Originally Posted by BeefJello

I don't know if any of you read J. Wood's blog from Powell's books website, but he had an interesting discovery of just that.

From his blog on this episode: "Jump ahead to the end of the episode, when Sayid is having his gunshot wound treated by Ben. We find that Sayid is being blackmailed by Ben to hunt down a list of people; if Sayid doesn't play along, his friends (the rest of the Oceanic Six?) will come to some bad end: “Do you want to protect your friends or not, Sayid?” The people Sayid is hunting are possibly members of the Maxwell Group, since Sayid's mark, Elsa, is wearing the same bracelet as Naomi. After the incident when Elsa shoots Sayid and contacts her boss (getting two in the chest in return), Sayid tells Ben that the people on the list will now know who he is; Ben is just fine with that. Indeed, Avellino's flash of recognition on the golf course suggests this is the case, and if so, it also suggests that the episode on the golf course took place after the rest of the flashes in the episode; the narrative time of the episode twists back on itself, giving “The Economist” a kind of circular feel. Avellino may even have been Elsa's boss. But there's more: Daniel Faraday conducts an experiment where he has Regina on the freighter fire a rocket with a clock in it onto the island. The rocket doesn't land when it should. When Faraday opens the rocket and checks the clock against his clocks on the island, he finds that the island is about 31 minutes behind time on the freighter. That's a significant 31 minutes; if you start at the very beginning of the episode and skip ahead 31 minutes (sans commercials), you'll be at the beginning of the pivotal scene where Sayid and Elsa are in bed. If you take the scene where Sayid tells Elsa he's in Germany to kill her boss and go back 31 minutes, you're at the beginning of the golf course scene where he shoots Avellino. This may be just a simple coincidence and an intriguing play on spacetime, but coincidence may be too simple an explanation (and if it's just a coincidence, it's damn cool and damn convenient)."

Pretty interesting, no?