Lost Rewatch on VHS: The Variable

 

VHS Notes: Oh we’ve got a ton. The opening of the episode cuts to a footage of space of which the Enterprise goes through to lead to a sneak peak of J.J. Abrams spectacular reimagining of Star Trek which launched him to the path of blockbuster director and officially put Chris Pine on the map. Because we are closing on blockbuster season, we also see previews of Angels & Demons and the fourth – and red-haired stepchild – of the Terminator franchise, Salvation.

There are also trailers for other series that are coming in the summer, including the season premiere of Wipeout and throughout we see the hints of trailers for Flashforward yet another attempt of ABC to create the next Lost, and frankly their best effort.

 

Requiescat in pace Daniel Faraday.

Few episodes fit the term of ‘centric’ more than The Variable being Daniel-centric. Ever since we flashed three years forward in ‘Lafleur’, we’ve all been wondering where Daniel has been all this time. It’s notable that none of the Losties in the Initiative have either mentioned or even seemed to care where Dan is, even though they’ve clearly been following his concept of ‘whatever happened, happened’ for three years straight.

Now with everything they built in Dharma about to come undone Dan returns to the island, tells Jack that his mother was lying about them having to come back to the island, demands that Miles take him to the Orchid – where we see his perspective of the opening teaser of the season. We see him violate the rule he started about being from the future to Pierre Chang, in this case to tell him what is about to happen to the Swan in roughly six hours. And Miles’ first reaction is to tell Dan not to do anything as well as deny Dan’s version of events.

When Dan returns to ‘Lafleur’s’ home, everything is starting to unravel. Sawyer, being more democratic than any island leader we’ve seen before, talks to his friends and tells them that they only have two choices: commandeer the sub or go back to the jungle and start over. He’s already convinced Jin and Hurley to his side when Dan and Miles show up. Sawyer doesn’t seem happy that Dan is there and doesn’t seem to care about anything he tells him – even if it involves going back to where they’re supposed to be. When Jack points out that they don’t belong here – which is true – Sawyer says that I belong here just fine. And almost all of his followers go along with this idea, even Miles.

Why Sawyer seems so committed to staying in 1977, even if it means that he’s still in the jungle is something that will never be clear. There was never a future for him in Dharmaville that had a happy ending even if his friends had never shown up. When he tells Faraday to help himself to the punch, he doesn’t realize the metaphor – he’s drunk the Dharma Kool-Aid for three years and he’s now upset that it’s all over. The fact that even now Dan, who has been right about everything to this point and is still right about it now, is still referred to as crazy by Sawyer, Miles – and as we see near the end of the episode, even Kate – is sad but fitting. Because this episode is the story of Daniel Faraday, a man whose entire destiny was written before he came to the island, who was driven his whole life to have his personal desires ignored by the person who should have cared about him the most, and whose gift was restored on the island and then ignored by almost everybody who came into contact with him for his entire time on the island.

Dan’s story is not just tragic, but it has the flavor of mythology. In 1977, he is Casandra trying to warn everybody of what he knows will happen, trying to change the future and being ignored the whole time despite the fact that everyone knows the accuracy of his prophecies by now. We’ve already known that his mother, Eloise Hawking, seemed to be a mythical figure herself. Throughout Season Five she has seemed to know the future when it comes to the Oceanic 6, she convinced Jack that this was his destiny and seemed not to care when Desmond showed up and told him that he didn’t have anything to do with fate.

Now in a flash to civilization, we see both her and the other figure Dan’s destiny has been tied to since the Season Four episode The Constant: Desmond Hume. It appears to take place in the aftermath of Ben’s shooting, presumably within hours of Ajira 316 taking off. (Desmond was shot in the morning and this episode takes place at night.)

Eloise visits Penny and for the first time since we met her way back in Flashes Before Your Eyes, she seems like a human being. She tells Penny that Desmond’s shooting is her fault, which it is – Desmond is only here because Dan told him to come. She tells Penny that her husband is a casualty in this epic struggle and when Penny wonders if Des will be all right, she says that for the first time in a very long time, she doesn’t know what’s going to happen.

Eloise Hawking has been a strange figure in Lost: someone whose knowledge of the island and the destiny of everyone on it has seemed supernatural even for this show. In this episode we essentially learn how she knows everything that will happen – her son told her.

Dan’s journal is sort of a MacGuffin for him. Ever since he arrived on the island, every time he looks through it he seems to know certain things about the future and the island that he just couldn’t know without having him come here. He told us when Season Five that the journal had everything he’d ever studied about relativity and the Dharma Initiative but we’ve never known how he knew this – particularly since when he first met him he seemed to know the least about the island. We’ve wondered how he knew these things and it seems the journal came to existence the same way that the compass Richard gave to Locke back at the start of Season 5 did – just as Richard gave it to Locke so Locke could give it to him, Eloise has known everything that will happen in the next thirty years because her adult son came into the jungle to tell her before he was born and she shot him without knowing who he was. (Like I said, it’s out of mythology.)

Eloise comes across as sympathetic for the first time in the entire series, from the moment we see her telling Dan that he has a gift and his gift is his mind. We’ve know that destiny was a fickle bitch well before Ben told us so in Cabin Fever, and the juxtaposition couldn’t be clearer. Dan could have been a happy musician, playing complicated pieces of music but his mother has been pushing him towards a life in science ever since he was a child. The scene in Oxford is even more shocking because it’s clear that Eloise is still convinced that Dan has to fulfill his destiny and that means that nothing he does will be good enough. This will destroy his romantic relationships, his mental well-being and ultimately cost him his life and Eloise seems to have no problem lying to her son the whole time, even when she pushes him to the island by saying this will make her proud of him.

