Dollhouse Plot Idea: Keeping Up With The Joneses

[Whedonesque asked in Twitter what actor would make a great addition to Dollhouse Season two. Wil Wheaton (@wilw) volunteered himself and many of us simultaneously seconded his self-nomination. Wheaton would be an awesome special guest star, but what role would be ideal for him? Upon contemplation, I came up with this. This is VERY rough. I'm not a professional writer. I wanted to be at one time, but this is a first draft that could probably be better fleshed out by someone who actually knows what makes good television. In this, Wil Wheaton would play the part of a guy named Marcus Jones, and ideally we'd need to get Oswald Patton to come back as Joel Mynor.]

Keeping Up With The Joneses
a plot treatment for Dollhouse Season two

TEASER
EXT NIGHT: Outside an industrial warehouse complex.
We first see an overview of a white van and four black SUVs. There are several men mulling about, all are in matching brown business suits and are wearing sunglasses. At night. They have ear pieces and scream expensive security, but not presidential. This is corporate. A couple are walking from an SUV to the van or otherwise appearing to have business to attend to, but these are last minute preparations. Most of these guys are just standing around bored. There's way more security detail than should be necessary.

We overhear a couple guys in talking about that very thing as we get a closer view of men in white dust-clean outfits packing boxes into the van. What's inside them is not important, but it's probably computer equiptment of some sort. Again, appears to be far more attention than necessary. The two guys mull over the absurdity of the evening, but so long as Mister Joel Mynor's checks don't bounce, they'll do what they're told.

At the mention of his name, camera cuts to inside the warehouse. A couple more men in white dust-clean outfits are carrying boxes out to the van, and we see Joel Mynor walking towards three men in suits wearing sunglasses, in a corner of this large room. One of these men is on the ground being kicked by the other two, their guns also drawn on the security guy on the ground.

Mynor walks up to them casually with a nonchalance that indicates immediately that he's paying for everything we see, and treats the men in suits and sunglasses with the same respect he would have for a very expensive car or any possession.

He addresses the men kicking the third guy first and asks them to back off, then he addresses the third guy by his first name. The guy on the ground corrects him because he gets the name wrong. Joel apologizes, and we see that though the other two men have backed off, their guns are still drawn on the guy on the ground. The third guy manages to put his sunglasses back on during this next exchange.

Joel Mynor: "What seems to be the trouble?"

Guy w/gun 1: "He's our mole, Mister Mynor."

Joel Mynor: "Oh really? And how do we know?"

Guy w/gun 2: "It's our job to find out sir."

Joel Mynor: "No. It's your job to find out three days ago before I committed myself to shipping tonight!"

Guy w/gun 1: "We have to cancel the shipment sir."

Joel Mynor: "WE don't have to do anything. I am committed to tonight. Now in fact. Deal with this."

Guy w/gun 2: "You want us to interrogate him first? We don't even know who he works for."

Joel Mynor: "I can guess who he works for."

Joel kneels down to the bloodied security guy. He takes off the guy's sunglasses and informs him he is no longer employed. That his family will get his final check in the mail and a respectable severence package later. His mom will get a letter from his office saying he died heroically.

Joel Mynor: "I just got two words for you. Markie Jones."

It's now an OTS shot where we see the bloodied guy's face. He's trying not to show any emotion but it's obvious Joel has guessed correctly.

Joel Mynor: "You'd suck at poker, you know that?"

Guy w/gun 2: "Marcus Jones? He's your boss? Holy crap!"

Guy w/gun 1: "We have to cancel sir."

Joel Mynor stands up and slaps the glasses off the guy with gun 1.

"We cancel nothing! I make those decisions and I say we go! WHY do you think I put so much security detail on this evening? I have twenty of you guys in four SUVs circling an armored van. We will do this now. We will do this right. Nothing will go wrong. Jones is not going to outwit me this time! Let's move out!"

We see Joel and Guy w/gun 1 walk out of the warehouse and into the van. Guy w/gun 1 takes the driver's seat and Joel takes the passenger side. They're the only two in the van. The guys in white are done packing it with a final slam of the back door, and we hear a scream and gunshots as the van and SUVs move out.

