Remember That Time On LOST When: Daniel Faraday Stole Your Heart?

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Daniel Faraday’s entrance into the LOST mythos was even more fucking spoogeworthy than initially thought. I had a feeling the quirky guy with the sweet facial hair and the stringy body was awesome. I could just tell from the moment he was walking through the forest after bailing the hell out of the helicopter. But after rewatching Confirmed Dead this afternoon, something so obvious hit me that I was actually upset that I didn’t notice it.

Daniel Faraday’s initial conversation with Jack and The Whore Known As Kate was an homage to Luke fucking Skywalker. Yeah, isn’t it awesome? Faraday struts up to Kate, wrangling to get his helmet off. A little pipsqueak in an enormous, foreboding get-up. A stranger, even. After taking the helmet off, he’s asked, you know, who the fuck are you?

And dude drops, “I’m Daniel Faraday, I’m here to rescue you.”

Awesome! Usually LOST has me in a frenzied state. I’m watching it, but I am trying to pay attention to every thing on the screen. Convinced that there’s something encoded onto the tree bark or something that I’m missing. That I should be seeing. Because obviously it holds the answer to everything, from the Island to the Smoke Monster. And then I end up missing awesome homages to Star Wars and shit. It makes sense that they’d throw this sort of reference in, since Lindelof himself is a huge Star Wars geek, and wore something The Force-related to his first meeting with Abrams during his hiring process.

Anyways.

There’s a multitude of reasons that Daniel Faraday is awesome. In short order,   he had a mullet back in the day. Which obviously means he listened to sweet hair metal. Even though it was 1996 when he was a Professor, you totally know that he was pissed off about grunge and was still blaring Queensryche and wearing a leather jacket at night. And there’s also the fact that he’s a genius, and time-travels with the frequency that most of us make our daily commutes. Getting caught in the slipstream? Pfft man, I’m Daniel Faraday. I do that shit before lunch. And it’s so blase I don’t even celebrate with some fine eatery, I get a peanut butter sandwich. Grape jelly? Ha! That shit is for pussies. Straight up chunky peanut butter, no milk. I’m a bad ass, I have a mullet!

But more than anything, Faraday seemed to represent the shift into insanity that came with the beginning of Season 4. Here we had a time-traveling physicist who was sent to measure temporal cross-dimensional shifts and uh, other stuff. No, I really don’t get what he was up to. But it all sounded incredibly difficult and I knew he was the only one who could do it, because he had a Ph.D. and a mullet. If Season 4 was a shift into a time-traveling exploration of man’s own inability to save themselves, of the idea that man creates the same demons that ultimately claim him, who better than Faraday to represent that. Faraday was channeled down to the Island by the writers themselves to embody the concept of the rest of the series, and perhaps retroactively and with the entire premise in focus, the show.

Faraday was a gentleman hurdling through time set on a course to be killed by his own creation. Literally. All of the characters of LOST are sent through the cosmos, destined to create in the past the same things that will lead to their own suffering in the future. It happens on both a micro and a macro level; for they seem not only responsible for the events on the Island that lead to the Incident, but they also wrangle with the idea that all their past actions and inactions are resultant in them being on the Island in the first place.

Jesus Christ, the Diet Mountain Dew is rocketing through me, and I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about anymore. You know what would be crazy? A hydra, but instead of heads, it just has like sixteen dongs, and every time you cut off a dong, two more spawn.

And then, Faraday is killed by that which created him. It was a goddamn tragic moment. I pretend to sneeze and fart at the same time so my friends wouldn’t realize I was trembling with tears. My friends looked at me, and I was like “Sneeze and fart! One of the most deadly combinations ever known! I’m lucky I didn’t die! I’m just shaking and covered in snot and remorse! Now look away, LOOK AWAY!”

Eloise shoots down her own son, and lives with the tragedy throughout her entire life. Eloise Hawking is condemned by the situation which she created – her own son. Faraday is not only a stud, a phyicist and the lead singer in a Maiden cover band, he’s the essence of the show. People suffering over and over again as the sum of their actions. I could be completely wrong. It’s hard to make any certain conjecture without having seen the end of the show; maybe all the plight can be avoided, maybe there are variables or constants that can be relied upon to change situations. But Faraday, the time-traveling maestro of pure sex and intelligence seems to embody where the show was going.