Since we’re talking about theories, my favorite theory about Adam & Eve is that they’re Desmond and Penny — Charlie Hume grows up to become Charles Widmore, and his own grandfather. We have no idea who Penny’s mother is or if she’s even biologically Charles’s daughter, but I think there’d be a decent poetry to it. Like Hawking faced with raising Daniel, all the time knowing he’d die in 1977, Widmore would grow up on the island, all the time knowing he’d be responsible for bringing his parents together and forcing them to a place they didn’t want to be. I like the symmetry there, though there’s really nothing to indicate this is something they’re really leading toward.

Smokey has generally been quite truthful in his claims, except that Jacob is not protecting the island from something. The balance of black & white on the island allows it to exist – once Jacob & Smokey are not there to maintain that balance, it ceases to be. Over the next few episodes, Smokey will succeed in leaving, which will create a ripple effect that retroactively causes the island to sink as we witnessed in “LA X.” (Time being non-linear for Trafalmadorians like Jacob & Smokey, of course!)

The timeline will reboot in a way that all of our island friends will have the semi-happy lives free of Jacob’s meddling that we’ve been seeing… except for some residual lingering traces of the past. I figure Desmond, who became special with the failsafe, somehow can straddle these realities and is able to put the band back together in 2004, where they go back to the underwater island to do something really important but cryptic for somebody (Widmore? Faraday? Jacob’s ghost?). And that’s where the show will end, with redemption, struggle, and a really big close-up of somebody’s eye.

Thoughts?

One thing I noticed last night — of the three main Oceanics that are part of Team Smokey now (Claire, Sayid, Sawyer), all of them still seem inordinately hung up on people they’d lost. Claire seems to have gone insane over the loss of Aaron, Sayid is still destroyed because of Nadia’s death, and even after he seemed to get some peace after killing Locke’s dad and getting over his parents’ death, Sawyer now seems hung up on Juliet’s death.

So much of the show has been about choices and how the cast deals with death, and I don’t see this as a coincidence. Jack doesn’t seem terribly torn up about his father anymore, Kate’s never seemed particularly bothered by what she did, and Ben actually seems remorseful for his actions. I’m guessing this will become more important as the season progresses?