LOST #308: "Flashes Before Your Eyes": You Will Die, Brother

Bravo! That was amazing! Incredible! Abso-frakkin-lutely unthinkable! And yet there will be those who will be whining and putting the words "Lost", "jump" and "shark" into one sentence. Well, shame on them.

The truly exceptional episode of ABC's time and space mystery saga "LOST" revealed a brilliant twist - Desmond who many had believed possessed precognitive abilities when he saved Claire's life (or that is at least what we had thought he was doing) was actually not able to see the future as Charlie and Hurley had suspected.

Oh, no. He was able to do something much better. Or worse. It all depends on your point of view and being in his shoes you might not actually like going back and forth in time either despite the fact most people wish they could go back in time to repair their mistakes.



The show's writers Damond Lindelof and Carlton Cuse dropped a bomb by reinventing Lost's trademark flashback storytelling and revealing that those may not even have been flashbacks. The question however remains - is it just Desmond who is locked in a time loop and gets to relieve the key chapters of his life or is everyone on the island doing the same?

For those who missed this explosive episode: it was revealed that after Desmond turned the hatch fail-safe key in the 2nd season finale he went back in time to relive his doomed relationship with Penny, the humiliation of asking her vicious rich son of a bitch of a father for her hand and meeting Charlie, then struggling artist in the streets of London.



Desmond who realizes he had already relived the events he was experiencing, begins to remember the heartbreak, the sail race and the hatch, which is a clever premise, one I can not help but compare to an entirely different, but equally groundbreaking "what-if" posed by "The Matrix". What if we all live in a time loop and those occasional 'deja-vous' are the key to something we can not comprehend?

As many of us would do, Desmond tries to repair his mistakes. Enter Fionnula Flanagan in a creepy, yet stellar performance of a jewelry shop assistant who declines to sell him the engagement ring he wants to give Penny as the only truly exceptional thing he will ever do in his life is to "push that button" or "we all die".



Finally, we learned Desmond has already seen Charlie dying and he was trying to protect him and not Claire. Charlie was the one who died when the lightning stroke or when Claire was drowning. But as the mysterious lady had said, the universe has its way of self-correcting its course and one can not escape fate. If Charlie is supposed to die, he will die, no matter what Desmond does.


So is the LOST mythology really a question of fate? Or is it a revolutionary elaboration of time? And more importantly (at least as far as I am concerned) who is that lady and how does she know all that?

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