the bomb exploding, and allow the island to continue into normal time. One plan could be to ‘hold’ the island artificially at the same point by performing a series of min-resets every 108 minutes, preventing time from progressing, thus stopping the bomb. However, this is only a temporary fix. Eventually someone will forget, or be distracted, and time will then jump to where it is supposed to be. In order to stop the explosion, the bomb needs to be dismantled, first of all removing the core, and then rendering it harmless. However, herein lies the problem. While Jacob has the power to bring people to the Island, he cannot ‘make’ them do things; he cannot tell them to do things, as that would alter the timeline outside, and potentially nullify the new version of history created.

What we may be witnessing therefore in Seasons 1-5, is the result of a long series of iterations which have been needed to extricate the island from this loop. There have been lots of temporary fixes, lots of sticking-plaster solutions, and each one has generated an intricate chain of events eating their own tail. Something needs to change to extricate the island from this loop

5x14-FaradaysBigHead

Daniel Faraday

Faraday’s plan may very well have been a crucial factor here. He may well have worked out exactly what the bomb would do if it exploded, and his purpose in returning to the island was actually to prevent the explosion, by having the bomb dismantled. The consequence of this is that 1977 the bomb did NOT explode, but remained somewhere. It is conceivable that the bomb actually did detonate post 1977, either in the 1985 incident (this one seems to have been forgotten...) or when Desmond turned the failsafe key. None of these seem to be likely contenders for a nuclear explosion, and so a fair guess would be that in 2007 the core of the bomb is actually still undetonated somewhere on the island, and the remainder of the bomb is still under the Dharma complex. Sayid has the know how to reconstruct it. --Sean Sheep 00:27, February 14, 2010 (UTC)

What was leaking from the shell of the bomb but not from the core that Sayid and Jack carried around?[]

Hydrogen bombs have a core to create a Hydrogen Fission (first stage/core) surrounded of Uranium (second stage). Probably was leaking uranium in some liquid compost.

Why the bomb failed to detonate when Jack dropped it?[]

By the same way the dynamite failed to detonate when Jack was with Alpert in the Black Rock.

Jughead[]

(moved from The_End/Theories)

5x03e Jughead caption

Jughead circa 1954

  • Jughead (the h-bomb, detonated by Juliet) needed to go off in order for the Losties to realize their presence in the timelessness of the flash-sideways existence. By disrupting the past, they were able to create the possibility of this "afterlife." If Jughead did not go off, the "afterlife" would not have existed.
  • Juliet was saying her line about coffee in a moment when Jughead really exploded (that's why it was possible to bleed through) so maybe it's going off was needed somehow for all of them in FST to reunite. That's why it didn't happen before. And, as they're besides time (that's why it's sideways, although the Island was also supposed to be place where time's different) it doesn't disrupt the logic that the bomb goes off when in the FST they're all already dead.
  • Christian said the FST was the place they built to be together. This is how and when they built it. Clearly, it wasn't a conscious decision. But each of the ones involved in the bomb were willing (some more reluctant than others) to risk their lives and each others lives to reset time. And what were they going back to? As Jacob said, none of them were happy before he brought them there. And Juliet would have gone back to being an "Others' captive" and Miles to hating his father and conning people. But they were willing to that so that they could bring all those people back to life. Those people who were strangers to them when the plane crashed. Their willingness to do that somehow caused that FST to exist so they could come together in the afterlife. Desmond knew this on some level,that is why he thought that going into the light would get him their because he thought that if he pulled the cork the island would sink and they'd all end up in the FST.
  • The bomb never went off. Juliet was a candidate, and therefore couldn't kill herself or set off the bomb. The bomb was left at the site, and when Desmond turned the key he actually detonated Jughead. The "incident" would have been tapping into the electromagnetic field, not blowing up the bomb. When Richard said "I watched you all die", he was referring to them all disappearing, when they moved thru time to Island Current Time.
  • Perhaps I missed something, but don't we SEE the bomb detonate in the Season 5 finale? Seems like the fail-safe Desmond used earlier was simply a different sort of "release" of EM buildup
  • What we see is the time flash that pulls them back to 2007. Jin even comments on having experienced this before. The time flash may have been a course correction, or possibly Jacob's last act before dying.
  • Jughead ALWAYS went off. The whole what happened happened rule applies here as well. Jack and Faraday argued that they could change the past, but Faraday was right the first time when he said that what happened, happened. Jughead caused the incident in the first place, they were just fulfilling their roles by making sure it went off. The release of electromagnetism pushed them back through time to the present. We were all assuming that an alternate universe was created with the hydrogen bomb, but clearly we were all wrong. Therefore, the bomb didn't really do anything other than throw them back into the present.

