Something clicked with me this morning regarding last week’s episode of LOST that just doesn’t make sense.

At one point Ben calls up Charles on the phone prior to threatening to kill his daughter. Ben tells Charles something to the effect of ‘I’m going back to the island’. Charles responds with “Oh, I’ve been looking for a way to do that for 20 years. The island won’t let you”.

Later on in the episode they flash back to Charles being banished from the island. He’s being lead off in chains by guards to the *submarine* that the others used to get back and forth to the real world from the island.

Here’s my problem (and for non-LOST fans, bear with me). Assuming Charles has been gone for 20 years and when he and ben had that conversation it was 2007, that would have made Charles’ departure around 1987 – around 5 years before the infamous ‘Purge’ where the others kill the rest of the Dharma Initiative.

How, then, is charles lead off via the Dharma Initiative’s Submarine when, presumably, the others don’t have access to it yet?

I’m wondering if the writers may have played a hand about how the series ends in plain sight. I suspect that Widmore had some sort of role in getting the existing survivors of the airline crash to safety prior to the Purge.

Either that or it was a big continuity error.