Lost Rewatch on VHS: The Constant

 

What is perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Constant when you think about it is just how atypical an episode of the series it is.  We spend almost no time on the island itself, and when we do, it’s more for exposition to what’s happening on the freighter than anything else. It has one of the smallest casts of regulars in Season Four and many of the ones we see are only in small parts.  We only have appearances by two of the original cast members: Jack’s role isn’t that significant and Sayid spends far more of the episode reacting (though you can’t exactly say Desmond would have gotten through it without him). Aside from Henry Ian Cusick, we only see three other cast members and neither Juliet nor Charlotte really do much. Hell, considering all the effort we’ve spent in the last few episodes just getting to the freighter to the first place, we spend almost the entire episode there learning almost about the people who came to ‘rescue them’  - though as it turns out we learn more than we think.

Yet this episode is considered the greatest episode in the entire series run. I’m not sure I’d go that far but I can’t deny that it is by far one of the greatest episodes in the history of 21^st century television. The fact that is so atypical to what we’ve seen is in part the reason so many people, myself definitely among them, responded so strongly to it both at the time and more than fifteen years later.  Frequently the most atypical episodes of series are the ones that are the very best moments of TV- think of ‘The Pine Barrens’ of The Sopranos or ‘Hush’ on Buffy.  There have been countless examples of this in the years since – ‘The Suitcase on Mad Men, ‘Hitting the Fan’ on The Good Wife, ‘Teddy Perkins’ on Atlanta or ‘ronny/lily’ on Barry.  These episodes cross genres and services but the reason they achieve greatness is because they take the formula of a series that has already transcended its genre and find a way to twist it still further.

 And in a way that is even more remarkable ‘The Constant’ is a glorious outlier among some of the greatest episodes of any TV show. Most episodes that we consider among the greatest of all time in this century have a way of gutting us with their darkness. This was true even before Peak TV began: ‘Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose (or to be fair, any of Darin Morgan’s work for The X-Files) and ‘The Subway’ episode of Homicide led the march because they were so dark and looked at death from the worst way possible. Throughout the era of Peak TV great moments in history came part and parcel with the death of a beloved character – take the death of Stringer Bell on The Wire, Edgar’s dying in Day 5 of 24 or of course ‘Ozymandias’ in Breaking Bad.  These moments linger with the viewer because they take out the lives of characters we have come to care about and we barely have time to recover.

But ‘The Constant’ proves just as effectively that you don’t have to kill a major character off to make a powerfully emotional connection with the viewer. To be clear most of the action involving the story does seem to deal with the increasingly likelihood that Desmond’s being unstuck in time may end up leading to his death. Desmond himself spends the second half of the episode trying to deal with that threat. But the episode is just as much about Desmond trying to connect with the woman he loves.  We see him looking at the picture of Penny in the moments before the chopper goes into the storm with affection and certainty. When he finds him in his training camp in Scotland, the only thing he remembers from the helicopter is that picture. Even before he has any idea of what he needs to do to save himself, his first reaction is to call Penny. And the moment Daniel mentions the constant, a smile crosses his face because even as he is utterly baffled about what is happening, he knows that Penny can save him.  As I mentioned in Season Two, the idea of love being enough to overcome everything was basically out of style well before Lost debuted in 2004. The saga of Desmond and Penny proves just how wrong the cynics were about this idea, and it’s maddening just how much all of television has spent so much of its time and energy denouncing it as a concept. (Yes Shonda Rhimes, I’m looking at you.)

Even now, there’s still some debate as to exactly what happened to Desmond in this episode, which has always been tied as a companion piece to ‘Flashes Before Your Eyes’ which just like The Constant dealt with both Desmond and Penny’s love story and the idea of time travel.  What is fundamentally clear (though of course, not to the people on the island because no one talks to each other) is that Desmond’s exposure to electromagnetism when he blew the hatch at the end of Season Two has triggered…something in him that makes him experience time differently than the rest of the people on the island. In Season Three, it seemed to give him the ability to see glimpses of the future that were connected to the death of Charlie. Desmond spent most of Season Three trying to stop that future from happening despite what Mrs. Hawking told him and what Daniel tells him in a different context here. (Hmm. You might think there’s a connection between that.) In the end Desmond could not stop Charlie from meeting his fate and just before that he stopped having flashes. There has been no sign of anything like that so far in Season Four but we haven’t really spent much time with him until now.

Now we, among other things, get confirmation that the island seems to have some kind of force protecting it and if you don’t go through it the exact right way, there are ‘side effects’, to put it mildly.  Almost lost under what is happening to Desmond is that it seems to have already happened. The first person Desmond meets – and really the only person on this freighter who seems genuinely inclined to realize just how screwed everyone is  - is George Minkowski. We’ve heard his voice a few times in the first couple of episodes, and then he disappeared from the channel. Now we see why – and its not comforting at all for anyone.

