A big thank you to LOST for using the hilarious Miles/Hurley exchange to finally blow away the annoying time travel theories flying around this season. Alternate realities, splitting timelines, time loops resulting in multiple (separate) versions of each character- theories almost as annoying as the Season 1 "It's purgatory!!" bandwagon, are finally gone. Gone. Like Marty's siblings and his disappearing hand. Erased from existence.
Like Hurley, many fans based their knowledge of time travel on Back to the Future. But clearly, the LOST writers are not following those rules. They've made their own and for anyone paying attention to Faraday's emphatic "whatever happened, happened" speeches, one would realize this is the rule the writers are following. They've pulled twists on us in the past, but that would just be ridiculous for them to preach Faraday's mantra as the core time travel rule and then rip it out from under us.
So, we can finally forget everything Back to the Future taught us about time travel. There is no flying Delorean, no flux capacitor and no white-haired, wild-eyed scientist (OK, Faraday is a little wild-eyed, but his hair is definitely not white). There is one reality, one timeline and whatever happened, happened. What we're seeing now in 1977 is the way it always happened. We just didn't know it during seasons 1 through 4 and for the Losties personal timelines, 1977 is the future even though it's taking place in the past in the overall timeline.
As for the curious case of Desmond David Hume that so many fans used to back their alternate reality/split timeline theories? Rewatch The Constant. It explicitly tells us that Desmond is different. His consciousness can travel through time, at any time. Meaning, he can wake up from sleeping (er...consciousness time traveling) with a brand new memory that just happened to him at that moment even if the year his consciousness traveled to happened to be three years in the past. Rules do not apply to him. Anything that happens to him cannot be used an example to support any kind of time-looping, alternate reality theory.
On a non-time traveling note, what happened to Jack? Why is he such a sniveling, miserable shell of his former self? And how ironic that his refusal to save young Ben actually caused old Ben to become the maniacal, calculating lunatic we know and hate in 2004. Of course, Sayid helped a little by shooting young Ben. But between the two of them, they created the very thing they were trying to prevent. You can't change the future or the past. Whatever happened, happened.
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