"You're not ready to go to the Island"

"What kind of name is Bram anyway?" That's the only thing running through my head whenever I see that totally generic dude who drags Miles into the van, costing him a fish taco in "Some Like it Hoth", and who later ends up lugging the corpse of John Locke around the Island in "The Incident". It really gets in the way of good Lost thinking.

But I managed to push that nagging question out of mind at least temporarily to to a little theorizing. Using the transitive property, it appears that Bram is working with Jacob, since Jacob called on Ilana for help and Ilana's buddies with Bram. And Bram is very anti-Widmore, as demonstrated by his courtship of Miles. Does that mean Widmore and Jacob are enemies? And because the MIB is clearly Jacob's enemy, is Widmore in cahoots with the MIB? I've stated as much before, but this little chain of connections certainly lends more evidence to the claim.

Bram asks Miles the "What did one snowman say to the other?" question of season 5 - "What lies in the shadow of the statue?" Miles offers a snarky remark, and Bram answers with "Then you're not ready to go to the Island". What? Is this just a throwaway line, or is there something more here? Was Miles not "supposed" to go to the Island on the freighter, somehow causing the entire time-traveling fiasco? If you subscribe to the "whatever happened, happened" ideology, the answer is no; Sawyer, Jack and crew always ended up in 1977.

But at the same time, a couple tidbits suggest that the path our characters traveled was not their only possible path. The most significant one involves a miraculously special person - Desmond. Brotha Des saw visions of the future, but on four different occasions, he prevented the future from happening. This directly led to Charlie turning off the jammer switch in the Looking Glass station, allowing the freighter people to come to the Island, leading Ben to turn the Donkey Wheel, and causing everyone to skip through time. It's easy to see how the first intended future - Charlie dying after being struck by lightening - would have prevented the rest of the dominoes from falling in place.

So what's my point? I don't think I have one. But if I do, here it is - Bram was trying to prevent all the time-skipping from taking place under orders from Jacob. Jacob is trying to undermine the established timeline of events - the one that Faraday wrote in his journal and Eloise Hawking has used as her playbook for the past 30 years. Something that always happens needs to be prevented, and preventing Miles from getting on the freighter stops it from happening. But why only Miles then? Did Bram also approach Daniel and Charlotte? He didn't seem to think much of the candidacy of Frank. I think I've dug myself too deep.

My brain hurts. Until next time.