Lost: The Variable. Time Travel Paradoxes Continue to Elude Attempts to Cause Them in the 100th Episode.

Posted by ScuzzBuster

April 30, 2009

elle It’s official, Daniel Faraday’s mom is a real punk. We have continually seen her behavior get more distasteful and rude over the show’s run, and this time she finally comes within striking distance of Ben Linus as the most hated character in Lostland. Not only does she shoot my current favorite supporting character, it’s her own son.

Hopefully we haven’t seen the end of Faraday, though it certainly looks like a mortal wound. Also, as much as I hate to see him go, it would probably cheapen the moment by having him survive. However, it does begin to once again raise incredibly cool questions about the time travel elements of the program.
First, I’m starting to come to the conclusion that Lost has become one of the most interesting television or film treatments of time travel issues I’ve had the pleasure of watching. I’m really hoping that the writers continue to hold up their end of the bargain by giving it serious treatment in spite of the some of the more magical and hocus pocus aspects of the show, like the entire Jacob mystery, the ageless Richard Alpert and the spontaneous resurrections from the dead.

So once again this week we circle back around to Russian Cosmologist Igor Novikov and his theories about time travel paradoxes. Previously, I explored the consequences of Time Travel paradoxes back investigating Sayid’s attempt to kill the young Ben in my article Lost: He’s Our You. The Time Travel Theories of Einstein, Hawking, Doc Brown and Sayid Jarrah?
From Faraday’s entrance last season, he has had an adamant contention that the past could not be changed under any circumstances. In fact, this week’s episode was named The Variable as a nod to the Desmond-centric episode The Constant, which really was Lost’s foray into the deep end of the time travel pool. Faraday has been a died-in-the-wool supporter of Novikov’s theory that the past cannot be changed because the universe may be inherently constructed in such a way that it the creation of time paradoxes would just not be allowed to happen.

variable3 To those not familiar with theoretical physics, the discussion of time travel paradoxes is a serious scientific controversy because basically every theory of the known laws of the universe including Einstein’s involves the conclusion that time is not a constant. This was Einstein’s gift to science. His breakthrough on relativity was entirely based on allowing science to acknowledge that against all intuitive common sense, time is absolutely not a constant. It can be changed, sped up or slowed down. This is an established fact now. It’s provable and it’s testable. The faster an object moves, the slower time travels for that object.

Not only does NASA prove this every single day, but so does every telecommunications company on the planet. The satellites in orbit around the planet must be plotted and designed to have clocks that run at slightly different rates to take into account that they are moving so fast that they would quickly become unsynchronized with ground based-clocks. When you took a highly accurate time keeping device on to the now defunct Concorde supersonic jet liner on a transatlantic flight, your time piece would be a few thousands of a second behind the clock you synchronized it with before you left.

As a result of us acknowledging that the true universal constant is the speed of light and not time, everything falls into place. Admittedly, the amount of resources and energy it would take to actually successfully travel in time are astronomical, they are by no means impossible, just very very difficult. Physicists have already designed theoretical machines that can do it. Believe it or not, we know how to build a time machine. Unfortunately, they are still not feasible. The most plausible of any of them would still come down to having to build a solid, rotating cylinder as wide as our solar system and rotating at speeds approaching 186,000 miles per second, I don’t believe we’ll be hopping back to 1977 to watch the opening of Star Wars again any time soon.

However unlikely it may be, we still have to allow for the fact the universe allows time travel to be possible. Novikov’s proposal disturbs many other physicists because allowing the universe to regulate our actions to prevents us from creating paradoxes to say, pop back in time and kill our parents before they meet has dire implications for the concept of human free will. And thus we have the crux of Faraday’s contentions up until this week and his change of heart in the most recent episode.

Basically, Faraday has been adamant that the past cannot be changed. For instance, he tells Sawyer a while back that he can’t just walk up to the hatch in 2004, knock on the door and talk to himself or another one of the crash survivors when they are stuck in the past. When Sawyer questions that, Faraday explains that if it didn’t happen the first time they lived through 2004 it didn’t happen, so no matter what he does to make that happen, it won’t.

It was through this that Faraday concludes that the only possible interaction he can have with someone on the island when they are in the past is to see if he can confront Desmond at the hatch before he ever even knows about the crash survivors because there was no clear evidence either way that this did or did not happen to Desmond. And so he does it. He bangs on the hatch door and confronts Desmond with the message to find his mother when gets back to the mainland.

variable2 Something happens between Faraday’s introduction into the show and this week’s airing of The Variable. He decides that he has been wrong all along and that even though he had been viewing the events of the past as “constant” and unchangeable by any attempt to do so, he hadn’t taken into account that human free will is a variable which should make changing the past possible.
He’s wrong, and he goes on to prove he’s wrong by ending up with a bullet in him at the wrong end of a gun being held by his mother when she was a young woman. This represents one of my favorite moments in the entire run of the show so far. Seeing Daniel Faraday come to the realization that his own mother guided his entire life toward steering him back to the island in 1977 knowing that she would end up shooting him reveals her to be one of the most stupendous bitches that ever lived. I can accept the fact she is resigned to the Novikov theory that the past cannot be altered, but for either Faraday or his mother to be resigned to this should mean that they have no need to push the people in the past to do what they know has to happen. In their view of the universe, it shouldn’t be necessary. This is what makes Faraday’s mom all the more heartless. For whatever reason, not only is she resigned to the fact that her destiny is to shoot and probably kill her own son, but she spends half her life ensuring that this eventuality comes true. There’s more to this story and it’s going to be fun finding out what.

jughead It’s also great to see that our errant nuclear bomb, jughead, from early in the season now makes sense in the context of Faraday’s plans. Blow up the Dharma experimental complex with a nuke and change everything. No accident, no Desmond pushing the button, no Oceanic Air crash…nothing.

The real problem is that most of Oceanic Six have nothing to gain by wiping the entire plane crash out of existence. This would put Kate in prison for murder destined for a life sentance or death row. Sawyer has to rejoin society and go back to being a worthless con man alone with the guilt of killing an innocent man in cold blood in Australia. Hurley goes back to the being in an institution or worse. Locke ends up back in a wheel chair in a miserable existence back at the box factory. Hell, Kate and Sawyer alone probably should have shot Faraday themselves.

variable1 And so we creep toward the end of season 5 of Lost. Even though the show is running heavy on split character focus, it’s more fun than ever on the sci-fi front and we still have a bunch of the castaways living out an island soap opera that keeps us tuning back in to find out what happens. I’m not sure that any consistent stretch of Lost has been as consistently as good as the first season of the show, but it’s still hands down one of the best hours of entertainment on television.