I have to briefly apologize for the oddity of this week’s LOST recap. I’m boarding a bus Wednesday for the New City of York, and I have to pound this out tonight. That’s what she said. I generally write this at the apex of a caffeine rocket, filled up with an energy drink and three or four Diet Mountain Dews. As well, I take screen caps as I go along flipping through the episode to gather my thoughts. So I’m without the episode at hand, I’m tired and generally content, and I feel rather blase.

Like LAX, this is the LOST recap you’ve come to know and love. Just a little different. Next week will be back to the usual.

I dug the fuck out of this week’s episode. I really did. By the end of it, I wasn’t really certain what was going on, but it seems like the veil of LAX is beginning to crumble down around the alternate reality, courtesy of some gorgeous Scottish hands. Shit is getting more and more complicated, and I’m going to get a priapism from all the romantic ideals and science-fiction bonery. I’m sold man, sold man like woah.

I knew shit was poppin’ off when Charles “I’ve Got a Powerful Chin” Widmore stuck Desmond into that hut with all the crazy fucking coils and shit. The whole scene smacked of Dr. Manhattan and Watchmen, and I couldn’t help but think homage as Desmond stood in the middle of the room and began to glow like a motherfucker.

You have to admire such a pack of nerds and their ability to stuff their television show with a zillion references.

We find Desmond in LAX, and we all know that it’s merely a matter of time before he begins to ask himself what the fuck is going on. Note the first shot of Desmond in LAX is courtesy of a reflective surface. If you took a shot of whiskey every time the show uses a mirror or a puddle of water or something equally reflective to transition between the real Island and LAX, you’d be drinking at least once an episode. That drinking game wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever thought of, okay?

Much like on the Island, Desmond spends his time in this episode trying to save Charlie’s drug-addled ass. And once Charlie plunges The Constant’s sexy car into the ocean, it triggers the OMFG Moment you knew was coming but were secretly excited for anyways.

Desmond flashes back to the Island, and then snaps back into LAX, after witnessing the superimposition of Charlie’s hand on the glass underwater with his death on the actual Island. This coincides with Charlie’s earlier commentary on having witnessed the “truth” after nearly dying.

So wait, LAX is a construction? An intentional fabrication? Awesome.

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Thwack and kapow! Smokey this week laid down the meanest of pimp hands I had seen in a long god damn time. It was honed to a perfection that only living for hundreds of years can give you. I mean, I’m sure we’ve all imagined giving a pimp hand at some point in our lives. For some reason, the idea of slapping someone across the face just seems enjoyable. It’s probably all the television and violent cartoons we were raised on.

Smokey has officially begun to freak me the fuck out. While I’ve never been on the “This Guy is Sweet, Jacob Is Dick” train, if I had been, I would calmly requested that I be let off at the next stop after this week. I mean, I know that Claire is insane, and she has shitty hair, and she builds baby cribs out of animal skeletons and shit, but if you missed the foreshadow that pimp hand wrought, yeah I don’t know what to tell you.

You want to bring that Jacob is a deceiver heat? Get the fuck out of here. Smokey is just as grand a manipulator as Jacob, and how! I mean, seriously. Jacob presents people with choices, offers them destinations. Smokey gives you the illusion of choice. What MiB spits is tantamount to “I’m not here to tell you what to do. But if you don’t come with me, I’m going to smash you into paste as a billowing cloud of crackling smoke.”

Yeah dude, freedom of choice right there.

Smokey spent this entire episode using the oldest trick in the book: divide and conquer. If you wanted insight into how he’s able to manipulate people with impressive effectiveness, just check out what went down. Smokey takes everyone aside and beguiles them with sugary promises and rhetoric. He’s good man, he’s like, real good. In a revealing conversation with Kate, the dude even lays out how he bent Claire to his will. He gave her someone to hate, and by hating them, she really worked out his objective of throwing down those dickheads who lived in the Temple of Doom.

His methods are awesome, and I say that with no sarcasm.

It’s continuing to all be so Locke versus Hobbes that if you’ve missed it by this point, I don’t know what to tell you. The appeal of MiB versus Smokey at this point isn’t really deciphering their motives, but watching them play out. We get it, yo. Free Will and the belief that humanity will do a solid versus the whole Humanity is a Dung Heap and needs to be controlled. Yep, got it. I got it a season ago. But you know what? I don’t give a fuck, I’m a philosophy geek.

There’s something so alluring about Smokey; but there’s always something so alluring about the darkness. The promises of what ever you want. I’ve seen Star Wars though, I know how this fucking shit ends. You fight Mace Windu in some shitty office apartment, and then you sire a son who kills your crippled ass. I mean, do we really think that Smokey wants to get them off the Island? That he really cares about them? I sure don’t. But I also think there’s really some uncomfortable side to Jacob, the God that Failed.

Poor Sawyer. Even in LAX, he’s haunted by the demons of Anthony Cooper. Sawyer’s a tricky cat to peg on LOST. He always seems one step away from either redemption or full blown moral collapse. As the episode unfolded in the main reality, we saw Sawyer once again walk this tight-rope over the precipice. And as usual, there really was no denouement. I really have no idea which way Sawyer is going to go on the Island, other than apparently back with Freckly McHussy. Oh god dammit, Kate.

I dug how Sawyer is a undercover detective, which means that even in LAX he’s a con man who gets to sleep with tons of women. His monologue explaining the thin line between criminal and cop was interesting, even if it smacked of a thousand cliches.

As a brief aside, last night I realized something. Sawyer has to be a genuinely hunky dude. Why? ‘Cause if he wasn’t, we would totally fixate on his hair. I mean, it’s fucking dumb. It’s all like, flinging around and awkward, and I can’t tell if maybe it’s a mullet, or maybe it’s just oddly coiffed. But it ain’t usual. No sir. I was watching him clunk about the detectives’ offices and I was like, what the fuck? How did I not notice that hair before?

But yeah dude, what are you going to do? I need to know. The world holds its breath. Maybe there will never be any resolution for him, maybe he’ll always be torn by those demons. If LAX a reflection of the consequences of one’s behavior on the Island, it would seem fitting that Sawyer is once again pigeonholed between happiness and totally byronic brooding. You go ahead and seethe, Sawyer. It’s what makes us swoon for you.

Let me ask you something. WHERE THE FUCK IS FARADAY!?

Everyone has fucking shown up in LAX save for my boyfriend. I need to see him. We’ve seen fucking Artz, Charlie’s dumb brother, Boone. What the fuck is this dog shit. Last night we got Charlotte. But no mullet-rocking fucking physicist? Who is so adorable in his quirkiness? Kiss my ass, LAX. I want to put up some fucking Scorpions, sit around with Faraday, and have temporal abnormalities affect my perceptions of reality and give me nosebleeds and crap. It’s hogwash.

Also, I can’t help but feel that it’s almost too convenient that everyone is showing up. They’re all concentrated in Los Angeles? It really makes me wonder if this isn’t some bubble reality that all of the people involved on the Island are somehow transported to.

Everyone, save for my boy.

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[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.