LYT's Weblog

Not to say that this is "proof," but this all leads me to believe that it really is what we think we saw:

1. There's been a pattern of LOST writers using anagrams to give a little more information about certain things... The funeral parlour Jack visits is called Hoffs-Drawlor. Unscramble it = "flash forward."

2. Jack tells Kate that he's been using the "Golden Pass" "they" gave them. I'm assuming that's a lifetime pass from Oceanic Airlines.

3. The actual language Jack uses with Kate... he's saying he uses this pass often (If I'm not mistaken, wasn't Jack a bit afraid to fly pre-815 crash?) to take flights in hopes of crashing, and he pleads that they have to "go back." He says he's tired of lying and that they made a mistake. I don't see what else he would be referring to... and Locke warned once again earlier in the episode, that they're not supposed to leave the island. Someone is now dead and it's pretty much left Jack feeling guilty and screwed. I take this all to mean that he wants to get back to the island to right the wrongs that were done.

4. If it were a flashback, as dramatic as he's been about his dad, Sarah, and every patient who didn't survive pre-crash, the enormity of how this death affected him and the fact that whomever it is, is someone he and Kate both knew in common, certainly would have tortured him for the past three seasons.

5. I'll have to watch it again, but I thought the new Chief of Staff was about to say something to Jack when he implied the guy should check in with his father "upstairs". Almost as though the Chief knew that Christian was dead. Christian was the Chief of Staff before he was fired, so it wouldn't make any sense for him now to be working upstairs as a regular ol' surgeon if he wasn't deemed competent enough to stay on board in his old position. Methinks Jack was just in denial or looped out of his gourd.

6. And I haven't figured out the surefire connection just yet, if any... but there's been enough seeming references to Mythology, "The Wizard of Oz", as well as "Alice In Wonderland" throughout the run of the show thus far, to pique my further interest. The title of this episode refers to much more than the underwater lab, in my opinion. In Lewis Carroll's "Through The Looking-Glass" you're dealing with a lot of mirrors and reversals, including the motion of time, as Alice wonders what things are like on the other side of the mirror. With this episode, I'm currently thinking it applies to the literal reversal of time in the flashes, and Jack's desire to get back to "Wonderland," which actually seems to have been better than his normal life. In the book, Alice awakens from what may or may not have been a dream and blames her black cat for all the bad stuff that went down. In this case, Jack's probably not in a dream, but blames himself.

That's my current theory anyway. We shall see in 2008!

Obviously it was supposed to seem like the past because jack keeps mentioning his father, but apparently that's just of a symptom of his declining sanity. Kate also says "Still pulling people out of burning crashes?" or something like that. Clearly post-island talk.
One theory is that for the first half of the next season at least, it's going to be all flash forwards of how the survivor's lives would be if they got off island. Then, right at the very cusp of being rescued, something (jacob?) re-corrects their destiny so they have to stay.

We shall see.

Also, the phone he used was issued after the crash--supposedly a KRZR, released in 2006. The newspaper from which he had the obit clipping is a real LA Times from April 2007, with the obit added for the show. Plus, he's looking at maps and trying to triangulate a location for the island.

Lots of people are theorizing that Christian isn't actually dead--that maybe he was hooked up with the DHARMA people and his body in the morgue was a fake-out. So it was either his drunk/drugged out hallucinations given to trick the audience into thinking it was a flash back, or Christian isn't actually dead (no body in the coffin).

Also, Lindelof acknowledges that the flash forward is something they've been planning on doing all along. I'd take that as a pretty firm confirmation that it IS a flash-forward, though lots of people are still disputing it. Here's a link if you want to see it: http://www.eonline.com/gossip/kristin/detail/index.jsp?uuid=9c9aafc1-e118-4d0c-9686-6b982fbd4e87