smartgrrrl's guide to stuff

Why are Desmond episodes so good? It’s partly because Henry Ian Cusick is just so good, so fun to watch, but it’s also because Des eps always have to do with the timey-wimey stuff, the scientific explanations for why the island is like it is, its powers and limitations. It’s the same reason the Locke and Ben episodes are always so good — Locke eps always have the spiritual element of the island at their core, while Ben eps tend to focus on the island’s history. These three are like the Island Trinity.

This episode was like “Flashes Before Your Eyes” and “The Constant” swirled together in a delicious Desmond cone. My notes are all exclamation points. “Minkowski!” “Driveshaft!” “Daniel alive! Musician!” “NOT PENNY’S BOAT!” “MILTON!”

Now that I think about it, this entire episode was really little more than a string of callbacks and references to previous episodes, back to back to back. And it was FANTASTIC.

Minkowski: not a mathematician, but a driver for Widmore, kinda skeezy, but thankfully questioning Desmond on his request for the 815 flight manifest. Good on Minkowski, for actually asking a pertinent question! Good on Desmond, for answering it! Except he doesn’t really, but still. Also, does Des say “I need to show THEM something,” or “show HIM something”? Where him = Widmore, but them = everyone on that flight? I would assume that the manifest would somehow prove that the Sideways world isn’t real, but how? (Maybe them = the Widmores?)

We also saw the return of animal testing (boo!) with the white rabbit named Angstrom. (Ha! I really got a kick out of that.)

Widmore has a large painting of the scales of justice in his office, recalling the scales in the cave.

That Widmore and Desmond are all buddy-buddy parallels the way everyone’s father seems to be pretty decent in the Sideways world. My throat caught a little when Widmore brought out the bottle of MacCutcheon (best fake scotch ever! Every time I see it referenced my mind goes to Kramer’s Hennigan’s commercial).

Widmore and Eloise Hawking are married. Daniel is a musician. And I have to wonder whether Eloise deliberately steered him into music, the same way she had deliberately steered him into physics. It was pretty clear that Eloise knows exactly what’s going on — telling Desmond he’s “not ready” to meet Penny.

I am probably one of about five people who was happy to hear “You All Everybody” again. Sorry, but that song has always cracked me up. And Driveshaft being still together explains Liam’s presence at the jail however many episodes ago.

Desmond sees his own reflection a couple times, in the arrivals board at LAX and in the door to the jail just before Charlie walks out of it.

I know I’m a big ol’ sap, but I was surely not the only one who got chills when Charlie does his “Not Penny’s boat” gesture in the sinking car. CHILLS. Coming as it did after all the layers of Desmond and Charlie’s relationship were referenced — Desmond is charged with babysitting Charlie, the two of them talk about love and choice — to have the pivotal drowning scene from the end of Season 3 repeated was powerful.

Desmond experiences more flashes before his eyes, all about Penny, as he goes into the MRI chamber. At that moment I thought that everyone was going to converge on the hospital and Doctor Who would show up and sonic screwdriver the MRI machine into something hugely powerful and that’s how everything gets OK.

Oh, Eloise’s LOOK when she meets Desmond. Fantastic. And then she echoes Faraday in saying “What happened, happened.” Also fantastic. She knows. She knows! (How?) (Nah, don’t care. She’s always known.)

Penny’s last name is Milton. OF COURSE. You could ask how this last name came about, why it’s Milton and not Widmore, and I’d answer that I never understood why Daniel’s last name was Faraday, unless it was to shield him from knowing that Widmore was his father. So my guess is that Sideways Penny doesn’t know that Widmore is her father, and this was done to prevent Desmond from meeting her before it was time. Daniel knows because his two worlds are bleeding into each other.

Oh my stars was it nice to see Jeremy Davies again. Damn, I missed him. And his description of seeing Charlotte in the museum and just knowing that he already loved her — so sweet! And HELLO now the look Jack gave Kate in the first episode makes sense.

