WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU ****ING IDIOT?!

Last night’s Lost should have been awesome. Called, “The Variable,” it should have been a companion piece to “The Constant,” one of the best episodes in the series’ history. It was also the show’s 100th episode, and was Faraday centric, and add all those things up and you can’t have much more going for it than that.

But it was awful, I mean, beyond awful. I can’t remember being so unsatisfied with an episode of Lost, and the whole damn show is built to be unsatisfying every week!

Hit the jump where I start the spoilers:

Faraday is back on the island, and we don’t really know why he left in the first place. His disappearance is explained simply by, “I was doing research,” but before we can hear any sort of elaboration on that, he’s off to crazy town, badgering Jack about how he got back to the island. After hearing that tale and giving Jack a cryptic put down (it’s not your destiny to be here, bro), he switches course, and goes and yells at Chang that he’s about to explode the island with electromagnetic energy, telling him that he’s from the future and Miles is his son. As you may guess, Chang is resistant to the idea.

“Maybe if I move this Jeep, this patch of grass won’t be dead in 30 years! Fight the future!”

The “big” reveals this episode were two-fold. The first was that Faraday’s mother was currently on the island as a hostile. If you didn’t guess that in Jughead when we met “Ellie,” you’re fairly dense, and the show may have realized that was too simple. Which is why they felt the need to have the second revelation that Widmore is actually Daniel’s father.

…

Yup, that was my reaction too, since I figured that out weeks ago with the research granting and Ellie bonding. It’s not exactly rocket science here.

I think the problem with Lost now is that it’s trained us to be too smart. We now know how the show thinks, so moments that should have been shocking (Chang is Miles’ father OMG!) we ended up already figuring out months ago. This season has been lacking in any sort of WTF factor, and WTF is what this show runs on.

Aside from disappointing revelations, the episode had much greater problems to face down. The Faraday flashbacks, which could have given insight into one of my favorite characters, were instead a series of whiny, confusing scenes, with Faraday arguing with his oppressive mother and blubbering about his Memento-esque memory loss condition. And you find out Widmore sends him to the island to not only do research, but get healed. Touching.

Back on the island, Faraday explains to everyone that he got it all wrong. This whole time, his time travel theories have been complete bollocks. He’s been looking at the constants, when he should have been looking at the variables, which are apparently the time skipping Oceanic and freighter crew. That means they CAN change the past, which completely throws out the point of this entire season, where we learned how everything went down since everything that happened, happened.

That was the only time travel philosophy I’d ever seen make sense before, and things were going great. But now with this revelation we’re back in Back to the Future, Terminator and Heroes territory, trying to change a past event to make the future better. Faraday’s new plan is trying to stop “the incident” from happening, which in turn makes Oceanic 815 never crash.  He also says that if that doesn’t happen, the freighter never gets sent out, and he never comes, Charlotte never dies etc. Except that’s not true, because the sole purpose of the freighter was to come get Benjamin Linus, who was there regardless of the plane crashing.

“So everything you’ve ever told us about time travel has been wrong? Well, I’m off to impregnate my mom and be my own dad.”

But now we move on to the very worst part of the episode, the idiotic death of Daniel Faraday. He decides he needs to go see his Other mother in the jungle, and ask her for the hydrogen bomb so he can negate the electromagnetic energy of “the incident.” Sure, I’ll buy that. But why, oh why, would anyone, especially Farraday, think storming into the Others’ camp waving a gun around would achieve the desired results?

Let’s recap what happened. Faraday runs in with a luger and points it at Richard’s immortal mug, yelling like a madman that he needs to see Eloise, and he needs the hydrogen bomb he told Richard to bury in the fifties. Eloise comes out and shoots Farraday in the back since he’s pointing a gun at Richard, and then we get the divine revelation that Faraday’s mom knew her whole life that she would end up killing her son that time travels back from the future.

And now let’s recap what should have happened. Faraday calmly walks into the Others’ camp, and is immediately surrounded at gunpoint. Richard walks over and tells him that he’s breaking the truce. Daniel tells Richard that they met twenty years ago, when he told him to bury the hydrogen bomb, and he really needs to talk to Eloise. Richard calls off his men from the time traveling phenom, and goes and gets Eloise who then has no reason to shoot the man sitting calmly and talking rationally.

It was a stupid writing trick to make a stupid plot twist that should never have even existed in the first place. I’m all for killing characters on the show, but this has to be the dumbest death I’ve ever seen, since the Smoke Monster got its period and killed Mr. Eko for no reason. Faraday was a great character and really deserved better. This was lazy, dumb writing at its peak, and I can only hope the last three episodes are a thousand times better than this one.

There’s nothing worse than writing an entire article and realizing you spelled “Faraday” wrong 26 times.