TV COLUMN: 'LOST' - SEASON 6, EPISODE 10

"Happily Ever After" - There's Always a Choice

By: Josh Moorhead

April 7, 2010

Oh my goodness. My sweet, sweet goodness. That was it. The Lost I’d been waiting for. The true love I saw in hazed moments between consciousness and daydreams. The entertainment I’ve dreamt for. I’m seriously gushing in this moment. “Happily Ever After” was affirmation. I just literally finished this episode. I… I think I’m going to faint…

*FLASHBACK/FORWARD/SIDEWAYS/TIME-TRAVEL SOUND*

“Where are the donuts?” Schiest. I’m in the mail room. We’re wondering where NCIS: Los Angeles‘s daily batch of donuts is. How long was I unconscious? I ask myself. About three and a half hours. Fudge. Whatever will keep me awake now? Especially if these donuts don’t show up? I need a constant! Hurry, quick — what do I love? No, I already said the donuts aren’t here! Oh yes, Lost!

Eyes wide now, Lost-aways. Last night, when Desmond came to, we all should have woke up. Whenever Lost opens an episode by having someone pop the pupil, we should know we’re in for something big. Several season beginnings and endings have started just this way. Whenever we get a Des-centric episode, it’s also time to stand at attention. After all, the first time we met Des, it answered the question that first got people hooked on Lost: “What’s in the hatch?” If last night was our last Des-focused episode, we got the answer to the question we’ve been asking all season, which is “WTF?” Or, more Des appropriate, “WTF, mate?!”

These flash-sideways have been pesky things. Like the hatch, we didn’t know what mystery was contained in them, what potentially revelatory meaning they had, or even really where they came from. Leave it to Des to climb down the ladder into the thing and figure it out for us. In “Happily Ever After,” we saw that most definitely wasn’t the case. Our characters in the sideways-ness are not living their best lives. Even if it seems better, say for Jack who’s got a kid and less fix-it issues, or Locke who’s getting hitched to Helen and isn’t a train-wreck of fate-destiny-faith blind motion, or Ben who didn’t kill a whole population of happy Dharma hippy campers, or his dad…it’s just not. Not even for Desmond, who in sideways world has apparently seen Up In The Air 5 or 6 years before it came out in the normal reality and decided George Clooney’s character made a lot of good points about packing lightly and avoiding human connections. In this reality, Des apparently hasn’t caught Clooney’s other 2009 offering, though, Fantastic Mr. Fox, which says, “Live without fear, even of your own faults, and let your purpose out of its wild animal cage — and also dance and maul live chickens.” Most of that’s good advice for the Fantastic Mr. Hume.

Charles Widmore had to commit the slight impoliteness of kidnapping Desmond and bringing him back to the island because Des is fantastic. He can survive electro-magnetic unspeakables ranging from hatches imploding to generator boxes reverbing to, I’m assuming, standing too close to a microwave for an extended period of time making a hot pocket. These abilities allowed Des to vacation in his summer home of sideways reality in his sideways consciousness after Widmore zapped him. Stop me if any of this sounds too trippy. Actually, don’t, because you probably stopped watching Lost years ago. Amuse yourself with a hot pocket.

It seems as though when Des is jolted by the right hot pocket of energy, his mind can get its passport stamped for other places and times. We knew this before. What Widmore’s crazy electric box did was unlock the ability for Des not to just go forward or backward in our time-line, but in others, fulfilling the unintentional prophecy: “See ya in another life, brotha.” And as soon as Des realized where and what he was when his consciousness landed back in the box, he no longer had to struggle with Widmore. He got it completely, down to his bones — or better yet, his soul. Imagine a world where no one did what they were supposed to, had what they were supposed to, shared what they were supposed to — and that is what the sideways is: a world where you pick door number 2 instead of 1, and you win the new car, which is cool and everything, but doesn’t compare to the million bucks behind door number 1.

Lost was much too smart to explain this to us in terms of money or even success, though. Lost hit it home with love — the kind of love that gives you an irregular but more powerful heartbeat. The kind of love that’s riskier than solitude and contentedness but all the more fulfilling and completing for the investment you make in it. The kind of love that could get a man through two lonely years of pushing a button in a hatch. By framing the absences of the sideways world in the Penny-Desmond disconnect, the audience was instantly able to agree that the sideways blew chunks. Des and Penny’s epic, pure love has been one of the most touching and one of the most enjoyed things about the show. Any Lost world where it doesn’t exist is a lesser one. By extension, we can understand how Charlie is lesser for never having Claire, maybe how Sawyer is lesser for never having Juliet, and, by further extension, how Sayid might be lesser for never having gone to the island to get his mercenary on.

Whhhhhaaaa? But love is good. Soul-infected killing machine is bad. Yes and no. Love is the most relatable, compelling example to illustrate to the audience that the sideways is the bag-cereal of realities, but the larger idere is that love is just one example of many. And maybe, though it’s hard to understand or accept, a reality without a pretty terrible plane crash, not to mention everything that happened after it, is a lesser one. Because hell, high-water or Dharma peanut butter, a world without the island is a world without purpose for some, wonder for many and maybe protection for all — even if in the other one, the sideways, they don’t quite know what they’re missing.

