Loaded Couch Potatoes

Honk Mahfah reviews “The Variable,” the most recent episode of Lost.  Spoilers are the constant.

After taking a week off, Lost returned tonight with its 100th episode.  And was it a doozy?  Why, yes, it was, thank you for asking.

It was a big ole Farraday episode, and it serves as a bit of a companion piece to “Some Like It Hoth” in that, for the most part, this is an old-school Lost flashback episode, going all the way back to Daniel’s childhood and forward again, filling in some of the blanks about the twitchy bearded wonder.

Interestingly, it can also be seen as an Eloise episode.  It begins with Desmond being wheeled into the ER after being shot by Ben, with Penny and Charlie following him frantically.  Penny is visited by Eloise, who apologizes for the whole thing, which is her son’s fault.  She reveals to Penny that she’s Farraday’s mother, at which point we flash back (or forward, depending on how you look at it) to “Thirty Years Earlier.”  Farraday is getting off of the submarine, and Miles is meeting him.  As it turns out, Daniel has seen the Dharma group photo that Jack and friends are in, and confronts them, telling them that his mother was wrong about it being their destiny to go back to the island; they don’t belong there.

Daniel finds Pierre Chang at the Orchid, tells him that he’s from the future, that he has to evacuate the island due to a massive explosion that is going to take place at the Swan in the next six hours.  He also tells Chang that Miles is his son.  Chang does not believe him, and leaves; Miles is furious, but Daniel says that he is just ensuring that Chang will do “what he’s supposed to do.”  (That’s ominous.)  In grand Lost tradition, Miles does not ask him what he means by that.

(Side note: is it just my imagination, or do some of the sounds from the Orchid construction site sound an awful lot like some of the sounds the smoke monster makes?)

We see Daniel graduating from Oxford, with another grand Lost tradition intact: terrible, terrible hair which is meant to show us that This Happened In The Past.  We find out that Daniel has gotten a $1.5 million grant from an industrialist, Charles Widmore; Eloise seems disturbed by this.  Later, after Farraday’s accident, Widmore visits him and offers him the opportunity to go to a scientific anomaly, an island, which could heal him; Daniel is skeptical, but his mother will later tell him he has to accept Widmore’s offer.  Daniel asks if going will make her proud; she says it will, and he agrees to go.

Back in Dharmaville, Sawyer holds a meeting and tells Jack and friends that — thanks to the closetful of Phil he’s currently a proud owner of — they have to leave, either sneaking off the island in the sub or fleeing into the jungle.  Farraday interrupts, asking if they know how to find the Hostiles; he needs to find them because his mother is among them, and only she can help put them back where they belong.  Sawyer and Jack get into an argument over this, but Juliet gives Kate the code to the gate, and they slipt into two groups, with Jack, Kate, and Daniel heading off for the jungle and everyone else planning to make for the beach.

Before they all get underway, Daniel approaches young Charlotte, and warns her about … what, exactly?  We don’t see the entire conversation, so I’m not sure if we’re supposed to think he’s done what Charlotte said he did in her past, or if he’s tried to change things by telling her something different this time.  Unfortunately, this scene doesn’t come off as well as you might have expected it to.  The little girl who plays Charlotte is not exactly the next Dakota Fanning; in fact, she’s kinda terrible.  The scene feels rushed, and this might be due to the writers wanting you to think Farraday has done one thing, setting it up so they can tell us in a future episode that he did something else entirely.  If that’s how it shakes out, I’m okay with it.  But if the scene is meant to merely be taken at its face value, then it’s a swing and a miss; Jeremy Davies does his part, but he’s got no assistance in this particular scene.  A shame (I think).

Then, Jack’s group gets into a gunfight with Radzinski.  They escape, and Daniel is shot, but the bullet only grazes his neck.  He tells Jack not to be mistaken; they can all definitely be killed in this timeline.

