'Lost': 'Up in the Air' with Desmond Hume [Updated]

 If you did not like "Happily Ever After," then I'm pretty sure we can't be Internet friends anymore. Don't get me wrong. I respect your point of view. I'm sure you're a great person. You're just wrong about this and probably everything else. I mean, I try not to be a hard-liner. I try not to let my passions overwhelm me. And, obviously, you all know how I feel about Desmond. (The words "man crush" do not even begin to explain it.) But "Happily Ever After" is just a sublime episode of television. If you watch the medium for great characters or great moments or the construction of great worlds, I'd wager you felt roughly similar to me. If you're just in this for answers to every little question you have, well, it's probably time to get off the boat, I'd wager.

I mean, sure, "Happily Ever After" has its answers (or, more accurately, its suggestions about what's going on), but it's also something of a line in the sand, asking if you care more about figuring out just what the ins and outs of the Island are about or if you care more about seeing how the characters the Island drew to it try to deal with its impact on their lives. I certainly don't begrudge the people who feel the show owes them answers their feelings. I just don't, ultimately, understand that point of view. I like the mysteries, sure, and if the show somehow wraps everything up in a way that explains away absolutely every little bit of information, all the better. But what I most want is to see the ultimate fates of these characters, to see them have endings that fit who they've become (or been revealed to be) over the course of six seasons.

To some degree, television is about instant gratification, about giving us what we want every week so we keep coming back for more. We're not addicts, exactly, but we need what only that show can provide. The most daring gambit of the final season of "Lost," then, has been to suggest that what we don't want isn't answers, even if we say we do. What we want is more mystery, more strange noises in the jungle, more misdirection that seems to be pointing one way and then merrily heads off in another direction entirely. It's not a bad guess, really. "Lost" has made its living off of mystery all this time, just as surely as "C.S.I." makes its living off of letting us watch cops catch bad guys or as surely as "The Office" makes its living off of showing us workplace life in all its squeamish details. 

The great Time TV critic James Poniewozik has argued in the past that people approach the end of a series like "Lost" not as a conclusion to the story, but as an answer, a solution, a series of pieces that fill in the last gaps in the puzzle. In regards to fan reaction, I don't disagree with his thesis. A lot of people are looking to this last season of "Lost" to explain everything, to justify the fact that they've watched the whole thing or spent time online puzzling out what it all means or bought all of the DVDs and taken screen grabs or ... insert your favorite bit of "Lost" nerdery here. And, yeah, I'm not innocent of all of these things. I've messed around on Lostpedia at work. I've gotten into heated forum arguments about the meaning of everything and defended the show in blog post comment sections. I'm definitely interested in what, if anything, it all means.

But I take another view of all of this too. Imagine that you actually are doing a puzzle. Imagine that you're coming up on the end of your last session with some 5,000-piece behemoth. Maybe you don't have a box to compare to, so you're not entirely sure what the picture's supposed to be. You've just had your wits and a sense that if you started with the corners and then the edges and worked your way inward, you'd be fine. Now, you're coming up on the end. You've got just a few more sessions of working on this puzzle left, and you can pretty much tell what the picture is going to be. Fewer than 100 pieces remain, and you're working them in as you can, but you're starting to realize there are more holes than there are pieces. You've got 100 holes, but you only have 80 pieces. The puzzle is going to have some holes, is going to be incomplete. And no matter how much you search your house for those last few pieces, you're not going to find them, not in a way that makes you feel the rush of finishing that puzzle. 

But step back a little bit, and you can still see what was supposed to go in those 20 blank spaces. You can tell that that was supposed to be a bit of cloud and that a deer's hoof. Over there was a piece of that snow-capped peak, and over there was to be a hawk's wingtip. Your mind can fill in the blanks, and you're left with an appreciation both of the picture as a whole and of all the work you put into it, all of the time you spent enjoying it and figuring out where you were, of orienting yourself. I view "Lost" similarly. Heck, I view television itself similarly.

