Lost: Daniels Monologue

Did this blow anybody else's mind out of the water last night, or was it just me? Daniels soliloquy last night in the forrest, when he talked about the "Variables" of time and changing the past to affect the future was so...unexpected.

I was expecting things to go as they were laying out: the past was unchangable and the losties were in 1977 not to change things, but to learn about the island and take that knowledge with them (eventually) to the present day. The logical end result would be using this knowledge to "save the world". Not so. Now it seems that their goal is not only to observe and report, but actually to change events so that the planes never crashed, so the various people never died, etc. I wonder how well it's all going to work out.

The universe, as they have pointed out on numerous occasions, is self-correcting. Bringing the losties back to the seventies apparently is the universe's way of correcting for the huge mistake made by the Dharma people in releasing the electromagnetic energy, and thus causing a bunch of people to die who weren't "ready". Previously I had posited that Locke was the only "special" person, and the rest of the Ajira 316 passengers were only there to ensure Locke could return to the island as intended. Now, this doesn't seem to be the case, the rest of the members appear to be special too and are each going to play a unique role in this huge Rube Goldberg device to save the world.

This does raise some new questions from me now:
1) In show-time, they only have about 4 hours to detonate that bomb and stop the events from happening. Once that occurs, they obviously won't just fade away (a la Back To The Future) and resume their lives from where they would have been without it. There's no way that they could just resume normal lives and still have any material left over for a sixth season.
2) A lot of people have met loved ones as a result of the various show events (Swayer/Juliet, Jack/Kate sortof, Kate/Aaron) Kate even suggested that it was crazy that she would never have met the people on the plane. Are these people going to let the past be "undone" like Daniel suggests?

So I'm very much looking forward to the episode next week and then the 2-hr season finale sometime after that. Something tells me that the finale this year is going to be BIG.