"Lost" in thought: Of McFly, monkeys and mind-bending mumbo-jumbo

This was the week I almost gave on up future "Lost" guesswork, the week where I said "Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse: You win."

Consider this running monologue while driving to work today.

OK, so as far as time travel is concerned, here's how "Back to the Future" functioned on the most basic of levels. Marty McFly hears "Johnny B. Goode" for the first time when he's, let's say, nine years old. He listens to the song, completely unaware that he will eventually travel back in time as a 17-year-old and inadvertently influence Chuck Berry (through "his cousin" Marvin) to write a song, that to Marty, had always been in existence. So even though the only reason Marty knows "Johnny B. Goode" is because Berry created it, it's only because Marty went back in time to play a song already in existence that it was written in the first place! Similarly, in "12 Monkeys," Bruce Willis' character James Cole is haunted by the vision of a man being shot dead in an airport. Turns out that James Cole as a child witnessed the event -- which turns out in the shocker of all shockers -- to be his own death as an adult. So Cole sees himself dying, but continues to exist until the point where he travels back in time and is killed in front of himself.

Confused? Yeah, now you know why I'm looking forward to a second viewing of "The Constant" tonight.

Anyway, tonight's "Lost" episode is called "The Other Woman" and puts the spotlight on Juliet. To be revealed tonight: the identity of Ben's secret freighter agent and a peek at a new Dharma station rumored to be called "The Tempest." Crap, I didn't read that one in English class.

Entertainment Weekly's Doc Jensen continues to do an excellent job tying up some loose ends. The biggest one -- that completely obliterates my concept of time travel, mind travel, whatever -- is that Desmond and Faraday did not have to meet in 1996 to end up on the island. That would fit the destiny-chain-of-event-mold written about above. And apparently that's not true. Go figure.

Present vs. future: "Desmond's Island-present mind wasn't the one doing the time traveling. When Desmond got hit with Island magic, his consciousness got knocked off-line and was replaced by his 1996 self. It was this older Desmond consciousness that toggled between present and past throughout the episode. Once Desmond '96 completed the errand of getting Penny's phone number so he could call her on Christmas Eve 2004, Desmond's present-day mind came back online, but rebooted with the new memories created by his time-travel adventure."

From the mouth of Lindelof: ''As Faraday explains in the episode, the effect is random. Sometimes a person can be displaced by minutes, other times, years. And the direction of the effect is equally unpredictable. Our way of demonstrating this was to give Minkowski a wildly different experience than Desmond was having.''

Exposure to electromagnetism or radiation plays a role, but Lindelof said, ''Looking for specific rules for how all this works will lead you down the path of insanity.'' Geez, you think?

Say what? "Desmond's past was different before 'The Constant.'' Before his time-travel adventure, Desmond never met Faraday at Oxford, never got Penelope's digits. As a consequence of changing the past, Desmond's personal history has been 'course corrected' by The Powers That Be, beginning from the moment he walked away from Penny's apartment."

The big question: Jensen asks, "since scoring Penelope's phone number, has course-corrected Desmond lived his life knowing that on Christmas Eve 2004, he MUST be on a freighter in the South Pacific in order to make a call to Penelope if he wants any chance of having a future with her?" Lindelof tells him that this is indeed a matter we should be mulling. It could change the entire perspective of Desmond's backstory and how he ended up on a boat that crashed onto the island.

The rest of the article can be viewed here, including Jensen's validation of my observation (well, not mine alone, but an original thought that may prove correct) about Rousseau's people ending up dead by the same Minkowski sickness. Also worth checking out, this TV Guide article where "Lost" cast members ask burning questions to the creators.

Good to know others are in the dark, too.

-- Thomas Rozwadowski, trozwado@greenbaypressgazette.com