LOST: We All Knew This Was Coming

I like LOST. I’m not receiving any money from ABC or trying to plug for some LOST fan site, I just really love the show. I didn’t always think it was a great idea, like for instance, when I saw the original commercials for the upcoming pilot and they featured the hobbit from LOTR and a guy from Party of Five, I was pretty unexcited. I avoided the show for the entire first season, too, but the buzz finally got the best of me. During the hiatus after Season 1, I decided to check out the DVDs. Four days and only a few hours of sleep later, I was hooked.

I’m not (too) ashamed to admit that I’m in pretty deep, either. I listen to the “Official Podcast” with executive producers Damon Lindelof (original co-creator of the show and the whole story) and Carlton Cuse. I frequent Lostpedia and a few of the forums. I talk about it to anyone who listens. So I figured I’d start writing about it, too.

ALERT: The following part of this post, below the shameless promo picture, is about LOST season four, and references things up through last night’s episode The Constant.

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Okay, so it’s time travel, but not really. I haven’t read any reactions or talked to many people about last night’s Season Four episode The Constant yet, but let me say right away that I loved the episode and think that it puts the show on a good course to explain a lot of the mysteries of the island over the remaining 43 episodes. Here’s what we now know.

• Time on the island doesn’t go at the same rate as time in other places. They alluded to this in The Economist when Daniel Faraday did his tripod experiment and the clocks didn’t match up, but it’s now been verified. It took them no more than an hour to fly out to the ship in the helicopter, but to Jack over a day had passed.

• There is a specific bearing that you have to use to get “off” the island, presumably to accurately navigate the wormhole or whatever it actually is. Faraday suggests that slipping off that bearing is what can lead to “side-effects” which include the time travel of your consciousness. He later suggests that one’s susceptibility to this is based on exposure to radiation or electromagnetism.
• The time travel that has been introduced isn’t really time travel as we normally think of it. It involves your mind/awareness switching back and forth between a past time and the current time while your body remains in both times as it always was. Although, when the mind is present in the future body, the past body goes catatonic, whereas when the mind is present in the past body and then returns to the future body, it’s as if no time has passed. Very confusing still, but plausible. I’m excited to hear more about it and see it in action again.
• Desmond and Minkowski were unable to control the traveling back and forth. Eventually this kind of uncontrolled switching kills you by overloading your mind, we think. It seems like the way to prevent death (and possibly stop the switching, though we don’t know yet) is to find your “constant” — someone you can make contact with during both awarenesses. I have no idea why this works yet.

All that makes for a great introduction into the beginnings of all the explanations they have to do. But it leaves a lot of questions that I still have too.

• Who’s the captain of the freighter (that’s a really cool link, by the way), and what are he/she and his/her crew doing? They obviously don’t like Faraday and his “science”, so it seems like they have another motive than the team we’ve already met. But somebody put that team together for a reason, too. Are there two different groups on the boat, with two different missions?
• What triggers the time travel and why only Desmond? Is it something you can control somehow?
• If Desmond’s consciousness from 1996 traveled forward to his 2004 body, what happened to his 2004 consciousness at that point?
• Ben is obviously leaving the island, but he has a drawer full of passports and money and THINGS. You can’t take things with you if you’re traveling by way of “consciousness time travel” (Desmond couldn’t bring the writing on his hand, etc), so he must be leaving another way. How and why?

• What is it about connecting with Penny, the constant, that restores Desmond’s consciousness to 2004?
• Who is Daniel Faraday, what does he do, what does he study, what’s in his notebook, and why does he name Desmond as his “constant“?

• What is the significance of Daniel Faraday’s memory problems (he was playing the memory-based card game with Charlotte in Eggtown).
  

• Was Penny’s search for Desmond in part because of his promise to call her in 2004, or not, based on the time-travel problem of repeating events (the events seemingly happened once to lead Desmond to 2004, but then once he travels back and talks to Penny, allegedly the events must happen again from that point, but with Penny having more information than the first time through those same events)?

That’s all I can say for now. I need to watch it again and think about it more, but I am very pleased with where everything seems to be headed.