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Thursday LOST Blogging: The Variable

Cara

Spoilers below!

All I can say to last night’s episode the Variable is a big fat wow.  After a few episodes that I thought were a bit mediocre — and yeah, I know, others have disagreed — last night kicked some major ass.  Inner-group conflict, gun fights, mind-bending quandaries, flashback reveals and more!

RECAP

Rather than a full-on recap this week (let me know if you prefer it this way), because I’ve got a lot of questions and such, just a basic run down of everything that happened:

After scaring the shit out of us by making us think he might not, Desmond lived.  Hooray!

We learned that before arriving on the island, something bad had happened to Daniel.  He had severe short-term memory loss, though his long-term memory seems to be in tact.  We learned that on the same day that Faraday saw the fake Oceanic 815 wreckage at the bottom of the ocean, Widmore, who was funding his research, came to visit him.  He asked Faraday to go to the island to continue his research, and explained to him that the island would cure him.  After some hesitance on Faraday’s part, his mother also encouraged him to go.

We got 100% official confirmation that the Ellie who was escorting Faraday around the island with a gun in the 50s is his mom Eloise Hawking.  We also got confirmation of my long-held suspicion that Widmore is in fact Daniel’s father.

Back on the island, Sawyer and Juliet tried to figure out what to do with tied up Phil, and decided that it was time to split.  It was either try to steal the submarine, or go back to square one and live on the beach/in the jungle.  They seemed to decide that square one is the best idea.

But Daniel wasn’t having any of that.  After arriving back on the island, Faraday was a man on a mission.  He knew that on this day, “the Incident” that causes the button to be installed into the hatch is going to happen, and had decided to prevent it.

After trying and failing to convince Dr. Chang that he’s from the future by outing Miles as his son, he took matters into his own hands and tried to go find Eloise.  After a bad ass gun battle between Faraday, Jack and Kate, and Radzinsky and two random Dharma dudes, they escaped and went to find the Others.

Meanwhile, Radzinsky et al came in and found that Sawyer and Juliet have Phil locked up in their closet.  Oops.

Faraday explained to Jack and Kate about the Incident, and that he thinks he can stop it.  After spending so much time focusing on the constant in time travel, he realized that he was forgetting about the variable, which is them and their free will.  And so, he realized he could prevent the Incident, thereby preventing the plane from crashing, the freighter from landing on the island, Desmond from pushing the button — basically the whole show.  He can negate the energy from the Swan station accident.  How?  By detonating a hydrogen bomb, of course.

They found the Others and, being rather reckless for someone who doesn’t know how to use a gun properly, Faraday went parading into the camp demanding to see Eloise.  Saying that he was going to shoot Alpert in the head unless he took him to her, Faraday started a countdown, and just as he neared one, a shot came through his back.  He fell to the ground, and saw Eloise, his mother, standing above him.  Faraday told her that she knew all along.  She knew what?  Who is this man bleeding before her?  As seemingly parting words, Faraday said “I’m your son.”

QUESTIONS/THEORIES/ANALYSIS

So, is Faraday dead?  I know, you’re all going to say yes.  He looked pretty damn dead to me, too.  But Mini-Ben also looked pretty dead!  Right?  I’d almost believe that therefore Faraday could still be alive if I didn’t think they wouldn’t pull the “he’s dead — wait!!! no he’s not!!!” trick on us twice in the span of a few episodes.  Sigh.  I liked him a lot.  Though I guess that if they had to kill someone, it’s about time they picked a white dude.

Who ever thought that Miles and Lapidus would be the last Freighter folks standing?

What happened to Faraday before he went to the island?  It seems to have been one of his experiments gone wrong, but I feel like the specifics of what the experiment was and why it affected him in terms of memory loss might be important.

What happened between Eloise and Widmore?  Obviously they were together at some point, and now they aren’t.  But this doesn’t seem like your basic break up.  Before, I thought that Eloise might be a double-agent, playing either Ben or Widmore, but not knowing which.  Now, it seems like Widmore and Eloise are actually enemies and aren’t exactly in contact.  Did you read the exchange between them differently?  Which “side” is Eloise on?

