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Welcome back to the Lost Secret Clue, where we dig deeper to find the clues and secrets you might've missed to fuel your theories! This week's episode, "The Variable", served as a bookend to season four's "The Constant" and took us through the utterly depressing, inevitable death loop that made up Daniel Faraday's driven life. He told Jack he'd spent his life studying relativism, attempting to find his way around the theory of relativity by discovering time travel through consciousness-movement rather than moving mass, but despite his claims of being able to "make time", his own mother had already sealed his fate. Music, mothers, maths, meetings and a mournful moment...

There were two big revelations from Charles Widmore, both having major ramifications. His confirmation to Daniel that he was behind the staged Oceanic 815 crash finally proves that Ben, Tom and all the Others had been telling the truth all along. More importantly, Widmore declared that Faraday is his son, something Eloise Hawking took exception to, meaning Faraday is Penny's half-brother, Desmond's brother-in-law and Charlie Jr's uncle!

While this is a revelation in itself, it also intriguingly sets up two family trees in opposition for the island. Christian, now serving as the voice of Jacob, has a secret daughter he supports (Claire), a son who despises him (Jack) and a grandson he has no contact with (Aaron), probably for the child's safety. Widmore, no longer serving as the voice of the Others, had a secret son he supported (Faraday), a daughter who despises him (Penny) and has a grandson he has no contact with (Charlie Jr), probably for the child's safety. Could these be the warring factions Walt referred to in his prophetic vision of Locke's future – Clan Shephard against the Widmore Dynasty?

While much of what Faraday spent his time doing in Ann Arbour at Dharma HQ remains a mystery, there were a few very sly clues that he may have been assisting with the designing of their island stations. He worked as a physicist, returning to the island with the team arriving for the Swan station ground-breaking and had filled his journal with important dates and information. However, there were two tiny clues that might've given us an answer to one of our most burning questions.

Through his piano playing, we saw that Faraday was inherently aware of time and possibly a musical savant. Despite his memory problems and being unable to retain any new information due to his self-experimentation, Daniel was able to sit at the piano and play the same piece he learnt as a boy. If you listened closely, you may have heard both times that he played the song quite flatly, playing rigidly to the beat, not his own rhythm, playing what he had heard, not what he read. His perception of the movement of time is so exact he is able to instantly recall how many ticks of the metronome have passed (864, or 8 times 108). Several autistic savants with musical ability have demonstrated an amazing talent to recall exact music pieces, even upon a single hearing, and it is believed that for some that this is linked to lesser function in certain brain areas causing an increased capacity for numerical storage – music stored as pieces of code. Accordingly, most compositions arranged by autistic savant musicians tend to be highly technical.

Couple that with the appearance of yet another white rabbit, this time seen through a glass while Faraday dined with his mother, and an interesting theory presents itself – was Daniel "the musician" who programmed the musical security code Charlie entered in The Looking Glass station to "save" them all?

If you believe this could be possible, it also results in another time-loop brought about by one of our survivors. Several weeks ago we witnessed Locke impart knowledge of his own importance to Richard, setting up the chain of events that led to their constant interaction. This episode, we saw Daniel begin the loop with a young Charlotte, putting her on the quest he had so desperately tried to avoid. If Daniel programmed the code, then he is also responsible for Desmond's rigid belief in the importance of a helicopter. When Daniel visited Desmond at the hatch pre-2004, he told him that "if the helicopter somehow made it off the island, if you got home..." Desmond's initial flashes of a helicopter brought him visions of Penny, in reality Naomi, but his later flash involving Charlie turning off the button specifically involved a helicopter rescuing them all, the crucial piece of information that convinced Charlie to go through with the plan.

Faraday looked like a man unhinged but was clearly a man on a mission this episode, and he seemed to be getting all his clues to timings of future events from his journal. Is it such a stretch considering we know of his belief in Desmond's unique, exceptional qualities that he was attempting to create the things needed for an eventual rescue?

Finally, just how did Faraday obtain all of this information? Was he able to resume his consciousness-travelling experiments in Ann Arbour, flashing forward to obtain what he needed? Did he unlock the secrets of physical time travel? Or could the journal itself be the key, obtained during a time anomaly similar to Locke giving Richard the compass – could the journal be an edition from a later iteration of the time-loop containing the secrets they needed to escape, given to him from a future Desmond?