UPDATE: Heath and I mentioned on the “Flash Forward LIVE” podcast in last week’s episode ( Episode#9 for “The Gift”) that we received a very good, but lengthy, theory from erseN in Istanbul, that would be posted on the blog(s). If you would like to read it, it is will be at the bottom of this post. 
The LOST Revisited Now podcast will be putting out a couple episodes this month as this final hiatus is winding down. Just a little more than 2 months away until LOST’s return ( possible return date : January 20th, 2010).
In the meantime, we will be doing a special episode due out in the middle of this month. Yes, it is the ” Efren Salonga Podcast” . As our regular listeners know, Efren has made quite an impression on us since his brief but resonating appearance in Season 5’s Desmondcentric episode ” Jughead”. We’ll be joined by some fellow LOST podcasters in celebration of all that is ” Salonga”!
Heath and I will also be doing a two part special based on an article that I linked to prior to Season 5 Premiere that I first saw on Nicole’s LOST blog called ” The Pre Season Five Top Ten Essential Episodes” We are going to be looking back at these episodes and , in particular, why they may have stood out to Damon and Carlton when writing last season. We will be recording the first part sometime in the last week of November.
I will keep you updated on when these episodes will be posted.
Recently, Donald from the ” Donald is LOST” podcast did an all musical episode called…. ” Donald is LOST : The Musical” As well as, of course, joining Donald and his co-hosts, Charlotte and Mikhail, I had the pleasure in taking part in the episode along with fellow podcasters Anna in Indiana from the “Jacob’s Cabin” podcast and Matt & Leslie from the ” Keys To LOST” podcast ( and even a pivotal but silent part by Jed from ” LOSTies with Jed and Cara” 
). You can give it a listen here.
Heath was also on the ” Alex’s Hiatus Cast” this month. Heath is an actor and Alex had him on to discuss acting as a profession and about his point of view on the acting/actors on LOST. If you want to check it out, click here.
If you have any LOST thoughts, theories, questions and/or comments, you can contact us at : (Heath) thelostrevisited@gmail.com
(Me) bunnieshatch@aol.com
In FF News: We are going to be recording ” The Flash Forward LIVE” podcast on Saturdays( at least, for now) . So, new podcast episodes will be out sometime on Saturday instead of Fridays.
If you have any thoughts/theories/FF Alums, send them to flashforwardlive@gmail.com
And you can visit Heath’s blog at heathsworld.wordpress.com
As always, thank you for listening!
erseN’s Theory
Disclaimer 1: I’ll use the word “vision” because A. it’s shorter and 2. I’m so sick of everyone on the show saying “Flashforward” every few seconds! I don’t know why people would repeat the word so much when the whole damn world knows what they’re talking about. Flashforward. Yes. We got it. Everyone got it.
Disclaimer 2: It’s gonna be very long and may be very boring. But you guys like “ramble on” podcasts so you might like this. In either case I’ll try to provide a very short summary at the end; maybe it will make it easier to talk about on the podcast if you don’t have the time to (which is euphemism for “don’t wanna”) read all of it. The reason I’m not sending only the short version is that I don’t exactly know what I’m going to say, so I want to ramble on until I think I make my point. Please skip to the end at the moment it starts getting boring I really don’t want to waste anyone’s time.
Anyway…
It’s all about the ultimate question: Can they change their future?
Yawn Version
The first thing that comes to mind is a paradox: If they change it, it won’t happen, so how would they have seen it in the first place? While this is generally seen as a reason why they shouldn’t be able to change, I think it’s still possible. See this case is slightly different than the one that every time-travel story has to (but usually doesn’t) deal with: X happens. Joe goes back in time to prevent it. He does. X doesn’t happen. Future Joe doesn’t have a reason to go back in time anymore. Paradox.
This is different though. There’s no physical time-travel, and the consciousness travels to the future; not to the past. So it can be argued that nothing is changed from A to B, because the consciousness doesn’t travel to the past to change something that has already happened (like the time-travel scenario above), but it travels to the future, and whatever a character does in the future, it can’t change anything because nothing has happened yet–it’s all happening for the first time. So there’s no problem with the actual time-travel. The problem is with when the time in that future eventually comes to pass and whether everything has to happen exactly as seen before. Can they do anything differently?
