Its the trials and triumphs that characters experience that ultimately causes the audience to empathize with them. Lost was a series that was able to achieve that fairly early on in its run, culminating in one of the best examples of the marriage of fantasy and feeling with The Constant. Desmond (what a performance by Henry Ian Cusick) begins to experience shifts in time, with his consciousness jumping between 2004 and 1996. Realising what is happening, Faraday (Jeremy Davies) tells Desmond to seek his younger self out in Oxford during his next shift. With the help of 1996-Faraday, Desmond determines he is caught in a time-warp, his consciousness shifting between his older and younger-self. In order to break the cycle, Desmond must find someone, a constant that will serve to anchor him in both time periods. That someone is Desmonds love, Penny. What follows is a story unlike any other that measures the depths of true love and the lengths one will go to hold on to it. And the final lines of the episode, read by Faraday from his journal written in 1996, are as profound to the series as they are chilling for the viewer: If anything goes wrong, Desmond Hume will be my constant. Putting thought and emotion ahead of plot devices is what allows for an episode like The Constant to elevate from not just a great episode of the series, but one of the most heart rending yet ultimately uplifting hours of television ever.