Cut to inside the warehouse. The mole guy is now dead. Guy w/gun 2 turns around to see the convoy driving away without him. He curses under his breath and touches his earpiece. "Clean up on aisle five. ..yeah I'll be here. Hurry up."

Cut to show the five vehciles on the road. Everyone's on high alert because news has been passed around by earpiece that Jones knows and to be on their guard. None of them are taking this lightly.

Joel puts one of the earpieces on, looks at the sunglasses and opts not to wear them. We cut to the perspective of the Guy w/gun 1 and whenever we see through a security guys eyes we find out that the shades are actually high tech w/night vision and computer readouts intended to help them. Joel tells the four SUVs to report in. SUVs 1, 3, and 4 respond in a routine business like manner, but SUV 2 does not. Joel looks in the mirror, then sticks his head out the side window. There's only three SUVs following him now.

Guy w/gun 1 yelps. Joel asks what's wrong as the guy takes off his sunglasses. "it musta shorted out. Just went dark. Can't drive like that."SUV4 reports in quickly that their shades just shorted out. Joel asks if the others have the same problem. SUV1 reports immediately, and Guy w/gun 1 points out that they're all on wifi anyone could hack into them, to which Joel tells him to shut up. Then Joel realizes SUV 3 hasn't reported in. He checks the mirror and looks outside again, and there's no b lack SUVs behind him now. Only the two in front of him.

That's when the back doors on the van burst open, and a black garbed figure falls into frame from the roof of the van. Immediately after that, the two cars in front of the white van explode. The Guy w/gun 1 yelps again and struggles to avoid the exploding cars, causing the van to almost run off the road and threaten to drive into a ravine. The guy w/gun 1 manages to keep the van upright and back on the road, but half the goods have fallen out the back of the van, and we get a close up of Joel Mynor looking as if he's seen a ghost. He's looking at the black garbed figure who puts a gun to the back of The Guy w/Gun 1's head.

Echo: "That was an impressive display of driving. Joel ain't paying you enough."

Guy w/gun 1: "Mister Mynor?"

Joel: "Rebecca?"

Guy w/gun 1: "You know this lady?"

Echo: "Who's Rebecca?" she turns her attention back to the driver, "Stop it here so I can shoot you."

Guy w/gun 1: "Lady my driving right now is the only thing keeping you from killing me."

Echo: "actually you're wrong."

She shoots him point blank in the back of the head, but we don't see that. We see an outside shot of the white van running off the road into the ravine. Then we see Echo holding a groggy Joel and dragging him out of the van. She gets him to safety just in time as the van explodes. He tries to catch his breath.

Joel: "What the hell is the meaning of this? I'm one of your clients! I pay the Dollhouse! Why the hell are you attacking me?"

Echo: "I really don't know what you're talking about, but Mister Jones hired me to send you a message. You wanna hear the message? It's pretty funny."

Joel: "I don't care about that. I get the message! He's willing to do whatever it takes to put me outta business so he can be the next Bill Gates. Whatever! I can't believe this! Every year! Once a year for the past three or four years I've ordered you! From the Dollhouse! You come to my house with my wife's brain in your head! Don't you remember? Of course you don't remember. Well if you don't remember Rebecca maybe you remember that cop's fantasy lady. Caroline. You remember her? Some FBI guy was trying to find you. Did he?"

Echo: "Caroline..?"

Joel: "Yeah! Caroline! That took that smirk off your face didn't it? Now you tell me how I can get an audience with your boss.

Echo: "Mister Jones?"

Joel: "No! Your real boss! Adele DeWitt! Cuz if Markie is gonna start using MY Dollhouse to put me outta business, turnabout's fair play!"

...

Okay that's just the teaser. In the first act I see Oswald Patton as Joel Mynor storming into Adele's office and demanding an audience. She counters that she had no idea Jones was using her services to take out one of her other clients. This is of course a lie. She offers Mynor all the resources at her disposal to get back at Marcus Jones and Mynor is all for the idea. We then see that play out, and during that exchange, we meet Marcus Jones for the first time. Marcus Jones would be played by Wil Wheaton.