One of my biggest questions: when talking to Penny in the hospital, Eloise said that for the first time in a long time, she doesn’t know what’s going to happen.  Why? What has changed?  Why did she know before and no longer does?  Seriously, the answer to that question has to be a key to something.

Is Daniel right?  Does the variable exist?

His own death would seem to indicate otherwise.  He tried to change things, but instead what happened is what happened all along.  I mean, the fact that Faraday still told Charlotte what he promised not to tell her also bears this out.  He always tried to change it.  Eloise always shot him.  Based on what she said to Widmore (and statements to him as a child about him not having enough time, the inscription to him in the journal, etc.), she knew that this would happen.

So, if it could be changed, why would Eloise send him back?  She may be cold, but she does seem to love her son, and surely she didn’t want to kill him.  Granted her line has always been that certain things are supposed to happen, and therefore they must, no matter how much they suck.  But her sending Faraday back pretty strongly indicates that she wasn’t playing around or hiding something from us in that regard.  If things can be changed, it seems that she doesn’t know about it.

And yet, judging from the preview, it seems that Jack is going to attempt to try to change things anyway.  But then again, Jack is pigheaded and has really bad ideas.  Here’s the thing, though: how could Faraday be right?  I don’t know a non-confusing way to phrase it, but: if one of them who has time-traveled to the past prevents the Incident from happening, then none of the stuff on the island that we’ve seen with our main characters ever happens at all — and therefore they never would have gone to the past to prevent it.  Do you see what I’m saying?  The only way that it could be prevented is if, well, it wasn’t.

Granted I’m new to this time-travel stuff, but what I’ve outlined above is what makes sense to me.  Please, if I’m missing something, clue me in.  But it seems to me that you can’t change something in the past if what you change is what caused you to go to the past in the first place.  The fact that you didn’t go to the past would invalidate the fact that you changed it!

What’s going to happen to Sawyer and Juliet?  What’s going to happen to Hurley, Miles and Jin?  What is going to happen if they’re on the island when the Incident occurs?

And the most probing question of all.  Surely you didn’t miss the fact that the 100th episode of LOST last night just “happened” to coincide with Obama’s 100th day in office.  We all know there’s no coincidences in LOST.

So: is Obama really Jacob?????

35 thoughts on Thursday LOST Blogging: The Variable

  1. Yea, I hope Faraday isn’t dead either.

    Hhmm, let me try to explain how I read it and see if this is what you are saying:

    Eloise has THOUGHT she always knew what was going to happen because it always did. Just as Faraday said. Based from her reaction to Whidmore about “sacrifice” and her having to send her son back, it appears as if she always knew he would die. Because he always did. But perhaps you are right Cara. From what she said to Penny in the hospital, this being the first time she DIDN’T know what was going to happen….that maybe she in fact doesn’t know that things can change, that the course of these events can change. (if it in fact can) And maybe she kept sending him back each time because she truly thought nothing could change it and thats what had to be done…like everyone has been saying. Until this episode, where Farday squares it out and says maybe not, because we keep focusing on the constants, not the variables.

    I don’t know what I’m saying but I understand it in my head.

    I just wanna know one thing: where the french is Rose and Bernard already????
    (most people think they are going to end up being the Adam/Eve skeletons, but who cares, just tell us y’all)

  2. Daniel Faraday fried his brain and that of his assistant/girlfriend Tresa in an experiment similar to the one that he performed on the rates in the maze. It’s the episode where Desmond finds Faraday in Oxford and gives him the coordinates for the machine, thus transporting the mind of the rat into the future, allowing it to do the maze even though it was the first time it went through it. I assume that Daniel then tried it on himself, frying his brain a bit, then turned it up a notch when Teresa tried it, rendering her a vegetable whose brain is constantly traveling through time.
    All in all, I think John Locke will rise up and rule everyone, and I’m not just talking in the show. Sorry Obama, you’re a great guy and all, but John Locke is more badass then you’ll even be, which is why I am going to start the Church of John Locke. We’ll all shave our heads, like his, and give ourselves awesome face scars. Then, we will take over the government, that is if Obama isn’t already in on the plan, but I have yet to call him up.

