Well, not at all what most of us expected, I would hazard a guess to say.

Let’s discuss after the break, shall we.
Disclaimer: I’ve only watched the episode once so far, so some of the more subtle points have not come to me yet.

So, Desmond is not dead (yet). ABC deserves kudos or a kick in the nads for the promo (playing Amazing Grace on the bagpipes, making all us nerds think about Mr. Spock dying) that swerved most people. And it appears he is on a mission not from God (or Jacob), but Charles Widmore.

Has there ever been such a loaded list of guest stars in one episode? Charles Widmore, Penny (Milton?), Eloise Hawking/Widmore, Daniel Faraday/Widmore, Charlie Pace and even George Minkowski.

Early thinking is that Eloise is working somehow with MIB right? And she’s probably doing it all for Daniel, to atone for killing him in 1977. And she probably doesn’t like Penny, since she’s the evil stepmother.

I have to admit, I chuckled when I saw that Penny was running at the track. Is she the one entering the race around the world in the Flash Sideways?

Hard to miss the giant painting of a scale in Widmore’s office. Same with what I presume was the Black Rock. And there’s that Scotch again.

I totally expected the page in the notebook Faraday was going to reveal was the one that said “Desmond Hume is my constant” (pictured in last week’s column).

So was Charlie actually the first person to become aware of the Sideways-verse on Earth-2? We think Juliet somehow was aware of it. Do you need a near-death (or death-death) experience to converge?

We all knew that MRI machines were evil already, yes?

the EM building seems very reminiscent of Jacob’s cabin, right down to the rocking chair.

They should have just gone ahead and cast Patton Oswald as the tech guy working for Widmore.

Next week: spotlight on Hurley. How many dead characters will return? Looks like at least 2 from the trailer.

Your thoughts?

25 COMMENTS

  1. What’s funny is that all of Desmond’s “guides” in this episode (Minkowski, Charlie, Faraday) are dead in the other timeline.

  2. It’s funny we were just betting before the show started that Charles Widmore will end up being a good guy. Interesting that once Sayid intervenes at the end, Desmond wakes up again on earth-2. Has Sayid just stopped something from happening or at least delayed it?

  3. It’s interesting that Earth-2 Eloise appears to know what’s going on and mentions that Earth-2 Desmond “got what he always wanted,” which SmokeyLocke claims he’s able to give. So I have to wonder if Earth-2 takes place chronologically after SmokeyLocke escapes The Island and grants the Losties their hearts’ desire.

    And I’m curious to find out if the Desmond that was on board Earth-2 Oceanic Flight 315 and acted like he knew what was going on is the Earth-1 Desmond crossing realities or the Earth-2 Desmond time-traveling.

  4. I never thought Desmond was dead. I remember his last scene before this as him recovering in hospital.

    I’m wondering if Eloise is simply like Desmond; someone to whom “the rules don’t apply.” It seems a little late for her to be revealed as a secret Time Lord.

  5. I think it’s interesting that when Desmond is first transported during the electromagnet experiment, there is no jet-landing sound affect (which reminded me of earlier episodes focusing on him), but there is before the last scene.

    It’s like Desmond’s consciousness was shunted to Earth-2, and when he returned to our reality, his consciousness was split, so Desmond in both realities realize that somewhere else there is another version of him that needs to be reconciled.

  6. “What’s funny is that all of Desmond’s “guides” in this episode (Minkowski, Charlie, Faraday) are dead in the other timeline.”

    Not only that, but all three of those folks were, in the “normal” timeline, associated with temporal weirdness: Minkowski, who died from the temporal displacement when coming to the island; Farady, addled scholar of the phenomenon; and (admittedly, most tenuously) Charlie, who was the subject of Desmond’s fatalistic “you’re-gonna-die” visions of the future.

  7. “I have to wonder if Earth-2 takes place chronologically after SmokeyLocke escapes The Island and grants the Losties their hearts’ desire.”

    bingo.

    I don’t think the LA-based scenes are a “Flash Sideways/Earth-2/Alternate Reality”. Instead they take place after what we are seeing on the island, it’s just how it came to be has yet to be shown.

    Desmond has never been shown to be able to jump from one reality to another, just through time. It would make sense that he jumped FORWARD in time and then back again.

    Also, everyone who has sided with Fake Locke/MiB has gotten a version of what they lost on the island in the LA-based storylines.

    Sayid’s love is alive but he can’t have her & Claire has Aaron. Those that have not sided with MiB are on the losing side: Sun & Jin are together but may lose the baby.

    As the season progresses & people start choosing sides on the island we will see how their LA-based lives pan out.

