@hjbau wrote:
But they weren’t flashes into an alternate reality. They weren’t. That was why Desmond was so at peace near the end of the last season. You know how his power was that his mind would move through time and he would see bits and peaces of his future and his past. So he was at peace because he had popped into their futures and seen them all together their in the afterlife. That was the real and true future in the afterlife of all of the characters. They were attempting to imply throughout the season that it was an alternate reality, but it was not. It was the future for those characters.
My LOST is a bit rusty but I’ll give it a try.
The flash sideways were not the afterlife nor an alternate reality. Desmond’s mind (vision, intuition or whatever you wanna call it) never saw the flash sideways. The “afterlife” was the white light in which they all bathed at in the chapel in the very last scene.
For the sake of the argument, let’s call the flash sideways limbo. While the survivors were there, their job was to find each other and remember their past so they could move on together. It is said that they didn’t die at the same time and implied, that some people made it off the island for a second time and lived for an extended period of time(the ones who were on the Ajira plane flying off the island). sideways was just the place where their “soul” would go and wait for everyone else.
Desmond’s gift, was nothing more then high tolerance to electro-magnetic field, only after intense exposure to EMF his mind started glimpsing and traveling back and forth into the future and past. The assumption is, anyone who would have survive that kind of event, would suffer the same consequences. Lucky for him he had Penny.