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We don't know why they cooked up the story of the plane hitting water and the five (Aaron not yet born) getting to shore via flotation devices from the plane.
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Well, they (meaning "The Six")
didn't cook up the story of the plane going down in the ocean. That had already been cooked up by Widmore before anyone escaped from the island. That was the public "fact" that everybody already knew about the flight.
The way I see it, you have two mutually hostile groups of people who both have good reason to conceal the truth, and who therefore strike a deal.
Widmore and Co. apparently managed to sink a jumbo jet filled with the freshly-killed corpses of a couple of hundred people and arranged for it to be "found" so as to put a halt to the search for the plane. (Which created the risk of someone finding the island.) Once they secured Ben Linus they had to kill everyone on the island because they were either survivors of the crash or at least knew the truth about it. They had to commit another 30 or 40 murders to cover up the 300 hundred or so they had already committed.
The Oceanic 6 present a real dillema for Widmore. The easiest thing would be to kill them, but evidently something makes that impossible. Short of that the 6 at least have to be persuaded to explain their return in a way that won't cause problems for Widmore or contradict the official story. I think Jack and the rest cut a deal with Widmore. In exchange for their cooperation they get huge financial settlements (evidently way beyond what would be expected in similar real-world circumstances), return to their lives and are left alone by Widmore. Widmore probably accepts the deal because he thinks he can eventually use the 6 to locate the island again. It seems likely that Locke and/or Ben do whatever it is that moves the island, and that the 6 are not on the island when this happens. (Whether they volunteered to escape or just happened to be on ship or the zodiac when the island "jumps" remains to be seen.)
I doubt they're going to entirely dispense with the flashbacks next season. We still have gaps in time between the threads of the story. Ben escapes from the island at least several months
after the 6 reach civilization (Sayiid has married and lost Nadia.) But I do think the two timelines will continue to run in parallel until they converge at the end of the season, much like the two timelines in
Damages did.
The show is really firing on all cylinders now. I can't wait until season finale in two weeks, and the series finale next year.
Regards,
Joe