Yet again, Wednesday has come upon us, which means yet another day of Wednesday Briefs. And this week, I'm breaking ground with a fandom I haven't even discussed in great detail on this blog: JJ Abrams' LOST, which I'm currently in the thick of, watching season five and getting my mind blown with every plot twist big and small. So I hope you enjoy my first proper LOST post on this blog and please, no spoilers anything beyond what is discussed!
Adrift,
Again: LOST, Desmond Hume & Daniel
Faraday, G, prompt - "time heals all wounds, orchids"
Canon
note: Takes place at the beginning of season
five. No spoilers past events around episode 2/3. Basically, if you
can understand "Faraday's flashes", you're good. Also
refers to Ben Linus, Penny Widmore, Hugo "Hurley" Reyes,
and John Locke, either explicitly or otherwise.
It
begins like this: a flash of light, and everyone is lost.
Or:
it begins with Desmond Hume waking up as he has done every day for
the past four years in his prison of a hatch, oblivious to the fact
that his life is about to take another dramatic shift forward. It
begins with a light in the dark and a figure banging on the door from
above, and hope, catching in both of their chests like an unexpected
breath. It begins with a key in the floor, with the hairs on his neck
standing on end, with a promise to a woman he thinks he'll never see
again.
It
begins in another life soon split into two, because he is Desmond
Hume, the Scot who can't stay still even when he's standing, with the
ability to be in two places at once. He lives in a fractured fairy
tale, constantly running after his princess as the errant knight with
no path, no purpose. One day, he is lying on the floor of his studio
apartment, red paint dripping across his face like fresh blood. At
the same time, he is washing ashore on a strange island and being
dragged onto land by a man who will become his unwilling companion
for a short time. In another instance, at the same time, Desmond is
racing across the green fields of Oxford, looking for a physics
professor who will explain his life away.
If
Desmond Hume is a ship that has come untethered from its dock and is
bobbing helplessly on the waves of time, then Daniel Faraday is its
saving anchor, its lighthouse shining through the fog to light the
way home. He's hope, a hastily written message in an old
college-lined notebook: If anything goes
wrong, Desmond Hume is my constant.
Desmond
doesn't pretend to understand how the particulars of time travel
works. He's smart but he's no physicist. He's no Daniel Faraday, who
can cover his workroom blackboards in complicated mathematical
divination with effortless ease and can transport a mouse's brain
into the past but can't bring it back, although not from lack of
trying. With his tie and button-down shirt and backpack as well as
his nervous physicality and movements, Faraday is nerd personified.
At
first, Faraday doesn't get Desmond. He doesn't understand why this
strange Scottish man has burst into his laboratory and asked him
invasive questions about his research. But they know each other - not
then, but later. And when Faraday helps establish a constant for
Desmond, he can only understand the man's struggle on a theoretical
basis. After all, Desmond Hume's travels were due to a total
accident, an interaction with pure energy that has left the man
disengaged from proper chronology. If time is a string, than Desmond
is barely hanging on with his fingernails to his own thread.
Through
the power of time and space and notebooks and secret words and phone
calls, Desmond is grounded. He creates his own constant, Penny, and
he is no longer flitting back between past and present like a crazed
yo-yo. And yet, there it is, in Daniel's notebook. If
anything goes wrong - but what could go
wrong? Daniel Faraday helps Desmond from the relative safety of the
island shore and does not prepare himself for any similar time based
hijinks.
And
then, shortly afterward, Ben Linus moves the whole damn island. And
like that, everything changes. As far as he knows, Linus has taken a
hammer to the world's clock and now it's Faraday who has become
unstuck in time.
The
Orchid Station. That's where everything started. And Daniel Faraday
doesn't know it yet, but he's been there before, he'll be there very
soon, in fact. The island knows him. Daniel Faraday has become
unstuck in time - and today, he is reaching out to his very own
constant, even though at this time, his constant doesn't even know
him yet.
(Awash
from a sea of memories twisted up by time travel, Desmond Hume wakes
up in his wife's bed, remembering a promise he made to a man on an
island. He is soon turning the boat around to English, to Cambridge.
To Faraday.)
There
is an island somewhere in the middle of the ocean that, thanks to
Benjamin Linus, has become a rift in time, adrift from the regular
groove of the world. On it, a group of people keep popping in and out
of a confused time stream, struggling to reach some sense of
normalcy, fighting to get their lives back. Among them is Daniel
Faraday, and he has a plan.
It
feels like many years ago that Faraday and Hume put so much trust in
each other to save Hume's life from death by a time travel-related
brain hemorrhage. And yet, there is Daniel Faraday, talking to a
scared man in a biohazard suit, putting all his hope yet again on the
same man who will later escape this cursed island, who will save
everyone and fix what has been broken.
The
first time Desmond Hume meets Daniel Faraday, the physicist has no
idea who Desmond is or why he knows who he
is. The first time Daniel Faraday meets Desmond Hume, Desmond hasn't
seen another human being in years, much less Faraday. Desmond has
already been hurt by the constantly shifting laws of time. Now it's
Daniel's turn, and he's reaching out for a man who barely knows him.
Daniel
already knows what he's going to say, the next time his and Desmond's
time lines cross: "We've really got to stop meeting like this."
Above
his head, a bird screeches and flies off into the distance, and its
cry sounds like it is saying another man's name.
Here are the other bloggers who are flashing this week:
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