This post is more for me than anyone else. If you were to ask me what my favorite parts of this season was I would say without a doubt the episode “The Constant” and the scene in the finale when Desmond and Penny get back together.
For quite sometime I have agreed with a friend of mine, HH, who had said that she expected Desmond and Penny to reunite in the series finale of the show. This made perfect sense to me, this is an epic love story, why not stretch it out until the end. The comparisons of Desmond and Penny’s story to Homer’s The Odyssey are completely purposeful. I would love to go into them, but that should be in another post, this one is more about the season 4 finale and beyond. The reason I bring it up is just to say how it diverged from the legend in this last episode, (maybe). You see, with HH’s theory that Penny & Desmond would hook up at the end of Lost it pretty much guaranteed that it would have happy ending, as does The Odyssey when Penelope and Odysseus are reunited. Having Desmond and Penny reunite at the end of season four, of six, really worries me. What’s going to happen to them in the future? The odds are low that they are going to have two worry free seasons.
This surprise rendezvous of my favorite characters prompted me to try to think of why the writers would do this. The first thing I thought of was the actors schedules. They were worried that they wouldn’t be able to get Sonya Walger (Penny) back this season because she is starring in an HBO show these days (and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles [also I just heard that Shirley Manson, from Garbage, is going to star in that show next year, now I'll have to watch it, I'm already embarrassed]). So she is pretty busy, and Henry Ian Cusick is also a moderately busy actor who apparently hasn’t been to into the TV series schedule. He has also been on the show for three years which is the traditional contract that actors sign on for TV shows. So does this mean that we won’t see Penny and Desmond again? I doubt it.
I do believe that they, mostly I mean Desmond, will have a more minor role, a very critical role but less in the forefront as in the last two season. I’ll bet they will become more of the guest star you look forward to seeing return, like Rousseau. You don’t expect to see them in every episode but when they do come up you know something important will happen.
These two apparently have a lot to deal with in the future. Ben has promised to hunt down and kill Penny, and Desmond is pretty much going to have to live in secret. Charles Widmore will definitely be unhappy when he finds out that Penny is back with Desmond. So a lot can still happen to these two. A strange thing that happened this season was that Desmond promised to never return to the island, that could go both ways though. It might be good ol’ fashion foreshadowing and it might mean that Desmond won’t ever go back to the island. Or it might be some good ol’ fashion irony, maybe they are setting poor Desmond up for some tragedy, maybe he has to go back. Or maybe there will be a time when he wants to go back, when the island might seem like the best place on Earth, the only place where both Ben and Whidmore can’t find them. I’m betting on the latter.
I know there is a little bit of speculation about whether Desmond has to go back to the island when Jack goes back, I don’t know, I doubt it, but I’ll talk about that in a later post.
Again I want everyone to know how happy I am about those two getting back together, for me, that was the highlight of the finale.
- Izi