  3. Perhaps what Eloise meant was that she’s reached a point beyond what she knew of the future. She knew Daniel would go back and she’d shoot him. She knew the losties would go back (probably) since they met/will meet them in the past. But now that she’s helped Daniel and the Losties go back she’s in a future without certainty.

    Does that make sense?

  5. FreshPeaches — it makes sense on some level, but I got the impression that she also knew Desmond would be shot. How else would she have found out about it and gone to the hospital to apologize. . . although . . .

    Okay totally thinking out loud mode now:

    If she knew Desmond would be shot, chances are she would know if he was going to live. Not necessarily, but probably. So, assuming that’s the case, if she didn’t know what was going to happen to him next, how did she know to go to the hospital?

    Did Widmore send her? Did he call Eloise after he got the call from Ben and ask her to go to the hospitals to try to locate her and see if she was alright? Since Widmore was outside, that makes sense. In which case are they working together?

    Then there’s this: there’s something really weird going on with Eloise. We can’t forget how we first met her — way, way back in the episode, which is my all time favorite episode barring perhaps the pilot, Flashes Before Your Eyes. The episode after the hatch blew up and Desmond was unstuck in time for the first time. She was selling him the ring for Penny, and explained to him the rules of time travel.

    The fact that she was there has always indicated to me that there is something odd and special about her and that perhaps she can travel through time at will somehow. At first there was speculation that the whole episode of Flashes Before Your Eyes wasn’t really real, and Desmond wasn’t unstuck in time. But that theory seems a bit out the window now, seeing everything else that has gone on.

    So, was she always there? It seems like that would be a fairly big coincidence. It’s like she knew this would happen to Desmond and willed herself to be there. And how else would she know that it happened to Desmond unless she could in fact see the future somehow?

    I know, that’s a giant jumble. I said it was thinking out loud! But . . . thoughts?

  6. Greg — that’s kind of what I assumed, but I guess I’m just confused about why it would give him short-term memory loss rather than time travel flashes. I mean, Desmond doesn’t seem to be suffering from short-term memory loss.

  7. He doesn’t because he found his constant, who is Desmond. The reason Desmond is immune from short term memory loss is because he wasn’t apart of that experiment with Daniel and Teresa, so he is free. He almost died and would have on the boat, but he was saved when he found his constant, Widmores daughter.

  8. I think the Losties and freighter people were suppose to go back in time and make bad things happen. Ben getting shot and becoming an Other is an example. My take is Locke is going to bring the people from the past to 2007. (If it is 2007.) The new people with the guns in 2007 will play a big rolein the final season.

    Question: what happened to the Others in 2007?

    I heard the Lost theory if you’re shot in the side (Desmond, Locke and Sayid) you live. A shot in the chest is death. Faraday is a goner. He could come back as a ghost or in a flashback.

    So: is Obama really Jacob?????

    Tim Geithner all the way. His secret plan to back AIG bonuses is the clue.

    Eloise provided a character with Mommy issues. I didn’t want to see another character (Jack and Locke) with Daddy issue.

    An interesting question I heard is who is the hero of Lost? It isn’t Jack. Sayid has done too many evil things to be the hero. Locke fits the Joseph Campbell hero myth. Sawyer fits the reluctant hero mode. The writers aren’t doing anything with Kate are Juliet this season. There are theories that Ben may turn out to be the hero.

    I think Jack was suppose to be the hero. The character has the same problem as Ana Lucia. Too annoying and unlikable. Jack will be around to the end because of the Christian Shepard connection. The producers said the last episode will have a shocker about Jack. That plays into theories about Jack being Jacob. Although, I don’t see how.

  9. “…but he was saved when he found his constant, Widmores daughter.”

    Wait a minute now, this has just made me realize that Penny is Whidmore’s daughter and Desmond is evidently Whidmore’s son and that means…erm…

  11. Daniel thinks he can change the future, and believes humans are the variable, but everything he did was what he was “supposed” to do to close the historic loop. Right down to warning young Rachel that she needed to get off the island. I think it’s pretty clear that whatever the great catastrophe is, and whether or not the hydrogen bomb explodes (or perhaps because the hydrogen bomb explodes), it’s going to happen.

