Whenever the spotlight shines on Desmond in a Lost episode, the groundwork is typically laid for the Big Ideas that wreak havoc with the castaways’ lives in future episodes. This week’s Hume-centric episode, ‘Happily Ever After’, was — very happily — no different.
At Bumbershoot last summer, Carlton Cuse and Lost writers Eddy Kitsis and Adam Horowitz gave some insight into the goings-on of Lost‘s writers’ room. It was an engaging behind-the-scenes glimpse into my favorite show, but one of the more interesting anecdotes was hearing about the laborious process behind writing ‘The Constant’ — one of my all-time favorite episodes of any show ever. But the episode is of special significance to Lost mythology because it officially marked the show’s first full-on use of unabashedly geeky time travel. As of last September, ‘The Constant’ had the honor of being the longest story for the writers to crack and write, taking a total of five weeks. (It actually doesn’t sound like that much time, but I think it works out to approximately 5 movie-screenplay years.)
Even though time travel had always been planned on being introduced to the show, ‘The Constant’ was a monumental step forward for Lost, signaling the point where the show openly embraced the sci-fi plot device, wearing its craziness on its sleeve onward. But before they could get to that point, the writers needed to have the mechanics and mythology of the device hammered out. The episode circled and circled The Island, waiting for the perfect chance to blow our minds, and when ‘The Constant’ finally arrived, we were not only rewarded with a brain-frying sci-fi tale with tons of heart, but also an ominous – and awesome – sign of crazy things to come. ‘The Constant’ was a harbinger for the direction of the show, as it pushed the ideas of fate and consequence introduced in ‘Flashes Before Your Eyes’ (another Desmond episode), as well as preparing us for the flash-forwards of Season Four and Season Five’s time jumping.
Similar to ‘The Constant’, ‘Happily Ever After’ has probably been looming large unbeknownst to us, circling Hydra Island and LA X all season, and now that it’s safely landed, the craziness has officially been released on Lost’s final season, as The Island-verse and the LA X-verse have finally made first contact.
Days later, I’m still stuck thinking about the title of the episode, ‘Happily Ever After’. It’s definitely not as cut and dry as some of the previous titles this season (‘The Package’, ‘Recon’, ‘The Substitute’), but applying those three iconic closing words from a fairy tale to the context of this episode does bring forth a couple of thoughts.
I could be convinced that ‘Happily Ever After’ is Lost’s version of a fairy tale, continuing Desmond’s quest through time and space to reunite with his soul mate Penny. In fact, the episode itself was kind of a remix of previous Desmond episodes ‘The Constant’, which saw Desmond chase Penny against fated odds, and ‘Flashes Before Your Eyes’, which featured Eloise boldly instructing Desmond not to tinker with his reality or fate. Taking the fairy tale connection a step further, it makes sense that Eloise is very much Lost’s twisted version of a Fairy Godmother, operating with a knowledge of space-time and The Island that borders on magical.
In ‘Flashes Before Your Eyes’, Eloise talked Desmond out of proposing, acting as a very unhelpful Fairy Godmother. In the LA X-verse, she told Desmond that he wasn’t “ready yet” to meet his soul mate. The goal of Eloise’s quantum curse over the fated lovers remains a mystery and it’s up for debate whether she’s using her powers to help Cinderella meet her Prince Charming or to curse Sleeping Beauty to a lifetime of silence and solitude. Or it could be that I’m doing a disservice to the fairy godmother archetype by equating it to Disney. After all, fairy tales were originally often cruel cautionary tales of tortured protagonists and lost children, manipulated by mysterious and magical beings — and that doesn’t sound like Lost at all.
If this episode wasn’t Lost’s version of a fairy tale, maybe the title refers to Desmond’s strange attitude at episode’s end. After waking up from his visit to LA X, Des is faced with two “choices,” even though neither of them is really a choice at all — a position not unlike the one Charlie was put in at the bar. Desmond can make an unknown sacrifice to a man he (awesomely) beat over the head with an IV pole for dragging him back to his personal Hell, or follow a crazed-looking, gun-toting Sayid (now with 75% more neck snapping!). The two options are grim, but Desmond looked strangely content accepting both propositions. For all the hope Penny’s appearance in the LA X-verse brought Des, it doesn’t look any path on The Island leads to a happy ending at the moment.
Or it could simply be that ‘Happily Ever After’ is referring to properly predicted fan response for another Desmond episode.
Not Penny’s World?
How great was the setup for the long-awaited link between the two worlds? Suicidal Charlie hijacks the car and drives it straight into the water. Desmond narrowly escapes, but goes back underwater to rescue the drowning junkie. Charlie, looking very dead, puts his hand to the window, reliving his Season Three death and sending Desmond’s head spinning between two worlds. It was the moment we’ve been waiting for all season, officially linking the LA X-verse and Island-verse, and it really couldn’t have been executed better.
Having Desmond protect Charlie in the episode was a good callback made even better with LA X Charlie’s creepy death-wish attitude, walking blindly into traffic and launching a car into the ocean. But Bizarro Charlie is powered by something bigger and stronger than his heroin addiction. His drug of choice is now “conscious-altering love,” and he makes a hard sell of it to Desmond, once again playing a massive role in helping the Scot reunite with Penny.
‘Happily Ever After’ was also stacked with the best supporting cast appearances yet: Charlie, Daniel, Eloise, Penny and Minkowski. The appearances of previously established people, places and things in the LA X-verse is now solidly adding to the emotional hum of the show, instead of coming off as pandering to the diehards — which I think it dangerously flirted with previously. I know many didn’t (and maybe still don’t) like the plausibility in the scene from ‘What Kate Does’, where Kate had no problem tracking Claire in small town Los Angeles and then convinced her to be her new BFF after the whole cab-jacking thing. But, as I thought then, it was teasing us to try and connect the dots and to see that these characters are still linked — by fate or something else — in this other world and they’re destined to play a part in each other’s lives, especially when it’s not at all realistic.
But the callbacks have grown increasingly spookier since then, as we can see Fate’s hands “correct” events, making them mirror The Island world. In this week’s episode, Widmore finally gave Desmond a taste of 60-year-old Scotch — and even though it meant something to Desmond, it meant even more to all of us who watched him being viciously denied by Widmore with the same bottle before. And how cool was the flipside to that scene, when Eloise ominously told Des that he has what he really wants: “my husband’s approval.” Both were powerful scenes, but only in the context of what we know from The Island-verse.
Desmond’s Cabin
I know I can’t be the only one who was reminded of Jacob’s Cabin when Desmond was tied down inside Widmore’s super-secret science experiment. I think it was the combo of confined space, poor lighting and a wooden chair, but my head is spinning to see how this connects to the big picture. Does anyone else think that the sacrifice Widmore is asking Desmond to make includes him becoming the next Jacob (or Smokey?), trapping him in a tackily-decorated time-traveling cabin, that acts like sort of a DeLorean-meets-TARDIS ,as he forever rides through different pockets of The Island’s electromagnetic energy — maybe with Zoe’s map as his guide.
[Special thanks to ABC and Lostpedia for the images. The above painting of Jacob’s Cabin was done by Daniel Danger for The Lost Art Project last summer.]