For a fleeting moment tonight, I thought that my beloved Lost was about to abandon the conceit that you cannot change the future, that what is going to happen is going to happen and there’s damn little you can do about it.

Did I mention how fleeting that moment was?

Remember, if you will, that Desmond tried to save Charlie multiple times. But no matter what he did, he could only change the circumstances – not the end result.

Have I mentioned yet that you shouldn’t read if you didn’t watch? No? Well, I have now.

We did have a bit of foreshadowing of Daniel’s death, when he told Jack that the present is the present and anyone could still die.

And I think it’s important to note that now everyone who came on the freighter is dead except for Miles. Even Abbadon is dead.

And, yet, Eloise knew that Daniel would die if he went back there. She claimed to Penny that for the first time, she didn’t know what was going to happen; is that true because her body of knowledge about what happened came from Daniel’s journal and now that he’d gone back to the island, he was dead and gone and nothing else would ever be written in it?

So if she knew she would be the one to kill Daniel if he went back to the island, why did she tell him to go? Did she believe that somehow it would be different this time? Did she just believe that was his destiny and so therefore he had to go, even though she would be responsible for his death? And Charles knew that Eloise would kill Daniel if they went back to the island; why did he send him there? Was he simply trying to save his son’s brilliant brain? Or did he, too, believe that destiny is destiny?

And if Daniel’s destiny was to end up back on the island, then it was destiny, too, for Jack & Kate to end up back there, because they’re the ones who took Faraday to his mommy. Who killed him.

By the way — I realized the second Eloise Hawking stepped on screen tonight that, of course, she was Ellie, and Widmore was Daniel’s father. Just curious, though, how she ended up with the last name Hawking and he with the last name Faraday, but I think that’s more Cuse & Lindelof screwing with the fanbase than anything else. They love to give the characters the names of famous philosphers and scientists, no?

But I ask this: At what point is a destiny truly a destiny and when is it the abdication of free will in favor of what you believe you must do?

If we are beholden to a destiny, then why do anything at all? If what’s going to happen is going to happen no matter what, then what’s the point? By now, I can’t really blame Jack for becoming an alcoholic. He’s being jerked back and forth by destiny. Destiny, she’s a bitch.

Laugh-out-loud moments of the night: It was all Sawyer tonight, first when he called Faraday “Twitchy,” and second when he asked Miles, “Is he still insane?”