The Death of Daniel Faraday

With the episode "The Variable," Lost has moved into the endgame chapter - everything is in place for the final season. When I wrote last year about the book Time Machines, I never suspected that it would pertain so much to Lost, which is to my mind the most significant example of postmodernism in current pop culture. The view expressed in that book is that time travel is possible, but that the universe consists of a single time-line, so what ever has been done in the past is fixed. This is precisely the view that has been enumerated several times on Lost, since the survivors started jumping through time with the commencement of this season. They usually express the view in terms of "whatever happened, happened." But now, Daniel Faraday has theorized that the timeline can be changed, and has refocused his concentration on constants to that of variables- people with freewill. Of course that presents many problems: obviously whatever has happened has become reality by occurring. The only way out is to split the universe into a parallel reality where the future is changeable, or do what even God cannot logically do - erase history. This last option seems to be the one that the survivors will ambitiously attempt to do, make it so their plane ( and 5 years of adventures) never happens. They will begin this attempt by detonating a hydrogen bomb (presumably this years' finale explosion). We may very well see in the last episode, Flight 815 safely landing, unaware of the events that were erased and skipped and the characters will continue on as they were. I hope the ending is not this simple, and even if the plane does land, hopefully the characters will remember their experiences. What is particularly interesting at this point is the existential crisis confronting them. If it is possible to erase your life, should you do it? It is your life and who you are now. Undoing it may be the greatest sin of life.

But I think the writers still have a more important meta-story to tell here. Even if the survivors were to return to their original lives, there must be a significant point to the mysteries of Richard, Jacob, Widmore, Cerberus and the Island itself. Flight 815 is a mechanism for furthering some greater purpose, and even if the survivors escape the rhizomic conditions they are currently in, their interaction in it will have made profound changes. This may have been one of the most brain-straining seasons of television, and the next year promises to be just as enthralling.