Piercing the Veil: Dawning Recognition on Lost

"None of this is real." - Charlie

Imagine a world where you managed to achieve your heart's desire. Would you be questioning the nature of the universe around you? Or would you be so complacent that you'd be blinded to what's actually going on until cracks started to form in the seemingly perfect veneer of your existence?

It's the latter that has given the Lost-X (or "sideways" timeline) some of its heft this season on Lost as several of the characters have begun to feel an eerie sense of deja vu or a biting sense of frisson in which they seemed to realize, if only for a split-second, that something was "off" with the world and their place in it.

This week's magnificent episode of Lost ("Happily Ever After"), written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and directed by Jack Bender, offered the biggest clues yet to the real function of the Lost-X timeline as Desmond was forcibly returned to the island to participate in Widmore's test, a test that would have serious consequences for every single living person in the world should he fail.

A lot of speculation has been made about just what the Lost-X timeline actually is, with many critics and viewers jumping on the bandwagon that is the epilogue for the entire series. I've never been one of those who believed in this theory and last night's episode went a long way to disproving it all together.

So what did I think of last night's episode? Grab yourself a glass of MacCutcheon, make your way to baggage carousel four, buckle your seatbelt, and let's discuss "Happily Ever After."

Personally, I thought that "Happily Ever After" was hands down the best episode of the season, even if it didn't feature many of the main cast members (other than Hurley, Jin, and Sayid, all very briefly). But what it offered was a new prism through which to see the sixth and final season and it placed a significant weight on just what was unfolding within the Lost-X timeline, pushing it and the main timeline closer together while making each of them vitally important.

The Lost-X timeline isn't the ending for Lost, nor is it just a way of revisiting relationships and characters we haven't seen in a while. It's the very crux of the entire season, the outcome of Jack and Co.'s efforts to detonate Jughead, and it's resulted in each of the characters having their consciousness split between these two realities.

The alternate timeline established when Juliet detonated the hydrogen bomb at the future site of the Swan is just as "real" as the mainstream one but it's a divergent timeline that I believe will require--as I've said several times before in the past--the passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 to raise the island from the ocean floor and recork the bottle. This is a world where each of them has received their heart's desire but it's made them unable to see what's truly happening around them, making them little more than sleepwalkers in an eternal battle that they're blind to.

In other words: someone needs to wake them up.

While watching "Happily Ever After," I turned to my wife and said, "Des is Layla Miller?!?" with a chuckle. For those not in the know, Layla Miller is a comic book character introduced during Marvel Comics' "House of M" storyline a few years back. Without getting too sidetracked, here's the gist of the storyline: the Scarlet Witch, once one of Earth's mightiest heroes and a mutant wielding the power to warp reality, succumbed to madness and killed several of her teammates before disappearing with her father, the evil mutant Magneto.

The heroes banded together to deal with her but suddenly the world went white and they found themselves living in another world, where each of them had--aha!--been granted their heart's desire and where mutants ruled the world under the House of Magnus. But not everyone was happy in this seemingly idyllic paradise and eventually--thanks to young mutant Layla Miller--many of the heroes were "awakened" and realized that the world around them was fake, created by the Scarlet Witch to trap them and keep them docile. Layla had ripped through the veil separating their consciousness from the truth about the world and then set out to overthrow the House of M and return the world to the way it was meant to be. Of course, there was a price to be paid...

The sixth season of Lost would seem to owe a debt to "House of M," whose themes and narrative devices Lost has cribbed from a bit this year, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Desmond would seem to be cast in the role of Layla Miller, someone whose main purpose is to remove the heroes' blinders and grant them the ability to recognize that their world is inherently wrong and not meant to be. Each of them has already experienced moments where they realized this on a subconscious level but there's a difference between a second of realization and full-blown recognition. That's where Desmond comes in.

Desmond, after all, had survived--as Charles Widmore puts it--a cataclysmic electromagnetic incident that rendered him able to shift his consciousness to other timelines. We saw evidence of this in "Flashes Before Your Eyes," where Desmond visited an alternate reality and attempted to change his fate, before Eloise Hawking intervened and pushed the timeline back into place. Given that he's already been charged with subatomic particles, he's the ideal candidate to deliver a message to the other timeline.

This supposes several things. One, that Widmore has known all along that Desmond activated the failsafe in the Swan Station and experienced an electromagnetic incident. (Check.) Two, that Widmore also knows about the existence of the alternate timeline and that the Incident split time into two streams, one of which is the current mainstream reality and the other in which the island doesn't exist. Three, that recreating the incident could transfer Desmond's consciousness into the other timeline or give him a multi-dimensional awareness (much like Juliet possibly experienced at the bottom of the Swan shaft). Four, that it's possible to bring these divergent timelines back together again somehow or that there's a way to safeguard their own reality by tweaking things in the Lost-X world.

