lost

Tyrone Warner, CTV.ca

The season finale of "Lost" is everything the rumors suggest it is -- a "game changer."

Too see where "Lost" might be heading in the coming seasons, it's worth taking a closer look at a new island theory that has emerged this season: the black hole.

A black hole is an anomaly in space with so much mass that objects are unable to escape its gravitation pull - including light, and perhaps, time.

The island is a similar anomaly, somehow hidden, and impossible to escape.

Desmond, who left the "Swan" hatch in season two and ran off to his sailboat, returned to the island later that season, declaring the island was a giant snow globe and he couldn't sail away. However, Michael and Walt, after being released from the custody of the Others in season two, were given a boat and a very specific coordinate to sail towards - and they haven't been seen since.

If the island is a black hole, and the Others are aware of it, it could explain why they can apparently escape from it, while Desmond is stuck in the island's "pull."

There has still has been no official explanation from season two of what pressing "the button" did (besides "saving the world"), but we did learn that failure to press the button on schedule caused an electromagnetic pulse that caused the crash of Flight 815.

In the finale of season two Desmond decided to use his fail-safe key to prevent another such disaster from occurring, and caused the hatch to seemingly "implode."

Waking up in the jungle in season three, something profound happened to Desmond - he began to have premonitions about the future and was able to see things in flashes that were about to happen.

In a major turning point, Desmond had an awakening during one of his flashbacks. He was aware that he was experiencing a flashback, but had all the knowledge about his time on the island. While he tried to change the past, he learned that fate could not be changed and that the universe has a way of correcting itself.

If the island is a black hole, and the button in the Swan hatch was somehow related to it, that would explain why Desmond has a different perspective on time after the implosion. If a black hole can trap time - it means the past, present and future are all trapped together. And Desmond is experiencing them all at once, due to some freak explosion in the hatch.

After all, "Lost" itself has been a show that has treated its own timeline very loosely. While each episode so far has been grounded in the immediate present, almost half of every show flashes back to the past, and all of the Losties have dreamed of their future - off the island.

There are two other small, yet important clues buried in the fabric of "Lost" that point towards the growing "black hole" theory:

• The first occurs when Kate and Alex attempt a rescue mission while trapped on the "Alcatraz" island, and come upon an Other named Aldo. Over his shoulder, viewers can see that he is reading Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time," opened up to a chapter about black holes.
• The second occurs through the anagram "Mittelos," the name of the "company" that the Other Richard Alpert worked for when he was in Miami recruiting Juliet. Rearranged, "Mittelos" spells out "lost time" - perhaps a clue about the strange nature of time on the island. Anagrams have revealed clues before - "Ethan Rom," the full name of an Other than infiltrated the losties' camp, is an anagram for "Other man."

But the "black hole" theory doesn't explain everything. For some reason the Others can apparently travel to and from the island with a submarine. However, Ben did admit that due to the fail-safe in the hatch being activated, the Others are able to leave the island, but they would be unable to find their way back.

Each season "Lost" dramatically shifts the story to an entirely different situation that has been unimagined before, from the discovery of the hatch to the discovery of who the Others really are. Keep in mind that something new and dramatic might be revealed about the island, and it might not just be a "black hole."