Chuck
4801
It was explained that the bullet went through Locke just where his kidney was removed. Far-fetched, to be sure, but a good enough (another Lost coincidence) answer for me.
DT1
4802
So Daniel says “Whatever happened, happened.” Then in this episode he says events can be changed through the variable of human intervention. Ugh, whatever.
This whole business of one person’s past is another person’s present is clunky and annoying. I hope next season they ditch the whole time travel mess.
Daniel was kind of pretty obviously pulling all that stuff about being able to change history directly out of his butt. He transitioned from Science Talk to metaphysical hogwash about how humans are variables. What I find more curious is how he went to Chang and hooted at him to stop the hell drilling near The Swan to “get him to do what he’s supposed to.” I’m not sure we can take it at face value that Daniel’s intention is to stop The Incident, or that, if it is, that he’s not just gone crazy.
Love it!
This was a terrible episode - no characters are actually doing anything, they’re just flailing about. All of Sawyer’s celebrated thinking comes to nothing, and Jack went through personal hell to return just so he could mope on the Island instead of in California. Hurley is ready to pack up and leave without a second thought … To where?! 70’s America?! What will he do there? Why the fuck did they bother coming?
Why did Daniel shoulder an air tank and sneak by Chang (to tie-in to the bit we’d seen previously, of course), but then immediately drop the apparent subterfuge to rush back and seize his attention? Why did he break into the Hostile camp shooting off his gun and waving it around, completely out of character? Just to justify being shot by his mother …
The only compelling aspect of this episode, for me, was the moment when Daniel demonstrates how he has compelled Chang to have caused the events that led to the past he knows (Miles and Charlotte being sent off the island).
So then he goes on about the ‘Variable vs Constant’ speech, while his actions have already corresponded with the past he knows to have happened.
The only way that could make sense is if that speech was a ruse meant to indirectly compel the other characters (Jack and Kate) to cause The Incident while thinking they are preventing it …
Possibly off topic, but does anyone know what the little “What did you just see” ads that were shown throughout the episode about? Off the top of my head I remember a guy surfing and a mom and son coming out of their house, and I still have it on the dvr if it’s possibly important that we know what it was about.
New show for Fall called Flash/Forward based on the book of the same name that I won’t link for fear of spoilarz for a show that hasn’t even released a proper commercial yet. ABC is positioning it as the next Lost.
I don’t think the Dharma crew causes the second accident. I think Chang evacuates people on the sub (we already know Charlotte leaves the island) and Jack and crew go in and try to execute Daniel’s plan, and they cause the accident. Maybe knocking themselves back to the future in the process. This gives a purpose to all this stuff in the past and it’s the same kind of gotcha as Daniel’s mom killing him – they cause their own plane crash.
That’s precisely what I think he was doing, although he obviously didn’t know he was going to get shot.
Unless he did and that’s exactly why he went rolling in like a complete idiot - to ensure he did get shot. In which case his reaction to his mother is pretty well-staged.
That’s really testing the limits of silly.
JeffL
4811
I now know the ending.
There will be a huge flash, and then Jack will wake up from suspended animation, in a spaceship on a mission to Mars, with the other members of the cast also waking up in the spaceship, and he’ll share this weird dream he had and they’ll all laugh.
(that will only make sense to Life on Mars fans…)
Well, we see the scene where his mother tells him to go to The Island, and later the scene where she clearly understood what was coming and didn’t like it, but no indication of the latter in the former. One assumes that if she had told Daniel that she was totally going to send him there to get shot, even assuming that he remembered that (remember he had the brain melts at that point), one might expect him to choke a bitch at that point. Or at least balk a little bit. It would be an odd point of the plot to leave out, particularly when you could include it with three or four lines and foreshadow the ending.
No, I wouldn’t suspect that his mother would have told him that point - but rather that he derived the solution from other means - the same which told him he had to prevent/cause the accident.
Which all depends on what he learned while he was doing Science at the Mainland Dharma facility.
As in that scenario he has somehow concluded what will/needs to happen.
I don’t get the sense the Faraday was scheming – the reaction he had when he was dying smacked a lot more of piecing it all together and realizing what his mom had done (knowing what she knows) than it did of being staged as it would have been if he knew what was going to happen all along. Unless they specify for sure in a future episode, I’m going to take what happened at face value, he thought he could change things and turned out to be wrong… DEAD WRONG (muhahahah!).
I think his comment about getting Chang to do what he has to do was a separate (though tangentially related) thing from meeting the hostiles – his comments to Chang, IMO, were not meant to actually stop him from doing whatever at the Swan but were made to seed enough doubt in him that he’d call for voluntary evacuations via the sub before they did whatever it is they were always going to do at the Swan so that Charlotte gets off the island before the Incident (as she always did anyway, because what happened, happened – presumably this is also when baby Miles and his mom leave, etc) because having her get off the island and living long enough to come back and die (as she is doomed to do) is preferrable to Daniel to her being at risk during the Incident.
The primary issue I have this this episode and the ideas it presents is they never justified why Daniel suddenly thought he could change things beyond some mamby pamby emotional bullshit about people being variables. Hopefully this is something they cover in a future episode since this series is big on flash backs, but this episode is weak as it stands until we know wtf Daniel thought he was doing and why he thought it would work.
I also have trouble understanding why many of the Lost passengers would be down with the idea of making it so the plane never crashed even if that were a possible/logical thing to do since most of them found some sort of redemption on the island (if the plane never crashes Kate ends up in jail, Charley comes back alive but is a junky/loser instead of an unlikely hero, Hurley is an unlucky half-crazy loser, Locke is a cripple (though I guess he doesn’t have much say since he’s in the future anyone), Jin and Sun wind up in their old busted marriage with no kid, etc. They’ve laid some halfassed groundwork to give Kate a reason to go ahead with such a thing despite the jail thing (promising Claire’s mom to bring Claire back), but really the whole idea of stopping the crash is just stupid and wrong on a lot of different levels and I hope they don’t really pursue that too much and I REALLY hope the last episode isn’t them achieving that goal).
The scenes for next week kind of suggested that’s going to be a plot point. I’m guessing it just didn’t fit in the script for this week.
RIGHT!
But if it was Daniel’s actions that result in Chang’s evacuation, then he didn’t change anything - because that is the past as he knows it.
Why, after essentially becoming the cause to that effect, would he genuinely believe that his actions could also create a different result than the past that he knows? He was the ‘constant’ that effected Chang’s evacuation. Why would the Incident be any different?
It’s either a ruse, or Daniel is crazy.
Here’s the thing, though: The show has pretty clearly laid down the rules that you can’t change the past. You might be able to affect it for a little while, but the island will “correct” itself so that the thing that needs to happen happens.
Except there’s one person who can change stuff. That’s Des. But he’s not in the past, nor on the Island.
Not quite. He didn’t change the past. His past changed and he noticed. Important distinction. Theoretically.
HRose
4820
The contradiction is that people aren’t variables, as Charlie’s case demonstrated.
It’s either both death and life being constant, or both variables.
Or it’s just a case of mystery whose big pieces are being deliberately left out (so it’s pointless to guess).