Through the rest of the episode, we witness an interplay between Marcus Jones and Joel Mynor. They try to outwit one another, and during the course of this they both get more obsessed with outdoing one another, exhausting all of their money and resources to be able to afford Dewitt's services. We also get to see moments like Echo and Sierra pitted against each other. This time Echo is working for Joel and Sierra is working for Marcus. Echo is supposed to protect Joel and kill Marcus. Sierra is supposed to defend Marcus and take out Joel. Marcus orders Sierra to kill Echo, but Joel never goes that far in return.

We learn as the episode progresses that Marcus Jones is much like Joel Mynor in many ways. They have a history together. They went to school together. They used to be friends and in a way still are, but business is business and they're both vying for position in the industrial computer sector, which turns out to be a lot more bloody and dangerous than you might think. The two guys treat this like it's a video game; they use their pocketbooks like joysticks and the Dollhouse like a PS3. Marcus is much more soulless than Joel. He's literally willing to do anything to outdo his old friend. Joel has a line he won't cross and it looks like it'll cost him the fight.

A subplot involves Ballard and Boyd investigating both of these men. DeWitt's real goal here is to keep both Mynor and Jones preoccupied while the Dollhouse tries to find out what dirt is under their fingernails. Boyd and Ballard discover that at first it appears Mynor is secretly involved in overseas weapons shipments to a foreign country that is most decidedly not one of the Dollhouse's clients. These weapons are being put into the hands of children in a third world country and DeWitt has a personal stake in keeping that from happening any longer. So they confront Mynor about this in the last act and Mynor insists he knows nothing about it. Then Boyd & Ballard look at the same evidence another way and discover that Jones has been doing this the entire time, and purposefully making it to look like Mynor is the culprit, so if Jones' more questionable business transactions ever got found out, Mynor would be the one to go down.

The climax of the episode lets Marcus Jones get away physically (cuz now he's a great potential villan for future episodes, with motive to bring down the Dollhouse), but the Dollhouse now has enough information to anonymously report Jones' company to the authorities for a full investigation. Therefore, Mynor wins in his Keeping Up With the Joneses competition, but then he gets the final bill, and in order to pay the Dollhouse back for everything they've done for him, Mynor essentially has to sign over controlling interest in his company. He's now penniless.

Mynor asks DeWitt for a job, to which she admits he's a little too reckless and foolhardy to work for for her company, "but if you give your resume to the receptionist before you leave, I'll keep your name on file for the next six months. Maybe a janitor position will open up."

Course Correcting Lost

"Doing time travel is a little bit like dating a beautiful girl. It seems really attractive at first and really fun and then you discover that she's high maintenance. Then you discover that she's actually psychotic, and you can't extricate yourself from the relationship. It seemed really alluring at the beginning of the season. By the end of the season we were like 'whew!' We just wanted to escape with our lives."
- Carlton Cuse

Back in April I attempted to tackle this topic with Lost Versus The Temporal Paradox but I just read over that and I didn't explain it well enough. I need to simplify my position. Please understand that's almost impossible given the subject matter. Temporal physics is widely theoretical. Some would argue that at best it is speculative fiction and at worst it's not science at all. Many scientists presume that time travel is not even possible. It's like assuming a comic strip character could magically lift himself off the newsprint and walk around in our three dimensional universe.

We are in fact traveling through time right now at one second per second. You may notice if you are in a fast car or a moving train, that outside it appears that people and things not going your speed and your direction are moving more slowly. In fact they are. Einstein's theory of relativity proves that. The faster you travel, the slower time moves around you. This is essentially why the GPS guys have to resynchronize their clocks with the ones floating in geostationary orbit out in space. Time outside the atmosphere of the planet Earth differs from time here on the ground.

On television, or in the movies, or even in your favorite novel, time works on even more absurd levels of rules. First there's the actual time you use to experience a story. For example, in the first few seasons of Lost we estimate that the average episode reveals to us approximately three days on the Island, however it takes us less than an hour to experience any single episode. This is not consistent w/other shows by the way. Time works differently for all shows but I'm concentrating on Lost right now.