No Alternate Reality Created[]

"So then what did the bomb do?" you ask...

First of all, if the bomb did in fact detonate (now that we know that there was only one timeline), Pierre Chang and Radzinsky would have died in the explosion (along with several others). But we know that Chang lived to make those DHARMA videos and Radzinsky lived to push the button in the hatch...

So the most plausible start to any theory regarding the bomb (though not automatically the correct one), is to assume that the bomb did not explode...... at least in 1977. Here's what I think happened:

The Island flashed the Losties back into their original time frame right before Juliet could detonate the bomb. The Island had to do this as a last resort because it was the only way left for the Island to stop them from detonating it. So now, there's an H-bomb sitting at the bottom of the very deep hole that the D.I. has drilled. We know that after the incident, the D.I. had to build a device (the button in the hatch) that would dissipate the electro-magnetic energy that was seeping out of the Island as a result of them drilling into the pocket of energy. As a failsafe, they connected the hydrogen bomb to a keyhole and gave the failsafe key to the button-pusher. But whoever turned the key would die because no one can survive the electro-magnetic pulse created by a hydrogen bomb... except Desmond.

So the Losties had to go back in time not to detonate the bomb, but simply to put the bomb there so that the D.I. could create a failsafe that Desmond would later utilize to save the world... After all, the bomb was rigged to detonate on impact. If it were supposed to go off in 1977, it would have gone off when it hit the ground after falling for over 100 feet.

So what was the importance of the bomb?... If they had not gone back in time and put the bomb there, the failsafe would never have been created and Locke's failure to press the button would have lead to the end of the world... So although it didn't create an alternate timeline as Dan had hoped (although he previously admitted several times that he knew this to be impossible), it did save the world--a feat that I would classify as "pretty damn important."

  • The one problem with this theory that I can't wrap my head around is this: the destroyed Swan looked different after Desmond destroyed it versus when Jack/Kate/Juliet/Sawyer flashed back to 2007. The "original" destroyed Swan was simply a pit in the ground that had "imploded." The Season 6 destroyed Swan was a pit that had a bunch of metal in the middle which was sucked in in 1977 that Juliet had to be rescued from in 2007. Since the metal must have been there from 1977 to 2007, then the Swan could not have been built on top of that metal. Juliet should have been simply sitting in an empty pit.
  • No problem with Juliet not being in an empty pit - whenever the time flashing Losties jumped, they would always bring with them anything they were in contact with - they even discussed this in one of the Season 5 episodes. For example, when they were in the boats and then flashed to the storm in Rousseau's time, they brought the boats with them, rather than appearing in the middle of the ocean. So when the Losties flashed from 1977 to 2007, they brought the Dharma van (because Sayid was still in it) and some of the metal rubble on top of Juliet.
    • This particular postulation niftily explains how Rose and Bernard's cabin was still completely intact in 2007, which was something that had been bugging me.
  • This theory misunderstands the purpose of detonating the bomb in the first place. It wasn't supposed to destroy everything. Faraday's theory was that the bomb would somehow counteract the release of elecromagnetism that necessitated the creation of the button process to contain it - which would alter the chain of events that brought them to the island. Clearly the bomb did detonate (there's a very audible explosion sound after Juliet smashes it). This H-bomb explosion in the midst of the island's unique energy blasted our time-traveling heroes back to the present; and it also contained the cataclysmic release of the island electromagnetism, at least slowing it down - which afforded Dharma the time to fill it with cement, and build the 108 minute release mechanism (the button).

