“It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.”

As I’ve said time and time again, I believe the season 3 episode, Flashes Before Your Eyes is one of the most important episodes of the series as a whole. At hour 57, it falls almost exactly midway through the entire series run, and the title is a reference to its purpose at a meta level. I believe in this episode the writers were giving us a glimpse as to the final end game of the series. I believe now in Season 6, what we are viewing as the “alternate” timeline is in fact the timeline that Desmond gets a peek into when he turns the failsafe key in Live Together, Die Alone. Perhaps he even creates the timeline when he turns the key. This sideways timeline is everyone’s life “flashing before their eyes” to see what it could have been. To see what they need to change. To see how everyone’s lives are to play out in order to bring on “the” end.

Immediately after turning the key, Desmond is thrust into the other timeline, back in 1996 where he starts to become aware of another life on the Island. He remembers the hatch. He runs into Charlie in the street and remembers him from the Island. This time Charlie isn’t on drugs. There are differences, much like in the Season 6 premiere “alternate” timeline. Oh and the title of that premiere episode? LA X (note the space.) In “Flashes,” Desmond begins to freak out as he becomes aware of the Island and goes to see his physicist friend, Donovan. Donovan is in the library talking to a colleague and says, “Your thesis is a bit neat. The wild card part which is unpredictability — run the same test 10 times — you’ll get 10 different outcomes.” Perhaps, LA X is the 10th iteration. This is the one that they will get right in order to bring on “the” end. The wild card is Desmond.

Back to LA X. I didn’t notice this myself, but saw a screencap online that on the LA X Oceanic flight, Desmond has on a wedding ring. In this timeline, he obviously hasn’t run into Hawking feeding him these lines as she does in “Flashes”:

This is wrong. You don’t buy the ring. You have second thoughts; you walk right out that door. So, come on, let’s have it…. Well, breaking her heart is, of course, what drives you in a few short years from now to enter that sailing race — to prove her father wrong — which brings you to the island where you spend the next 3 years of your life entering numbers into the computer until you are forced to turn that failsafe key. And if you don’t do those things, Desmond David Hume, every single one of us is dead.

In this timeline he keeps the ring and gets married to Penny, rather than throwing the ring into the Thames. Why? Because Widmore is never there to stop him from marrying his daughter.

Widmore never makes it off the Island because the explosion of the Jughead in the Incident caused the Island to sink and everyone to die. I’ve always found it strange how evil Widmore has been to Desmond, for really no reason at all. This has to be resolved. Does he know about the button in the Swan Hatch? I don’t think we can say for sure. But he must be aware of Desmond’s special power and his necessity in the end game. Perhaps he’s read his son, Daniel Faraday’s journal.

When Desmond wakes up from his flash, he sees the photo of him and Penny, and cries and pleads asking for another time to “make it right.”

Little does he know that he will be given another chance… all because he himself came to the Island. He pushes the button, he then fails to push the button on 9/22/04, crashing Oceanic 815, which brings new people to push the button as well as a doctor to save Ben, a few weeks later they don’t push the button, which makes the Island visible to the outside world, which brings Penny to the Island, as well as Widmore’s people / Naomi (note: this could have been Penny all along, however Season 4 is a result of Desmond saving Charlie that day in the woods during Catch-22), which leads Ben to eventually move the Island to protect it, which causes it to flash through time, which leads the Losties into 1977, which leads them to cause the Incident, which leads to a new TIMELINE.

Desmond is the key to his own happiness, his destiny, and perhaps the redemption of all the characters. So far in Season 6 we’ve seen Kate stay still, Locke be comfortable with his paralysis, and Jack resolve his daddy issues.

The only question is how will the timelines resolve in the show? I’m not sure how this will be shown, but I have faith that it will be cool. I think it has to involve Desmond, I would think.

Oh, and one more thing. We’ve never seen or heard about Desmond’s parents on the show. Doesn’t this seem strange to anyone else? Every other character has an extensive backstory and we have no idea about his family. In “Flashes” he mentions he had to “take care of his three brothers after his father…” and is abruptly cut off by Widmore. Very odd writing, if it isn’t supposed to mean something.