Secondly, time differs inside the show itself. The writers could have chosen to pull a fast one. They could have made us think time worked one way for a given episode, and then for another episode it would work differently. However, for the first few seasons they were mostly consistent w/audience perceptions of time. One episode per every three days, give or take. This is in regards the 'present day' storytelling. Flashbacks are a whole other can of worms. In fact, in some episodes there were flashbacks that gave us information of events transpiring on the Island while other events we already knew about were going on. You can look over a very detailed time line over at LostPedia.com . Wherever possible, the producers of Lost were careful to give us visual and auditory clues to explain when and where they deviated temporally, and how that affected the story. We could tell after a dramatic sound cue and cutaway, that now we're no longer viewing events on the Island, but instead have been transported to Sydney Australia days before the 815 Crash, or years before based on costuming choices, references to calendars or watches, various props and location choices, etc.

Late into season four, things got dramatically different. Some of our Losties left the Island and went home. Other Losties remained on the Island and began to experience temporal distortions that caused them to end up in the same place on the Island, but in different times, and the island was also shifting in space relative to the rest of Earth. This was about the time we were introduced to the idea of Fast Forwards in which some events the producers opted to show us revealed information about what would happen after events currently going on, on the Island.

There were practical reasons why some of these temporal changes occurred. The first has to do with aging. The actor playing Walt started as a little kid, but hit a growth spurt by the end of season two, making it difficult for him to continue playing the part of a child who had aged less than a couple months. So both he and Michael were written out of the story. Walt has been seen very little since then, but usually in the context of years after September 2004, to explain why the actor/character now looks like a young man. Elements such as these simply compounded the extraordinary difficulty the producers had in conveying to we the viewers just where and when each scene was taking place. To combat that, the cast & crew of Lost rose to the challenge. To the best of anyone's ability, I think they were successful, but it's understandable that a large chunk of the audience is still in the dark; still a little.. lost.

In season four, it was explained the Oceanic Six were on the mainland approximately three years. Maybe four. In season five, it was explained that after multiple time hops, Sawyer and his group of survivors hung out in Dharmaville for approximately three years. Maybe four. This means that even though our characters have been separated, when they reunite late in season five, they are all about the same ages as they would have been had they all shared the same normal linear time frame. Maybe they differ several weeks, or months, even close to a year, but not a noticeable time difference. By the way this also means the Losties have now aged about as much as we have, give or take a bit. So if any of the actors look their age, they can show it now, cuz they're supposed to be about the same age they currently are. They can even bring Walt back now if they wanted, because by now the actor would be the right age. They just can't do any flashbacks involving Walt without some camera trickery or CGI.

In fact it's possible that when the crash of Ajira 316 happened, Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Sayid were returned to the island at precisely the second they would have been on the Island had they never left. This brings me.. to Course Correcting.

In the episode "Flashes Before Your Eyes" Desmond meets Mrs. Hawking for his first time, although she seems to recognize him. She tells him that he can't marry Penny, because he's always meant to end up on that island and if he doesn't go, "time has a way of course correcting." If he's destined to do something, it's going to happen, because whatever happened happened and when the island is done with you, it'll kill you. Dead is dead. Up until the island is done with you, you can in theory live forever, but if you're meant to die, you're going to die. Charlie and Desmond learn this first hand, when Desmond begins seeing premonitions of Charlie's death, tries to save him, only to learn he's postponing the inevitable.

Now this is the crux of our problem with time travel on Lost. Many viewers of the show are expecting time travel to behave on Lost the way it does for most television and film. However, it can't. We are used to time travel like on Back to the Future, where you can go back in time and accidentally your own mother gets smitten by you, neglects your future father, so they never get married and you never get born. That's a paradox. The writers on Lost have gone out of their way to avoid paradoxes, even to establish that time doesn't allow them. If you go back in time and try to kill yourself, the gun will jam, or the piano will not fall fast enough, or your younger self will happen to take a drink of a canteen just as the blade flies towards his head. You will not die, because you can't.

