I haven't re-watched the episodes yet, but...
... I'll throw out my initial speculations now along with LC...
I did predict last season that Miles is the son of the "orientation video dude", and I'll be thrilled if that turns out to be true. Also, it did seem to me that the prologue to the season premier was trying to show us that the problem with pregnant women only started after the "unlimited energy source" was discovered. Whether or not "the incident" is related to this or not is still unclear, but if it is then it might imply that the Swan station and the 108 minutes were connected directly to managing the energy source beneath the Orchid. But if that's the case, then why didn't the destruction of the Swan station have more dire consequences than it appeared to have?
If Ben has been working with Hawking all along, then perhaps we can conclude that Ben goaded John into "not pushing the button" because he knew what that would cause Desmond to do. It also seems to settle the question of who Hawking is allied with (Ben rather than Widmore, although she could be a free or double agent only interested in some ultimate goal).
I presumed during the show that she was Dan's mother. We'll see if that's made more clear.
I, too, think that Sun is going dark and vengeful on just about everyone... or at least she'll have no trouble stepping on one person to get to who she wants. It would be interesting if Jin survived the explosion but later dies for real due to Sun's machinations.
The way I understand the time weirdness is as follows:
Right now the folks back on the island are moving around in time, but not with the island. Presumably, the island moved in space-time once and now it sits in a location that can be found... presumably by a modern-day Ms. Hawking... and it'll have the survivors' camp on it and the whole works just like it had when it vanished. The only thing it doesn't presently have is the survivors because they are popping around in the island's past and future. So... the island seems to have traveled three years into future (relative to when it vanished), but the people who were on the island or in the zodiac at the time are still bouncing around in time and haven't settled into that "three years into the future" location.
Dan insists that the timeline cannot be changed, past OR future, and this is consistent not only with modern understandings of physics, but also with logic. In a way, this is just the "course correction" idea we're already familiar with, but he states it in stronger terms than most people have taken it so far, I think. In particular, he seems to suggest that the universe will not allow paradoxes at all. Up to now, people have understood that course correction means if you save someone from getting hit by a bus, say, then the next day they'll just drown in their bathtub. But Dan seems to be suggesting that even if you go back to the past and get someone's attention, your efforts will have no effect at all. It seems to be implied that, to begin with, you may find all kinds of things suddenly preventing you from even making contact with whoever you're looking for (like the way Michael's gun mysteriously jammed every time he tried to shoot himself with it). If you do happen to get the person's attention, you'll probably just end up driving them faster into the event you were trying to prevent. For example, when Ms. Hawking told Desmond that the guy in the red shoes was going to die no matter what (because of course correction), I don't think she just meant that if she'd warned the man of this event that some new event would come along to kill him later. I think she also meant that if she rushed over to him to warn him of his impending doom he would have become alarmed, say, and only walked more briskly to the place where the bricks were going to fall. Furthermore, if people notice you somewhere in time where you're not supposed to be, they will eventually forget noticing you (because to remember would allow a paradox). This is why, perhaps, John doesn't remember meeting Richard in his childhood and Desmond doesn’t recognize Dan as someone he’s met before (and, of course, why Dan forgot about Desmond, too). There is a special problem for the time traveler, though, as the traveler actually has in her-or-his head two versions of the timeline. That is, while no paradox exists in the actual timeline itself, one does exist in the brain of the traveler. Alas, the universe cannot even allow this paradox to persist, because the traveler eventually dies UNLESS she-or-he can find a constant... an anchor into the timeline... to ease them back into the proper flow of time and settle their mind on only the version of reality that exists, allowing them to forget the other version entirely.
Desmond, however, is an exception to some of this. He still needs an anchor (Penny, his constant) but he is somehow above it all in a manner that allows him to change it. (Desmond, it seems, is like the Looking Glass station... apart from the island, but still anchored to it.) This does, in fact, make him a "wild card" and a very desirable commodity for those who wish to steer the (otherwise un-steerable) timeline away from the catastrophe toward which it seems to be headed. Insofar as Ms. Hawking is one of the agents who is interested in this "timeline steering", we may now conclude that she knew that Desmond would not only go to the island and press the button, but also that he'd activate the failsafe and receive special powers as a result.
