Cue the Dr. Who theme music because The Constant should shatter any lingering doubts about whether Desmond actually time travels. As we discussed after Flashes Before Your Eyes, the obvious analogy is to Billy Pilgrim, the time-traveling protagonist of Slaughterhouse Five. Like Billy, Des has become unstuck in time -- his consciousness can jump through the fourth dimension to any point along his timeline. Also like Billy, Desmond can't change the future, which presumably course corrects to stop him if he tries. He can, however, influence the past to effectuate the present, creating what's called a
predestination paradox.
That's where effects precede their causes in time, necessitating time travel or some other form of reverse causality to complete the chain of events. The Constant actually featured two of these predestination paradoxes. One was Eloise the rat knowing her way around the maze before being taught the correct route -- her apparent foreknowledge was actually the result of time travel. Another such paradox was Penny's decision to keep the same phone number for eight years before Desmond called her to be his Constant. If Des hadn't made contact with Penny in the past through time travel, she wouldn't have waited around for his call.
The examples of Eloise and Penny are important because they highlight two larger predestination paradoxes, both stemming from activation of the Fail-Safe, that are at the very heart of the show. The first is the characters' strange attraction to various Island elements (e.g., the Numbers) in their flashbacks. I argue in
Cause and Effect that this attraction results from the Fail-Safe blasting their thoughts and memories back in time. Just as Eloise "remembers" the correct route through the maze because she will learn it in the near future, our Losties are drawn to the Island and its symbols by their subconscious "recollection" of future events.
The second big predestination paradox explains our Losties' rescue. I've suggested before (e.g., in
The Cancer Man's Con) that Desmond's conversation with his physicist friend Donovan set in motion events culminating in the Freighter expedition. Charles Widmore somehow learned of Desmond's time travel rant, recognized his description of the Swan button, and waited for the discharge to find the Island. As with Penny's constant phone number, the effect paradoxically precedes its cause in time. If Des had never traveled into the past via the Fail-Safe, the Freighter would not have known to look for the electromagnetic anomaly.
Still with me? Good, because I'd like to raise one more related but distinct paradox clearly depicted in The Constant. An
ontological paradox involves the spontaneous creation of objects and information through time travel. The classic illustration is actually pretty close to what we saw in the episode. A scientist is visited by his future self, who provides him with plans for a time machine he will later invent. The scientist builds the machine and travels back in time, closing the loop by providing the plans to himself in the past. The ontological paradox results because it's unclear where the plans for the time machine came from in the first place.
Ask yourself: how did Daniel know to set his machine to 2.342 and 11 Hz? Future Dan got those numbers from his notebook, then gave them to Desmond, who traveled back in time. While in the past, Des gave the figures back to Dan, who wrote them down in his notebook, apparently completing the loop. But that really doesn't explain anything -- we're still left with the ontological puzzle of how the information originally came into being. It's unclear what the significance of this twist will be, but at least one grim possibility occurs to me. What if the course correction for such ontological paradoxes is the total elimination of everyone affected?