Lost – “The Variable”

For the past few weeks I’ve stuck with the “if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all” line and avoided talking much about Lost.  Don’t get me wrong–it hasn’t been horrible or even bad, and I will watch it until the end no matter what, it’s just been kind of a disappointment for me.  I’ve said before it’s because I have high standards for it and once the standards are set it’s extremely difficult to lower them.

Here are a few things about Wednesday’s episode, “The Variable,” that are kind of indicative of the problems I’ve been having with the show all together this season.  Obviously, you should consider this a spoiler warning, too.

First, why did Daniel Faraday have a gun? The man has about as much business holding a gun as I do.  The “do you have anything for a beginner?” line was cute, but not much of an excuse for his out-of-character behavior a short while later.  I get that he was out of his element and freaking out about the timeline, but to go with guns blazing into Other territory?  It was semi-believable until he fired the two warning shots.  And to give Richard Alpert to the count of 3 before shooting him in the face?  Who was that?

It was very un-Faraday.  He has always been the pressure-release, trying to get everyone talking and to calm down.  When the four freighter people were released, I even said Daniel Faraday was the one out of all of them that I felt we could explicitly trust and for the most part he lived up to that… until he lost his damn mind and got shot.

Secondly, whatever happened… happened, and you can’t change the past, right? I mean, that’s what people have been telling us since the time travel concept was introduced.  Even the producers themselves have said so.  But with Daniel Faraday suddenly coming up with this plan to change the past, everything we’ve been told could not be true.  It’s the grandfather paradox, just dressed up a little.

The grandfather paradox is that old story about you going into the past and killing your own grandfather.  If your grandfather is dead, he can’t produce your father, who in turn could not produce you.  So if you don’t exist, you can’t go back in time to kill your own grandfather in the first place… which would mean he would be safe and alive, and able to produce your father, who in turn would produce you.

This gives you a headache if you think about it, and is why it’s a paradox.

So if Daniel’s plan is to erase the Swan Incident, so that Desmond doesn’t not have to hang out in the hatch and press the button and Ocean 815 never crashes and Faraday himself is never brought to the Island as a result, how would he go back in time in the first place to erase the Swan Incident?  Look at it this way:  Event 1 caused Event 2, Event 3, and Event 4.  Event 4 enabled Faraday to travel into the past, where he decides to stop Event 1 from ever happening.  If Event 1 never happens, neither can 2, 3, or 4… which is how he is able to stop Event 1.

Time paradox, feedback loop, and as Doc Brown would say, “the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuum, and destroy the entire universe!”

I suppose it’s entirely possible that Faraday’s plan isn’t going to happen so this whole thing is moot.  Or, that “course correction” would prevent it from happening and this “whatever happened, happened” thing really is true.  Even so, this is no good, because it would mean Daniel came up with a faulty plan, which, as we’ve seen, he would be extremely unlikely to do, especially because someone like me can see it’s faults and I’m just some guy who makes Vulcan cartoons of himself and likes to eat.  So not only have we witnessed another un-Faraday, every episode we’ve seen so far (unless you watch it purely for the characters) have been a waste of time, since it’s all pre-determined and “whatever happened, happened and there’s no sense in trying to change it.”

Also, if Charles Widmore and Elouise Hawking are Daniel Faraday’s parents, and he grew up with his mother, why 3 different last names?  And why would he not speak with an English accent, if he presumably grew up in England with his mother and attended Oxford?  I’ll tell you why… they wanted to put some drama in the script and took a cue from Heroes, and, instead of real development, just said, “what if he was CHARLES WIDMORE’s SON zOMG!!!!!!”  At least, that’s the impression I got.

I know there are other interpretations out there, these are just mine.  I just can’t help but feeling the quality of Lost has been lost (I swear I don’t mean that as a pun).