Lost: The Dan with the Plan

While none of us liked having to do without a new episode of "Lost" last week, I was pumped to see the show come back with one of its more action-packed installments in recent memory.

And I’m not just talking about the fact that "The Variable" featured loads of gunfire and a solid explosion. (For once, it made sense that there would be a barrel of fuel in the middle of a firefight, since the skirmish took place at the motor pool.) I’m talking about the fact that in the space of a briskly-paced hour that never felt rushed, we got a ton of back story on Daniel Faraday (his youth; what brought him on the freighter to the Island), we got the apparent set up for the final two episodes of the season (teardrop) and a regular cast member was killed off.

Maybe.

Before all that, we revisited the Ben/Pen/Des shootout at the marina. Desmond was curiously rushed to a hospital with what appeared to be a life-threatening wound, despite the fact that he’d just had the strength to sprint at, tackle and pummel the hell out of Ben after being shot. Maybe he was exhausted from kicking so much ass and passed out. Seriously though, this can probably be chalked up to Desmond’s adrenaline aiding him in saving his family’s life. However, given the shady nature of that entire marina sequence when it first aired a few weeks back, (and the fact that Desmond ended up being totally ok after all) I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more to it.

While Penny fretted in the waiting room, she got a visit from Eloise Hawking who blamed her son (that would be Faraday, not icky Ben) for Desmond’s predicament. I thought it was very amusing that the woman who has dedicated a good portion of her life to forcing certain people (Daniel and Desmond that we’ve seen) to remain on their predestined tracks in life would scorn her son for sending someone off the rails by making an alteration in the past like Faraday did with Desmond. (Gotta love kids rebelling against their parents.) I also think that Fionnula Flanagan sometimes overdoes it with her "I’m saying something mysterious" line readings.

After this we got the back story on young Daniel, wannabe pianist with a bit of an odd accent that I suppose was meant to hint at his British parentage. The first we saw of him was Eloise squashing his dreams of being a Piano Man and, instead, imploring him to use his brain. Except, that it wasn’t a suggestion, it was a demand for Daniel to focus all his energy on becoming a brilliant scientist. (It only took five seasons, but the show finally decided to give a character some Mommy issues, instead of a totally messed up relationship with his dad. Oh wait, as was the case with Miles, daddy wasn’t around for Dan either, so nevermind.)

That meant there was no time for research assistant/girlfriend/eventual guinea pigs like Theresa (Eloise’s cold shoulder was particularly frosty). Another new thing we learned last night was that, before frying Theresa’s brain, Faraday tested his time-consciousness machine on himself, resulting in the broken, memory-impaired young man we saw last season sobbing as he learned of the (fake) Oceanic 815 freighter.

At that moment he got a visit from Charles Widmore - the man who’d funded his work at Oxford despite never meeting Faraday - who reassured Daniel that the wreckage was fake because he faked it (that settles that) and offered him a chance to regain his mental faculties by travelling to a magical Island of healing. In a surprise to Daniel, his mom flew in and said she was completely on board with the job, though (with a rare subtle piece of acting) Flanagan still conveyed some ambivalence.

In the final off-Island segment, Desmond was revealed to be ok (Des: "I promised I’d never leave you." Me: Gulp.) and Widmore was revealed to be Faraday’s father. Not exactly a major shocker given that we’d gotten hints during the scene where the two first met (I believe Widmore when he says he’d never met Dan before - maybe Ellie got pregnant and skipped town, er, skipped Island) and the fact that we knew from a few weeks back that Widmore and Ellie ruled the Island together for a while.

The flashback scenes were informative, captivating (thanks to great work from Jeremy Davies) and, as in the best episodes of "Lost", directly informed what we were seeing on the Island, where the real fireworks were going on.

Despite the explosions to come, the biggest thrills of the episode involved the normally stuttering, socially-awkward Daniel becoming a bold, still-awkward (asking for a beginner’s gun = LOL!) man of action. As soon as he landed, he informed Jack that Eloise was wrong about him belonging there. Still, the biggest"Holy s---" moment of the entire episode for me was Faraday cavalierly spilling the beans to Dr. Pierre Chang at the Orchid station (a new view of the season-opening sequence). To paraphrase Dan: "I’m a time-traveler, and this Chinese guy named Miles is YOUR Chinese son named Miles, because, how many Chinese guys named Miles could there be on a single island?" Though he left skeptical, I’m inclined to believe that Chang is inclined to believe Faraday, which is good because Faraday apparently just needed to spur Chang to do - something.