There's something to be said for a story where absolutely everything adds up and there are no loose ends. But that's hard to do in TV, where the nature of collaboration means that not everything can gel with everything else. What's important is that you capture the sweep, that you create a world and characters people want to get lost in and then do the best possible job of keeping that world and those characters true to what you've done before. We can watch "Happily Ever After" and wonder just what Widmore's game is or we can watch it and wonder just what Desmond's going to have to sacrifice (and, oh please, don't make him sacrifice his life, "Lost"). But I prefer to watch it and be amazed by just how swooningly romantic the whole thing is, how it takes the basic premise of the movie "Family Man" (only in reverse) and makes something genius out of it.

Put another way, if that moment when Desmond suddenly flashed on a vision of his life with Penny didn't make your heartstrings sing just a little bit, you're probably not the kind of "Lost" fan I am, and, sad to say, these last episodes are probably going to disappoint you, were probably ALWAYS going to disappoint you.

 "Happily Ever After" is a bunch of things, I guess. It's a way to interpret the events of the final season and the flash sideways universe. It's a deeply felt story of a man who regains a love he didn't know he'd lost. It's something of a solution to the puzzle of whether the flash-sideways universe is an epilogue to the series proper or not. It's a fun thriller about a man who finds himself in over his head in two realities and isn't sure what, if anything, is even "real." And, on top of everything else, it's got the usual sense of "Lost" religiosity, the sense that everything is moving toward a grander purpose. When Desmond gets in his car at the end with an almost evangelical zeal and says he has to show the other "Lost" castaways something, well, that's a moment that pushes us forward in a new direction and gives the show a new sense of purpose.

One of the things I liked most about "Happily Ever After" is just how much time it gave us in the flash-sideways world. I think we needed that time, even if many of us would have rather been back on the Island. We needed some time to see how the whole place is constructed, how there are some flaws around the edges, holes that can be poked through by moments of strong emotion. (The show makes the most use out of "love" as a way to do this, but notice that it also happens when Desmond is trying to save Charlie in a situation remarkably similar to the end of Season Three.) The flash-sideways world has been a place that we've only gotten a few glancing glimpses of in between all of the Island action, a place that has seemed a little underdeveloped at times. Now, I think, we're getting a better sense of it as a place that exists only because everyone has been given what they think they want but at some sort of price. It's not quite a shared hallucination like "The Matrix," I don't think, but it is a place where everyone has given something up to get something else. In Desmond's case, that means he's never met his beloved Penny, but he has gained the acceptance of her father, Charles Widmore.

The Desmond and Penny relationship has always been the romantic bedrock of the series. For all of the other doomed-and-otherwise couplings the show has served up, the Desmond and Penny relationship -- which involved, at one point, both having to move space and time to be together -- has seemed like the show's mission statement for what matters, love-wise. Love is hard, "Lost" seems to say, but if you find it, you have to cling to it. It's the only thing that will rescue you from a dark and mysterious Island. It's the only thing that will right you in time so you don't die from having your brain scrambled. And it's the only thing that can pull you out of an alternate timeline stupor. "Lost" works not because it's a show about lots of interesting mysteries. It works because it's a show about characters who all want something and dream of something concrete. In Desmond's case, that's always been Penny, and when he doesn't seem terribly concerned that he doesn't have love in the flash-sideways, he seems ... emptier somehow.

But then, oh then, things start to break through. The flash-sideways ends up being like a remix of every episode Desmond has featured prominently in since the show began. (In particular, we hit one of my favorite, very underrated episodes, Season Three's "Flashes Before Your Eyes," another episode that completely took place in a place other than the main timeline.) Charlie is there to describe a woman who is obviously Claire and bring about the flash Desmond sees of the other world. Both Eloise and Daniel are there to tell Desmond to follow his heart, one urging him to run away from it and the other urging him to run toward it. (And, as my friend Zack Handlen points out, both Charlie and Daniel died in the other timeline after following their hearts.) [For the record: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Eloise and Daniel, not Charlie and Daniel, died in the other timeline.] Even the smallest of details -- a glass of fine Scotch, a hand pressed against a window -- hearkens back to an earlier episode but in a way designed to provoke a kind of sadness at what has been lost, an apprehension of what might be to come.

