* I thought this episode was simultaneously one of the more predictable and well-acted eps this season. On the predictable front, I was pretty sure from the jump that Widmore was Daniel’s dad, and it wasn’t tough to guess that Eloise was grooming Daniel to his death all along in order to set other events in motion. And “predictable” isn’t the right word for this, but the heavy-handed “I’m putting personality-warping pressure on you, my child, because that’s what parents do on this show” scene between Eloise and piano-playing Tiny Daniel was straight outta similar earlier encounters between young Charlie and his parents, young Jack and his dad, young Miles and his mom, young Ben and his dad, young Sun and her dad, young Sayid and his dad, and on and on and on.
* But on the acting front, Jeremy Davies is yet another one of the show’s richly enjoyable performance discoveries, and he’s given more to do here than ever before. I was particularly impressed by the painful way he displayed his post-experiment mental disabilities in the flashbacks. He also made for a convincing long-haired science weirdo in the “guy in Val Kilmer’s closet in Real Genius” mode. His death was well played as well, with a great “I shoulda known” vibe overlaid upon his grief.
* I was also impressed by Elizabeth Mitchell’s work here. Her fatalism ever since the return of the Oceanic, uh, Four has been a lovely note for the show to play, and having all her fears confirmed in this dramatic fashion enabled her to do a lot with it. I love how she can flip an internal switch to make her beatific (okay, and botoxed) face segue from serene to devastated by intensifying the look in her eyes and twitching the edges of that ducklike mouth just so.
* This is down to the writing as well, but I was really grateful for the degree to which Sawyer went out of his way to apologize to her and comfort her. Mitchell and Josh Holloway have real, loving-couple chemistry in addition to the in-story connection between their characters, and I hope the show’s writers realize what a mistake it would be to re-involve them with Jack or Kate again.
* Regarding the central development of the episode as expressed in its title, “The Variable,” I’m of two minds regarding the newly advanced notion that maybe we can change the past. (Well, more or less “newly advanced”–Daniel’s implication in sending Desmond on his mission to find Eloise was that Desmond, at least, is able to operate freely in time, independent from the “whatever happened, happened” constraint.) On the one hand, I think Lost‘s great achievement in dealing with time travel is coming up with such a thematically elegant counter to the time travel paradox.
Back when I first watched The Terminator, it occurred to me that if Skynet sent a terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor, there wouldn’t have been time for adult John Connor to send Kyle Reese back in time to stop the terminator: barring Kyle Reese’s involvement, the terminator would have had no problem killing Sarah, which would have wiped John Connor from the existence, which means he wouldn’t have been able to discover Skynet’s plot and send Kyle back in time hot on the terminator’s heels. Then I was like “Whoa, wait a minute–if that’s how it worked, Skynet would never have needed to send a terminator back in time in the first place, because John Connor would never be born and there’d never be a resistance to send a terminator back in time to prevent.” And this is all without even getting into the idea that John sent Kyle back in time to be his own dad, or that Skynet in essence did the same thing by sending the terminator back in time only to have his design and circuitry inspire the creation of Skynet in the first place. Basically, in order to even have a story to tell with time travel working as it does in the James Cameron Terminator movies, you sorta just have to arbitrarily declare a cut-off point after which you’re not going to worry about the ramifications–you’re just going to tell the story, even though its own events dictate that the story could never be told.
By contrast, Lost argues that whatever time travelers do in the past is fixed. Nothing can change as a result of what they do, because what they do is more accurately described as what they did–by the time they were sent back in time, their actions while time travelling were already 30 years in the past. There’s one timestream, and in it, whatever happened, happened. The elegance comes in how that euphonious bit of sci-fi exposition resonates as philosophy, as a theme for a show that has long concerned itself with questions of fate, destiny, and free will.
So in that light, I’m hesitant to believe that this diktat is going to go out the window, and (as the message board types are theorizing) season six will be some kind of “everything has changed!!!!” Heroes/”Days of Future Past” scenario–not just because the creators have said they wanted to establish firm ground rules for time travel to avoid confusion, but also because it’s such a narratively and thematically satisfying approach.
On the other hand, it’s easy to picture the show wanting to make some kind of point about how we’re free, how we can break out of the roles imposed upon us by cruel fate or sinister puppetmasters or the relentlessness of space-time and change the world for the better. Just because the show hasn’t come out and done that so far–just because it’s been pretty rigorous in refusing to give characters like Jack, Locke, and Desmond an out from their destinies, frequently to their detriment–doesn’t mean it won’t, particularly as the finale nears.
* Okay, enough of that. Now some short but sweet observations:
* Eloise seems a little old compared to Daniel to be his mom, no? I mean, she was at the very least in her late teens in 1954–how old is Daniel supposed to be? I’m sure that Gregg Nations has the dates written down, but it looks weird.
* If, as it seems, Li’l Miles and his mom and Li’l Charlotte and her mom flee in advance of the Incident, does this mean that all the children do so, and does that mean that we’ll finally see Li’l Ben’s doll-making girlfriend Annie again? And would that also mean that the Incident has something to do with the Island’s infertility problem and its inhabitants inability to successfully reproduce afterwards?
* Radzinksy’s a great annoying bad guy. It’s too bad we know he lives to hang out with Inman in the Hatch and then kill himself, because I would like to see someone ice him.
* It sure was nice to see the whole gang get back together even if they immediately broke apart. I’m not quite sure why Hurley wouldn’t have gone with Jack and Kate, though.
* I bought Miles needing to explain the fact that the characters are all currently living in their own present to Hurley, because Hurley’s the audience-indentification character and therefore the writers have to make him stupid. But Jack is a very smart guy, so having him not be able to grasp how their journeys through time work and needing Miles to explain it to him (i.e. to us) rang false.
* There’s probably something else that I’m forgetting. Ah well. Here’s Todd Van Der Werff’s review.
“* Eloise seems a little old compared to Daniel to be his mom, no? I mean, she was at the very least in her late teens in 1954–how old is Daniel supposed to be? I’m sure that Gregg Nations has the dates written down, but it looks weird.”
I don’t think that’s true, I think you’re barking up a tree here. I haven’t done the math, but I don’t feel it
My only real issue with this episode is that both Sawyer and Daniel had the chance to say “back to the future” and neither of them took it. I’m betting on Hurley now…
I agree with you on the time-travel-is-best-if-simple idea. I think the Eloise actress’s awful Vincent-Price style acting kind of sums up how all the weird fantastical elements of the show can ring really dumb sometimes, whereas Ben and Locke are so well-played that they somehow sell it.
I thought the Daniel-death was so obvious that it was a red herring, so I was actually a little mortified at the end of the show. But maybe he’s still around somehow–how in the world did he ever fill that notebook up with all that stuff and events and so forth, if he were not travelling backwards and forwards in time all the time?
Anonymous: Just to be clear, I wasn’t implying “she must not be his mom!” or anything like that. I just thought it was a flub.
Sam: Definitely a dropped ball.
Dustin: I don’t mind Eloise that much, but I guess you’re right, she’s genre-ing it in a way that most of the other actors don’t. Maybe that’s just how she is, I dunno. As for Daniel’s notebook, he had his entire post-graduation career to fill it in. It’s only one lousy notebook. I think that gave him plenty of time. I mean, we’ve seen the past version of him interact with time-displaced Desmond, so i don’t think we need to suppose this death doesn’t stick and he somehow keeps running around in time–plenty of shit went down in his life up until that point.