Well this episode was both an anticlimax in some ways and a hell of a humdinger and shocker in other ways – but as I’d foolishly read the spoiler about Daniel getting shot by his own mother back in 1977, I of course lost the ‘shock factor’ there….

However, knowing that that was going to happen was in a way a good thing because it enabled me to know that for the entirety of Daniel’s life – from his piano playing savant childhood to the moment he went back to island for the final time – Eloise had known that she herself would end his life… so why did she send him back?

Why not just say ‘no’ when he was vegged out from his own temporal displacement experiments on himself and asked her if she’d be proud of him if he took up Charles Widmore’s ‘job opportunity’ to go on the Kahuna to the island? And why spend years raising him, making him focus solely on science and become this ‘prodigy’ when she knew she was going to be the one to kill him before he could actually do any good with everything he’d learned??

I at first thought that maybe it was because she knows/thinks a person can’t change time – the whole Whatever Happened, Happened, thing – but we now know that’s not true because as Daniel himself pointed out, when Jack first met him, he didn’t have a scar on his neck, which, after having been shot at and grazed with a bullet in 1977, he would have had, so evidently events through time can be changed.

And if he was shot and killed in 1977, how did he manage to make it into the mid 2000’s anyway?? And again, as Dan himself pointed out, the “variables” of the equation of changing events in time are the people involved, both on and off the island, so again, clearly events in time can be changed and that had been his intention when he turned up on the sub last week… he was going to rewrite the Island’s history and save everyone from everything that happened to them because of the Island.

Apropos of which, Dan also informed Jack that Eloise had lied to him; it wasn’t his ‘destiny’ to be on the Island and in fact, he shouldn’t be there at all.

And if you recall, Eloise did the same headfudge on Des when she made him not give Penny the engagement ring and sent him to the Island so he could push the button for donkey’s ages until he finally flipped and didn’t push it, causing the magnetic pull to yank Oceanic 816 out of the sky. She’s a bit of a pain the rear with regard to causing people problems and/or death isn’t she?

Anyway, Dan’s plan was to get everyone off the island then detonate Jughead under what we know as The Hatch – thereby defusing the massive energy build up under it – and if he’d achieved it, none of Lost would’ve happened. As he didn’t, it did, if you see what I mean…

But we did get to find out that the button pushing was how the energy was ‘contained’ within its concrete tomb, but if Daniel had achieved his plan, the Oceanic flight wouldn’t have crashed when Des failed to press the button and indeed, everyone else who ended up button pushing every 108 minutes wouldn’t have happened either… so given that Eloise knew she herself could’ve changed all that by helping Dan instead of allowing him to go back and be shot by her young self is extremely confusing.

Why is it that she clearly wants all these events to occur with the Island, even knowing it would cost her her own son?

Then, outside the hospital where Eloise had gone to see how Desmond was doing – and why would she do that?? I have a theory that I’ll explain in a minute – she had that confrontation with Charles where she bitch-slapped him when he said he’d sacrificed his relationship with his daughter and she indignantly claimed she’d made more of a sacrifice vis-à-vis her son, and of course, she meant that she’d actually sent him back to the island to his death at her own hand.

And now my aforementioned theory; does anyone else think that Eloise is also Penny’s mother? I do.

Both Charles and Eloise referred to each of their children as ‘my’ – ‘my son’, ‘my daughter’ – but we know of course that Charles was Dan’s father, so maybe if she’s Penny’s mother, the kids were brought up separately by each parent because of their differing yet ultimately intertwined destinies? Either that or a custody dispute or something… they obviously fell out at some point.

And another thing; when the doctor came to tell Penny that Des was ok and she could go and see him, she said, “This nurse will take care of your son.” Didn’t that seem just a tad iffy? I suspect that when Penny returns to the waiting room, Charlie is going to be gone… but why and who’s going to take him?

