Hey there super studiers of spatial sciences, and what a way to end Lost's 100th episode – with a bang! Sorry, terrible I know. I'm proper upset Faraday is gone; I've dug the tie-wearing spatial supremo since his first appearance and was devastated to see him go in his first flashback episode. This one ripped apart, like, a mountain of my theories, but it also gave me a whole bunch of new ones and a definitive answer about a hell of a lot. It was nice to take a break from daddy issues for a change, only to learn to Daniel Faraday has The. Worst. Mother. Ever. All season, I've been back and forth whether Kate or Sun would take the prize, but Eloise Hawking muscled her way in, beat them up and stole their lunch money for the award. Not only did she push him incredibly hard his entire life, denying him any pleasures, but she knowingly sent him off to die, by her own hand. Seriously, that woman scares me to my very core and I see her as being so much more very evil than Ben. There, I said it.
For posterity, and so you can memorize and recite it anytime someone says "Ugh, Lost, what is that show even about anyways?!" I'm going to quote, verbatim, the scene I'd like to call FARADAY FINALLY FRAKIN FESSES UP!
Faraday: "In about four hours, the Dharma folks at the Swan work site, they're going to drill into the ground and accidentally tap into a massive pocket of energy. The result of the release of this energy would be catastrophic. So in order to contain it, they're gonna have to cement the entire area in, like Chernobyl. And this containment, the place they built over it - I believe you called it the hatch, the Swan hatch? Because of this one accident, these people are going to spend the next 20 years keeping that energy at bay, by pressing a button… a button that your friend Desmond will one day fail to push, and that will cause your plane, Oceanic 815, to crash on this island. And because your plane crashed, a freighter will be sent to this Island--a freighter I was on and Charlotte was on and so forth. This entire chain of events, it's gonna start happening this afternoon. But we can change that. I studied relativistic physics my entire life. One thing emerged over and over. Can't change the past. Can't do it. Whatever happened, happened. All right? But then I finally realized, I had been spending so much time focused on the constants, I forgot about the variables! Do you know what the variables in these equations are, Jack?"Jack: "No."
Faraday: "Us. We're the variables. People. We think. We reason. We make choices. We have free will. We can change our destiny. I think I can negate that energy under the Swan. I think I can destroy it. If I can, then that hatch will never be built, and your plane... your plane will land, just like it's supposed to, in Los Angeles."
Kate: "And just how exactly do you plan on destroying this energy?"
Faraday: "I'm going to detonate a hydrogen bomb."
Just bask in that for a moment. The pure, clean, beautiful nature of a straight-up answer - doesn't that feel incredible?!
I hate to do this, but I'm going to burst the bubble right away. I loved Dan to death, but his plan was stupid and futile. He may've thought he was a variable but he completely forgot the fact that other variables can counteract and enforce the constant, in this case his mother, choosing to negate his free will by ensuring the time loop is upheld.
Even if this wasn't the case, his plan is fruitless because Miles exists. We can talk about the paradoxes created by destroying the island in the past, therefore negating the reason to destroy it, meaning they never destroyed… until we're blue in the face and have brain matter leaking out of our ears but the fact that Miles exists means the plan didn't, can't and won't work. Faraday scared Pierre Chang, presumably setting off the events that lead to baby Miles and his mother leaving the island alongside Charlotte so that Dan could enact his plan, meaning Miles only ever left the island because of the plan being enacted. If the plan succeeds, Miles simply blips out of existence, which would suck but probably create major lols. Here are the questions I've got milling in my brain at the moment:
• How did Faraday know so many specifics for events that haven't happened yet?
• Why is Faraday's surname and accent different to his parents'?
• Did Faraday invent the fax machine in order to get that picture?
• Why didn't Miles man up and tell Pierre Chang the truth?
• Will Miles, Hurley and Jin make it to the beach? What of Sawyer and Juliet, now caught by the Dharma heads?
• Will Roger be pissed at how long it will take him to clean up that shootout mess?
• Will Miles be forced to pull the rest of the plan from Dead Dan's decomposing brain?
All that's left to say is RIP Daniel Faraday. You and your tie will be sorely missed.
Namaste,
The Heroic Lost Ninja