I certainly don't want to tell any of you who are watching this final season and demanding more answers that you're wrong to watch the show that way. Everyone watches TV for their own reasons. All I can do is tell you why I watch it, and I watch it because I want to see worlds I believe in, no matter how ridiculous, characters I care about, no matter how they end up mired in metaphysical conflicts from beyond our reality. I want to see a man realize that the only thing worth fighting for is the love of a woman he's never met. I want to see another man who keeps chasing death because he thinks it's the only way to find purpose. I want to see a doctor slowly realizing that there's more to the strange events swirling around him in two worlds, a sad musician pull scientific genius out of thin air. The people on "Lost" aren't real, obviously, but I want to believe they could be, that they're living in a universe just around the corner. I want to see that smooth cut from Desmond grasping Penny's hand to his eyes opening back on the Island, the look of joy on his face when it happens, a realization that some things matter more than others. Does it matter to me if the puzzle has its holes? No. Because what's there is something I desperately want to see.

Some other thoughts:

• * Man, I do love me some Daniel "Faraday" Widmore. The sad genius is such a type, but Jeremy Davies plays it so well, and his scene this episode, where he said that he thought that he HAD blown up a nuclear bomb, was just terrific.
• * Oh, and Eloise, too! This episode was crammed full of great "Lost" players we haven't seen in a while, and it's a good reminder of just how many fun characters who never got developed lurked around the edges of the show. For example, George Minkowski, who I hope sticks around.
• * For those of you playing along at home, this is the first episode of Season Six that Terry O'Quinn does not appear in at all. That's kind of notable for an episode where I'm assuming that much of what happens is happening because of his character.
• * I liked Eloise saying, "What happened, happened," but I did so want to hear her say that the universe has a way of "course correcting." 
• * So are we to believe Penny's alternate timeline last name is Milton? Or is that just some other Penny? I took it to be the latter, but it seems most others are taking it to be the former.
• * Some great direction by Jack Bender in this one. I love that shot of Desmond slowly striding toward Penny as she runs up and down the stairs at the stadium and the shot of Daniel watching Desmond and his mother talk from the piano.
• * Man, that is way, way too much about this episode and my feelings on the season in general. I'm sure many of you will have way better theories than I do, so let's hear 'em. And if you still think the show is headed down a path toward being an utter  waste of time, I promise I'll try to stay Internet friends with you, no matter how hard it is. And don't forget that you can e-mail or Tweet me too!

--Todd VanDerWerff (follow me on Twitter at @tvoti)

Photos: Above: Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) and Penny (Sonya Walger) 4-ever! Below: Meanwhile, in another universe entirely, Desmond actually works for Penny's dad, Charles Widmore (Alan Dale). (Credit: ABC)

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Comments

[Amy]

Eloise didn't die in the other timeline

[Todd VDW]

Whoops. Meant Charlie, got caught up in the parallelism. Will edit.

[debi lee]

I'm with you. However, Eloise did not die. Your friend was referring to Daniel and... Charlie. Silly.

[chris]

great article - sums up my feelings on the series and its resolution well. I don't remember Eloise dying in the other timeline though? Unless you mean the rat?

[Alex]

I'll tell you: I'm watching the first five minutes of this episode thinking, "Where is the wonder? Where is that delicious tension and dread I remember from earlier seasons, even earlier episodes in THIS season?" Look, there's some more oddly-junky Dharma/Widmore/Others gear. Ah, I see. A generator. Look, an innocent tech has been turned into a Hot Pocket. Yawn.

...And then we're in Desmond's flash-sideways, and the sky opens up, and I don't come up for air until the last second of this episode is over, and possibly another 10 to 15 seconds after.

Thrills! Chills! And totally expected spills! Tonight's episode was like unto a Lost Buffet: everything that made me fall in love with the show in the first place, all piled onto a plate and served up piping hot. Order UP!

What a scandalously disorienting moment, finding that Eloise seems to be the only one in that reality who knows what the hell is going on! How delicious was it to see Charlie's hand lazily splayed against the window of the submerged Mercedes? And then so thrillingly sudden the smashcut to Charlie's hand splayed against the porthole as he drowns...

!!!ZOMG!!!

Typical Lost inversions abound! Surely I am not the only one who rolled around on his sofa tonight, audibly speaking to his TV in chagrined delight as Desmond approaches the deserted arena where Penny is training in the stands? Am I the only one who smirked evilly when Claire passes up a free ride to take her chances with what we know will turn into the Cab Ride of Doom courtesy of a crazed Kate? I can't be the only person watching tonight whose toes curled in anticipation once we hear Daniel's name invoked in Widmore's office, followed by the churlish tease of his head bent over the piano during the preparations for the benefit at Widmore's house? Surely I'm not the only one who audibly giggled in anticipation when we see the outline of his charmingly unfortunate hat as he knocks on Desmond's limo? I know I can't be the only one who kept trying to spy Charlie's bum peeking from the back of his hospital gown as he raced around the halls like a hamster with dementia, right?