FST was created when Juliet detonated Jughead[]

Normal theincident1452

Juliet detonates the bomb

I believe the FST timeline was created when Juliet sacrificed herself and detonated JugHead. Let's keep in mind that there is no "now" in the FST, so Juliet saying "It worked" or more importantly "We can go dutch" when she was dying doesn't need to be extrapolated in time with the moment in which she says it in the FST, since "now" (therefor after or before does not apply there).

The Losties created the FST together, they go back to the past together, a small group that gets there due to the effort of a larger group that began it all. It was, conscious or not, a group effort in an attempt to correct things. Ultimately the FST timeline seems to allow that "to correct all things and move on".

If they come back to the present and nothing has changed, what was the purpose of detonating JugHead? You see few sacrifices with no meaning in Lost. I don't think JugHead's detonation was just a way for the Hatch or the Incident to come into existence, it also allowed the FST timeline to be created. The changes of detonating JugHead bring change, just not to the Island, but to the FST line, where it is needed.

Why does Juliet say it worked? Because it achieved it's ultimate goal, allowing them to find each other when their time on the Island was over and as some sort of reward for all their sacrifices on the Island. It worked, just not in the way the Losties expected it to work. Not in the short run, but in the greater scheme of things.

  • Boone dies in order for Locke to find the Hatch.
  • Shannon dies in order to reunite the tailies with the main camp.
  • Ana Lucia dies to guilt Michael into returning to the Island and helping the Oceanic 6.
  • Libby dies in order to convince Hurley to travel with Michael to get Walt freed.
  • Eko dies so Locke can use his stick to find and destroy the submarine.
  • Charlie dies so the Losties can get off the Island.
  • Michael dies so the Oceanic 6 can escape.
  • Locke dies in order to get the Losties back to the Island.
    • Locke was killed
  • Charlotte dies in order to make Dan upset and leave for Ann Arbor.
  • Daniel dies to guilt Eloise and make her become a helper to people off Island.
  • Juliet dies in order to detonate JugHead and create the FST.
    • Juliet died from falling down a shaft.
      • A bomb exploding in her face can't have done her much good.
  • Ilana died to show the Losties how important it is to stop MIB from leaving.
  • Sayid dies in order to save the rest of the Losties.
  • Jin dies to be with Sun.
  • Jack dies in order to re-ignite the light.
    • Jack died from a stab wound fighting man in black.
      • ...In the process of re-igniting the light.

Almost every death of a major character has a meaning, they don't just because you need to kill off some good guys to make the show seem more serious or real. The only deaths that seem kind of unfair in this light are Sun and Yin's, since their death doesn't bring the type of sacrifice that for example Sayid's did (saving the rest of them).

  • Nice theory and it works for me. I do believe the jughead explosion created their special afterlife. The island is magical and it rewarded the Losties with a place for them all to find each other when their natural lives ended. Their plan worked in an even more beautiful way then any of them could imagine. They thought it would make the events not happen and they would wake up on the plane. If this happened, the time they would have had together would have been erased. The explosion caused them to meet in the afterlife and all move to the next level of consciousness as a group. In their next lives they will all start again finding each other and building their special relationships, they are all true soulmates. Jin and Sun made their own sacrifices too. Jin sacrificed his life for his love of Sun. Sun, I am sure she sacrificed something.
    • It could be argued that The death of Jin and Sun was what pushed jack and the others forward to take down the man in black.
    • Far more straight forward to say the bomb never went off (otherwise the island would have been toast).
    • The FST didn't just magically come into being. As Eloise indicated it was carefully constructed.
    • The whispers were all people that died connected to the island and couldn't move on. All the losties ended up in this 'reality'. They somehow constructed the FST as a place where they could learn how to move on.

Jughead was a red herring[]

5x16 Inverted lost

Lost - The Incident Pt 2

I believe that not only was Jughead not detonated, but it also wasn't used in the creation of the failsafe that Desmond triggers. I believe that the detonation of the bomb was used to mislead the audience into believing that it created two separate timelines (usually "the bomb detonated" and "the bomb didn't detonate"). However, in light of the FSW actually being a limbo-type place, it's my opinion that the best way to keep this secret until the reveal would be for the audience to believe that the FSW was actually going on in real life. That is to say, that it was either a post-Island flashforward (technically true, but not in the capacity that it is assumed by many), or another separate universe where Jacob didn't influence anyone, and the bomb sank the Island.

