Now, granted, in the Primary timeline, the evacuated dharmas (including Miles and his mom) were off the island (I’m assuming, at least – I don’t think we ever saw the sub with Miles and Mom actually leave) – did not include Ben or his Dad.

But that may be one of the subtle shifts.

OR! Something that isn’t any of this stuff that I just said.

@Sebastian: …I’m gonna trust that that makes sense. To be honest, the numbers thing has always been the least interesting part of the show to me, so I leave that to others to fiddle with.

@Hsaing: Well now I HAVE to think that was their intention.

@Braak: I think, until we are told something else – and I figure we will at some point – what we are supposed to assume is that because of the hot bomb-on-electromagnetism action, the island sunk (shut UP, science!).
And Ben and his dad were being evacuated off the island with all the other Dharma folks. This is why he and Ethan are currently LA residents.

(Again, this is only what I think we’re supposed to guess has happened, until the show tells us otherwise. If it DOESN’T, then we can continue assuming this, and either be mad that it’s a flimsy idea or just roll with it.)

-Holland

So, what the hell happened there?

Also, two of the numbers–23 & 42–are sacred numbers in science fiction novels; the first is from the masterful conspiracy epic The Illuminatus Trilogy, the second from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I think that 23 has guided most of my thinking about the Lost backstory.

The numbers add up to 108, as in “you have to push the button every 108 minutes”. Alright. That’s cute, but so far doesn’t actually mean anything.

On the other hand, Oceanic flight 815 also uses the numbers and since we now know that each number equals a person that means Oceanic flight 815 could, in a way, mean Hurley and Sawyer. That probably doesn’t mean anything since this whole thing coming down to Hurley and Sawyer seems highly unlikely.

However, if they had this stuff worked out, it could have been Oceanic flight 108, which, being the total of all the numbers put together would work on a symbolic level that these people were all important and destiny brought them together to be on the flight.

You could also have switched the “108 minutes” thing in the hatch to every “234 minutes”, which would still have meant nothing back in season 2, but now we’d understand it to be Jack and Locke and it would be symbolic of how Locke needed Jack to help him with the button. And that would been awesome. And if 234 minutes was too long, they could just have assigned Jack and Locke different numbers to get whatever length of time they wanted.

Sure, on some level it’s still dream logic, but it would have been cool.

Also, Richard is terrified of Flocke. Not just duly respectful and awed, but scared to the point that he wants to avoid him at all costs. We don’t know much about Richard but that seems telling.