Desmond is a right ol’ Billy Pilgrim! Just as he and Sayid finally leave the island and head toward the mysterious freighter in a helicopter, they run into an electrical storm and Desmond becomes “unstuck in time”. His body stays put, but his mind travels back and forth between 2004 and 1996. A side-effect of this time travel is memory loss, and so a frantic and confused Desmond hunts down information in both eras to help him in his quest to stop jumping in time and remember just how the bloody hell he ended up on a boat in the middle of nowhere. I know how he feels. First it was flashbacks, then it was flashforwards and now it’s two equally significant presents with directly-related causality. So it goes.

As fate would have it, “The Constant” is one of the best episodes of Lost so far. Not only is it stuffed tighter than Hurley’s crackers with info and clues, this episode gives season 4 the defining moment that was notably missing from its premiere. There’s an expectation that season openers be momentous, and this is especially true of Lost which has a history of revealing big new ideas: the S1 opener had a plane crash, S2 introduced the button, and S3 gave us Otherville with its chalets and mod-cons -think Pontins for bastards. But S4 saw everyone unceremoniously getting on with it. There were flashforwards but they were introduced in the S3 finale, and there were some new characters but we knew they were coming. So what was this long-awaited moment of S4? Desmond finally contacts Penny.

In the most emotional moment since Charlie’s Duty-Dance with Death, Desmond’s ongoing odyssey to get back to his beloved Penelope took one step closer thanks to a phone call. Their exchange, its urgent cadence, had all the earnest melodrama of a 1940s Hollywood romance -it was brilliant. Were they in person, Penny would have been pressed up against a towering Desmond, both of them quivering with love. The epic circumstances behind their separation and the seemingly eternal nature of their love is unique within the series. Lost is stuck with a bunch of people who’ve only known each other for 90 days and bonds are easily broken. Des and Penny’s romance makes all the Jack-Kate-Sawyer shenanigans seem terribly unsophisticated. The answer to why The Alpha Pack persists in their tedious love triangle appears to be the same answer behind ‘why do dogs lick their balls?’

Amazingly, this episode’s answers go beyond the dog’s bollocks. It’s definite now that time runs differently on the island, and that time travel is a part of the Lost mystery. We learned that those things grannies sit under at the hairdressers are time machines. And we also got to visit the eponymous home The Freight-astic Four, and what a ropey vessel it was. If George Bush were to have a photo-op on the deck of this old banger, the banner would read ‘All Day Buffet 5.95′ Just seeing it confirms that it’s ‘NOT PENNY’S BOAT’; no self-respecting girl from Knightsbridge would ever be seen dead on it. Speaking of the Penny, Papa Widmore was seen buying the secret journal of the Black Rock’s first mate from the Hanso family, and was looking pretty pleased about it. Does this means he’s connected to the island or that he’s simply looking forward to putting his new book on the shelf next to his blu-ray edition of Master and Commander? He paid £380,000 for the journal. If he was that desperate to hear the thoughts of old seamen, he should have put a stethoscope to his balls.

But what does all this time travel mean? Once again fate seems to be winning out against ideas of free will. The physicist Faraday says “the future can’t be changed”. Ms. Hawking in season 3 talked about the inevitability of events; the variables may be changed but the result it always the same. “Course correcting” she called it. So is Desmond locked into an unchangeable course? Is he truly destined to be with Penny?

My name is Des, brotha
I’m not quite an other
I live on an island somewhere
The people I meet when I walk down the beach
They say, ‘What’s your name?’
And I say,
‘My name is Des, brotha
I’m not quite an other…’

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Homework:

Read “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes” by HG Wells.

It’s a very short story written in 1895 about a scientist in London who steps between a powerful electromagnet and has his vision split with his body; he can hear and feel everything in London, but his sight is constantly seeing an island in the South Pacific. And if you think that sounds familiar, wait until you hear the scientist’s reaction to his time travel… “Great scott!”