Lost: The Constant
By fred | February 29, 2008
(S04E05) Jacob I love this show! Yes I finally seen this new episode, and there’s no question about it : this will be the best season of the show to date. In fact, it already is. And what is so great about Lost and this season, is how they have been able to “reinvent” to show, if not in what it actually is and what happens on the show, nothing needed there, in the way not only things happens about also how the stories are being told.
More than that, writers have now every cards in their hands to create the show and tell the stories they want. They know when it will end, and how long they have to get us there, so they can really plan the entire journey and ensure that we get the most of it, and they’re doing just that.
A simple proof : this episode could have a subtitle that read, simply, “Answers“. Once again we got answers, and we got plenty of them. Once again it focused on nothing but what Lost really is all about, and we had answers in a way we probably never expected to get from this show ! We’d have to be stupid not to realize how great this feels, and how lucky we are, and how awesome this show is.
Writers have reinvented ways to tell stories, bringing entire new dimensions to the show. Yes, I mean the flash-forwards. You can describe them as “simply” a mirroring image of the what flashbacks were, a simple opposite, but they really are so much more than that. Or they are totally that, in that when flashbacks could feel filler, boring and uninteresting at times, like unrelated to the show itself, what we’ve seen with flash-forwards in the past 4 episodes this season, is how they’ve become a real part of the show and its main story, how they sometimes even seem to take the lead over what’s actually happening on the Island it self.
But this time, we had no flash-forwards, or flashbacks, now what we had was something entirely different, something completely new, and that yet, obviously, came with a strong impression of déjà-vu…
As I was saying not so long ago, Charlotte and Dan do know a lot more about this Island and what goes on that they’ve said. In the past I’ve said that I felt Charlotte was probably the one with the most knowledge, the more “important” of the two. After this episode, I could say that either I was wrong, and Dan clearly is the one, but I won’t.
Not because I won’t admit that I was wrong, but because I feel that Charlotte still might be so. One thing for sure is that she is way more secretive than Dan. Dan wants to share his knowledge, he wants to understand what’s happening, and he wants to help people. Charlotte, on the other hand, is a lot more cold & calculative. She’s got to remind you of Ben in that way.
When asked about the helicopter and what is going on, Charlotte just lies : “What makes you think I know anything ?” It’s only when forced to admit that she does, by Dan, that she will. Or that she will stop pretending she does not, because she remains against it and Dan has to do all the talking. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t know as much, or that she hasn’t been involved in the whole thing for years as well, just that she doesn’t share.
So thank God for Dan !
The best explanation to Lost’s prescription of time travel is not one where alternate universes are created, but rather that there is only ONE. It is constant and everything that happened in the past already happened for the present to be here. That means even from the outset of the series, a season before Desmond was ever introduced, his mind had already travelled to the past. To tell Penny to wait for his call. Using Back to the Future’s time travel theory would make the time travel on Lost impossible, so don’t even try.
In “Flashes Before Your Eyes” it was heavily insinuated that the future is near absolute and can not be changed significantly. Sure, Desmond saved Charlie’s life a boat load of times, but in the end our little Englishman croaked.
This new phenomenon seems to fit this mould. Faraday’s calculations, the numbers he gave Desmond, were in his book BECAUSE Desmond had told him 8 years previous. Unlike you, I do believe Faraday’s memory is deteriorating. This is why he doesn’t remember his work with Desmond and why he had the scene with the cards. Because of this memory problem, he didn’t know who “Desmond” was until after he made contact this episode. That look of enlightenment he had at the end of the episode was due to him finally realizing WHY he had written that statement.
Well, I have to say this looks like a very nice idea, that it was always written in his journals but that he couldn’t remember it, why it was there, what it meant or just who Desmond was. But the problem (I have) with this idea is what I believe to be a common time travel paradox : for the ‘96 events (Desmond giving Dan the numbers) to take place, events from ‘04 (Dan giving the info from his journals to Desmond) needs to have happened already. But for those to happen, events from ‘96 needs to have happened already!
It’s a classic vicious circle that can’t be started, since A needs B to be happen, and B needs A to happen, so it can’t work, how could it start ? It’s like the chicken and the egg.
But, with alternate timeline/realities, you can explain this : you have C that made A to happen, but also created a new reality in which C ceased to exists. But since A did, it could create B which then would “justify” the existence of A.
Here, C would be Dan working his experiment and finding out the numbers himself, so that he could have them in ‘04 and then allow his ‘96 self not to have to figure them out himself but get them from Desmond.
As I said, it’s exactly what we have with Eloise : as soon as Dan sends her into the future and back, the future she went to ceased to exists, because she now knows how to run the maze, so Dan won’t ever teach her how to. Why would he, she already knows !
So we are now in a reality where Eloise can and did run the maze, yet was never taught how to do so, because when Dan should have been doing so, when he would have been so, in the original reality/timeline, in this one he was working on something else, Desmond was unconscious, and Eloise was dead !
It’s true that Mrs. Hawking told Desmond about course-correcting and that he couldn’t change his fate, his future, that is a recurring theme on Lost. But that doesn’t mean she told the truth. I think it’s possible to look at it like so : she tried to convince Desmond that resistance was futile, not because it is but because it is not !
Because she/they knew Desmond could change his future, and they feared he would, because they needed him to take his boat and end up pushing those buttons every 108 minutes. Just don’t ask me who “they” are, or why they need Desmond to do it, cause right now I have no clue…
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