When Juliet "blows up the bomb," a flash occurs. If you watch closely, the white flash doesn't come from the bomb itself, but rather from everywhere. Clearly the time flash took our heroes back to the 2007 time. Juliet is down in the hatch, but it's not blown up due to the incident or even Jughead, it is in the state of disrepair that it is due to Desmond turning the failsafe key.

As others have stated, if the bomb really went off, it would have killed a TON of people. Notably, Radzinsky and Chang both survived, and were both just above where the bomb would've exploded. They clearly survived since Radzinsky was the first occupant of the Swan, and Chang (at very least) recorded the Swan video in 1980.

  • Dating the videos as 1980 is potentially not correct. They have a copyright notice of 1980, but may have been produced some time earlier. Also, we saw that at least some of the videos were originally shot on film. The Losties found some still were on film, whereas others were now on video tape. However, regarding the point of the theory, it is safe to say that some videos were made after the date of the bomb.

The reason I'm quick to discredit the bomb later being fused into the Swan failsafe is the very same reason. Many people would've died from a hydrogen bomb exploding, yet nobody actually is killed from the "incident" that the Losties experienced.

Another part of this: when Juliet says "it worked" to Sawyer, it was meant to lead the audience to believe, again, that the bomb created another timeline. In reality, this is her talking about how pulling the plug for the vending machine made the Apollo bar drop.

  • This theory misunderstands the purpose of detonating the bomb in the first place. It wasn't supposed to destroy everything. Faraday's theory was that the bomb would somehow counteract the release of elecromagnetism that necessitated the creation of the button process to contain it - which would alter the chain of events that brought them to the Island. Clearly the bomb did detonate (there's a very audible explosion sound after Juliet smashes it). This H-bomb explosion in the midst of the island's unique energy blasted our time-traveling heroes back to the present; and it also contained the cataclysmic release of the island electromagnetism, at least slowing it down - which afforded Dharma the time to fill it with cement, and build the 108 minute release mechanism (the button).
    • I'll accept that, I forgot to take into account the sound of the explosion, and you're right about all of this. I'm not sure if it came across properly or not but the theory is more about the bomb being used to throw the audience off from what the FSW really was the whole time moreso than whether the bomb detonated or not (though I do realize that I said it didn't detonate).
      • Yes, in hindsight, the bomb was indeed a red herring - but a good one. Because of it and everyone's assumption that it created an alternate timeline, I got to enjoy being surprised in the finale. And all season Lindelof insisted it wasn't an alternate timeline at all, and I struggled trying to figure how that could be. And he was right.
DonkeyWheelPortal

The Frozen Donkey Wheel

  • People are missing one important point: in the last episode Ben and Rose gave an account of what happened when the bomb "exploded", something that the other survivors didn't realize because they were knocked unconscious: They said "the sky lit up again." i.e. something akin to the Donkey Wheel effect that they already knew as jumping through time and that, we know, had the result of relocating the survivors stranded in time back into their own time. In Accross the Sea MiB stated that the light could be accessed from different parts and in fact, he built the Donkey Wheel for that purpose. In other words, detonating the bomb simply triggered the "light" in the same way the Wheel does.

Parody of Abrahamic religions[]

Quoting myself from http://users.bestweb.net/~robgood/teach/GetLost14.html in that the makers of Lost were:

so lucky as to unearth an actual historic hydrogen bomb (which would undoubtedly have been blown up on a Pacific island had it been tested) whose name puns so well with “Jew's head” and “Jehova”[.] A being of immense destructive power that various factions have contended over ownership of, it will eventually destroy the world. Yahweh is not known for having been buried for a long period, but similar gods are; for instance in Odinism, Balder is dead and buried but will arise alive again after Ragnarok. And then, in a hilarious parody of vaginal delivery by Jack as “obstetrician”, Jughead brought forth a Baby Jughead to “save everyone”, as foretold by the Book of Daniel (Faraday). Thrown down a deep shaft, Baby Jughead might have been forgotten, but Juliet (representing by name a diminutive of Julius Caesar, hence his successors the Caesars, hence the popes) would keep “banging on it” until it “caught”. Christ, that's funny!

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