Another top-notch, wrenching, conceptually breathtaking time travel story on Lost tonight - 5.14 - which skirts around paradox, but is thoroughly explicable on the basis of obsessed human nature.
Daniel has returned to the island in 1977 - that is, the Daniel we know, who lost his love Charlotte, and understands better than most the possibilities and limitations of time travel. Nonetheless, he has a daring plan - do something that will prevent "the incident" that made the "Hatch" a necessity, which in turn will allow Flight 815 not to fall out of the sky, and instead make it safely to L.A.
Kate and Jack agree to help him - a good thing, too, because Hurley or Miles might have known enough to stop Daniel, if they had had any time to think about it. If Daniel had succeeded in changing the past, that would mean that Kate and Jack and all Losties would never have been on the island in the first place. So Kate and Jack are supporting Daniel in his plan without realizing the consequences.
But of course Daniel's plan can't succeed - because, if it did, then we would suddenly be shifted to a completely different story, off the island, in which Kate would probably be in prison and Jack would be practicing medicine in Los Angles. So the only real question is, what would stop Daniel?
The solution is heartbreaking but elegant. Daniel needs the help of his mother, Eloise, young and on the island with the hostiles in 1977. Eloise, as we know, is Ms. Hawking (and it turns out, as many viewers also have guessed, Charles Widmore is his father). Daniel waves a gun to Richard, who tells him Eloise isn't there, but a shot rings out and Daniel is killed - a shot fired by Eloise.
With his last breath, Daniel asks Eloise how she could have sent him, her son, back to the island, knowing that she as her younger self would kill him in 1977? The younger Eloise of course has no answer, because she could at that point in her life have had no knowledge of what the adult Daniel looked and sounded like.
But from that moment on, she will carry the memory of having killed a man who said he was her son. And she soon enough will realize that that wild man on island was indeed her son. So, why, as Daniel asked, did she get him to go back?
The only answer is that making or keeping things in the island the way she thought those things should be was more important to her than her son's life. Cold, cold, indeed.
By the way, there's nothing paradoxical in this result - as there would have been if, say, Daniel had been the one who killed his mother, before she conceived him. That event would have thrown Lost right into the teeth of the perennial grandfather/grandmother paradox, which can just as effectively occur if the time traveler does something to prevent his mother from being his mother.
But the coming attractions, if I saw them correctly, seem to be showing Jack now trying to do what Daniel Faraday was trying to do - stop the events which led to 815 crashing - and that would lead to paradox about as profound as it gets...
Two other points -
1. Daniel may not be dead, which would make Eloise not as cold as I said above. After all, young Ben survived his wound in healing Hostile hands...
2. I would've have liked to have seen a little more about what Daniel did and learned in Ann Arbor...
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PS ... did you see the little flashes in the commercials, with the tag "What did you see?" Keep staying tuned - those are little previews of my friend Rob Sawyer's "Flash Forward," which will likely be following Lost on ABC next season...
More Lost - see : The Richard-Locke Compass Time Travel Loop ...
and Lost Returns in 5 Dimensions and 5.3: The Loops, The Bomb ... 5.4: A Saving Skip Back in Time ... 5.5 Two Time Loops and Mind Benders ... 5.6 A Lot of Questions ... 5.7 Bentham and Ben ... 5.8 True Love Ways ... 5.9 Two Times and a Baby ... 5.10 The Impossible Cannot Happen ... 5.11 Clockwork Perfect Time Travel ... 5.12: Ben v. Charles, and Locke' Slave ... 5.13: Lost Meets Star Wars and the Sixth Sense ... The Problem with Baby Aaron and the Return of the Oceanic Six
10-min podcast review of Lost 5.14
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Comments
Daniel's mother made such a strong point about his returning to the island to be "healed." There is more to that story.
It seems to me, we will see other Lost characters returning and new events will prevent Kate and Jack from preventing the plane crash.
The possibilities are mystifying.
From what I've read, the time travel described in that article is similar to how time travel works in Lost.
JJ Abrams was guest editor of the most recent issue of wired.
Anyway, I thought the scar talk was pointing to that...
I also thought they were all dead at one point. I still love that idea.
Then again, why did he repeat the act of bumping into Dr. Chang, down in the Orchid construction site? That happened in an earlier episode and Daniel made it a point to repeat it here, though he then also made it a point to confront Dr. Chang, another thing that had never happened before. I took that as an overt gesture to change the past.
Again, I feel cheated when it seems like nothing can change and we're just watching things play out. It was exciting when they shot the kid version of Ben (b/c then anything would be possible) but a total rip-off when he was alive in the next episode.
for me it becomes dramatically uninteresting if the show takes the view that we are watching a loop that is unchanging. This is how I used to view time-travel and it can be logically maintained. However, I'm so relieved to finally see the other perspective and, like you, I think Faraday was coming to that as well. I disagree with Paul's view that Daniel was simply reminding Jack that scars go away with age. In fact, I think shot Daniel will now carry a very visiable scar with him.
Filmskool, have you seen the film PRIMER. Oh, man, now that tackles time-travel the way you and I are talking about. And I think Lost might be as well. Nothing has happened yet that puts it to the test. Now, if young Ben had died THEN we'd know for sure which way they are going with this...
Whether or not the show will ultimately back off the "whatever happened, happened" conceit is not for me to say, but this wasn't an example of that. :-)