It seems most likely that the letter will never leave the mailbox; the magic simply stops working. The fact that the book has not yet been published would only matter if Alex showed it to someone else, and there doesn't seem to be any reason for him to have done so (save perhaps to his brother Henry, but he might not have done even that and Henry already knows about the supposed time traveling letters), so the danger is minimal. He does not answer this in a letter; instead, he gets a can of spray paint, drives to Chicago, and paints on the wall. The film has some of the problems of Frequency, but only to the degree that information traveling to the past creates temporal problems. It does not compute. Wood Green are extremely proud to have been the focus of an eight-part documentary series on Channel 4 called The Dog House. Kate's buying the LH was nothing to do with Alex's fate. Little changes can have major consequences--but they do not always do so. Kate moves to the lake house in the late winter or early spring of 2005, on schedule, and the dog shows up then for her. With each repeat of history, he learns a bit more. There are very few ways to resolve a predestination paradox. They do not make that mistake. The ladder is shown near the end of the movie (when he's putting the box of letters away) to fold up into a small space, and the "attic" is merely a small space, easily the height of the roof plus one of the glass bits you can see from outside the house. It might be that rather than moving out because he was reconciled with his father and moving forward with his life, he moved because the death of his father made the house the more oppressive, a reminder of a bad relationship that would now never be made good. Yet it also must be redefined sequentially, which for us means temporally:  the people involved must experience the changes as if in time, and thus from a certain point of view all of that history replays to form the new version. Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. But again Alex will not get her reply in this history, because time has to be rewritten to the point that she answers before she can answer. It has already been noted that once Alex has the dog, he attends Kate's 2004 birthday party. So maybe the dog's name is Jackie, and somehow it let Kate know this (it is, after all, a magic dog). However, all of history must be rewritten before Kate can send her answer to that letter, so the flag will never in this history be raised. Siworae was adapted for The Lake House by American playwright David Auburn. There is not a single wooden panel to enclose the attic, nor any construction in the house that looks like it could be that attic. Alex decides to take Kate on a walking tour of Chicago, and it is at this point that the correspondence becomes conversational and confusing. We go through this once more, as she rips off a quick question in reply, creating the new history from that moment two years before, and he answers it, and both of them in this history have now seen the flag fall and rise twice. If Alex does not resolve his feelings about his father, he does not reconnect with Henry and start the firm; if he does not start the firm he does not move out of the Lake House; if he does not move out, Kate cannot move in, and they cannot communicate by the mailbox. With this, we can launch the magic, as her attendance on him creates the connection between them. Wyler writes back, because some of the things she said about the property do not match what he sees, and his letter mysteriously travels to the future to be received by her. That makes sense, because if the wallet was put there in 1969 and never removed, it will still be there in 1999 for John to find. The dog barks as the boat circles an area on the lake. Kate needed a place closer to her residency and hoped to live on the lake, so the property caught her fancy. His letter can leap across time to reach her, but the time across which it leaps must exist in that form which flows from the point of departure to the point of arrival, and that form must be determined by the outworking of events in time. That is what left the prints. They are also able to send other objects--she sends him a scarf and a book--as long as they are placed in the mailbox with an accompanying letter. Correction: They were showing a shot from the mirror behind the bar. It makes our magic much more complicated if the tree is to leap across two years of time into the future and age two years in the process. Since at that point in the film their paths had not crossed in either present or future, where did the dog's name come from? Thus, reminiscent of The Time Machine, he is fatally prevented from meeting her because were he to do so he never would. They might talk briefly outside, but at this point he knows nothing about the book and nothing about her, and certainly won't connect her with the tenant who sent the letter. It becomes an unresolved mystery. At one point, Kate sends Alex a book that has not yet been published when Alex receives it. Late in 2004 the dog runs away. What is remarkable at this point, though, is not so much that Kate Forster drags her boyfriend Morgan to the very architectural firm founded by Alex Wyler and his brother Henry, but that after all the contact she had with Alex and her attention to the death of his father Simon and the delivery of the book about Simon Wyler's life it never occurred to her that the architect Henry Wyler might be related to the architect Alex Wyler with whom she had so intimately corresponded. Correction: The dog was just a stray. I therefore believe this was not a plot hole but a clever idea that fits the movie perfectly. After looking at many photos of the house, there is no space for the attic. When Jack the dog runs up the ramp being painted, he makes footprints but when Keanu immediately runs after him he makes no footprints, though it would still be wet. Yet on this particular day she steps on the rug and realizes that the floor is loose beneath it. Chronologically, Alex names him Jack after he realizes it's the same dog Kate has. Somehow, though, she does not make the connection until she sees Alex' sketches of the lake house. Part of it comes after that, though. This is almost certainly Madison, Wisconsin, which is about three hours from Chicago, Illinois. This then sets up the final and fatal anomaly of the film, the one which changes everything. If the temperature in the room were 80 degrees, which is feasible, and the coffee temperature were 95 degrees, then there would not be any steam coming off of the coffee, even though Alex's dad considers it "hot". This gives us a brief sawtooth snap, because the content of the letter changes slightly. Now the dog's paw prints are on the walkway, and she mentions them in the letter. Alex is confused because when he first reads the letter there are no pawprints, but he then watches Jackie walk through his pan of paint and track those prints up to the door. We might cite Butterfly Effect as similarly handling time, as Evan Treborn seems to jump from one version of history to another, completely unaware of the events of the new history with full memories of the one now erased. This can be resolved with the odd solution to be considered next, but it's not a very good solution overall and it doesn't really fit here. It is now certain that Alex can recognize Kate on sight, and so beginning probably with this history we can assume that whatever brought him to Daley Plaza on Valentines Day 2006, he was crossing the street specifically to reach her.