People see this on the show and think "The Island" is doing this. It is not. TIME is doing this. During Meet Kevin Johnson, there are times when Michael should by all rights be very dead, but he doesn't die. He can't die, until he's successfully slowed the bomb enough for the Oceanic Six to get rescued, because he was always meant to do that.

Ben says to Jack that he was never meant to leave the Island. From this we are to infer that there was a previous timeline in which he never did, but that something happened to change events. Viewers see this and presume that means there are multiple timelines in which other events have transpired, but there are no other timelines. There is only one timeline.

Look at a body of water. There may be ripples or waves. Perhaps it is still. If you throw a rock into the body of water, it will disrupt the surface of the water temporarily, but it won't cause the water to change irrevocably, and after a bit of wave dispersion, it will return to its previous tranquil state. Time on the television series Lost doesn't operate like something that can be molded and shaped on a whim. Time on Lost also doesn't behave like something that's solid and impossible to alter. Time is fluid. However, once something happens, it happens. What we are essentially witnessing as we see the events of Lost unfold before us, is we are watching a large body of water from late fall into early winter, as it slowly freezes over. Once a part of the ice has frozen over, it remains where and how it is. Once the writers tell us something that happened on Lost, to the best of their ability, they're going to keep it that way. However, in areas they have not yet explained to us, the lake hasn't yet frozen over, so they can still reveal information to us that explains how the other pieces fit together. By the end of the series, the metaphorical lake will be completely frozen over. and we'll see a finished whole.

Many viewers assume that at the end of season five, Juliet was successful at causing the bomb to explode by banging on it repeatedly with a rock. After Sayid and Jack had so roughly traversed with it across a great distance, and after that same bomb fell into a large gaping hole. If that bomb was ever going to go off, it would have gone off long before Juliet banged on it eight times. What we thought was an explosion, when everything went white, was actually another temporal hop - most probably to present day where UnLocke, Ben, Richard, Sun, and the fallen Jacob are awaiting their arrival.

Why? Because The Incident never involved a nuclear explosion. It involved an electromagnetic disturbance that was caused not by our Losties, but by Radzinsky foolishly continuing drilling into the anomaly underground. That always happened. That was always going to happen, whether the Losties were there or not.

Because even though some unnatural things or people have obviously been manipulating events and people for unspecified ends, time has a way of course correcting. You may be able to postpone an event from happening but if it's meant to happen, it will happen. Eventually.

This explains everything on Lost. It explains why Richard hasn't died. It explains why Charlie had to. It explains why Locke could walk on the Island and it explains the times when he could not. It explains why Jin met Danielle. It explains why Hurley is exceedingly lucky. It explains why Susan was such a jerk to Michael. It explains why Juliet was brought to the Island. Not because of The Island, but because of temporal distortion. Time and destiny.

There was perhaps an original timeline before the distortion. A timeline in which events as we know them now transpired a little differently. Maybe Desmond was the one to die underwater at the hands of Patchy, but because Desmond saved Charlie multiple times, Charlie was there to take Desmond's place, allowing him a chance to be with Penny for awhile and have their son. Maybe that didn't happen in the original timeline. We'll never know, because that original timeline without these temporal distortions is gone forever, like a summer rain erasing a chalked hopscotch game off a sidewalk.

"We did dig this whole notion of fate and destiny. You know, can you change the future. How much of their lives is pre-ordained? The big question the audience should have going into the final season of the show is what is the destiny of these characters, and the degree to which that destiny feels pre-ordained is something that we wanted to explore."
- Carlton Cuse

Carlton Cuse mentions whether the lives of these characters is preordained. A lot of Lost fans I talk with speak of destiny and how these characters don't have any control over their lives, then they say they don't understand why, for example, Jack would say no to saving little Ben when we already saw him say yes to saving bigger Ben. I find this frustrating. He had a choice, but given the events, there was only one choice he could make.

