Yet another reason the sideways world doesn’t work
I had another thought today regarding the conceit behind the sideways world. Obviously, if you’ve read the about page here, you already know my general thinking behind why the sideways storyline was a failed experiment — but there’s yet another flaw that hadn’t occurred to me before. (As if I needed another reason to be doing this.)
As I mentioned earlier, one of the things that bothered me the most about the sideways world was the ultimate revelation that, in the afterlife, “there is no now.” This was a way to explain how all the characters had come back together in death, even though many were still alive at the end of the actual story. Well, let’s say that, just for a minute, we roll with that and say it’s not as much of a cop-out as it really is.
The upshot there is that, once dead, the characters are no longer living in linear time. However, throughout much of the series, we have seen numerous instances of the dead interacting with the living (mostly Hurley), operating very much in linear time. If being freed from this mortal coil indeed takes people into a state of timeless existence, they wouldn’t be interacting with the still-living in this way at all.
Granted, I’m sure plenty of people can come up with an explanation for how this isn’t a real contradiction. I could probably even come up with one myself if I really wanted to. However, it would require some highly elastic thinking, and would, as a result, be more than a bit of a stretch.
