4 Jughead-Explosion Theories (And Why They're All Wrong)

Jeff Jensen was back today with his long-awaited end-of-the-season column at EW.com. (He's actually decided to keep writing columns through the summer, but, hey, semantics.) In it, he outlines four possibilities of what happened when Juliet made Jughead explode. Let's dig through them now, shall we?

1. The "Touched" Propel Back to the Future

This is the most common theory (and one I ruminated about at length last month): that when Jughead exploded, all the folks who were touched by Jacob -- Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, and Jin -- are propelled back to the future to the moment of Jacob's death.

2. New Timeline; the "Touched" Keep Their Old Memories

Juliet's act really did change the past -- it created a course-corrected alternate future. The only difference is, the touched -- everyone I listed above plus Sun and Locke -- retain their former memories and can choose to what degree they want to relive things or change things.

3. They All Died, and Now They're Ghosts

All the important folks caught within Jughead's blast radius turned into a ghost, a la Christian and Claire. Now they're stuck on whatever kind of island-purgatory exists for those types of ghosts.

4. They All Survived and Just Kept on Livin'

Everybody survived the blast and just hung out on the island. The folks in the current day run into them when they're, "like, 65 years old." (So basically, a joke theory.)

So those were the four theories that Jensen presented. As I read, I realized...

There's a Problem with All this Touchy-Business

Yeah, it would make perfect sense that when Jacob said "they're coming", it meant he was bringing everybody in the past back to the future to help fight against the Second Man. But Jacob touched Sun and Locke, too. If he went around touching people as a fail-safe against his own death, he only needed to touch the people that were heading to '77. And for reasons still unexplained, Sun didn't take the trip. (And Locke was dearly departed by then.)

My Own Thoughts, with a Thank-You to Matthew Fox

My own theory is that all of the above theories are wrong. This occurred to me after hearing about Matthew Fox's interview at the Monte Carlo TV Festival, in which he said the resolution to Juliet igniting the bomb would probably confuse a lot of people, and both timelines wouldn't be immediately solidified into one timeline.

Which just makes sense. At the beginning of basically every season of Lost, there's a seven-episode period where there's (at least) two groups of people in (at least) two different places, and they need to be reunited. It only stands to reason that the sixth season would include this settling-in period as well.

The key to what happens when the bomb goes off, I'm convinced, lies with two minor plot incidents:

1. Pierre Chang gets his hand crushed.

As the hatch was dragging everything inside it and everything was going haywire, the show took the time to explain how Pierre Chang busted up his hand (in the orientation videos, he only ever uses one hand): he got it jammed under a heavy metal object.

If Jughead was going to completely obliterate the known future, why on Earth would the show take the time to wrap up that loose end?

2. Richard claims he saw all of Sun's friends die.

My guess is, Richard's talking about the Jughead explosion. He didn't necessarily see them go up in smoke, but he saw the explosion, knew they were there, etc. He was obviously under the impression that they had perished, meaning he never saw them again.

So there's no alternate future, and they don't get whisked back right away because Season 6 takes a bit of time to merge timelines. So what does happen to them?

How about this: everyone at the bomb site pulls a Desmond and wakes up naked in the jungle after some time-jumping. Dharma and the Others assume everyone's dead until they all show up at Dharma headquarters, and, with Pierre's help, take over the joint. They then sentence Radzinsky to life in the Hatch and find an entirely different means of hopping back to 2007.

Nah, that's ridiculous.

TAGS: Jack, Jacob, Jughead, Juliet, Pierre Chang, Radzinsky, Richard Alpert, Season 5, Season 6, Season 6 Premiere, Second Man, The Incident, Theories, Touching
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