Time Travel and Lost

Going back in time produces paradoxes if something happens to prevent the time-traveler from going back in time in the first place. If a time traveler goes back in time to prevent a disaster, stops the disaster, then the disaster will no longer exist and the time traveler would have no reason to stop it. The other one is the grandfather paradox which states that you can't go back in time and kill your own grandfather (before he impregnates grandma with your mother/father -after that have at the old coot). This one is closely linked to auto-infacticide - you can't kill baby you because big you wouldn't exist to kill baby you.

"But the producers said we won't have paradoxes!" I can hear you yelling at me.

Note that they said we wouldn't have time travel either. However, I believe we've already seen what I believe to be examples of the ontological paradox: Daniel's machine settings and the compass. For example, Daniel looks in his notebook and gives Desmond the settings for his machine. Desmond travels back and gives those settings to younger Daniel and they work! Then younger Daniel writes them in his notebook where they stay so he can give them to Desmond... who then goes back in time... There is no origin for the settings, they just ARE. By the way, if Daniel didn't actually teach Eloise the maze while Desmond was out of it then things are really wonky - or he has a teeny tiny defibrillator.

I would be careful about taking everything that Daniel or Pierre say as fact. First, Daniel could be influenced by his mother, who I believe has a definite agenda (the longest con on the show: 'course correction'); we haven't definitively seen any course correction first hand, so we are taking Eloise's word for it. I don't believe Charlie is a case of course correction, but rather a sacrifice made by Desmond to find Penny; Charlie and Desmond could easily have gotten out of the station before it was flooded. As for Pierre, he is limited by the science of 1977 and probably even less credible; there is a huge knowledge gap between 1977 and 2007 (in which lies the Novikov self-consistency principle, for one).

I can't shake the feeling that what we are seeing on Lost is a time-loop. If this is the case, something has to give (or already has) or we'll just see the loop begin to repeat as the final *boom* "LOST" hits our screens. In the end it doesn't really matter. The producers have created their own failsafe in Desmond and can turn the key if the storyline starts to blow (figuratively or literally take your pick).