SPOILERS AHEAD
Something I JUST thought of as I was fixing my generic cheerios that I thought deserved a post rather than a comment: Ethan and Ben were both already on the Island when Jack and company successfully blew it up in the alternate timeline–Ben was a kid and he’d been shot by Sayid and handed over to Richard and the Others, and Ethan was a little baby who’d just been born to Horace and Amy Goodspeed. So how are they walking around leading happy lives as productive members of society there on Earth X? Shouldn’t they be at the bottom of the ocean, or long dead from radiation poisoning? Do the ripples of “the incident” go both forwards AND backwards through the timestream, so that things somehow changed and now they were never on the Island at all? Or is there more to their current alternate-reality incarnations than meets the eye? Or is the “alternate reality” something else entirely?
Daniel Faraday and Miles Straume convinced Dr. Chang to evacuate the island before the incident. So that accounts for baby Ethan, but not Ben, who was with the Others.
Oh, right. And that reminds me that if Sayid never came to the Island in the first place, as was the case in the alternate timeline, he never went back in time to shoot Ben, so Ben wasn’t with the Others. If he was on the Island at all, he’d have been with his parents.
But hang on–with no plane crash, who told Dharma to evacuate?
And with no plane crash, how did the bomb go off in the first place?
Oh, time travel.
hmm, I figured anything that happened before The Incident still happened in the alternate timeline, including the presence of time travelers from the original timeline–that’s usually how diverging timelines work in sci-fi.
But would Ben have been with the Others at that point? I thought he just got transmogrified in the temple but continued to stay on as a sort of sleeper agent in the Dharma Initiative until he killed everyone with poisonous gas.
My bet is on it being a ripple in the timestream caused by a Superboy punch.
Jesse, I cede to Shaggy on this one.
My memory’s not so good on things such as this, but didn’t the time traveling Faraday have something to do with how the 50s era Others kept the bomb safe? Without him ever getting to the island and time traveling (I’m going with the theory that them setting the bomb off completely wipes their presence off of the island before and after the bomb) maybe the bomb went off between the 50s and 70s. So, Dharma may have been there, set up Dharmaville (which we saw under water, right?) and got blown up without ever knowing what was going on before Ben and Ethan’s parents got to the island. It’ll be interesting to see if Charles Whidmore shows up in the alternate timeline.