So, to answer a question posed by jaz... the reason Desmond came to the door when Dan knocked was because, indeed, Desmond is special. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say the reason Desmond could actually save Charlie all of those times without anything really stopping him was because Desmond is special. If we're to take Dan's comments about the rules of time-travel at face value, I don't think any ordinary human could have changed things that way.
Much of Richard's time traveling seems to have been initiated by John. I doubt this includes, though, Richard's contact with young Ben. Many questions still remain there.
I'm going to speculate for now that what kills John are problems associated with his own attempts to manipulate the timeline. For example, he'll decide that the only way to save the people on the island is to travel three years into the future and beg everyone to return. When it's apparent that his efforts will succeed (and, remember, it can be apparent to the cosmos before it's apparent to anyone else) a paradox will form in his mind and kill him. He'll have some way to come back, I suspect, but it could be just as a ghost. I guess we'll see.
D'oh
I hadn't thought of that either...good catch Jukin!
It goes along with Agent's idea that it's the Swan that's the cloaking device. A lot of this seems to be circling around the incident doesn't it? That the incident let the genie out of the bottle? Dharma as Manhattan project. And then they had to try to do something to try and put it back in?The island, the people and space/time
I'm not sure about this one. You say the island just moved once and it's the people on it that are now traveling back and forth through time. But in the scene before Ms Hawking tells Ben he has 70 hours to get everyone to the island, we see her using a Foucault pendulum and a computer to seemingly determine the location of the island - the computer shows various points where presumably the island has been "skipping".
So... ultimately I guess I am wondering how John could witness Yemi's plane crash on the island (suggesting it went back in time) if the island traveled 3 years into the future?
Foucault's Pendulum
I may have an idea about Foucault's Pendulum and why it's being used as a way to calibrate getting back to the island. This is based on a number of metaphoric ways I think the writers are showing us a 4th dimension.
I was rereading my theories from LT yesterday--the ones DB so kindly packaged up onto a pdf file and sent me--and the first one about changing destiny had a section on names (I think I edited it out when I reposted it here for some reason). I was connecting Eko to Umberto Eco and Eco's novel "Foucault's Pendulum":
"Foucault’s Pendulum as a visual model for the conflict between destiny and change? The pendulum swinging back and forth never in fact changes direction (destiny) but creates a kind of spirograph picture because the earth is revolving (changing one’s destiny). Could this also be a model for Dharma (the unchanging moral principle) and Reincarnation? Are various people (Desmond the best example here) spiraling out on different versions of their life?"
Tangentially--the novel relates to "The Lie"--its about a group of people who publish a conspiracy theory as a joke, but by publishing it make it real.
So in an analogy to space--spatially our perspective might lead us to think that we're living on a flat earth. If we began walking we would just keep walking in a straight line (unless there's an edge). What the pendulum does is show both the shape of the earth and that it is rotating. So a straight line movement is not in fact straight because the earth is not flat and is circling beneath us. So temporally--we think time is linear. We move in a straight line like the swinging pendulum. But time is actually round and circling beneath us.--this is also the record analogy. We think we're moving on a flat surface, but if we had a view from above we'd see that we're on a spiral. (lines and circles also being the two prominent narrative devices on the show) And possibly--just as we think that if we move in a straight line through space--but we aren't--if we kept walking in one direction we'd loop back to our starting point--so temporally. If we knew how to look at it we'd find we aren't just moving linearly, but looping.
One last metaphor--the tie dye t-shirt that Hurley gives Des. Image there of Des being reborn and then his first item of clothing is one which is created by taking something flat and then lifting it in the middle to give it a 3rd dimension--tie bands around it and dip it in color to create spiral patterns. When it is lifted up--things that are spatially distant on the shirt are brought into close proximity. So what if that happens at particular moments to the fabric of space/time on the show? Making it possible to travel in a different way across both space and time to something that would usually be very far away, or possibly even inaccessible? Another supporting allusion for this idea is that this is the basic illustration of the Tesseract in "A Wrinkle in Time" (the tesseract explanation's at the bottom of the Wiki entry).