We learn that while the ship was in dock, George and Brandon got bored, decided to take a lifeboat out and then Brandon started acting crazy. Brandon died a little later and George is well on the way to that point by the time Desmond and Sayid meet him.  Could there have been a way to save him? The sad truth is no one this freighter is destined for a long life.

It becomes clear the moment that the helicopter is set down that not only is no one glad to see Sayid and Desmond, they don’t even seem that happy to see Frank. Yes this is where we first meet the charming Martin Keamy, without question the only character in the entire six seasons of this show who has absolutely no redeeming virtues. (Or common sense, or higher brain function, or really anything resembling a human being.) He actually seems angry that Frank has come back at all, which considering one of his later missions will be to fly back to the island really makes you wonder how he planned to get out there in the first place.

We also get another very clear sense that no one on the freighter was given any preparation for this trip to begin with and that no one seems to care about anyone else. Keamy answer to what he is seeing is to essentially lock Desmond in the sick bay and the doctor’s ‘treatment’ for what is clearly temporal displacement is to drug his patient’s into submission. No one has any respect for Daniel Faraday even though he seems to be the only one who actually knows what’s going wrong and no one seems willing to listen anything Frank has to say about anything.  No one seems to care what happened to the scientists they sent in and they don’t care that Naomi is dead.  When Minkowski tells us that the communications room was wrecked, it’s almost as if the writers are giving a metaphor for the ship as a whole; it would be obvious if we hadn’t already seen this playing out on the island.

And we’re still not clear whose giving the orders.  Keamy spends the (blessedly) few minutes we see him throwing his chest out and acting like he’s in charge but he is willing to defer to the captain, who Sayid wants to talk to. In later episodes it will become clear that Keamy seems to be in charge of one group of people on the island, the captain is running the ship and Naomi was in charge of the scientists. Considering that all of them seem to have gotten different and conflicting reasons for being hired and that none of them seem willing to share power or delegate,  you really wonder what Abaddon was thinking when he put this team together. We still don’t know whose boat this is (but we’re going to get an answer in the next episode) but considering the effort he has put into finding this place, you’d think that he would have put more work into making sure the people he sent knew what they were getting into.

All of this is, of course, to be discovered later because what ‘The Constant’ is about is Desmond. While I think the Emmys made many mistakes when it came to not nominated most of the actors connected with the show, I can’t entirely blame them for never giving Henry Ian Cusick his due.  While individual episodes in every season would highlight his ability and the storyline involving Desmond and Penny is the most beloved of Lost fans, Desmond’s role on the show in the second half is smaller than you’d think. He only appears in nine episodes in a truncated Season Four and after this episode, his role becomes almost insignificant until the season finale. Nikki says at one point that he barely has a line after this episode until the Season finale and while that is an exaggeration, it’s not much of one. In subsequent seasons his role will actually become smaller, appearing in fewer episodes and with less screen time in each of the last two seasons. No one would argue Desmond’s role isn’t essential to either season but you could be forgiven for thinking the show had forgotten about him.

Yet this episode makes it very clear just how integral Desmond is to Lost particularly in the second half.  In part this is because time travel is about to become a critical theme to the series, particularly in this season and the next.  We’ve already seen Desmond’s consciousness from 2004 travel back in time to 1996 (based on what we see in this episode it starts slightly after he broke Penny’s heart in Flashes) and in this one his consciousness from 1996 travels to 2004.  In Flashes he thought he was in the past to change the future and in The Constant, now that’s he’s in the future, he can only remember from the past.

This episode is also critical because it forges a link between Desmond and Daniel Faraday. Jeremy Davies has the biggest secondary role in this episode and it serves as his coming out party on Lost.  He’s already become a fan favorite from the moment we met him but that’s because he spent so much of the first four episodes seeming alternatively amazed and clueless by what is going on around him. ‘The Constant’ is the first episode to tell us that Daniel clearly knows more about what’s happening on the island that he let on -  though somehow, he doesn’t seem to yet know how he knows this.

The scenes between Davies and Cusick in Oxford are brilliant as we see a different Daniel than the one we’ve met before.  This Daniel seems connected to reality in a way the one we already meet isn’t: he initially seems more cynical than the one in the future but he also immediately accepts Desmond’s statements in a way that almost never happens on the show anywhere.  Interestingly while so many people on this show accept things because of faith, Daniel accepts Desmond’s story because of science.

