"Happy 100th Episode - 5.14"

This week we watch helplessly as Dan’s life is revealed to be a dizzying circle of destiny that he has little control over. His mother (and missing father) guide his brilliant mind toward their own goals of saving…what, the island? The world? The Universe? Whatever, it’s the “God help us all” destruction that TPTB have been hinting at since Season 2. Who knew that Daniel Faraday was the center of all of this, we thought that it was Desmond?! We also watch Dan propel himself into a spiral of logic concerning what could happen if the energy pocket under the Swan location never gets compromised by the excavation, sending the 815ers on a new course that they never dreamed could exist, i.e., getting the Big Do-Over.

So many questions are aroused by Dan’s startling new mission (which is actually his mother’s mission?), that you hardly know where to begin. The obvious being the contradictions between what he said previously about changing the past, and what he said to Jack and Kate about people being the variables in the equation of life. People are always the variables! Didn't Calvin once tell Hobbes the tiger that the world would be a perfect place if it wasn’t for all the people in it? Somehow, Dan had forgotten to include these variables in his calculations concerning the island’s energetic timewarp problems. I guess that we can give him some slack for forgetting, since he did have those memory problems and had to catch up on his theories in double-time after he arrived on the island, verified by how we’ve seen him frantically shuffling through his notes every time something offbeat happens. BTW, Dan’s reading his notes on the Scale Factor (a theory on relative expansion of the universe) as he's preparing to speak to Chang below the Orchid, which I’ll do some research on for a Lost Science post.

The next question to ponder is for Jack and Kate. That is, do they really want to change their future course so that they never crash on the island? Certainly for those who died that might be a better outcome, although perhaps they would die somehow soon anyway, as per universal course-correction. But do Jack and Kate really want to create a world in which they never meet or have the chance for redemption? One where all the interactions between the other Losties never happened and where the sick people aren't healed? Juliet and James might have something to say about that, they seem to want things to stay just the way they are now and I don't blame them. Another thing to consider about this is, what will happen when the future changes…they don’t belong in 1977 in their 2007 bodies, will they get sucked into some kind of vortex and get spit back out into their proper place in time? That’s gotta hurt. Or maybe they'll just stay put and never exist where they did later. And one more question about course-correction: how do you know which is the correction and which is the way it was supposed to be? Maybe Charlie was supposed to almost die three times.

Then we are compelled to question the heck out of Eloise’s actions. At first I didn’t see it, but she seemed to be in a painful spot at each critical turn of Dan’s life, guiding her gentle talented son towards something that was necessary but (at the end) fatal for him. Eloise is played by the same actress in the piano scene and on the island. How long after she shot and met older Dan, was she in the parlor steering Danny to his life spent "studying relativistic physics"? Did she suddenly know when she walked into the parlor that she had shot her own son in the past, the way that Desmond suddenly “knew” that Dan had given him a new memory? It sounded like that, the way that Dan accused her of knowing what was going to happen in his last breath. She and Widmore may have both known where Dan was going in life, but perhaps Eloise alone knew that she shot Dan in another time loop. Let’s hope that he gets carried to the temple like Bennie did, but I don’t have much hope for that. Anyway, you know that she was always proud of him and his special gifts, but maybe she should have taken some of Miles’ advice and told him that before it was too late.

The next probing question is why Dr.Chang didn’t believe Dan at all about his time travel. I mean, if you’re studying time travel, you might think that someone from the future where it’s become possible, might travel back to talk to you about it for some reason, most likely to give you some advice. But I suppose we can assume that somehow Chang warms up to the idea, due to the video that he made in his bungalow that he sent to the DIs at ComicCom last summer.

A few other thoughts I had were:
* Des, don’t you know that saying you’ll never leave someone will make it happen?!
* Why would Eloise say that it was Dan’s fault that Des was shot? Wasn’t it more Widmore’s fault because of sending Ben on a vengeance spree?
* I thought that Eloise was going to steal Charlie while Penny was visiting Des!
* Won’t blowing the island up with an H-bomb ruin everyone’s future as well, via either death or severe radiation burns?!
* Was Widmore in LA due to Ben’s threat against Penny?
* Jack falls back into his comfort zone of resolving conflict and fixing things, hoo-rah!
* Dammitt Kate, you and your guns you got Dan killed!
* Why did Dan need a gun to talk to his mother, so she couldn’t talk him into her way of doing things again or because of how trigger-happy she was in 1954?
* Why does Richard seem to have memory problems like Dan when it comes to recalling people that he’s met on the island before?!

* Will little Charlie not be born if time gets reset?

* I knew that Teresa was his girlfriend as well as his assistant, how could she resist?!
* Funniest line: “I just got shot by a physicist!” -- as if physicists aren’t supposed to shoot people. X-D

A great episode for a great milestone! Thanks to TPTB for giving us 100 fascinating hours of TV fun, new friends, stimulating mental gymnastics, and intellectual frustration.