Lost – Happily Ever After

Well, finally. Why couldn’t you do this sort of thing a long time ago, Lost?! Or at least, a little sooner than this!

“Happily Ever After” was not a perfect episode, but it did at least suggest that we’re moving toward some answers about the flash-sideways, and it suggested that those answers have the potential to be quite interesting. Thank goodness Desmond has finally come back, and even better, he’s brought with him all his special outside-the-timeline powers and his merry band of cryptic oracles. The resonances between the two timelines have begun to accumulate meaning rather than continue as an endless succession of surprising but empty coincidences. Charlie’s death in one timeline seems to trigger his suicidal or hallucination-seeking episodes in the other, leading to that mirroring, hand-on-the-glass drowning scene. In earlier episodes from this season, that uncanny coincidence would have only existed in the minds of the audience – hey! It’s just like last time, with the outstretched hand! – and it would have been just another cute but meaningless symmetry. At last, finally, Desmond has a flash of Charlie’s hand with the message on it from the original time line, and we have confirmation that those bizarre similarities exist inside the fiction, not just inside the audience’s memory.

Things escalate from there, with the help of the ever-enigmatic Widmore clan. Just as she always has, Eloise seems to understand much more about the meta-narrative than anyone else, and Daniel Faraday/Widmore has somehow gained access to his alternate lifetime’s worth of advanced physics research. Widmore puts Desmond in the middle of a catastrophic electromagnetic event (er, okay), which corresponds with the moment Alt-Desmond makes contact with his Constant and collapses from the ineffable space-timey thingness of it all. Both versions of Desmond wake up, having glimpsed some enormous piece of the puzzle. Desmond’s now a bridge between the two timelines. I was so excited that we’re finally seeing some links between those threads that I didn’t even care when Widmore pulled a classic Lost “Let me explain all of this!” and Desmond was all, “Naw, I’m cool.” I would have loved for this storyline to show up earlier in the season.

I'm encouraged by the look of resolve and certainty on Desmond's face.

This is definitely up there now with “Ab Aeterno” for the best episodes of the season so far, and it’s useful to think of these two episodes together. In many ways, “Ab Aeterno” and “Happily Ever After” represent two dominant, often opposing forces in the Lost mythology. “Ab Aeterno” is totally centered on the island, its major power players are Jacob and Smokey, and it represents a strain in Lost that is about good versus evil, human nature, allegory, timelessness, and fantasy. This aspect of the show has always dealt with problems like choice, free will, and temptation, and has been reliably disdainful of more concrete questions like “What is Smokey made of?” Conversely, “Happily Ever After” is the time travel, science fiction, “catastrophic electromagnetic events” portion of Lost. This is the part of the show where Desmond and Penny, Faraday, Widmore, and Eloise Hawking have always been dominant, and instead of centering on issues like whether human beings can change, these stories are about space time, seeing the future, searching for your soulmate, and experimental rabbits named Angstrom. The “Happily Ever After” stories tend to take place in the world outside the island, and the means for telling these stories has always had a stronger explanatory bent. Faraday’s physics obsession is a great example of this: on the island, Smokey’s just hanging around, being a crazy smoke monster, and thinking about human corruptibility, and I doubt we’ll get ever get much more than that. Back at Oxford, the explanations for time travel and having a Constant aren’t any more plausible, but they’re introduced with equations, blackboards, mazes for the time-traveling mice, and giant magnets.

Always with the giant magnets

These are not completely unrelated story lines, of course. Ben has had some extensive contact with both the Jacob/Man in Black material and the Desmond/Eloise Hawking stories, and Desmond himself has always been the means of linking the two together. For the most part, though, the two plot groups and their related thematic contents have pretty much stayed in their own corners, and it’s about time that Lost began to resolve the two. I said after “Ab Aeterno” that I needed to drop my question about whether or not Lost is science fiction, because that episode seemed to be answering with a resounding, “No.” I think “Happily Ever After” revives that question, and demonstrates how important it’s going to be for Lost to find some way to connect the dot between the two opposing forces.