do yourself a mischief

AT LAST he's back: tonight on lost, daniel faraday -- american tv's current best substitute for a time lord -- was in full return (as opposed to just arriving on the island via submarine last ep, right before the end screen went black and logo-y). it was a frickin' mindblower of an hour, in which my favorite time-traveling physicist totally rocked inna doctor who stylee, right down to the "i'll explain later" (if not in those exact words).

all right. you know the drill. i'm about to talk a lot about this episode, so if you haven't seen it, LOOK AWAY! DO NOT READ ON! MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!!







... i'm not fooling. beeg spoilers coming up, right now ...








first off, sawyer was totally ON this week, dubbing faraday both "twitchy" and "h.g. wells." and he also brought the angst when realizing they all had to leave ... he finally finds a place to belong, to be respected and useful (escaping his past -- in the past), and it's cruelly ripped from him by ... JACK! the dirty bastard.

anyway, sacrifice -- big and small -- was pretty much a theme this week. not least for us faraday fans, who've impatiently awaited his return, rejoiced at same, and now perhaps had him cruelly ripped from us by ... his own mother?? holy hell!

i didn't like faraday's mom, eloise hawking, making tiny tinsel-teethed daniel quit piano b/c he had to become a brilliant scientist. not b/c it was mean, although it was, but b/c ... there is an element of mathematics to music, and what better way to expand one's mind than to learn that language, as well as the art of improvisation (aka thinking outside the box)?

but i suppose it's a small thing to make him give up, since she knows she is grooming him to ultimately give up his entire life (uh, maybe -- not sure about that yet). ironically, eloise pushes young dan to his "destiny," seemingly believing it can't be changed. but faraday comes to realize/believe that the constants aren't the important part of the equation; it's the variables -- ie, humans -- that matter. so if he does certain things, he CAN change what happens in 1977, and keep the flight 815 accident from ever happening. (which actually raises a whole bunch of other questions, like, if jack, kate, and the rest of the oceanic 6 -- except sun -- were still in 1977 when faraday changed events, would they stay in 1977 or vanish back to their original timeline? that's just one.)

and so, as dan tells jack, it turns out one's existence in the future is no guarantee of one's survival in the past ... in effect, they have become the butterfly.

when eloise (who's a hostile OMG!) shoots daniel in 1977, she doesn't know what she's doing, even though he accuses her of doing everything she did, despite knowing what would happen to him (to everyone, maybe). daniel is speaking to the mother he knows, not the woman she is when she shoots him.

this stuff makes my head hurt, but i LOVE IT. or, as jack puts it, "i'm getting kind of used to the insane."

faraday's not really INSANE in the scenes where we finally see more about him weeping while watching that tv report on the fake 815 crash (pictured above). he's damaged, from the time-travel experiments at oxford, with a sort of memory impairment that widmore (his secret daddy, wowee!) tells him the island will cure. what dan says about trying it on himself first (again, the experiment) and never wanting to hurt theresa (his assistant/subject) was kind of chilling. so faraday feels guilty for not being able to save people (like charlotte). but he's a little bit reckless with their lives. just like ... the doctor!

sigh. poor charlotte. they could've been so good together.



anyway, this backstory makes me want to rewatch the eps where we first met faraday ... was he acting a little more squirrelly in the very beginning, due to slowly recovering as he spent more time on the island? i want to say yes, but maybe i'm just impressionable.

i love how in lost we get to see different events from different points of view, and how sometimes when the timeline expands to show us something we've only heard about, or seen a fragment of, the picture totally shifts and we understand events more completely. other times the revelation is more about a deepening of the emotional background. we heard charlotte tell daniel, before she died, about when he frightened her as a child. and tonight, the actual scene of him with little charlotte was really intense and desperate. you could see why she said, as an adult, that he'd scared her. it was a sad, heavy-duty moment. not least b/c he tells her he tried not to have to tell her what he's telling her, but he couldn't avoid doing it. which isn't so good for that changing-the-past theory, IMO.

see? head hurts!

but i wonder if faraday will survive the gunshot? the teaser for next week carefully conceals his fate, of course. i've been trying to avoid lost spoilers (as i am gorging on DW shooting spoilers, i really can't take any more than that), so i don't know whether he's going to live. of course, i'm not optimistic. and, as time lord-y as faraday can be, i doubt he'll regenerate. darn it.