A few thoughts that popped into my head immediately after watching last night’s episode, “The Variable”:
I’m glad we finally got to find out a bit about Faraday. Since he’s dead now.
It’s been awhile since we had a good, old-fashioned Lost gunfight.
Only two more episodes until this season is over. Dammit.
Jeremy Davies better dust off his finest tux for Emmy night.
Another fine episode in the pantheon of Lost’s penultimate season came to pass, with many big reveals and a major game-changing cliffhanger ending. Enough dilly-dallying:
We got our hands wet with the backstory of Faraday’s struggles with his role as a prodigy. The scenes with he and his mother, finally officially revealed to be Eloise Hawking, were particularly tender when you first saw them, and downright heartbreaking when you got to the end of the episode.
Some Deja Vu
We got to relive cryptic moments from two episodes past last night. The first was from the season opener, “Because You Left.” We saw Daniel down in the bowels of the Orchid Station. We got the rest of that scene, which saw Daniel spill the beans about he and his friends time-travelling exploits to Dr. Chang. We later found out that this was to ensure that Chang went through with his plans of evacuating the island.
We also got the rest of the scene we first saw last season in “Confirmed Dead.” Where a distraught Daniel openly sobbed upon news of the Oceanic 815 wreckage being found. He was later visited by his research backer Charles Widmore who proposed to him the opportunity to go on the Freighter and journey to island to heal his memory condition, the result of prolonged time-travel/electromagnetic experimentation, and continue his research.
The jig is up
In “Some Like it Hoth”, we saw the Losties elaborate ruse regarding their true origins to the DHARMA folk begin to crumble. In last night’s ep, it came crashing down all around them. Jack was informed by Daniel that his mother was wrong and they are not at all supposed to be in the time they currently are. When Jack went to share this with Sawyer, it led to a tribal council-esque meeting wherein the man we’ve come to know as LaFleur weighed his options as to what their next course of action ought to be. Daniel demanded to be taken to the Hostiles to meet up with the younger version of his mother, last seen in this season’s episode “Jughead”. This led to some pretty nice, but not to over-the-top Jack/Kate/Sawyer tension, which is of course broken by Juliet (I guess this love square thing isn’t going away after all).
As Daniel, Kate and Jack prepared to make their way to Hostile territory, they were found out by Radzinsky and his cohorts from the Swan, leading to that aforementioned shootout. The heroes made off fairly unscathed, save for a bullet graze to Daniel, and Radzinsky stormed to Sawyer and Juliet’s abode and realized what was up. I felt a genuine sadness for the show’s new “It” couple. They did a pretty nice job of selling us on the concept that this was their home, their correct place in life, but now it’s just not meant to be.
The time, it is A-Changing?
Siiiiigh…just when I was getting a grapple on this whole time travel stuff. All season long, we’ve had the fact that you can’t change time drilled into our heads. “Whatever Happened, Happened” right? Right. Well…Maybe. Daniel explained that the living, breathing people of this conflict serve as variables in this wild time-travel theory and that he has cooked up a scheme to neutralize the exotic matter that becomes the hatch that will eventually cause 815 to crash.
Now, the show has sort of tipped it’s hand here. Having Faraday so carefully explain precisely what he plans to do is pretty much a clear indication that that is not at all how things will come to pass as we go into the home stretch of this brilliant season. That being said, I have no idea how this is all going to play out.
And now we come to the big twist. A Hostile-era Eloise caps her own son, not knowing that he is her son. Now when you think back to all the previous interaction between Eloise and Daniel, she always persisting that he focus on his scientific studies, ushering him off to the island knowing what will happen to him there when she could easily just prevent it, it represents the kind of heartbreaking dramatic irony that only Lost can deliver.
Nagging questions and potential answers
Q: If the Oceanic 6 are not supposed to be in 1977, why in the hell did they end up there?
A: Eloise spoke ominously of Ben’s failure to round up every one of the six for the trip back to the island, and said that the result of an incomplete reunion would be “unpredictable”. It’s safe to assume that since Aaron was not on Flight 316, that the group was split up into the factions we’ve seen today and that their will be some sort of cataclysmic incident at the end of this season that will possibly reunite them in the same place on the time-space continuum.
Q: Is Faraday really dead?
A: Unfortunately, I have to think the answer is yes. The rumor mill has been churning for weeks about a major character death around this time of the season and inside sources had confirmed the character was “major’ and “well-liked.” Faraday certainly fits that bill. Also, if the promo for next week’s episode is any indication, it looks as though Jack will attempt to take on the burden of preventing the Swan’s construction by detonating the Jughead. No Daniel to be found. This is very sad, and leads us to another, harder question: Now that Daniel is gone, who will explain all this heady, time travel mumbo jumbo to us peons??
Q: How awesome is Jeremy Davies?
A: Very. Lost often presents actors with completely ludicrous scenarios and asks the actors to make them emotionally relevant to the audience. This was absolutely the case in Daniel’s scene with a young Charlotte in this episode. On the page, I can only imagine this might have come off as creepy and sort of weird, but Davies completely sold it, offering such tender a haunting words to the young version of the woman he’ll come to care to much about in the future. Brilliant stuff.
Some leftovers
Two new nicknames from Sawyer, both about Faraday: Twitchy, H.G. Wells. Both equally awesome.
Hurley: “You guys were in 1954?” It seems like so long ago doesn’t it?
Widmore is not only Daniel’s financier, but also his dad. Boss.
I loved the Penny and Desmond scene. And, really, don’t we all?
So that’s all I’ve got for this week. How in the world is this thing going to end? Do you miss Daniel as much as I do? Does Eloise Hawking win the award for “Character Portrayed by the most number of different actresses”? By my count it’s five. Anyway, leave a comment or feel free to fill up my email box via the link up top. See you next week!
