Lost v Slaughterhouse Five

Calculated. Exactly. It's to drive us mad talking about it and wondering what it means. I might ask in return: if Desmond was actually there via time-travel, why not just have LAX-Bernard and LAX-Rose admit that they saw him instead of giving us uncertainty as to whether he was ever there at all? Why imply that it might have been that only LAX-Jack had seen him? Why not just have LAX-Bernard and LAX-Rose say: "We don't know where that guy went." The very fact that they give us Jack as the only witness at least raises the possibility that he wasn't physically there and was only a figment of LAX-Jack's mind. Darth

That would be a new thing -- Desmond sort of traveling into Jack's consciousness, unless Jack is just hallucinating (which I doubt, because there's little point). So either way, it's something new -- Desmond is either appearing in Jack's subjectivity or Desmond is transmigrating between two parallel universes. Not enough clues to say which way -- wonder how many episodes before they start to lock it down.

DL: This is where, while Carlton has a much more practical background in science and engineering, I have a long and storied history in every single time travel story that's ever been written, and draw upon that to fundamentally provide our stories with what we want to do. from Cindy's research

I would have to say the whole science and engineering thing is fairly irrelevant; they are definitely past the point of worrying about what's possible and anyway -- the mention of prior stories is the more telling comment. This isn't based on science, it's based on literary tradition.

In this case, we said the way that we want to do time travel on Lost is consciousness based, as opposed to somebody gets in a DeLorean or a HG Wells-like apparatus and zaps themself back in time where they can interact with an earlier version of themself. It's more interesting if your brain basically drops into your body at different points in your life, which is more consistent with the sort of Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5, paradigm,

Pretty much confirms what Darth has been saying.
also seems to express a little bit of disdain for "sciency" explanations, which may become telling. . .

So if Desmond travels back in time and he remembers that a certain team beat another team in a football game, and then something different happens, we're hinting at the idea that the future has changed, when in fact he just remembered it wrong, which is kinda cool for us. . . .

Now that's interesting, isn't it? It's a common conceit amongst time travel stories (one school anyway) that any time you change the past, it creates a branch in the timestream (or continuum or whateves) and creates two parallel realities: the original reality which the meddler would call "Home" and a new one that develops from all the consequences of the change. I'd say this is why we have LAX Jack. As to how they resolve having these two parallel options -- this will be one of the larger plot arcs of the final season (I predict), and they will merge or one will fizzle out and the other will become the "true" reality.