I’m also not one to roll my eyes at the idea that love is going to be The Answer to Everything at the end in some sort of Harry Potter way. I don’t think this is where they’re going with this, but capital-L Love has ALWAYS been a major part/theme of this show: Desmond/Penny, Jin/Sun, Charlie/Claire, Rose/Bernard! — let’s also include Daniel/Charlotte now and Jack/Kate and Sawyer/Juliet (please?).

(Sidenote: how come it’s just the guys who have these love at first sight flashes?)

My take is that seeing Charlotte was a trigger for Daniel’s real-time consciousness to seep into his Sideways consciousness (true love’ll do that sometimes, make you dream in quantum mechanics and stuff), so he drew this graph and equation without really understanding them. I caught the words “real space” and “imaginary time.” The Sideways world isn’t real. I mean, duh, but I’m glad we got confirmation on that, and I think it’s more than “it’s not real.” Another theory floating around was that this was how things would turn out if Jacob hadn’t touched any of the candidates, but that’s no longer valid. Jughead wasn’t a giant reset button, it was something else altogether. This world simply isn’t meant to be. It’s imaginary.

And again, Daniel and his mother are approaching things in different ways — Eloise seems to be adhering to a very rigid set of circumstances that must happen in a certain order (whatever happened to course correction?), while Daniel — perhaps banking on the variables once again — is all “Penny? That’s my sister! Yeah, she’s running a tour de stade. Go find her.”

I loved that Des finds Penny at the same stadium he and Jack met. I loved that he asks her for coffee and my breath caught because I was waiting for her to answer as Juliet mumbles at the beginning of the season. Which wouldn’t have made sense, but I was still waiting for it. (P.S. My new theory is that Juliet’s “I’d love to go for coffee” is not said to Sawyer, but to Ben.)

(Why was Penny at the stadium and why did she then suggest to meet for coffee in an hour when she’s supposed to be at this charity thing?)

And finally, the minute Desmond shakes Penny’s hand, his consciousness jumps back to the island, and we’re right back in “The Constant” territory, and . . . Desmond is different. He’s calmer. He’s TOO calm. He tells Widmore he gets it, he’s ready to start. And then with equal equanimity, he follows Zombie Sayid after watching Sayid snap a guy’s neck. My guess: Desmond now sees the whole picture. He’s fully aware of both real and imaginary timelines, what has happened in both, and more importantly what WILL happen in both. So he knows that he needs to go with Sayid, knows that Sayid is not really Sayid and more importantly that Sayid will lead him to Smokey. And why does Desmond need to find Smokey? I think there are two possibilities:

1. Desmond’s the new Jacob. No, we haven’t seen his name on the list of candidates, but. Widmore spoke of a sacrifice he was going to ask Desmond to make, once their experiment was over. I think that sacrifice could very well be “You’re never going to see your wife and son again. You have to stay on this island and protect it.”

2. Or, possibly, that Smokey is actually Faraday (this is a theory I’ve seen batted around a few times — check out Jeff Jensen’s posts on Lost, because he’s written about it, but I don’t remember for which episode. The one where Smokey tells Kate that he had a crazy mom). I’m not entirely sure I understand it, or fully buy it, but it’s intriguing, so let’s go with that as a premise) and, because Desmond is Faraday’s Constant, Desmond is the one person who can pull Faraday out of this mess, which will then somehow put everything back to rights.

Or, of course, neither one of these could be true. Or they both could be true. It’s probably something completely different and more simple. But clearly Desmond is the key to saving the island, saving the world. So the Desmond/Jacob theory I think holds some weight, despite evidence to the contrary.

I didn’t see previews for next week, but Lostpedia lists the episode title as “Everybody Loves Hugo,” which is a reference to another favorite episode of mine, “Everybody Hates Hugo,” which has my favorite Lost opening of all time.

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