    Thing seem to be breaking down in two general directions. The Dharma people are scientists, playing with forces they don’t understand. Whether before or after the catastrophe, many of them will flee the island never planning to return.

    The others have some sense of the power of the island, and the significance of the temple. The Others had a list of important survivors they wanted to abduct, apparently including all of the children on the plane. Eloise speaks to Daniel of his “destiny”, pointing his life in the direction of the island – even giving him as a graduation present the diary that, years later/before, they recover from his body. Charles Widmore learns something that makes him betray the island, never to return, but perhaps out of the knowledge that it would also make him exceedingly wealthy; he also manipulates Daniel toward his destiny. Ben spent years convincing the survivors that those “left behind” were in grave danger; lies and manipulation to get them to return. Etc. Whatever the catastrophe is, for a variety of reasons they want it to occur. (And I say “variety” because I don’t think Richard’s motives are the same as Ben’s or that either’s are the same as Widmore’s, and who even knows what Eloise is thinking…. The only constant seems to be that nobody wants to make Jacob angry.)

    And of course there may be a third faction, perhaps aligned with Dharma… perhaps aligned with the industrialist who funded Dharma (who is… Mr. Kwon? Not yet introduced?)… perhaps aligned with a faction of the Others (Richard?) Or perhaps a sleight of hand. But that third faction, by making sure Ben returned to the Island, seems to have an interest or stake in bringing about a particular outcome.

    What of the children who survived the plane crash? Might they have transported to the 1970’s and grown up on the island among the Others, such that we’ve already encountered them as adults?

  12. I heard the Lost theory if you’re shot in the side (Desmond, Locke and Sayid) you live. A shot in the chest is death. Faraday is a goner. He could come back as a ghost or in a flashback.

    Hmm, generally true. Though Mini-Ben would be the exception.

    I think Jack was suppose to be the hero.

    Well it depends on what point we’re taking “supposed to” from. Originally, Kate was supposed to be the lead, and Jack was killed off in the main episode. Until focus groups totally hated it. So.

    But once they decided to keep Jack around? I think he was supposed to be the hero in the first season, but I think it might have been a red herring. It seems unlikely that they can find a way to realistically redeem him as the hero at this point. You know, he’s just kind of sad now.

    But I’m not sure that Lost necessarily needs an overarching hero. It has always been an ensemble show, and the point has always been to show human struggle and human flaws. I’m not sure that when all is resolved, assuming it’s a happy ending, that one character is really going to be able to get all of the credit.

    Though I wouldn’t mind Des being the hero 🙂 Mainly because I love Des, and am convinced that he is going to be absolutely central to the plot resolution in some way.

    The producers said the last episode will have a shocker about Jack. That plays into theories about Jack being Jacob.

    I haven’t heard either of these things. First point, very interesting. Last point . . . what? I’m having trouble even wrapping my head around that.

  13. (And I say “variety” because I don’t think Richard’s motives are the same as Ben’s or that either’s are the same as Widmore’s, and who even knows what Eloise is thinking…. The only constant seems to be that nobody wants to make Jacob angry.)

    Yeah, Richard is something that I wanted to comment on, actually. First of all, he’s really intriguing. But at first I was convinced that he was a bad guy, and now I feel much more that he’s not. He seemed to approve of Ben’s decision to not kill Alex. He keeps his word. And, what I thought was really interesting, last night he was mad at Ellie for shooting Daniel. What was that? The man held a gun to his head and was counting down the moments until he said he was going to pull the trigger. It may in fact be that Daniel wasn’t going to pull it and that Richard was right about that, but it’s better safe than sorry. But Richard thought that Eloise shouldn’t have shot him, that she had no good reason, that he should have been left to live. That it was better to risk letting Daniel pull the trigger than to shoot him.

    It’s quite odd, really. Don’t you think?

    What of the children who survived the plane crash? Might they have transported to the 1970’s and grown up on the island among the Others, such that we’ve already encountered them as adults?

