Lost Season 4 Episode 5: "The Constant"

Time travel is a hard theory to illustrate in any medium. It is just such a confusing concept that the risk of losing your audience seems inevitable. That was the downfall of "The Constant." It's like having a conversation with someone about computers, and then realizing 5 minutes in that they know way more than you about not only computers, but programming, motherboards, RAM and a whole bunch of other stuff that you could care less about. You just end up nodding along, pretending like you're not in over your head. Needless to say, there was a lot of nodding going on during last night's episode. While I appreciate the concept of the episode, I'm not totally convinced that the execution was flawless. Here is what I took away from it all.

1.) Wherever the island is in relation to the real world, there is apparently some sort of wormhole (whatever that is) or void in the space/time continuum on the way there. We're definitely dealing with a rift in the linear passage of time, which is probably why the island is impossible to find unless you have "the exact bearings" to find it.

2.) Desmond's backstory is almost as boring as Kate's.

3.) I actually like Jeremy Davies' character in the show, which is a complete shock to me. However, in the flashback he looks like a jackass with that bad long hair wig. But I actually like his character, Daniel, and hope that he turns out to be a larger part of this season's story arc.

4.) Sayid is apparently the Iraqui MacGyver. I know this may be something that I should have noticed about three years ago, but whenever something in the show is broken, regardless of what type of equipment it is, Sayid will fix it. That is kind of a cop out to me. Just once I'd like someone to say "Sayid, can you fix it?" and have him say, "Absolutely not. What are you, an asshole?"

5.)I enjoyed the match-cut editing for much of this episode (when cutting between Desmond in 1996 and 2004.) Though, I did find that it got less and less interesting as the show went on. It was a tad gimmicky, but I suppose it worked given the necessity to show Desmond falling back and forth between two times.

And I apologize-- apparently I mixed up which episode we were on last week. I accidentally said that this week's episode was the one that supposedly would be a "revelation" type episode. It's actually next week's episode--episode 6-- and the preview does indeed seem pretty exciting.

I guess we'll see...