Mysterious Relationships

Lost returns tonight. Grade-A speculation —and some stuff that seems to be actually true — is now popping up all over the net. In other words, it’s time for some totally irresponsible theorizing!

Basically, it’s all about Time, or the lack of it, or the it folding in on itself, or it being everywhen all at once, like cable reruns of Law and Order during weekday afternoons. As EW says, “The Island is a place where the future has already happened.” Neat! Or something. Now Lindelof and co. just have to manage to avoid the last two seasons turning into extended variants on Deja Vu, or that Star Trek movie with the whales.

But let’s go a little further. Lindelof has said that fans should study up on the Bible if they want to know what’s coming. Doubtless some of the devoted will now dutifully truck off to divinity school, and Tufts will add Lost Studies to its theology department. Nerds are very excited about this!

But what I’m thinking is: Maybe the whole series is just a really long answer (or “exploration,” as the artsy-fartsy among us like to say) to what Ross Douthat is talking about here:

[Maybe] the Fall is both a temporal and an extra- or supra-temporal event, one whose impact on creation runs both forward and backward in time, retroactively poisoning the pre-historic development of man as well as his history. This sounds like the strangest and most implausible of the possible explanations, obviously. But given the mysterious relationship between space and time that modern physics has uncovered, and the still more mysterious relationship between space, time and eternity that obtains if Christianity’s account of things is true, it may not be quite so implausible as it sounds.

I don’t know if I’m really comfortable saying I actually know what this means, but “strange and implausible” as this explanation may be, it sounds like about as good a Theory of Lost as anything else I’ve read.

(On a related note, this is the cleverest explanation of string theory’s ten-dimensional universe I’ve yet to see, (though I admit I’m not often out actively hunting down clever explanation of string theory). People who actually know anything about physics — ie: people other than me — are encouraged to let me know how wrong it is in the comments. Set me straight!)