Desmond as the Fixed Point?
"Are various people (Desmond the best example here) spiraling out on different versions of their life?" --jaz
Desmond is the different one, the special one, the one to which rules not apply. Is he the Pendulum's Fixed Point, the point around which all the rest of the universe turns? Hm..
Desmond as the fixed point
I like that idea :-)
'Cause for one thing, he's at the center of the tie dye pattern.
Have to have a think about implications, but would that make him everyone's constant?
Everyone's constant? Interesting...
The event Ms. Hawking was looking for...
I don't think she was looking for a new appearance of the island. To begin with, if the island and people are skipping around together in space and time, then the camp shouldn't have disappeared and they shouldn't have been able to talk to Desmond. Now, I suppose it's possible the two are skipping around separately, but... I just tend to think Ms. Hawking was looking for something else. Maybe some event that will help them all transport to the island? I'm not sure how else they would get there. All of the "normal" ways we've seen so far don't seem... right to me.
Again, the island didn't go back in time... John and all the other people did. Dan pointed this out. The island went, I presume, forward in time. I presume this because otherwise how could Ben and the rest even plan to go back?
Stupid time travel
Well, to be fair, initially Dan explained the whole "record skipping" analogy in terms of the island being THE record that was once spinning on the turntable. But he did later specify that it was just as likely that the people were moving through time as it was the island moving through time. But I think the island and the people are two separate mechanisms. In other words, the island could be moving through space and the people are moving through time.
Like, for instance... I have been under the impression that Yemi's plane couldn't have reached the Pacific ocean where the island was sitting when 815 crashed, so the island had to have been located at least one other place in the past. So in accordance, it seems to me Locke sees Yemi's plane crash when the island "skipped" to the same location it was when Yemi's plane crashed before. In fact, one of the locations on Ms Hawking's computer indicates a reasonable location of the island near Nigeria when Yemi's plane crashed. Which also suggests to me that the island could be skipping through its history. But I agree that the island "settled" in the future, I just think it's also been skipping. Did that make sense? I don't think it did.
I see what you and Jukin are saying though. But I admit I am being biased because I had a different perspective while watching and my bleeding lil brain was okay with what I thought I understood about the time properties, and more so about the island skipping, so I'm just going to hold my breath till we find out more. 
Time after time....
Kat I see what you were talking about - there were several locations that appeared on that chart. But maybe that's the island locations over the past 100 years for example and not necessarily the locations were it's been since the O6 left.
Then again why does the island have to change time at all? If Dan is right and the survivors are moving forward and backwards in time... dislodged as he put it... why does the island have to have changed times? It could just move to a new location in it's "normal" time and the survivors are the ones jumping forwards and back as Prof said. (That Prof is a purty smart guy ain't he tho?) It would also explain a lot of the missing items and people. When and if they get to the fall of 2004, they should be able to see them selves on the island. Maybe that's what the whispers really are - their attempt to interact with them selves but the island prevents it by masking them to avoid a paradox since it didn't happen the first time.
Time funk and the Others
Right, I think the whispers can be explained with this time hooey and paradoxes and such. I think on a different thread the question was asked if the Others have ever heard the whispers. But I wonder, too, if time travel can somehow explain the Others mysteriously appearing and disappearing (Harper in The Other Woman, the Others leaving Otherville after gasing Kate and Jack in season 3) with no traceability like footprints.
I hesitate to even speculate about that, honestly, because I don't think I'd like that outcome.
Well, I presume...
... the island traveled three years into the future because... well, Ben et al have to find it. But it's as you say... it didn't have to go anywhere in time at all, just a new location.
Thanks for the compliment, J... back atcha.