Wouldn’t it be a gigantic twist if the Charlie Pace from the island turned out to be Des’s son? Especially given that it was Charlie who first made contact with Penny on the boat and let Des know that she was out there looking for him. Charlie also saved Des’s life by not allowing him into the control room and then passing on the message about the ‘rescue’ boat not being Penny’s. In case you’ve forgotten that bit, here’s a clip of Charlie’s demise and the events in the minutes up to it…

I mean, it could happen, what with all this time shifting around business. Maybe someone, for some reason, takes Charlie Hume and places him with the family we saw Charlie Pace with in the first few seasons – including the druggie brother and odd mother – and he ends up on the island where Des meets him, not knowing he’s his own son? And don’t forget that Charlie was a talented musician, as was Dan with the piano, so maybe that runs in the family eh?

It would be something of a parallel to Eloise shooting Daniel without knowing she’s his son but in the Des-Charlie-son scenario, son would save parent rather than parent killing son…

But another little facteroo that could back this up was in the closing credits of Dead is Dead; ordinarily, when the credits roll, we see for instance ‘Young Ethan’ which refers to a younger version of an existing, older character, but, at the end of Dead Is Dead, we see Charlie Hume listed not as ‘Charlie Hume’ or ‘Charlie’ but as ‘Young Charlie’. Oooooooooo my brain hurts.

But despite this being an awesome episode in many regards, ABC had really pushed the point that we were going to find out EVERYTHING Daniel knew about the island, and that didn’t really happen. We did get to know a lot of things, primarily what the button pushing was about, but I was expecting a lot of answers to stuff like what the hell the smoke monster is, why/how the island and its inhabitants move around time and what all the island’s ‘special’ properties are. But we didn’t get to hear about any of that; we mainly just got confirmation of a lot of things we already knew or had guessed.

I think we’d all guessed that Widmore was Daniel’s father and we knew it was Widmore who’d funded Daniel’s research; the research that would end up with him frying the brain of his girlfriend and research assistant Theresa and leave her a living vegetable who can do nothing but lie in a bed.

Here's Theresa with Dan at his graduation before he frazzled her

And here's Theresa 'lost' in time somewhere after the brain frazzling

It was also to result in Daniel frying his own brain, though not so severely as he did Theresa’s, but as Widmore told him, the Island would heal him, and sure enough, it did. Even though he was a tad scatter brained when he first arrived on the island, the healing must’ve been quick because he was nowhere near as ‘veggie’ as he’d been in the ‘real’ world.

It was also interesting to see that flashback to the episode Confirmed Dead where Dan was watching the fake footage of the Oceanic plane on the seabed and crying about it, but he didn’t know why it upset him so much. That was pretty damn good, especially as the storyline then picked up again with Widmore arriving on his doorstep and making the ‘job’ offer.

And did you notice the magazine/comic that Widmore picked up when he walked into Daniel’s house to offer him the trip to the island? Here’s a picture of the cover…

Notice the '108' at the top right and time travel references

Anyway, moving on, and later, I thought the scene when Dan tracked down the young Charlotte as she played on a swing and ate illicit pre-dinner chocolate, was very moving.

And as you’ll recall, as she lay dying in the episode, This Place is Death, she finally remembered that Dan had been the “odd weirdo” who’d told her as a child that she must never come back to the island… but of course, she did.

So, at the end of the episode, as always, we’re now we’re left with lots more questions such as how Sawyer, Juliet et al are going to get out of the fine mess that having Phil stowed in a cupboard has gotten them into.

And are Juliet and Sawyer over now that Juliet believes Sawyer still loves ‘freckles’?

What’ll happen to Jack and Kate now that they’ve just witnessed Dan being shot to death?

What’s going to happen with Des and Penny?

Will Dr Chang take Daniel’s theory about the explosion that’s going to happen in a few hours seriously or is that to be the ‘incident’ that Chang referred to often in his Orientation videos?

Why won’t Miles admit to Dr Chang that he is his son?

And finally, just what is it about that Island that’s sooooooooooo important to both Eloise and Charles – not to mention Ben!

Next week’s episode is entitled “Follow the Leader” in which Jack and Kate find themselves at odds over the direction to take to save their fellow island survivors while Locke further solidifies his stance as leader of “The Others,” and Sawyer and Juliet come under scrutiny from the Dharma Initiative.

Here’s the first ABC promo and we’ll of course bring you more as they crop up this week!