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One night a few years ago some friends and I were stumbling around a City of Austin municipal golf-course drinking fortified wine, smoking that purp, and generally getting blasted when my homie PaperTrail hit upon what he thought was a brilliant idea for a movie: some Mexican soldiers from the Mexican–American war walk into a time-warp of some kind and emerge right then and right there--scruffy, surly, and a little drunk--in modern times on that very same golf course. They do not remember the Alamo, since for them it has not yet occurred. Wacky hi-jinks ensue.

This, he insisted, can’t miss.

Naturally, everybody acknowledged this idea as the retarded musings of a stoned simpleton and clowned on dude accordingly. In fact--along with the time he got all drunk and red-faced and weepy and confessed that if he had to have sex with a guy (not that he wants to, of course, but if he had to,) that guy would without a doubt be Ving Rhames—it’s one of those things we’ve never really let old PaperTrail live down.

All of which explains, I guess, why the idea of time-travel was recently bubbling up in his (in actuality far removed from simple) mind in reference to what was then the upcoming second season of LOST.

Back on September 20 of this year he sent me the following in an email:

The island and its inner workings are actually the nexus of some sort of time-traveling apparatus. The people and polar bears and shit have all been pulled there from different points in time and space. The pirate guys are actually the crew of the Black Rock (the big old ship with the dynamite). The magic numbers are some sort of temporal coordinates, describing the island's location in space-time.

Brilliant, I thought. Beautiful. So what if the guy wants to screw Marcellus Wallace, he’s onto something here. Time-travel is the perfect explanation for all these wacky island happenings. The crash. The numbers. The old ship. Locke and Walt’s prescience (they could be receiving clues from their future selves). Jin’s mysteriously important watch. The “monster,” which could be a T-Rex. Hell, Charlie might even be Marc Bolan.

It’s perfect because, since time-travel actually makes very little sense once you begin to get down to it’s logistical specifics, it can be used to explain anything.

I bring this up now, following the recent clue-filled bonanza of the hatch and its Orientation video with their myriad indications that everything on the island may be explained by some sort of scientific experiments into magnets and eugenics and paranormal military weaponry, because I hope there’s more to it than that. This Dharma initiative stuff is cool, I just hope it’s not the end of the mysterious road so many have been sucked into.

Enough of Sanskrit scientists and shadowy Norwegian businessmen, where are the anachronous, befuddled, and mustachioed Mexican-American War soldiers who mistake Jack for Davey Crockett and Hurley for Santa Ana?

Seriously, JJ, step it up.