The Variable SE5 EP14

Welcome to the meeting, Twitchy.

Ok, freaking AWESOME episode with a lot of mythology addressed and a couple of big reveals. I’m quite sure I missed a ton of stuff; I was so busy taking notes. Everything was relevant; it was hard to leave anything out. Literally the only time I got a bit of a break was during the shootout. Anyway, let’s dive right in:

Daughters, sons and the fate of Desmond
The episode opens with Penny running alongside a gunshot Desmond. They take him to emergency and Penny goes to wait. As she is stroking a sleeping Charlie’s hair, Eloise Hawking approaches. “He has his father’s hair.” Maybe that’s a family trait that Brits comment on but it sounded damn odd to me. Penny’s all, “I’m sorry? Do I know you?” Eloise explains that she knows Desmond. “It’s my son’s fault that Desmond has been shot.” Penny is confused. “Your son in Ben Linus?” “Oh no,” Eloise says in disgust. “My son is Daniel Faraday.”

Eloise is there to apologize and explain. “Your husband is a casualty in a conflict that is bigger than all of us.” Penny is panicked with all this talk of Des being a “casualty.” “Is he going to be ok?”She asks. Eloise looks close to tears. “I don’t know,” she says. “For the first time in a long time I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

The nurse come out and tells Penny that Des is ok, so Penny rushes to him. Hooray! Des is ok! “I promised you,” Des says, taking her hand. “I promised you I’d never leave you again.”

Eloise is leaving the hospital and she runs into Charles Widmore. “Is he all right?” Charles wants to know, which is odd since we’ve kind of had this idea all along that Widmore could care less about the fate of Desmond. “Yes, Charles. He’s fine.” Eloise snaps. “Good.” Again, what’s up with Widmore's goodwill towards Des? “Your daughter’s in there,” Eloise offers. “Why don’t you go in to say hello.” Widmore sighs a long suffering sigh. “My relationship with my daughter is one thing I had to sacrifice.” This pisses Ellie off. “Don’t talk to me about sacrifice. I had to send my son…”

“He’s my son, too,” Widmore begins, which earns him a huge slap in the face from Ellie before she storms off. Oh yeah. Nice piece of the puzzle, even though many of us already expected that one.

Long ago and Faraday
The little kid playing the piano is Daniel. The overbearing schoolmarm mother is Eloise. “Daniel, do you know what destiny means?” Eloise asks Daniel. “If one has a special gift, it must be nurtured. How many beats has that metronome kept since you started playing?” “864,” Daniel answers like Rainman counting toothpicks. “Your gift is your mind, science, mathematics. My job to keep you on your path. There’s no more time for distractions.” “But I like playing the piano,” Daniel protest. “I can MAKE time.” “If only you could,” Eloise answers.

Eloise shows up at Oxford to celebrate some award Daniel has received. Theresa, the girlfriend we first saw last season in a catatonic state, is blown off by Eloise. It seems she wants to celebrate only with Daniel. After she leaves, Eloise scolds Daniel. “You should be focusing your energies on your work. You’re not going to have time for relationships. The women in your life will always be hurt.” Daniel tells her about the grant he has received. “Grant? From whom?” She asks. “Widmore. Charles Widmore,” Daniel answers. Eloise starts and then seems placated. She does not want to fight, “I came to congratulate you. Good luck. I do mean that.” She passes a present to Daniel and leaves. Inside the package is Daniel’s famous notebook and inside the front cover is an inscription: “No matter what, always remember that I love you.”

We next see Daniel where we first met him: watching the news of the discovery of 815 and crying. Widmore shows up, but Daniel doesn’t remember him. It seems his time travelling experiments have rendered his memory useless. “I tested it on myself first—I would never hurt Teresa,” he explains to Widmore, assuming that that is why he has come. He continues crying, looking at the scenes of Flight 815 on TV. “It’s so sad,” he tells Widmore. “I don’t know why it’s affecting me this much. All those people are dead.” “What if I told you those people were alive? That it was an elaborate fake. That I put it there?” “Why would you tell me that?” Daniel wants to know. “Because come tomorrow, you won’t remember I did. The real 815 crashed on an island with special scientific properties. It will heal your mind and your memory. You’re a man of tremendous gifts and it would be a shame to see them go to waste.” Widmore explains, pitching the idea of Daniel going to the island. “You sound like my mother,” Daniel says. “That’s because we’re old friends.” Old friends. Yeah. Right.

