Last night’s Lost episode gave us more information about the mysterious Charles Widmore. Read about it below.
Charles Widmore - Lost
Every since we were first introduced to the Lost character Charles Widmore and found out that he and Benjamin Linus had an ongoing feud over who owned the island, I’ve wondered which of them was the good guy and which was the bad guy. Or maybe they are both bad guys. I realize that we’ve seen Widmore do some pretty nasty things, but really, has he done anything as bad as what we’ve seen Linus do? Remember, Ben Linus was the REAL bad guy when the survivors first came in contact with The Others.
Last night, the characters that have usually been central to the episodes weren’t around. Instead, this episode, titled ‘Jughead’, focused on Desmond and Penny … and Penny’s father Charles Widmore. I say it focused on them because, even though Sawyer, Daniel Faraday, John Locke, Charlotte and Miles are still being affected by being unstuck in time, its still more about disclosing who Charles Widmore is than much else.
We find out that Daniel Faraday has a past that belies his nervous, mild mannered persona. His experiments at Oxford left his girlfriend there in a permanent ‘coma’. More than that, we find out that his research has been funded by none other than Widmore. Faraday and Widmore crossed paths before, in 1954, when the survivors find themselves meeting The Others for the first time along the spectrum of time. There is a hydrogen bomb on the island that Faraday reassures The Others won’t explode because ‘the island is still here in 50 years’. Much to their dismay, of course. He recommends they bury it in cement. Is this the source of the strange magnetic powers of the hatch? Is that where they buried the bomb?
Most interesting is that the young soldier who showed up at the end of last week’s episode, ‘The Lie’, was none other than a young Charles Widmore. He’s in this week’s episode as well as a hot tempered young man who is an Other.
When Desmond goes back to Oxford to find Faraday’s mother, he finds out that Widmore has been funding Faraday and confronts Widmore. Widmore tells him the mother is in Los Angeles. He also tells him to take Penny back to where ever they are hiding and stay hidden. He tells Desmond that he is involved in something that goes back a long way and needs to disengage himself from it all …. to protect Penny.
We know that Ben is still looking for Penny to kill her to pay Widmore back for the death of his daughter. An eye for an eye and all that. Now Faraday has persuaded Desmond to come out of hiding to save the survivors because Charlotte is showing symptoms of the time sickness. In fact, she may have been dying at the end of the episode when she collapses in much the same way others with the time sickness have died.
So we are back to the feud between Widmore and Linus. Why is Widmore not on the island? If he’s an Other, then why is he living off the island and aging? Is the blond Other Penny’s mother? Why does Widmore feel he ‘owns’ the island when Richard Alpert seems to be the leader of the Others? Now we know why Richard was at John Locke’s birth and visited him as a child. Is that why they feel Locke is their leader? Is he really or was it a fluke of him being there are the right time in the right place?
Now that we know that Widmore is an Other, its making me rethink how Benjamin is manipulating the Oceanic 6. Who are these people that know Ben and tell him they won’t survive if the Oceanic 6 don’t go back to the island? There are obviously more forces in play.
How on earth are they going to get Hurley out of jail?!?!
Oh, one more thing. The degrees of separation between the characters are getting fewer and fewer. We’ve known all along that their lives have intersected here and there before they boarded Oceanic 815. Now, it seems, their intersecting lives are much more complex than anyone might have previously thought. Not only have they run into each other in their lives, but now they are running into each other as they flip back and forth between years and decades while they are disengaged from time.
For instance, the gun toting blond who is one of The Others in the 1950s looks a lot like the woman Faraday experimented on in the 1990s and the abandoned when she slipped into a coma. Her sister caretaker looks like the woman in Los Angeles who is willing to hold Locke’s body while Ben tries to get all the other survivors together.
Most interestingly to me, and I might be making too much of this, is all the people named Charles. There’s Charles Widmore and Charlie, one of our favorite survivors. Now we find out that Desmond and Penny have had a baby boy and named him Charlie. With all this time traveling and looping relationships, one has to wonder if there is a connection between all these men named Charles. Or may be the writers just like that name.
For myself, I keep coming back to Adam and Eve … the skeletons that the survivors found in the cave in the first season. I can’t help but wonder if in the end, we will find out that those skeletons were, in fact, survivors from the plane who might have been the first of, or the last of, The Others. That’s just one of my own pet theories.
The writers have told us that this season is the beginning of answering more questions than raising new questions, so at some point, we’ll know the rest of the story.