THE VARIABLE:
MOTHER, JUGHEAD, AND SPEED IT UP!

The 100th episode of Lost — the fifth's season antepenultimate installment (that's a fancy way of saying ''third to last'') — was all about momma issues, mad scientist schemes, and the official start of a season-ending, ticking-clock plot in which our heroes must race against time to save themselves from electromagnetic calamity. (Unless Faraday wasn't being truthful about that — and I think it's possible he wasn't.) The episode had been billed as a dark corollary to ''The Constant,'' the season 4 classic in which Desmond went back in time to set up a future phone date with Penelope. But allow me to suggest a connection to another Lost episode.

For weeks, I've been insisting that season 5 parallels season 2, and deliberately so: the series is doubling back on itself, creating an ouroboros-shaped saga (a snake that chases and eats its own tail; see: Ms. Hawking's brooch, Season 3) whereby the castaways are helping to forge the very history that forged them. In the final episodes of season 2, MIA Michael returned to the castaway fold and manipulated them into actions that had long-tail ramifications. Here, at the close of season 5, it appears to me that Prodigal Dan has come back to do something very similar. Specifically to ''The Variable,'' we have a title that is thematically identical to season 2's antepenultimate outing, known as ''?''. Both episodes were about the same thing: a philosophical role reversal. In ''?'', John Locke changed his mind about the Hatch and decided (erroneously) that the Button was a mind-game that had no meaning. The fateful mistake would have massive consequences, none bigger than turning Desmond Hume into a time traveler and doomsday Cassandra. In ''The Variable,'' Faraday returned with a new perspective on the mutability of the time-space continuum and a Big Plan to put that thinking into action. If his gambit works, the consequences could be massive, especially for Desmond, whose entire Island narrative was defined by being stuck in the very structure that Faraday now wants to erase from existence. No one would be more affected by paradox than Faraday's half-sister's husband. ''The Variable'' was loaded with lines filled with double-meanings, like this one by Desmond: ''I promised you, Penny...I promised you I'd never leave you again.'' Famous last words, friend-o. Be very afraid, all you DesPen shippers: I fear their happily-ever-after life is about to unravel in the continuity reboot to come. Put another way: See you in another life, bruthuh.

DANIEL: But I can make time.
ELOISE: If only you could.

Why did she do it? Why did Eloise Hawking put her son on a road to predestined ruin — by her own hand, no less? I'm haunted by the question. In Faraday's first flashback scene (the year wasn't specified), we saw Mama Other interrupt Adolescent Dan's piano practice and break the news to her budding Glenn Gould that Carnegie Hall wasn't in the cards for him. She was distraught; she knew what she was about to set into motion. But she composed herself to carefully made her pitch, like Obi-Wan gingerly selling young Luke Skywalker on the whole Jedi Knight thing. Eloise said that Daniel had a destiny, and it was her job to help him pursue it, to put him and keep him on ''his path.'' She told him he had a proverbial quantum computer for a brain resting within his crystal alien skull, and that he had to learn to harness its magnificent energies to lead his people back to their planet. Okay, what she actually said was that he had ''a special gift...your mind,'' but I clearly got the vibe that his metronome-tracking mental superiority was akin to a Miles-like super-power. So, was Dan also an Island baby, too? FUN FACT! In the aforementioned Wired issue, one of eight abilities profiled in an article on plausible super-powers is total recall — rather ironic in light of Faraday's memory issues in the episode. Also featured: teleportation (see: Jack and co. getting beamed off the plane), regeneration (see: John Locke's legs; the Island's quick-healing powers), weather manipulation (see: meteorology was one of Dharma's fields of study); force fields (see: the sonic fence); underwater breathing (see: Charlie swimming toward the Looking-Glass); super-strength (see: Desmond, battling back a worse-than-it-appeared gunshot wound to beat the bloody snot out of Ben). As for the eighth power, x-ray vision: Smokey?

Daniel's youth was a big pile of no-fun. Eloise pushed him hard — like Gypsy-mom hard, like Carrie-mom hard, like Texas Cheerleader Mom hard — to become a grant-scoring, youngest-Oxford-doc-ever, time travel machine-inventing genius, even at the expense of a conventional mother-child relationship. Learn your Maxwell equations, or no more hugs! And I don't care if you think they look like Kerr rings, get your Slurpee cup off my hardbound limited edition 'A Brief History of Time!' That's no way to treat your Uncle Stevie's manuscript! Now: rub my corns, please. Behold the incarnation of conditional parental love — of maternal nurturing that was very much a variable, not a constant, in Dan's life. And she was rude to his girlfriends, too! Wouldn't even let poor soon-to-be-brain-scrambled Theresa come to graduation lunch! Bitch.

We could think the worst of Ms. Hawking. With time loop theory, we could paint her as a real monster. In this scenario, she would be someone so spooked by death that she'd be willing to shoot and maybe even kill her son over and over and over and over again, forever and ever, amen, just to cheat the grim reaper. But I'm going to bet this week's offering money that such a deliciously dark possibility is, alas, not the case. My interpretation of Eloise's motivations — most suggested by the scene in which she tenderly behooved brain-damaged Adult Dan to take the freighter gig — was that she wanted Dan to go to the Island to get healed and use his ''gift'' to find some way to buck the odds of physics and change time, especially the whole I shot my son thing. (Remember how in ''Dead Is Dead'' Smokey judged Ben for his daughter's death? Maybe that's why Eloise fled the Island — to escape the Monster's judgment.)

I invoked time loop theory in the previous paragraph, but ''The Variable'' left me feeling that maybe time loops aren't valid to Lost, after all. Notice I said maybe; I'm not ready to throw it out yet. I'm just saying I'm skeptical. Anyway, on Lost, there are other ways to know the future. The example of Desmond established that it's possible in this world to have the gift/curse of precognition — the ability to see into the future. The season 3 episode ''Flashes Before Your Eyes'' established that Eloise has long possessed knowledge of future events, although last night, we learned that she is no longer the seer that she used to be. ''For the first time in a long time I don't know what's going to happen next,'' she told Penelope. FUN FACT! The Dead Zone, the 1979 novel by Lost inspiration Stephen King, is set against the backdrop of 1970s events, about a guy who can see into the future by touching stuff.

NEXT: What does Ellie know?

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