The easiest answer here is that they can’t change the future, with the easiest explanation being what’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy. This simply means that something that was prophesied eventually comes to pass solely, or at least in large part, due to the prophecy. For example, if Joe is currently planning to go to Hawaii this weekend, then sees in a vision that he is in Florida visiting his parents on Saturday, and decides to cancel his trip to Hawaii and instead visit his parents because he’s worried about the vision and what it might mean, that becomes a self-fulfilled prophecy: He is in Florida because he saw he was going to be in Florida. A lot of characters on the show seem to be taking this path, willingly or not. Mark and Olivia are so worried about their visions that they keep fighting about the visions and it seems to be harming their relationship severely, probably leading to them breaking up, Mark drinking again and Olivia falling for this very charming, compassionate man who killed about a billion people.
Now the question about this theory is: Does this have to happen? Do these self-fulfilling prophecies take place only with people who, knowingly or not, give in to their visions, or do these have to happen to everyone because of some sort of course-correction of the universe to keep the space/time continuum intact? I think it’s the former, and people can change what they’ve seen.
The easiest argument for that is that we don’t know for sure that these visions are even truly visions of the future. The fact that they’re consistent doesn’t positively prove they’re truly visions of the future. It is an overwhelming evidence, yes, but not proof.
I’ll try to explain this by changing the argument slightly and making the theory a little more complicated:
The visions are truly visions of future, but it’s not the future; it’s a future. A lot of people think of time as a line, and this is the idea that supports the concept of time as the “fourth dimension”. However, time isn’t necessarily one-dimensional (a line), it could very well be two-dimensional (a plane). What we experience as time is actually duration, which is sort of a journey within time. Think of the fourth dimension, “duration”, as a line from the past to the future, consisting of points that represent “moments”. Since we can see only three dimensions, we cannot see this line, which is in the fourth dimension. We cannot see everything from the past to the future at the same time just like we see a complete line with a starting and ending point. Instead, we live in the three dimensional space, and we can only see a “moment”, or a point, in that line, at a time. Because we can see only these points, and not the whole line, we can’t even be sure that the line is straight! If the line is actually an arc, for example, it would automatically be two-dimensional. So what I’m saying is that time is probably not a line or an arc at all; it’s probably a plane and we go straight, right and left when we journey within time, but don’t know the difference because we can’t see past the three dimensions, and everything above is only a series of points, which make only a line to us when we connect them in our minds. If we go out of the house, to the road, and to the park, and at any moment we only see and feel only the exact place we are in and nothing else, we can only connect those dots in a straight line when we think about it: House to road to park. No sense of right, left, up or down makes us think that it’s straight while it actually isn’t. In a non-equivalent but close enough example that is easier to understand: When you are at some seaport and look at the ocean to see a boat at the horizon coming towards you, you see it that it’s slowly rising, because it’s not just far ahead, it’s also actually below your level (if you were to draw a imaginary line from your feet straight ahead), because the world is round. Yet the boat seems to go always at the same level which is the sea level, because wherever you are on the world, you can only see close surroundings and it always feels like it’s flat. And people did think that the world is flat because of that illusion. So the one-dimensional experience in time is only such an illusion, because we only see and feel the moment we’re in.
So time is actually a plane, and consists of not a definitive history, but possibilities. Within our journey in time we don’t have to go straight ahead. Every choice we make is a fork on the road, and we can go in different directions. It just so happens that we can only see where we are, and we can’t see these forks and the road ahead, and it just feels like a straight road.
So, if time is actually a plane and not a line, that would mean that if you see a future, it doesn’t mean that it necessarily will happen for you. It exists, because the time plane (not time line) has every possible thing that may happen within it, but what will happen depends only on choices people make. If you see a future where X happens, you may avoid it by taking another path and see that it doesn’t happen. It’s just like seeing a road sign that says Florida, and choosing not to take that road. What you see is a possibility.
Wow. That was long. Let me try to summarize that in a few sentences…
Summary
The easiest answer to whether they can change the future or not is that they can’t, because the visions will become self-fulfilling prophecies either due to the characters’ actions or the universe forcing the events to keep space/time intact.
However, I think that time is not strictly linear. The time is multi-dimensional, and it consists of all possibilities. The linear feel of time is a matter of perception; an illusion that is a result of our being able to perceive time by experiencing only the moment we are in. We can’t see the future, the past, or the other possibilities. So if you see a future in a vision but eventually avoid it, it won’t necessarily be a paradox. Because if all things that can possibly happen exist in “time”, we can see one possibility in a vision but eventually come to experience another. There’s no paradox because you don’t actually change anything, the other possibility that you saw before is still there, but just not where you are right now. You only think you changed it because you only experience the moment you are in, and are oblivious to the fact that the other possibility still exists.
Anyway. Sorry for causing drowsiness, or any damage to your eyes. ( End of Theory)
) We had a fun time, as usual. ( Thanks to all at ” LRLOST” podcast for having us on. 