Invisible threads of fate bind each of the Oceanic Flight 815 passengers together and their paths continue to cross as they are forced back together in an act of course correction. While their flight never crashed on the island, these individuals are still of vital significance to the island, which hasn't finished with them yet. (Or started, one could argue.) Everyone who set foot on the island in the mainstream reality--from Daniel Faraday to Charles Widmore and Eloise Hawking--will need to band together to change the world, to cast off the illusion that this world is the right one, and sacrifice their own happiness in order to put things right. The cracks are growing bigger...

Desmond. Given the importance of Desmond in the overarching mythology of the series, it was only fitting that his first episode back would been entirely Desmond-centric. Returning to the island by way of Charles Widmore's, er, undersea hospitality, Desmond is the subject of a crucial test ordered by Widmore to test his resilience in the face of an enormous electromagnetic energy wave that would fire any lesser man. (Though I do wonder if they should have attempted to test it first on the bunny Angstrom, named for the physicist whose moniker is used to to measure "lengths on a scale of the wavelength of light or interatomic spacings in condensed matter.") Instead, Widmore orders Zoe and Seamus to conduct the test on Desmond straightaway.

But that's not before Desmond attacks Widmore. I mean, if your supposedly evil and estranged father-in-law kidnapped you, tearing you away from your wife and son, and brought you back to a place of unspeakable torment from which you had only fairly recently escaped, you'd be pretty angry too. But if we see Widmore not as pure evil but rather a man for whom the ends justify the means, much of his actions throughout the series can be perceived as acting to protect the island, particularly if he knew that Ben would be the one to kill Jacob and therefore allow the Man in Black to potentially escape his prison via a loophole.

Widmore tells Desmond that he'll have to make a sacrifice in order to save the entire world, a fact that Desmond finds ironic as Widmore has never had to sacrifice anything in his entire life. But not so: he willingly gave up his relationship with his daughter Penny, allowed his son (Daniel Faraday) to die on the island, and has never even met grandson Charlie. Everything he's done has been in service to the island.

The Mission. Desmond, of course, does survive the solenoid dosing (though does experience burns over his body, indicating that he doesn't quite come through the test unscathed) and now understands his mission on the island. His sudden docile nature and willingness to work together is vastly at odds with his behavior before the test (given the fact that he attempted to bludgeon Widmore with an IV stand). Just what does he "understand"? His actions inside the solenoid chamber would seem to point toward the fact that he is aware of the other timeline (his hand is raised here, just as it was in the Lost-X timeline) and knows that he must do something involving the two divergent realities. But what?

While he's ready to get to work with Widmore and his team, Desmond is also all too willing to along with Sayid when the assassin shows up, kills his escorts, and demands that Desmond comes with him. But why exactly? Was that his mission all along? To make his way to the Man in Black? The way that Desmond just says "Of course, lead the way," either points to that fact or to Desmond having some knowledge of what's to come in the days ahead.

But perhaps it doesn't physically matter where "our" Desmond is because half of the mission has already been started: Lost-X Desmond will begin to gather the passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 and wake them from their slumber. Things are already in motion.

Lost-X Desmond. While some might wonder just why--if Desmond got what he always wanted (or thought he always wanted)--that he's been split up from Penny, that's not really his heart's desire. What Des has always longed for is the approval of the one man who would never give it: Charles Widmore. In this reality, Desmond is an unattached single man whose entire life revolves around his career and his job working for Widmore, here happily ensconced in an office in Los Angeles with a stash of MacCutcheon whiskey and a provocative painting of scales (symbol alert!); he's also married to Eloise and his son, Daniel, is a classical pianist. Eloise is hosting an event and Desmond is sent on a mission to ensure that Charlie Pace, about to be released from jail after his suicide attempt, is at the concert to perform with Daniel.

And that's when things start to go wrong, or right depending on your point of view. Charlie, in the moments before death, experienced a shift of consciousness that displayed another reality, one in which he was in love with Claire Littleton. (In fact, it would seem that the main thrust of the entire series is love, actually.) He wants to show Desmond something, proof that their lives are wrong and that their world is a lie. He seizes control of Desmond's car and drives it into the ocean (in fact, right near the dock where Desmond had been living with Penny and Charlie). Under the water, Desmond attempts to save Charlie (echoes of Season Three) and has a vision of a similar incident in which Charlie pressed his hand against the glass of the Looking Glass Station (another instance of a looking glass, in fact!) and Desmond read the words, "Not Penny's Boat."

