Desmond wakes up to a nightmare, in Lost "Happily Ever After".
*SPOILER ALERT* Tonight's Lost, "Happily Ever After", brought the show back around to the mystery and heebie jeebies we've come to love. We got more Desmond/Penny love and crazy Charlie as a bonus, which just added to the goodness of this tight and compelling episode.
I confess, when Lost episode "Ab Aeterno" aired, I was pretty disappointed. After the anticipation of a Richard Alpert-centric episode, I was let down by a story took the gorgeous and immortal Eyeliner Man and stripped away all his mystery. While it was nice to see the sensitive side of Richard and his truly eternal love for his bride, the fact that Richard was only special out of making a deal with the devil took away from his sexy mystique. This is one of the pitfalls of stretching out a one year series this long--the build-up is sometimes too much for the resolution you originally had planned.
With "The Package" and especially tonight's "Happily Ever After", however, Lost is back on track to muddling our brains. While we've seen hints before that the alternate timeline Losties have occasional flashbacks or deja vu to their original Island lives, tonight we got confirmation that the two are definitely connected. After Desmond has a run-in with crazy, seemingly suicidal Charlie and a terrifying car ride off of a short pier into the ocean, Desmond gets a flash of the pivotal "Not Penny's boat" moment from his previous life.
We've seen a lot of "what if" scenarios for our Lost castaways, including an awesome hotel seduction scene between Sun and Jin, but tonight's set-up may be one of the most shocking. We get Desmond working for Widmore, as his respected right hand man. Widmore is married to Eloise, and their son Daniel Faraday is a classical musician hoping to perform some rock/classical with Charlie's band Drive Shaft. Then there's Daniel's half-sister Penny, whom Desmond has not even met--but the ever-tuned-in-to-weirdness Daniel points out that Desmond may need to discover his other life and have his love-at-first-sight moment with Penny.
The most telling moment is when Eloise confronts Desmond about his inconvenient digging into these strange blips in reality. She hints that the Losties' alternate lives may be wish fulfillment of a sort--she tells Desmond he has what he wants, which is Widmore's respect. She tells Desmond he's not "ready" to find out anything about the facts he's pursuing. The headstrong Desmond ignores her, with a little help from Daniel, of course.
There's also the ongoing Lost mystery of what Widmore has planned in our familiar timeline, where he's brought Desmond back to the island to prove he can withstand an electro-magnetic catastrophe. Which he can. But what does this have to do with the Man in Black, Jacob, and Widmore's kidnapping of Jin? And can Desmond trust Sayid as his savior from Widmore's clutches? Can Desmond tell the future still?
And did Daniel's plan to detonate the nuclear bomb trigger the alternate reality? And did his mother Eloise have that result in mind from the beginning? Who exactly is pulling the strings in the Lost universe...or is their more than one puppeteer?
Things are getting interesting again.
Love at first sight...
Watch Lost on ABC, Tuesday nights at 9/8c.
PHOTOS: Lost, "Happily Ever After" screencaps, c2010, ABC Studios.
I confess, when Lost episode "Ab Aeterno" aired, I was pretty disappointed. After the anticipation of a Richard Alpert-centric episode, I was let down by a story took the gorgeous and immortal Eyeliner Man and stripped away all his mystery. While it was nice to see the sensitive side of Richard and his truly eternal love for his bride, the fact that Richard was only special out of making a deal with the devil took away from his sexy mystique. This is one of the pitfalls of stretching out a one year series this long--the build-up is sometimes too much for the resolution you originally had planned.
With "The Package" and especially tonight's "Happily Ever After", however, Lost is back on track to muddling our brains. While we've seen hints before that the alternate timeline Losties have occasional flashbacks or deja vu to their original Island lives, tonight we got confirmation that the two are definitely connected. After Desmond has a run-in with crazy, seemingly suicidal Charlie and a terrifying car ride off of a short pier into the ocean, Desmond gets a flash of the pivotal "Not Penny's boat" moment from his previous life.
We've seen a lot of "what if" scenarios for our Lost castaways, including an awesome hotel seduction scene between Sun and Jin, but tonight's set-up may be one of the most shocking. We get Desmond working for Widmore, as his respected right hand man. Widmore is married to Eloise, and their son Daniel Faraday is a classical musician hoping to perform some rock/classical with Charlie's band Drive Shaft. Then there's Daniel's half-sister Penny, whom Desmond has not even met--but the ever-tuned-in-to-weirdness Daniel points out that Desmond may need to discover his other life and have his love-at-first-sight moment with Penny.
The most telling moment is when Eloise confronts Desmond about his inconvenient digging into these strange blips in reality. She hints that the Losties' alternate lives may be wish fulfillment of a sort--she tells Desmond he has what he wants, which is Widmore's respect. She tells Desmond he's not "ready" to find out anything about the facts he's pursuing. The headstrong Desmond ignores her, with a little help from Daniel, of course.
There's also the ongoing Lost mystery of what Widmore has planned in our familiar timeline, where he's brought Desmond back to the island to prove he can withstand an electro-magnetic catastrophe. Which he can. But what does this have to do with the Man in Black, Jacob, and Widmore's kidnapping of Jin? And can Desmond trust Sayid as his savior from Widmore's clutches? Can Desmond tell the future still?
And did Daniel's plan to detonate the nuclear bomb trigger the alternate reality? And did his mother Eloise have that result in mind from the beginning? Who exactly is pulling the strings in the Lost universe...or is their more than one puppeteer?Things are getting interesting again.
Love at first sight...
Watch Lost on ABC, Tuesday nights at 9/8c.PHOTOS: Lost, "Happily Ever After" screencaps, c2010, ABC Studios.
That was fascinating the way the timelines were bleeding into each other. "Not Penny's boat" indeed!
ReplyDeleteThough I wasn't sure if what we were watching was an alternate timeline like the other alternate timelines we've been seeing, or if it was something else, perhaps a hallucination induced by the radiation washing over Desmond?
P.S. I've been neglecting my blog lately, due to life chaos and being disconnected from the grid -- but now at least the second of those has been remedied. ;-) I hope to be able to pay a lot more attention to the show as it (sob) starts to come to a close.
They've done a great job of keeping us guessing right until the end.
I'm looking forward to the Hurley-centric episode tonight. Every Hurley episode so far has been a classic.