LOSTBLOG pregame

We are 75 minutes away from "Follow the Leader," tonight's new episode of "Lost" and the penultimate installment of Season 5. I won't get to see it until sometime around 1 a.m., and until then I have the show's increasingly awesome mysteries eating away at my brain. Consider the following while watching tonight:

What if Daniel was right, and the Losties can prevent the plane crash? Logic (or sci-fi time-travel logic) would dictate that whatever they do to avert "the incident" and, in turn, the plane crash, would have to happen even if they weren't on the island. If Jack and Co. are the sole cause of Jughead's detonation, then the very fact that they were on the island to make that happen is a paradox -- if they never crash on the island, they never go back to 1977 and join the DHARMA Initiative, and so on.

So if Jughead is detonated, and the island or its special properties are destroyed, it will have to be after the Losties die -- which, in their own individual timelines, will have happened at least 27 years before the plane crash -- and it will have to be done in a way that doesn't directly depend on them.

But wait ... what of Locke and Sun? They were in that plane crash, and cannot be ignored. So they have to be involved in this non-involvement plan as well. (Is this making any sense?!?)

So how can Jack pull off Daniel's plan to avert the plane crash? Perhaps by taking his friends into the temple and staying there for 30 years, until such a time that they can reunite with Locke and Sun, and then --

Well, after that, I got nothin'. Anything the Losties do, no matter how far in the past, will inevitably end with them being the ultimate cause of Jughead's detonation.

Perhaps this is where Richard comes in ...

LOSTBLOG: "Follow the Leader" will be posted by 3 a.m. Thursday morning.