While Desmond was unable to save Charlie in the mainstream reality, here he successfully rescues him from drowning and the incident forces a switch to be flipped inside his brain, a switch that's all the more potently felt when Desmond undergoes his own test in this reality, an MRI at the hospital. An MRI, after all, is an example of magnetic resonance imaging, in which a "powerful magnetic field [is used] to align the nuclear magnetization of (usually) hydrogen atoms in water in the body." Or succinctly: more magnets, which allows Desmond's consciousness to connect to the other reality and send back images of Penny. Unable to withstand the mental onslaught, he pushes the button (dun-dun-dun) and demands to see Charlie... who is attempting to flee the hospital.

Charlie does give Desmond an important piece of information, telling him that none of this is real and that he has to find Penny. His first clue comes when he goes to tell Eloise that Charlie won't be appearing at the event. But she's eerily calm about it, despite George Minkowski--here Desmond's driver in this reality--warning him about her temper. But Eloise just shrugs it off, offering yet another example of that old Lost adage, "whatever happened, happened." Which made me wonder: did Eloise already know that Charlie wouldn't be turning up? And how much is she aware of the chasm between the realities?

The answer to the second question would appear to be answered somewhat by the heated exchange between Eloise and Desmond when he asks to see the guest list after hearing the name Penny Milton. (Why does Penny have a different last name than Charles despite being his daughter? Because he is still married to Eloise and never married Penny's mother. And, yes, Milton would clearly seem to be a reference to "Paradise Lost" author John Milton, a title that seems to offer a sharp foreboding about what's to come in the Lost-X world.) Whereas Charlie spurred Desmond on to find Penny, Eloise seems to be against it, saying that it is a "violation" and that he's "not ready yet." Hmmm...

Lost-X Eloise. It's interesting that the more Eloise protests, the more Desmond believes in the righteousness of his mission. But whereas Eloise offered a course-correction previously, here her hands seem to be tied and the use of the world "violation" seems particularly meaningful. Why is Desmond not ready to be enlightened about the truth of their world? If Eloise is once again aware of the divergent realities, why does she seek to prevent Desmond from seeing Penny? Or is it just that Eloise knows that Desmond will eventually meet Penny--that he has to in this universe as well--but that things are now unfolding not in the proper sequence or timeframe? Curious. I would have thought that this Eloise would have wanted things to course-correct, even if it means losing Daniel all over again...

Lost-X Daniel. Loved that we got a glimpse of Daniel Faraday, much missed this season. Here, Daniel too has achieved his heart's desire as he got to follow his chosen path to become a concert pianist rather than a physicist. Though he's plagued by a sense of deja vu, experiencing an otherworldly attraction to Charlotte Staples Lewis when he spies her in the museum, and an inexplicable talent at advanced quantum mechanics, something he couldn't have done had he not studied physics for years. Nice callback with the notebook, where this Daniel made a chart that included an axis that read real space, imaginary time. He believes that they changed things and that somehow, somewhere, he had detonated a nuclear device and altered reality. He tells Desmond that Penny is his half-sister and enables him to find her. Despite Eloise's efforts to keep the two apart, it's her own son that pushes Desmond and Penny together. Could it be that the universe is course-correcting, even without Eloise's influence? (Also loved the reflection of Daniel in Desmond's car window, another example of a looking glass.)

Lost-X Desmond and Penny. Desmond, of course, does come face to face with Penny, as she is runs up and down the stairs at the stadium, the same one where in the mainstream reality Desmond met Jack for the first time. Penny herself has a moment of deja vu upon meeting Desmond but his consciousness flashes over to the island when they actually touch, a moment of profound connection that bridges the chasm between the two realities. (We see this as Desmond wakes up, still apparently shaking Penny's hand.) The incident spurs Desmond to ask Minkowski to track down the passenger manifest for Oceanic Flight 815. Why? Because Desmond will begin to track down each of them and "awaken" their true consciousness, granting each of them the ability to become aware of the other world.

Which would put them on the path of putting the world right again--bringing the island back to the surface--in order to recork the bottle and get the genie (the Man in Black) back in his prison. But to do so, they'll have to sacrifice everything they hold dear in this world in order to chose a world that's more flawed--if proper--than their own. Yes, each of them will be faced with the choice to leave Eden behind in order to do the noble thing and each will be judged accordingly.

Would you give up a chance at love to put the world right again? If you got your heart's desire, could you turn your back on it? Is ignorance bliss or just blindness? With only five episodes remaining before the series finale of Lost, I think we're about to see things get increasingly dark as lives will be lost, alliances broken, and sacrifices made. If last night's episode is any indication of the road ahead, I dare say that we're in for quite a ride.

What did you think of this week's episode? Agree or disagree with the above theories? Were you struck by the similarities to "House of M"? Got predictions on just what will happen next? Head to the comments to discuss.

Next week on Lost ("Everybody Loves Hugo"), Hurley agonizes over what the group should do next, while Locke is curious about the new arrival to his camp.