Am I the only one who actually exploded off the couch to caper about in glee when Penny shakes Desmond's hand, Desmond is catapulted to the island, but WITH ALL MEMORY OF THE ENCOUNTER INTACT?!?!?!

Am I? Am I the only one who can't get his punctuation under control?

What great tv, this was. Seriously. You guys? Seriously?!?!

[Joe]

There are two ways to go with this episode: after suddenly finding yourself five minutes from the end, you react either to not receiving desired answers or to the fact that time flies...

My main concern with the future of the show doesn't have so much to do answers as whether it will maintain its originality. After seeing Desmond go all Dr. Manhattan in that machine, I became concerned that our latest Answer was going to be an outright rip from Watchmen. I kind of dread each of the show's reveals should they be at best an homage--at worst a rip--from The Stand, Twin Peaks, or whatever of the many book covers we've been shown. I have faith that the show won't enter too deep into that territory, but it's probably my main concern next to consistent characters (for which I'll forgive Penny, who seemed to have forgotten Desmond calling her by name at the stadium). So I guess I'm just worried that when I finish the puzzle, I'll realize I already did it five years ago--but I don't doubt I'll have enjoyed myself and still find the picture pretty. Cuz time flies when you're watching Lost.

And as a side note, thanks for indicating a correction! I don't like it when web journalists just change mistakes as if they never made them.

[Mike]

OH MY EFFIN GOD, LOST was amazing tonight. A+++++++++++++++++!!!!!!! I can't believe my mind got blown again. This show is somehow 1000x times cooler now.

The Alice and Wonderland references. Seeing Des get messed up Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen style. The pulling of some of the biggest, coolest philosophical ideas all at one time (Descartes' Evil Deceiver, Leibnez's Best of All Worlds, Humean cause and effect). The CONSTANTS! The return of some of our favorite Lost characters, who all had awesome things to do in the flashsideways. And now, the stage is set for Desmond to kick ass in the future, because he knows that this alternate reality is BS and is robbing him of what he really cares about in life. AND NOW WE CAN THINK ABOUT WHAT'S LACKING IN EVERYONE ELSE'S FLASHSIDEWAYS SO FAR TOO!

All of the "why should we care?" thoughts about the flashsideways are now being paid off and in a way that fucking blows my mind.

I can't get over it.

[Robert]

Btw wanted to add that Penny was running up and down the stadium stairs....the first flashback we get of desmond is jacks when he first met him, and told him he was going on a solo race around the world, both were running the stadium stairs, season 2 episode 1 i think, or one of the first episodes that season

[Todd Gilchrist]

Admittedly this is the first of these I'm reading, but what is this supposed to be? A review of the show? Because if it is, half of it's just plain inaccurate, and the other is precisely the kind of blind fanboyism that justifies the creators doing b.s. storylines that go further and further away from any kind of closure or explanation.

"The most daring gambit of the final season of "Lost," then, has been to suggest that what we don't want isn't answers, even if we say we do." Do you mean "what we don't want IS answers, even if we say we do"? Because the other way does not make any sense.

"Both Eloise and Daniel are there to tell Desmond to follow his heart, one urging him to run away from it and the other urging him to run toward it." How can two people be telling him the same thing and the opposite thing at the exact same time?

Ultimately I don't even strongly disagree about the episode, although I do feel like the season as a whole has wasted a lot of time it could have spent providing even a few answers to ideas in previous seasons. But to suggest that the creators are in any way deliberately not trying to provide something satisfying so that (according to your metaphor) you have to look at the spaces in between the pieces of the puzzle in order to appreciate your effort, that's bad storytelling, and to defend that is just being thoughtless and too infatuated with something to see its flaws. Because I am sure that the creators think they ARE providing something satisfying, but they're just killing time waiting for a third (or however many) season-ending nuclear explosion that's going to change/ end/ resolve things even though they've made no real effort to explain any of the random (although at the time they were incredibly important) details that were lorded over in episodes past. Because at this point, the Others and the Dharma Initiative all essentially is irrelevant since the island has completely been taken over by the Jacob/ Man in Black narrrative, but as a longtime viewer, it makes me feel like all of my hours of watching and caring about all of this storytelling from past seasons was a waste. And on a show where the creators have told you from day one that it's ALL important, that's an insult.

