Brendan says:

Here’s my guess:  The Alt-Losts take the place of flashbacks.  That way we get the Lost story with fun alternate bits mixed in that can be used ironically to enhance the humor, tragedy or joy of a given episode.  That’s how I’d do it, anyway.

‘B’

E. Christopher Clark says:

That sounds like a totally cool way of doing it, but I want these flash-alts to matter. I want the stakes to be high in this final season. If they’re going to do something like this, they need to make it have a definite impact on the episodes. So, maybe Jacob’s touch made the people he touched aware of the alternate reality they’d be shunted off from (in this scenario, all of the flashes in the season five finale were in the alternate reality… sort of like the season 3 finale was the first flash-forward). And maybe what happens is that they have a choice to embrace the alternate reality or to go back to the “real world” that we’ve known and loved for five seasons.

I don’t know. My main concern is that this is going to invalidate five years of storytelling. In Damon and Carlton We Trust, and all that. But I am a bit nervous.