At the end of my “Dr. Linus” recap, I said ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s banishment. The sideways is like that, and in being so, it’s more a purgatory than the island ever was…and maybe even a hell. And maybe, in some way, that’s what hell is — a place where you get what you think you wanted, but at the expense of what? Maybe a life with the grand thrust that love exemplifies and purpose triggers.

If the shortcomings of the sideways are like that, it shows us even more that Smokey is a bad man/monster/gaseous mechanical bull because his offers to his recruits are all about giving them desires; his goal is escape of the island, a denial of his purpose. He rewrites the scripture of the Stones: “If you try sometimes, you get what you want,” and then nobody gets what they need…if a world exists where Smokey isn’t trapped and where Desmond has better hygiene and business where it comes at the expense of the island, and everything special about it and what that meant for the rest of the world. Whittled down, Des gets Charles’s approval but not his life with Penny until he catches a glimpse of the way they were in the time-line where things are right, even though in that one he didn’t suffer only Charles’s disapproval but a lot of island bad stuff. Let me get Dumbledore on you. There is a difference between what is right and what is easy.

THEORY BUMP: And viola! I give you our real “big bad” when it comes to our non-smokey characters. Eloise Hawking. She seemed all too aware of the dimensional divide when she told Des to back off it last night. She seems to know what’s missing but also what is seemingly gained between the two. Imagine, in a time travel tragedy, you shot your own son while, at the same time, he was gestating in your stomach. Imagine the guilt, the questions you’d have to ask yourself about changing things. And so Eloise did. Last year, we watched as we thought Eloise sacrificed for the island, forcing her son back to a place where he’d still die at her hand. But I don’t think Eloise did all that for the island; I think she did it for herself. She forced math on Daniel Faraday while he would have preferred metronomes and piano keys. She tried to pull him away from personal relationships. In the end, she fostered a scenario where, yes, Dan would return to the island but with the knowledge and mission to blow up a big ol’ nuclear bomb that would create a splinter time-line where the island wasn’t and Dan was. While I do believe Eloise believes what happened happened, I believe she believes it for one time-line, not another. So Eloise created another what happened happened, where her son lives, is a little less twitchy, and really likes Driveshaft. It’s not that this line of thought is inherently evil,  but the consequences ain’t good. It seems, ultimately, only one of these time-lines can continue to exist, i.e. Widmore in this episode saying Penny and Charlie Hume would cease to exist, and in the sideways saying his wife would “destroy” him jokingly. Not a joke, dude! Throughout the season, similar statements have been made about other characters: Two weeks ago, Richard’s wife told him he had to “stop the man in black” or they would “all go to hell.” Again, I don’t take this to be a literal hell but a conceptual one, like, say, an alt-time-line.

This all goes back to some theorizing I’ve been doing since week one but rounded out in more definitive terms two weeks ago. Beware branching theory bump!

See? Told you. Now you’ve gone and hit your head and can only speak Korean. Shoulda’ listened. Anyway…

Theory Confirmation: Two weeks ago, I said soon enough we would see something “abhorrently wrong” with the sideways world that would let us know it’s an impostor. It could be anything, small or large, but we’d know it when we saw it. See Des and Penny’s lost love. Ultimately, in some way, the characters would have to choose which reality they preferred — one with or without the island. See Des’s instant understanding of the stakes after he zapped back to the island reality. He’d do anything, any sacrifice to keep it intact. In the off-island sideways, Des seeks to illuminate the other passengers of 815 of their coulda-shouldas. Charlie, being illuminated, shares the same idea, AKA in effect, they are choosing at least a preference. This is important because, if the sideways reality zips away into nothingness, we won’t feel bad about it. Since week one, I’ve figured Des would zap to the other reality and bring some peeps back with him in some way. But anyone that can find something in their nose worth picking would be able to say that. I think it’s still what we’re leading to. I said that after we realized what was wrong with the other world and Des tripped over and shared awareness, a chunk of the should-be castaways would die and their spirits would be guests on Lost Island Ghosts Live with your host Hugo Reyes. We’ll see. While this exact conjecture is a little trippy, I really think something at least similar will be likely. We’ll see next week.

And then, of course, at some point, the larger conflict will be resolved. Smokey will be tossed or contained, perhaps still in the alt. Since he exists on a scale with Jacob, Jacob will go with him or they will both cease to be. (I’m beginning to wonder if, since Jacob, died Smokey is beginning to lose some of his powers. He seems to be losing his grip at manipulating the castaways, and we haven’t seen him go smoke-mode in a while…) Since they represent concepts of good and evil, and good and evil can’t die…or, to a lesser degree, they represent differing philosophies and philosophies can’t die, and since the island is still special and requires stewardship, new representatives will emerge. I still say we haven’t seen the end of John Locke. As for the new man in black, I lean toward Ben, but that’s a wider race. Everything else is in the details. All the time travel and alt time-lines and freighters and scientific initiatives have been allowed to play out to ultimately facilitate this process. This does not mean they were not important in and of themselves; they were just more important than we realized…and that’s the point of the Lost reality. In it, your actions directly contribute to a larger, existential conflict that gives those actions greater meaning and even your purpose. Without the island, it’s just all so much frenzy for naught. A gerbil on a wheel.

