I posted this on The Fuselage board in response to someone not realizing what I meant about Charlie and Hugo, so I thought I’d post it here too.
Charlie’s dead. He even said so.
We already know that time travel is involved in the story line, and we know that people that are experiencing this can interact with people in the time line they’re visiting. We’ve seen it. Desmond did it, and talked to Ms. Hawking in the antique shop. Desmond even interacted with Charlie in the past (on the street while he was playing his guitar, before the plane crash).
If Desmond can travel back in time, why couldn’t Charlie travel forward in time… a time in which he was dead?
Say that Desmond realized that everything that was happening right now (the show we just saw, and those to shortly follow) was going completely wrong, and things “aren’t supposed to happen this way” as Locke would say. People got off the island that weren’t “supposed” to. What would Desmond do?
If Desmond was able to travel back again, this time to the island after the crash, and talk to Charlie, don’t you think that Charlie would be willing to talk to Hugo to give him that message?
Since Hugo saw people that didn’t exist before, his natural reaction to seeing Charlie would be to completely freak out. I think that’s exactly what the writer’s would want us to believe.
The thing that stands out to me is that the other patient at the hospital saw Charlie, and told Hugo about it.
I don’t know how Charlie did it. Maybe Desmond went back dragged him into the hatch, or there’s some other way to do it. But if a rabbit could do it to Dr. Candle (or whatever name he was using in that video we saw over the long break), I think Charlie could too.