Musings, Rants, and Ramblings: Lost, The Final Season, Episode 10, "Happily Ever After"

At a certain point last night, it all clicked. I got it. I had it all figured out. Then I as I lay in bed thinking it all over, it struck me that I don't have it. That I still only have a piece of it. That's what's frustrating with this show. You get so involved in one sector and you get it all mapped out and it's a breakthrough and it's marvelous and then that dreaded question sneaks in: "But what about....."

Last night's episode filled us with answers....about Desmond and Jughead and Eloise and the Sideways Storyline. But then, what about Jacob and Smokey and The Island? How does it all come together in the end?

This isn't going to be a typical recap, as it wasn't a typical episode. I think it might just be time to try and figure it out.

What Is Going On?
I think one of the big confusions is the timeline itself. With all of the time travelling, it's hard to grasp just where everyone is. But you have to look at it as one timeline. Like so:

Eloise and Charles and Richard live on The Island. Dharma moves in. Charles is kicked off The Island. Ben takes over his role as Other leader. The Others order Ben to kill the Dharma folks. He does. The Others move into Dharmaville and live there happily ever after conducting their own experiments and recruiting their own fertility doctors (Juliette) until Desmond is off accidentally killing his roommate and forgets to push the button that holds in a huge chunk of magnetic energy that then gets released causing a plane to crash. The crash survivors are our Losties and they go about their Island lives doing everything we've seen in this show, including being attacked by Smoke Monsters and Others and locked in polar bear cages and chased by freighter folk until the day Ben goes down in the hole and turns the Frozen Donkey Wheel and The Island disappears and it begins skipping through time. Then John Locke goes down to turn the Frozen Donkey Wheel and our remaining Losties get stuck in 1977. Here they live with Dharma and do all the Dharma stuff. At one point, Daniel Faraday figures out how to get them all back to where they are supposed to be. He goes to tell his mother, the young Eloise Hawking who is living on The Island and is currently pregnant with him, that he needs her help, but she thinks he's a threat and shoots him. Once she finds out he is her yet unborn son, she spends the rest of her life trying to help him to stop her from killing him.

Whoooo. That's a lot. But there's so much more.

Eloise gets off The Island and raises her prodigy son as a scientist, though he so wants to be a musician. She pushes him into physics so that he can find a way to stop her from killing him. And he does. So now we are back to the Losties time travelling to 1977. Daniel knows how to fix everything. He writes it down. After he is shot, it is left to Jack to figure out. And he does. They find Jughead the bomb, blow it up, and everything is "right". At least for Eloise. This is where the timeline splits. She has Daniel and she raises him as a musician and everything is hunkey dorey. Except that things are a mess in The Island's Original Timeline. Ben has gone and killed Jacob. Smokey is getting loose. The Original Timeline and Sideways Timeline are starting to merge. People are starting to remember their other lives. And what Widmore told Jin is coming true: Everything they love is going away. Jin just watched Sun get shot. Is she just the first casualty of Smokey's release from The Island? What will Sayid find when he returns home after killing Keamy? Will Nadiya and the kids and his brother all be alive and well? Or will they be gone?

Now is when you ask, "But what about...". Because, yes, but what about The Island and Smokey and Jacob and all of that crap? What does it mean? Who or What are Smokey and Jacob? Why are they there? What is their greater purpose? Should I be asking that? Does it matter? Why shouldn't it matter? How do they tie in to Eloise and Desmond and time travel and electro magnetic energy?

Because here is where things don't make sense.

What Doesn't Make Sense?
- Jughead the bomb exploded within a day or two of Eloise killing Daniel. If she was on The Island when Jughead went off, then she should be at the bottom of the ocean with her unborn fetus along with the rest of The Island. Because haven't we been lead to believe that the Jughead explosion is what caused the sinking of The Island? After all, in the Sideways Storyline, Ben's father expressed his regret for leaving The Island and taking away any potential Ben would have had to be someone great. So, The Island existed as is in Ben's lifetime. Ben lived on The Island in the 70s. So that all coincides with Jughead.

- It's possible that with the release of Jughead, it changed things that happened even in recent history before it exploded. Maybe Dr. Chang still evacuated The Island and Eloise left then, knowing what was going to happen because she has that clairvoyance. Maybe that's also when Ben and his dad left. Miles would have had to have left then, as well. Same with Charles Widmore. And Charlotte. The list goes on.

- BUT, does that mean that our Losties still travelled back in time? They would have had to, right? Because if they never did, Jughead never would have exploded meaning none of this would have happened. It would be one great paradox. Thus, the problem with time travel. That's some Back to the Future shit right there. If Eloise raises Daniel in the Sideways Storyline as a musician, then he never goes to The Island to do his time travelling magic.

- BUT, we were shown last night that he is starting to have flashes of his other life. He wrote some crazy science shit in his notebook. Maybe the universe is course correcting, just like he said it always would.

Yes, let's look at last night quick.

