Show Me Your Variable

LOSTaways-

I'm a busy man the next two weeks with finals, so I'm gonna make this re-cap of The Variable shorter and sweeter and bloggier than most. Fantastic episode! The best part of it was the admittedly hard-to-catch allusion to my 4th favorite movie of all-time, Saving Private Ryan . As most of you have realized by now, Jeremy Davies who plays Daniel Faraday was also in SPR. He played the mumbling, cowardly cartographer Upham who ends up being the reason Tom Hanks gets shot in the end. The allusion in this week's episode came when Faraday was handed a gun at the motor pool and said he didn't know how to use a weapon. On a few different occasions in SPR, Upham says basically the exact same thing and the gun he is handed in LOST is the same type of gun he was carrying in the movie. Fun fact? Maybe.

But let's get to it, shall we...

Working forwards in time, we see a young Faraday playing the piano with the TIME being kept by a metronome. His mom, Eloise, comes in and commends him for playing well but reminds him that his gift is his mind, is science, and that he needs to put aside the frivolities of music and focus on his studies. Faraday insists that he can do both, but su madre wasn't having any of it.

I want to just jump right in to the fact that we learn by the end of the episode that Eloise Hawking knew from the time her son was born that she would be the one who kills Daniel. I know this is skipping ahead, but there are a few key points I want to make along the way.

For example, the next scene in Faraday's life is at his graduation from Oxford. He and his friend/research assistant Theresa Spencer are rudely greeted by Eloise and she does his darndest to push Theresa away from Daniel. Now that seems mean, and obviously was, but think of it from Eloise's perspective. She knows that time has to play out as it has...or at least we could say she believes that it does, because we still don't know a lot about what will happen with things like "the incident"....so in her mind, the reality of her son "having" to die means that she would actually in some ways be doing him a favor to push him away from any marriage or family life because that would ruin many other people's lives when Daniel ends up in the past and after coming to the island.

Plus, maybe part of Eloise was pushing Theresa away because she knew what would happen to that poor eventually (see: the whole brain frying thing that eventually makes her a vegetable). Who knows? The point here is that Eloise is a firm believer in the idea that things must play out as they are "supposed" to. Hence, the creepy scene in Season Three when she tells Desmond not to buy the ring and marry Penny. This points to Eloise having more power and information than we might think. By that I mean that she obviously knows more than just big details, like that her son is coming back and will be shot by her...she knew in that scene with Desmond that the guy wearing red shoes would be crushed in a construction moments later. That's pretty specific if you ask me.

So after the graduation scene, Daniel tells his mom that Charles Widmore is sponsoring his research. I'm guessing she knew this already. She gives him the journal that he will use to make the calculations to come back to the island. That journal will, in a sense, be the thing that leads Daniel to his own ...at the hands of his mum, no less. Weird.

The next thing we see in Daniel's saga is the rest of the scene from the beginning of Season Four when Faraday is watching the news coverage of the Oceanic 815 (fake) wreckage being discovered in the Indian Ocean. The woman in the room with Faraday is still undisclosed and I would venture a guess that she is inconsequential, like the lady who was taking care of Miles' mom last episode. Widmore pops (no pun intended) in and offers Faraday a job and the chance to travel to a magical island that happens to have healing powers.

Even his own real dad is pushing him on the idea that Faraday will be able to "continue your research." Everything in Daniel's life from both of his parents has been pushing him in his "work." Obviously Faraday is even more important that we currently realize if his own parents are that willing to push their son this hard and then sacrifice him for the "good of the island." Eloise finds Daniel later playing the piano again and suggests that he take the job and confirms that she'll be proud of the guy should he take the job. Emotional stuff. You can tell that this hasn't been easy for Eloise, but in reality, who cares about her feelings...Faraday's the one primed for a bullet in his spine.

In 1977 time, Daniel returns and quickly makes his way to the Orchid station. Apparently everything he does there, like telling Dr Chang that he's from the future and that Miles is his son, was an act of sorts, designed to set off a chain of events. Faraday tells Miles he did that so that Dr. Chang will "do what he's supposed to do." Faraday, again, knows more than we know he knows. How does he know it? Likely much of what he knows is in that journal of his, but perhaps Faraday has been time traveling more than we know. Or acquired the information from someone else who knows more. Maybe Desmond is that person. Maybe Desmond has traveled through time more times than we've seen yet. Maybe he visited Faraday in Ann Arbor during those 3 years he was gone from the island in 1977 time. Just a thought.

All hell is breaking loose as Sawyer and Juliet's Dharma world is crashing down around them. That moron Radzinsky goes nuts and finds the security dude stuffed in Sawyer's pantry. There is the shootout at the motor pool with Jack-Kate-Faraday before they make haste to the Others' camp. Just wait till my man Horace finds out. He's gonna be livid. Trust me. So Horace.

