Juliet is da bomb

Alright, so obviously so much of the focus of the Season 5 finale of LOST and the early moments of Season 6 is on Juliet using her last ounce of strength to detonate the hydrogen bomb with a rock, after it failed to go off after a fall of probably 100 feet. Or something.

But am I the only one that's WAY more interested in the other storyline that was presented in that finale? If you perceive the world as LOST as a giant chess board then what happened in 1977 was a battle between pawns, whereas what happened in 2007 was the start of the ultimate showdown that the whole show has been structured around since Day 1.

I'm almost afraid to even speculate what all we're in store for with this storyline. Jacob's obviously pretty damn important and so is Fake Locke. But more mysterious to me is who is this Ilana and Bram and that team? There's obviously some connection to Jacob, and I think that once we sort out the whole mess from 1977, that this story will become the focus of the end of the series. Along with this story, hopefully come answers about the Island, Jacob, the Monster, and why the hell we've been committed to this thing for six years.

Now on to 1977, where Juliet may or may not have hit the reset button in the middle of our game (typical woman). The big question is: Did it work? Now I understand that with most of the Season 1 cast signing on to do episodes this spring that it's probably going to be presented as though it did, there's two reasons in my mind where Jack's plan isn't going to play out like he hopes.

#1 - Everything that they did in 1977 CAUSED things that we knew to happen, rather than affected them. Basically my school of thought is everything that Miles says whenever explaining time travel to Hurley and the gang. There was ONE timeline, and what happened always happened that way, and I think Season 5 was littered with examples of it:

When Amy goes into labor, there's complications in the childbirth. Juliet steps in and helps deliver the child. Without Juliet's intervention, would there have ever been an Ethan?

When things start to go to hell at the Swan station, Pierre Chang's arm is trapped by a flying piece of debris (explaining why he had a prosthetic arm during the Swan orientation film). But he's freed by Miles. Without Miles' intervention, would Dr. Chang have survived the incident?

Daniel Faraday initiates the evacuation of the island, allowing for a young Miles and a young Charlotte to escape unharmed. Without his intervention, would the two of them have been able to survive the incident and go on to live the lives that they do?

And of course you have Sayid shooting Ben. But more importantly you had Kate and Sawyer saving Ben by taking him to the Others. These two actions led Ben to becoming one of the Others for the rest of his life. Without this intervention, Ben might have just grown up to become a heavily disgruntled employee of the Dharma Initiative.

All of Season 5 sets up the idea that the survivors had ALWAYS been around in the '70s and that their actions caused the events that they had experienced to unfold. Plus there's a very fitting circularity to a story where the survivors actually caused their own plane to crash, setting themselves up in a tragic loop of causing their own fate.

The #2 reason why I think they can't prevent the plane from crashing may sound kind of silly, but here's my idea: If the plane lands safely in Los Angeles, then that means the survivors never would be able to prevent themselves from crashing. If they land in L.A., there is no travelling back in time to prevent the crash from happening, which means that they would crash anyways and MY HEAD JUST EXPLODED ON THE SCREEN.

- The Arrow