Widmore brought Desmond to The Island as his "package" because Desmond is the only person on the planet who has survived a magnetic explosion. He needs someone who can handle this so that he can fix whatever is wrong. But first he has to run some tests on Desmond. He puts him in a chamber and blasts him with magnetic energy. Besides a little brain travel he survives and is just fine.

The Brain Travel
Desmond flashes to his Sideways life. At first, it seems that we are just getting a glimpse into how he lives in this life, just like we have with all the other Losties. He's a very successful businessman. He works for Charles Widmore. He's his right hand man. Widmore completely respects and trusts him with everything. He asks Desmond to watch over some rock star hired by his wife to accompany their son in some classical music meets rock performance. The rock star? Our little hobbit, Charlie Pace.

Widmore bails him out of jail and sends Desmond to pick him up. But something is still not right with Charlie. He had a vision when he almost died after swallowing his heroin on the plane. He had a vision, and he's pretty sure Desmond needs to have one, too. So much so that he forces the car Desmond is driving off of a dock and, yes, Desmond does have a vision. He manages to get out of the car and to the surface. He dives back down to save Charlie. Charlie puts his palm to the window and on it reads "Not Penny's Boat". Desmond is flashing back to what happened on The Island. He breaks Charlie out of the car and they both end up in the hospital. The

docs want to do an MRI on Desmond. While in the machine, he has another flash of Island life and Penny. In his Sideways life, he doesn't know Penny. But while undergoing the MRI, he sees her and feels the love between them. He goes searching for Charlie to get some answers.

He finds Charlie running through the hospital. When he catches up to him, Charlie is happy to hear Desmond "felt it". Charlie says he is not going to perform at the rock show because none of that matters. He takes off. Desmond tells Widmore and Widmore makes Desmond tell his wife the bad news.

He heads to the performance site. I suppose I should mention that the limo driver Desmond has been cruising around with is George of the Nose Bleeding-Time Travelling Mind-No Constant Having-Died on the Freighter George. I kept expecting something to happen with him, but nothing did. Part of me believes that he was not a driver hired by Widmore, but is some sort of Island ghost.

Anyway, he tells Eloise the situation and she takes it all in stride. As he walks away, he hears someone read Penny's name off the list. He asks to see the list and Eloise freaks out and says he's not ready yet. You see, Eloise knows. She knows all that has happened before and every timeline. But she wants things her way and is pissed that Desmond is starting to question things.

As Desmond heads back to his car, Daniel Faraday approaches him. He explains who he is and that he, too, is

having visions and feelings. He says he saw a woman (Charlotte) and immediately loved her like he has loved her before. That night he went home and wrote in his journal a physics diagram for a nuclear bomb. He showed it to some professors who told him that there is no way he could have created that with no training. He says that he thinks he may have had training in another life and that he just may have set off this bomb. He then tells Desmond that Penny is his half-sister and tells him that she will be working out a stadium that night.

Desmond heads there and meets Penny and then faints - just like he would do back on The Island when his mind was travelling. After coming to, they agree to meet up for coffee later. He gets back in his limo and asks George if he can give him the manifest for the Oceanic flight he was just on. George says no problem, but why? Desmond says he needs to make sure they all "see" something.

It's also worth mentioning that when Desmond passed out in front of Penny, the show brought us back to The Island. Desmond had just been revived after being magnetically fried by Widmore. He now understands the purpose Widmore has for him and says he will help. As Tina Fey is walking him back to the barracks, shots ring out and people flee. It's Sayid. He says Widmore is evil and Desmond must join him. Desmond, in his haze, agrees and they leave.

My guess is that Desmond will soon pass out while walking with Sayid. Because just as they left, we then flashed to Desmond asking Penny out for coffee in Sideways land. I think bringing Desmond to The Island has caused his mind to warp and flash just like it did before he found his Constant.

Other Observations and Questions
- If Desmond not pushing the button caused Oceanic Flight 815 to crash, how lucky of a coincidence was it for Jacob that so many of candidates were on it? Or was Desmond not the cause and Jacob made it happen? Or did Jacob make it happen through Desmond? Is that how it all ties together? Is Jacob coordinating all of it?

Obviously he is with his lists and lighthouse mirrors and the whole touching thing. But it has to tie to the Eloise/Desmond/Widmore/Faraday story somehow.

- Or were the candidates chosen after the crash because Jacob thought, what the hell, why not give these folks a try? Then he went back into their lives via The Island's time travelling capabilities and made them all "special". Maybe because his plan to keep bringing people to The Island to test them and prove something to Smokey (as we learned in Richard's episode) wasn't working as planned? Or does Jacob just have millions of candidates out in the world and so when planes crash on The Island, he's always covered?

- On a Dharma note, isn't it funny how Dharma just doesn't really matter anymore? Dharma was, at one time, the big mystery. Now it's just a group of hippy scientists who found The Island, saw that it was wacky, and decided to do tests there. Then they got exterminated by The Others and all of their equipment has just been very convenient for everyone else.