    Hmm, interesting thought, but my guess is that if they were successfully integrated with the Others, they would have stayed in the present just as the Others did. Remember, the Others didn’t time travel with the Losties. There’s something about them and their connection with the island, apparently, that keeps them grounded in time.

  15. Wow. I hadn’t heard that. That really breaks my heart and makes me really angry.

    But I’m not sure how we get from there to pederast?

  16. My bad, I just wanted to use the word in a sentence because it’s a weird word, though not completely appropriate. I wonder if the writers will use this as an excuse to kill him off. I hope not, cause I like him alot, even if he is a creep, he’s a sweetheart on the show

  17. Cara, you’ve outlined the grandfather paradox nicely. (That is, you can’t go back in time and kill your grandfather, because if you did, you’d never have been born, which means you never could have gone back in time to kill your grandfather.) So no, there’s no way, according to the prevailing theories of time travel, that they can prevent the Incident from happening, just as there was no way Ben could die. Jack, however, is dumb as a brick when it comes to time travel, which is why Daniel had to remind him AGAIN that they can in fact be killed.

    There are other ways of writing time travel, though. Stephen King’s Dark Tower series takes a different route, and J.J. Abrams did just get the rights to film those books …

  18. Also, Henry Ian Cusick does sound like a scumbag based on those allegations, but what boggles my mind is the way the studio handled the sexual harassment complaint. Do they not have lawyers to tell them, you know, it’s a good idea to take such things seriously and, like, not retaliate against people who say they’ve been the victim of sexual harrassment? Seriously, the stupidity amazes me. /tangent

  19. LOL, yes I guess that really is the grandfather paradox! Duh. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me 🙂

    But yeah, Jack is dumb as a brick about this stuff, but Daniel isn’t. Why didn’t this occur to him? I mean, it’s relatively basic, is it not?

    Any idea how this scenario would work in the other versions of time travel you refer to?

  20. The producers said the last episode will have a shocker about Jack. That plays into theories about Jack being Jacob.

    The first part I got was from an online Entertainment Weekly interview. I was awhile ago. I see if I can find it. The second part is people consider either Jack or Locke to most likely be Jacob. About.com did a breakdown of the Jack is Jacob theory.

  21. I’ve talked about this before, but I’ll bring it up again. According to Quantum Physics (specifically Brian Greene The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos), time does not move in a straight line, but rather time is a series of moments, like beads, strung together on one or several lines, depending on how advanced you want to get. If we’re talking beaded tapestry (multiple lines of time going multiple directions, all made up of individual beads, or moments in time), like we are in the LOST plot, each bead exists in its own place, in its own color, but once you change beads you are either moving forward in time or sideways in time. One line of beads terminates at one place, causing one chain of events, and another line of beads terminates in another place, causing another chain of events.

    The LOST crew moved sideways in time, rather than backward. They moved sideways back to 1977, and while they can change the outcome and series of events for that line of beads, and change the chain of events that happens in that time dimension. However, THEY will all still be in that time dimension, following the events in that line of beads, but eventually time will right itself and 30 years later they won’t crash (but it’s not really them, cause they’ll still be on the island). They won’t go home. They won’t be sent back to Australia before boarding Oceanic 815. Eventually someone named Jack will fly to Oz to bring his dad back from an intercontinental bender, but it’s not the same Jack.

    So, time is very strange. I’m no physicist, but Greene’s literature on the subject is very comprehensive and easy to understand, and not as dry as physics literature usually is. (Plus, there’s the Nova special that he did.)

  22. Wow, Rachel, you just blew my mind.

    So, are you saying that if they did change it, they wouldn’t disappear in time a la Hurley’s suggestion, but stay there? And then there would be two Jacks, two Kates etc in the world?

    *confused*

  23. The other scenario would the like the Back to the Future movies. They change the past and end up in a different future and then have to go back further into the past to stop the change that led to the alternative future.

  24. And what Rachel said.

    Also, did anyone find the scene with Faraday and Little Charlotte reminiscent of The Time Traveler’s Wife?

  26. Thanks Reagan. I think I like the shorter recap, too. Unless I get opposing votes, I’m probably going to stick with it.