[Larry]

After Charlie made that reference about "love," I realized that most of the main characters in the alt-timeline do not have love interests. The exceptions are Locke and Widmore. Among the main islanders, Locke is a fishy choice for the exception. Not sure what to make of the Widmore/Hawkins relationship. But Miles even goes so far as to ask Saywer why he doesn't find a girlfriend and if he's content to die alone.

Jack has the love of his son, but he's divorced.

Sayid loves a woman he can't have.

Sun and Jin love each other, but can't be together.

Linus is alone (with his dad) - never had a daughter.

Second Point:

What can Desmond show to the people that died during the crash????? I can understand that Claire, Kate, Jack etc will see their Island lives, but what about the others? If that's not the creepiest thing, I don't know what is.

[Charlotte K]

I am starting to wonder if the ghosts that appeared have been bleeding through all this time from the other timeline....as if once you've died you can come back and start to guide people? That would explain Christian off-island, Charlie at the asylum, Ana-Lucia helping out Hugo.

Charlie is the one who breaks my heart in this great episode, he knows he is supposed to be dead, he knows the universe needs a course correction.

Eloise is the White Queen in Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" somehow living backward in time. I can't wait to see how that all develops.

I love the storytelling we're seeing. I don't think I'll see its like again on TV although people will try.

[Rogers]

All this episode did, much like the preceding ones, is tell us things we already know.

[Drew]

Great post. I watch the shows for a lot the reasons you write about and it completely bugs me to hear people complain about not getting answers, especially today after an amazing episode last night.

Love the series and what they've done, but the show has created monsters as fans and a good chunk of them, I can't stand.

[Dhmbrglr]

I do love the characters and watching them grow in the Lost world has been amazing, but show itself is Mystery. From the article I read just Season 6 hype...when the only reason the show got that far was b/c of the questions and mystery. We wouldn't've even been given up to a finale if the show was just about character development and how the react to their circumstance...the foundation of the show are the questions and it seems the creators have forgotten that too.

There's no doubt that a Desmond episode is on par with a Locke or Linus episode...but all those characters are so entrenched in the mystery of the island that they had to be part of the best stories and characterization. As if Desmond's love for Penny would be so special if he wasn't already on the island when the show started. I don't want a huge 2 hour answer extravaganza for the finale...they could take a page from BSG and start rolling answers out now with only 5 eps left....instead we get more answer/filler/answer/filler, etc. episode...1- numbers 2 - blah 3- candidates 4 - blah 5 - claiming/smoke/locke and so on...we need less blah and more answers...then again...it could be more emotional til the end and i'll still buy all the blu-rays...ha

[Sam]

Happily Ever After was a terrific episode. It is in the same vein as that of The Substitute, Dr. Linus and Ab Aeterno. It opens up multiple possibilities for the show's mythology but also, more importantly, it is full of heart. I don't care what anyone says, Lost is totally awesome.

[The Evil Marhall Dunn]

I respect your perspective, but mine is that this show has been a "bait and switch". It started out centering on the "mysteries of the Island" with romance thrown in for color, depth and an emotional anchor. Fine. But this late in the game, for the writers to boldly proclaim, "This show is about love and has always been about love" is a cop-out.

"The Terminator" was about love, too, but when The Terminator was turning that semi around to ram Sarah's/Kyle's overturned vehicle, they didn't pick that moment to proclaim, "It's about love" and start in with flashbacks of Sarah and Kyle's tender moments together.

No, James Cameron blew most his budget on the last 12 minutes of that skeleton-Terminator chasing Sarah around that warehouse. The film RAN to the end, not dragged it's feet and painting pretty, emotive imagery in a "look over here and you won't see how crappy our special effects look" effort. When you bring an audience that far, it's a little late for the "love story" angle. Save that for the end, after the climax.