Dan also couldn’t help himself where Charlotte was concerned and tried to warn her about what’s going to happen to her in the future. Nice restraint by the writer/director in pulling away and showing them from a distance before the actual warning. Also, nice punch to the stomach by having Charlotte’s first, chocolate-centric words to Daniel be the exact same thing she said to him right before she died.

Actually, I found this entire exchange to be fantastically ironic. Daniel had arrived back on the Island having done a 180 from his "Whatever happened, happened" stance and extolling a "Yes we can change the past" attitude. However, by trying to change the past he did something that had already happened in a previous timeline, thereby keeping things the same (whatever happened, happened).

With Faraday back, Sawyer decided to call a time-travelers-only meeting (quiet in that closet, Phil!) at his house. (Unfortunately, Sayid is unable to attend because he’s a kiddie-shooting fugitive.) Faraday wanted to go in the jungle and implore his mom to get them back where/when they belong (when/wherever the hell THAT is), while Saywer wanted to start from square one and either live in the beach or the jungle.

Am I the only one who thought Sawyer’s plan seemed kinda dumb? Still, that was far from the dumbest thing he did at the meeting - that would be slipping up and calling Kate "freckles." That sound you heard was Juliet’s heart breaking. However, since Juliet isn’t so much a girly-girl and is more of a hardass, she didn’t cry about it and instead instantly suggested that Kate go with Jack and Faraday into the jungle and in hostile territory. (Translation: Step off, bitch.)

One of the most heartbreaking things to watch this season has been Sawyer’s perfect little existence in Dharma-ville falling apart afterJack and Co. returned. He’s making rash decisions (punching Phil and locking him up) instead of reading some Churchill beforehand, and he’s back to using nicknames ("H.G. Wells"!). Now, he’s been captured by that pain-in-the-ass Radzinsky before he could espcape to the beach with Juliet. (At least Hurley got away.) The more desperate he gets to keep things the way they are (which explains his disapproval of Farday’s new theories), the worse things are getting.

Daniel’s plan, on the other hand, consisted of evacuating everyone off the Island and detonating Jughead the H-bomb before the electromagnetic accident that caused the Dharma Initiative to build the Swan hatch could occur. That would, of course, negate the crash, the freighter to the Island and everything else we’ve seen. (Cue skeptical, worried looks on Jack and Kate’s faces.)

Before that, he tried to meet up with his mom in the jungle. Everything about this meeting was curious to me. Did Faraday go into the Others’ camp knowing he was going to be shot (which would explain his reckless, aggressive behavior) or was he just being an idiot. The big reveal, of course, is that it was his mother Ellie who pulled the trigger. (This would explain Older Eloise’s ambivalence about sending her son to the Island on his predetermined path).Daniel appeared to take his last gasp and reveal to young Ellie that he was her son.

So it appears that "whatever happened, happened" is still in play, since Ellie seemed keenly aware in the present that she would kill her son in the past. However, given the fact that by the end of the episode Eloise admitted to Penny that, for the first time in a long while, she didn’t know what was going to happen next, something must have happened (or IS going to happen) to disprove "whatever happened, happened." (Which is holding up pretty well so far.)

If this is really the end for Faraday, I’ll just take a quick moment to give Jeremy Davies kudos for a quirky, interesting, funny and ultimately heartbreaking performance. You expect quirky and even funny out of a TV physicist, but not so much heartbreaking.

So what’d you think of this episode? Do we think that Daniel was born in the Island (like Miles was) and that his vast intellect is a result of that (like Miles’ ability)? Has the reason that Eloise can’t see future events anymore happened yet? How do you think Daniel knew about the events of 1977 in such detail from his journal? (Was this a result from his eventually-botched time travel experiments on himself?) Could Sawyer and Juliet be any more done? Finally, (speaking of being done) do you think Daniel is dead? (Yes. I actually think his storyline - sans potential Ann Arbor-era episodes - is pretty much wrapped up, don’t you?)