Spectacle-latin
A few quick thoughts about the theme of being seen--
Why was Widmore so incensed about the fact that Sun approached him in public--where the meeting could be seen? And does the fact that she drew attention in that way cast any doubt on her turning evil--that is is she making a show of her alliance to Widmore for some reason? It's interesting that the very next scene (right after Sun says she wants to kill Benjamin Linus) is of Ben and Jack watching TV. It did make me somewhat suspicious that Sun's appearance of treachery might be a show. 'Cause she knows how to be devious and hide out--so why approach him in the open?
Ahh, and just picked this up from the transcript--she makes a call on her cell but hangs up before anyone answers...right before she approaches the ticket counter--seems like that could be signal to Ben to me.
Then I had this other odd thought just coincidentally because of the inauguration and having a friend who attended who watched Obama on the Jumbotron. Isn't that a nickname for Hurley? And of all of them he seems to be the one who keeps getting picked up by cameras, keeps being made a spectacle of, and also keeps seeing things. The stuff about the fact that he wanted to tell the truth--and now he's the one who keeps being made a false spectacle of? But sees the truth in his visions? (or something like that :-)
This is probably not related but I just thought of it so I'm writing it down afore I forget...Why did Sawyer want a shirt so much? Dan's shirt? That was never going to fit him I thought. And Frogurt's? I'm surprised that one fit. I could only think of two things--red shirts from Star Wars, and a sign that Sawyer is becoming a different person 'cause he's always been pretty happy walking round with nothing on before. (doesn't want to make a spectacle of himself? heh)
OK--what about Sayid--he's paranoid? Seeing things that aren't there? Then unconsious and being carried around like a dead weight. Propped up in the car with dark glasses? Yeah, he's not on the right track I don't think.
D'Oh...ETA the episode begin with the filming of Dr. Chang appearing as Dr. Candle.
But my favorite line: "You know maybe if you ate more comfort food you wouldn't have to go around shooting people."
Sawyer's Shirt
Jumbotron of Truthiness
I was following some of the links to comments that Agent made and she mentioned that I said something about reality getting solidified when it is perceived. (Heh, I remember now that I said that, but I can't remember in relation to what!)
Con-artistry, story-telling, perception--if there are alternate timelines and they are going to create their own realities through perception, then I think Hurley's role is to be the eye of truth. I think it's his vision that they'll need to rely on to bring them to the right path. In other words, if Desmond is in some sense the pilot or the captain, I think Hurley needs to be the navigator--the one who sets the course.
Many Worlds and lying
Another speculation...
... the DI obviously knew what it was looking for when it found the energy source beneath the Orchid. They also seemed to know that just using the source to travel in time wouldn't be good enough for their purposes. So I presume they also knew they'd need to use the energy to super-charge some human who, if he-or-she survived, would be able to change the timeline in the desired way. So, creating someone like Desmond was the key to it all. On the way there, though, they would want to experiment with the energy itself and with the effects of the energy on humans. Perhaps the orientation film guy experimented on his son, Miles, and thus Miles received his abilities.
The reason for so much paranormal stuff being researched by the DI and taking place on the island in general is because this exotic energy is responsible for paranormal phenomena. It makes sense that its ultimate usefulness would be in allowing one to command time... precognition, after all, is a sort of "mind time travel".
Another speculation
Wow...yeah, I think that's right, and is in keeping with the Skinnerian theme.
Des is still a pretty big mystery...we don't know anything about his family history which is pretty unusual for one of the major players. I guess Sayid is the only other person I can think of where we don't know much about family. But I have been thinking since watching that the whole question of what led to Des's specialness hasn't been addressed at all yet.
Des/Jack
I'm thinking about what Des's specialness might mean as to how we define Jack's role. In lots of ways they seem to be parallel--both runners (Superman/Flash) but with Des ahead? And Des instructing Jack that he needs to lift it up. I think Agent might have mentioned that Des may be able to give Jack faith in a way that Locke could not--because Jack and Locke are too much opposing figures.
So if Des can in fact steer the timeline, change fate, be the lightning rod, is Jack's role the same, or is Jack going to be more of the course corrector--enforcing fate? He seems to be at the center of a lot of the looping which might suggest that it's the latter--looping back to where it should be?
