Lost: Follow The Leader
By fred | May 7, 2009
(S05E15) What we had this week is something we’ve often seen in the world of Lost. Something big is obviously about to happen, we know it simply because next week is the two-hour season finale, and so what was important to be done before it, what happened this week in preparation of this major upcoming event, was to move the pieces on the board.
Everyone was going where they need to be, getting ready to do whatever it is they will have to do next week. As a result, not a lot happened per-se this week, it was mostly people walking towards their destiny, if you believe in such a thing. But with the fantastic season we’re having now, after everything that happened so far and as the end of the series gets closer & closer every time, even such an episode can manage to be a lot of fun.
A few things happened, some in 1977 and others in 2007. Now, I was sad to see Daniel go last week, but he’s apparently really dead. He died before he could explain a lot of things, and the most important one of all, right now and to me, is the reason he changed his mind. Daniel was not a believer in destiny as his mother does, in fact he’s not a believer at all, he’s a scientist.
And he thought and told that there was a rule, a very simple rule: whatever happened, happened. And because it happened already, you can’t change the past, so whatever the Losties would do in 1977, it would be pointless. Not that it would have any consequences, maybe some major ones, but it cannot make the outcome any different that what they already know to have happened (in the(ir current) “future”).
Yet at some point, he changed his mind, he thought things could actually be changed. I never understood why, and his talk about variables was far from enough. People are variables? So what, they’re still in the past, coming from the future, the future based on the past they’re now on, living as their new present but that, in a way, already happened. And if Penny is Desmond’s constant, it means people are/can be constant as well.
I really wish we knew why Daniel changed his mind, what changed his mind, because everything we’ve seen so far, before and after he changed his mind, it all seemed to go into one single direction, it all seemed to obey that one rule: whatever happened, happened. That’s why we got to see Locke setting up Richard to help his “younger” self, and somehow there was also an exchange of compass whose origin evades me at the time.
With that in mind, I just can’t help but feel that Daniel was wrong, that the rule still stands, and that it doesn’t matter how hard he, Jack, Kate, Sawyer, any of them can try, they won’t change what happened. They can, ironically, set it all in motion while trying to prevent it, but they won’t change a thing. Maybe Eloise knew all along that she was sending Daniel back to the Island, to a certain death.
She knew he would die, from her own hands, but she believed too much in destiny not to send him back. Plus, she needed Daniel to go back and bring her his journals, so that she could know what would happen next, and if in fact maybe there was a way to change the past, all she had to do was not to send her son back. But that meant not getting his journals, not knowing what would happen, that meant changing the course of everything, creating a new life of which she knew nothing about, and she couldn’t dare taking the risk. Plus, she believed in destiny, she believed she had to send him back, because it was his destiny to die there.
Jack can’t be Jacob (unless he time travels even further into the past) since Jacob is known to “exist” while Jack is a member of DHARMA. When Kate and Sawyer take Ben to the Others after Sayid had shot him, Richard agrees to take him into the temple to heal him. However, later on when Widmore complains, Richard “lies” to him, claiming that it’s Jacob’s wishes, which appeases Widmore.
Also, did you notice all the ontological paradoxes in this episode?
Did I notice all the paradoxes? How could I have missed them? Jack and Daniel seem like complete idiots for thinking they can change the future (that would be so paradoxal). And who was behind the idea of telling Locke to bring everyone back to the island?
Okay, then there’s the paradox with the compass. I didn’t notice that one.