If anything goes wrong, Desmond Hume will be my constant.

First of all – I was lucky enough to catch “Sunshine Days,” one of the final episodes of The X-Files, on the Sci-Fi channel this week. Supercreep Michael Emerson (Benjamin Linus, everyone’s favorite d-bag from Lost) stars as a killer who is obsessed with the Brady Bunch. Good stuff.

However, what I REALLY want to talk about is “The Constant,” the 5th episode of Lost’s current (fourth) season.
(**WARNING: For those who are a little behind, or potential future Losties, DO NOT READ THIS POST. THERE ARE SPOILERS.** Sorry, but this episode was too good not to be talked about.)

This episode is a Desmond episode, which is always a good sign. Desmond is, in my opinion, not only a total babe with a sexy accent, but the best character on the show. (Proof: In Jack’s flashbacks, he drunkenly mopes around a hospital whining about his Dad and his ex-wife. In Desmond’s, he drunkenly sails around the world and travels through time.) The last time Des tried to leave the island, he did not succeed on his compass bearing and ended up back exactly where he started, drunk, exclaiming that the island was in “a bloody snowglobe”.

This time, he’s heading to the mysterious freighter offshore in a helicopter, whose pilot is instructed by physicist Daniel Faraday (an awesome new character) to follow a strict compass bearing, or else “side effects” will occur. In a recent episode, we saw Faraday conduct an experiment that revealed that time moves differently on the island than it does in the outside world. This has been one of the biggest reveals of the series, and potentially explains a lot of things: perhaps this is why pregnant women are dying, and perhaps this is why it seems as though not as much time has passed when we see the Oceanic Six back in the real world.

When the helicopter hits turbulence, Desmond’s consciousness from 1996 enters his 2004 body, and his consciousness jumps uncontrollably between 1996 and 2004. Long story short, Faraday helps the “unstuck in time” Desmond. We learn that Faraday had been studying time travel, which does not occur physically but occurs within the consciousness. The writers did their research, because some of these theories are actually somewhat grounded in reality. Here is a very interesting article on said topic from Popular Mechanics. Dealing with time travel is tricky, especially when you want to avoid creating a temporal paradox, which we’ve seen dealt with before in “Back to the Future.”

Basically, the answer to Desmond’s problem is to find a “constant,” something important to him in both 1996 and 2004 that can anchor his consciousness in time. And of course, his constant ends up being his true love, Penny. (Even when Lost gets cheesy, it’s still great.) Penelope Widmore is a great character (and she looks a lot like Frank Black’s wife on Millennium). She is the great love of one of our principal protagonists as well as the daughter of possibly the most evil man on the show, Charles Widmore, the man behind the plot against the island. Penny is one of the few connections between those on the island and the outside world, and the show’s producers have said that she is an extremely important character in the overarching mythology of the show.

My roommate also pointed out to me that the final season of Felicity, another J.J. Abrams show, had its protagonist traveling through time, and the only person who believed her was her true love. Awww.

EDIT: I just found this and I had to share it with you all. Pretty awesome.