Midichlorians: Is There Anything They Can't Do?

I was going to respond to a comment on my previous post with another comment, but I decided to put my response here instead, since it was so long and I went off on tangents.

The question posed was: "..what is the island if people aren't dead? That explains the sideways world but doesn't explain the island and how a few of them were able to get off and come back. And why the time travel?"

My response:

I've come up with an answer for any question about why the island does what it does: midichlorians. If it worked for The Force, it'll work for The Island!

The island is just an island that happens to have serious metaphysical properties that apparently affect the soul of every human being that has ever walked the earth. The nature of that effect is, of course, open to interpretation. Maybe its existence is what makes us human, rather than unthinking animals, and its total collapse into the ocean would have undone that.

There was a specific route in which one could get on and off the island. Considering what Ben said to Hurley, I'm guessing that this was something Jacob set in place to control traffic to and from the Island, but it could just be an electromagnetism thing. The Oceanic Six had taken that specific route out, as had Michael/Walt and, I would guess, the Dharma/Other subs. I guess that one could fly over the island without problems, since the only thing that kept Oceanic 815 from passing the Island by was Desmond failing to punch in the "stop the magnetic burst before it rips apart a plane" code in time. Since all of Jacob's Candidates were on that plane, however, I'm going to assume that Jacob had something to do with Desmond being late for that particular timer reset.

The time travel? The jumping was due to the Frozen Donkey Wheel being stuck, so apparently, at some point after the Man In Black was foiled, killed, and turned into smoke, someone came along, finished his work on the wheel, tapped into The Light, and figured out how to manipulate time with it. And how did The Light manipulate time? Midichlorians. Don't know if Jacob or Smokey was behind the whole "move the island" thing that led to the time jumping, but I will point out that when the Ajira flight came along, only the Candidates got sent back to 1977 (that would give us an idea which Kwon was Candidate #42.) Whether that was Jacob trying to get the Candidates all together, the MiB trying to keep the Candidates all in a place where they could get purged with the rest of the Dharma Initiative, or neither, is anybody's guess.

I think I'll stop. For now. I might watch the entire series again soon, now that we know how it all ends. Would anybody be interested if I posted thoughts on the old episodes, with the whole-series perspective?