A new approach.

Lost – The Constant
Sayid and Desmond run into turbulence on their way to the freighter, causing Desmond to suffer unusual side effects.

I’m taking a new approach to this this week. I’m sick of writing a detailed recap every week because I figure if you’re watching the show you don’t need me to retell what happened for you. They’re also super tedious to write and I’m sure you can find a detailed recap on ABC.com or somewhere else. This week was far too detailed to write out EVERYTHING that happened so I’m just going to react to it because it was nothing short of amazing and doesn’t deserve any trite commentary I throw in every once in a while. I’ve believed for a while that Desmond may be the key to unlocking everything that is going on with the island and this episode just cements that more and more in my mind.

Don’t be fooled. I’m not so sure this was a time travel episode. It may have been but I think something else is going on. There is a lot of speculation out there about who Daniel Faraday actually is. One of the most popular rumors is that he is the great-grandson of the famous British physicist Michael Faraday. Michael Faraday did a lot of studies on electromagnetism and discovered that magnetism could affect rays of light. If you remember in the first episode of this season, Daniel remarked that light didn’t seem to work the same on the island. I’m inclined to believe that there is sort of an electromagnetic field around the island that affects everything within its sphere of influence whether that be light, sound, or time and space. I know this episode seems like it was about time travel but I don’t think it was. I think that Desmond is jumping between real time and imaginary time. Imaginary time is a theory popularized by Steven Hawking. “Imaginary time is a way of looking at the time dimension as if it were a dimension of space: you can move forward and backward along imaginary time, just like you can move right and left in space.” After seeing a screen cap of Daniel’s notebook I’m fairly certain that’s exactly what is going on here.

A really interesting piece of Desmond’s story was during one of his flashbacks to 1996 when he came into the auction that Penny’s dad Charles Widmore is at. He was bidding on the first mate’s ledger from the Black Rock and the seller’s name was Tobard Hanso. This caught me right away because the captain of the Black Rock was Magnus Hanso. Alvar Hanso founded the Hanso Foundation which created the DHARMA Initiative. Why would Charles Widmore be interested in a ledger that possible talked about the island back in 1996? Maybe that is how Penny knows about the island and perhaps why Charles got Desmond into that sailing competition that landed him on the island. Ok I’ll be honest, anything involving the former Caleb Nichol gets me in a tizzy. He has got to be one of the best “son of a bitch” actors out there. No matter what he does you want to poke him in the eye and call him a jerk.

This episode really didn’t get into details about anyone other than Desmond so it doesn’t leave a lot of questions. It was mostly explaining how things on the island work. I have a sneaking suspicion that the whole card game thing Daniel and Charlotte were doing in the previous episode had something to do with Daniel skipping in and out of different times himself. Remember one of the first times we see Daniel he is crying while watching a camera swim around the fake wreckage of Flight 815 and he doesn’t know why he’s upset. Daniel had been exposed to a lot of radiation in his lab at Oxford, and Desmond had been exposed to a lot of electromagnetism while down in the hatch. Daniel says that those are factors that can trip the symptoms that Desmond exhibits when he leaves the island.

I want to make a special note to point out the last part of the episode. Who is their right mind didn’t get a little teary when Sayid finally fixed the phone and Desmond was finally able to talk to Penny. He called her eight years later on the day he said he would. She’s spent three years looking for him and she finally gets to talk to him and know for sure that he is alive. I know "long-lost lover" tales are told way too much in the movies but I thought this was handled very delicately and I never felt that I was being milked for tears. I was generally happy that Desmond and Penny FINALLY got to have some contact because obviously they dearly love each other no matter what occurred between them in the past.

This episode only left me with two questions. I wonder who the “friend” on the boat is that left the door open for Desmond, Sayid, and Minkowski to get to the communication deck is; and I wonder why Desmond Hume is Daniel Faraday’s constant. I have a feeling that Daniel is going to start making a lot more sense and seem a lot less absent-minded.

Well, that’s all for this week. I’ll probably go back to the old format for the next episode but I thought this episode was so different I wanted to address it in a different manner.