I love ya, Penny!
I
loved this show so much that I was just happy I gave myself an excuse to watch this
episode again. If you have never seen it, a lot of this will not make any
sense, and it will spoil a few things for you. It is regarded by fans and critics as the best episode of the entire series. It is also
my favorite episode.
May
I just muse a bit about the show itself?
If you passed altogether or gave up on Lost, I just want to express how retroactive criticism does not
apply. The thrust of the show was the
anticipation and speculation from week to week and season to season. This show existed before binge-watching was a
thing, and for those people it most likely lost a bit of luster. It is my favorite show of all time, and even
with its faults it’s still better than anything I will ever see. There must be a reason other shows are trying
to reproduce its success.
“The
Constant”, for my observation, is a very unique approach to time travel. In an episode of the second season, “Flashes
Before Your Eyes”, we get a taste of Lost
as sci-fi, and that the character of Desmond Hume (my favorite) can become
unstuck in time (a la Slaughterhouse-Five).
There is no machine. There are no controls or a plan or initial
stakes. An event on the island propels
the Desmond we know into a version of his former self, off the island. It is years before the events we have seen,
and this character’s flashback is guided by the present-day Desmond.
Got
it?
In
the past, he sees his girlfriend and life before the island. During his stay he is visited by someone we
do not yet know, who knows of him and his future. His trajectory is changed, because he asked
to make a decision he may not have made without interference. The writers liked the idea of free will
playing a part, and Desmond’s flaw is a tragic fear of commitment. Nice.
Solid. But as a standalone
episode, we didn’t know what to think. “The
Constant”, however is a different animal.
A separate event propels Desmond back in time, but now he flips back and
forth between 1996 and 2004. His 1996
self is in the action with the island people, and the 2004 Desmond is back in
2004.
It
is consciousness time travel. It has been done before, like Peggy Sue Got Married or a number of
Twilight Zone episodes. It is the answer
to a party question: “If you could go
back in time in your former body, would you change anything?” There are no physics at work and there is no
travel to speak of; this is simply about the humanity of the proposition
itself. The traveler is not an outsider
looking on past events. He is there,
controlling his younger body and making minute and sometimes drastic
alterations to his future. In Lost, the question of whether or not
this would work at all is also up for debate.
Desmond
tracks down Daniel, who he knows from the island in 2004. He is a physicist who recognizes Desmond’s
plight and utters those words that put my stomach in knots: “You can’t change
the future.” Oh yeah? The crux of the story is much more human and
insanely sweet. It is about Desmond and
Penny reuniting in the past so they can reunite again in 2004…before Desmond
dies from the trauma of all this flipping back and forth through time.
I
believe the writers backed themselves into a corner leaving their choice for
how time travel works in a logical limbo.
Either you can change things or you can’t. In a later episode, (I’ll tackle that another
time), the assumption changes. As a
viewer, I think it would have been better to know the construct even if the
characters were unsure. Accepting the
fate of events simply because you scientifically believe how it will all work
out is at best illogical, and at worst, unclear. I will add that most of these questions are
answered to a degree. Whether or not you
like the answers…well…
Although “The Constant” is
in a pretty weak season 4 overall, it encapsulates what made the show so great
to watch. Especially the final scene.
(Tears, kids…tears.) If you can make it to this one, the reason behind
such dedicated fandom for Lost will
be obvious.
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