Lost, “The Constant,” S4:E5

Dispatch 007

You may want to (re)watch this over the Christmas holidays. In arguably the best single episode of the entire series (and one of the best on all of television, according to various sources), Desmond is reconciled to the love of his life, Penny, whose heart he has broken. After he abandons her, he takes part in an around-the-world boat race that brings him to the island of Lost. From here, he has an experience that transports him to a time eight years earlier, and he begins oscillating between these two moments, one just off the island of Lost, the other in the UK.

An Oxford-based time-travel scientist, Daniel Faraday, whom Desmond meets on the island, gives him instructions to meet his (Daniel’s) earlier self. There, Daniel tells him that he needs a constant that is present in both times as a way to stabilize the oscillations. He knows that only Penny can be that constant. The problem is that he has broken up with her in 1996 and she has moved and changed her number. Desmond needs to be able to contact her from 2004 in order to be able to survive.

During one of his oscillations to 1996, Desmond finds her father, who despises him. The father contemptuously gives him his daughter’s address so she can tell him for herself why their relationship is over. When he arrives at her door on Christmas Eve, he convinces her that he needs her help, that he will need to be in touch with her by phone eight years in the future. When he promises her that he won’t try to contact her before then, she relents. He memorizes her number (she cannot understand why he doesn’t write it down) and on his next oscillation back to 2004 from his location on a ship that has restored its ability to communicate to the outside world, he calls her. Penny has indeed been waiting for Desmond’s call.

The episode requires that one accept the story’s premises, of course. (Trying to explain the subtleties of time-travel to establish context was always going to be demanding. Suffice to say that the writers got kudos for avoiding a contradiction that could cause viewers to lose interest since at any given point the stakes for characters wouldn’t seem very high). From the inside, this episode offers immense emotional payoff. Desmond is vindicated. He hadn’t left Penny on a whim, he isn’t cruel, and it turns out he also isn’t a coward, an accusation levelled at him by her father that Desmond seems to confirm by not standing up to him. His effort to make contact with her is courageous and he really needs and loves her. Penny is also vindicated. She had defied her father, has remained true to her beloved, hasn’t closed herself off to Desmond’s (past) love entirely, and instead has kept hoping when hope seemed ridiculous. Desmond and Penny really do love each other and each really is worthy of the other’s love. The episode is very satisfying.

How does it work? At bottom, a paradox beyond that of time travel grounds it. The episode turns on love and reason in tension. Desmond’s need is cast in mathematical terms: he needs a constant. Daniel Faraday describes his problem in the language of science: exposure to radiation or electromagnetism. Faraday is the name of a nineteenth-century physicist, Michael Faraday, the father of electricity; for his part, Desmond shares a last name with the famous eighteenth-century sceptical Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Daniel works as a physicist at intellectually iconic Oxford University. Desmond meets him there in his attic research lab, replete with formulae scrawled on a blackboard. The problem, time travel, is a classic intellectual head-banger. All of these signposts establish the problem that Desmond is encountering as an intellectual one. Even the threat to his well-being looks to be cerebral: Daniel’s lab rat Eloise appears to have died of a brain aneurysm after a time-travel experiment.

The name Eloise also conjures the medieval love affair between the student who would become a nun and her philosophical tutor Abelard. The writers are laying groundwork for something more than pure reason. Theoretically, anything could serve Desmond as the required fixed point. Yet the episode’s drama hinges on Desmond’s realization that he needs Penny to be his constant. Narratively and intellectually, the situation is transformed. One anticipates an intellectual problem finding resolution in the domain of love. This possibility involves potential narrative satisfactions with the integration of additional storylines, as well as ones that provoke questions about the limits and needs of the domain of the intellect.

Penny’s potential role involves wordplay – Desmond needs constancy from his beloved, just as he needs to prove his own constancy. The underlying notion of proving anything borrows from the territory of mathematical formulae, with their QED’s (that which was to be demonstrated). Here, though, proof transcends the popular perception of mathematics, logic, or science: it involves belief on the part of the person to whom proofs are proffered. The event of finding your true love, then realizing you’ve done so, surpasses that of solving an electromagnetic glitch, getting off the island, or even surviving. Desmond gets the satisfaction, and viewers share it, that whatever happens next, he knows Penny loves him and her faithfulness has saved him in the way that matters most.

In this moment, near the exact centre of Lost, the series’ driving questions “What happened?” and “Will these people ever get off the island?” find themselves taken up into a more primordial one: Am I loved? It is a question asked with sharp particularity, of Desmond and Penny. We find that we care intensely, cathartically, for them and their finding an affirmative answer to that question. We enter into it with a selfless, purgative purity. We feel honoured to share it and somehow affirmed in the process, though with no expectation that it must somehow or sometime redound to us personally.

I do not say that the writers intended this effect either structurally (in terms of a design spread over six seasons) or as a message at the heart of the show. The love affair does not dissolve other questions that the show has provoked and that have produced this singularity. To the contrary and somewhat paradoxically, this experience of love fortifies us to persist in the drama, one which involves intersecting lives and intellectual puzzles, for its own sake.