By Jon Lachonis

The first in CraveOnline's weekly look at the world of Lost.

Lost 4.05 “The Constant” was somewhat of a constant itself. Lost fans have wrestled with where time travel has fit into the plot for sometime, and with “The Constant” they received part two of their temporal plotting manual.  The previous temporal folly, “Flashes Before Your Eyes,” was also a Desmond centric episode, and like “The Constant” it introduced one of the key rules of time travel on Lost:  Course Correction. 

As of late, Lost’s co-show-runners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof have become more blunt about Course Correction’s place in the Lost universe, it is a paradox cure-all.  According to the law of Course Correction, the universe has some elasticity when it comes to the flow of events;  travel through time, change something, course correction natural return the flow of events back to ‘normal.’  This allows the writers to - they think - do whatever they want and let Course Correction clean up the mess.  Of course, the downside to Course Correction is it endorses fatalism as the major player in the Lost-verse; and hey, didn’t Charlie write ‘Fate’ on his finger tape in the Pilot, way back at the beginning of it all?  That is another story, no doubt -- perhaps one saved for the end; in the meantime read on for a few key points from “The Constant.”
 

---

 In Case of Emergency, Seek Your Constant

“The Constant” is something, anything, that connects both the present and the past.  If you find your consciousness the crude pixelated blip in a game of temporal pong, contact your Constant and you’ll fuse back with the present.  For instance, if I tripped back to 1978, my Darth Vader action figure with the sliding light saber and funky vinyl cape would be my constant; because it never leaves my side.  For Desmond it would be Penny of course.
 

Time Travel -- It is all in your head

If rule #1 was Course Correction, rule #2 is “Consciousness Only.” The second rule of time travel in Lost is that only your mind will travel;  at least in this case.  With our friend the Polar Bear skeleton from “Confirmed Dead,”  it seems a good bet that Dharma may have expanded the rules a bit.  If nothing else,  “Consciousness Only” raises more interesting possibilities.  If someone used a constant from the future to the past, could they stay in the past?

The Big (new) Questions

Faraday opens his journal to find out that Desmond Hume is his constant, if anything goes wrong.  This would imply that Faraday used his own machine to travel into the future at some point.  Is that how he fried his short term memory?

This Charlotte chick, I kinda liked her up until now.  She’s all for keeping secrets and doesn’t seem to think the locals have the capacity to understand “the big picture.”  She’s going to be big trouble before long.

Who is Ben’s spy?  We saw the spy interact for the first time last night.  Doesn’t the disappearing act just cry out that we’ve seen this person before?  We’ll find out in episode 8 “Meet Kevin Johnson,” ABC’s brand new press release for the episode says:

SPOILER: “...Sayid confronts Ben's spy on the freighter...”

One final thought.  As paradox averse as Carlton and Damon are, there is still at least one major change to space time that has slipped through their clever plot device:  The Freighter.  Charlie’s death was averted, and course correction eventually claimed him, but not until he made it possible for the freighter to find the island.  If the freighter folk somehow precipitate the events that lead to the Oceanic 6, hasn’t the fate of these characters been changed in a pretty significant way to the rest of the world?