I have always found episodes centering on Desmond and Penny to be the best of Lost. It is largely because their relationship is the only mature one on the show, save perhaps for Rose and Bernard. Appropriatey enough both those couple want to get the heck away from all the others. Who can blame them? The Kate/Jack/Sawyer/Juliet mess is juvenile enough to embarrass a junior high kid. Goth Claireand washed up, drug addicted rocker Charlie? Sayid, who is traveling to Los Angelesto be with his true, lost love Nadia, but decides to have a tryst with spoiled, shalllow Shannon instead? Abusive Jin and manipulative, adulterous Sun? Come on.To be honest, I do not think “Happily Ever After” was in the same league as “Flashes Before Your Eyes” or ”The Costant,” but that is because most of it took place in the sideways flash where Desmond is a completely different, somewhat unappealing character. He is CharlesWidmore’s lackey. Early on, I thought he might serve the same role as Jin did to Su’s father I the main timeline. Maybe he normally does, but his main mission here is to babysit Charlie and get him to Eloise Hawkings’ benefit concert on time.
He does not quite make it. Charlie forces their cat off a dock and under water. Desmond can barely save himself, much less Charlie. In one of a couple homage scenes to earlier episodes, Desmond’s underwater rescue causesa moment of recognition. Banging on the submerged car’s window remids him of Charlie drowning in ’Through the Looking Glass.” The flooding 9excusethe pun0 memories are also the first time he visualizes Penny.
Desmond continues throughout the remainder of the episode to find out who Penny is. He does so in spite of the admonition from Hawkings to stop. Help comes unexpectedly in the form of Daniel, who has shed some light on what the sideways flashes are.
To be more honest, Daniel makes the theory that some of the characters are traveling through time from the 2007 reality to the 2004 flash sideways. Early on Charlie, Charlie speaks of picturing a blonde woman he feel in love with that he envisioned as he was choking on the bag of heroin. He was clearly talking about Claire. Desmond sees penny while he is underwater. Daniel explains picturing Charlotte randomly some time ago. Each is connected to the “real world” by someone they love. I would theorize Claire, Daniel, and Desmond are using their loves as costants, but I have not seen that with other characters. Keeping that in mind, and knowing that both Charlie and Daniel are Dead, I have to assume Desmond is going to die, as well. It would explain the common occurrence between the three.
If you would rather have a brighter theory to chew on, Daniel once wrote in his journal that if anything went wrong, Desmond would be his constant. Perhaps that is playing out. There is really not enough to go on to make a clear determination.
What is obvious is Desmond is the connection between the real world and the sideways flashes. He apparently wants to gather together 815 passengers in the sideways flashes for...well, whatever reason. Maybe he is feeling more altruistic since feeling love for the first time after meeting Penny. Their meeting was an homage to the first meeting between Desmond and Jack back in ’Live Together, Die Alone.” Nice touch.
Good episode overall.
Theories? I got theories:
DarKLocke’s crazy mother is Eloise Hawkings. I cannot imagine a character would be mentioned so prominently if we were never going to find out anything else about her. A strike against this theory is that DarkLocke has the real Locke’s memories. He may have been talking about his foster mother. Or he could have just been lying to Kate.
Desmond’s rescue by Sayid is probably a bad thing. I suspect Desmond is the one the lighthouse was supposed to bring to the island. That means DarkLocke is going to manipulate him towards the wrong direction.
Some disaster like I “The Incident” is going to be caused in the flash sideways in order to restore things to normal.
Whatever happens, the two realities are going to be converging more obviously from here on out.
Rating: *** (out of 5)