We can only imagine how horrible Dan’s life has been, that his mother has spent his entire childhood and adulthood keeping him at a distance, driving him to sacrifice his personal happiness for some kind of futile offer at maternal satisfaction. She is doing this with the knowledge that this all ends with him walking into her camp so that she can kill him. She knows she has to do this but she never knows why. Eloise Hawking has believed in destiny her whole life but she has also interfered with the lives of other people so that their destinies can lead towards resolving hers.

In this episode, it’s worth noting, we get the story of who has the worst parents on the show and it’s Dan. When we learn that Charles Widmore is Dan’s father we now get a clearer picture of his own complicity. We’ve already known he’s been financing Faraday’s research, which means he’s been helping push his son to his destiny even if he didn’t know why. In the scene before we return to the island Widmore and Eloise are in the same scene in the present. We don’t know if they’ve seen each other since they left the island –  Widmore’s clearly been keeping tabs on her – but in it, it’s clear that they’re not even ‘old friends’ anymore. The coldness with which Eloise tells Widmore he should “say hello’ to his daughter is harsher than anything we’ve heard her say before and her reaction to the fact that he’s sacrificed his relationship with Penny is even harsher. Interestingly it’s one of the few times in the entire series that we feel anything resembling sympathy for Widmore. We don’t know why he wants the island so badly, but it’s cost him the love of one child and the life of another.

As for Eloise, perhaps she feels she has fulfilled her destiny. While the final season makes us wonder what exactly Widmore does during this interval, the one thing we know for certain is that Eloise clearly is done with the island. Eloise Hawking is seen as a young woman in the next few episodes but Fionnula Flanagan has never appeared on the island and never will. She has served her purpose.

I should mention the episode ends with Desmond in recovery from his wounds and that he and Penny seem happy. After Season Five ended, I truly hoped that Desmond’s story was over and that he and Penny would get their happily ever after. I continued to believe that until the final season was almost over and sometimes I really wish the writers had just left well enough alone.

Jeremy Davies is magnificent in this episode in a way that even his immense talent has not always given a chance to shine. Dan seems more in the moment, healthier and happier then at any point in the series. We now know that his memory condition was horrible before he came to the island after years of experimenting with radiation and time travel. And it seems the island healed him, if not immediately but effectively almost from the moment he landed. It also explains why Dan spent much of Season Four seeming scattered and unable to focus; it took several days for the island to heal the years of mental damage. (And it explains why no one on the freighter took Dan seriously. I imagine Naomi’s opinion of Dan as a ‘headcase’ was the most charming term used to his condition.)

But apparently after he left the island he seemed to get even healthier. It’s never been clear why he left in the first place or whether he would have ever come back to the island at all had he not learned of the presence of Jack and everyone else’s arrival on the island in 1977. It’s also not clear how he figured out that his mother was one of the leaders of the Others or if he knows anything more than that, such as that his father is Widmore. And we’ll never know what he thought his mother in 1977 could tell him.

What is clear is that over the last three years his way of thinking has completely changed on what is the key issue of the series: destiny versus free will. The initial conflict of the show was between Jack (the man of science) and Locke (the man of faith). What’s interesting is that Locke’s belief in destiny is completely different from either Eloise or Dan. Eloise was crystal clear to Desmond that we all have a path. “You don’t do it because you choose to,” she told Desmond. “You do it because you’re supposed to.” She used the same terms to talk to Jack about going back to the island. Now, of course, we know she was lying to make sure that her destiny played out.

Dan has been different than the other characters who believe in destiny. Where as Locke, Desmond and so many of the other characters have talked about it as a spiritual thing, Dan has always argued it in terms of a scientific equation. ‘Whatever happened, happened’ is a scientific way of saying that you can not change the future, even if you travel back in time. But now he’s clearly come to the decision that the variables in this equation – the human beings – can change their fates. And it’s clear that he thinks that the island’s time travel has been allowing for that to happen. He thinks that the island skipped through time for the purpose of letting him and his friends know that there was a hydrogen bomb on the island. He thinks that the island skipped to 1974 so that those who were left would be on the island when the Dharma Initiative was there. And now he believes that he can use the knowledge of those two things to stop the precipitating event of what starts all of this. He thinks that he can use the bomb to stop the incident from happening, stop the Swan from being built, stop the button from being pushed, stop Oceanic 815 from crashing – stop all of this from happening.

I think that maybe the real reason that Jack is the only person from the group that takes Dan seriously. Some have argued that Jack can no longer hang back and do nothing, but it’s worth noting right now Sawyer is planning – to run away. Sawyer told Jack that as a leader he thought things through while Jack reacted. Ever since then, however, all Sawyer has done is react. Sawyer’s leadership also follows the idea that he can make things work as ‘the constant’ when he can’t control the variables. That he thought he could manage all this, including while controlling an increasingly unstable Radzinsky, is proof again that Sawyer can be easily conned.

Jack may not know what his destiny is but he does know that it can’t be in 1977. Kate knows that much too, but it’s worth noting once they get to the Others’ territory she starts sounding like Jack – and not in a good way. Her telling him that Dan is acting crazy in the face of what has happened just since they woke up in 1977 is nearly as pig-headed as Jack denying Locke moved the island when he saw it disappear. This is, for the record, the closest as I come to actively joining the Kate-haters during Season Five.

The reason that Jack takes Dan seriously is because he is talking about destiny in something resembling scientific terms. The solution Dan may talk about is crazy but it involves something he knows about and that he’s seen firsthand the consequences of. Maybe he doesn’t believe this will work, but he also knows where he is and when and he knows all too well what will happy if he does nothing. At the end of Season Five, Jack decides to believe that he can merge science and faith, to change their destiny.

Of course Dan believed that too. And we all saw where that got him.