"The Variable" Review (Although If you Really Liked It you Might Not Want to Read This)

Well, I think we can agree that "The Variable" wasn't as good as "The Constant."

I had a good time watching Lost last night. An old friend came over and cooked my girlfriend and I dinner. It was great to see him, the food was good, and it was a fine night overall.

But the content of the episode was disappointing. Sorry to be a downer. I hope you liked it better.

The idea behind the episode is a great one, definitely: Mrs. Hawking pushes her son throughout his life to go to the island, all the while knowing that she'll kill him. Is she a heartless monster? A slave of destiny? Did she make him go to the island because she thought fate was forcing her to?

I do have a mild issue with the idea of doing something just because knowing what you know about future/past events makes you think you have to. It's circular and feels paradoxical and raises some great questions, certainly, but I wish Hawking had a higher motivation. Maybe she did and we don't know what it is yet. I hope so, because otherwise the whole storyline would seem to be remarkably pointless.

"The Variable" is less a companion to "The Constant" as it is a companion to "He's Our You", Sayid's episode in which he climactically shoots ten-year-old Ben. In both episodes, a great ending (an ironic shooting) at once saves and is marred by the weak execution leading up to it.

In Sayid's case, I didn't like the opening flashback scene of him as a boy and all the scenes of Ben manipulating him way too easily, and on the island, the whole truth serum bit was amusing but kind of wheel-spinning. In this case of "The Variable", here are some things that didn't work for me:

-Simple logistics. Faraday is born to a man and woman with upper-class English accents and light brown hair, and grows up to go to school at Oxford. Somehow, he has an American accent and looks nothing like either of them.

-The Faraday/Hawking dynamic. A mother pushing her son too hard. Is that the most original angle they could come up with?

-There seems like big pieces of story are missing. What happened between Faraday's graduation and his debilitating memory condition? It was really cool to find out that Faraday was sick up right until getting to the island -- but was he cured while on the freighter, or was his first "cured" moment when he actually dropped out of the helicopter in Season 4? And what kind of stuff was he doing in Ann Arbor? I feel like we were seeing all the mundane stuff and only hearing about the cool stuff.

-On the island: the gunfight, while cool, seemed like it came from absolutely nowhere.

-My biggest gripe: the way the climax was staged. Why was no one guarding the Hostiles' camp like when Kate and Sawyer brought them Ben? Why are they sometimes ninjas and sometimes oblivious to three people stomping around the jungle with guns right outside their camp? Why did Faraday walk into the camp waving a gun around everywhere? Why did he feel the need to threaten Richard at gunpoint? Why didn't Richard tell him he'd take him to Hawking (or that Hawking was right there)? Why didn't every other Hostile already shoot Faraday by the time Hawking got there? C'mon. A maniac walks into your camp, points a gun at one of your leaders, and then turns his back to you. He should've gotten about twenty bullets in the spine by the time Hawking walked up. The verdict: STUPID.

In order to end things on a positive note, here are things I liked about the episode:

-Faraday: "Well, I've got some bad news for you, Jack. She was wrong." Great line, well-delivered, with interesting implications (and plenty more torment) for Jack. (Those implications, though, seem a little easy to predict: if he decides that his purpose on the island is to follow Faraday's lead and detonate the H bomb, actually succeeds, but then discovers that the detonation is what "The Incident" is in the first place and it's all his fault and he met his destiny on the path to avoid it, etc, you read it here first. I hope that's not how it goes down.)

-Sawyer's plan to go back to the beach and start over. A quaint idea that brings back happy memories.

-Seeing the very first sequence of the season -- Faraday and Chang underground -- happen again. Very cool that they inserted it so well. (Also, Faraday planting the truth about Miles in Chang's mind.)

-The revelation that Widmore is Faraday's dad. Yeah, I complained about it before, but the implications about Widmore and Hawkings' past relationship are interesting.

-Desmond's okay! Cool. More Penny = also cool. Hawking's revulsion at the idea of Ben being her son = hilarious.

TAGS: Charles Widmore, Daniel Faraday, Mrs Hawking, Recaps, Richard Alpert, The Variable
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