It’s clear that Dan seems to be working on a way to deal with time travel when it comes to Eloise: the phrase he uses ‘unstuck in time’ is a term to Slaughterhouse Five (which you can imagine Dan might have read growing up).  Dan is trying to make it so a person can go from time period to time period and see them all at once: that is clearly what is happening to George and Desmond, but it’s also clear that it’s not something our poor brains can handle. (We get a big hint in this episode that Dan’s brain might not have been able to handle it either, which explains some of what we’ve seen him do.)

We also get our first look at Dan’s journal, something that seems like a throwaway when we see it but at the end of the episode seems to have far larger implications. The last line of the episode – written but not spoken – is ‘If anything goes wrong, Desmond Hume will be my constant.” We’re never going to get a clear idea about this statement, including when it was written but it seems that some part of Dan always knew he was coming to the island, always knew Desmond would leave, and always knew he would give Desmond the coordinates.  Small wonder that Nikki Stafford gets to a certain point in her rave of this episode and asks: “Does your brain hurt yet?” I have a feeling if you tried to work out the logic hard enough, you too might not be able to get back.

And we get our first real hint about Charles Widmore’s connection to the island.  When Desmond tries to see him, Widmore is bidding on the journal of the Black Rock which we learn was ‘lost at sea in 1845 and no one knows it fate.” Well, the viewer knows exactly where it ended up and the fact that Widmore is willing to spend a small fortune to get his hands on this journal seems to indicate that he has an idea as to where it ended up to. That and the fact that the ship is blocking any communication from Penny would seem to be a very big hint that she’s not the only Widmore who knows about the island’s existence.

But everyone who watches this episode does so for the final three minutes. This episode, like almost every moment of the Penny-Desmond saga will leave the most hardened viewer in a puddle every time they see it; it certainly still does for me. Perhaps the reason it resonates is because of what we’ve seen immediately before. Penny looks at Desmond as if he is crazy, which he thinks he is. She is stern and unforgiving and genuinely seems to be telling him her number so that he will go away.  Even knowing everything we know about the two of them, we don’t have enough faith that the call will come through. Maybe Penny gave him a false number. Maybe she moved. Hell, given what we saw at the end of Season Three, she might not even at her flat on December 24,2004. After all, she knows Desmond’s alive: she might have chartered a boat right then.

And then…she picks up the phone. And the entire viewing public bursts into tears along with Penny and Des.  Ever since we learned of their love story in ‘Live Together, Die Alone’, we knew that these two people will never give up on each other.  Desmond has faith; Penny has determination, and both of them love each other too much to let anything – not Penny’s prick of a father, not Desmond’s conceptions of honor, not him being lost on an island for three years, not the forces of time and space itself -  get in their way.

  Love conquers all is an old cliché, and while television utilizes it often, the fact that so many people in TV just consider it dull because there is no conflict means that they refuses to let it be a force once the chase is over. It wouldn’t seem to fit in a show like Lost which seems to be a series among mind-bending concepts and darkness that grinds such things as love down; the series has already broken our hearts multiple times and will keep doing it over and over.  But an episode like ‘The Constant’ tells us that love is so much more than a cliché. It is the kind of thing that drives us and that we need. So many of the great moments in this show – and not all of them will have to do with Des and Penny – are about how characters are driven by love and how it brings salvation and hope.

And there is  one last bonus: The Constant is as close to a Christmas episode as Lost will give us.  I doubt people need an excuse to watch this episode for any reason but to watch it on Christmas Day is one that would be worth doing. This episode climaxes with two people who love each other giving themselves the greatest gift either could possibly receive. For Desmond, it is that he has a chance to live. For Penny, it is hope that her quest is working. And they both give a declaration of love that is as much a promise as anything else. What more do you need for great television?

 

 

VHS Notes: We get a preview of Marvel’s Iron Man. Years after so many films, it’s almost impossible to remember what a huge risk this was for the movies at the time, considering that even in the first decade of the century comic book films were hit or miss. To do so with a franchise that was hardly the first tier of Marvel with an actor as its lead who while immensely talented was still considered a box office risk, it’s kind of amazing how big a gamble this was and that there were no guarantees of anything.

We also get the beginning of an ad campaign by ABC  about ‘spring returning after a long winter’. This was as euphemistical a term the network could use about the writer’s strike that had come to an end a few weeks ago. They show ads for the returns of their hit shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Ugly Betty, Brothers & Sisters and yes, Lost. However, they leave out the fact that so many of the hits the previous fall such as Pushing Daisies and Dirty Sexy Money are not coming back. It was the first sign that ABC was focusing on its present rather than its future. It was a trend of things to come, sad to say.