Eloise shows up at Daniel’s little house. “Hello Daniel. I hear you have been offered a job.” “How do you know that?” Daniel asks. “It’s my business to know. It is very important that you say Yes to Mr. Widmore. That you accept this opportunity. This place he mentioned to you, did he tell you it could make you better? What if it’s true? You could go on with your work. Think about all you can accomplish.” “Will it make you proud of me?” Is all Daniel wants to know. “Yes Daniel, it will.” “Then I’ll do it.”

Faraday is here again, the skies above are clear again
We return to 1977 with Daniel getting off the sub, and Miles wants to know why he came back. “I figured once you left for Ann Arbor, you invented the DVD or something and got rich. What are you doing back here?” Daniel pulls out the Namaste picture with Jack, Kate, and Hurley. “This is what I’m back here for. When did they get here?” And Miles takes Daniel back to Dharmaville.

The first person Daniel sees is Jack. “How did you get back here to 1977?” Daniel wants to know. “On a plane,” Jack answers. “Who told you to get on the plane, Jack?” “It was your mother.” Daniel shakes his head. “And how’d she convince you? Did she tell you it was your ‘destiny’?” “Yes,” Jack replies, still not sure where Daniel is going with this. “As a matter of fact she did.” “Well, I’ve got some bad news for you Jack. She was wrong. You don’t belong here at all.” Jack has more questions, but Daniel has an errand to run.

Jack goes to see Sawyer and tells him about Faraday. Jack is suspicious that Sawyer and Juliet are hiding something because they are not reacting with proper interest to Jack’s news. Jack wants to know what’s going on, but Sawyer starts to give him the bum’s rush. Juliet stops him. “Tell him what’s going on.” So Sawyer relents, pulls Jack inside and tells him about the tape Phil has of he and Kate taking Lil Ben to the Others. “Where’s the tape?” Jack wants to know. “The tape is with Phil,” Sawyer says. Phil is tied up in the closet. Sawyer makes the introductions.

Daniel and Miles go out to the Orchid. “Here he comes, right on time,” Daniel observes. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.” Daniel follows Chang into the Orchid and we recognize this scene from when the island was skipping back at the beginning of the season. Daniel overhears Chang yelling at a workman. “If you go 1 cm further you would release that energy then God help us all!” Daniel gets Dr. Chang aside. “I need you to order the evacuation of the island. In about six hours, the energy you released from drilling will release in the Swan station with catastrophic results.” “That’s preposterous,” Chang scoffs. “What would make you qualified to make such a prediction?” Daniel delivers that priceless line: “I’m from the future.” Is Daniel is warning Chang about “the incident’? Is this the “incident” where Dr. Chang/Halliwax/Candle loses his arm? This seems a safe bet.

Chang isn’t buying any of Daniel’s nonsense, though. “You heard me talk about time travel and now you’ve had your fun.” Daniel tries to tell him that Miles is his son. Miles counters this move by telling Dr. Chang not to listen to him and that Daniel must have taken a lot of drugs. When Chang leaves in disgust, Miles wants to know what Daniel is trying to do. “I’m just making sure that your father does what he’s supposed to do.”

Meanwhile, back at Dharmaville, Sawyer is having trouble letting go of his Dharma life. “This is our home. We don’t want to leave.” “Where do we go?” Hurley asks. Sawyer says there are two options: “Get back on the sub or back to square one in the jungle.” As the debate ensues and everyone seems to be opting for the jungle (since they went through all this trouble to get here anyway) Daniel knocks at the door and the whole gang is back together again. Sawyer asks Miles, “Is he still crazy?” “On a whole new level, man,” Miles affirms. Daniel is in a hurry and in no mood to explain. He apologizes for being rude to Jack then explains that he is there for a reason. “Does anyone know where I can find the hostiles?” Juliet wants to know why Daniel wants to know that. “Because one of them is my mother and she is the only one who can get us back to where we belong.”

