Dan Snierson: I guess the big question now become, I’m trying to, you know, unpack all the rules of time travel, so does this mean that when Danielle shows up in season one and meet Jin, does she know that she had an encounter with him?

Jeff Jensen: I say that, she did recall Jin because my theory on the time travel on the show is these memories aren’t uploaded or booted in peoples’ heads until both parties have the experience.

And he gives the Daniel Faraday and Desmond Hume connection we saw last year; Desmond visited Faraday at Cambridge in the past but Faraday came to the island with no memory of this meet up. Desmond’s visit to Faraday was a trigger and once Desmond has that experience both of them have the memory.

Sounds good enough for me. You can watch the video here.

Season 5 is hitting viewers mind quite hard, and this weeks’ episode was not an exception. If you are following his blog, Brian told us in his “Because You Left” and “The Lie” instant reactions that he thinks; “these two episodes probably effectively turned off any casual viewers of the show.” His prophecy is happening according to Doc Artz’s recent post about the decline in Lost viewer statistics. Lucky we don’t have to worry about a cancellation :)

Please think twice before jumping the rest of this post if you haven’t watched the episode five yet, since it will contain spoilers.

Yesterday’s episode was full of information. We discovered the “Temple” at last and finding that it is home to Smokey and is related to what Danielle calls “sickness” is made it more interesting. Apparently her team has experienced some kind of brain washing there before she started curing them off with bullets. With all these things in mind, it is hard to think the Temple as a “safe house”, but we know that according to Ben, it is :) I think that depends on if you have control over the Smokey or not, and Ben already showed us that he can call Smokey as he needs.

Although we have seen a brief history of Danielle, there are still gaps to be filled. Such as the how French team of scientists became freaks after the meet the Smokey and the Temple. But looks like we had an answer for a question puzzling us; “Did Danielle recognize Jin when she first met the castaways in Season 1?”. Answer could be yes, as stated by Entertainment Weekly’s Jeff Jensen:

Does it matter? For Rousseau, Reappearing Jin was one more scary, inexplicable thing in a scary, inexplicable situation that was about to become a way of life. By the time their lives intersected once more in her future timeline, seeing Jin again (if she even recognized him), the significance probably just bounced off her. ”Oh. You again. Whatever.”

What we also learned from “This place is death” is not all of the Oceanic 6 will return to the island at first, and probably because of this time travelling will continue for some time. Which I think will let Faraday to visit young Charlotte before her dismissal from the island and warn her not to come back. Also he will probably try something stupid to “fix” things, during his visit to the orchid station build process. Actually all of these things might show us that the flashback of Faraday at last season might actually be a flash-forward! Think about that; he might be crying in front of TV because he messed things up, couldn’t save Charlotte’s life and, worse, can’t remember a thing because his memory is erased after a great magnetic pulse. Crying because only thing left in his conscience is feeling of being guilty. I feel like whole session will seem to be Faraday centric at the end.

We know that Lost writers likes these kinds of mind games after all.

We also learned that Eloise Hawking is Faradays’ mother. Well, it was obvious, I know, but seeing Ben surprised with the idea was quite interesting. I think he had a “oh god, she might have her own agenda besides our common goal!” moment, or he was surprised because he knows that Widmore is Faradays’ father (yes, that is another theory if you are not following Lostpedia) and having a partner who has that kind of relationship with the biggest competitor in the business would probably left a fuzzy feeling in his guts.

It is getting better, let’s wait and see.