"Lost" again: Rethinking "The Variable"

  As usual, it’s taken us a few days to wrap our brains around this week’s episode of “Lost.”
  In our post-episode blog, our take was that Faraday had returned to the island a changed man, thinking he could, in fact, rewrite history only to tragically discover he was wrong. We also speculated that Jack was about to embark on a similar, futile journey. But now we see clearly that Faraday’s behavior was a calculated ruse designed to ensure that was has always happened on the island happens, that is, to ensure that Jack does what we think he’s about to do, which is, try to prevent the crash of Flight 815, but, in fact, cause it.
  Think specifically about how Faraday walked into The Others camp waving that gun around, practically begging to be shot. Think about how his speech was exactly what Jack needed to hear to shift him back into “Jack needs to fix things” mode. It was all a setup to set Jack in motion on a plan that’s doomed to fail, no, that must fail because it always has failed.
  Think about it: Jack is now in the past trying to prevent the crash of Flight 815. But if he prevents it, then the means by which he came to the island and traveled into the past will disappear making it impossible for him to prevent it.
  No, whatever happened happened and it’s about to happen again, which brings us back to this: What’s at stake on “Lost”? Hopefully, that will be theme of Season 6.
  Quick thoughts:
  > To add to the creep factor of Faraday’s death at his mother’s hand: Could it be that Ellie and Widmore are now going to conceive a child and name him Daniel Faraday in order to fulfill their role in the loop? It makes sense that Faraday’s super-charged brain derived from an island birth and it would answer the question of why Ellie Hawking and Charles Widmore named their son Daniel Faraday: Because that’s what he told them his name was.
  > It’s now clear that when Faraday was doing the memory testing last season he was measuring how quickly his brain was healing not fading.
  > We totally missed it the first time through, but young Charlotte’s opening words to crazy Dan – “I’m not allowed to have ice cream before dinner.” – were also her last words to him when she died in his arms.
  > When do we find out what’s in Hurley’s guitar case? Inquiring minds want to know.