Jack thinks they should help Daniel find the hostiles since he’s totally all about the whole “we don’t belong here” theory that Daniel has been promoting. “We belonged with here just fine until you came back,” Sawyer says. Jack looks at Kate, “You know where they are.” Kate is torn between loyalty to Jack and Sawyer and Juliet solves her dilemma for her by announcing the code to the security gate. “You should take Daniel,” she tells Kate. “It’s over here for us anyway.” Kate, jack and Daniel start to leave and Sawyer calls after them, “When you realize you’ve made a huge mistake, we’ll be back at the beach right where we started.” He looks a Juliet, “Time to go.”

As they are walking out, Daniel can’t help himself when he sees Lil Charlotte swinging on the famous Dharma swing set. “I’ll meet you at the motor pool. I need just a minute.” He tells Kate and Jack. “We aren’t allowed to have chocolate before dinner,” Charlotte tells Daniel, which is also the last sentence she utters before dying. “Listen do you know Dr. Chang? You have to leave. I tried to avoid telling you this; I don’t think it would change things. You cannot be here and you cannot come back.”

The Charlotte business having been disposed of, Jake, Kate and Daniel go to collect some guns, but they are caught by some Dharma hippies. A huge shootout occurs in which our heroes blast their way out of Mos Eisley and make their getaway in a jeep and I rest my poor, poor hands.

As Kate dismantles the sonic fence, Jack attends to the graze wound on Daniel’s neck. “This is our present, Jack. Did I have a scar on my neck when I met you? Any one of us can die, Jack.”

Meanwhile, back a Dharmaville, Sawyer, Jules et al are getting ready to fly the coop. “You called it the minute those yahoos got here,” Sawyer tells Juliet. “You still got my back?” “You still got mine?” Poor Juliet. I think she thinks Sawyer is going to leave her for Kate. They exchange pledges of love, when the alarm starts going off. The hippies who just got into the shootout with Jack Kate and Daniel arrive and want Sawyer to do something about it. In addition to the claim that, “I just got shot by a physicist!” Baldy insists they’ve been infiltrated. Phil takes this opportunity to make some noise and he is discovered by the shootout hippies and Sawyer and Juliet are in heap big trouble.

On the trek through the jungle, Jack begins to question Daniel. “Are you ready to tell me why she was wrong, why we don’t belong here?” This came at me really fast, so here’s a pretty good summation of Daniel said, if I do say so myself:
“In about 4 hours the Dharma folks are going to drill into a pocket of energy with catastrophic results. They will have to cover up the whole area with concrete like Chernobyl. (Remember back in season two with Sayid and Jack beneath the hatch and Sayid said something similar about Chernobyl???) I think you called it the hatch. The Swan hatch. They will spend the next twenty years pressing a button to keep that energy at bay. Then one day, Desmond will fail to push the button and it will cause your plane to crash. The entire chain of events is going to start happening this afternoon.”

Because of the incident.

Daniel continues, “I’ve been spending so much time thinking about the constants, I haven’t been thinking about the variables. We’re the variables: people. I think I can negate the energy and stop the entire chain of events from happening and your plane will land just like it’s supposed to.”

“What are you going to do?” Kate wants to know. “I’m going to detonate a hydrogen bomb.” Kate’s all, “Well, that seems rather harsh.” But you can see that Jack is intrigued with this whole, I-can-erase-the-past-by-blowing-up-the-island idea. Jack would rather risk vaporization by H-bomb than live through the last three years, even though he already did it.

They arrive at camp Other and Daniel leaves immediately to walk into Camp “Wish me luck.” He raises his gun and begins demanding to see Eloise. Richard, who was enjoying his second or third cup of Other coffee comes out and tries to be reasonable, saying, “I’m sorry. Ellie isn’t here right now, can I take a message?” But Daniel is having none of it. He recognizes Richard, and Richard recognizes that Daniel recognizes him. “Where’s the bomb?” He asks Richard, after a brief explanation of how they know each other. Suddenly Daniel is shot from behind and it’s Ellie who has shot him. Eloise leans over him and Daniel tells her in his dying breath, “You knew. You always knew. You knew this would happen but you sent me here anyway.” “Who are you?” Eloise wants to know. “I’m your son.”

Next week
Jack wants to erase the past using the extreme eraser...