  8. “Are the people invited to Eloise’s party the same people on the flight 815 manifest?”

    I don’t think so. The only name I recognized was Penny’s, and she wasn’t on flight 815.

    “I’m wondering if Eloise is simply like Desmond; someone to whom “the rules don’t apply.” It seems a little late for her to be revealed as a secret Time Lord.”

    This isn’t the first hint that the rules seem different for Eloise. In Season 3 she was running the jewelry store where Desmond tried to buy a ring for Penny.

    She says he can’t have it, and that he has to enter the race around the world and end up on the island, pushing a button in the hatch.

  9. Damon has been upfront about Alan Moore’s influence on the show. When Des got zapped by the EM machine it was pure Dr. Manhatten. But looks like Lost’s take is gonna be more along the lines of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. Which we know was a HUGE influence on Moore.

  10. Eloise killed her time-travelling son before the Island was nuked, so she had an idea what the alternate future was going to be like. I’m not sure why Charlie and Faraday were aware of it.

  11. I agree with Charles and Seth that what we’re seeing in the sideways-universe hasn’t happened yet. I think there’s one more “event” to happen on the island, possibly a final turn of the wheel, maybe by Richard (who will not be in the sideways-universe), that causes the island to move and wind up on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in the sideways universe. Jack wakes up, slightly startled, on Oceanic Flight 815 (as seen in the first episode of this season). The end. Sigh.

  12. Wasn’t there an episode where Desmond traveled not just through time but into other realities as well? When he kept flashing back and forth on Whitmore’s ship?

  13. FINALLY the side-flash LAXverse gets folded into the Islandverse! I’ve gotten tired of waiting to see how yet another Island’er manages to somehow make their way to the LA Basin and meet each other— be they the original LOSTies, French scientist (and her daughter), ginger Brit nosebleeder, Russian henchman, Aussie businessman, etc. etc.

    The inexplicable pull of The Basin to draw ALL these characters together in an Alt-verse seemed… forced… somehow. At their best, they drew upon and echoed/paralleled things that happened on the Island; at their worse, nothing but fan service to give characters more interaction. Ie, they were nothing more than in-series FanFic: Hurley as a successful and lucky businesseman! Locke and Ben as allied schoolteachers! A Sawyer/Miles cop-buddies teamup!

    The “unreality” of The Basin character mash-ups made me think that the side-verse was LOST’s version of The Matrix— which Eloise 2 seemed to confirm. Now to see how will Team Jacob (with Islandverse Widmore as its ‘Morpheus’?) will go about and bring them all back to Reality…

  14. The flash-sideways have already happened. When Juliet set off the bomb at the end of last season the flash sideways started. “it worked,” is what she said. Desmond will be the one to show the losties that what they are living is not what should be. They don’t have what they really want by not crashing on the island. They all come to the reality that what they are living is a lie and somehow wake up on the island again(the start of this season) and think the bomb going off didn’t work.

  15. Where can I get a copy of Driveshaft’s debut album?

    I’d be interested in exploring more fully that classical music mixed with modern rock that was talked about.

    ~

    Coat

  16. Agreed 100% about the EM building looking like Jacob’s cabin. No idea if that was intentional or what it could mean.

  17. i don’t think Eloise is on MIB’s side, at least not in the regular timeline.

    otherwise she wouldn’t have helped the Oceanic six [or most of them] getting on the Ajira flight back to the Island…

    MIB needs the candidates to hop on the plane with him, as he told Sawyer [or Sayid, can’t recall that], to prevent them to lock him again.

  18. Well, if Christian Shephard is MIB, he helped John Locke leave the island to bring all the other candidates back.

    It’s possible MIB can’t leave the island until all the candidates are dead, so he would need them to come back to the Island.

    I guess the question would also be when did Eloise know that she killed Faraday. DId she know it the entire time she raised him?

  19. “I guess the question would also be when did Eloise know that she killed Faraday. DId she know it the entire time she raised him?”

    She found out he was her son right after she killed him, while at the same time being pregnant with him. So yeah, she had known the entire time she was raising him.

  20. “i don’t think Eloise is on MIB’s side, at least not in the regular timeline.

    otherwise she wouldn’t have helped the Oceanic six [or most of them] getting on the Ajira flight back to the Island…

    MIB needs the candidates to hop on the plane with him, as he told Sawyer [or Sayid, can’t recall that], to prevent them to lock him again.’

    I don’t know that Eloise is on MIB’s side, but he needed a way off the island, and sending the Oceanic 6 there also gave him a plane he could leave in.

  21. I agree with James. The flash sideways aren’t the future. They are a concurrent timeline. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat.

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