John says:

1. I think Ben is in the coffin. I also think I am wrong.
2. I think Desmond is going to die. I hope that he doesn’t die because his episodes are the best.
3. You don’t. You move everything else around it.

Bryan White says:

Alright.  Let me throw my hat in the ring but know this, I haven’t watched ANY of those clips.  There is no way in hell I’m going to spoil anything for myself.  But this is how I think it’s going to go down, with some blanks left in because I just can’t count on how Hurley, Sayid, Sun and Jack wind up back on the beach… but here’s a high level overview:

Ben occupies the mercenaries as long as he can while Locke gets himself into position in The Orchid.  I suspect that The Orchid uses the Island’s natural magnetic properties to bend space in a theory of relativity sort of way.  I can’t say exactly how, but it’s probably a safe bet that Ben and the Mercenaries will wind up at the center of the mechanism that causes the island to move through space/time, which explains how he suddenly appears out of nowhere in Africa wearing an Orchid jacket, still carrying the collapsable baton that he concealed right before he surrendered to the mercenaries.

Meanwhile, for reasons I’m still trying to come up with, Sayid and Sun will wind up back on the island where Hurley, Jack, Kate and Aaron will head back in the raft to the boat.  While en route, the island blinks out of existence, removing it from continuity, severing the connection between Keamy’s dead man switch and the explosives on the boat.  The island is gone and the boat is reduced to burning metal leaving them screwed in the ocean where they drift until they wash up on the island where they are found and become The Oceanic 6.

The huge cliffhanger is is Jin really dead?  Is that Michael in the coffin?

Booyah!

Bryan White says:

Jeff here at work thinks that the entire series will end with Bob Newhart waking up in bed and telling his wife that he had the craziest dream…

ChrisClark says:

@Bryan White: Man, can you imagine how much trouble they’d be in with fandom if they pulled the “it was all a dream” ending?

BTW, I think you’ll be right about the cliffhanger being “Is Jin really dead?”

@John: why do you think you’re wrong about Ben being in the coffin? Just curious.

@Both of you: really interested to see if you’re right about moving everything else around the island instead of the island itself. Me, I’ve always thought that the island was some sort of amalgam between the Garden of Eden and Atlantis, the type of place that you weren’t supposed to find or find again or leave or… Well, I think you see where I’m going.

Bryan White says:

I’m much more hung up on the Relativity/String Theory nature of The Island.  I think that because of its magnetic properties, space bends around it so that it exists in our space, but an unspecified amount of time ahead of the rest of us, which explains why the doctor washed up on the island dead before Keamy even killed him.

My other thought is that it’s like a tesseract where The Island is this place that exists in the same space as the ocean and real-time geography of our Earth, like a parallel universe.  It can move in any direction in relation to our own world and always exist either inside of or outside of ours.  Only under very specific conditions can it be reached, such as following a certain compass bearing or a magnetic event strong enough to open space enough for, say, an airplane to fly through.

Am I blowing your mind yet?

ChrisClark says:

You are definitely blowing my mind, Bryan (as did last night’s episode). The neat thing is that, while we saw the island disappear last night, we still don’t know exactly where it disappeared to, so we can continue this sort of speculation for a good, long while.