Found in Lost: Thoughts on "The Constant"

Read some of our thoughts and discuss the latest episode of LOST in the comments below. We'll update throughout the week as we think things over. Spoiler alert: don't click through if you haven't seen "The Constant" yet!

TOPH TUCKER '08

Um, wow. Gotta be one of my favorite episodes ever.

First of all, the Black Rock thing was awesome.

We got more hints regarding time dilation and such. (Dan's way of putting it--that their perception of the passage of time was different than the helicopter's--was interesting.) And, as suspected, the storm does indeed look like a permanent feature of the world/island "snowglobe barrier" (as Maddy put it). Looks like it's a combination of time dilation and some sort of... well, not portal/wormhole, but some sort of catastrophic event that "unhinges" people from time. If you think about time as just another dimension, like time and space, it makes sense. People are free to move around wherever we want in space.

Great to see who Minkowski was--fascinating given his namesake that he, like Desmond, would also suffer from temporal unhinging.

You know how Penny said she's been looking for Desmond for 3 years? Interesting that, by going back in time and telling her about the island, he causes her to then look for it. But you know, I don't think he could change anything significant about the past even if he tried. This is not Back to the Future (although tonight's episode was extremely reminiscent of it). The universe has a way of course-correcting; paradoxes may not be allowed to exist.

Then again... I wonder. What the creepy ring lady was saying (the course-correcting thing) was essentially that the universe was stable. Like those little dolls that can't be pushed over, or a river in a deep gorge, it always comes back to the same spot, the same path. But what if the river reached a delta? Is it possible that it could become, well, *un*stable? That'd be baaaaad news, I reckon.