    Also, my husband spent about an hour tonight trying to explain to me the theory that Rachel put forth. I . . . still don’t think I quite get it. Hehe. 🙂 My dad is into physics though and always helped me with my physics class in high school by finding a way to get these concepts into my head, so I’m going to see if he knows anything about this and maybe he can do a better job? Who knows.

    I’m still fairly convinced regardless that they can’t change anything, though.

  27. Well, clarification: they can’t change anything of huge consequence. Or, like with Desmond trying to save Charlie’s life, they might change how something happens, but they can’t change the fact that it’s going to happen.

  28. OK. I have nothing hugely of consequence to contribute to the discussion– most of my thoughts/questions/answer on this episode have already been said by someone else on this thread— BUT, one thing that is bugging the hell out of me is this: WHY does Daniel not have an accent? Young Daniel playing the piano did, and we now know he was raised by Eloise, who has an accent. And, he attended Oxford. As a result of the Eloise=Mom factor, and the accent when young factor and the Oxford factor, I’m assuming he was raised in the UK? So he should have an accent.

    Is it something the writers are just choosing to ignore because they found the actor long before they actually had his future in the plot figured out?

  29. there is a great radio lab that explains string theory (rachel’s theory of lost multiverses) that may be helpful for those of you who are boggling. although, i think at one point the producers said that parallel universes were not the explanation, but i may have imagined that because i would find that kind of annoying (a little too similar to the end of newhart, ya’know?)

  30. Yeah, I think they did say that parallel universes weren’t going to happen. Alternate time lines (which is different, right?) are a bit trickier, though they have given us a couple of sign posts that nothing has actually changed in the present. Remember Ben’s house when Sun and Frank went? It was left as is, including Hurley and Sawyer’s game of Risk. Thus indicating that nothing (or extremely little) had been changed.

  31. Surely Charlotte would have remembered the massive gun battle, rather than talking to a weird guy with a beard?

  32. Foobar, your point leads to exactly one I thought of yesterday (when I was far away from a computer!)

    So it occurred to me that clearly Faraday did change something because 1. Charlotte didn’t remember a gun battle. 2. Wasn’t there an episode earlier (I don’t remember if it was this season or not) in which we saw a video of Faraday and Dr. Chang arguing? If Faraday just died, and if Chang didn’t know him when he tried to out Miles…then maybe that video never gets made…meaning that something did change.

    Maybe Eloise knew that in order for the right change to me made, Faraday had to go back (and probably die)…maybe that’s why she let it happen, even encouraged it…even though it meant killing her own son??

  33. I’m assuming that Eloise was able to take Desmond on the terrifying journey of fate at the ring shop not because she travels through time, but because of the information in Daniel’s journal, which is presumably on him when he dies.

    So… how comprehensive was that? Did Eloise dictate his journal entries to him?

  34. OK, maybe I’m being dense because I am only a casual fan of the show, but does the timeline track on Daniel’s journal?

    Maybe Eloise knows what is going to happen because she finds Daniel’s journal on his dead body.

    This knowledge of the future is what Widmore uses to become rich, but this betrays the island somehow. Eloise thinks the timeline must be protected, but Charles wants to take advantage of things, so they split up.

    We have now reached the end of what was in the Journal, and she knows no more.

    So… complete lunacy that has already been contradicted in the show or does that make any sense at all?

  35. A week later, I am here to say that I, for one, hope Daniel is dead. IMO, he has served his purpose in the show, to illustrate that you can’t change the past. He thought that he was changing it by going back, but it was his mother’s plan all along because she knew she was supposed to shoot him. I suppose he could still be alive though, since the point was for him to be shot, not necessarily die. But yeah, he’s served his purpose and I’m ready to see him go.

    I’m curious as to why people assume Charlotte would’ve remembered the gun battle. As a child, wouldn’t it make more sense for you to remember things that happen to you personally as opposed to things that happen around you?

    I understand what Rachel S says about time travel, but I still think the way time travel has been set up in Lost, they simply can’t create a reality where they never crashed on the island. As I said above, I think that’s the reason Daniel was shot in this episode.

    And I like this format too. Less recap, more question/discussion.

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