People think of destiny as something that is cut and dried. If you are meant to do something it's because you have no control over what you do. However, destiny is far more complex. Your control over your own destiny is what you make of it. If you choose never to leave your house, you were always meant to stay inside, because that's what you do. Maybe something happened in your childhood to make you agoraphobic. Maybe you're just lazy. Whatever the reason, your psychological make up is how you choose your behavior. Not destiny. Now, there are things that happen outside your realm of control that will also influence your choices. The choices of others for example. You can be manipulated, but those manipulations are also 'destined' to happen, by the choices of whatever causes them, or by the physical laws of nature.

Jack has an opportunity to save Ben twice. Jack gave older Ben the benefit of the doubt, and saved him from cancer. Then when Jack was sent back in time, he had a second opportunity to save Ben. Jack chose not to, because of Ben's reaction to Jack's saving him the first time. In that, Jack broke his Hippocratic oath, but he felt justified in not saving young Ben, because of old Ben's behavior. Jack had no motivation for saving Ben as a child, because of Ben's behavior as an adult.

Faraday decides to try and change history, and time sets into motion events that lead Faraday's own mother to shoot him dead, to keep him from changing history. Or so it would seem. How much of this was Faraday's own doing, and how much of it was beyond his control?

Man of Science (Jack). Man of Faith (Locke). Man of Luck (Hugo). How much control do we have, and how much control is beyond our capacity? If we run from our fate (Kate), will it catch up to us inevitably? If we try to con fate (Sawyer), are we destined to fail to outwit it? In the equation of life, are the constants variable (Desmond), or are the variables a constant (Faraday)? Are we destined to fail, like Faraday at the barrel of his own mother's gun, or are we able to put off the inevitable long enough to change history, like when Desmond saved Charlie long enough to allow Charlie to choose to die a hero and not a fool? And was Charlie always meant to die the way he did, or did he replace Desmond? Was Desmond destined to die at the hands of Patchy underwater, or did Desmond inadvertently use Charlie as a sacrifice, so that he may live? Did Locke do the same with Boone, either on purpose or accidentally? Was Locke meant to die when Boone did, had Locke been alone investigating that plane?

This is what Darlton & the cast & crew of Lost have been exploring. Are our lives fated, or do we choose our fate, by the seemingly inconsequential choices we make every day? And if we do what we can to change our own fate, will events around us that we can't control force us into alignment anyway? Does anything we do make any difference?

Either Blackie or Jacob threw a very big hot rock into the placid lake as it was icing up for the winter. Whichever one did, the other one has actively sought to fix things.. To 'patch them up' if you will. You can throw as many hot rocks into the metaphoric lake as you want, but winter is coming, and that lake is gonna freeze over. Nothing can change that. It's fate. Just as surely as a year from now, Lost will be over.

Lost's Zombie Season Is Now, Part Two

This is speculation & not spoilage. Even so, read further at your own risk. You have been warned.

It is very possible that any and all previously killed characters can return. We've witnessed it already. Two phrases so significant in season five they became titles of episodes are "whatever happened happened" and "dead is dead." We've witnessed first-hand that while these two phrases are true, there's something sinister about them. What we think happened may not have happened the way we think, but only because we do not know all the facts. We may see an event in the past from Jack's perspective where he meets Desmond, but then if we see that same night from Desmond's perspective it carries different meaning and significance. We may see Locke fall from a great height in season one and think his survival miraculous but not otherworldly. In season five we witnessed Locke was very dead until Jacob revived him after his fall. This adds new information to what happened, without literally changing the event. Our perception of it is all that changes, given the new information.

Christian and Locke are both very dead. Dr. Jack Shepherd is many things but he is not incompetent in determining conditions of traditional death. However, both individuals are also still clearly walking around. We've also seen other characters we know to be dead reappear on the series as visions or dreams. It's also possible that there were people who died in the crash of Flight 815 or Ajira 316 who appear to still be alive, but are being kept alive artificially through the unique powers of The Island, for Jacob's purposes, or Blackie's, or perhaps another party we've yet to meet.

Although I personally believe there will be few if any flashbacks in this final season, the writers may surprise me and continue the flashbacks for consistency's sake. There certainly is no longer an overpowering need beyond curiosity at this point. I'd like to see Ben meet, kill, and bury Henry Gale for example, but unless the writers come up with a compelling reason why that pertains to the predicaments in the present of Ben & UnLocke, it'd be little more than a novelty at this point.