Or do we have Des, the pilot and Jack, the shepherd--both guides? As you were saying Des is more like the looking glass station--Jack's family connections seem to make him less of the "wild-card" figure. The fact that he's Aaron's uncle (this just popped into my head, that in many cultures maternal uncles have very strong roles as guides--often they are more important figures than fathers)--Aaron's rod--becomes a serpent (of evil or wisdom?)--a serpent that swallows other serpents (the serpent swallowing it's own tail--Ourobos--Ms. Hawking's pin). And we see Ben's rod next to Jack in the pilot I think?
Hmmm, I think all of that is leading me to believe that Des is going to pave the way as the wild card, but that it will ultimately be Jack's responsibility to steer things to where they should be.
Sorry for rambliness--first day back to school and on the road--lack of sleep compensated for with large amount of caffeine :-)
Des and breaking the rules
Wondering about how the fact that the rules don't apply to Des might fit with other things we've heard about rules. Ben accuses Widmore of breaking the rules. Des is a wildcard--he can be used by either side and his changing of the timeline is what led to Alex being killed? So is his coming back to the island another correction (that is, how many times has he changed the timeline already?) Perhaps Jack will need to be the stabilizing force against the changes Des brings about?
Not executing Juliet--but marking her--was also referred to as the rules not applying. Richard and the others who were with him are not time jumping. Is the reasong that Juliet is time jumping because she was marked? Did Ben do that so he would have a contact among the jumpers?
And Dan says you can't change things (except for Des)--when he knocks on the door and talks to Des is that a change, or did it happen that way in the original timeline? At first I was thinking that it happened that way originally--'cause there's nothing to indicate that it didn't. But then the fact that Des remembers this in the future right after we are shown it happening in the past, maybe suggests that this memory just got created.
And what's Dan doing at the Dharma initiative in the past? That looks like a more planned bit of time travel than the jumping that they're doing in this episode.
Des's dream
Actually I had the same impression that the memory just got created - because something had just changed in the past... which is happening concurrently with present time since the island has been dislodged and is "skipping through time". Time on the island is not synchronized with the outside world anymore. Perhaps the calculations Hawking and Ben are doing are a mathematical calculation to determine when the correct present moment is so that they can travel back to the island safely.
It seems to me to signify that Des has got his "precognition" abilities back, but when they're about the past they come in dreams maybe? It's not just "precognition" but an indicator that he's at the center of the present timeline reality and knows everything that affects it.
...and Richard?
In the scene between Richard and Locke--Richard knows to have first aid supplies because Locke will tell him in the future that he has been shot. So Richard has memories of the future (precog)? Or is physically travelling from that future. But then he gives Locke the compass because he says the next time they meet Richard won't recognize him. He won't recognize him because they haven't met yet? (I'm wondering how far back in time they're going to go.) But why would Richard be able to remembera future in which Locke tells him to be at a certain place with a first aid kit, but not remember a future in which he met Locke?
Richard
Yeah that is weird. I remember thinking perhaps the indiginous people on the island are not affected by the time shift for some reason and they experience time only in a linear fashion.
But that wouldn't explain why Alpert always looks the same - I still have questions about that and how it all fits in. They're definitely making a big deal about that.
speculations
I thought the explanation of how the timeline works was well said. But I too need to rewatch before I can conclude anything confidently about the time issues.
What kills John - well actually, in the newspaper Jack read last season it said that he committed suicide. It was assumed that this was a set up and that John was actually murdered. But now that we know John was told he had to die, I'm thinking he indeed killed himself after he went back to the states (possibly after first attempting to convince some of the O6, and Walt, to come back to the island).
I think it is likely John will succeed Jacob's seat on the island when he finally returns (that is, if John ISN'T Jacob).
I've been missing the obvious
It would take an entire battalion of army engineers quite a while to set up an H bomb for testing. That means it didn't come over in one run but most likely took several trips to bring the components and set it up. Add to that the process of selecting an appropriate island for the testing and it's likely that army has been going to and from the island at will.