Sawyer and Juliet are getting ready to leave when Radzinski and his goons burst in on them, intending to tell LaFleur what has happened.  They discover the closetful of Phil, and take Sawyer and Juliet captive.

In the jungle, Daniel tells Jack and Kate his plan: to disrupt the accident at the Swan (and, therefore, the entire chain of events which will lead to 815′s crash landing on the island, along with all the resultant events) by setting off a hydrogen bomb.  This, apparently, is what he needs his mother for: to tell him where Jughead is.

Cut back to Eloise at the ER; she tells Penny that for the first time in a long while, she doesn’t know what will happen next.  We find out that Desmond is recovering just fine.  Widmore lurches out of the shadows at Eloise, and he confirms for us that he is Daniel’s father.  No shocker there.

Daniel marches into the Hostiles’ camp with his gun drawn, demanding that Richard tell him where Eloise is.  He finds out when she shoots him in the back.  He looks up at her — the younger version of her we’ve seen in flashbacks of him as a child, when she discourages him from playing the piano and tells him that he has to focus his intelligence on mathematics — and breathes out in wonderment and horror that she knew all along what was going to happen to him, but she sent him to the island anyways.  Then, he dies.  The end!

There’s a lot to digest here, starting with the fact that this is Eloise’s episode as much as it is Daniel’s.  The first scene involves her owning up to being Daniel’s mother, and the final scene involves her finding out that she’s just killed him.  The implication is that she, as Daniel says, finds herself from that point on in life making decisions to ensure that she and her son arrive at that place.  Just like Daniel says he’s making sure Doctor Chang does what he’s supposed to do, that’s what Eloise must spend the rest of her life acting out.  That certainly fits into Farraday’s assertions in previous episodes that the timeline can’t be changed.  We still don’t know to what extent Desmond — who may or may not be an exception to this rule — will play a part in this idea, but his presence in this episode seems to be some sort of hint.

On the face of things, it must seem like Eloise is a cold, cold, heartless bitch, but consider this: she gives birth to Daniel knowing that she has already killed him.  What would be the emotional impact of that knowledge?  Some folks, I’m sure, would spend each day weeping into their palms while listening to Sarah McLachlan for hours on end; others might find that they then had no ability whatsoever to actually love that child.  I can’t get enough of a read on Eloise to know where she falls on that spectrum.  Is that bad writing?  I can’t even tell that; I’m sometimes unsure as to the specifics of what this show is prompting me to feel.  I’m also perfectly content to not spend much time worrying about it; that’s what DVD collections are for.  However, it might help to explain the seemingly ever-shrinking audience for this once-upon-a-time ratings behemoth.  Not everyone is as patient — and as willing to swim in the waters of ambiguity — as I am.  (I probably should have said “as we are,” since it’s unlikely that this will be read by many people who aren’t in the same camp.)  What I know is that the final scene of the episode renders much of the rest of it quite chilling; in particular, the scene in which Eloise tells Daniel that she’ll be proud of him if he returns to the island.

I’d guess that Jack and Kate are now going to try and fulfill Daniel’s plan to find Jughead and stop the “incident” from ever happening.  Knowing this show, they just might be successful.  How trippy would it be if the final season consisted of everyone living out the lives they were going to live if only Oceanic 815 had landed like it was supposed to?  I don’t see that happening — the Locke/Ben storyline (amongst others) hasn’t been resolved yet — but if it did happen, I wouldn’t be too surprised.  On this show, you just never know.

As always, Jeremy Davies was great in this episode.  Then again, who wasn’t?  I actually even liked Fionnula Flanagan in this episode, and while Alan Dale is always good playing Widmore, I felt myself sympathizing a bit with Widmore, which has never happened before.  I wonder: did he, too, know he was sending Daniel to his death by sending him to the island?

Another strong episode from Lost in its fifth season.  It seems to have been some sort of important turning point in the history of the show, and I guess that’s appropriate for episode 100 of any series.