Yuku free message boards

So I'm trying to think of Daniel Faraday and his mom's life as a straight line....

70's: Okay, mom's life is moving along just fine on the island... She's chillin with the Hostiles/Others in the late 70's la dee da, when one day some gun-toting idiot wanders in and, fearing he's gonna shoot one her people, she shoots him. With his dying breath, he says to her that he's her son. Within a relatively quick time (a matter of months at most, but maybe even within as little as hours) something causes her to leave the island, whether its going nuts over that shooting (over the course of a few months) or the upcoming "Incident" (hours) or something else.

At some point shortly after leaving (still late 70's), she gives birth to a son, Daniel. Daniel was apparently conceived on the island (with Charles Widmore), but for the purposes of this discussion, that doesn't matter (or...does it..?). She'd been trying to convince herself of that dude she shot just being crazy, but during pregnancy, with her baby on the way, she had started to worry. So she gives birth. She decides early on she'll never say a word about her memory to him, of course, because a) that would fuck up her son's head, b) she wants him to enjoy his life, and that's tough to do with a fucked up head, and c) she's hoping it's all a mistake or she can change it anyhow.

80's: Daniel is obviously a genius as soon as he starts talking. Over the years, mom wrestles with the worry and this impending feeling of doom/inevitability and, and she maybe makes some crap attempts to direct her and Daniel's life in a way that ensures against the outcome she already remembers. But it all feels futile. One day, when he's like 11 and playing the piano, she decides that from that day forward, she's going to stop trying to fight the supposed future and instead prepare him for it--he's obviously some kind of freaky genius who has a freaky thing going on with time (counting that ticker-thingy on one side of his head while playing the piano on another), so she commits to that decision.

She pushes him like crazy to study study study and refine his genius and time fetish/voodoo. She knows roughly how old Daniel's gonna be when he wanders into the camp, and thus is shot and killed, so her life has this weird clairvoyant vibe in that respect. When he gets his doctorate at Oxford or whatever the hell, she has lunch with him, and he mentions Widmore as providing him a grant for his time-research. This obviously perks up mom, who realizes "Widmore, eh? Well shit son, things are set in motion now" but of course still says nothing to her son.

90's: Daniel does all these freaky time experiments on Widmore's dime. Desmond comes in one day seeming like a loon but perks up Daniel's interest, as he (Desmond) seems to actually have time-traveled or whatever. [Here I'm fuzzy, as I'd have to go back and watch the older episodes.]

2000's: At some point, his chick Teresa winds up comatose as a result of his experiments. He goes nuts over her death and just gets more cuckoo over some weird time things going on in his own brain. In 2004, a plane crash makes the news. Loony as hell, he cries over the news coverage. Widmore comes in (first face-to-face meeting?) to his house and says all Daniel's troubles can go away if he goes on this expedition to this magical Island. Daniel accepts. His mom visits him and also encourages him to go. In one interpretation I take from the way the show is going, she's resigned to fate (determinism). In another, she knows it's do-or-die time for...something to do with free will. Maybe both, I dunno.

In any case, somehow he pulls himself together enough to join this expedition with Charlotte and Miles, etc. on the freighter, and they arrive on the Island. Daniel meets Desmond (again from his perspective--for the first time from Desmond's). Shit happens with the 815 crowd. The freigther blows up. The Island moves. The time flash happens. Daniel's in 1974.

Sawyer, Juliet, and Miles stay in 1974, but somehow Daniel leaves soon for Ann Arbor. Three years later, he comes back to the Island. It's 1977 and he sees the whole crowd (Jack, Kate, etc. in addition to Sawyer/Juliet) there. He bugs Dr. Chang to evacuate the Island. That fails, and then he absolutely MUST get to his mother, who somehow he knows is a Hostile/Other (maybe something he somehow found out in Ann Arbor in the 1970's--or maybe he knew it to start with on the freighter?) Maybe he's hoping she can convince Chang? He tells little Charlotte to get off the Island*.

He makes good on his attempt to find his mom with the Hostiles/Others, and she shoots and kills him.

*Asterisk here because in his weepy pleas to swingset-little-Charlotte, he cries about how he doesn't think he can change the outcome, but he has to try--he just couldn't avoid talking to her. Isn't there a disconnect here... that's something you'd say to someone who DID die--to your recollection--in the upcoming "Incident," not someone you know didn't die, and Daniel knows Charlotte didn't die at that time because he saw her die in 2004ish time (her 30's, to keep it simple) with the flashes... Or maybe I'm overthinking it, and Daniel's thinking that fleeing the Incident sets into motion the rest of Charlotte's life where she dies in her 30's and so he doesn't want to tell her to flee, but he also can't resist telling her to flee because...seriously...dude...the fucking Incident is coming. I don't know. Final word on this topic: how did Daniel supposedly fall in love with Charlotte? They only had fleeting, brief contact on the freigther just a handful of days before he professed her love to her during the time flashes. Maybe...at the conclusion of all of this, we'll have revealed to us that Daniel became in love with the *idea of Charlotte* before he even knew her in person, as his special mind pieced itself back together to comprehend all of these goings-on for his "purpose"...he will come know Charlotte as a "variable" in all his equations.

In conclusion, I don't know precisely what I intended to accomplish by typing all that up, but it helped me sort some things out in my head, nonetheless, and it gives me that ethereal-but-nonetheless-satisfying "I-have-insight-into-Lost" feeling I let myself have every once in a while, knowing full-well the show's probably just gonna pull the rug out from under me next episode.

Having posted ^that and having a few minutes to reflect on it, I think Daniel's "purpose" that I referenced was to... at the moment in 1977 when his mom shot and killed him before he was born... do something, effect some small little change, at that time, so that that didn't happen. He was supposed to figure it all out--with his special time-y brain--intellectually to do what Desmond seems to be able to do more naturally: make a tiny change in the past that can, presumably, affect an entire time cycle.

Like Jack and Kate and crew have their lives barreling toward a set of circumstances, seemingly, that would be a point for cutting off whatever chain of events leaves them stranded, miserable, crazy over the Island-and-time-hopping, Daniel's life cycle moved inevitably to a set of circumstances where he was supposed to make some small change to avoid winding up a miserable brain-dead mess who fucked up his girlfriend. Eloise fought for a long time to deny and/or change the course of events herself, but she knew she had to let Daniel try. You can see the bittersweet pains on the actress's face as she's encouraging Daniel to go on the freighter trip to the Island. She knows it's the only possibility to turn that life around, but at the same time, if he fails, she's sending her son to her death. There's also the whole "eliminating the life cycle" conundrum there... where you wrestle with some really profound moral questions, like Jack and Kate seem to be headed to, with the prevention of the 815 crash.