LOST SEASON FINALE

To me, it's becoming increasingly obvious that our Losties are traveling in some sort of temportal displacement loop. They are stuck and trying to get out of the loop. We'll eventually find out that the two skeletons in the cave in season 1 were Jack and Kate. Remnants from another timeline that ended up with our characters on the island. I also think Charlie is the "musician" who created the looking glass hatch code for himself. This was something setup by Losties in a pervious loop to remind them that Charlie can change something they've been doing over and over again. They do this because they keep failing to break the loop.

• The whispering is Losties from other timelines, possibly trying to communicate with one another.
• Demond's flashes aren't really flashes of past and future, they are flashes of different times during the temporal loop where the same things ended up happening on the island.
• The chance encounters of our characters in each others flashbacks (Nadia, Kelvin, Christian, Hurley's boss/Locke's boss [same], countless other crossover examples)

This may all be a Dharma experiment. They are purposely guiding our characters in this loop. Pressing the button kept them in the loop. It was all Dharma's doing. Once Desmond blew the hatch, he gained this power to see into the other timelines. Suddenly, he could change the future. He warned Charlie about his death, so Charlie got the marker and wrote the list. Because of this, Charlie has the pen in the looking glass station and was able to warn desmond it isn't Penny's boat. I think the future was changed in this episode.

The hatch blast shot Desmond back to before he met Penny. This worried Dharma as their expeirment can only go on with Desmond setting sail and crashing on the island to press the button. To this end, Dharma has sent agents traveling through time (the old woman from Desmond's 'ring' episode) to guide Desmond to meet Penny. The old woman might not be the only agent traveling in and out of timelines.

This is interesting too...

The Incident allowed a Dharma employee (Jacob?) to timetravel to the future. There he was told that the only way to save the human race from reaching the Doomsday predicted by the VE was to create a Time Loop between 2 points in Time. One in the future, set probably the day before reaching the end of the world and the other one in the past on the island by establishing the button-protocol. So while the button was being pushed the time loop was working.

So every time the world reaches the day before the end of the world, Time rewinds to the Incident Day, starting all over again. Of course, we still don't know WHEN the VE predicted the world was gonna end, so we don't know HOW LONG this Time Loop is. But we know it is at least 30 years. If you knew the Time Span, we would know how many times the world has 'restarted'.