I tell you this this. If Penny turns out to be double crossing Desmond I burn all my Lost discs. That would probably be the most upsetting ending ever for a TV show to me.

BTW, thinking outside the box here: I certainly see a circular time 'theme' with Desmond. Is it possible that the Season 3 flash forwards, of Charlie's death, were appearing to him due to December 2004 Desmond going back to 1996 Desmond? Perhaps the events became hidden in his subconscious?

So if Desmond is popping up and back, does that explain the Polar Bear, the Horse, Jack seeing his Dad.

Is Jack's Dad time travelling?
Is the Polar Bear?

I'm guessing maybe it explains the animals but perhaps there is another explanation for Jack's dad. Perhaps it's a variation on time travel.

I agree.

The entire cast is phenomenal.

why did faraday know the numbers to have des tell to his 1996 self?

Didn't he have them in his notebook? I believe he looked them up in his notebook before he told them to Desmond.

is is just me or that Faraday guy looks like Barney.... aka Neil Pattrick Harris....
a Brunette Barney......

yes but how would he know the numbers if desmond hadn't told them to him yet?

So, basically, this episode answers a lot of questions about Daniel Faraday.

We could glean from the final scene that Daniel is experiencing the same time traveling phenomenon as Desmond. He could even be experiencing future flashes like Desmond as well. That's how he would know Jack's name immediately before even meeting him and that's why he would be able to know faces of cards he'd never seen before.

That would explain his need for a caretaker. That's probably also why Naomi called him a "head case" and Miles called him "genius" (sarcastically, of course). Even the freighter's doctor says Daniel can't help himself.

Although Daniel was helping Desmond to overcome his time jumping, Daniel may have been helping himself as well. He may have set up Desmond so that Desmond became Daniel's "constant." That's why he wanted 1996 Desmond to see 1996 Daniel. He sort of killed two birds with one stone.

That's why Daniel knows so much about Desmond's condition. He was experiencing it.

Notice when Daniel left the freighter, Minkowski all of a sudden isn't available to talk with on the satellite phone. Perhaps Daniel may have been protecting Minkowski on the freighter because he had sympathy for his condition.

So, does Desmond being Farady's "constant" explain why Naomi had a picture of Desmond?

BRILLIANT point! She said they all went crazy.

I am sure the others know how to safely travel between the island and the mainland, since they seemed to have done so routinely without ill effects.

It does make one wonder why none of the plane crash survivors experienced the same symptoms.

Matthew Fox is good and that episode was his finest but desmond's 5 episodes just eclipses what Fox has done. put it this way. desmond, locke, juliet, ben and faraday are no doubt the best actors on the show. hurley and kate being the worst.

also it made it look like that "desmond should be my constant" was already written down but we don't know if he didn't just wrote it in there.

i actually don't think there was any time traveling going on at all.

Based on the questions Faraday was asking Desmond, it seemed like you had to be exposed to high doses of radiation or electromagnetism to experience the effects. Desmond was at ground zero during the hatch implosion, and Faraday was experimenting with radiation without any protection for his face. That's why Sayid and the pilot didn't have any symptoms. Minkowski and the guy he said died must have been exposed to radiation earlier as well.


I thought during the flashback scenes at the college he looked exactly like Charles Manson! -eek-

I'm assuming you're referring to the polar bear being found in Tunisia earlier this season and not just the polar bear in general right, as the polar bear on the island was already explained.
As for Jack's dad, there is a mobisode that is apparently cannon that is pretty interesting. I've long thought Jack's dad was more important than we all initially thought and the mobisode hints that maybe just maybe I'm right for a change :)

But the plane was brought down by an EM-pulse from the Swan - the system failure event that nearly destroyed the Swan when Desmond left the hatch to follow Kelvin.

Also, the Freighter people had a picture of Ben and a picture of Desmond.

Looking back, have Ben and Desmond ever been in the same place at the same time? Not saying they're the same person or anything, but it's a little strange that they've never crossed paths.

I'm fairly certain that the Ben is also travelling through time via this method, and that the current Ben we see on the show is the "past" version.

Ok, now my daughter has me confused. She thinks the island time would actually run faster because to the ones left on the island a lot of time (like a day and a half) had gone by before the helicopter got to the ship. But it wasn't that much time for the people on the helicopter. So time on the island would move faster rather than slower. Does that make any sense? Thoughts?

At some point during his experiments Faraday figured out what settings/numbers he needed. He was then able to give Desmond these numbers so that Desmond could in turn tell him the numbers and he could see the effects earlier than he would of had it taken place in a normal fashion.

Actually time, as perceived by the survivors appears to be in sync with time as perceived by the freighter people (the outside world). Both perceive it to be around Xmas of 2004. 93 days have supposedly passed (according to the enhanced episode with pop-up text). 93 days after Sept 22, 2004, would be Xmas eve. Which it is on the freighter as well. I think what's different is the PERCEPTION of time. What Faraday said to Jack was that the amount of time that he "perceived" to have passed was not what actually passed. So the survivors would then perceive more time to have passed than has actually passed.

My current thought is that the island is 1996. The outside world is at 2004. The consciousness of the 2004 survivors has now leaped into their 1996 bodies. We saw with the rat, that the body doesn't physically go anywhere during the time travel.

Here's another possibility. Are the flashbacks and flashforwards REALLY flashes? Or are they actually leaping back and forth through time on the island and would only "remember" what happens in the other times when they've left the island? I have to think about this one for a little while longer...

I guess the writers of Lost just read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Kindred-Bluest...4370351&sr=8-1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_constant

In physics and chemistry, the Faraday constant is the amount of electric charge per mole of electrons. The Faraday constant was named after British scientist Michael Faraday, and is widely used in calculations in electrochemistry.

It has the symbol F, and is related to the charge on an individual electron by

F = NAe,
where NA is Avogadro's number (approximately 6.02 × 1023 mole−1) and e is the elementary charge, the magnitude of the charge on an electron (approximately 1.602 × 10−19 coulombs per electron).

The value of F was first determined by weighing the amount of silver deposited in an electrochemical reaction in which a measured current was passed for a measured time[1]. Research is continuing into more accurate ways of determining F, and thereby NA. [Source: NPL Annual Review 1999]

F = 96 485.3383(83) coulomb/mole

I assume no one. The hatch station with the computer blew up/imploded when they did not punch in the numbers one time, did it not? Of course, maybe it did not in some other timeline, which is why the whole time travel thing is a ridiculous cop out. True to Lost tradition, the writers have added yet another mysterious element without solving any of the previous ones they set up.

I know I am in the minority, but I thought this episode was as awful as the rest of the season has been. I believe I am just getting burned out on Lost and its parlor tricks. It no longer relies on good story telling to keep viewers watching but on making people feel like they have to keep watching to see how in the world they will eventually explain all of this and tie it together in a believable way. I for one don't think they will; yet I will probably keep watching (which is all they care about anyway), not because I enjoy it but because I am so invested that I have to find out what the 4-toed statue, smoke monster, etc. (from seasons I did enjoy) are.

As someone said earlier, time must run at the same time on the island as it does outside because they are both on Christmas Eve.

There is ONLY a time discrepancy when you are traveling to and from the island. Objects traveling through this "lightning storm" are stuck in some kind of time purgatory. The helicopter ride from the island to the freighter should have taken 20 minutes and to everyone else seems like it took half a day or more. The payload coming into the island should have taken seconds to get there and instead goes into oblivion for 30 minutes.