Even that explanation is kind of suspect since the only "love" we've seen are 'Kate-Jack-Sawyer-Juliet' (after crash only) versus Desmond-Penny (an established romance from the beginning). Hurley....quickly given a girl-friend who was just as quickly killed....is a main character that didn't have the "all you need is love" angle. Kind of gimmicky from the beginning. The Jin-Sun "Somewhere Out There" love story is getting tedious since they insist on keeping them apart. Eko's tribulations didn't come from "love" (ok, love of his brother but I saw more focus on Eko's willingness to do bad things, even if it was for good reasons as exemplified by his back story as a priest), Michael's issue wasn't about love (OK, love of his son but I saw michael's backstory as focusing more on his over-controlling, stubborn nature), Charlie's main issue was addiction....love came next and it was "creepy love' if I recall correctly. Locke wasn't about love. He, like Jack, had father issues, and moreso, a need to belong (by the way, do you think he shot that undercover cop that found his pot-growing operation?.....tune in...well in the next 5 episodes). Richard's tribulations weren't about love (ok, love of his wife, but I saw more about his loss of faith as a result of her death and all that came after). Bernard-Rose WAS a well-established emotional anchor, and stayed true to that. That would play into the "what about love" plot direction, but they've been hardly utilized the entire series, so it's not ALL about love. It's about "these people's love"....the rest of you will DIE! So, in actuality, given the total screentime given to other sub-plots..."what's love got to do with it?"
And all this time, I thought it was about "redemption". I hear gears grinding here. (Use the clutch, writers!)

I was disappointed...not in the episode per se, but the presumption and the poor use of limited time to give us an episode of "The Guilding Light". Furthermore, this "sideways reality trap" kind of makes that entire season "off-Island" season seem insignificant.

And one final note: Desmond being able to withstand EM at high levels is a poor, poor plot device in that it's a weak excuse for why Desmond is "special". Like Widmore tested every person in the freaking world to assume that. Are Jedi "Midi-chlorians" responsibile for his special abilities? Even to borrow heavily from "The Butterfly effect" and make it a "brain abnormality enhanced in a strong EM field" would be a better explantion than this.

Desmond and Penny are my favorite couple. What a waste of a very good love story.

[Jaboobinator]

I was pleased to see the show return to the scientific questions and the physics of the alternate realities, after the overt religiosity of the last two or three episodes. I'm curious to see if, and how, they will tie together the quasi-religious conflict of good and evil with quantum mechanics and alternate universes.

[Natalie]

Thanks for another great review! I love your image of the puzzle - even when you think you can fill in those last 20 pieces yourself, you're never quite sure...and that's such an important part of Lost, living with mystery again in a way our culture hasn't embraced for a while. I love it!

I was pretty captivated by how love functioned in last night's episode. Usually I'm immediately bored by soppy love plots, especially when they involve a corny concept like soul mates. But Penny and Desmond have always complicated such narratives in interesting ways. Last night's episode did the work necessary to use a concept like a soul mate - connection to another requires time and effort, even if that's time and effort in some alternative existence (apparently).

I blog about this episode at http://themothchase.wordpress.com - check us out!

[Adam]

You are literally the best television reviewer I have ever read. You hit every single nail on the head and put into words my own feelings about the show so succinctly. You're so right that this show is about so much more than answers. The journeys of these characters that have become so dear to us has become my primary focus. Seeing them through to the finale has become paramount as opposed to answering every little question about the cerebrus vents and such. Though I still need to know what exactly the goddamn smoke monster is excatly. But really, thank you for giving Lost the treatment it deserves. This is a special show that deserves to be recognized as such.

[E]

Your fantastic post has summed up how I feel in a nutshell. I've watched Lost from the beginning for various reasons but overtime I've stuck with the show because of the characters even the ones I've hated like "Kate" and "Charlie." (Yeah, I said Charlie. I like him better in the sideways timeline, though.) I've never really been concerned about certain things like what is the island or about who the Others were because it just didn't matter to me. Would I like answers? I certainly would, however I choose to view Lost like I do life. Sometimes we get the answers and sometimes we don't. Everything doesn't have to be wrapped up in a neat little bow. And I truly hope the finale doesn't do this because I've seen too many shows try to give us everything and every answer. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes we don't need to know everything. A little mystery doesn't hurt.