It's a testament to the strengths of the show that, four seasons in, it could logically introduce new characters to the island that managed to be just as strong and memorable as those who had been around from the very beginning. Season four brought with it the full reveal of the mysterious off-shore freighter and its numerous passengers, the most important of whom being the disgraced Oxford physicist Daniel Faraday. Throughout the show's fourth and fifth seasons, Faraday helped ease audiences into the notion of time travel by offering up easily-digestible quantum physics concepts to the characters around him. After the island's time jumps ceased and left Sawyer and his group stuck in 1974, Faraday managed to disappear for several episodes until he returned in 1977 under the belief that he could rewrite everyone's fates - by keeping Oceanic 815 from ever crashing on the island - through the detonation of a hydrogen bomb. In the closing moments of his centric-episode "The Variable," however, Faraday and the audience are taken by surprise when he is shot and killed by his own mother, the younger Eloise Hawking. In a season that had gleefully played with time travel and the notion of whether or not the survivors could alter their circumstances, Faraday's death was a cruel twist of fate for such a likeable, level-headed character and stands as one of the show's most out-of-left-field goodbyes.
Writer, film enthusiast, part-time gamer and watcher of (mostly) good television located on the fringe of Los Angeles, who now has his own website at www.highdefgeoff.com!