It’s like the hatch (again!). Was the button doing anything, or were they just being watched to see if they’d actually press the button? The truth? Both. In Lost world, everything that is done has immediate importance and larger consequences.

Sideways reality is like Unbreakable — M Night Shyamalan’s movie about Bruce Willis basically not realizing he’s Bruce Willis aka an invincible hero. In it, Bruce plays a sullen everyman who is coaxed into his potential by Samuel L. Jackson, a guy looking for the extraordinary in the world. Bruce’s character talks about waking up everyday with a sadness; Jackson says it’s because he “ain’t doin’ what he’s supposed to be doin’.” Jackson also says the worst thing is to not know your purpose in the world. Wacky hi-jinks ensue. Point being in the sideways, they all wake up with that sadness and are just filling their lives to lesser or better effect, but still just filling it — like we do with work, or cheeseburgers and beers, or *gasp!* Even something like Lost — pulling straws, hoping for the right one.

But don’t let me trivialize the show, because I have so much more to say — whoohoo!

Simply, this episode was executed beautifully. It did what the sideways do best, even when they’ve been cryptic and frustrating. They show us parallels and diversions and course corrections that jones with our Lost muscles. Pairing Charlie and Des was an exciting start. The drowning Charlie hand thing that made Des see sideways = awesome. Charlie’s Driveshaft being a more successful band in the alt (therefore he has a whole different set of greatest hits than the list he created in season 3)… And, for Pete’s sake, the stadium! Just awesome — Des fainting into a comfy cushion of love memories = fantastic. Penny giggling like a taken school girl = delightful. Even the inclusion of Fisher Stevens (now an Oscar-winner, thanks to The Cove, and no stranger to time travel reality time-lines, thanks to CBS’s ’90s drama Early Edition) was welcome. This episode was laudable for many reasons, and not just because it made sense of some things but because of how it did it. It was exciting, engaging, unpredictable and, more than anything, satisfying. These are the episodes we wait for — a part of the ultimate resolution we’ve been pining for…like Des pined for Penny. It just so happens that loving her also made him do all the other right stuff. And that, as they call it in the biz, I think, is motivation.

What else? Charles’s big boom box and Des’s unwilling return to the island reminded me a lot, again, of Jurassic Park, and The Lost World in particular, since Hydra Island is like a Site B and Des was unwillingly coming back to the island like Jeff Goldblum. In this scenario, Charles reprises his role of John Hammond and Des is Ian Malcom. Ian Malcom, in the Jurassic books and flicks, is a mathematician and master of chaos theory. Chaos theory says almost anything isn’t predictable because of the predictable unpredictability inherent in all systems. Easy, right? Call it something between Murphy’s Law and the important-in-chaos-theory butterfly effect — how one small action can set off an unpredictable, unmeasurable chain of events…like the differences of the time-lines. See how our characters are the variables in a system of time and rules as dictated by the island?

A few seasons ago, in a Comic-Con video, we saw Dr. Chang filming a Dharma instructional video about the very station Widmore and crew were in. They sent a bunny into another dimension and brought one back. But then suddenly, they were both in the same room on accident, and bunny pellets started hitting the fan. The two could never meet! The ramifications would be horrible! This was probably three years ago now. We’re starting to make sense of it now. Take that, “Lost wasn’t planned” naysayers! The rabbit in question in Tuesday night’s episode was named Angstrom. An angstrom is a unit of measurement that, amongst other things, measures the wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. It was named after physicist Anders Jonas Angstrom who geeked out on astrophysics, terrestrial magnetism and “spectroscopy,” which is all about measuring light and prisms and junk. For all my overwrought metaphors, I’m suddenly feeling smarter about my “island is like a prism” bit. Call it luck of the draw…or chaos theory! Or Jurassic Park! Or a Bruce Willis movie!

But Angstrom is also a reference to John Updike’s character Harold C. “Rabbit” Angstrom, whose journeys are about “life, death and redemption.” Quotes attributable to Lostpedia.

I’ve got one more movie for you, though, before I collapse, or wake up and realize my article was all a dream and that Lost was actually about Niki and Paulo arguing and being pretty Tuesday night, and then my hopes and dreams will be crushed.

All Des’s hallucinating and such made me think of the flick Jacob’s Ladder — about a Vietnam vet’s shifty consciousness. Then some Googling mined me this quote which might be worth noting for next week, Hurley’s episode: “The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they’re not punishing you,’ he said. ‘They’re freeing your soul. So if you’re frightened of dying and…you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the Earth.”

The devils of the quote are the spirits of those already gone or simply those loved. Sounds like Hurley’s ability to me. And while it might seem like a particularly dire quote to close on for what was such a hopeful, energizing episode, that’s exactly the thing about hell or lesser lives or callings or greater ones or gained loves or lost loves or demons or angels or islands or Lost itself. As Jacob has been saying, and as Desmond told Charlie last night, and as Charlie then told Desmond before driving them into the deep end of enlightenment:

There’s always a choice.