so one of my new favorite questions/theories is: did jughead actually explode?

take into consideration: if it didn't explode, and it was the "electromagnetism" that sent everyone back to their proper time, just as it had been making the island/losties skip around in time to begin with. then the hatch would still be built, dharma keeps on keepin on, and everything would be as it was when the losties got to the island.

if, as christian says*, there is no now, time has no meaning "here" then juliet saying "it worked" for the losties to hear is actually her talking about the candy bar she was trying to salvage for sawyer in limboland. miles "heard it" as a message for sawyer, because it's the first thing she says as she's "awakened" in limbo. even though she's lived an entire limbo life with jack and jr. "it worked" is the first thing that 'our" juliet says after her island death. miles hears it right away, because "there is no now" for juliet, who has just experienced all of her "afterlife-life" in a nano-second of nothingness that is the limbo world.

i've got some more thoughts on this, and i feel like i need to double check some shit, but so far, i'm sticking with this one.
jughead never exploded.





*not a tones on tail reference

interesting theory, but i really don't see how it means that jughead didn't explode.

after all, when they are set back in the right timeline, everything was as if dharma had kept on trucking. the bomb didn't work in the way that Faraday and Jack had thought/hoped. It didn't change the past, it just sent them back to where they were supposed to be. What happened, still happened. That's why Sawyer kicked the shit out of Jack. and why everybody was like "the fuck?" when Miles heard Juliet say, "it worked."

now i agree that she could be talking from a place where there is no "now," and her saying "it worked" is more of a statement either about the enlightenment or the church party and everything is cool and shit, but i don't think it means that jughead didn't explode.

also, it ties in with her dying in sawyer's arms conversation about going out for coffee. this was her seeing the limbo-world because of all the electromagnetism shock the same way it allowed des to see limbo after his extreme electro-shock.

see, it's weird to me what some people are willing to give a pass to and take a leap of faith on.

for me, i don't really know how nuclear bombs and supermassive pockets of electomagnetism react together on mystical islands. i'm willing to accept that the combination of those things created some sort of wormhole or whatever that brought our Losties back to where they were supposed to be timewise without actually torching the island.

i mean, surviving a plane crash at 30,000 ft., magical cures for paralysis and cancer, no-baby curses, smoke monsters, time travel... is that really something that's so hard to believe?

I like that you picked up the coffee and it worked connections, that's cool and i didn't realize that... but for me, that still doesn't convince me that jughead didn't explode. for me if it didn't it would just add another level of pointlessness to everything.

in other words, i find it easier to accept that:

atomic bomb + electomagnetism = weird timehole thingy - devastation

than i do:

jacob deciding that the best way to protect himself and the island from something that can't kill him/destroy the island was to bring more people to the island.

p.s. somebody at work got some nutter butters stuck in the vending machine and i tried to unplug it and plug it back in and IT DID NOT FUCKING WORK, JULIET.

also regarding jughead: Faraday's belief was that the drilling was what caused the incident. his theory was that the atomic bomb would contain the energy of the drill breaking the pocket, hence stopping the incident from happening. he was half right. the bomb contained the energy keeping the island safe from both the electromagnetic discharge and the atomic blast. however, as miles postulated it was this, and not the drilling unmolested that actually turned out to be "the incident."

also ties in with the hatch/chernobyl comparisons

it doesn't require that assumption, bringing people to the island just increases the possibility of the shit hitting the fan

Okay, here goes.

1.) I like the idea that Ben didn't go into the church because he was waiting for Alex's reawakening. I also like the idea that he wasn't sure if he was worthy to move on. Or rather, that JACK didn't think he was worthy. I'm more apt to believe that Sideways World (all of it, even the parts that didn't involve Jack) were created by Jack's subconscious. Like, his soul could remember bits and flashes of people that were important to him, but not enough to put the story together, so his soul pieced together this crazy-ass story to try and make sense of the memories (much like your brain will do while you sleep). So Jack didn't want Ben to come along for his ride. Doesn't mean Ben won't or hasn't already crossed over and Jack will run into him in the afterlife.

2.) Doc Jensen had what I think is the best theory of what 'the light' is. It seems clear now that the 'loophole' didn't involve killing all of the candidates. MIB just needed Jacob dead so that his rules would no longer apply. Jense maintains that MIB (or more specifically Smokey, as that is his true form) is just a soul, no corporeal body. When Desmond pulled the cork, Smokey lost his soul, but became a body. And everyone else did too (this ties into Sayid dying and being thrown into the holy water and coming back, but 'feeling nothing'. He had no soul!). Jack, Kate, Hurley, none of them had souls while the cork was removed. This would allow MIB to leave the island as he has matter now and is not just a soul, but it also allowed him to become mortal. And Jack too.

So they fight each other and MIB goes over the cliff and is dead, yay, but hey, we still don't have souls. And Jack realized (or Jensen postulates that he realized) that we probably need our souls. So he goes back and puts the cork back in, everyone gets their souls back, but he's still mortally wounded and dies.

Jensen says we need souls to get into the afterlife. If the cork had been permanently removed, no one anywhere would have had a soul and no one anywhere would have moved on which thus leads to 'all hell breaking loose'. By putting the cork back, Jack ensured that his friends and everyone else in the world would be able to move in.

Much like Jesus Christ sacrificing himself so that people might get everlasting salvation....

I hope Vincent's in the afterlife, but if you believe animals don't have souls, that would explain why he wasn't in the Holy Church of All Religions....

corggirl, i think that's surely a possible explanation, and probably right on line with what the writers would say if you forced them to. here's a couple things though. first: occam's razor. that's a pretty complex explanation, compared to, "i have to protect this island, so i won't bring any people to it."

second: i don't believe that MIB necessarily needed Jacob dead to leave the island as much as he needed someone to pull the cork (i liked Doc Jensen's article, btw). if MIB just needed the protector of the island dead, then wouldn't it make sense that he could have just left after Jacob died? technically at that point there was no protector, only candidates. maybe he didn't know this, or maybe there were some other rules... anyhow, this all leads to my next point which is Desmond. we don't know whether or not Desmond was originally brought to the island by Jacob... however, if we are to believe Widmore, Jacob came to him and told him to bring Desmond back to the island. Desmond had been to the island, escaped the island, and under no circumstances wanted to ever go back to the island. this is also the one person that could pull the plug and potentially destroy the island and free MIB. Is it worth the risk, just because you feel bad about killing your brother and you want to kill him again?

and if we're going to talk about Jacob's way, we shouldn't overlook the fact that he's not afraid to break his share of eggs. Plenty of people didn't survive the crash of 815. So it's not like he didn't kill more than a few people just to get his candidates to the island. sure he didn't do it with his bare hands, but you know what i'm saying... they didn't kill each other in this instance at least.

so yeah, there wouldn't be a show or it would go in a different direction at least. i'm not disappointed with the show because i feel like i didn't get answers... i'm disappointed because it doesn't seem like "what they died for" was validated. it's like a reverse jesus, they died for jacob's sins.

i'm satisfied that i differ from a lot of people here on this issue. and i'm pretty firm in that this is something that isn't going to stop bugging me about the show. i really only brought it up again to show the different things that people are willing to give a pass/suspend belief/rationalize.

Here's a nice little tidbit for all the "that wreckage at the end proves they all died in the crash" people out there:

- ABC says the final images that aired over the Lost credits were added by the network "to allow the viewer to decompress before heading into the news."

Ha! just noticed your new avitar abstraction. Nice.