Young Danielle Rousseau and Bristol Palin are the same person

Melissa Farman as (left) Bristol Palin in Game Change, and (right) young Danielle Rousseau on Lost.

The young French actress who played Bristol Palin in HBO's Game Change looks uncannily like the real thing. The resemblance is so strong that an audience member at an advanced screening of the movie felt compelled to ask aloud, "Is that Bristol?" when she first appeared onscreen.

Before Game Change, however, USC student and actress Melissa Farman was best known as another pregnant teenager braving hostile conditions. As young Danielle Rousseau in "This Place is Death," a fifth-season episode of Lost, Farman dealt not with the mockery of TV pundits, but with the constant threat of dismemberment by a disembodied smoke monster.

Because I am the sort of person who enjoys conflating different characters played by the same actor - I'm still waiting for Community's Professor Kane to start whistling "The Farmer in the Dell" while cheerfully murdering some drug dealers - this discovery has me theorizing. What if Bristol Palin is, in fact, the smoke monster in disguise? What if the Man in Black has secretly been using Bristol's human shape to groom Sarah Palin for the presidency as part of some nefarious plot to escape the Island and wreak havoc on the world? What if Sasha or Malia Obama is actually a reincarnation of Jacob, fighting with the Bristol-shaped Man in Black to avert the apocalypse? What if it was all true?!

So, clearly that's not the case, and I'm just letting my finals-addled brain run wild. Obviously the real explanation is that Bristol Palin somehow fell through a wormhole and ended up in 1988, with her memory wiped, speaking perfect French and convinced that she was part of a scientific expedition despite the fact that she was seven months pregnant. It explains so much...