lost: the variable s05e14

Faraday Flashback for the 100th Episode! We learn that his mom's a bitch-- in many directions and at many different times in his life and her's. This one is all over the timeline, so bear with me.

Baby!Daniel is a piano virtuoso, as well as adorable, but mother says he needs to focus on science because his brain is too good to waste on piano. It's a distraction. Completely ignoring that piano is good for the brain that deals with math, and that it's what he wants to do.

Now!Daniel is leading the Losties around blabbing stuff all over-- that Miles is Chang's son, that they need to talk to the Hostiles, that his mom is one of them, that there's a bomb that can kill the EMP that the Hatch was built to keep track of, that Charlotte needs to never come back, that Chang has to evacuate everyone... It's refreshing. He thinks everything can be changed, whereas everyone else is always 'what's done is done' and that has been frustrating me, because, as I said in my last post, innevitability is boring, and even with all this cool shit going down and things starting to finally make sense, all of it is pre-ordained. They just didn't know the story yet. I really wanted Ben to die as a kid, and I really want them to be able to change things anyway. Jack's all onboard, being all Jack about it, but I'm kind of with Sawyer on this one: let it be. They all had craptacular lives before the crash, and they can just start over somewhere else on the island. What's another weird faction? And there's still, like, an entire coastline where we've never been.

Back to the story.

We see Daniel's life: his mom's a bitch at him when he graduates Oxford with bad Oxford hair and the youngest phD the place has ever given; he's all broken post-accident that turned his girlfriend into a vegetable who can't keep track of her own timeframe, and it's damaged his memory, made him simple and incapable of the math that got him that far in his life, made him emotionally fragile, and left him weepy and terrible in a delicate way that makes me want to hug him, rather than making me want to kick him, as when similar things happen to John or Jack; Widmore tells him he needs him to go to the island; his mom looks in on Penny and Desmond and we learn who Daniel's dad is (E totally called it), and that dear old mother might be yet another opposing faction; we see the context of Daniel down in the place where the Frozen Donkey Wheel is, but he doesn't do anything, and that disappointed me a little, because it seemed like he was working there before, and that would have been sweet; Widmore wants him to go to the island to further his research, but the plane crash footage is upsetting him and he says no-- until his mom is a manipulative bitch and tells him to go.

So he goes, and he runs around on his own mission, as he always has, and gets himself in trouble. He talks jack and Kate into getting him to the Hostiles to talk to his mom, gets Richard instead, and gets shot. And I almost burst into tears, because he was one of my favorites, and one of the few that I still cared about by this point. That just leaves Miles. 

I wonder if we'll get Mr Hawking's backstory, and why she's so awful? The story shows that she needed certain things to happen, but not why she was so terrible about it along the way. And she finally doesn't know what's going to happen, so maybe she'll be less awful now? 

And there's six hours until the Incident that Daniel was trying to stop / would have wound up the maker of, and three episodes left, and there's not been any Locke for a while, and there's only one season left after this. So! Onward!