You can tell that Juliet can tell things won't be like they were between her and Sawyer. Sawyer's idea to "get back to the basics" on the beach was a dumb one to begin with, but admit it...you had a flutter in your stomach because when he mentioned the beach and the way things used to be, you thought of Season One and all the fun we used to have back then with our 815 survivors. But alas, it wasn't meant to be and now Sawyer and Juliet are in some hot water.

Jack is told by Faraday that he was duped by his mom in to coming back to the island. Again, there is more that we don't know yet, like why Faraday is so convinced that Jack didn't have to come back. I think Jack did need to come back and we'll see in these last three hours of Season Five what Jack's role is to play in all this. But you can tell that Jack is a little miffed and confused. He had just started to buy in to all the "destiny" and "fate" that Locke had tried to sell him for four seasons, and now this spaz physicist is telling him it was all rubbish again. Don't lose hope, Dr. Shepard. I predict an encounter between Jack and his dad before the end of this season, which will make it all worthwhile to the troubled spinal surgeon.

Faraday's basic understanding of how time works has changed to include the "variables" of human beings. 1977 is THEIR present, so for these band of time-travelers, the future is yet unknown and unwritten. I think in some ways, if not completely, that theory is de-bunked (at least in part) a few moments later when Faraday is shot by his own mom and he realizes that she knew this would happen all along and had in fact sent her son on the path he was even just then on.

When Jack, Kate, and Faraday get to the Others camp, Alpert is there and seems to genuinely want to help Daniel. He is incredulous when Eloise shoots the poor lad, and defends Faraday before they all learn that he is her son. I think we see here another example of Alpert being kind of his own man. Or...a physical manifestation of the island's power (or Smokey the Monster). He doesn't answer to anyone, apart from Jacob it seems. He goes around people's back to help who he wants (first with Ben when Charles is angry, and then later helping Locke when Ben is angry). Very interesting character, that Alpert is.

We also see present time back in the real world where Desmond has been shot by Ben and taken to the hospital for surgery. Penny is visited by Eloise who apologizes for the conflict Desmond and her have been caught up in. Eloise, however, says that for the first time in her life she doesn't know what is going to happen. Hmmm. This implies that up until that moment Eloise had been privy to information regarding nearly everything that would happen. Like my example earlier about her knowing that the guy in the red shoes would be killed when she talked to Desmond years back. Eloise tells Penny that Desmond's wound is her son Daniel's fault. I think she just means that because of the chain of events Faraday put Desmond on by going back to visit him in the hatch earlier this season when the island was skipping in time, Daniel led Desmond to this moment of being shot and in surgery. But there might be more there than meets the eye. More to Faraday's connection to Desmond, like I was mentioning earlier.

Finally, we learn that Faraday's plan is to blow up The Swan with Jughead and stop the chain of events that lead to 815's crash and The Freighter's expedition. More on this below.

So that's that for the episode itself. Here's a few brief thoughts/theories:

-Daniel counts the beats of the metronome is his head. The total is 864. 108 x 8 = 864. 108 is the total sum when the add up "the numbers."

-Faraday also goes to talk to little Charlotte on the swing set. She says the line about not being allowed to have chocolate before dinner, the last thing she says to him before she dies in the future in Daniel's arms. He thinks he can save her and change things, but it appears to me that this is exactly how it all played out before and nothing will be different. For this to be true, Faraday will have to be raised from the grave, Locke style...or the island will heal him...also Locke style. But then again, if Faraday is right and this is the present for he and Jack and the rest, then Faraday is really and that is that for him.

-Widmore is Faraday's dad, as we learned, and I called that earlier this season. Look it up.

-The way last season ended, with groups of the LOSTaways splitting up to run around the island for big tasks, is happening again. I love the continuity on this show. Almost like they planned it this way.

-Jughead, our favorite nuclear weapon, is the solution in Faraday's mind to all their island, time-traveling troubles. Some theories being tossed around include the idea that Jughead is buried in the "shadow of the statue", like Ilana and Bram have been asking people. I think that the "incident" Faraday thinks is just some electromagnetic energy being released might actually end up being the nuke going off. Not sure how that would work or how the island would inhabitable after that, but we haven't seen the last of Jughead.

-Sawyer calls Faraday "HG Wells", referring to the famous British novelist. Wells' books are classics and many of them have been referenced already in LOST or contain themes very similar to it. For example, The Shape of Things to Come was an episode title from last season, and is also the title of a Wells novel about a future world controlled a single government.

-There is a copy of Wired magazine on Faraday's couch when Widmore comes to visit him. That issue included articles about time-travel, and it was also thrown in there this week because LOST co-creator JJ Abrhams was the guest editor this month of the magazine in lieu of his sci-fi blockbuster Star Trek coming out this month.


There's more to say about this episode, as there always is each week. I'm donzo for now, but if you want/need more info about this episode, please read THIS week's Doc Jensen article at Entertainment Weekly's website. Enjoy it.

Thanks for reading and please leave comments below.


-John Locke's Pants