What's more plausible is the fact that although we've witnessed the phrase "whatever happened happened" to be predominantly accurate, the writers have also made it clear what we see happen is not always what we think we see. In season one we saw Locke fall out of a building, and miraculously survive. It wasn't until the end of season five that we saw why he survived. There are many events we have witnessed which may have had other participants out of our periphery view. We've been told of Hurley's accident on the pier that allegedly killed 23 people. We have no idea who those people are because the show has never actually visited that incident visually. The writers could choose to do so now, if (and only if) it pertained directly to the current present of Ben & UnLocke.

The phrase which is obviously not accurate is "dead is dead" although one can argue it's very true, IF (and only if) Locke is very dead and what we've been seeing walking around in Locke's stead since the crash of Ajira 316 is 0% Locke. If that's the case, then yes dead is dead. So any and all characters who have died on the Island can and probably will return, but as agents of Blackie/Essau/UnLocke/WhateverHisNameIs or as agents of Jacob. In fact it's plenty plausible that all or some of our characters from Oceanic 815 are very much not really among the living.

One of my more fantastical theories is that most who crashed on Oceanic 815 did die, with the sole witness of Kate. She has admitted that she witnessed the entire crash, while others appear to have blacked out. It's possible that she knows who is real and who is not, which might explain some of her aberrant behavior in the earlier seasons. However, it wouldn't explain her love interests, unless she knew Sawyer & Jack were two people who are still normal.

We know that Jacob can bring people back to life. We've seen miraculous cures for disease and disability. We've witnessed instances when someone should have died but did not. These instances could easily be explained away if said individuals are already dead and are being kept alive by artificial, god-like means.

The easiest way to bring Dominic back would be to bring back Patchy. He waits until he witnesses Desmond return to the surface, then fishes Charlie out of the station and brings Charlie back to the Island. Patchy would then pump the water out of Charlie's lungs, wait for him to get his bearings and breath back, and explain to him that he couldn't die in the station, because he already died on the plane. Patchy would then reveal he's an agent of either Blackie or Jacob, and tell Charlie that now he is too.

Is Charlie still the Charlie that we have come to know? Yes and no. He's got self-awareness, but he's being manipulated. To what extent is unclear. We know that Locke has been getting messages from The Island, and was being manipulated, but he had to actually die (by suicide or murder) off the Island in order for Blackie to get to appear AS him. Why? We don't know. It may have to do with rules that Jacob & Blackie set for themselves when all this began, or rules that have been laid for them by whoever is pulling THEIR strings. Cuz there's always someone bigger.

Who is actually alive and who is actually (un)dead is a little murky. Hurley could very well already be dead. He may have died when the pier crashed, and either Jacob or Blackie revived him at an opportune moment, just as we witnessed Jacob revive Locke after his fall. Hurley experiences great luck that keeps him from dying, but people around him suffer the consequences. Hurley and Charlie both crossed a bridge that they really should not have been able to safely traverse, but Jack & Sayid were not able to cross it. They had to go around. This could be one circumstantial indication that Hurley & Charlie are already (un)dead, and are being kept alive by The Island. However, if Jack & Sayid are still very much alive, the writers wouldn't want them to cross that bridge. It may have shown their hand.

If all that I say is true, then it'd be very easy for the writers to bring back all of the characters we've witnessed die, in order to pose as agents of Jacob & Blackie wherever it might be strategically advantageous for them to do so. For example, Alex appeared before Ben in what was obviously a strategic move on Blackie's part to make Ben obey his wishes. Any characters who have died in previous seasons can come back in a similar manner, to impart messages to surviving Losties that came from either Jacob or Blackie.

We could even witness the return of Nikki & Paulo, IF it would be to the benefit of either Blackie or Jacob to do so. Personally, I'd rather see Arzt and Frogurt one last time, but Nikki was easy on the eyes, and Paulo was good for a laugh. We may see them all come back before the series is over. It's entirely plausible.