Remember That Time On LOST When: Desmond Was Unstuck In Time?

[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.]

Desmond Hume getting unstuck in time was one of those episodes of LOST that left you absolutely rocked. It was pure undiluted win. It tugged on your heart strings, it made your mind melt with time traveling insanity, and it features Daniel Faraday rocking out with the mullet to end all mullets.

I remember watching Desmond catapult through time with the idea that they were going to kill off my boy Mr. Hume. Instead, the dude seems to be an essential linchpin in the entire series. He’s a Scottish time-bandit stud, who just so happens to have surfed the slipstream of time and space before being saved by love. Awwww, how fucking cute! No seriously, I shouldn’t act hard. When he finally dials up Penny at the end of the episode, I was pretending to sneeze a lot, because I was a weepy mess.

Penny! Oh Penny!

Desmond gets rocked on his ass when Locke and the Band of Merry Assholes decide to stop punching the numbers into their sweet ass 1982 Apple II or something. The resultant EMP alters him in some way and his consciousness allows him to be hurtled back and forth through points in time in his own life. Sounds awesome, right? I mean, who hasn’t wanted to go back and remember that first awkward kiss, or your first wet dream, or the horrible acne you had, or being dumped by the girl you loved.

Wait a second, fuck traveling through time.

Desmond’s ability to travel through time makes him uniquely equipped for the bullshit that’s going on with the Island. I mean, we have a mass of land that is jumping from point to point in time, just like our boy Desmond. And there’s been more than one reference to him being special. When the Island gets unstuck in time and everyone is jumping around and partying with Mayans and shit, Faraday goes to Desmond and is like, yo bro, you have to remember this shit: if you escape the Island, go find my Mom. She’s going to help you out, even though she shoots my beautiful, algorithm-computing ass before I’m even born.

Why is it up to Desmond? Per Faraday, the rules don’t apply to Desmond.

Whatever the fuck that means.

Desmond seems to be the guy most equipped to sort shit out.   He seems to cage all of his memories in his dome-piece regardless of the where he is in time. I always try and figure this out, usually loudly and during an episode, and it goes something like this:

Wait, so if Faraday told him in the past…why wouldn’t he remember now? Or does he remember now? And wait, if Faraday visits him in 2001 on the Island, wouldn’t he recognize him in present day? Wait, I think I have a nosebleed and uh, wait, I’m so confused.

And then my friend Dave tells me that it isn’t going to make sense outside of the show, and I need to relax. This usually holds me over to the next commercial break, and then I’m back at it, raving wildly.

But I mean, if someone can alter the course of events, wouldn’t it be Desmond? Faraday says that there are Variables, and those variables are people. If we take it to be more than a throwaway existential moment on the show, it means that someone on the Island has the ability to prevent, or change, or fix something.

Yeah, I have no fucking idea.

But maybe Faraday The Gorgeous Physicist and Desmond the Scottish Wundersexkind can team up to fix reality, right? Let’s say the hydrogen bomb went off, and instead of fixing everything, it just wiped their dumb asses out.

This is what I think happened. As I said, they’re the source of their own misery. They wipe themselves out, and they’re condemned to dying.

Wouldn’t it be within Desmond’s power, during the past, to prevent Oceanic 815 from crashing in the first place? Or the second place? Can’t a man, unstuck in time, prevent the whole clusterfuck from happening? Or at the least altering it in some way? I’m getting that nosebleed again. Good thing I have Diet Mountain Dew as my constant. Stick a sock in my nose and let’s continue on here.

So basically, I’ve said the following: Desmond is awesome, because he has pecs of steel, a sweet accent, and he’s unstuck in time. His total unstuckness is totally important, I just don’t know why. And Daniel Faraday with a mullet makes my groin seethe with sexual inspiration.